Tag Archives: biofuels
A Conversation with Naveen Sikka: An Insider’s Look into Biofuels
Posted on 29. Jul, 2010 by Jacqui Polk.
On Monday, Opportunity Green had the chance to speak with Naveen Sikka about biofuels and specifically his company, TerViva.
Click here to listen to the full interview.
TerViva has developed an environmentally-responsible biofuel that extracts non-edible oils from the seeds of the Pongamia tree. Using their promising method, the energy output of a gallon of their diesel is significantly more than the energy used to produce that gallon.
1. What stage is TerViva at right now? Have you begun production?
We’ve just begun our first tree plantings in locations across the US Southwest. These plantings will serve as the basis for further, larger-scale plantings in 2011 and 2012.
2. The global market for biodiesel is poised for explosive growth in the next ten years; how do you see TerViva fitting into the biodiesel market?
We envision TerViva as the provider of the lowest cost and most environmentally-friendly form of biodiesel. We are excited that many companies are pursuing many different pathways to produce biodiesel – we have much to do as an industry to displace petroleum. But some of those companies will produce expensive fuels, or fuels of questionable environmental benefit.
3. What’s your next big strategic phase as a company? Will TerViva be consumer facing?
Because of the product that we produce – transportation fuel – the biggest challenge for TerViva (like all biodiesel companies) is scalability. Our goal is to produce millions of gallons of fuel in five years, and to clearly identify our product as ‘best in class’ in terms of economics and the environment.
4. How do you plan on selling your product? Are you raising venture capital funding?
Our goal is to collaborate in the ecosystem in which we exist, thereby creating jobs and spreading the wealth. So we currently work with local landowners, farmers, and field crews in the regions in which we are planting trees. We are in the process of identifying existing biodiesel refiners who would like to partner with TerViva.
TerViva has raised seed funding, but needs additional money to plant more trees. We are in active discussions with venture capitalists, private equity firms and other sources of capital. It’s not a great time to be raising money, but we’ve had great receptivity so far from investors.
Click here to listen to Naveen’s full interview.
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Interview with Paul Bunje, Exec. Director of the Center for Climate Change Solutions
Posted on 01. Nov, 2009 by Susanna Schick.
Paul Bunje is the Executive Director of the Center for Climate Change Solutions (CCCS) at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment
OG: So what are some of the projects you’re working on at the center? It’s a little hard to tell from your website.
Paul: We never have enough time to update the website, but you can find the most up-to-date information at UCLA’s Climate Change Portal, which is like one stop shop for all things going on in climate, energy, sustainability. It’s still in the beta phase, but it is live. We try to stay on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary studies, so this keeps UCLA people aware of what’s going across campus, to better learn from each other, and prevent redundancies in research.
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It’s Over: Five Reasons the Electric Car Wins
Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by Ben Upham.
It could take ten years or more to become apparent, but I’ll call it now: the electric car will replace the internal combustion engine.
A caveat: I am not an automotive industry expert. Which is why I’m right. I’m not mired in the details, the past failures, the what-ifs or the buts. All I see are the big, obvious things. When it comes to sea change in human behavior, though, obvious matters.
So, since no prediction is worth its salt without an accompanying list, the following are five overlapping reasons why our children will all be driving electric cars. By the way, these all assume that business as usual; that is, running cars on gasoline derived from (imported, finite, polluting) oil is unsustainable. If you disagree, you’re at the wrong website.
1. Momentum, aka, Forget Tesla.
“Automotive start-up” may be an oxymoron, but it doesn’t matter. Even if electric car company Tesla and its cohort don’t succeed, the fact is the big car companies are all developing EVs, or hybrid plug-ins, where the emphasis will increasingly be on the electric part, not the gasoline part.
Meanwhile, a zillion companies, plus many national governments, are furiously developing batteries that are powerful, quick to charge, and inexpensive. It’s practically a new arms race.
And then there’s the burgeoning smart-grid industry, which will make charging those cars even cheaper. “Smartness” will also make managing when and where to charge your car much easier.
2. People Get It.
I read an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that predicted the healthcare bill would fail because, unlike Social Security or Medicare, it’s too complicated. People just don’t get it. And while I personally believe in universal healthcare (I’m a freelance writer), I understand the point.
People get electric cars. People get where the fuel comes from: the wall socket – the same place you plug in your toaster or your TV (cars are increasingly appliance-like anyway). People get how electric cars move, too. Most people are at least familiar with the concept of an electric motor, and they’ve seen a Prius in action, if they don’t already own one.
What people already get, people are more willing to a) fund development of, b) support through government, and c) buy.
3. Biofuel is Foreign Oil. And so is Natural Gas.
Not literally, of course; but to an economy dangerously dependent on imported fossil fuels, they might as well be. And that’s bad news for these primary competitors to electric powered cars.
Without going into the details, it would take a long time for biofuel to replace foreign oil as a source of our automobile fuel. Meanwhile, the price of oil will continue to climb, pushing the price of biofuel up with it. The public, seeing no relief from gas prices, will turn to non-oil alternatives, e.g., EVs.
So the chief selling point of biofuel, that it is a cheap domestic source of gasoline for our cars, is wrong in the short term and moot in the long term. Sure, we might be using biofuel in our hybrids, but those hybrids will be getting 200+ miles to the gallon, and eventually infinity/mpg.
As for natural gas, recent discoveries have pegged domestic reserves at 2000 trillion cubic feet, enough to last us 100 years at current rates of consumption. If we use natural gas to power all our cars, however, we will run out a lot quicker. And it’s still a dirty fossil fuel with a limited supply and a wildly fluctuating price related to – you guessed it – oil.
Oh, and by the way: fuel cells are dead.
4. It’s Electricity, Stupid.
Critics of EVs point out that anyone who lives in an apartment building or parks on the street, or ever wants to drive more than 100 miles at a time, can’t have an electric car, because without a recharge it will die.
Good point. But let’s put it another way:
Which would you rather pay for? New infrastructure to develop, extract and/or grow and then pump and/or truck the heavy, expensive “carbon fuel of the future” to gas stations…
…or longer extension cords?
Providing public places for electric cars to charge will not happen overnight, or for free, but the technology is here, it’s simple and it’s easily scalable. The problem of range will be solved either through quick charging batteries, battery-swapping, or an extended reliance on hybrids, until people feel confident they will always find a place to charge.
5. Dawning Obsolescence.
Using gasoline to power your car is the 21st century equivalent of heating your home with firewood. I love gathering and chopping wood for a nice cozy fire on a winter night, but if I had to do it all winter, every winter, I would be eager to find a replacement technology.
In the future, people will look back on our once or twice weekly ritual of driving to a gas station and pouring a noxious, flammable and very expensive liquid into our loud, dirty vehicle and wonder what “life back then” must have been like.
By the way, by “dirty” I don’t just mean polluting, I mean actually dirty, the dirt that accompanies any vehicle that moves by means of burning things: rocket ships, steam locomotives, Corollas, whatever.
Next time you’re at a gas station, think about it. Is it really so hard to imagine the rubber pumps and hoses, the smell of gasoline and oil as just so…19th century?
Resistance is Futile.
The EV revolution will not happen overnight. Stakeholders in various competing technologies will not allow their ventures to die without a fight. While problems of range and charging persist, consumers will be hesitant to switch, even as they are squeezed by gas prices. And of course, the shift from gasoline to electric can only happen one car at a time.
But my guess is that the shift to electric cars will happen sooner than we think. Change happens very slowly, and then, all of a sudden, very fast. Think of VHS to DVD, or the road from vinyl records to iTunes – four different technologies in less than 30 years (five, if you count eight-tracks).
The automotive industry is a whole lot bigger than the record business, but that means there’s more incentive to make the switch to the leading technology. It also means once that technology is in place, there’s more incentive to support it. That technology is electric.
photo: Nissan
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The Future of Biofuels: Can This Green Energy Pay Off?
Posted on 31. Aug, 2009 by Ben Upham.
Opportunity Green was drawn to the Milken Institute yesterday to attend a panel entitled “The Future of Biofuels: Can This Green Energy Pay Off — and Save the Planet?” Biofuels, such as ethanol, made from corn, other plants, like switchgrass, and even from algae, have been both touted and trashed in the last couple years. Heralded as a way to “grow our gasoline”, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions and securing energy independence, and denounced for perpetuating heavily subsidized industrial farming techniques that harm the environment and, allegedly, contribute to food scarcity.
The panel featured three guests, Roger Conway, director of the Office of Energy Policy and New Uses at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Daniel Gardenswartz, a founding partner of The Sage Group LLC, a Los Angeles-based boutique merchant banking firm, and Richard Hamilton, president and CEO of Ceres, a company that is developing dedicated energy crops for a new generation of biofuels.
A Convincing Argument for Biofuel
Given the business background of the three speakers, the panel was clearly biased towards the industry, and it showed in the presentation. One by one, the panelists attempted to knock down most of the traditional complaints about biofuel:
It is heavily subsidized. Well, so is oil, solar, wind — every major industry.
It causes food prices to rise, most noticeably in 2008. Actually, food prices rose in ’08 because of the rise in the price of oil (backed up with an accompanying slide).
We don’t have the land. There is more than enough unused “marginal” farm land to produce all the biofuel we need.
It uses up precious resources, like water. Most corn and switchgrass (Hamilton’s preferred crop) is rain-fed.
It adds to global warming. Switchgrass is carbon negative, because the plants suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
By the end of the Q & A the panel seemed to have the audience in the palm of its hand, especially Hamilton, who is 6’6″ and bears a striking resemblance to Brian Williams.
…But on the Other Hand
Opportunity Green remains skeptical. These men have made a career out of deflecting questions about biofuel, and have a lot of practice. While they have valid points on all the issues raised here, the information they provided was selective. For more detailed analysis, check out these articles from the New York Times and Treehugger.
Plus, there are other objections that were not raised. For instance, biofuel is most viable when oil prices are high, but if they are, people are not going to be looking to find a cheaper (but still not free) substitute for gasoline — they’re going to be looking for a way to avoid the stuff altogether. Why pay for liquid fuel when you can get electricity for little or nothing?
Over the long run, we think biofuels will provide a stop-gap between current internal combustion technology and widespread adaption of a green technology like electricity or fuel cells. Biofuels also have a future in aviation and shipping, and possibly diesel trucking, where alternative energies are not cost-effective or simply not possible.
One biofuel that did get short-shrift from the panel was the so-called third generation fuel made from algae. Hamilton and Gardenswartz agreed that those processes were still too untested and expensive for commercial use. This opinion seems to jibe with current sentiment. There’s been a lot of excitement about algae-based fuels in the last couple years, but a lot of high-profile failures too.
Despite our skepticism, Opportunity Green left the panel with increased open-mindedness about this much-maligned fuel source. But we’re still waiting for our electric car.
