In this video podcast, Steve Podmore, founder of the Global Sustainability Challenge, tells us how he’s lobbying people in high places to get cash to clean-tech innovators.
His organisation is actually doing something pretty different in trying to change the model of investment in smaller companies…
Here’s how. (But give it a sec to load 
)
Stephen Pritchard is an amazing journalist - a real professional. He has an impressive CV, but is one of the few journalists Greenbang has ever met who can write, produce film and edit audio on pretty much any subject you care to throw at him.
He also takes time over detail, which in today’s media scene is a very rare trait.
As part of the special report on innovation this month, Greenbang asked Stephen to look at the latest innovations and uses of fuel cells. In this podcast he talks to the likes of Lux and Honda to find his answers…
To listen to the podcast click on the words - “fuel cells”
Guy Clapperton is an esteemed business journalist. He has written for the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Sunday Times, the Times, the Daily Mirror…you name it.
Guy now turns his attention to some of BMW’s attempts at green innovation in an industry blamed for so many of today’s environmental problems.
Over to you, Guy:
The motor industry is clearly one of the world’s largest polluters; it is perhaps ironic that this gives it the opportunity to become one of the most proactive reducers of emissions. BMW is among the manufacturers taking its responsibilities in this area very seriously indeed, on both product design and corporate levels.
In corporate terms the organisation has won awards and is completely up-front about its principles around sustainability. This year it won the Corporate Responsibility Reporting Award for best carbon disclosure; it also has production facilities based on the UN’s cleaner production programme and uses preventive environmental management on a voluntary basis.
Its real innovation, though, has to be in its vehicle design and manufacture. “We’ve been at the forefront of realising from a product point of view that the continued growth of performance needed to be balanced against a realisation that some sort of sustainability was going to be necessary,” says Duncan Forrester, a PR for the company. The company therefore initiated the scheme now known as Efficient Dynamics five years ago.
“Efficient Dynamics is an umbrella term for a number of technologies that come together to deliver not only the customer’s desire for increases in performance and output but at the same time decreases in consumption and improvements in emissions,” he says. Products started to emerge early last year and the specific elements of Efficient Dynamics in a car depends on the model. The one with the most are four cylinder manual cars, which get the whole bandwidth.
“We’re talking about things like start-stop technology, so that when the car pulls up to a traffic jam or something you put it in neutral, take your foot off the clutch and the engine stops.” As soon as the traffic pulls away and the driver puts his or her foot back on the clutch, the first ten per cent of the clutch movement restarts the engine.
Naysayers will point out, with some justification, that starting and stopping uses more fuel than idling; “It’s around about two to two and a half seconds the car has to be stopped and then you’re in credit,” says Duncan. The aim is to save 3 per cent of emissions and consumption – as long as most stops are for longer than three seconds this should be perfectly achievable.
That is the main measure visible to customers. The rest is a little more ‘under the bonnet’ so drivers won’t know it’s happening. For example one significant feature is brake energy regeneration. This is a system that recognises that when someone is cruising down a hill and has taken their foot off the accelerator, the energy the car is generating is wasted.
“Our engineers have created an intelligent alternator that decouples from the engine under normal driving, but when you’re cruising it activates so it’s effectively got a clutch on it. So you’ve not got the drag on the engine when you want the performance from the engine, but when you don’t need the performance the alternator kicks in.” BMW believes this saves 3 per cent in terms of emissions and consumption.
There are more deeply technical enhancements as well. High precision direct injection saves on waste as does twin turbocharging. Active aerodynamics also features: “So you’re changing the aerodynamic of the engine depending upon the cooling or induction requirements,” says Duncan. Behind the kidney grilles are flaps, and when the engine doesn’t require any air the flaps close automatically so air passes straight over the car. If the engine does need air the flaps open.
“We also have things like low rolling resistance tyres,” says Duncan. “Efficient Dynamics is a huge number of technologies and it comes together to produce huge efficiencies in a number of our cars. When we launched the new 6 series in the Autumn of last year, a three and a half year old model, we announced up to 22 per cent increases in efficiency which is a huge number.”
Most of this, confirms the spokesman, comes from BMW rather than the customers, whose demands don’t always include green elements. “It’s a slow process, some are and some don’t care,” he says. “Obviously one needs to be seen to be doing the right thing but it’s not about token gestures – one needs to be doing the right thing for the customer who really understands the motor industry.”
BMW has won awards last year and this for the Efficient Dynamics idea, leading to the current stage at which a diesel powered car with no hybrid technologies or biofueld won Green Car of the Year. “That’s a pretty good achievement without going to hybrid fuels or anything like that,” says Duncan.
Sustainability is also about the future. BMW is keeping many of its future plans secret but confirms that Efficient Dynamics is a work in progress rather than a box which is now ticked and from which it will move on.
“We’re working in partnership with other manufacturers to deliver hybrid technologies,” he says. “In the longer term we are working on hydrogen. This time last year we brought eight hydrogen powered cars to the country to show that these are fully production-ready line-built cars.” The difficulty with this at the moment is that nobody is selling hydrogen to fill the car at the moment – anyone buying one would be in the position of someone with the first telephone, without anyone else to connect to.
BMW is therefore going about trying to influence the opinion formers that the technology is ready to run but that it needs sizeable investment to run. “We all accept that at some point fossil fuels will either run out or become too expensive to be feasible, and at that stage we can’t just put our cars away and walk,” he says. “This ongoing activity is BMW putting a stake in the ground and saying this is where we see the future but it’s not just about cars it’s about an infrastructure, it’s about forecourts and petrol stations.”
Once the infrastructure and economies are in place and sustainable electricity can be used for the electrolysis to extract hydrogen from sea water, the traditional picture of the polluting motorist will be very different.
The next big thing - where is innovation taking us?
I’m very excited to say that Danny Bradbury has written a feature for Greenbang. Danny is a superb journalist who writes a lot for the Financial Times, which was how we got talking. Check out his website…
This week, he investigates for Greenbang’s first special report some of the claims being made in the algae-carbon-capture industry. Can we really pin our hopes on the green stuff?
Ian Houston has a lot on his plate at the moment. The self-taught chemical engineer says he’s got a technology in his garage that will change the face of the car industry, and he’s trying to get people to believe in it. The components: a new exhaust design, a box of leaves, and the green stuff that you find in the pond.
Houston first hit on the idea of using algae to eat carbon dioxide when developing an idea for an organic fish farm. “We were trying to get the algae to grow faster,” he says. “We were trying to figure out ways to capture carbon to feed the algae.” Why not get the carbon from the exhaust of a car, he thought?
The system, which Houston calls the ‘Ecobox’, uses some secret sauce that he’s not prepared to talk about, but he does admit that it’s a material made from leaves of material packed together in a small space. These leaves are made from a sorbent - a catalyst that draws the CO2 out of the air and holds it. It creates a space with a lot of surface area that the car’s exhaust fumes pass through. The box will be able to hold the carbon from 50 miles of driving (at which point it either has to be flushed, or it stops capturing carbon). The CO2 can be flushed out using heat, fluid, or gas. Then what?
Algae loves CO2. The little critters literally eat it up. Algae in a bioreactor would chew through the CO2, producing two products. “You put the CO2 into the biochamber, the algae absorbs it, and then you squeeze the oil out of one side, and you’re left with algae cake that you can incinerate.” The oil could be ‘brewed’ to create biodiesel, he says, which could then fuel a car.
“Ian gets all excited about these things and starts going off on superman trips,” says Stephen Perham, group managing director of the Airmax Group, which develops telemetry systems that monitor fuel consumption and the burning of carbon in cars. “He’s an enthusiast. We’re just a bunch of engineers. We don’t get as excited about all this stuff.”
In fact, Perham says he wanted to shoot the idea down. Houston went to Airmax when he discovered the carbon capture technology, and Perham’s team of forty engineers laughed, and said it wouldn’t work.
Intrigued, Perham offered to test it out. Houston turned up with a concept car housing an Ecobox in the boot. “It reduced the carbon output by 7% volume down to 2%,” Perham says.
Blimey. Suddenly, the engineers weren’t laughing any more.
Capturing carbon from the air might sound like a crazy idea, and using algae to munch through it crazier still. But others with more credentials have been studying the same thing.
Columbus University professor Klaus Lackner came up with a similar concept for industrial-scale carbon capture. Within 2-3 years, his company Global Research Technologies hopes to be selling a 40-foot device that will suck around a tonne of carbon per day out of the air, again using what we at Greenbang have lovingly coined the leafy sorbent concept. It’s effectively a big mechanical tree.
So the carbon capture idea has legs. And so, according to Mae Wan Ho, director of the Institute for Science in Society, does the algae idea.
“It sounds very promising,” says Ho, who last studied the topic a couple of years ago and evaluated its applicability on a commercial scale. “It’s certainly a lot more promising than doing what they’re doing now in power stations - trying to capture and store it underground, where it’s bound to leak out anyway.
And there are people hard at work on this, too. Green Fuel Technologies recently sold a pilot algae-munching system to scoff carbon from a Lousiana coal plant owned by NRG Energy.
Greenshift’s subsidiary Veridiem is also researching algae-based carbon processing, and so is A2BE Carbon Capture, which scores the best name if nothing else for Algae@Work, a system that does the same.
None of these firms would speak with us, suggesting that the algae oil is either snake oil, or that they think they’re onto something so big that they don’t want it getting out just yet. The more we speak to industry observers like Ho, the less snake-oily this idea looks.
Mind you, viable for power stations is one thing. Viable in the back of your Ford Escort is another. Houston has to get the thing into a state that will interact directly with the exhaust system of tens of different car designs, and he has to work with auto manufacturers that are willing to guarantee not to reverse-engineer his system. Either that, or he has to issue patents for the carbon capture system in combination with all the different exhaust systems, he says. And while he knows that he wants to license the technology rather than manufacture it he’s not sure how to do it yet. This is the point at which Dragon’s Den contestants normally get flamed.
And he has to find his market. Houston wants to put cartridge-flushing units in garage forecourts, but Perham doesn’t think this will fly. “You can’t change canisters. People are waiting to fill their cars,” he says, suggesting that it will take around 10 minutes to flush the unit. Houston estimates 6-12 seconds.
In fact, there’s not a huge amount that these guys do seem to agree on, other than its potential for home brewing biodiesel. Some people already brew biofuels using portable home brewers like these, which can produce 2500 litres of tax-free fuel.
The main problem has been finding the feedstock - there are only so many local restaurants willing to sell or give you their chip fat. Sticking a small algae bio-reactor into your garage could give you all the oil you need, says Perham.
Whether the average punter would be willing to swap the lawnmower’s spot in the garage for a home chemistry set and the contents of their pond is another matter, but both Perham and Houston think there’s a big enough market, which will only grow as petrol prices soar. “Turn around to anyone and say ‘if you have it fitted you’ll save on four taxes’, and you’ll have a queue a mile long,” Houston says.
Four taxes? “Road, company car tax, and the congestion charge,” says Houston. “And you’re also make 2,500 litres of fuel tax free, which means that we’re hitting fuel duty tax.”
Suddenly, his secretive little gizmo begins to look a lot less crazy than we might have thought at first. The question is, can he get from zero to sixty, and how long will it take him?
Greenbang tracks the explosion of the environmental industry, reporting on news of green innovation and thought leadership.
We blog on this rather than the environmental problems of the world because we are interested in the answers to climate change.
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