Report: Chevron plans to exit coal mining business

By Dan Lowrey

Multinational energy company Chevron Corp. said it is exiting the coal industry because new clean coal technologies are too far off to make it a profitable investment, according to a Jan. 28 report by the Associated Press.

Chevron Mining spokeswoman Margaret Lejuste told the AP the company has begun seeking a buyer for its Kemmerer surface mine in Lincoln County, Wyo. Kemmerer produced 4.8 million tons of coal in 2010, according to the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Lejuste also said Chevron may consider selling reclaimed land around its closed McKinley surface mine in New Mexico, which the company shuttered at the end of 2009 when it was unable to find customers for its last remaining coal reserves.

In 2010, the company made a deal with Walter Energy Inc. to sell its North River steam coal mine in Fayette and Tuscaloosa counties, Ala. The Walter Energy deal is close to being completed, the AP reported.

The company also owns a 50 percent interest in Youngs Creek Mining Co. LLC, a joint venture that it formed in 2007 with CONSOL Energy Inc. to develop a large coal reserve in the northern Powder River Basin.

At year-end 2009, Chevron controlled about 193 million tons of proven and probable coal reserves in the United States, including reserves of low-sulfur coal, according to the company's February 2010 Form 10-K filing.

The power of the press

Solid-state batteries

Jan 27th 2011 | ORLANDO, FLORIDA | from PRINT EDITION

ELECTRONICS made a huge leap forward when the delicate and temperamental vacuum tube was replaced by the robust, reliable transistor. That change led to the now ubiquitous silicon chip. As a consequence, electronic devices have become vastly more powerful and, at the same time, have shrunk in both size and cost. Some people believe that a similar change would happen if rechargeable batteries could likewise be made into thin, solid devices. Researchers are working on various ways to do this and now one of these efforts is coming to fruition. That promises smaller, cheaper, more powerful batteries for consumer electronics and, eventually, for electric cars.

The new development is the work of Planar Energy of Orlando, Florida—a company spun out of America’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2007. The firm is about to complete a pilot production line that will print lithium-ion batteries onto sheets of metal or plastic, like printing a newspaper.

“Thin-film” printing methods of this sort are already used to make solar cells and display screens, but no one has yet been able to pull off the trick on anything like an industrial scale with batteries. Paradoxically, though thin-film printing needs liquid precursor chemicals to act as the “ink” which is sprayed onto the metal or plastic substrate, it works well only when those precursors react to form a solid final product. Most batteries include liquid or semi-liquid electrolytes—so printing them has been thought to be out of the question. Planar, however, has discovered a solid electrolyte it believes is suitable for thin-film printing.

Charge!

A battery’s electrolyte is the material through which ions (in this case lithium ions) pass from one electrode (the cathode) to another (the anode) inside a battery cell. Electrons prised from those ions make a similar journey, but do so in an external circuit, usually through a wire. That means the energy they carry can be employed for some useful purpose. Push electrons through the wire in the opposite direction and the ions will return to their original home, recharging the battery.

Many sorts of ion can be used in batteries, but lithium has become popular in recent years because it is light. Rechargeable batteries based on lithium chemistry store more energy, weight for weight, than any other sort. In the case of a lithium-ion battery the electrolyte is usually in the form of a gel. It is possible to make such a battery with a solid electrolyte, but until now that has been done by a process called vacuum deposition. This uses complex and expensive machinery to build up atomic layers of material on a substrate. Batteries made this way tend to be small and costly, suited for specialist devices like sensors. To be any use in consumer electronics, and especially electric cars, solid-state batteries would need to be bigger and capable of being cranked out in greater numbers.

What Planar has come up with is a ceramic electrolyte which it says works as well as a gel. It can print this electrolyte (along with the battery’s electrodes) onto a sheet of metal or plastic that passes from one reel to another in a process similar to that used in a traditional printing press. Nor does it have to be done in a vacuum. Once printed, the reels can be cut up into individual cells and wired together to make battery packs.

For the cathode, Planar uses lithium manganese dioxide; for the anode, doped tin oxides and lithium alloys. For the crucial solid electrolyte it turns to materials called thio-LISICONs—shorthand for lithium superionic conductors. Exactly which thio-LISICON is best needs further investigation, but the principle certainly works.

The crucial trick is that although both the electrodes and the electrolyte appear solid, they are actually finely structured at the nanometre scale (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre). This is to allow the lithium ions free passage. Getting the materials in question to settle down in an appropriate arrangement has taken blood, sweat and tears but Planar’s scientists think they have cracked the problem.

The “inks” they use to print their battery cells are waterborne precursor chemicals that, when mixed and sprayed onto the substrate in appropriate (and proprietary) concentrations and conditions, react to form suitably nanostructured films. Once that has happened, the water simply evaporates and the desired electronic sandwich is left behind in a thousandth of the time that it would take to make it using vacuum deposition.

Printing batteries this way also offers the possibility of incorporating other thin-film devices, such as ultracapacitors, directly into the cells. An ultracapacitor is an electricity-storage device that can be charged and discharged rapidly. In electric cars, ultracapacitors can capture energy from regenerative braking and use it for fast acceleration.

Planar says its cells will be more reliable than conventional lithium-ion cells, will be able to store two to three times more energy in the same weight and will last for tens of thousands of recharging cycles. They could also be made for a third of the cost.

Material benefits

These are bold claims, but as Scott Faris, Planar’s boss, points out, a lot of the benefits come from savings in materials. About half of a typical lithium-ion battery is made of stuff that plays no direct part in the battery’s chemistry. This includes a stout casing and what is known as a permeable polymer separator, which stops the electrodes in the cell touching each other and causing a short circuit. Thin-film technology eliminates the need for so much casing, and Planar’s solid-state electrolyte doubles as a separator. The result, says Mr Faris, is that 97% of the materials used to construct a Planar cell are actively engaged in storing electricity.

If the pilot production line is successful, the company hopes to begin operations in earnest in about 18 months. To start with it will make small cells for portable devices. It will then scale up to larger cells and, in around six years’ time, it hopes to be producing batteries powerful enough for carmakers. If, by then, anyone needs a replacement battery for a Chevy Volt, such technology may offer a solid-state alternative that could increase that car’s all-electric range from about 65km (40 miles) to some 200km. Lack of range is reckoned one of the main obstacles to the widespread use of electric cars. If solid-state batteries could overcome such range anxiety that would, indeed, be a revolution on a par with the silicon chip.

Tax equity financing, cash grants broaden investor appetite for renewables

By Abby Gruen

The tax equity market for renewables continues to be an engine for investment, along with other forms of financing using U.S. Treasury Department Section 1603 tax grants, according to John Eber, managing director of energy investments for JP Morgan Capital Corp.

Speaking at SNL Financial's 24th annual Power and Utilities M&A Symposium in New York City on Jan. 24, Eber said new tax equity investors also have emerged.

A dominant player in the renewables space since 2003, JP Morgan's Energy Investments group, a division of JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s investment bank, has invested more than $3 billion in 80 wind and solar projects.

JP Morgan partners with large banks, investment banks and insurance companies, as minority partners in its tax equity deals.

"There was a tightening in the market due to the recession. Many of our partners and investors pulled back, or pulled out, but we continued to be there throughout the whole cycle," Eber said.

There are about 18 active investors like JP Morgan in the renewables space — seven exclusively investing in solar, four exclusively in wind and seven who do both, Eber said.

Rick Needham, green business operations director at Google Inc., said at the conference that the Mountainview, Calif.-based technology company partnered with JP Morgan on its $38.8 millioninvestment in a utility-scale wind farm project developed by NextEra Energy Resources LLC in North Dakota.

Most renewable structured financings by JP Morgan use a vehicle called a partnership flip structure, in which a wind company, for example, will form a partnership with two types of equity, class A and class B. The investors hold one class of equity and the wind developer holds the subordinate class of equity.

"The intent is to allocate as many, if not all, of the tax benefits to us, and some of the cash to us, to get our return, and then allocate the remaining cash to our partner, so he gets his return predominantly in cash," Eber said.

The use of production tax credits and accelerated depreciation in the partnership flip structure has been the backbone of tax equity investment for wind farms since 2002. Solar projects have received the investment tax credit and accelerated depreciation, and geothermal projects have received the production tax credit and accelerated depreciation.

Since Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and made stimulus funds available for investment in renewables, there has been an option to convert the production tax credit into an investment tax credit, and then further to receive the investment tax credit as a Section 1603 grant. The grant program was extended through December in tax legislation signed by President Barack Obama in December 2010.

The Section 1603 cash grants have broadened developers' financing options, as some tax equity investors struggled during the recession.

"The field has changed over the years as people's ability to be tax investors changed. If your parent company is not consistently profitable, and is consistently a large taxpayer, it is difficult to be this type of investor," Eber said.

GE Energy Financial Services, another tax equity player with about $6 billion in renewable energy investments, has incorporated Section 1603 grants into its financing programs.

"One of the things that we have been doing is bringing in investors who want to enter into the renewable investment space to participate in our transactions," GE Energy Financial Services President and CEO Alex Urquhart said in an interview with SNL in December 2010. "[M]ost of these investors are interested in grant deals, not [production tax credit] deals. In some cases, they don't have tax base. They don't have the predictability of the tax base. To continue to increase the size of the investor pool, I think the grant is a better way to go."

Leveraged leases, another form of tax equity investment, became uneconomic financing vehicles after the production tax credit was passed in the 1990s because of how the law was structured. But leveraged leases are desirable for investors again because of how the Section 1603 grants and the investment tax credits are designed.

Wind energy developer Pattern Energy Group LP closed a leveraged lease equity financing with insurer MetLife Inc. for Pattern subsidiary Hatchet Ridge Wind LLC, the lessee of a 101-MW wind energy project in Burney, Calif., in December 2010.

Pattern CEO Mike Garland said MetLife's investment was the first closing of a leveraged lease on an operational wind farm since the early 1980s.

"The lease is an indication of the transition from just being a [production tax credit] world for wind," Garland said.

Going forward, the San Francisco-based wind developer, whose backers include Riverstone Holdings LLC, is keeping its financing options open.

"We look at each project individually. [A leveraged lease] is something we will continue to look at, but we're not committed to doing it on all of our projects," Garland said in a recent interview. "The irony is that we are already starting to be taxable, so there is the obvious [question] that if we are taxable, do we need a leveraged lease?"

Acting on its own behalf, and on behalf of its partners, who are also large taxpayers, JP Morgan intends to continue to finance renewables with tax equity.

"We have been investing in all of the cycles, so the returns, not unlike lending, follow a certain pattern," Eber said. "The returns vary considerably from year to year, depending on market circumstances. We have just been a continuous investor throughout that cycle."

M.I.T. Panel Says a Charging Infrastructure May Be a Bigger Roadblock for Electric Vehicles Than Technology

The infrastructure challenges include installing tens of millions of charging stations, strengthening the grid to handle electricity demand by plug-ins, and changing utility regulations to promote nighttime recharging

By Peter Behr and ClimateWire  | Friday, January 14, 2011 | 16

CHARGING STATIONS NEEDED: For the electric car market to prosper, millions of charging stations must be installed at residences and commercial sites.Image: Flickr/felixkramer

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A Massachusetts Institute of Technology report, issued yesterday, concludes that creating a nationwide infrastructure for electric vehicles appears to be a bigger challenge than producing affordable batteries to power the cars.

The report, authored by professors Ernest Moniz and John Deutch, summarizes an MIT symposium last year on the electric vehicle.

Symposium participants generally agreed that a comprehensive federal policy to limit carbon emissions would be the most effective boost for electric vehicle development, stimulating steadily growing consumer purchases and moving the United States toward low-carbon or carbon-free generation of electricity to charge the cars.

But the summary pessimistically concludes: "The prospect for such a policy at the national level is remote. More likely, is a hodge-podge of state and federal regulation and targeted subsidies for favored technologies."

Leaving the matter to separate states "is sheer lunacy," but that is where the matter is headed, Deutch said.

"We need to continue aggressive R&D on these areas," he said. There was consensus on that point, as well, at the symposium, although the participants differed on how much government support should go to pure research versus manufacturing operations with current technologies.

Moniz said he came away from the study more hopeful about the prospects of research breakthroughs that could lower battery costs significantly. "The infrastructure issues were far more complex that I realized," he added. He and Deutch said that the summary released yesterday reflected their own conclusions and was not offered as a consensus view of the symposium participants.

Seeking a magic combination of gas prices and research dollars

The infrastructure challenges include installing tens of millions of charging stations at residences and commercial sites, strengthening the grid to handle electricity demand by plug-in vehicles, and changing utility regulations to promote nighttime recharging. Looming over these issues are the unsettled questions of who pays for the new infrastructure and who decides who pays, panel members said.

The summary takes a cautious view of the prospects for advanced batteries that would bring electric vehicle costs in line with internal combustion engines. It concludes that a "rough rule of thumb" is that battery costs must drop from $600 to about $300 per kilowatt-hour to compete against an internal combustion-engine vehicle burning gasoline at $3.50 a gallon.

"It is worth noting that there has been considerable support for battery research and development (R&D) by industry and government both in the U.S. and elsewhere for many years without the kind of major advance that would make EVs economically competitive," the summary says.

Yet-Ming Chiang, one of the MIT professors presenting the report, said the outlook is not so grim. Predicted prices and performance measures for electric vehicle batteries are improving faster than predicted a few years ago. The number of scientists working on the technology has tripled in a decade, he added. "I saw more grounds for optimism about future progress in battery technology," he said.

Deutch was on the other side. "I don't have a lot of confidence about incremental improvements in lithium-ion" batteries, he said. No one knows yet whether a successor technology such as the lithium air battery can be perfected and commercialized, said MIT professor and panelist John Heywood. "The technology hasn't yet developed enough for us to have clear answers."

Deutch offered a back-of-the-envelope assessment that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from light motor vehicles by half, between now and 2050, would require gasoline prices to rise to $6 to $8 a gallon, which would depress vehicle miles driven by 20 to 30 percent. The rest of the improvement would come from some combination of electric vehicles and low-carbon fuels, provided that the electricity for vehicles came from clean sources, he said. Stiff federal policies could achieve that result, but he dismissed the prospects of that happening in next few decades. "The answer is, 'no chance at all.'"

Closing the gap

Chiang and Moniz said plug-in hybrid vehicles -- just now appearing in the U.S. market -- are a valuable bridge toward the all-electric vehicle.

A plug-in hybrid carries a battery with a usable energy capacity of about 10 kilowatt-hours, but its range is extended by its hybrid gasoline engine that is available for recharging. If technology advances and increasing production lowers the cost to $250 per kilowatt-hour within this decade, then the incremental cost of the battery for this vehicle would be $2,500. "That's credible," said Moniz. "That isn't crazy."

Heywood said that the price gap between electric and internal combustion engine vehicles must close substantially. It is not realistic to imagine that Congress would continue the current top federal subsidy of $7,500 per vehicle if annual sales reach 1 million, he said. "Politicians won't spend that much. They'll stop short," he said.

While better technology will shrink the difference on one end, rising gasoline prices would do the same on the other, he said. The world's supply of oil may grow only half as much as demand in the coming decades, and that means higher fuel prices, he said. With all the uncertainties, the United States must keep working on the most promising electric vehicle strategies, he said. "We have no choice."

Climate change and evolution

Jan 24th 2011, 14:31 by M.S.

OUR topics this morning are global warming, evolution and feathers. Let's start with the warming. Despite a frenzied last-minute drive involving snowstorms in Europe and the eastern United States, planet Earth failed to save itself from another last-place finish in 2010: once again, it was the least cold year on record. The World Meteorological Organization announced its findinglast week that global mean temperatures for the year were 0.53°C above the 1961-1990 mean, 0.01°C warmer than 2005 and 0.02°C above 1998. With the comparison having a margin of uncertainty of 0.09°C, the three years are considered tied for the hottest year on record. That followed results the previous week from NOAA, which found 2010 and 2005 tied as the hottest years ever, and NASA, which found the same thing. (They both think 1998 was a bit colder.)

By itself, as we always say, one hot year doesn't prove anything. The fact that every one of the twelve hottest years on record has come since 1997 is a little harder to wave away. 2010 was also the wettest year ever, corresponding to the expectation that higher heat means more water vapour. More countries set national high-temperature recordsin 2010 than ever before, including the biggest one, Russia. Arctic sea ice in December was at its lowest level ever, temperatures across a broad swathe of northern Canada have been 20° C higher than normalfor the past month, the record temperatures are coming despite the lowest levels of solar activityin a century and a La Nina effect that should be making Canada colder rather than warmer, and so on. It is of course possible that global warming plateaued this year; it's also possible that it plateaued this morning. One can always hope! For now, though, this is the basic shape of things:

The George Will "global warming has ended" momentshows up as that little dip towards the end, before it returns to trend. So, what effect will the new data have on that meme? Quite possibly none. People who tried to cast doubt on global warming in 2009 based on a few years one could isolate so that they didn't show a discernible trend will now no doubt respond that a couple of very hot years don't prove anything. Which underlines how often the conclusions one draws from data are determined by a combination of the hypotheses you're framing, and at what point you start looking.

This brings me to the feathers. In this month's National Geographic, Carl Zimmer sums uprecent paleontological progress in figuring out when and how feathers evolved, and how they fit into the relationship between dinosaurs and birds. Apparently there have been tons of new feather-bearing fossils unearthed over the past 15 years, and scientists can now use microscopic analysis and knowledge of how modern feathers work to actually figure out what color some of the feathers on these dinosaurs were. It's pretty clear that the development of feathers came long before they had anything to do with flight, but it's still not so clear whether feathered dinosaurs evolved into birds or whether they (and feathered proto-crocodiles!) shared a common feathered ancestor. Anyway, towards the beginning of the article comes this:

The origin of this wonderful mechanism is one of evolution's most durable mysteries. In 1861, just two years after Darwin published Origin of Species, quarry workers in Germany unearthed spectacular fossils of a crow-size bird, dubbed Archaeopteryx, that lived about 150 million years ago. It had feathers and other traits of living birds but also vestiges of a reptilian past, such as teeth in its mouth, claws on its wings, and a long, bony tail. Like fossils of whales with legs,Archaeopteryx seemed to capture a moment in a critical evolutionary metamorphosis. "It is a grand case for me," Darwin confided to a friend.

Think about how that must have looked to contemporaries. Darwin publishes his theory that species develop through evolution from other species. Okay, many people think, wild idea, but can one species really change so deeply over time that it becomes a different species? Wolves into dogs, sure, but fish into lizards and so forth? Then, two years later, a fossil is discovered that suggests dinosaurs evolving into birds. To first have a theory presented that suggests these outlandish transformations, and then to have an example turn up that perfectly describes the theory's most improbable consequences, with no possibility of prior knowledge—this is an extremely convincing sequence of evidence.

But if you grew up, say, 150 years after "The Origin of Species" was published, you didn't experience that remarkable sequence of evidence. You get the theory of evolution and the fossil background presented at the same time. So if you want to be an evolution sceptic, the fossil record just becomes another set of data you can poke holes in, along with the theory. After all, nobody understands what function feathers served before they were used for flight. If they were for mating displays, why did they turn out to be perfect for aerodynamics? How come nothing has feathers anymore that doesn't fly, or isn't descended from something that did? Darwin's theory can't explain it! And so on.

Now, back to global warming. For me, or anyone older, the thesis that rising global temperature data were due to a greenhouse effect produced by industrial emissions of CO2 and other gases, and that this might lead to environmental disaster, was something we first encountered as a mind-bending idea being thrown around by scientists in the mid-1980s. The first time we heard a scientist authoritatively state that the evidence was in, and that global warming was real, was when James Hansen said it while presenting his researchto Congress in 1988. That was a daring claim for Mr Hansen to make at that point. It was daring because it was very clearly falsifiable. If, after 1988, global temperatures had stopped rising, or had started to exhibit a lot of volatility—if there had been a decade-long cooling episode, such as the world saw in the late 1930s and 40s—then Mr Hansen would have been discredited. But that didn't happen. Instead, for a decade and a half after Mr Hansen made the call, global mean temperatures kept going up and up. They bounced around a bit in the mid-2000s, and have now resumed rising again.

For people my age or older who were paying attention over the past couple of decades, that really ought to be convincing. But for people who just joined the conversation when "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, things are different. For them, the evidence of global warming was presented at the same time as the theory. And so they're susceptible to people trying to poke holes in the data or the theory. The temperature rise from 1998-2008 isn't statistically significant, tree ring data is unreliable, and so forth. Give them another two decades, and they'll probably come around. Unfortunately, by that time an enormous amount of damage will already have been done.

As to why George Will buys this stuff, I have no explanation. Maybe, in the internet age, we're all effectively getting our memories wiped every week or two, and it's as if we don't remember the sequence of events; everything is presented simultaneously. Or maybe we selectively wipe our own memories of the sequence of events when they threaten to prove inconvenient to our interests or our ideological predispositions
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