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swissforextrading · 6 years

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“In research, you need a sense of daring”

13.06.18 - Doris Leuthard, head of Switzerland’s Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications, takes a hands-on approach. She rarely misses an opportunity to get personally involved, whether to attend the unveiling of NeighborHub in Fribourg in late April or to take part in the Forum des 100 conference on mobility at EPFL’s Dorigny campus. We spoke with her about the latest challenges in transport, energy and communication – three core areas of research at our school. What impressed you about NeighborHub? The whole project fascinated me. I learned about it after the Swiss team’s “famous” victory in Denver, and had the honor of taking Germany’s president on a tour of the building during his visit to Switzerland. NeighborHub’s success shows that a cross-disciplinary approach can be highly effective for resolving complex issues – and that such an approach is one of the strengths our country can leverage. The project brought together experts in fields ranging from energy and ecology to design, mobility and even food production. The project also shows the added value in bringing together EPFL, the University of Fribourg and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Each one added essential skills and experience to the project. How can this type of research initiative help foster progress in your department’s areas of focus? Every field of research has not only its own body of knowledge, but also its own methods. This type of cross-disciplinary approach can bring fresh ideas to discussions that experts from the same field might have among themselves. Also, we’re interested in tangible results, and that’s something NeighborHub delivers. We can market the building and integrate it into our society. This is the kind of initiative that can help effect change. What advice would you give to the current generation of students? That they need to take a proactive role if they want to advance their fields. According to EasyPark’s Smart Cities Index – which ranks cities according to criteria such as mobility, sustainability, energy, quality of life and digital infrastructure – Zurich comes in fourth place and Geneva, ninth. So we’re not on top, and still have progress to make in the areas that today’s youth are concerned about. How important is the research done by Switzerland’s specialized universities for public policymakers? You are our gems! You do excellent work that bolsters our country’s economy and global reputation. The Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich are ranked among the best universities in Europe. You drive innovation and are at the forefront of the latest developments. For us it’s very important to stay updated on what your researchers are doing – what international projects they’re working on. We need to bring initiatives like NeighborHub out into the spotlight. They harbor useful new technology that should be shown and promoted to small businesses and society in general. Our talks with universities are a source of inspiration for us and point the way forward, including in terms of funding. Transportation – especially by air – isn’t exactly good for the environment, but people today are traveling more than ever. What are your priorities for responding to this growing need? Planes, trains or automobiles? I believe it’s dangerous to set priorities for specific means of transportation. Today’s lifestyles are shifting towards multimodal systems, and that trend is set to accelerate. Our strategy is to identify investment opportunities in various forms of transportation and infrastructure based on their environmental impact, energy use and the number of people they carry. Trains are clearly the best choice for long-distance travel, but when it comes to visiting other countries, flying is an inexpensive, quick and easy solution. All we can do there is question whether those low fares are appropriate or disconnected from the market. And there are the issues of CO2 emissions and the use of kerosene-based versus gasoline-based fuel. Switzerland is behind other countries such as Norway when it comes to electric vehicles. Do you have any measures planned to encourage EV use? We do fairly well when compared with other European countries. Norway clearly comes out on top, but that’s thanks in large part to subsidies – something we want to avoid. Our country’s car importers have set themselves the target of having 10% of new cars be electric by 2020 [the figure is currently 0.4%]. We could do more, but that would depend on three key variables: the vehicles’ range, their cost – which is increasingly in line with that of standard cars – and our country’s charging station infrastructure. We are in the process of building that infrastructure, but we need the support of cantonal and municipal governments as well as the private sector. The Swiss Federal Roads Office is encouraging the installation of charging stations at highway rest stops. For now, electric cars in Switzerland are exempt from taxes and duties, except for the highway pass. But given that these cars are driven on our roadways, it would make sense to eventually ask their drivers to contribute to the cost of maintaining those roadways. However, the timing for that is still very much up in the air. Doris Leuthard during one of her visits at EPFL, in 2013. ©Alain Herzog/EPFL How do you feel about self-driving cars? Do you think they could help alleviate traffic congestion and bottlenecks? I’m not sure if they could be part of the solution, but I do know that the technology is advancing at a rapid pace. In any case, those cars still need road infrastructure, so that doesn’t change our plans or investment objectives. It will be interesting to see the day when all cars on the road are autonomous. But in the meantime, as long as there’s a mix of driver and driverless cars, that won’t change traffic flows, speeds or safety. Plus there’s a number of legal and ethical issues that still need to be sorted out. This summer EPFL students will compete in the Hyperloop competition. Do you see a future for this technology? I see it as a visionary concept, like Solar Impulse. These ideas typically strike us as eccentric, or even unrealistic, but sometimes we need to think outside the box. Such large-scale programs usually result in many smaller projects that churn out genuine solutions. In research, including at EPFL, you need vision and a sense of daring. It would be a mistake to focus only on research where we know the outcome. We have to push boundaries, conceive the unconceivable. But that’s harder in politics, where we have to be pragmatic. And how do you feel about the planned underground freight system? We’ve been behind this project from the start. There are clear benefits to reducing the amount of freight traffic on our national highways, especially if the funding comes from the private sector. The idea seems feasible and I think the costs can be managed. Now it’s up to the project investors to decide – they will have to submit their plans to the Swiss Federal Council since a special law would need to be passed for the project to go through. The days for nuclear power as we know it are numbered. But Switzerland still has five operating nuclear plants that will need to be decommissioned. Do you think there’s much of a future for careers in nuclear engineering? Nuclear engineers, physicists and other such experts are still very much needed, and the dwindling appeal of this field is worrying. A nuclear power plant can run for 50 years and takes ten years to decommission, meaning we’ll need qualified personnel for our Leibstadt plant, for example, until 2045. That’s a long career for someone just starting out. But on top of decommissioning, there’s also R&D. We’re still involved in the ITER project because who knows – maybe we’ll see a major breakthrough ten years from now. Not to mention the possible applications in healthcare. You’ve had a lot of success championing various political issues. Which were you the most enthusiastic about? Probably Switzerland’s Energy Strategy 2050. That was especially tough in the months right after Fukushima. I asked myself a lot of questions – what should we do? What’s feasible? Do I have the courage to go through with it? To help find the answers, I worked with businesses, cantons and cities, as well as EPFL and ETHZ, which was all extremely interesting. The EPFL and EPFZ scientists did a lot to support us, providing expertise in areas like energy efficiency, renewable energy and economic feasibility studies. As a politician, I often have a hard time getting my head around the technical details, so it was nice to be able to draw on that network. Thanks to their support, I had the courage to stand behind the strategy, knowing that experts have confirmed that our plans are technically feasible. That left me with the political part of the job – getting the various parties, the Swiss parliament and eventually the Swiss people on board. What do you plan to do after you leave the Swiss Federal Council? There are a lot of things I’m interested in, but the first thing I plan to do is take some vacation. I promised my husband we’d go on a long trip and get a closer look at the wonders of this planet. After you go, there could be just one woman remaining on the Federal Council, down from four in 2010. Does that worry you? Yes, because in politics, as elsewhere, women are underrepresented. I plan to continue to defend women’s issues after I step down from the Federal Council. It’s true that there may be just one or two women on the Federal Council for a while. But I think there is already pressure to change that, especially on the PLR and the UDC which each have two seats. The women are there, but we shouldn’t look only at the federal level; there are also many female political leaders at the cantonal level who could serve on the Federal Council. Parliament just needs to elect them. Brief bio 1963 Born in the Canton of Aargau 1991 Admitted to the bar 2006 Elected to the Swiss Federal Council 2010 & 2017 Served as president of Switzerland 2017 Switzerland’s Energy Strategy 2050 approved in a referendum Anne-Muriel Brouet http://actu.epfl.ch/news/in-research-you-need-a-sense-of-daring (Source of the original content)

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technato · 6 years

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Methanol-Fueled Cars Could Drive Us Toward an Emissionless Future

Icelandic firm Carbon Recycling International is turning industrial pollution into a low-carbon fuel for cars, trucks, and ships

Photo: Carbon Recycling International

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Photo: Carbon Recycling International

Road to Methanol: Iceland’s Carbon Recycling International has pioneered a way to produce methanol fuel using renewable energy and waste CO 2. A nearby geothermal power station supplies CO 2 and electricity to the methanol plant and mineral-rich water to the famous Blue Lagoon spa [above].

Just off a two-lane highway that winds through the black volcanic rock fields of southwest Iceland sits a nondescript industrial plant. Its multistoried network of pipes and tubes reveal little about what goes on there. Each year hundreds of thousands of tourists pass right by, on their way to visit the strange and beautiful Blue Lagoon, an outdoor spa whose steaming milky blue water flows directly from the nearby Svartsengi geothermal power station. If tourists notice the plant at all, it’s maybe to wonder why it’s here.

As it happens, this plant also depends on the Svartsengi facility, not for its silica-infused water but for its carbon dioxide. And what’s going on inside the plant has the potential to dramatically decarbonize the transportation sector. The plant belongs to Carbon Recycling International (CRI), whose engineers have developed a novel method of using renewable energy to produce methanol fuel from waste streams of CO2 and electrolyzed water. Methanol generated this way, CRI is betting, could have a real impact on climate change.

Photo: Carbon Recycling International

Expansion Plans: Carbon Recycling International’s methanol plant, in Iceland, produces 5 million liters of fuel a year. The company plans to build plants 10 times as large in China by leveraging its partnership with the carmaker Geely, which has been investing in methanol cars.

Over the past decade, CRI engineers have been refining and vetting their process at the plant, which is named for the late Nobel Prize–winning chemist George A. Olah. A pipeline carries about 5,500 metric tons of CO2 per year from Svartsengi, which also supplies the electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen and CO2 are then combined to form water-laden methanol, which is distilled into pure methanol. Opened in 2012, the plant now produces 4,000 metric tons, or 5 million liters, a year. Some of the fuel, which CRI has dubbed Vulcanol, is used to operate a test fleet of methanol-burning sedans built by the Chinese car giant Geely Auto Group. The carmaker’s founder, billionaire Li Shufu, has been pushing methanol transportation in his country. Geely has a factory in Shanxi province that can produce up to 100,000 methanol cars a year and is constructing another factory in Guizhou province.

Of course, in an ideal low-carbon world, the roads would be filled not with methanol cars but with electric vehicles charged by renewable energy. We’re still well short of that goal, however. Today, EVs make up a tiny fraction of cars in every country where they’re sold. Even under the most optimistic assumptions, it may be midcentury before a majority of cars on the road are all-electric.

In the meantime, methanol is among the most promising alternatives for significantly shrinking our cars’ carbon footprint. If you power a methanol plant with a renewable energy source and capture the CO2 coming from the exhaust of, say, a steel plant, you can halve the total carbon being released into the atmosphere. So even though burning methanol in a car’s internal combustion engine does release CO2, along with some water vapor, you’re first capturing CO2 from the steel plant. That is, you’re basically recycling the carbon and extracting some useful work before it gets released. In contrast to carbon capture and storage, which aims to permanently sequester CO2 deep underground, this type of cycle is known as “carbon capture and utilization.”

“Many people are convinced that EVs will solve our climate problem,” says G.K. Surya Prakash, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California and a longtime collaborator of Olah’s. “But the technology isn’t there yet, the batteries aren’t there yet. And many third-world countries don’t have enough electricity even for basic needs, so what’s all this talk about EVs?” Methanol, by contrast, is doable right now, he says. The simple alcohol can be burned in an internal combustion engine, and it can be stored, transported, and distributed using the same basic infrastructure that’s now used for gasoline and diesel.

“That’s the beauty of methanol,” says Prakash. “You don’t have to build an entirely new infrastructure from scratch.”

If the idea of methanol cars sounds vaguely familiar, that may be because it’s not new. Back in the 1980s, such vehicles were heavily promoted by the government of California, as a way to address the state’s air pollution as well as its dependence on foreign oil. Ford Motor Co. spearheaded the development of a flex-fuel car, which could burn gasoline as well as alternative fuels like methanol. California’s fleet of methanol vehicles eventually reached 15,000. But falling oil prices and the U.S. corn lobby’s push for ethanol ultimately killed the methanol car.

This time around is different, says Paul Wuebben. He was one of the leaders of California’s methanol experiment and now serves as CRI’s senior director of fuel applications. (Wuebben’s colleagues call him “Mr. Methanol,” a nickname that makes him both slightly embarrassed and rather proud.) “Methanol is coming back strongly,” he says.

Photos: Jeibmann Photographik/Torpedo Motor

Deep Purple: At the Beijing Motor Show in April, the Chinese car startup AIWays unveiled a methanol fuel cell sports car [top] designed by Germany auto engineer Roland Gumpert. The fuel cell system [above] was supplied by SerEnergy. The car boasts a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour and an 0-to-100 km/h acceleration of about 2.5 seconds.

The European Union, India, and Israel are all investing in methanol transportation, Wuebben notes. And in China, methanol accounts for 8 percent of transportation fuel, and the market research firm IHS Markit is projecting demand to grow by 7 percent per year. The availability of methanol-gasoline blends there ranges from 5 percent methanol (M5) to 100 percent (M100). While most of China’s methanol is produced from coal or using coal power, Geely’s Li recently called for the creation of a “liquid sunshine economy,” in which the fuel’s production would be solar powered. And in April, the Chinese car startup AIWays, working with the German car engineer Roland Gumpert and the Danish fuel cell company SerEnergy, unveiled a methanol fuel cell sports car at the Beijing Motor Show.

And Iceland’s CRI is riding the methanol wave. At the company’s headquarters in Kópavogur, just outside Reykjavík, Benedikt Stefánsson, the business development director, says it’s been quite a ride. CRI was founded by two Icelanders and two Americans in 2006, the same year that Olah, Prakash, and Alain Goeppert published Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy (Wiley), laying out a grand vision for weaning the world from its habit of consuming some 97 million barrels of oil a day. The following year, CRI opened a small pilot plant. But the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 hit Iceland particularly hard, and investment funding dried up. CRI cobbled together enough money from local investors and family members to complete the Olah plant in 2012. Subsequent investments from Canadian methanol producer Methenex and Geely allowed the company to expand the plant and start developing projects outside Iceland.

Illustration: MCKIBILLO

Smil Says…

Current and planned projects have an annual capacity equal to just 0.3 percent of annual emissions from stationary sources.

Stefánsson says the right way to view a methanol-fueled car is as a replacement for a traditional gasoline- or diesel-powered car, for the vast majority of consumers who aren’t ready to make the leap to a fully electric car. In Iceland, he notes, government incentives favoring EVs have led to a recent uptick in battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. Nevertheless, he says, Iceland’s cold climate exacerbates the vehicles’ already limited electric range. So owners of hybrids still find themselves pulling up to the pump regularly.

Of course, even if methanol fuel is similar to gasoline in many respects, it’s not exactly the same. For starters, methanol’s energy content is about half that of gasoline, so an M100 car has to be filled up twice as often. “Methanol is a unique product, so you have to handle it in parallel with gasoline,” says Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. He’s highly skeptical that methanol cars will ever expand beyond their current niche.

“The auto industry is investing tens of billions of dollars in electric drive technology,” Sperling says. “They don’t need or want another product.”

For different reasons, Edward S. Rubin, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, also doubts methanol’s prospects. In a recent paper, he and several collaborators examined the extent to which converting CO2 to fuels—as CRI is doing—could mitigate climate change. Their conclusion: “While CCU [carbon capture and utilization] does have the potential to mitigate some CO2 emissions (provided that a continuous supply of carbon-free electricity is available), an alternative system employing CCS [carbon capture and storage] together with the same carbon-free electricity is a far more effective mitigation option.”

“If your chief goal is to solve the climate problem, methanol isn’t the best way to do it,” Rubin says. Climate models suggest that to stave off the worst effects of a changing climate, the electricity grid and other industrial sectors need to be deeply decarbonized by midcentury, he says. CCU may be more attractive than CCS because you may be able to make money doing it, he notes, but it also prolongs the time it will take to bring down greenhouse gas emissions to the levels needed to avoid dangerous impacts. “The timescale of climate-change mitigation means we really can’t afford to wait.”

Stefánsson agrees with this sense of urgency but argues that any scheme to mitigate climate change should include liquid fuels from CO2. “In any scenario, we need rapidly increasing investment in carbon capture,” he says. “But CCS has zero impact on the use of fossil fuels in transport. It is also a perpetual cost, which is why adoption has been so slow.” And there’s still no good near-term technology for electrifying long-distance and heavy-goods transport or shipping or aviation, he adds.

“Right now, the world is still flush with fossil fuel resources,” says USC’s Prakash. Absent a strong system of rewards and penalties that discourages the use of those resources, people will use them. Methanol offers a bridge from our highly carbonated present to a low-carbon future, in which electricity comes from renewables or nuclear and cars are electric. In the meantime, Prakash says, methanol can help. Rather than wastefully flaring natural gas in the Bakken Formation, for instance, why not place a methanol plant there and produce fuel? Rather than curtailing wind and solar when the power grid can’t absorb their output, why not use the excess for methanol?

“Methanol gives us a way to store not just kilowatt- or megawatt-hours of power but gigawatt-hours,” Prakash says. “It could be a game changer.”

This article appears in the June 2018 print issue as “Turning Pollution Into Fuel.”

Methanol-Fueled Cars Could Drive Us Toward an Emissionless Future syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

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tektronixtechnology · 5 months

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tektronixtechnology · 11 months

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tektronixtechnology · 11 months

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