27/08/2017

Scientists Hope To Farm The Biofuel Of The Future In The Pacific Ocean

NPR -  | 

Kelp plants grow on a 30-foot-long, white PVC pole suspended in the water. If this is successful, instead of just one row, there would be a whole platform, hundreds of meters across and hundreds of meters deep, full of kelp plants. Courtesy of David Ginsburg/Wrigley Institute
The push for renewable energy in the U.S. often focuses on well-established sources of electricity: solar, wind and hydropower. Off the coast of California, a team of researchers is working on what they hope will become an energy source of the future — macroalgae, otherwise known as kelp.
Diane Kim is the associate director of special projects and the director of undergraduate programs at The Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. She is one of the researchers who runs the kelp elevator project. Monika Evstatieva/NPR
The Pacific Coast is known for its vast kelp forests. It's one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth, and farming it requires no fertilizer, fresh water, pesticides, or arable land. "It can grow 2 to 3 feet per day," says Diane Kim, one of the scientists running the kelp research project at the University of Southern California.
Kelp is transformed into biofuel by a process called thermochemical liquefaction. The kelp is dried out, and the salt is washed away. Then it's turned into bio-oil through a high-temperature, high-pressure conversion process.
Some small companies are growing kelp as a substitute for kale in the U.S., but that's exactly the problem – very, very few are doing it. Thus, the infrastructure and investment isn't in place to make other products from kelp, like biofuel.
"We're testing out a concept that would enable large-scale, open-ocean farming," she says. "And what that would essentially do is grow enough kelp to make it economically feasible to make it cost competitive and maybe one day, provide a source of clean, sustainable, non-polluting source of energy to compete with fossil fuels."
Twenty-five miles from downtown Los Angeles, on sunny Catalina Island, Kim and her colleagues operate a center called the Wrigley Institute of Environmental Studies. The clean, deep waters off the island provide a great environment for research.
The Wrigley Marine Science Center is located 20 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, on Santa Catalina Island. Monika Evstatieva/NPR
Harvesting kelp in California for commercial purposes is not unprecedented. "They did have these large boats that gave the kelp a haircut, harvesting kelp along the California coast," Kim explains. During World War I, kelp was used to make gunpowder. By the 1960s, a company in San Diego harvested kelp to make products like alginate, which is a solidifying agent in ice cream and cosmetics.
Here on Catalina Island, Kim and her colleagues are trying to build a machine that would raise and lower kelp beds to get sunlight in the shallow water and nutrients in the deep water. This would allow them to farm miles from shore. They call the device a "kelp elevator."
There are real obstacles to creating large-scale kelp farms in the U.S., though.
"At the moment, they're way behind the curve," says University of Hawaii tenured researcher Michael Cooney of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. He says countries in Asia and Scandinavia are much farther along than the U.S.
One of the main reasons for this discrepancy is that these countries have been growing kelp for food for many years. "They already have a pre-existing infrastructure that's pretty sophisticated for growing and harvesting," Cooney explains. "It's harvesting for food and other products, but a lot of that capital's already in place. And that's a much better starting point than small companies in the U.S. that try to go from ground zero to a transportation fuel."
In Sweden, people have been farming seaweed for a long time. "The first thing we do with the high-quality kelp, we do it for food, actually, "says Fredrik Grondahl of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He says selling kelp for food is very profitable.
The researchers don't use the natural populations of kelp on Catalina Island, but grow their own in a nursery starting from spores, like this one at the research facility. Anjuli Sastry/NPR
"The next part is to make feed ingredients," Grondahl adds. "And then we are also extracting polymers from the kelp to do bioplastics and adhesives and maybe also textiles." The leftover kelp is turned into biofuel, so the clean energy aspect is just one of many uses for kelp in Scandinavia.
The Wrigley Institute scientists don't use natural populations of kelp, but grow their own in a nursery, starting from spores. They tie the juvenile kelp to long, white PVC pipes and drop them into the water. Eventually they hope to create sheets of kelp plants hundreds of yards across.
Ken Nealson, director of the Wrigley Institute, takes us out onto the water in a boat to see the test site where they've already dropped a pipe 30 feet below the surface, with small kelp plants sprouting off of it. Nealson straps on scuba gear and dives down to inspect the project, while bass and other marine life circle around him.
"What you see here is the beginning of something that can really revolutionize bio-fuel production, if it works on a large scale," he explains. "You can imagine growing enough kelp to supply a percentage of the bioenergy that's needed in this country."
"Imagine" is the key word here. This experiment is in its earliest stages. By September, the researchers hope to put a full-scale kelp elevator in the water. And if that works, then someday years from now, endless miles of ocean could one day become farmland.

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Where's The Kelp? Warm Ocean Takes Toll On Undersea Forests

Associated Press - Michael Casey

In this June 15, 2017, photo, research technician Kristen Mello shows a sample of a red shrub-like seaweed collected in the waters off Appledore Island, Maine. Kelp forests are critical to the fishing industry but are disappearing around the world. The Gulf of Maine is the latest global hotspot to lose kelp. Scientists say the likely culprits are climate change and invasive species. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
When diving in the Gulf of Maine a few years back, Jennifer Dijkstra expected to be swimming through a flowing kelp forest that had long served as a nursery and food for juvenile fish and lobster.
But Dijkstra, a University of New Hampshire marine biologist, saw only a patchy seafloor before her. The sugar kelp had declined dramatically and been replaced by invasive, shrub-like seaweed that looked like a giant shag rug.
"I remember going to some dive sites and honestly being shocked at how few kelp blades we saw," she said.
The Gulf of Maine, stretching from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, is the latest in a growing list of global hotspots losing their kelp, including hundreds of miles in the Mediterranean Sea, off southern Japan and Australia, and parts of the California coast.
Among the world's most diverse marine ecosystems, kelp forests are found on all continental coastlines except for Antarctica and provide critical food and shelter to myriad fish and other creatures. Kelp also is critical to coastal economies, providing billions of dollars in tourism and fishing.
The likely culprit for the loss of kelp, according to several scientific studies, is warming oceans from climate change, coupled with the arrival of invasive species.
In Maine, the invaders are other seaweeds.
In Australia, the Mediterranean and Japan, tropical fish are feasting on the kelp.
Most kelp are replaced by small, tightly packed, bushy seaweeds that collect sediment and prevent kelp from growing back, said the University of Western Australia's Thomas Wernberg.
"Collectively these changes are part of a recent and increasing global trend of flattening of the world's kelp forests," said Wernberg, co-author of a 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that 38 percent of kelp forest declined over the past 50 years in regions that had data.
Kelp losses on Australia's Great Southern Reef threaten tourism and fishing industries worth $10 billion. Die-offs contributed to a 60 percent drop in species richness in the Mediterranean and were blamed for the collapse of the abalone fishery in Japan.
"You are losing habitat. You are losing food. You are losing shoreline protection," said University of Massachusetts Boston's Jarrett Byrnes, who leads a working group on kelp and climate change. "They provide real value to humans."
The Pacific Coast from northern California to the Oregon border is one place that suffered dramatic kelp loss, according to Cynthia Catton, a research associate at the Bodega Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Davis. Since 2014, aerial surveys have shown that bull kelp declined by over 90 percent, something Catton blamed on a marine heat wave along with a rapid increase in kelp-eating sea urchins.
Without the kelp to eat, Northern California's abalone fishery has been harmed.
"It's pretty devastating to the ecosystem as a whole," Catton said. "It's like a redwood forest that has been completely clear-cut. If you lose the trees, you don't have a forest."
Kelp is incredibly resilient and has been known to bounce back from storms and heat waves.
But in Maine, it has struggled to recover following an explosion of voracious sea urchins in the 1980s that wiped out many kelp beds. Now, it must survive in waters that are warming faster than the vast majority of the world's oceans — most likely forcing kelp to migrate northward or into deeper waters.
"What the future holds is more complicated," Byrnes said. "If the Gulf of Maine warms sufficiently, we know kelp will have a hard time holding on."
On their dives around Maine's Appledore Island, a craggy island off New Hampshire that's home to nesting seagulls, Dijkstra and colleague Larry Harris have witnessed dramatic changes.
Their study, published by the Journal of Ecology in April, examined photos of seaweed populations and dive logs going back 30 years in the Gulf of Maine. They found introduced species from as far away as Asia, such as the filamentous red seaweed, had increased by as much 90 percent and were covering 50 to 90 percent of the gulf's seafloor.
They are seeing far fewer ocean pout, wolf eel and pollock that once were commonplace in these kelp beds. But they also are finding that the half-dozen invasive seaweeds replacing kelp are harboring up to three times more tiny shrimp, snails and other invertebrates.
"We're not really sure how this new seascape will affect higher species in the food web, especially commercially important ones like fish, crabs and lobster," said Dijkstra, following a dive in which bags of invasive seaweed were collected and the invertebrates painstakingly counted. "What we do think is that fish are using these seascapes differently."

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Worldwide 100% Renewable Energy Possible By 2050, Claims Detailed New Plan

Cosmos - Ketan Joshi

A detailed roadmap for 139 countries outlines a path to a future powered entirely by wind, water and solar energy.
Is a renewable-powered world by 2050 really possible? Paul Kennedy / Getty
Everybody wants to change the world. Few of us publish research detailing exactly how to do it.
Stanford’s Mark Z. Jacobson, who led a 2015 effort to create a state-by-state plan for a US transition to 100% renewable energy, has published similar research on a much larger scale, examining scenarios in which 139 countries could be powered purely by wind, water and solar (WWS) by the year 2050.
In scope and scale, the paper – published in the new energy journal Joule – is a significant expansion on Jacobson’s prior work. It isn’t limited to each country’s electricity sector – it examines the electrification and decarbonisation of transportation, heating, cooling, industry, agriculture, forestry and fishing. The authors chose the 139 countries, which between them cover 99% of the world’s carbon emissions, because the necessary energy data about them were available through the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The study also examines reductions in total power demand resulting from efficiencies found in electrification, net changes to electricity sector jobs, reductions in air pollution deaths and costs, reductions in climate change deaths and costs and the benefits of the decentralisation of energy technology. The authors are careful to place this herculean effort and the resulting roadmap in context.
“Both individuals and governments can lead this change. Policymakers don’t usually want to commit to doing something unless there is some reasonable science that can show it is possible, and that is what we are trying to do,” says Jacobson. “We are not saying that there is only one way we can do this, but having a scenario gives people direction.”
His ideal policy outcome would see “governments in many countries of the world commit to 100% clean, renewable energy in all sectors by 2050 with 80% by 2030”.
Few attempts to map out a potential route for total decarbonisation attempt to do it on this scale, and as such, this is likely to turn the heads of policymakers. But modelling is a double-edged sword: forecasting the future invariably draws attempts at rebuttal and interrogation of the complexities, uncertainties and assumptions that are a necessary part of the exercise.

The devil in the detail
Jacobson’s prior US-focused paper highlighted a tense contradiction within the intermeshed spaces of policy, academia and analysis that span the renewable energy sector. The paper was criticised in a follow-up published in the same journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which stated that Jacobson’s work “involves errors, inappropriate methods, and implausible assumptions” – triggering a back-and-forth through social and academic channels that lasted many weeks.
The key gripe focused on assumed increases in the discharge rate of US hydro power stations – considered, by respondents, to be unviable.
In the new global study, Jacobson has addressed this criticism by assuming dispatchable output is sourced from concentrating solar power with thermal storage, batteries and other dedicated storage.
The study also models the interplay between supply and demand in the electricity grids of these countries by using a model to simulate estimated resource availability (wind, water and sunlight), adding constraints (such as competition among wind turbines), and load data for each country simulated at a 30-second resolution for 50 years into the future. The authors specifically exclude bioenergy, nuclear, fossil fuels with carbon capture and natural gas from their models. These exclusions are likely to be a driving element of subsequent debates, with critics regularly citing the need for a bigger ‘toolbox’ to address climate change.

Australia’s findings
The supplemental information attached to Jacobson’s paper provides data about Jacobson’s Australia-specific modelling, some of which is illustrated below.
Jacobson’s projected mix of energy sources in 2050 in a 100% renewable scenario. Ketan Joshi based on data from Jacobson et al., Joule (2017)  LARGE IMAGE
Jacobson estimates that his proposed shift to 100% WWS power would achieve savings of $11,393 per person per year by the year 2050.
“That number is broken down into direct energy cost savings (~$500 per person per year), health cost savings (~$800 per person per year), and avoided 2050 global climate cost savings (~$10,100)”, Jacobson told Cosmos. “Given that a complete melting of all the ice worldwide would raise sea levels 70 meters, flooding 7% of the world's land, I believe the $10,000 per person is probably an underestimate.”
A recent review authored by Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel, elaborating on a blueprint for Australia’s electricity system, embarked on a similar (and far narrower) future-modelling exercise. A key difference was the continued presence of coal and gas in the system modelled by Finkel.
Chart from the Finkel report shows projected mix of energy sources up to 2050 with a clean energy target. From Finkel et al., Blueprint for the Future: Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market LARGE IMAGE
Jacobson contends that this rate of change is not sufficient. “To avoid 1.5 C global warming, we need 80% reduction of everything by 2030 and 100% by 2050. We think a faster acceleration is possible at reasonable to low cost.”
Jacobson’s paper is designed to serve as a vision for future, but even Finkel’s proposal for a far less ambitious emissions reduction target has not been adopted several months after it was proposed.

The hazards of the future
Mark Dyson, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, grapples with the hazards of forecasting the future in an accompanying commentary on the paper. “Different authors with different assumptions and technique will understandably find different ‘answers’ for long-term decarbonisation. Yet most debate about particular conclusions misses the massive uncertainty of the inputs that drive those answers.”
Detailed modelling of 100% renewable scenarios are designed as tools for inspiring policy action rather than strict instructions for altering energy systems, and they are often successful to some degree. The study is also likely inspire discussion and debate about the exclusion of technologies like nuclear power and carbon capture and storage, about specific responses to the technical nuances of modelling systems on this scale, and of course about the perceived blending of boundaries between academia and activism.

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