Business leaders say "green" approach doable, profitable
By Jim Phillips
Athens NEWS Senior Writer
March 27, 2008
What if Ohio-based companies could cut greenhouse emissions, wean America off imported oil – and kick-start the state’s economy in the process? A no-brainer, right?
This happy scenario is achievable, three business leaders told an audience at Ohio University Tuesday, and the key is alternative energy.
“I’m going to talk about a very real business opportunity for Ohio,” said Neill Lane, president and CEO of the Athens-based Sunpower, Inc., a company that makes free-piston engines. “Things are not changing slowly – they’re changing enormously quickly.”
Lane was one of three presenters at the Green Energy Summit, sponsored jointly by OU’s Consortium for Energy, Economics and the Environment (CE3), the Pew Environment Group, and the office of U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.
The event brought government and business leaders together to discuss ways to promote “green” and sustainable businesses in the region.
Lane noted that Sunpower, founded by local engineer William Beale, has been toiling away in relative obscurity for years, making Stirling engines that, when heated externally, produce electricity.
Though using reflector dishes to heat banks of Stirling engines with solar power can provide large amounts of clean electricity, he said, little attention was paid to the process until recently. But suddenly, with both global temperatures and oil prices shooting up, interest in Stirling technology is rising as well, he said.
“The world is different now from what it was three months ago, based on my phone ringing,” he observed.
Lane stressed that the technology – including many inventions to which Sunpower holds exclusive patent – already exists to move toward large-scale electric generation. One model is already being tested in Europe, where Stirling-based combined-heat-and-power (CHP) units completely power individual homes.
“It’s a power station on your wall,” Lane explained, adding that Sunpower has partnerships with four European companies that together account for over a third of the European Union’s heating-equipment market.
With concentrated solar technology, Lane said, the promise may be even greater. One 100-mile-square field of dish collectors and Stirling engines in a sunny state like New Mexico, he said, could meet the entire U.S. energy demand.
The best part of the story for Ohio, he added, is that the state is positioned to midwife a huge, new, clean industry that can provide both knowledge-based and manufacturing jobs. Lane estimated the industry has the potential to be worth over $28 billion by 2025.
“This is ours to lose,” he said. “This is Ohio’s to lose, and the USA’s to lose.”
BEN SCHAEFFER IS president of American Hydrogen Corporation, a company that recently opened in southeast Ohio to commercialize technology created at OU to generate hydrogen fuel by electrolyzing ammonia. The firm has an office in Athens and is opening a plant in Meigs County.
Where older methods created hydrogen at a cost of around $10 a kilogram, Schaeffer said, his company’s process brings the cost to 30 cents a kilo.
Schaeffer argued passionately that cleaner alternatives to oil must be found, and fast. He cited the “Hubbert’s peak” of oil production, named for a geophysicist who shocked the world in 1949 by predicting that the fossil fuel era wouldn’t last long.
Hubbert said that with unrestrained extraction of a natural resource in a given area, a graph of production levels will be a bell curve, peaking when the resource is about half exhausted. The world is near or past that peak now, Schaeffer warned. And as oil supplies peter out, the risk of global conflict over what’s left goes up.
Last year, he noted, China bought 55 percent of the world’s spot market in oil – up from about 3 percent five years earlier. Globally, he said, “$1.8 million an hour is what we spend on oil.” For the United States, whose domestic oil production has long since peaked, this means lots of purchases from the Middle East and elsewhere.
“I’d like to not be dependent on people who are organized slightly differently from what we are,” he noted wryly.
Citing the well-worn metaphor of the frog slowly boiled alive as the temperature under his pan of water is gradually raised, Schaeffer offered an alternative to the “boiled” frog – the “bold” frog that sees the long-term trend and acts to change it.
“I’ve always been curious why the frog didn’t turn the heat down,” he joked.
Schaeffer said American Hydrogen is committed to being a waste-free, completely sustainable business. The ammonia for its electrolysis is widely available as industrial waste, he said. And while the Meigs County plant will be on the utility power grid at first, he promised, as soon as possible it will generate its own power with fuel cells.
“We’re going to be eating our own dog food,” he said. “Our plant is going to run on the electricity we produce.”
AN OFFICIAL FROM a large food-processing plant in Jackson, Ohio, provided an example of how an existing, old-school industrial business can take huge steps toward cutting pollution and increasing energy efficiency.
Ryan Wright, utility/sustainability manager for the Bellisio Foods plant in Jackson, described how the 63-acre plant, which runs 20 production lines to create frozen entrees, has begun using its food waste to generate methane gas for energy.
The wastes are fed into a large treatment tank where they are “digested” by bio-organisms to create methane, which is then used to fire boilers.
The project cost $4.65 million, but has allowed the company to save on natural gas use, and the costs of trucking food wastes to a landfill, Wright reported. He estimated that it also cuts down on carbon dioxide production by over 43,000 tons annually.
“It’s great project; we’re proud of it,” Wright said. In addition to the cost savings, he added, “it’s the right thing to do.”
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