Printed 10/19/16 Page of

Future Forests offers a no-frills menu of one tree or bulb for each short-haul flight, two trees or bulbs for each medium-distance trip and five of either for each long-range odyssey. Each transaction will net you a free luggage tag made of recycled leather.

Future Forests is not the only game in town. The Better World Club (www.betterworldclub.com), the self-declared environmentally friendly alternative to the AAA, offers a simple alternative. Suggested donations of $11 for every domestic flight and $22 for every international flight, will be invested in new energy-efficient heating systems in schools in its hometown, Portland, Ore. On trips booked through its travel agency, Better World Travel, Better World Club will pay part or all of the fees itself.

The group has rejected tree planting as a solution, however, exposing a rift in the nascent movement. "It is very difficult to calculate the carbon dioxide absorption by trees," said Mitchell Rofsky, president of the Better World Club. "It is easy to cheat, and besides, as young trees absorb more CO2 than old ones, carbon dioxide offsets may inspire the clear-cutting of forests to plant new trees."

American Forests, a century-old nonprofit organization in Washington, offers the cheapest option: It will plant a tree for every dollar donated, and the donor can choose from programs like Memorial Trees, which honors those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, and Trees for Tigers, which is aimed at restoring the habitat of the threatened Siberian Tiger. The minimum donation is $15. At its Web site (www.americanforests .org), you can calculate the carbon dioxide you produce in other activities like driving your car or mowing your lawn.

So far, the number of Americans who pay to undo the damage their flights inflict is negligible. The Better World Club says it handles 1,500 to 2,000 requests a year. American Forests says it receives more than 25,000 donations, though not all are related to air travel. Future Forests says the majority of the 40,000 individuals who have paid for environmentally friendly measures since it was founded in 1997 are Europeans.

Should the general public become more uneasy about global warming, though, these figures could explode. In European countries like the Netherlands, Britain and Germany, the practice has become much more common. And it is not limited to flying. Avis Europe, for example, offers clients who book a car online the opportunity to pay a small extra fee to have trees planted. In the United States, Avis — a unit of Cendant — said it had no immediate plans to follow suit.

There may be cause for more concern in the years ahead. Despite the current lull in air travel and according to figures provided by the Edinburgh Center, an independent consulting group, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions from civil aviation will double from 1999 to 2015, to 900 million tons a year, despite a 20 percent increase in fuel efficiency by the airline industry over the period. By 2015, airplanes' share of human-generated carbon dioxide emissions will rise to 3 percent from 2 percent in 1999.

While few in number, the American business travelers who have signed onto the environmental campaign have strong views. "The fact that the U.S. government hasn't ratified the Kyoto treaty against global warming was a big reason for me," said Martha L. Delaney, a lawyer in Minneapolis and a regular flier to San Diego, who joined the Better World Club last summer.

Shannon E. St. John, president of a nonprofit concern in Durham, N.C., who makes around 20 business trips a year, believes that the airlines should pitch in. "It would be marvelous if they gave you the option to pay a bit extra to offset the negative environmental impact of flying," said Ms. St. John, who in December began paying Future Forests to plant trees.

It might take a while for the airlines to come on board. "We are extremely focused on financial survival," said Tim Doke, a spokesman for American Airlines. "CO2 emissions are not something we have time for to think about."

Jonathan Shopley, Future Forests' chief executive, says his appeals to the airline industry have fallen on deaf ears. "They act towards this environmental problem like the chemical industry 20 years ago:

Big business is not thinking a lot about the issue, either, but here and there the movement has won a corporate convert. For example, Nike; Interface, a carpet maker based in Atlanta; and the American subsidiary of Tetra Pack, the Swedish packaging concern, offset the business air miles traveled by their employees.

Interface pays American Forests to plant a tree for every 1,500 passenger miles its employees fly. "It's part of our program to minimize our impact on the environment," said Ray C. Anderson, Interface's chairman. "The cost is minimal, and we create enormous good will."

http://www.evuk.co.uk/hotwires/rawstuff/art47.html

HOTWIRE:RAWSTUFF

Hydro wants to build electric car

Canadian Press

Friday, September 20, 2002

Hydro-Quebec wants to enter into partnerships with manufacturers to market an electric automobile engine, utility president Andre Caille said Thursday.

Caille announced the desire for a collaboration as he inaugurated a new Avestor manufacturing plant for lithium-metal-polymer (LMP) batteries under a partnership with American company Kerr-McGee.

Caille said the utility wants to develop a partnership to minimize the risks associated with developing a production process.

Hydro-Quebec's research institute has developed three technologies that can be used for electric vehicles, including LMP. The first model of the battery being built in this town on Montreal's south shore will be used by the telecommunications sector.

Research to develop LMP for cars puts the company "months and months ahead of the competition", said Caille.

Canadian Press 2002

For immediate release Montréal, September 19, 2002

Mission accomplished - Avestor, subsidiary of Hydro-Québec and Kerr-McGee, ready to market lithium-metal-polymer battery

Avestor officially inaugurated today its lithium-metal-polymer (LMP) battery manufacturing plant, the Alpha plant, located in Boucherville, Québec.

“This plant, globally one of a kind, is now ready to market a top-performance product whose technological and environmental applications will mark the years to come. This remarkable technological breakthrough has a very bright future and is now ready for mass production.” affirmed Hydro-Québec President and CEO, André Caillé.

Avestor technology has a target market estimated at over US$ 2 billion. The plant will employ 125 people this year, and a projected 350 more by 2004. The American firm Kerr-McGee Chemicals LLC and Hydro-Québec, who signed a partnership agreement in 2001, each hold a 50% stake in Avestor.

Avestor, now recognized as the world leader in LMP battery technology, was founded in 1994 and has since been granted over 70 patents covering key aspects of this leading-edge technology. The company’s two short-term goals were, first, to ensure that this exclusive technology met requirements for the telecommunications and electric vehicle sectors and, second, to build an infrastructure enabling it to quickly bring its product to market. These goals have been clearly achieved and customers in several continents have already expressed interest.

The LMP battery, developed in Québec over the past two decades, is based on the ACEP (polymer-electrolyte) technology developed by IREQ, Hydro-Québec’s research institute, and other partners, including the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. The LMP battery redefines performance standards in electrical storage. The technology’s exceptional characteristics and versatility make it a leading contender for applications in a wide range of industries.

To learn more about Avestor and LMP, Kerr-McGee and Hydro-Québec, please visit the following Web sites: (www.avestor.com), (www.kmg.com), (www.hydroquebec.com).

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/opinion/21KRIS.html

February 21, 2003

Our New Hydrogen Bomb

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

MESA, Ariz.

To understand how we might bolster our national security aside from invading Iraq, I'm on a General Motors test track here in Arizona, driving the coolest car you've never seen.

It's called Hy-wire, and it's a one-of-a-kind prototype: a four-door sedan fueled by hydrogen, capable of speeds of 100 miles an hour, whisper-quiet, and emitting no pollution at all — only water vapor as exhaust. It looks like a spaceship, with glass all around and no pedals or steering wheel.

Jeff Wolak, the engineer who travels with Hy-wire and mothers it, explained that it is drive-by-wire, controlled by electronics and computers rather than cables and hydraulics. To accelerate, you rotate the handgrips. To steer, you move the grips up or down.

Then Mr. Wolak tells me to drive the $5 million prototype. He is in the passenger seat and picks up what looks like a computer game console that he rests on his lap.

"It's a second set of controls with an emergency brake," he explains brightly. "We only have one of these vehicles, and we don't want to risk it getting in a crash."

And he hadn't even seen me drive.

On the vast track, the Hy-wire zipped about flawlessly. It turns sharply, brakes smoothly and accelerates easily — all almost noiselessly. It's all you would expect of a $5 million car. And if a driver crosses to England, he could press a button and the driving controls would whirr over to the right front seat.

Likewise, each driver of a family car could have a different steering mechanism. "It could be a joystick for the 20-something generation who are used to computer games, or a steering wheel for the older set used to a Cadillac," said Timothy Perzanowski, a G.M. engineer.

In short, hydrogen fuel cells are not necessarily a distant dream. Toyota, Honda and BMW also are churning out hydrogen prototypes. General Motors is talking about having the Hy-wire in showrooms by 2010 and selling a million hydrogen vehicles by 2015.

"We see fuel cells as the first technology that has come along in 100 years that has the potential of competing with the internal combustion engine," said Scott Fosgard, a G.M. official involved in hydrogen cars. "We're doing this because we're going to make a boatload of money."

Mr. Fosgard says that eventually, hydrogen cars will have significant advantages: "What does it cost in New York for a parking space? Maybe $500 a month? Well, imagine if the parking garage paid you, because while it's parked there it's producing electricity that is sold back to the grid."

This may be pie in the sky, of course. For example, it's true that hydrogen vehicles can generate electricity while parked, but the cost of producing it might be prohibitive.

History is littered with other energy technologies that fell flat: synthetic fuels, biomass, nuclear fusion, solar, electric vehicles. Hydrogen cars still face technical hitches, as well as the central challenge: how to cut costs. Carlos Ghosn, the head of Nissan, has joked that fuel cell cars would carry a sticker price of about $700,000.

Moreover, getting the hydrogen can be a problem and can produce greenhouse gases. Hydrogen does not exist on its own but is locked up in water and fossil fuels. The goal is to use wind energy to pluck hydrogen from water in the ocean, but in the near term it's more likely that the hydrogen will come from natural gas.

The bottom line is that President Bush was dead right last month to offer $1.7 billion to boost hydrogen technology, although it would help if the White House also promoted high-mileage hybrid cars for the present. The government could also do more, by deregulating commercial power supply by fuel cells and by encouraging fleet purchases of hydrogen vehicles.

What does any of this have to do with Iraq?

Hydrogen cars are a reminder that there is more than one way to ensure our supplies of energy in the years ahead, even if invading Iraq and investing in hydrogen address the issue on very different time horizons. Nonetheless, I have to say that waging war seems a reflex, pushing toward a hydrogen economy a vision.

As Mr. Fosgard of G.M. put it only half-jokingly: "I don't want to say that this car will eliminate war, but we might not have wars for energy anymore. We'd have to find different reasons to go to war."

Businesss & Technology

President Bush says hydrogen fuel-cell cars guarantee a pollution-free future. But there's a catch: Where's all the hydrogen going to come from?

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Feb. 25, 2003 | On Oct. 30, 2002, a hydrogen fueling station opened in Richmond, Calif., with the kind of local fanfare typically reserved for the groundbreaking of a new civic institution, like a public library or a Wal-Mart.

The mayor of Richmond, Irma Anderson, was on hand to fill up a Ford fuel-cell prototype, while Rep. George Miller pumped hydrogen into a Hyundai SUV. The goal: to show that anyone -- even a member of the U.S. House of Representatives -- can gas up one of these newfangled fuel-cell vehicles.

Hydrogen fuel-cell cars have long been popular with environmentalists eager to escape fossil fuel nastiness, and earlier this year President Bush boosted hydrogen's public profile when he lent the cause his bully pulpit and promised federal budgetary support to these "pollution free" cars. Cars that run on electricity generated from hydrogen fuel are a dream that easily draws bipartisan support: a futuristic, technocratic cure for the country's overdependence on foreign oil and environmental problems.

It's not a dream that will be realized tomorrow or even next year, however. A host of serious technological hurdles must be overcome before gasoline is obsolete. There are the questions of how hydrogen will be stored and distributed on a large scale. And then there's the problem that hydrogen isn't necessarily the environmental panacea that its advocates proclaim it to be. Hydrogen doesn't occur in a natural state, like coal or oil or natural gas -- it must be produced by a process that itself consumes energy, with inevitable consequences for the environment.

Take the Richmond station, which generates hydrogen fuel by electrolysis, a process that separates water into hydrogen and oxygen. Using technology from Canada-based Stuart Energy, the separation process is powered by electricity. The catch: The electricity comes off the grid.

"You can connect to the grid, or you can connect to renewable sources like wind and solar," says Wanda Cutler, a spokeswoman for Stuart Energy. "The grid is very clean, and you don't necessarily have to make your hydrogen during peak periods."

The grid is very clean? In the United States more than 50 percent of power plants are coal-fired, while renewable sources, like wind, account for less than 2 percent of electrical energy, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewable_energy/page.cfm?pageID=45

"If you take the electricity from the current energy mix in the U.S., then in fact it doubles the CO2 [produced] per mile," says John Turner, a principal scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.

Translation: Driving a hydrogen-powered car juiced with fuel generated by electrolysis could actually be worse for the ozone layer than sticking with gasoline.

"Electrolysis totally defeats the purpose in terms of greenhouse gas emissions," says Sandy Thomas, the president of H2Gen Innovations in Alexandria, Va., a start-up with a prototype for a competing hydrogen-generation system that converts natural gas into hydrogen at the gas station. Even if future hydrogen were solely generated from natural gas, as is currently the case for most hydrogen production, it still wouldn't be pollution free.

So what's the answer? For environmentalists, the only way to go is to make sure the electricity to separate the hydrogen is generated from renewable energy sources, like wind, solar, hydroelectric or geothermal energy.

"If we're going to a hydrogen economy, we must simultaneously move toward renewable electricity," says Turner, who conducts research on photoelectrolysis to make solar power more efficient.

But President Bush, despite his enthusiasm for clean cars, has apparently not figured out this part. In the same federal budget where Bush asked for more money for his hydrogen initiative, he cut funding for some renewable-energy alternatives, like wind, while increasing spending for nuclear energy. In fact, the Nuclear Energy Institute, a pro-nuke trade group, hailed Bush's commitment to hydrogen with this headline on its Web site: "President Bush Calls for Use of Nuclear Energy to Power U.S. Hydrogen Economy."

Nuclear energy isn't exactly pollution free. Of the many challenges involved in bringing cars that run on hydrogen to market -- fuel infrastructure, automotive technology, cost, safety -- this may be the biggest hurdle to the cars' having a real-world impact: Where will the hydrogen come from?

In Bush's 2004 federal budget, submitted to Congress on Feb. 3, the president designated $273 million for research into hydrogen fuel cells, including studies on deriving hydrogen from coal ($5 million), nuclear sources ($4 million), natural gas ($12.2 million), and renewable alternatives such as solar and wind ($17.3 million).

The nod to the old-school energy industry disturbed environmentalists, since it's hard to call coal the road to a "pollution free" car.

"None of this money should be going to coal. It's like running to McDonald's if you want to lose weight," says Brendan Bell, a spokesman for the Sierra Club.

Environmentalists found it even worse after Bush viewed fuel-cell-powered cellphones, laptops and scooters at an event at the National Building Museum on Feb. 6. The president then touted nuclear fusion as one promising path for producing hydrogen. "The energy produced will be safe and clean and abundant," he said, not bothering to mention the nuclear waste byproduct. "If we develop hydrogen power to its full potential, we can reduce our demand for oil by over 11 million barrels per day by the year 2040," he cheered.

There's even money in the new budget to support technological research into reforming gasoline into hydrogen right onboard a fuel-cell vehicle in order to power it.

But how much of an impact will using gasoline for hydrogen production have on reaching "energy independence"? According to the Department of Energy, some 96 percent of hydrogen around the world is produced from fossil fuel sources such as natural gas, oil and coal. Even with the help of hydrogen, weaning American drivers off fossil fuels will be a challenge.

The vast majority of hydrogen used in the U.S. today, however, has nothing to do with foreign oil: It is generated by the "steam reforming" of natural gas, according to Turner. In steam reforming, extremely hot steam (700-1,100 degrees centigrade) is mixed with methane gas in a specialized reactor.

The process is only 85 percent efficient, meaning that some energy is "lost" when natural gas is converted to hydrogen. Which raises the question, why bother? Why not just convert combustion engines to run on natural gas and be done with it?

Scientists say that while some energy is wasted, a fuel-cell vehicle powered with hydrogen derived from natural gas is still more efficient than, say, a car powered by natural gas.

"Energy is lost," says David Friedman, a senior analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, "but fuel cells are more efficient than internal combustion engines using natural gas, so they more than make up for that."

The environmental benefit is also considerable. "[In fuel-cell cars] the vehicle is zero emission. The compressed natural gas vehicles on the road are low emission, but they're not zero," says Turner.

Most of the cars and buses at the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a research consortium of automakers and energy companies, get their hydrogen through just such steam-reformed natural gas. The automakers in the partnership already have 21 cars and three fuel-cell buses on the road in California, either in prototype or actually leased to customers.

Natural gas is abundantly available in the U.S., so going that route will help energy independence. Plus, driving a hydrogen-powered car with the fuel derived from natural gas will lead to cleaner air in cities and near freeways. It will even cut greenhouse gas emissions by one-half, according to Turner.

"Natural gas is viewed as the fuel to bring us to a hydrogen economy, because we can extract hydrogen from natural gas. It's more plentiful, and it produces less carbon dioxide when it's burned," says Brian Adams, a public information officer at the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Still, the conversion does initially produce CO2, making the resulting fuel-cell cars not quite "pollution free."

Here's the environmentalists' dream for a hydrogen economy: 100 percent hydrogen-powered vehicles running on fuel generated through electrolysis, where the energy used to electrolyze the water is created through solar power or wind power. That would also greatly please those in favor of energy independence, since we have plenty of wind and sun right here. "We don't have to go to the Middle East for sunshine," says Turner. "We've got plenty out in the Mojave Desert."

But Bush's 2004 budget reduces the amount of research dollars going into renewable-energy sources over the previous year, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. For instance, the administration recommended cutting the budget for wind power by 5.5 percent.

"These budget cuts reduce the chance that the Bush administration's hydrogen plan will deliver on its promise," said Friedman. "We need a shift in budget priorities toward renewable energy sources and away from fossil fuels if we want to have a clean, homegrown hydrogen future."

Still, federal scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory say that their research will benefit from the new attention from the top, according to George Sverdrup, technology manager for the lab's hydrogen fuel cells and infrastructure technologies group.

The lab is researching producing hydrogen from biomass, including Georgia peanut shells. "We're not saying that peanut shells are going to provide the hydrogen for the country, not at all," says Sverdrup. "But around the country, there are different types of biomass that right now are waste material."

Turning agricultural waste into hydrogen fuel could still produce a carbon byproduct, for which other projects at the lab are exploring ways to create a commercial market. Even renewables are not necessarily CO2free.

Research into renewables at the lab includes deriving hydrogen from certain algae, and making hydrogen through electrolysis that uses solar energy more efficiently.

While the U.S. government is cutting funding for some renewables, other countries are taking them more seriously. Ron Pernick, a principal at Clean Edge, an energy consulting firm, points out that the Japanese environmental ministry is funding a study that uses wind power to convert seawater to hydrogen. The same ministry, according to Adams of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has set a mandate of having 50,000 fuel-cell vehicles on their roads by 2010.

It's also the Japanese automakers -- Honda and Toyota -- who have gotten the keys to fuel-cell vehicles into the hands of consumers in California before American automakers have.

Like the nuclear energy industry, renewable-energy advocates still have high hopes for their role in hydrogen. "It means a terrific market for wind generation. If you take electricity and shoot it through an electrolyzer to make hydrogen, where do you get the electricity from?" says Joe Richardson, president of Harnessing Dakota Wind, who believes that wind will be able to produce hydrogen more cost effectively from electrolysis than through the steam reformation of natural gas.

But even those who would like to see a hydrogen economy, fueled by the wind and the sun, have their doubts about what part renewable energy will play.

"The hydrogen economy is not a renewable economy. It's an absolute fantasy," says David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, who points out that it has taken 30 years for renewable energy to get to just barely 2 percent of usage in the U.S. "At what point would they get to 2 percent of their hydrogen economy from renewables? It wouldn't be before 2030 or 2040. I don't want to spend another 40 years getting 2 percent of the hydrogen economy."

Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon Technology.

http://evworld.com/databases/storybuilder.cfm?storyid=496&subcookie=1

EV Party and Politics

For a couple hours the corner of Euclid and Grant in Santa Monica had the hightest concentration of private EVs in America.

By Josh Landess