 Winter 2005 |
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A New Energy Crisis Precarious energy situation demands strategic solutions, by Jane M. Sanders |
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AS CERTAIN AS death, the world’s production of oil and gas is limited. But predicting when production of these high-demand energy sources will peak is as difficult as forecasting the hour and date of one’s passing.
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This teeter-totter of energy supply and demand has reached a tipping point, and the Georgia Institute of Technology wants to help restore its balance. Challenged by Institute President Wayne Clough to create innovative solutions with value that makes them worth the cost in the competitive 21st century world, researchers recently launched the Strategic Energy Initiative (SEI) at the request of Provost Jean-Lou Chameau.
“The focus of SEI is to develop strategies to decrease dependence on fossil fuel resources and define requisite and required high-impact technological development,” Chameau says. “SEI is taking a multidisciplinary systems approach incorporating socio-economic, political and technological elements.”
Its goal is to develop economically viable, transitional energy technologies that will help the nation and the world bridge the gap between its oil- and gas-dependent energy infrastructure to one based on a clean, renewable source – a milestone that could be 50 years in the future.
“Even if peak production doesn’t happen for 15 to 20 more years, you can’t rebuild the energy infrastructure in less time than that,” says initiative director Sam Shelton, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. “So you’ve got to start now developing transitional technologies, especially those for the oil-dependent transportation system.”
In addition to energy technology development for the transportation, building, manufacturing and electric power sectors, the Strategic Energy Initiative (SEI)
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At the heart of this effort is its emphasis on strategic solutions, Shelton notes. Does an energy technology not only meet efficiency, environmental and safety criteria, but is it also economically viable? Can it make a significant impact?
“There are all kinds of ideas – like geothermal, solar and wind – for renewable energy technology and ways to reduce energy consumption,” Shelton says. “The winners will be the ones that are economically viable in our capitalistic, free market society. If oil is the cheapest, then it will continue to win as long as we have it.”
Shelton bemoans the nation’s lack of focus on transitional energy technologies – such as higher efficiency air conditioners, advanced hybrid vehicles, wind power, and biomass and coal gasification – that could fill the gap until renewables are readily available and economically viable.
“Sometimes I feel like we as energy researchers are working to build the streets of San Francisco, but there’s no highway to get anybody there,” he says. “Why build the streets if you can’t ever get to San Francisco? Why would you create hydrogen energy technology, for example, if you have no path to get there and the economy is going to collapse before you get there?”
Hoping to “help build the highway,” the SEI has begun its quest with studies of two potential transitional energy solutions that could have a significant impact, especially in the southeastern U.S.
Blowin’ in the Wind
The answer, my friend, may be blowin’ in the wind, as the old Bob Dylan song goes. More specifically, offshore wind energy may have much more potential in the southeastern United States than once believed.
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A feasibility study conducted by SEI revealed that the average annual wind speed of 16 miles an hour 40 miles off Georgia’s coast makes the region a Class 4, or “good,” wind energy source on a scale of one to seven. A “Class 7” source is rare, while most land-based wind energy projects rate as Class 5 or 6. A 1981 study by Pacific Northwest Laboratory had ranked the Southeast’s coasts as a Class 2 resource.
“People had written off the Southeast as a wind energy source, and we’re finding this is absolutely not true,” says SEI research engineer Susan Stewart, who conducted the feasibility study. “It was a huge surprise. And it seems economically feasible based on our cost estimates.”
In fact, a demonstration project of three to five wind turbines near Savannah could generate 10 megawatts of power for about 6 cents per kilowatt hour, a cost competitive with natural gas fuel costs, the study shows. This amount of electricity – 27 million kilowatt hours per year – could meet the annual energy needs of about 2,500 average homes – a significant number to power with renewable energy, Stewart says.
The study was based on six years of wind data taken from meteorological equipment mounted 50 meters above the ocean waters on several platforms about 40 miles off Georgia’s coast. This equipment, operated by the University System of Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah, records wind speed and direction information.
SEI’s Shelton became aware of the data’s existence through David Frost, director of the Georgia Tech Savannah campus, who is on Skidaway’s Marine Science Foundation Board. Frost is also a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant for InfinitEnergy, a public/private alternative energy partnership that initiated the wind energy feasibility study. (See “Power Surge” sidebar article.)
“If it hadn’t been for this data, no one would’ve ever believed that this is an economically viable place for a wind turbine,” Shelton says.
In addition to its favorable wind speeds, another factor that makes Georgia’s coast an attractive location for offshore wind power is its 80-mile wide continental shelf, the largest in the Southeast.
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With the Georgia coast’s potential documented and other supporting studies in hand, Shelton and the SEI team – including newly hired project leader Bill Bulpitt – are busy forming a consortium of industry, academic and government organizations. It will spearhead a research, development and demonstration project to build and operate a small wind energy farm to produce 10 megawatts of electrical power off Savannah’s coast. Shelton hopes construction will begin in early 2006, but points out many hurdles ahead. These include environmental and engineering studies, as well as federal permitting. The effort would involve Skidaway researchers, as well as scientists and engineers from numerous Georgia Tech academic units.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle will be permitting. But Shelton believes the Savannah project will have public support because of its research nature, as opposed to a controversial, large-scale commercial venture proposed just three miles off the coast of Nantucket Island, Mass.
Numerous researchers would be continually involved in the Savannah project, but the turbines would most likely be owned and operated by a private company that could use or sell wind energy to meet its standards for providing “green” energy, Shelton notes. If the demonstration project proves successful, it could be expanded, he adds.
“It seems like this idea will work,” Stewart says. “We don’t know who might oppose it. But this is a demonstration project. We will do research and learn from this and pass on that knowledge to clear a path for other offshore wind energy projects in the future.”
Gasoline from Biomass
Another undertaking of the SEI is to determine the feasibility of building a demonstration plant in south Georgia for using woody cellulose – wood waste, trees and switchgrass, for example – to produce ethanol. Ethanol, currently produced from corn, represents 10 percent of the contents of regular gasoline in many areas of the United States.
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Georgia would be well-suited for a commercial ethanol production facility because of its large forestry industry, say Shelton and power systems expert Bill Bulpitt, who is conducting the feasibility study.
“There are 25 million acres of forests in Georgia, and timber is a cash crop in a lot of ways,” Bulpitt says. “But its demand has diminished in the past 10 years as the demand for pulp in paper mills in Georgia has gone down. So much pulp is produced elsewhere now, like in Brazil where they have a longer growing season and cheaper operating costs.”
The industry, as well as the Georgia Forestry Commission, is concerned because trees are not being consumed at a balanced rate, Bulpitt notes. He expects the feasibility study will show renewed interest in creating energy from wood waste, such as non-market timber left over after a clear cut, forest thinning operations and sawmills.
An ethanol plant also could be supplied by fast-growing switchgrass, which could be a new crop for south Georgia foresters, Shelton says.
“There is not a single woody cellulose-based ethanol commercial plant in the United States today, but we could work with Georgia Tech faculty and agricultural engineers at the University of Georgia to put together the technology to make this happen and become a national leader in this field,” Shelton says.
The feasibility study is expected to be finished by midsummer 2005.
“It is interesting that making ethanol from woody cellulose was a topic of discussion 25 years ago and now we’re looking at it again,” says Bulpitt, who conducted wood and other biomass energy research at the Engineering Experiment Station, precursor to the Georgia Tech Research Institute, from 1977 to 1985. The energy crises of the 1970s prompted funding of much of that research, but changing federal priorities ended most of the work by 1985.
So Bulpitt left GTRI and soon thereafter worked for Southern Company’s Southern Electric International subsidiary to start up and operate a commercial biomass gasifier in the panhandle of Florida. The facility operated for more than three years, selling its natural gas substitute to a third party until deregulation and falling prices made it uneconomical.
Now, as natural gas prices have soared again and there’s more consensus that supply is finite, interest in biomass – and coal – gasification has re-emerged, Bulpitt says. Coal gasification dates to the 1800s, when its product lit city streetlamps, but created pollution and safety hazards.
Today, newer processes produce gas from coal in an ecologically friendly way, Bulpitt explains. In a conventional power plant with natural gas-powered turbines, a coal gasification facility operates as a mini-refinery next door to make usable gas and chemical byproducts. There are several demonstration projects operating with these new processes, but they have not competed well with natural gas until the recent rise in prices, he adds.
“Renewable energy technologies like these have a place in solving our energy problems,” Bulpitt says. “They always have. The problem, however, is that it’s difficult for them to stand alone without government energy subsidies. But if energy prices stay where they are today, there will be more interest in these transitional technologies.”
Bulpitt laments the lessons not learned from the energy crises of the 1970s and says the nation is more vulnerable today than it was then because of its increased dependence on foreign gas and oil.
“We’ve not fixed this problem as a whole in this country,” Bulpitt says. “So now Georgia Tech is trying to plug the hole.”
Shelton adds: “It’s our goal to provide national energy options and opportunities… with the goal of a more independent, secure and environmentally sound economy.”
Read more at: www.energy.gatech.edu
For more information, contact Sam Shelton at 404-385-0384 or info@energy.gatech.edu
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Last updated: April 3, 2005