A woody grass called Miscanthus is one of the biofuel feedstocks being examined.

Despite all the buzz around biofuels, commercial production has been slow to scale up. As a result, the EPA scaled back its goals for advanced biofuels earlier this year. Still, some Bay Area scientists recently made a breakthrough that could move us one step closer to a day when our cars run on fuels from plants.

The idea behind biofuels is pretty simple. Plants take sunlight and use that energy to make sugars. The biofuels industry wants to transform those sugars into fuel. That requires some molecular rearranging, so they’re looking to microbes to do the job.

At the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in Emeryville, e.coli is the microbe of choice. Researcher Greg Bokinsky shows me racks of glass tubes that are home to e.coli cultures that have been biologically engineered. They’ve created e.coli that munch on a woody plant called switchgrass.

If you’ve heard anything about biofuels, you’ve probably heard about ethanol that’s made from corn, which you can buy at gas stations today. But ethanol can’t be transported long distances because it corrodes pipelines. And using corn for fuel has also raised some concerns.

“Corn is used extensively to feed animals. Corn is also used for some food as well, human consumption. So we want to be very careful about using corn itself,” says Jay Keasling, CEO of JBEI.

Engineering Microbes

JBEI was founded 5 years ago with a $125 million grant from the Department of Energy. It’s a partnership between UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and other groups with the mission of creating biofuels from plants that aren’t used for food – also known as cellulosic biofuels.

“Switchgrass is one that gets mentioned a lot,” says Keasling. “Switchgrass is a native to much of the Midwest. It grows without a lot of water and fertilizer.”

But unlocking the energy inside switchgrass is no easy task. “Plants have evolved to be tough. There are beetles, there are fungi that want to attack them all the time and get access to those sugars. So they’ve evolved defense mechanisms,” he says.

The first line of defense is like a barbed wire fence. Plants protect their sugars with a tough material called lignin. Keasling’s team breaks through it using a liquid salt solution.

Once it’s gone, the sugars still have to be broken down further. Most companies use industrial enzymes to do that. But this is where Keasling’s engineered e.coli comes in.

“What we’ve done is we’ve gone to places like the rainforest in Puerto Rico and to compost piles. We’ve sequenced the organisms that are breaking down that biomass and then cloned those genes into e.coli,” Keasling says.

The e.coli break down the sugars for themselves, saving an expensive step in the process. Using the sugars, they produce fuels. “Really they’re pooping out fuels,” says Keasling. “And these are fuels that can be put directly into gasoline engines, diesel engines or jet engines.” These microbes are an exciting breakthrough for Keasling, since they could help bring down the cost of production.

Federal Goals Scale Back

The federal government was once excited about cellulosic biofuels, too. In 2006, former President George W Bush included them in his State of the Union address, saying “we'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switchgrass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within 6 years.”

Congress set up tax credits for cellulosic biofuels with a goal of seeing 500 million gallons produced in 2012. Since then, the industry has faced a harsh reality. The goal for next year has been cut back to just 12 million gallons.

“It was oversold. There was a lot of hype around it. It’s a tough problem. We can’t expect this to happen overnight,” says Keasling.

Keasling says if there’s anything that casts a shadow over biofuels, it’s the price of their biggest competitor. “If oil is under $100 a barrel, we’re not going to see many advanced biofuels on the market. They’re just not going to be able to compete. It’s virtually impossible,” he says.

Chris Somerville, director of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), agrees. “The costs are still not where we need them to be.” EBI is also run by UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, among other collaborators. It was started with a $500 million grant from BP.

Like JBEI, EBI’s mission is also engineering cellulosic biofuels. They’ve developed specially engineered yeast that eat feedstocks like miscanthus. “It’s going to be another 10 years before it really scales up. And it’s not because there’s a big problem. It’s just takes time to build and bring online big industrial facilities that are first of a kind.”

Companies, including BP, are now building commercial-scale biofuel plants. But the science is evolving so quickly, Somerville says it’s hard for companies to commit. “If you’re a company that has to lay down some hundreds of millions of dollars for a new facility and you look around and everyday, there’s new advances, you think, well maybe I’ll wait until next week and build a better facility.”

Although some in Congress are impatient over the progress of advanced biofuels, Somerville is confident that it’s just a matter of time before the industry scales up. “What we’re really trying to do is change the world. And we have this huge entrenched energy sector. And so there’s lots of entrenched players that don’t welcome change.”

And he says, if we care about addressing climate change, we won’t be able to do it without remaking the fuels that go in our cars.

Hydrogen is not exactly a fuel. That is, we don't burn it to make energy. It's used more as a medium for storing and transporting energy.

The science of hydrogen fuel cell systems is based on a simple concept. When you combine hydrogen with oxygen, energy is released. You get electricity. What makes it such a clean technology is that the byproducts of that chemical reaction are just heat and water.  So when a fuel cell takes hydrogen from a fuel tank and combines it with oxygen in the air, it produces electricity and emits only a wisp of heated water vapor from the tailpipe.

Hydrogen is combustible (remember the Hindenburg?), and needs to be handled carefully. However, there are easy ways to demonstrate electrolysis, which breaks water apart into oxygen and hydrogen, and the opposite process of joining those chemicals. In fact, you could make a type of fuel cell in your kitchen, with a popsicle stick, battery clips, Scotch tape and a few other household products. You do need one item that can't be found in your kitchen: platinum wire or platinum-coated nickel wire.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. And hydrogen fuel cell conversion is a squeaky clean technology. But the production of hydrogen for use in fuel cells — that can produce a lot of carbon dioxide. In fact, most hydrogen is currently made by stripping, or re-forming, natural gas. That's one of the ongoing criticisms of fuel-cell technology, that it generates greenhouse gas emissions just to get the hydrogen in the first place.

Fuel cells also can store energy generated by solar-powered electrolysis, as well as similar energy generated by wind and hydropower. That's the kind of hydrogen generation that advocates hope to eventually use in fuel cells. But being able to store energy also makes it extremely attractive to harnessing wind, solar and hydropower.

For example, California could generate a lot of wind energy at night, but since electricity has to be used right away, that nighttime, offpeak energy is less valuable. But if it could be stored in a fuel cell through the electrolysis process, that would make it much more lucrative.

Listen to the Where's my Hydrogen Highway? radio report online, and watch our Web Extra Slideshow.

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The House version comes from Democrats on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. If it passes, a consumer would get a $3,500 voucher for trading in a truck with 15 miles per gallon in exchange for buying a new truck that gets 16 miles per gallon – a one MPG difference. (If the new truck got 17 miles a gallon, the consumer would earn $4,500). That's why environmentalists complain that the legislation is more about stimulating car sales than it is about getting gas guzzlers off the road.

The Senate version proposed by U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), puts the bar a bit higher. In order to qualify for the $3,500 voucher, that same replacement truck would have to get 20 MPG – five miles per gallon more than the old truck. (An improvement of seven miles per gallon would earn the consumer a $4,500 voucher.)

Interestingly, this is a compromise even for Senator Feinstein herself. Check out her original, more stringent, Cash for Clunkers bill here. Proposed in January, it required stricter efficiency from the replacement vehicle, and would have allowed consumers to use their vouchers for used cars, or for public transit. Those conditions were junked, presumably, because they don't stimulate new car sales.

This article from the Christian Science Monitor, takes the number crunching even farther. Among the details worth considering is the "carbon cost" of making all these new vehicles that consumers will be enouraged to buy, should C4C pass: between 3.5 to 12.4 tons of CO2 per vehicle, according to a Duke economist.

Listen to the Cash for Clunkers radio report online.

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A carbon-tracking cell phone. Credit: Nokia

Not exactly the environmentally-conscious line of thinking that organizers were hoping for, but understandable for those high-schoolers holding a brand new, latest version of the Nokia in their hands.

The way the San Francisco pilot program works is like this: students get a mobile phone equipped with a GPS maps application. They fill out a profile with the make and model of the cars they use. The cell phone monitors movement, so it picks up when that student is making a car trip. The server factors in the time of day, the weather and humidity, and the type of car the student is riding in – and then calculates the amount of carbon output that trip represents.

The program currently doesn't differentiate between cars and other forms of transportation – bikes, ferries, trains, carpools, buses – so students may need to note when those trips were not regular car trips. The final number is their carbon rating.

When the program expands to three other San Francisco schools at the end of March 2009, a competition will be formed between the high schools to see which group of 25 students can cut back the most on their car trips and carbon output.

That will help answer the question of how much pollution people can save just by altering transportation behavior. And hopefully, the participants here are young enough that those transportation choices might continue after the program has ended. Once they get used to walking or biking, for instance, maybe they'll make that a regular form of transportation.

That, of course, doesn't ameliorate the answer to the other burning question – that, yes, the cool phone goes away when the pilot program ends.

Listen to the Tracking Carbon through Your Cell Phone radio report online.

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Research shows that to be healthy physically and psychologically, when we grow old we should stay connected to others. My father moved into an apartment that he had built next to my sister's house in Maryland. My mother and father-in-law are still able to live in their home in Orinda after more than 40 years there. My grandmother on my mother's side lived for nearly 100 years. She spent the last 20 or so years of her life in a community, where everyone had their own apartment, but everyone was responsible, according to their ability, to see to the safety and well being of the others. She rode with three other elderly women to daily Mass and shopping in a big blue Cadillac.

Recent research results published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives shows that the buildings we live in influence whether we stay connected– and stay healthy– or not. Researchers from the University of Miami, the University of Maine, and Lehigh University in the departments of medicine, education, human development, and architecture, studied a community of mostly elderly, Hispanic, and low-income people in a place called East Little Havana, a neighborhood in Miami. They gathered information about the health and lifestyles of more than 250 people over the course of two years, as well as the buildings they occupied.

Here is a summary of their findings:

1. People who live on blocks where there is a high percentage of porches, stoops, and with buildings built with windows overlooking sidewalks were healthier and happier than those on blocks with fewer of these architectural features. Interestingly, people in buildings with low windowsills out front (less than about a meter between the bottom of the window and the main level of the first floor) were more likely to feel isolated than those with higher windowsills. The researchers speculate that residents felt a lack of privacy with the low windows that made them feel vulnerable, and therefore less likely to interact with people outside the home.

2. People in East Little Havana who lived on blocks with a high level of first floor parking garages did worse physically and psychologically than those living on blocks with more buildings that had people, not cars, living on the first floors. Since newer buildings tend to have the first floor parking, it seems that buildings built before cars became widely available, say pre-1945, are more conducive to the health and well being of their elderly occupants.

The Cadillac my grandmother rode in? It was parked in a parking lot.

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By Rori Gallagher.

Even in these difficult economic times, California's population continues to grow, and those additional people are going to need a place to live. Recent legislation in California directs city planners to make environmentally responsible choices for new housing. One way to do that is to create transit villages.

The idea is to design housing near a transit station with easy access to retail and commercial space. That way people can drive less if they want to. Some transit villages are easy to identify as pre-planned developments, like the transit village in South San Francisco. Others developed more organically, like the area surrounding the Rockridge Station in Oakland.

As with all new development and redevelopment, there's always a concern about gentrification. Most cities have a requirement that a certain percentage of new units are offered below market rate. But some longtime residents of established communities, like San Mateo, worry about new development changing the character of the community. In order to make transit villages work, designers have to carefully blend new development with the existing community, creating a truly pedestrian-oriented destination. Check out a map of transit-oriented development in California. Also, here are some fun audio walking tours of transit-oriented development projects in the Bay Area.

Listen to the Mass Transit Housing Plan radio report online.

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The pilot project at UC Berkeley called Mobile Millennium uses cell phones as data points to show traffic patterns in real time.

To become an early adopter of the technology, you must have an unlimited data plan on a mobile phone with a GPS system. If you have that, you can sign up here.

Project leader Alex Bayen says that it's not just a breakthrough in how we can gauge traffic, but also a scientific breakthrough – that is, it was a challenge to take random data points, some in motion, some not, and to turn them into usable traffic information. This is how Alex Bayen put it.

And he adds that, as cell phones get more memory and more devices on them, they will become more central in our lives.

The science of place-based reporting is a burgeoning field. A program at UCLA, for example, uses cell phone information to create a personal environmental risk assessment and a UC Berkeley study monitors currents in the Sacramento River.

Listen to the Dialing in on Traffic radio report online.

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The California Air Resources Board is expected to vote on a new diesel-emissions regulation when the board meets on December 11 and 12 in Sacramento. As Dan Sperling, head of the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis, explains in this clip, diesel trucks haven't been regulated the same way cars have been.

It would require all trucks on California roads to meet the lower 2010 emissions standards. The cost to retrofit a diesel truck could run anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 per truck. There are roughly a million diesel trucks driving through the state – but not all of them are going to get the retrofit.

About half of the trucks traveling through California are from out of state. And almost all of those are long-distance freight trucks, which drive so many miles that they only last about three years – so most of the out-of-state trucks will meet 2010 standards in time.

That leaves about half-a-million California trucks, and of those, only about 200,000 are estimated to need retrofitting. From the truckers' point of view, that's still a tough haul in today's economy. Here's Bob Ramorino, President of Road Star Trucking in Hayward and head of the California Trucking Association, discussing how the new regulations could affect his business.

Overall, the expected cost is about $5.5 billion. About $1 billion of bond money will be available to make that transition easier for truckers.

And not just for truckers. Diesel buses will need to meet the requirement, as well. And blood centers are concerned about retrofitting their bloodmobiles.

If retrofitting really old diesel trucks doesn't quite make financial sense – that is, if the cost of retrofitting isn't worth the mileage left in some old diesel trucks — some truckers have the choice of junking those trucks and springing for new ones. But for bloodmobiles, with their specialized and complicated and expensive layouts, buying new could be financially crippling.

There's one more number to compare to all the others. According to the Air Resources Board, California loses about $40 billion a year due to lost job time and illnesses attributable to diesel exhaust. In the clip above, Dr. Tom Dailey, chief of pulmonary medicine at Kaiser Permanente, Santa Clara talks about some of those health dangers.

Listen to the Get the Soot Out radio report online.

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Credit: California High Speed Rail Authority

One of those outstanding questions is: Where will the train go?

In the Bay Area, that has been a huge issue. There are two proposed routes (check out an interactive map here) — one through the East Bay and the Altamont Corridor toward Sacramento, and the "preferred alternative," which runs down the Peninsula, through San Jose, Gilroy and the Pacheco Pass, and then loops back around to Sacramento.

Some rail advocates filed a lawsuit, pushing the state to do more study, particularly environmental study. The Pacheco Pass route cuts through some pristine landscape, and that worries environmentalists. And the Altamont route runs through some of the heaviest traffic corridors in the Bay Area, so a high speed train could relieve some of the East Bay's congestion. In addition, the Peninsula communities of Menlo Park and Atherton joined the lawsuit, because they're concerned about the potential of massive above-the-street construction there.

The Rail Authority says it's working with communities to answer their concerns. For instance, it's possible that some of the high speed rail stations could go below ground on the Peninsula — and that they hope to build BOTH routes eventually. Right now, they say, the Pacheco Pass route is preferred, but they point out that it's a long way till the tracks go down and the train starts running, and there will be a lot to work out over the next decade.

Listen to the Fast Trains radio report online.

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Your house may not be your biggest contributer to global
warming. Credit: Jim Gunshinan.

My focus in this blog had been on green homes, but there are other areas of our lives that account for our total carbon footprint–how much carbon we are responsible for adding to the atmosphere–a measure of our contribution to global warming. Our houses and apartments, but also our cars, air travel, and the food we eat all contribute.

Don Fugler, who does research for the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, estimated the amount each area of our lives contributes to our carbon footprint. He used a hypothetical family of four (two adults, two kids) in Ottawa, with a medium-sized house (2,400 square feet), and two cars (Ford Explorer and Honda Fit) to do the calculations. Both parents work and travel about 20 miles roundtrip to work each weekday. The kids travel a few miles each day back and forth to school. Both parents make a total of five trips to Toronto and five trips to other places each year for business, and the family goes on a yearly ski trip to Whistler by air travel, and back and forth by car to visit relatives in Nova Scotia once a year.

For us Californians, replace Ottawa with Oakland, Whistler with Lake Tahoe, add a trip to Hawaii, and subtract most of the energy used for heating a house, and I think we come close to the Canadian example.

The folks who brought us the movie also gave us a nifty
carbon calculator. Use it to measure the size of your carbon
footprint (go to www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction).
Credit: www.climatecrisis.net

Our hypothetical family, according to Don's calculations, emits about 13 tons of CO2 from their house, about 14 tons because of air travel, about 10 tons from their cars, and about 5 tons from the food they eat (including growing, shipping, and waste disposal). Notice that the highest amount is from air travel!

The folks who brought us the movie An Inconvenient Truth also provide an online calculator so that you can more accurately calculate your contribution to global warming–the site also gives good information on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Don recommends that we conduct more and more of our business using the Internet instead of traveling far from our homes, live close to our jobs in dense urban areas with good public transportation, ride our bikes a lot, and all become vegetarians.


Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

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