The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium”.

Source: NYT

Major carmakers as Toyota, Honda, Daimler, General Motors, and Hyundai/Kia are deep into plans for commercial production of cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells starting in 2012.

Like natural gas, hydrogen can be used as a car fuel with engine modifications. But carmakers think fuel cells are the better, more efficient, silent, clean power source for transportation. They function somewhat like a battery, except that their fuel is constantly replenished, reacting electrochemically with the air’s oxygen to make electricity to drive an electric motor.

Today, such vehicles are hand-built and expensive, but costs will come down once series production gets underway: Toyota says that it expects to “shock” the industry with its cost reduction as much as 90%.

As for hydrogen fuel costs are expected to be $2-3 per kilogram by around 2018 (a kilogram of hydrogen has about the same energy content as a gallon of gasoline), but because fuel cells are about twice as efficient as internal combustion engines, the effective cost per unit of distance would be about half that.

It is worth noting that hydrogen’s supporters do not oppose battery-powered cars, and they embrace biofuels as another renewable source of hydrogen. But because of the weight of electric batteries, their limited range, cost, and other considerations, batteries are best suited primarily for short-range city cars.

Source:  Project Syndicate &  Ecobella Blog

The New York Times says Toyota has “scrambled to gain the upper hand in an increasingly crowded battle over next-generation ‘green’ technology.” It’s a fair assessment, now that everyone’s jumping on the hybrid bandwagon. You know it’s a crowded field when there’s a Porsche Cayenne hybrid and even a Tata Nano hybrid on the horizon.

Clearly Toyota needs to do something if it is to retain its rep for innovation. And when you look at what Toyota is bringing to the showrooms, the plug-in Prius is a fairly nice piece of kit. For starters, it will be the first Toyota with lithium-ion batteries. It will allow the corded car to travel 14.5 miles on electricity alone. Not much, but it’s a start. More impressive is the fuel economy — Toyota’s claiming 134 mpg.

The Times notes Toyota is throwing its considerable weight behind hybrids and won’t be looking at battery electrics or other alt fuels anytime soon.

“We have been working on developing efficient powertrains to be able to use oil as efficiently as possible. Many hurdles remain for alternative fuels,” Takeshi Uchiyamada, Toyota’s executive vice president, told the Times. He went further when he talked to the Wall Street Journal: “Toyota believes that plug-in hybrids are a realistic solution among vehicles using electricity.”

Although we won’t see the plug-in Prius in showrooms until 2011, Toyota is rolling out 500 of them in the coming months. It’s providing 350 of them to municipal fleets in Japan to further refine the technology. Another 150 are slated for fleets in the United States early next year. Toyota will collect info on a variety of topics, including how and when the vehicles are charged, whether the batteries are depleted and how they are performing.

No word on what the plug-in Prius will cost, but Uchiyamada promised it will be “affordable.” The 2010 Prius starts at $22,400.

Source: Wired

August 26, 2009

The Japanese government wants the EV evangelists at Better Place to electrify some of Tokyo’s taxis, and the cabs with cords could be on the road by January. They will use the Silicon Valley startup’s swappable batteries, which can be replaced in about the time it takes to fill a gas tank.

The pilot program between Better Place and Nihon Kotsu — Tokyo’s largest taxi company — will be the first real-world test of the innovative battery-swap technology. Better Place says the ability to quickly and easy change a dead battery is essential to eliminating the “range anxiety” that makes EVs a tough sell. Tokyo is a perfect proving ground because the city has about 60,000 taxis — more than New York, Paris or Hong Kong. Although those taxis represent just 2 percent of the vehicles in Japan, they account for 20 percent of the CO2 that country’s automobiles produce, said Kiyotaka Fujii, president of Better Place Japan.

“Japan has a very large taxi market,” Fujii said at a press conference, according to Japan Times. “I believe EVs with switchable batteries will spread to many other Asian countries, if they succeed in Japan.”

The pilot program is starting small — really small. Better Place says “up to four newly modified and fully operational” electric taxis will serve the Roppongi Hills neighborhood of central Tokyo. Better Place plans to build one of its $500,000 battery-swap stations in Roppongi Hills to keep the cars going.

But Better Place and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry — which commissioned Better Place for the pilot program — have big plans. Better Place says it anticipates building 100 battery swap stations within the next decade and converting all of Tokyo’s taxis to electricity. It isn’t clear who’s going to build those cars, though. Although several automakers — most recently Mitsubishi with its iMiEV and Nissan with its Leaf — promise to begin selling electric vehicles, so far only Renault is building one with a swappable battery.

Still, taxis are a logical place for the technology because they can work from a centralized location — in this case, a battery swap station — and the economies of scale offered by a massive fleet could make the technology more cost-effective.

“Battery-switchable EVs are effective as vehicles that get a lot of use, such as taxis and cars used for car-sharing,” Minoru Nakamura, the crude oil distribution unit manager at the ministry’s Natural Resources and Energy Agency, said, according to Japan Times.

You can see the battery swap station in action here and check out our coverage of Better Place here.

Photo of a taxi in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hill neighborhood. megabn/Flickr

Source: Wired

Tell me your opinions about the price of gas and what might be done to influence it?

I think we need a revenue-neutral gas tax that puts a floor under the price of gasoline at around $3.50 to $4. The price of gas totally determines the types of vehicles that people buy and how they use them. The fact that America has ignored this reality is the reason why our energy policies have failed for 50 years. With gas now around $2 per gallon, it won’t be possible to sell fuel-efficient vehicles. Already, another great migration away from them is underway. I’ve seen this movie three times in my career.

How would you establish a price floor?

Through taxation. But it doesn’t need to happen by next month. If you simply announce that taxes will be put in after the economy recovers, in 2011 or 2012, people will start now to factor that into their decisions.

And how about your revenue-neutral point?

This would be a very painful, regressive tax, which needs to be rebated quickly–maybe through the payroll tax. If there’s a rebate, I think the political backlash can be handled. The biggest lie in American politics is the following combination: “I care passionately about America’s dependence on imported oil and we must do something about it, and I’m passionate about global warming–and I strongly believe we should have cheap, affordable gasoline.” There’s intellectual dishonesty in those assertions coming out of the same brain and the same mouth at the same time. That’s what Washington has been saying for 15 years, and that position guarantees you failure.

Related sites: Fortune

A tax exemption for vehicles that run on environmentally friendly technologies or “green” would come into effect in the near future.
After signing an executive decree taxes will fall by at least 30% on cars that use clean fuels (electric, alcohol-based fuels, hydrogen or other alternative to oil).
Although this legislation was to be ratified in July last year, its implementation was delayed due to the consultations with stakeholders.
“The process is almost ready, we expect it to be ratified this week” said Matamoros July, Deputy Minister of Energy.
This measure is intended to reduce environmental pollution caused by cars that run on petroleum products and the country’s dependence on these products.
In addition to be exempt from tolls and other vehicular restrictions, the government is looking for the creation of special battery recharging centers, similar to gasoline stations, according to the Deputy.
Signing this decree, opens the possibility for at least six companies in the country to sell environmentally friendly vehicles, whether electric or hybrid.
Reva, the electric vehicle manufacturer European capital, is one of those already announced that they entered the Central American market with their models. Other interested companies are Mitsubishi Electric-Car, Toyota, Isuzu and Chevrolet.

Permalink: http://www.larepublica.net/app/cms/www/index.php?pk_articulo=22453

NAIROBI – With unemployment soaring, bankruptcies climbing, and stock markets in free-fall, it may at first glance seem sensible to ditch the fight against climate change and put environmental investments on hold. But this would be a devastating mistake of immediate, as well as inter-generational, proportions.

Far from burdening an already over-stressed, over-stretched global economy, environmental investments are exactly what is needed to get people back to work, get order books flowing, and assist in powering economies back to health.

In the past, concern for the environment was viewed as a luxury; today, it is a necessity – a point grasped by some, but by no means all, economic architects yet.

A big slice of President Barack Obama’s $825 billion stimulus package for the United States includes a boost to renewable energy, “weatherizing” a million homes, and upgrading the country’s inefficient electricity grid. Such investments could generate an estimated five million “green-collar” jobs, provide a shot in the arm for the construction and engineering industries, and get America back into the equally serious business of combating climate change and achieving energy security.

The Republic of Korea, which is losing jobs for the first time in more than five years, has also spotted the green lining to grim economic times. President Lee Myung-Bak’s government plans to invest $38 billion employing people to clean up four major rivers and reduce disaster risks by building embankments and water-treatment facilities.

Other elements of Lee’s plan include construction of eco-friendly transportation networks, such as high-speed railways and hundreds of kilometers of bicycle tracks, and generating energy using waste methane from landfills. The package also counts on investments in hybrid vehicle technologies.

Similar pro-employment “Green New Deal” packages have been lined up in China, Japan, and the United Kingdom. They are equally relevant to developing economies in terms of jobs, fighting poverty, and creating new opportunities at a time of increasingly uncertain commodity prices and exports.

In South Africa, the government-backed Working for Water initiative – which employs more than 30,000 people, including women, youth, and the disabled – also sees opportunity in crisis. The country spends roughly $60 million annually fighting invasive alien plants that threaten native wildlife, water supplies, important tourism destinations, and farmland.

This work is set to expand as more than 40 million tons of invasive alien plants are harvested for power-station fuel. As a result, an estimated 500 megawatts of electricity, equal to 2% of the country’s electricity needs, will be generated, along with more than 5,000 jobs.

So it is clear that some countries now view environmental investments in infrastructure, energy systems, and ecosystems as among the best bets for recovery. Others may be unsure about the potential returns from investing in ecosystem services such as forest carbon storage or in renewable energy for the 80% of Africans who have no access to electricity. Still others may simply be unaware of how to precisely follow suit.

In early February, the United Nations Environment Program will convene some of the world’s leading economists at the UN’s headquarters in New York. A strategy for a Global Green New Deal, tailored to different national challenges, will be fleshed out in order to assist world leaders and ministers craft stimulus packages that work on multiple fronts.

The Global Green New Deal, which UNEP launched as a concept in October 2008, responds to the current economic malaise. Spent wisely, however, these stimulus packages could trigger far-reaching and transformational trends, setting the stage for a more sustainable, urgently needed Green Economy for the twenty-first century.

The trillions of dollars that have been mobilized to address current woes, together with the trillions of investors’ dollars waiting in the wings, represent an opportunity that was unthinkable only 12 months ago: the chance to steer a more resource-efficient and intelligent course that can address problems ranging from climate change and natural-resource scarcity to water shortages and biodiversity loss.

Blindly pumping the current bail-out billions into old industries and exhausted economic models will be throwing good money after bad while mortgaging our children’s future. Instead, political leaders must use these windfalls to invest in innovation, promote sustainable businesses, and encourage new patterns of decent, long-lasting employment.

Permalink: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/asteiner3

The backbone will let cheap fuels like coal and water displace expensive gas-fired power.

Online shipping or energy arrived a century before Ebay. The electric grid has long let us buy cheap fuel by the smidgen and rent billion-dollar, million-horsepower turbines by the millisecond. We can also use the grid to beat oil.

The wires that move electricity from power plant to wall outlet have done more to raise efficiency and lower energy costs than all the improvements made to car engines since Henry Ford rolled out the first Model T. We could gain as much again by building a high-voltage, continent-spanning backbone grid to establish a single national U.S. market for electricity. This would also unleash domestic capital, labor and ingenuity in the one energy market that stands a good chance of cutting us loose from foreign oil suppliers.

We use as much raw energy generating electricity as we get out of the 7 billion barrels of oil we burn every year. At $70 a barrel we spend four times as much on oil as we do on the fuels used to generate electricity, yet big electric power plants turn their fuel into a lot more useful power than we get out of oil-fired engines and furnaces. The huge capital investment in our power plants isn’t fully used, either. Idle capacity could power just about all the miles we drive, at a cost comparable to buck-a-gallon gasoline. A further 10% boost in electrical output could take care of all the heating supplied by oil-fired home furnaces, and at off-peak prices electric heat is cheaper than heating oil.

The price of electricity varies all over the map. Demand moves from east to west with the sun, tracking human activity and afternoon peaks in air-conditioning loads. At many hours on most days some utilities are burning expensive gas as they strain to meet peak demand while others have cheap capacity standing idle. Often someone is selling wholesale electricity for 20% to 50% less than others are paying elsewhere. Several hours later many of the cheap sellers and expensive buyers have traded places. This happens because the grid’s three main “interconnections”—east of the Rockies, west of the Rockies and Texas—are hardly linked to one another at all, and within each there’s too little transmission capacity to deliver much of the cheap power to the expensive buyers.

A single 765,000-volt transmission line can move about 1% of the total average U.S. electric load. Thousands of miles of these lines are already up and running. It will take another 22,000 miles to knit the existing wires together into a national grid. This backbone will be able to move about 25% of our current electricity consumption over distances that span significant fractions of the continent. Electrical losses will be modest, because very high voltage lines are fantastically efficient. The backbone will cost $75 billion to build. It will add about 0.3 cents of transmission cost per kilowatt-hour to the retail price of electricity, which currently averages about 9 cents.

By pooling demand, the backbone will let cheap power chase high demand around the clock and across the country. It will let inexpensive coal, uranium, water behind a dam or (eventually) wind, sun and other renewables displace expensive gas-fired power. It will lower the capital cost of electricity by allowing fuller use of billion-dollar power plants, much as filling every seat on a jumbo jet lowers the average cost of flying. A plant located in (say) Lebanon, Kans., the geographic center of the country, will be within easy reach of peak loads on both coasts and everywhere in between.

By pooling supply and demand nationwide, the backbone will cut the average cost of generating electricity by somewhere between 30% and 50%. And it will reduce it still more over the longer term, by allowing producers to locate power plants where the land is cheap, the neighbors are friendly, the coal, uranium, gas, wind or sun is most readily available, the ecosystems are durable and the obstructive lawyers are scarce.

By providing cheap access to the cheapest power, a backbone grid will also accelerate electrification. Plug-in hybrid cars will recharge mainly at night. Heating loads peak at night, too. Using idle capacity in plants and wires to compete in these two big, oil-dependent sectors will further level out supply and demand and thus further lower the cost of electricity.

If other fuels displace the gas currently used to generate electricity, that amount of gas can then displace about 10% of the oil used for transportation. Using electricity to displace oil and gas in the heating sector would put another 15% of the U.S. oil market into play. Electrifying light-duty cars and trucks would displace another 30%. These numbers will sound unrealistically big only to people who don’t grasp how big electricity already is.

We have abundant supplies of or reliable access to all the fuels we currently use to generate electricity, and the development of wind, solar and other renewables will only expand our homegrown options.

Peter Huber is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and coauthor of The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, January 2005)

Permalink: http://www.forbes.com/opinions/forbes/2008/1117/104.html

A very practical measure today would be to set a special tax that would set a floor at the price of a barrel of oil at $70. This would provide financing today for the plans several people are proposing. It would provide certainty for the consumers to make purchase decisions. Most important however is that it would take financial uncertainty to allow the market economy to finance the new projects.

In addition there is room for other initiatives. Specifically for Costa Rica I would like:

www.CostaRicaCleanAirInitiative