Approximately 300 million tires get tossed out every year in America and each tire contains about 10 gallons of oil, according to Patrick George, CFO of new age rubber recycler Lehigh Technologies. That comes to 3 billion gallons. The U.S. consumes about 145 billion gallons of oil. Thus, the amount thrown out in tires comes to around two percent of the annual total. Lehigh doesn't sell recovered oil-it has a process for making rubber powder out of things like tires that can then be reused for making new tires or other products--and it's not realistic that discarded tires can all be recycled. Still, the number gives you a sense of the gas consumption that could be avoided through better recycling. Recycling 30 million tires means 300 million gallons not consumed, which can also be viewed as 300 million gallons taken out of the ground. Just think: Tracy, California can call itself the Saudi Arabia of old tires. Lehigh has a plant that churn out 100 million pounds of recycled rubber powder a year. Two-thirds of the rubber in the world, by the way, is synthetic. One-third is the real stuff. Lehigh, which has raised $34.5 million, is one of the standouts in the green chemistry field. Like many other green chem companies, Lehigh has come up with a way to make a conventional product that a) relies on a cheap feedstock and/or b ) requires less fossil fuel to produce. Other standouts in the category include Serious Materials (wallboard that doesn't require much energy to manufacture), Hycrete (waterproof concrete) and Cereplast (bioplastics). Buyers of green chemistry products can also qualify, depending on the jurisidiction, for carbon credits, so there is a third advantage. Several companies have tried recycled rubber in the past, but found it tough to take the rubber powder and make something useful again. As a result, most old tires are burnt or put into monofills, said George. Some old rubber gets ground down into pellet-sized particles and refashioned into flooring or asphalt. But Lehigh is taking on a bigger market and a tougher assignment. It breaks down old rubber into an ultrafine powder, which can be used in a variety of products. Lehigh did not come up with the process itself. It started in Germany as a way to grind up, and dispose of, old pharmaceuticals. Lehigh is also not from Pennslyvania, George stated. The company is based in Florida. The founders, however, had another company with the Lehigh designation. "We needed a name quickly and we didn't want to pay a naming consultant," he said.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative marked the start of operations Friday, trading 70 futures and options contracts on the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange. The contracts, which represent 70,000 emissions credits, were the first traded in the U.S. under a regulated cap-and-trade scheme. Many believe RGGI, which comprises 10 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, will set the tone for a future federal emissions reduction scheme that is likely to be implemented under the next presidential administration. Let's hope not. While investor interest in the pre-sale - RGGI opens officially on January 1, 2009 - is heartening, the market itself suffers from serious design flaws. Most of these are related to political compromise that will sink the market before it has to chance to make a significant difference. If the design flaws evident in RGGI are replicated on the federal level, we should give up hope for a thriving carbon market in the U.S. in the short- to mid-term. Emissions credits in RGGI are limited to the power sector, binding generators to cumulative emissions of 188 million tons per year from 2009 to 2014. This number is set to decrease by 2.5 percent annually between 2015 and 2018, at which point climatologists expect most of the RGGI states to have sloughed off into the Atlantic. The emissions caps are set at higher-than-historic levels, meaning power generators will be allowed to emit more, though probably at a slower rate, than what was previously planned. Slowing emissions in the natural gas-dominated Northeastern power sector won't be difficult, and an emissions credit surplus problem will probably emerge within the first few months of trading and last beyond 2014. The contracts ended their first day of action at $5.58 per short ton, far below the level required to illict credible behavior change. Trading yesterday wasn't too thrilling either, with a meager trading volume of 4 contracts sending prices for December 2009 deliver down to $5.56. The spread out to December 2012 is still below $6.00, meaning traders don't expect market conditions to become more competitive anytime in the near future. And this is exactly what the power producers want. Electricity prices among RGGI states are some of the highest in the country, with New York and Massachusetts regularly topping out above $0.15/kWh. Because of retail choice, wheeling and common carrier requirements in the PJM Interconnection, NYISO, and and the Mass ISO, RGGI power producers often steep price competition from coal burners in West Virginia and hydroelectric producers in Quebec. The power producers within RGGI lobbied hard for relaxed emissions requirements - more stringent caps would have forced them to alter the fundamentals underlying their retail rates, which are negotiated annually with state-level public utility and public service commissions. By keeping caps high and requirements low, the cap-and-trade scheme will have little impact on the planning decisions of power producers. This defeats the purpose of emissions reduction. The regularly cited figure for incentivizing behavior change is €35 per metric ton (U.S. emissions credits are traded on the short ton, equivalent to 907 kg - another market design flaw). Credits on the EU market trade around €24 per metric ton, below the line, but inclusive of emissions in both the power and industrial sectors. Because of the retail rate restrictions and public service obligations regulators place on power producers, including the industrial sector in the reduction scheme necessarily places pressure on power producers to make creative, often risky decisions, like building out renewable capacity. Fortunately, EU countries offer policy support for these projects. While not perfect, the integration of policy across both incentives and mandates makes conforming to emissions reduction regimes less painful. Perhaps American power producers wouldn't balk at carbon regulation if government bodies set about getting the incentives right. Whether this involves extending the production and investment tax credits, introducing a federal RPS or REFIT program, tax breaks, or merely directing subsidies to emitting companies for technological development and process innovation (kind of like how the government gives money away to oil companies), remains to be seen. To ask entrenched sectors like power, construction, or the industrials to cut emissions without support is ludicrious and leads to markets as potentially disfunctional as RGGI.

Netcrystal has developed a MEMS-style solar technology that lets photovoltaic silicon stretch and expand to cover large areas. Netcrystal’s CEO, Bala Padmakumar, claims that the device’s efficiency will rival and exceed that of the mighty SunPower (~19%) while beating the price claims of the mightily-hyped Nanosolar ($.99/watt). The technology and IP originate with work done at Stanford University by Peter Peumans who is now Netcrystal’s Chief Science Officer. Interconnected nodes of PV silicon surrounded by coiled silicon are fabricated in a relatively standard DRIE process upon a flexible polymer substrate. The substrate is then mechanically stretched to expand many times resulting in distributed PV zones which are already connected by the now uncoiled silicon – ostensibly eliminating the wafer to wafer interconnection now performed on panels using crystalline silicon. Padmakumar is the principal investigator of a recently awarded $99,000 SBIR Phase I project focused on the development of high-efficiency, lightweight, non-tracking PV arrays based on stretched silicon. According to the SBIR document: “The stretchable silicon process can achieve accurate placement and electrical wiring of thousands of miniature solar cells in one parallel and potentially low-cost step.� “Efficiency matters,� says Padmakumar, claiming hisGen 1 product will have an efficiency north of SunPower and his Gen 2 product’s efficiency will be greater than 30 percent. Reduction in the use of silicon means that the panels will be lighter, much lighter, according to the CEO. Standard PV panels weigh about 32 pounds and Netcrystal’s panels are predicted to come in at about seven pounds, which can reduce installation time and cost. The CEO of this early-stage company already has some potential customers and is preparing to reveal some dramatic customer news in the coming weeks and months along with some funding activity. Stay tuned, you’ll hear it here first.Netcrystal is funded by Wellington Partners, Siemens and X/Seed Capital.