Renewable Energy - The Next Opportunity for Silicon Valley (by Brian McConnell, 12/10/2004, O'Reilly)
The article suggests that Silicon Valley aim its entrepeneurial might to make things better/faster/smaller/etc at the issue of Renewable Energy. This certainly fits my posting yesterday: Solaicx; making solar electricity cost effective as well as Nanosolar which I covered last March: Breakthrough in solar photovoltaics
Interesting stuff ...
Perchlorate is a chemical used in rocket fuel, but it's being found widely throughout the U.S. environment, food supply, water supply, etc.
Rocket fuel chemical in California cow milk (June 22, 2004; CNN unfortunately CNN doesn't have it on their site any longer)
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Young children and pregnant women who drink milk from California cows may be exposed to unsafe levels of a toxic chemical used in rocket fuel, according to a new study by an environmental group.
The study released Tuesday by the Environmental Working Group comes as state and federal regulators consider setting new standards to regulate perchlorate -- the explosive ingredient in missile fuel that has been linked to thyroid damage.
"Perchlorate exposure is more widespread than we have been led to believe," said Bill Walker, vice president for the West Coast office of the EWG, a research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.
Study: Rocket fuel chemical taints food, water (By Michael Coren, CNN, Friday, February 25, 2005)
There are few sure ways to avoid ingesting perchlorate, the chemical used in rocket fuel that researchers have detected in breast milk at levels five to eight times higher than those considered safe, experts say.
Studies by the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency suggest that perchlorate enters the food supply through reservoirs and tainted irrigation water that contaminates crops and livestock.
The chemical has been found in store-bought produce, such as lettuce, in milk and in public drinking water supplies across the United States. More than 11 million people have some level of perchlorate in their drinking water, according to the National Research Council.
Perchlorate is used in explosives and as an ingredient in solid rocket fuel. Although found naturally in some areas, production of the chemical began in the mid-1940s by the U.S. military and aerospace industry, which accounts for 90 percent of its use, according to the EPA. Few consumer products contain the chemical, which is used in mortars, grenades, fireworks, lubricating oils and air bags.
... "Our findings are very surprising because we found that perchlorate in breast milk is widespread, doesn't appear to come from drinking water, appears to suppress iodide in breast milk, and in some cases, the levels are really high," said Ph.D. student Andrea Kirk. Perchlorate can inhibit thyroid hormones and may cause iodine deficiencies that lead to learning disabilities or lower IQ.
I'm not sure why the guy chose Ethanol .. but he's putting together a strawman proposal, studying with back-of-the-napkin figuring whether Australia could support itself using home-grown Ethanol:
The result is that it would take 107,700 GWHrs of energy to grow and produce the ethanol required to supply the 237,400 GWHrs of energy currently consumed by oil each year in Australia.
That's not a good return on investment.
But, perhaps, there would be other fuels derviced from other crops that would be more suitable? e.g. biodiesel derived from bio-engineered algae. The analysis Stephen Gloor provides covers only one plant/fuel combination, while there are several possible plant/fuel combinations that could be employed. It's very possible that one of them will produce a better return on investment than the Ethanol scenario he examines.
Photoshop For DNA (Matthew Herper, 06.01.05, 6:00 AM ET, FORBES.COM)
The new firm, Codon Devices, is aiming to perfect a new technology that would allow scientists to edit sequences of DNA with never-before-seen ease. The leap might be akin to going from having to correct articles with White-Out to editing them onscreen with a word processor. The goal is to move from having to merely tweak the proteins that are used as biotech drugs to being able to design them, even taking material from multiple organisms and using them to create new, functional genes.
"I think if we pull it off, it changes everything to do with our interaction with the living world," says Drew Endy, a young MIT professor who is one of the company's co-founders. "We'll see if it works."
The organic process of evolution is what created the world of flora and fauna around us. And this represents another step forward in terms of scientists sticking bits of DNA together and seeing what happens.
What this raises in my mind is the fear that they'll accidentally create a monster through this. While these scientists know quite a lot about the function of DNA, they don't know it all. Which means they're left to trying lots of combinations, with little ability to predict the results of the combinations. Since they're working to create living organisms, the living organisms may well escape the laboratory, and if it happens to be a deadly organism it could wipe out a tremendous amount of life. Especially as its status as an engineered organism means our bodies and the bodies of other life forms would in now way have a defense against any attack this engineered organism might make. The evolutionary process that created our bodies, and the natural resistance to infecting organisms, takes thousands of years to unfold and create resistance to new organisms.
Of course the only way for the scientists to learn and grow their knowledge is to try out new ideas and see what happens.
Welcome to Codon Devices: Founded by leading scientists at the intersection of engineering and molecular biology, Codon Devices is working to pioneer the emerging field of synthetic biology. The company is currently developing its proprietary BioFAB production platform that is expected to accurately synthesize kilobase- to megabase-length genetic code, orders of magnitude more rapidly and less expensively than currently available technology. In the short term, product opportunities include comprehensive sets of biological parts for large-scale research projects, engineered cells that produce novel pharmaceuticals, engineered protein biotherapeutics, and novel biosensor devices. In the longer term, the company's core technology is expected to enable improved vaccines, agricultural products, and biorefineries for the production of industrial chemicals and energy.
Their dream is very nice isn't it?
They would be relying on the known purpose for DNA, which is that the DNA contains the instructions for producing proteins in our bodies. Raw chemicals go into the cells, and through other chemical signals floating through the body, those raw chemicals get transformed by the instructions in the DNA to create other chemicals (proteins basically) that our bodies need to live.
Hence, the dream for a long time in science is to engineer organisms whose DNA creates the chemicals used in various medicines. Another dream, Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae, is to have organisms that produce useful industrial chemicals, for example this link is to a plan to engineer a breed of Algae that produces oils that can easily be turned into biodiesel that can be burned in a power plant, and you can partially feed the algae growth from the emissions produced by the power plant.
Nice dream. Let's pray it doesn't turn into a nightmare.
UPDATE: My fiancee is a geneticist and read the above article and couldn't see anything in the article that indicated any breakthrough. The article does mention George Church publishing a paper in Nature describing the technique.
This is probably it: Accurate multiplex gene synthesis from programmable DNA microchips (JINGDONG TIAN, HUI GONG, NIJING SHENG, XIAOCHUAN ZHOU, ERDOGAN GULARI, XIAOLIAN GAO & GEORGE CHURCH)
He also wrote an impassioned letter From systems biology to synthetic biology calling for a model of greater sharing of more details that can lead to synthetic biology.
In August 2003 there was a major electricity blackout in the eastern U.S. This meant the coal-fired power plants shut down, and weren't burning coal. It provided a unique opportunity to study what would happen if coal-emissions were reduced.
Blackout gave cities a breath of fresh air (10:00 29 May 2004, Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition, Jenny Hogan)
As power plants were turned down in south-east Canada and the north-east and mid-west US, levels of pollutants fell, says meteorologist Russell Dickerson.
His team from the University of Maryland in College Park flew an aircraft over the middle of the blackout zone 24 hours after the power had gone down. "This was a unique opportunity to explore what would happen to air quality if power station emissions were reduced," he says.
The team compared pollution levels over Pennsylvania with those on a similar hot, sunny day the year before. While there was no significant difference in levels of pollutants associated solely with traffic, other pollutants linked with power stations fell dramatically.
Sulphur dioxide levels decreased by 90 per cent, there was around half the amount of ozone and visibility increased by 40 kilometres.
Driving into work this morning I passed someone painting the lines on the street ... and had an interesting series of thoughts.
What was in front of me was two city utility trucks, and a little special-build gizmo that had four-wheels, a lawnmower engine, a guy sitting on a seat, and a paint sprayer. The two city utility trucks were guarding the guy on this little gizmo.
I thought -- why isn't that an EV? I'm sure that thing has a very short range requirement, and therefore doesn't need to be burning gasoline. I'm sure several people (myself included) on this board could design an EV gizmo that does the same job.
I want to zoom out to the big picture now.
The gasoholic duopoly of oil companies and auto makers are very entrenched. It makes little sense to tackle that head-on, it would be like flying the Millenium Falcon and heading directly towards one of the massive warships. As C3PO would say, the odds of surviving such a maneuver are slim. Instead nibble around the side building a larger and larger business in areas the automakers think are non-core.
e.g. The Steel Industry used to be the big thing in what are now known as the Rust Belt states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc). What happened? Well, the "mini mills" established themselves selling products that the big steel industry didn't see as core to their businesses. Eventually the mini mills businesses grew big enough that the big steel industry collapsed, because the mini mills would take one small market niche after another until the big steel industry had nothing left.
In the vehicle industry, the EV folk could work to make small vehicles like the paint sprayer gizmo I saw this morning. I'm sure that city governments are under some kind of mandate to decrease their pollution output. I remember reading some time ago that airports are being affected by such a mandate, and given the nature of airports the only avenue they had to decreasing their pollution was to electrify the ground service vehicles. In other words, there's a whole range of specialized service vehicles that could be built, that would be electrically driven, which would be a niche the big auto industry might be ignoring and could be taken by an EV supplier.
It's not as glamourous as building a car. But it could be a more sustainable business. Maybe.
Our modern lifestyle as exemplified by the United States is very dependant on one thing: Cheap energy.
Cheap energy means an abundance of energy, compared to what our ancestors had. It wasn't so long ago that our ancestors rode horses. I don't think it was a matter of technology so much as it was energy. Without the cheap oil to drive our vehicles they wouldn't be of much use. But it's more than our cars, it's the food, the clothing, the ease of jetsetting around the world, it's having well lit homes at night, and more.
It all will probably be soon coming to an end. The cause? The oil peak, that the world oil production has reached a peak (or soon will do so) and shortly will be unable to meet the rising oil demand. That will change the equation of our society that's dependant on cheap oil.
Judging from the interview, his book is a very dark prediction:
In Kunstler's world, a teenager will be better off learning how to yoke up a horse-drawn buggy than how to change the oil in a car. Woodshop will be more important than computer literacy. Among Kunstler's predictions: The South will devolve into agricultural feudalism and the Pacific Northwest will be beset by a plague of pirates from Asia. Forget about sleek hydrogen-powered cars coming to the rescue. For that matter, quit tilting your hopes toward wind power.
Why is this? The core is a prediction known as Hubbert's Oil Peak. Hubbert was an oil company geologist who put together a model of the oil available in the world, predicted the rising demand for oil, and the possible production capacities over time. The model predicts a peak in the production capacity at some point, and in a way the exact point in time isn't so important as is the model and the fact that oil production will peak sometime.
The lifestyle to which we've become accustomed is dependant on oil. Without the cheap oil there's so many things we won't be able to do. But what will actually happen is a decline in oil production, not a stop in oil production. But at the same time the demand for oil has been rising continuously for over 100 years, meaning that the demand and supply will go wildly out of whack.
If you remember your high school economics -- high demand, and low supply, leads to high prices.
Kunstler's prediction is apparently close to the Mad Max scenario.
He describes two major mental disturbances in the mind of America:
One is the Jiminy Cricket syndrome -- the idea that when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. ... There's another mental disturbance that Americans are suffering from. It's the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing -- unearned riches, free energy, perpetual motion -- and it's exemplified by Las Vegas.
He's sure got a point. Just witness the onslaught of Hummers on our highways. Do they understand and grasp the power going on in those vehicles? Are we so accustomed to stopping by the gas station for a fillup, that we're numb to what we are actually doing?
We have evolved a cheese-doodle agriculture system run by large corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, which grow immense amounts of corn by using fossil fuels to produce immense amounts of corn-based junk food. The prospects are poor that we will continue living this way.
And he goes on to describe the economics of Wal-Mart, Costco, and the other big-box retailers. They have razor thin margins, and an extensive transportation system to deliver mass quantities of goods from centralized warehousing. The transportation system is very dependant on fuel cost, and rising fuel costs will kill these companies.
What will be the first signs of the long emergency?
We're already seeing them. The two clearest signs are serious geopolitical friction and the volatility in the oil markets. A third one, which hasn't quite gotten traction, will be disruptions in the financial markets. But that could happen at any moment.
The huge suburban metroplexes like New York and Chicago are not going to function very well. They're products of the oil age. They are oversupplied with skyscrapers and mega-structures that have poor prospects in a society with scarce energy. We will see a painful contraction in these places.
It's a very good and interesting interview, and it's tempting to just quote the whole thing. However, I can't, so let's just close this off with a summary of the rest of what he says.
Basically he's claiming the U.S. economy has outsourced so much of the real economic engine, beginning with all the factory jobs lost to foreign countries, and now with the tech industry outsourcing, that what's left of the American Economy is the buildout of suburbia, and the largely service-oriented jobs found there.
But suburbia is soon to be unviable. Suburbia survives because of the cheap energy allowing us to live far from our jobs and drive the 30+ miles each way to get to them. For our ancestors a 30+ mile trip took all day, and then some, but for us today it's a half hour on the highway and costs a couple dollars for the gasoline.
But if we can't get gasoline, or if gasoline cost $10 per gallon, we'd think twice about the 30+ mile commute wouldn't we? At 15 miles/gallon for the typical SUV, a 60+ mile daily trip would cost 4 gallons of fuel, or $40. Ooofda!
Agriculture will have to become localized again, and the distinction between City and Rural will have to become strong again.
But over the last 50 years all the localized commerce got tossed out the window ground under the wheels of big rigs riding a sea of cheap oil.
Les us all pray, shall we?
