The International Herald Tribune March 11, 2010 Thursday
In the Blogs: Green Inc. TODD WOODY
ABSTRACT
Researchers at I.B.M. and Stanford University said they had discovered a new way to make plastics that can be continuously recycled or developed for novel uses in health care and microelectronics.
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Researchers at I.B.M. and Stanford University in California have said they have discovered a new way to make plastics that can be continuously recycled or developed for novel uses in health care and microelectronics.
In a paper published Tuesday in Macromolecules, a journal of the American Chemical Society, the California researchers describe how they substituted organic catalysts for the metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts most often used to make the polymers that form plastics.
Chandrasekhar Narayan, who leads I.B.M.'s science and technology team at its Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, said the presence of metal catalysts in plastics meant that they could often be recycled only once before ending up in a landfill.
''When you try to take a product and recycle it, the metal in the polymer continues to degrade the polymer so it gets increasingly less strong,'' Mr. Narayan said. ''If you use organic reactants, you can make certain types of new polymers that are quite different and have other properties plastics don't have.''
That could give new life to the 13 billion plastic bottles thrown away each year in the United States.
''Plastic bottles can be converted to higher-value plastics, like body panels for cars,'' Mr. Narayan said.
Organic catalysts could create a new class of biodegradable plastics to replace those that are difficult to recycle, like polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, which is used in a variety of consumer products, including plastic beverage bottles.
These new green plastics could also potentially be used by the pharmaceutical industry as drug delivery devices to treat cancer, Mr. Narayan said. ''The pharma industry has a lot of good drugs on the shelf that they can't use because they are very toxic,'' he said. ''You could encapsulate drugs in a bioplastic polymer and deliver them directly to the cancer site. The polymer degrades locally at the site and releases the cargo.''
I.B.M. and Stanford scientists have proved that organic catalysts work in the laboratory, Mr. Narayan said, and the company has teamed with the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia to develop recyclable PET plastics.
Mr. Narayan said that the organic catalysts were ''dirt cheap'' to make and that I.B.M. was in discussions with pharmaceutical companies and other potential partners about developing a pilot project that could be producing plastics within two years.
''It's really a new class of polymers,'' he said. ''I think it's going to revolutionize synthetic chemistry.''
LOAD-DATE: March 10, 2010
Copyright 2009 International Herald Tribune All Rights Reserved
The International Herald Tribune
September 7, 2009 Monday
SECTION: Pg. 18
LENGTH: 1140 words
HEADLINE: Oil sands: Destroyer or savior?; Green Inc.
BYLINE: Tom Zeller Jr.
DATELINE: NEW YORK
BODY:ABSTRACT
A proposed Canadian-American pipeline stirs passions.
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Few energy resources stir passions like Canada's oil sands.
The vast, gooey mixture of clay, sand, water and, most notably, bitumen - a hydrocarbon paste that, with a fair amount of work, can be separated from the granular stuff and eventually refined into a variety of petroleum products - has the potential to produce upwards of a trillion barrels of oil, by some estimates.
Accomplishing that, however, is a profoundly expensive, dirty and energy-intensive affair. Huge inputs of natural gas, for example, are needed to separate and process the bitumen, and according to one study by RAND, production from oil sands generates perhaps 30 percent more greenhouse gases than conventional oil extraction.
As my colleague Ian Austen noted for The New York Times this year, the process amounts to the most capital-intensive method for extracting oil. ''Each of the tires on the cartoonishly oversize dump trucks used in oil sands mining,'' he noted, ''costs about $60,000.''
The question in the United States, then, is how to weigh the disadvantages against the very real benefit of securing access to a substantial - and friendly - source of foreign oil for decades to come.
Among those giving more weight to the benefits: the U.S. State Department, which issued final approval late last month for the construction of a new pipeline aimed at widening the United States' tap on Canadian tar sands. Last week, a coalition of environmental groups, invoking the downsides of oil sands production, called the State Department's review of the pipeline project slipshod and filed a lawsuit to block it.In its decision, the State Department, citing numbers from the Energy Information Administration, estimated that the ''balance between domestic supply and demand'' will require imports of unconventional oil from Canada to grow from current levels of roughly 1.5 million barrels a day to some 4.3 million barrels by 2030.
The pipeline project, the State Department asserted, ''would serve the national interest, in a time of considerable political tension in other major oil-producing regions and countries, by providing additional access to a proximate, stable, secure supply of crude oil.''As for the added intensity of greenhouse gas emissions associated with tar sands development, the State Department decision stated, ''The administration has considered these concerns and considers that on balance they do not outweigh the benefits to the national interests identified above.''
Sarah Burt, a lawyer with Earthjustice, a California-based law firm spearheading the suit, which targets the State Department and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said that one of the goals was to ''provide some space for decision makers to consider some of the central issues these pipeline projects raise.''Not least among those, Ms. Burt said, was whether the new supply line - dubbed the Alberta Clipper Project by its builder, Enbridge Energy Partners of Houston - unnecessarily expands the already voracious U.S. appetite for fossil fuels even as the nation is on the hunt for alternatives.
In its attempt to focus attention on that larger question, the lawsuit, in which Earthjustice is joined by a variety of state and national environmental groups, takes aim at smaller game, including what it sees as holes in the decision-making process.According to the suit, for example, the State Department, failed properly to review expansion of an auxiliary pipeline that would carry a substance to Alberta to dilute the viscous oil-sands product so that it can flow back down through the Alberta Clipper line. Earthjustice claims that this diluent pipeline should have been wholly examined as part of the larger environmental impact assessment required for permitting the Clipper.The group also argues that the State Department overlooked a variety of ''indirect and cumulative'' effects of the new pipeline, the U.S. portion of which will run more than 300 miles, or 480 kilometers, from the Canadian border just west of Minnesota, across the north of that state, to the western tip of Lake Superior near Duluth. Among those effects are environmental and climatic ones resulting from the inevitable expansion of bitumen refining facilities in the United States.And, of course, there are the effects on forest and wetland associated with construction of a new pipeline, and the potential for harm to the ''health, recreational, economic, aesthetic and cultural interests'' of American Indian tribes on whose land portions of the pipeline will run.The State Department did not return calls for comment, but Denise Hamsher, a spokeswoman for Enbridge (which is not named in the lawsuit), more than once summed up the company's opinion of the litany of charges made by Earthjustice this way: ''Nonsense.''The pipeline and the U.S. government permit, Ms. Hamsher noted, did not come about overnight, but after years of deliberation, public comments and the acquisition of dozens of accompanying state and tribal permits. The U.S. environmental impact statement, she pointed out, is nearly 4,000 pages long - and it includes, Ms. Hamsher said, an analysis of both the Clipper line and the accompanying diluent line.The project, too, runs along an existing pipeline corridor, Ms. Hamsher said, and isn't cutting through virgin territory - though she conceded that a new pipeline might expand that the width of that corridor as much as 100 feet, or 30 meters.Even here, Ms. Hamsher argued, the footprint would be minimal, and the company is required to perform reclamation measures to compensate for its effect on surrounding land.
As for American Indians on affected lands, Ms. Hamsher said Enbridge had the tribal leaders' blessing.
Indeed, Frank Bibeau, legal director for the Leech Lake Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, suggested in a phone call that he and other tribal leaders viewed the pipeline as a boon to the tribe - and the country - despite a petition drive among some tribal members seeking a referendum on the project.
According to Mr. Bibeau, the Leech Lake Band is receiving $10 million from Enbridge as part of the deal. ''That $10 million is very important for jobs and tribal members and the whole Northern Minnesota area,'' Mr. Bibeau said, ''which is economically depressed.''''My belief as a citizen of the U.S. is if we were able to completely stop the new pipelines,'' he added, ''I believe that the Chinese and Japanese will just build pipelines to the Pacific Coast, and they'll take the crude.''Whatever the merits of either side of the pipeline debate - and the larger one over Alberta's oil sands - that possibility may already be under way. Just last week, PetroChina, a Chinese state-owned oil company, agreed to pay $1.7 billion for a majority stake in two tar sands projects.
LOAD-DATE: September 9, 2009
In the Blogs: Green Inc. The International Herald Tribune September 10, 2009 Thursday
Copyright 2009 International Herald TribuneAll Rights Reserved The International Herald Tribune
September 10, 2009 Thursday
SECTION: Pg. 19
LENGTH: 443 words
HEADLINE: In Geneva, U.S. engages in green diplomacy; In the Blogs: Green Inc.
BYLINE: James Kanter
BODY:ABSTRACT In part to defuse the impression that America was not on board with environmental efforts, the U.S. Mission building was fitted with solar panels and an energy-saving air-conditioning system.
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Until four years ago, the U.S. Mission in Geneva was another unbecoming concrete office block in the city's diplomatic district.
Now staffers can boast that the building is a showcase for green technology.
The transformation began when the exterior began to crumble early this decade.
Instead of carrying out a straightforward restoration, diplomats asked the State Department to install a solar electric system.
Douglas M. Griffiths, the deputy permanent representative at the mission and an economic officer there when the idea for the solar system arose, said the panels protected the facade from sun and water and reduced the need for cooling by shading the windows.
But Mr. Griffiths said the project also had political benefits at a time when the United States was seen by many governments as turning up its nose at global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Festooning the building with photovoltaic panels helped counter ''a false perception that we were not in the game,'' Mr. Griffiths told me last week during a tour of the building.
The mission's latest project was replacing aging air-conditioning with a system that uses electromagnetic fields rather than a traditional motor to power an air compressor.
The chiller - the first device of its size to go into operation in Europe - has reduced the mission's overall water use and its production of chemical waste.
In addition, the device's key components operate in a frictionless and oil-free environment, enhancing energy efficiency and vastly reducing maintenance.
Mr. Griffiths said the 225-ton chiller, manufactured by Multistack, a company in Wisconsin, cost the State Department around $2.7 million and should reduce energy consumption for air-conditioning by 30 percent.
The chiller was switched on in April this year and is expected to pay for itself by 2019.
A larger device was installed at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo in 2007.
Installation of the solar panels cost the State Department $1.6 million, and the system is expected to pay for itself by 2015.
The American companies Solar Design Associates and Hankins & Anderson were responsible for the design.
Companies including Schott Solar produced the photovoltaic panels.
The system went online in July 2005 and at peak power can generate enough electricity for 37 houses.
The mission feeds the power directly into the local grid and buys it back at a preferential rate - cutting about $70,000 from the mission's power bills each year.
LOAD-DATE: September 9, 2009
