Turkey on Tuesday began constructing a new oil pipeline that is expected to carry Russian and Kazakh oil from its Black Sea coast to the Mediterranean, another move toward making Turkey a global energy corridor.
The US$1.5 billion pipeline is expected to connect the Black Sea port city of Samsun to the Mediterranean oil hub of Ceyhan--the end point of two existing major oil pipelines carrying Caspian oil from Baku, and Iraqi oil from Kirkuk.
Turkey is also building natural gas pipelines to export Russian and Iranian gas to Europe.
The United States and many European countries support Turkey’s significant role in diversifying energy supplies, according to Yahoo.com.
“I think that Turkey’s importance with the East-West energy corridor concept is (increasing), in light of the fact that Caspian and Middle East oil and gas producers are looking to transport their hydrocarbons to Europe and the only viable land route at this time is through Turkey,“ Gary Lakes, an oil expert with the Middle East Economic Survey, said on Tuesday.
The 550-kilometer (340-mile) pipeline is scheduled to be operational by 2009 and alleviate the congested tanker traffic through the Bosporus strait, a serious concern for Turkey, which fears a catastrophic accident in the narrow waterway bisecting Istanbul, the country’s largest city.
The pipeline competes with another project by Russia, Bulgaria and Greece to construct an oil pipeline, dubbed Burgas-Alexandroupolis, which would also bypass the Turkish-controlled Bosporus.
The Samsun-Ceyhan line will be built by a consortium led by the Italian oil and gas company Eni SpA and Turkey’s Calik Enerji. It will have a maximum carrying capacity of 1.5 million barrels of crude oil a day.
Italy’s Industry Minister Pierluigi Bersani and Turkey’s Energy Minister Hilmi Guler attended the groundbreaking ceremony near the Ceyhan oil terminal, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.
“The Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline will also contribute significantly toward Turkey’s plan to create an international oil, gas and petrochemical center at Ceyhan, although this will take some years to develop,“ Lakes said.
An oil pipeline from Baku through Georgia and on to Ceyhan was opened last year, and a gas line is in the works.
However, Turkey’s energy transmission projects are facing steep competition as well as feasibility questions.
“Russia is particularly keen to control the export routes for its oil and gas.
Some of the energy transport projects proposed are very expensive and so financing will need to be secured. The projects also need guaranteed suppliers and guaranteed buyers,“ said Lakes.
The dominance of Russian energy giant OAO Gazprom in Europe’s energy supply has concerned the European Union, European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said last week.
“I am not worried about dependence on Russia in oil as long as we have diversity of supply,“ Piebalgs said. “The problem is not Russia, the problem is that Gazprom is a monopoly supplier.“
Turkey is heavily reliant on supplies from Russia, which provide 60 percent of its gas needs.

As the United States looks to alternate fuel sources, ethanol has become one of the front runners. Farmers have begun planting corn in the hopes that its potential new use for corn will be a new income source. What many don’t realize, is the potential for other crops, besides corn, to provide an alternate energy source to fossil fuels. Scientists studied the greenhouse gas emissions and bioenergy of corn, hybrid poplar, switchgrass, and other crops to determine the efficiency of various biocrops in terms of energy consumption and energy output, Sciencedaily.com reported.
“Biofuels have a great potential to reduce our dependence on gasoline and diesel fuel,“ says Parton. “We have performed a unique analysis of the net biofuel greenhouse emissions from major biofuel cropping systems by combining ecosystem computer model data with estimates of the amount of fossil fuels used to grow and produce crop biofuels.“
Adler, Del Grosso and Parton used the Daycent biogeochemistry model, developed by Parton and Del Grosso to asses greenhouse gas fluxes and biomass yields for corn, soybean, alfalfa, hybrid poplar, reed canary grass and switchgrass.
The results of the study showed that when compared with gasoline and diesel, ethanol and biodisel from corn and soybean rotations reduced greenhouse gas emissions by almost 40 percent, reed canarygrass by 85 percent. Greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by about 115 percent for switchgrass and hybrid poplar. Both switchgrass and hybrid poplar offset the largest amounts of fossil fuels reduced emissions compared to other biofuel crops and offset two times as much fossil fuels if they are used for electricity generation via biomass gasification.
Study results showed that nitrogen (N2O) emission resulting from production of the biofuel crops is the largest greenhouse gas source, while displaced fossil is the largest greenhouse gas sink followed by soil carbon sequestration.
This research shows that farmers will have a variety of biofuel crop options available in the future and that these biofuel crop rotations will have different environmental impacts. Detailed studies of the environmental impact of biofuel crops similar to this study need to be done at the regional and national levels before biofuel national policy decisions are finalized.
The study, “Net greenhouse gas flux of bioenergy cropping systems using Daycent“, was completed by Paul Adler (United State Department of Agriculture - USDA), Stephen Del Grosso (USDA and Colorado State University), and William Parton (Colorado State University). Results appear in the April issue of Ecological Applications.

Solar energy is the most abundant form of renewable energy available.

Researchers at Imperial College London aim to develop a renewable, cost-effective method for harvesting solar energy to produce hydrogen fuel.
The £4m project--New and Renewable Solar Routes to Hydrogen Energy--will build on recent bioscience breakthroughs in detecting the structure of the enzyme that breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen during photosynthesis, using green algae and inorganic enzyme analogues based on titanium supports.
It will find ways to exploit these low-temperature natural biological and photocatalytic processes to produce hydrogen to power a fuelcell, E4engineering.com said.

World Leader
The researchers say if the project is successful, it would make an enormous impact on the viability of hydrogen as an energy carrier and allow renewable production of hydrogen to become a reality.
It will also position the UK as a world leader in one of the few solutions to a truly sustainable energy future.
’There is a lot of understanding of how water can be broken down at the molecular level but to obtain hydrogen using solar energy in a renewable way we have to scale it up,’ said Geoffrey Maitland, ICL professor of energy engineering, who will be part of the project.
’This is why the chemistry and engineering departments will play a big role.’
The five-year, government-funded project, which starts in October, will be led by fuelcell expert Prof Nigel Brandon, executive director of ICL’s Energy Futures Lab and involve bioscientists, chemists, engineers and industry.
Shell International and Hydrogen Solar are project partners and will act as commercial sponsors as well as lending expertise and serving on an industrial advisory panel that will monitor the scheme’s development.
In the UK and abroad there is an increasing focus on developing zero-carbon emission fuels, particularly hydrogen, using renewable energy sources. Most hydrogen is produced from natural gas, a fossil fuel, or by splitting water through electrolysis, a process that consumes a lot of electricity that is often produced by using non-renewable energy.
Solar energy is the most abundant form of renewable energy available and, if harvested efficiently, can meet global energy needs for the foreseeable future.
It is estimated that solar power could provide about 6,400 times the estimated global power demand for 2020.
Much research is focused on its direct conversion to electricity in photovoltaic devices, or on its direct conversion to heat in solar thermal devices. But a barrier to all these routes is their prohibitive cost.
The project aims to develop a demonstrator consisting of a rooftop reactor on top of the college that can use sunlight to break down water on the hundreds of liters scale.
Maitland said that to achieve their aims, the group must be able to capture the solar energy in an efficient manner.

Novel Design
’We have to design ways of capturing solar energy to get efficient transfer of light energy to the molecular centers where the breakdown of water occurs,’ said Maitland.
’This means a novel design is needed. However, there are many questions about whether we will be able to scale up the process.’
The team will then involve Brandon, who will study how the hydrogen produced can be used to power a fuelcell.
The group also hopes to identify the potential roadblocks to the process becoming commercially viable, tackling them at the different stages of development, such as during catalyst manufacture.
They will also identify whether it is best to develop the process so that it produces hydrogen and oxygen, or hydrogen and other oxidation products.
The disadvantage of the former is that it requires major separation of the atoms and so may not be as energy efficient.
However, other oxidation products may not be as compatible with fuelcells, requiring a compromise between the needs of the fuelcell and the efficiency of the solar breakdown process.

New taller windmills can catch gusts that are faster than those closer to the ground.

New technology is allowing energy producers to capture speedier wind that environmental activists say has the potential to provide 20 percent of the state’s electricity within 10 years.
What’s new are taller windmills that can catch gusts that are faster than those closer to the ground. The tallest windmills have been about 250 feet, but now proponents envision windmills whose bases are about 330 feet tall, Redorbit.com reported.
Four windmills in northwest Ohio provide part of Bowling Green’s energy supply, the only municipality in the state to use electricity from wind. Only eight states that use wind power make less than Ohio’s seven-megawatt capacity produced at Bowling Green, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Texas’ windmills produce 2,768 megawatts to lead the nation.
Ohio lags, in part, because the state is one of only 12 that have no standards that are established or under consideration for the use of renewable energy sources. However, new Gov. Ted Strickland has said development of those sources is a priority and House Speaker Jon Husted has created the House Alternative Energy Committee to study the issue.
Environment Ohio, which promotes the use of alternatives to coal and natural gas to produce electricity, and the DOE presented the department’s new wind map Thursday that shows speeds clocked at the height of taller windmills. According to the map, vast areas of northern and western Ohio have winds strong enough to make wind power profitable. Promoters consider winds of about 17 mph strong enough to produce energy.
“The map shows Ohio is considerably more windy than previous research,“ said Dennis Elliot, a principal scientist with DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The map excludes areas where wind harvesting could be impractical or harm the environment, including near airports and on Lake Erie.
Some Ohio-based power companies are investing in wind energy in states with laws requiring a set percentage of renewable energy.
Columbus-based American Electric Power has asked state regulators to allow it to charge its 1.5 million Ohio customers a small fee to buy electricity from renewable resources.
One reason utilities are reluctant to build wind farms is uncertainty over recovering the costs because the state’s regulatory structure is still being determined after changes were made in 1999, said Melissa McHenry, an AEP spokeswoman.
However, consultant Daryl Stockburger, who supervised construction of the Bowling Green project in 2003-04 when he was that city’s utilities director, is working with municipalities like Clyde and Elmore in northwest Ohio and Washtenaw County, Mich., which includes Ann Arbor. He also has a few private clients.
Stockburger said he has found the winds to be consistently faster at 330 feet than at the top of Bowling Green’s 250-foot windmills.
“I don’t know of anyone who has used a 100-meter (about 330 feet) tower. The extra wind speed we’d see would cost-justify the taller tower,“ said Stockburger, who operates North Coast Wind and Power.
Environment Ohio spokeswoman Amy Bomberg said she’s encouraging lawmakers to adopt percentage targets soon so Ohio doesn’t fall too far behind other states in developing renewable resources.
“We urge Ohio’s leaders to commit to getting 10 to 20 percent of Ohio’s energy from wind in the next decade,“ Bomberg said.
Whoever makes the next move in Ohio will attract attention, Stockburger said.
“People will watch the first one to do it,“ he said.

A black box that calculates the true emissions of a moving vehicle, reporting the level and composition of its pollutants, could slash fleet operators’ fuel bills and benefit the environment, its makers say.
According to its Essex-based developer, automotive software specialists Lysanda, use of the Eco-Log could cut fleet fuel costs by about 10 percent, Theengineer.co.uk reported.
It could also prove invaluable to fleet operators if the proposed London Low Emission Zone is introduced in 2008. As the technology will allow fleet operators to prove the true emissions of their vehicles, they will be able to demonstrate compliance with the zone restrictions.
The Eco-Log is aimed initially at managers of delivery fleets and public service vehicles. It will enable them to monitor how their vehicles are being driven and calculate the exact fuel economy of daily operations, mile by mile, minute by minute.
The company is in talks with a leading supermarket chain, which is interested in taking part in trials using the device in its supply chain.
The box could allow vehicle developers and government agencies to see the effects of applied emissions technologies, measuring the impact of vehicle operating and maintenance practices.

Diagnostics
The Eco-Log monitors the vehicle’s powertrain, taking information from its on-board diagnostic (OBD) system to predict its emissions characteristics, rather than directly measuring the gases in the exhaust pipe.
The factors examined include load, engine speed, throttle angle, engine temperature and for diesels, injector profile, and timing, shape and duration.
These are plotted against the vehicle’s powertrain characteristics map. The collected data is then transmitted back to base over the mobile phone network, where a software system analyses and reports on it.
The box can also display the key data to the driver via a visual display unit, allowing them to modify their driving to save on petrol use.
The system uses continual advanced simulation-based monitoring (CASM) technology--an emerging condition monitoring technology that is considered the cheapest, most reliable method of measuring the outputs of complex systems.
Alexander Willard, chief executive and founder of Lysanda, said it could help fleet managers improve emissions efficiency by identifying heavy-footed drivers and inefficient vehicles.
’The regulation of emissions at present is like sticking your finger in the air,’ said Willard. ’People rely on using figures based on manufacturers’ calculations of average emissions for a vehicle, depending on its year of manufacture.
It is very hard to control actual output unless you consider the largest factor, which is the driver or owner of the vehicle.
Presently, it is easy to see if, for instance, one vehicle’s fuel consumption goes up by 10 percent. However, finding out why this is and how to change it is difficult.’

Economy
The device allows the monitoring of fuel economy to be accurately calculated to a tenth of a second and, by monitoring driver behavior such as rapid acceleration and heavy braking, will allow fleet managers to identify what is causing increased fuel consumption.
Using the Eco-Log device, fleet managers will be able to create an accurate profile of each driver’s style and how this affects their fuel use. They will then be able to assign tasks based on this information to match the most efficient drivers in particular traffic conditions to jobs requiring these skills.
The company is the first to offer nitrogen oxide emission monitoring without the use of a sensor array. Such sensors are expensive and may also be vulnerable to damage as they are placed in the exhaust system itself. The black box can be installed simply by plugging it into the diagnostics port of the OBD.
The company has fitted a prototype unit to a Ford Focus 1.6 TDCi and is now carrying out road tests. Lysanda is developing the system to make it more robust and suitable for different engine configurations, such as light commercial, heavy goods vehicles and a spark-ignition petrol version.