The War for Clean Energy

By Patrick Blennerhassett
Victoria News
Mar 08 2006

Sharon Tiffin/Victoria News Dr. Andrew Rowe, left, and Dr. Ned Djilali stand behind two scooters which are part of their Low-Speed Fuel Cell Hybrid Electric Vehicle Testing Facility. The scooter on the right is powered by a conventional battery while the one on the left uses a hydrogen fuel-cell.

The threats that reliance on non-renewable energy sources pose to humanity are real, says University of Victoria scientist Dr. Ned Djilali.

It makes sense, then, that his research at UVic's Institute for Integrated Energy Systems seeks to find real solutions to the complex problems posed by environmentally destructive and limited energy sources such as fossil fuels.

"What we work on here at the institute is producing sustainable energy that has a chance of being implemented in real life," said Djilali, the institute's executive director. "We're not particularly dogmatic about what particular technology we promote. We'll look at any technology that has a chance of making an impact on issues of sustainability, greenhouse gas emissions and air quality."

To that end, his department is one of Canada's leading multidisciplinary institutes. It includes chemists, engineers, biologists and social scientists all working to find feasible paths toward renewable energy sources.

During a tour of the institute's array of laboratories, filled with complicated machinery, clean energy-producing prototypes and hydrogen storing mechanisms, Djilali outlined the institute's mission. Along with his colleagues, Djilali is calm and calculating while expressing a notable fervour for the work he does. IESVic looks at harnessing hydrogen fuel cells (carriers for storing and transmitting renewable energy) plus natural forms such as wind, solar and tidal power.

"The key problem is the lack of diversity that we have right now," said Djilali. "If we made an analogy of energy in general and painting, it's like we've been painting our whole lives in black and white and we have no type of variety. What sustainable and renewable energy allows you to do is in combination with hydro, nuclear, wind and hydrogen is broaden the range of possibilities."

As the world becomes more industrialized, it threatens the ecosystem with harmful non-renewable energy emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane, leading to unforeseeable environmental repercussions, Djilali said.

The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming becomes more concrete everyday. Global climate models by such organizations as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show the rise in carbon dioxide emissions coincide directly with the rise in the earth's temperature.

"Moving to a new energy system with a variety of sources allows you to adopt solutions that are best suited to your location. Whether you're in the corner of Vancouver Island or Thailand or North Africa. Each place has its own mix of resources and needs. You can adapt those to what's available locally and optimize that in terms of economic benefits and reduced environmental impact."
An obstacle to that is mankind's severe addiction to fossil fuels - hydrocarbon-containing natural resources such as coal, oil and natural gas. Humans must wean themselves from this dependency while looking for environmentally sound alternatives, Djilali added. He sees the threat of environmental catastrophe as an even greater peril than the prospect of a global oil crisis leading to political instability and war.

"I think the ticking clock that we feel we're working against is more to the potential of climate change to that of the impending shortage of fossil fuels," he said.

"The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of rocks and the oil age will probably not end because we've run out of oil," he continued. "The key issue with oil is the availability of the reserves that exist in the world. They're not absolute, and they are defined in terms of the cost you're willing to pay for them."

Mining tar sand hotbeds like Alberta and Venezuela for oil-rich bitumen only became economically feasible in the past three decades, Djilali noted. Once the recovery factor for more isolated oil reserves pushes the cost of a barrel of oil into the $200 price range mining and drilling will occur in less conventional reserves all over the world.

Andrew Rowe, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at IESVic, said economic prosperity also stands in the way of making renewable energy mankind's main source of power. A leading expert on developing devices for the liquefaction of hydrogen and natural gas, Rowe said the global economy's thirst for "the bottom line" needs to change.

"Cost is always the bottom line and of course emissions are becoming part of that bottom line. But really it's not built into the price yet," he said.

Emission downfalls like health risks due to air pollution, harmful ultraviolet radiation penetrating a depleted ozone layer, and an increase in greenhouse gases will force governments to equate something other than dollars into the "bottom line," said Rowe. Still, the goal will still be to provide sustainable sources of energy at cost competitive rates.

"People will always want reliable power on demand whenever they want it," Rowe said. "That's what we're working towards achieving."

Should that not be achieved, nobody can predict what the outcomes will be, Rowe admitted. However, he speculated that they won't likely be pleasant.

"We are on this increasingly steep curve and it's a really undefined set of consequences that we might be heading towards," he said. "Forget debating about what the consequences might be, let's just get to some sort of equilibrium of sustainability."

Solutions towards sustainability

Southern Vancouver Island is rich in potential renewable energy. It is a predominately hydro-dominated area, meaning the Island has many potential tidal, wind and solar sources of renewable energy, Djilali said. However, having and exploiting those natural resources are two completely different things.

"(IESVic) has ongoing work that looks at Vancouver Island and at various sites for potential for extracting tidal power, for extracting power from ocean waves, generation of electricity using wind, tidal currents," he said. "And all of this is tied up in what kind of benefits and what is the potential of the sites, economically. This is really a key issue to bring about a healthy mix of renewable energy into our grid system."

The institute has mapped out Vancouver Island and parts of B.C's Lower Mainland for possible sources of renewable energy. But integrating tidal, wind and solar power are extremely complicated, Djilali added.

"A lot of people are short-sighted about renewable energy," he said. "You know when you build a wind turbine that turbine has to be manufactured, at a cost. You need a concrete platform and you need a number of things that generate emissions in themselves. So you need to look globally at the overall picture and what you're achieving in emitting greenhouse emissions and not just say, 'Well we'll just stick a wind turbine there.'"

At present over 90 per cent of B.C.'s residential and stationary energy comes from hydroelectric power - energy obtained from flowing water. Hydropower is a relatively clean source of energy, although Djilali acknowledges that deforestation and flooding from dams make it far from perfect. The real battle lies in the mobile services/transportation sector where virtually 100 per cent of the energy comes from fossil fuels. Creating cars, trucks and buses that don't produce harmful emissions and rely on non-renewable sources should be the main goal, he says.

"The challenge is to make transportation renewable resources dependent," he said.

Fossil fuels are usually the product of carbonization of vegetable matter. Djilali wants to see a greener and more "de-carbonized" transportation sector.

"What's happening on this planet is that you have increasingly developing countries that want to legitimately catch up with Europe, North America and Japan. And these places are going to want to increase, double, triple or even multiply their energy consumption by 10 per cent over the next 10 to 20 years. And if everybody goes that route we're going to have some serious problems."

One possible solution to pull the transportation sector out of the fossil fuel fire is sitting in the basement of one of IESVic's labs. Institute researchers have been working on a fuel-cell hybrid scooter. The one-person vehicle runs on an electrochemical device, producing electricity from a supply of hydrogen (which currently comes from burning relatively clean propane) to create lower emissions than traditional vehicles. IESVic is focusing on this project, testing the capacity of a fuel-cell scooter with a regular two-stroke scooter on a dynamometer which simulates driving scenarios, Djilali said.

"If you look at the world, by and large about three-quarters of humanity is not yet motorized," he said. "And with nations such as China and India that are becoming increasingly more prosperous and industrialized and what they have done is moved from walking to bicycles and now from bicycles to two-stroke engines."

The emissions expelled by most two-stroke engines in Southeast Asia are "horrendous in terms of pollution," Djilali said. In many cases, emissions from one of these two-stroke engines are more harmful to the environment than from those of a full-sized passenger vehicle.

"Using electric scooters with batteries is not really feasible there," he said. "You can imagine people who live in places where power outlets are not readily available. They're very heavy; their performance is very dependent on temperature so the use of fuel cells could be a great solution in terms of resolving some of these issues. So there is a huge market there."

Working toward a hydrogen-based economy is only one area the institute is exploring in the fight to reduce and eventually eliminate the threat of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from our planet. It's a battle Djilali relishes on all fronts.

"As society and political bodies become more aware of this and start embedding the indirect costs of using fossil fuels, the differential in terms of economic advantages of using new technology to using existing internal combustion engines will become less and less and you'll see that they can finally compete."

patrickb@vicnews.com