Green is the new Black

Wednesday, 19 August 2009 00:00

With research excellence in areas such as carbon capture, green chemistry and efficient building, and a promising list of businesses working in renewable energy and green technologies, is it time that Nottingham and Nottinghamshire began recognising that is next major economic strength is the green-tech cluster? Mark Patterson reports.

 

About the size of a dishwasher detergent tablet, the small pink oblong seems an unlikely construction material for the next generation of power stations.  But this small piece of surprisingly dense carbonate, holding three litres of compressed carbon dioxide, is the subject of tests taking place this summer at the University of Nottingham to find out whether bricks just like this can be used to support large buildings.

And this isn't the only potential commercial application currently being researched at the university's £1.1m Centre for Innovation in Carbon Capture and Storage (CICCS).

 

In a few years, scientists here hope to have completed research on complex systems using industrial CO2 emissions to create new usable energy. Feed the waste carbon emissions from this energy back into the system and you would have the ideal recycling loop.

"The would be the Holy Grail of CO2 to some extent," says Professor Mercedes Maroto-Valer, Professor of Energy Technologies and Director of CICCS.

 

Academic research like this, directed towards real world commercial applications that will generate benefits for the economy and the planet, is underpinning Nottingham's growing reputation as an international centre of expertise in the related areas of sustainable energy and emissions control. And alongside the academic activity, Nottingham and the surrounding region is home to an emerging business sector devoted the renewable energy and low carbon technologies.

 

How big is the sector and how big will it grow?

At present, it would be misleading to declare that Nottinghamshire and the East Midlands are among the UK's leading centres for new environmental technology businesses – or 'green-tech'. The latest Government figures puts the value of LCEGS – Low Carbon Environmental Goods and Services – the region at around £8bn. That's higher than Wales, Northern Ireland and England's north east, but behind all other English regions.

 

But an informal count by Wavelength produced a promising list of companies based within the county borders that all produce unique products and services which respond in some way to the knotty related issues of climate change, carbon abatement and energy efficiency.

These range from small university spin-outs producing nano-particles in labs to a listed company tapping methane from former coal mines, and from an international business designing gears for wind turbines to Britain's leading provider of food waste-to-green energy technology.

 

There are both small innovators and some big hitters on this list, and many of these businesses are expecting to grow. One expects a "significant" increase in its employees over the next few years; another is physically expanding its operation in one of the city's newest science parks; a third is working on products for the next generation of Japanese 'green' cars, and so on. Meanwhile, a report card on local academic research would list major strengths in carbon capture and storage, the built environment, green chemistry and related areas.

Altogether, the local green-tech sector, allied to world-class academic research, is forecast to grow as society inches over to a heralded new "low carbon" model and the economy reacts to the domestic financial stimuli and international legislation brought to bear on climate change mitigation.

Today the UK's environmental sector is valued at £106.5bn, supporting 881,000 jobs. Projected growth rates in all environmental sectors could generate an extra 4000,000 jobs – or 45% growth - over the next eight years.

 

However, the biggest growth area lies in renewable energy and the 'emerging low carbon' sector. These already account for 79% of the UK's market value and both are expected to outstrip more established environmental sectors – water treatment and so on – over the next five years. These projections also hold true for the East Midlands.

 

These forecasts seem borne out by some recent big numbers in a sector where big numbers are announced thick and fast – and are often hedged by ifs and buts.  For example, in the April 2009 budget the Government announced an extra £14 billion to support low carbon industries and said the 'carbon abatement technologies' could support 50,000 jobs by 2030. Separately, the Carbon Trust estimates that off-shore wind power alone could create 70,000 new jobs in the UK by 2020.

 

In Nottingham, the story of green tech enterprise can't be separated from the research credentials of the two universities. Benefits should specifically accrue from the unique relationship between the University of Nottingham and China. The value of China's green-tech market is estimated to grow from US$186bn in 2010 to US$555 billion in 2020.  Alongside CICCS, which opened in 2007, the university runs the award-winning Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies on its Ningbo campus in China.

 

Meanwhile, another £5m is being invested in a new Energy Technologies Research Institute on the Jubilee Campus.  One of the university's main research strengths is in Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS. In précis, CCS is technology that aims to find ways of reducing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere by capturing them and storing them safely, or turning them into useful products.

 

While most of us are familiar with the terminology and arguments surrounding renewable energy, CCS has – so far, and in public perception at least – been the least regarded weapon in the scientific armoury deployed to reduce the industrial emissions that cause global warming.

That is set to change. The growing belief in this area was underlined in May this year when the University of Nottingham was awarded a share of £6.9m to search various CCS technologies. E.ON which was one of the funding bodies, described CCS as "the most important technology we have in the fight against climate change." Meanwhile, down the road in Loughborough, the Energy Technologies Institute believes that CCS could reduce Britain's emissions by 20% over the next 50 years and has made this sector one of its main research areas.

At CICCS, alongside more mature CCS technologies, researchers are also looking at the feasibility of re-using captured CO2 as a fuel. This project may not be ready for commercial use for another decade. But the target is to turn CO2 captured at a "point source" – e.g. a power station – into a useful product, and then re-use that fuel again in an endless loop of recycling, says Professor Maroto-Valer.

"We are doing something with the CO2 that is similar to what plants do – photosynthesis – but we tune up the process," she says. "Plants in photosynthesis develop products to grow. Instead of developing products to grow we are looking at producing a fuel. So it's an interface between a biological and a chemical engineering process.

"We are still at the laboratory stage, but have been working on this for three to four years. In ten years we will be looking at putting business cases around the project to tell us exactly where this process could be deployed. Something will probably be done on-site next to a point source of CO2 because we're trying to avoid building very large pipelines. Of course when you use the CO2 as a fuel you are releasing it again so we are looking at using it again in a loop. That would be the Holy Grail of CO2 to some extent."

A more immediate commercial application could be the use of captured CO2 as a building material. Prof Maroto-Valer displays the small oblong of pink carbonate that contains three litres of compressed CO2 (by way of comparison, a person emits around 450L of COs a day). This summer, engineers at the university's School of the Built Environment will be testing pieces of carbonate like this as a building material in their experimental eco-houses and comparing it to conventional building materials.

"Depending on the outcome of this project we may present this material in the international 2010 Sola Decathlon Challenge that's going to take place in Madrid next year." Says Prof Maroto-Valer. "Our engineers are going to tell us the strength of the material and whether we can use it as a load-bearing wall or whether it doesn't have the strength to do that."

In the medium-term future, carbonate could be used as a building material in small to medium sized power stations.

Of course, CCS research is based on the prediction that fossil fuels will continue to play a major part in Britain's energy mix, at least in the medium term. This may dismay environmentalists who are demanding a much quicker transfer to energy supply based on wind, sun and wave power. Yet the UK Government has now accepted that old King Coal or at least Clean King Coal, will remain one of the sources of Britain's energy in the years ahead, alongside renewable, gas and nuclear. Hence, commercial applications of CCS are on the verge of playing a major role in UK energy policy and the national's climate change strategy.

 

Following the April budget, energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband announced that in future all new UK coal stations would have to be fitted with CCS technology from day one. Five 'CCS clusters' were also proposed for the Thames, Humberside, Teesside, the Firth of Forth and Merseyside. Then, on the same day, E.ON announced that it would be fitting CCS technology to its controversial proposed Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent, the UK's first in over two decades, if it gets planning permission to build the plant.

"I wish we could wake up tomorrow and say we don't have to rely on fossil fuels because we have enough renewable," says Prof Maroto-Valer. "But that's not the case. For renewable to take over the market share that fossil fuels currently have, you're talking may be 40 or 50 years. During that time we cannot continue using fossil fuels the way we've been doing. I do believe we will have a significant, higher role for renewable in the future, but until we get to that point the only strategy that is going to allow us to reduce our emissions while using fossil fuels is CCS."

However, as she notes, emissions are an international problem and even achieving the UK's very ambitious target of reducing its CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050 will have little impact globally. To put this into perspective, a fossil fuel power station the size of Ratcliffe-on-Soar comes on line in China every fortnight. This is what makes Anglo-Chinese co-operation over CCS so important and potentially so fruitful for innovations in Nottingham

 

In April, CICCS hosted a visit by a large delegation of Chinese policy makers as part of the UK-China Near Zero Emissions Coal project, which is addressing the carbon dioxide emissions from China's increasing coal energy production. Nottingham was the only UK university visited by the Chinese, a sign that the city and region are regarded as leaders in CCS research leading to practical applications.

 

But current promising areas of research are not only concerned with physically large projects. In March, the East Midlands Conference Centre hosted a conference dedicated to companies involved in clean energy using nano particles. Delegates at the Nono4Energy event included Promethean Particles, a small university spin-out based at BioCity which manufactures nano-particles using a patented hot water process.

Two other international areas of expertise, shared by Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham, are the built environment and green chemistry.

 

The former is broadly concerned with improving the energy efficiency of buildings; the latter is about chemistry that uses less energy and without producing harmful waste products such as solvents. "Green chemistry is driven by industry demand for it," says Dr Gareth Cave, a senior lecturer in inorganic chemistry at Nottingham Trent University, who was at the forefront of work developing solvent-free reactions. "Legislation now demands that the chemical industry produces less waste, which it used to have to pay to remove. The days when you could just dump stuff down the drain are gone, especially since a lot of solvents are hazardous."

 

It is also worth noting that Nottingham's green-tech Renewables UK, the Government body that promotes the British renewable industry internationally, in Melton Mowbray, and the Energy Technologies Institute, in Loughborough. The latter is a public private partnership with funding of over £1bn set up to accelerate the deployment of low carbon technologies.

 

In January the ETI announced £20m for four large technology projects to develop affordable, renewable electricity.

Three of these projects concern developing new off-shore wind turbine technology; the fourth is to develop a new commercial tidal turbine. The private sector backers are E.ON, Rolls Royce, BP, Caterpillar, EDF Energy and Shell. One of the project consortia involves RomaxWIND, a division of the UK based global company Romax Technology, headquartered on Nottingham Science and Technology Park.

 

Promising sounds were also heard in a consultant's report on Nottingham's sustainable energy sector published in 2007. The report, by Sustainable Energy Consultants, pointed out that Nottingham is "at the centre of one of the most important regions for low carbon research within the UK", with major research centres at the Nottingham universities as well as De Montfort, Loughborough and Leicester.

 

And the report further said "Possibly the city and region as a whole could be considered to be one of the most potentially fertile sources for low carbon innovation ideas along with Cambridge (and the East of England) and Imperial College, London."

But note the word 'potentially'. The report identified that the local high level of green-tech academic research was not being translated into a comparable amount of commercial success. This was explained by an abundance of 'blue sky' research and the physical distance between venture capital in London.

 

But that was then. The question now is whether Nottinghamshire's burgeoning green-tech sector should be recognised as a distinct and promising sector, as biotech is. And if the city and county can be labelled as a 'centre of excellence' in green-tech innovation, what should be done to stimulate it further and attract investment for growth?

 

Neil Horsley, chief executive of Nottingham Development Enterprise, adds: "Nottingham has the potential to become an international centre of research excellence in this field but such 'know how' is easily exportable and the challenge to Nottingham and Science City in the coming years is to convert local expertise in to local businesses and jobs."

 

Article as published in 04 Nottingham Science City News.