Imperium Renewables, a biodiesel producer in Seattle, said it’s cut 24 people from its payroll. That represents “more than half� of the company’s workforce, said company spokesman John Williams. The company declined to disclose its total employee count.

The company said the recession has greatly reduced market demand for all types of fuels, prompting it to reduce its workforce. Fossil fuel prices have fallen sharply from a year ago, making it tough for biofuel makers to compete.

A recent vote by the European Union to impose a tariff on U.S.-made biodiesel also has had a crushing effect on the industry, Imperium said. The E.U. took the action after European biodiesel producers complained that U.S. biodiesel makers were offering cheaper fuel because they could take advantage of a U.S. tax credit.

Imperium had struggled to execute some of its plans before the global economy began to crumble quickly six months ago, however. It postponed an initial public offering, carried out two rounds of layoffs, closed its office in Hawaii and delayed the building of a refinery in Hawaii. The company still operates a refinery at the Port of Grays Harbor in Washington state, Williams said.

Add Advanced Energy (NSDQ: AEIS) to the list of solar companies being forced to lay off workers in the face of a global recession. The Fort Collins, Colo.-based maker of solar cells, semiconductors and grid-tie inverters, among other products, announced Thursday that it would lay off 330 workers, or about 22 percent of its workforce, by April. That's a bigger layoff than the company initially projected in December. But after reporting in February that it lost $1.8 million in 2008 — a sharp decline from profits of $34.4 million in 2007 — Advanced Energy said it needed to cut staff to "streamline our operations, and enable us to continue to focus on key market opportunities." It isn't the first solar company to cut staff. Since December,  Suntech, Heliovolt, Optisolar, and SunEdison have announced layoffs (see here, here, here and here). In January, Ausra announced it had laid off about 10 percent of its staff and shifted its business goals from building large-scale solar-thermal plants to selling solar steam generating systems to power plants and other industrial and mining customers. And solar panel maker Entech Solar announced earlier this month that it would lay off 40 percent of its employees, shortly after it merged withsolar installer World Water & Solar. Other renewable energy companies are feeling the pinch as well. Wind tower maker DMI Industries announced it would cut about 20 percent of its workforce in January, and Spanish wind turbine maker Gamesa said it was cutting about 180 of 720 workers at a Pennsylvania factory.

It's official — Pacific Gas & Electric Co.'s smart meter program will roll on with Silver Spring Networks. The utility got the sign-off from the California Public Utility Commission on Thursday to charge ratepayers for an additional $467 million to bring 10 million gas and electric meters with two-way communications capabilities to its customers by 2011. That brings the program's total cost to $2.2 billion, and allows the utility to officially add technology from Redwood City, Calif.-based Silver Spring to its electric smart meters. PG&E's smart meter rollout has gone through a few changes since it was launched in 2006, including bringing Silver Spring on board to install its communications cards in electric meters from General Electric and Landis+Gyr (see Q&A: PG&E's Andrew Tang). So far PG&E has installed communications equipment from Aclara on 1.5 million gas meters, as well as about 600,000 electric smart meters, PG&E Paul Moreno said in a Thursday email. Of those electric meters, about 380,000 are using a combination of radio transmission and powerline carrier technology to send and receive data (see Will Smart Grid See a Push for Power-Line Networking?). The remaining 220,000 are equipped with Silver Spring's circuit boards and radios, which communicate with one another and with utility communication nodes via radio frequency mesh technology. That's the technology that PG&E intends to use for the rest of the electric smart meters it will install. Silver Spring also has deals to provide smart meter communications and networking to Florida Power & Light, American Electric Power and other utilities. But the PG&E project has been its highest-profile smart meter contract to date, and is seen as a critical test of its technology (see Silver Spring Grabs $75M). PG&E will start out by reading the meters remotely, eliminating the need to send workers out in trucks to read them. But the long-term goal is to bring a set of two-way communications between customers and utility to measure and control energy use — the promise of so-called "smart grid" improvements being undertaken by utilities across the country. That's where the upgrade comes in. PG&E envisions using the smart meters to detect and pinpoint power outages more quickly at first. Eventually, it wants to connect smart meters to in-home devices that will be able to monitor and potentially control power usage by thermostats, appliances and other devices remotely, whether by the homeowner or the utility. And for now, PG&E is looking to ZigBee to communicate between smart meters and in-home devices. The protocol based on the 802.15.4 standard is emerging as a favorite for this kind of communications, although WiFi and WiMax are also being considered by some utilities. Silver Spring has named Vancouver-based Exegin Technologies Ltd. as its ZigBee partner for most of its smart meter contracts.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has opened a new database that allows you to search for your favorite toxic chemicals.

The EPA said the Aggregated Computational Toxicology Resource database provides information on more than 500,000 man-made chemicals, including the physical makeup, toxicity and experimental and test results of each chemical. The EPA has culled the data from more than 200 public resources, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institute of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health and Environment Canada, the European Union and the World Health Organization.

The database will not only serve scientists and the public, it also will help the EPA better regulate chemicals. The EPA currently regulates nearly 10,000 chemicals. The database will enable staff at the EPA’s National Center for Computational Toxicology to analyze the chemicals’ potential toxicity by using computer modeling and other methods.

The center’s work, in turn, will help the EPA identify missing information and prompt more testing of the chemicals, the EPA said. What the EPA has found so far is that it has acute toxicity data for 59 percent of the chemicals it regulates, but it only has carcinogenicity testing data for 29 percent of them. For data on the chemicals’ effects on the reproductive health of humans or other animals, the EPA said it only has information on 11 percent of the chemicals.

California also is working on developing a more comprehensive chemical database. The state wants what will be a publicly accessible database to help consumers evaluate the products they buy and use (remember the poisonous toys from China?). About 100,000 chemicals are used to make consumer products today, said Maureen Gorsen, director of the California Department of Toxic Substance Control, at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco last month.

The department, part of the Cal EPA, is developing the database. Another new law also is giving the department the power to identify and rank chemicals that pose health threats and to determine alternatives for manufacturers to use.

Previously, I wrote about C12 Energy (C12), a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup that is apparently working on processes for capturing carbon dioxide by increasing the alkalinity of the ocean, thereby enhancing its ability to absorb and store carbon dioxide. I noted that there was no publicly available U.S. patent or published application covering C12’s technology, though the company’s president and chief technology officer, Kurt Zenz House, published an article in the journal Environmental Science & Technology describing his carbon capture method. An alert reader pointed out that House’s CV is available through his homepage, and the CV has a “Patents Filed� heading, under which it lists “Carbon Dioxide Capture and Related Processes� and states:

Primary inventor of a novel chemical process that removes CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it permanently-International patent filed by Harvard University.

Indeed, after shifting my focus from U.S. patents and applications to an international search, I was able to locate House’s patent application. International Application No. PCT/US2007/010032 (’032 application) was filed April 26, 2007 with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and published on Feb. 14, 2008 as WO 2008/018928. The ‘032 application lists the owners as Harvard (where House is a grad student) and the Penn State Research Foundation and claims priority to two U.S. provisional applications (provisional applications are essentially one-year placeholders which are not examined or published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office). The ‘032 application describes and claims the carbon capture methods discussed in House’s journal article.  Claim 1 broadly recites the invention:

1.  A process for capturing carbon dioxide comprising: providing water; processing the water to generate acidic solution and alkaline solution; neutralizing the acidic solution; and capturing the carbon dioxide from a source of carbon dioxide with the alkaline solution.

One intriguing aspect of the ‘032 application is the synergy with fuel cell technology it claims.  Claim 33 recites an extension of the basic process wherein iron ions produced by neutralizing the acidic solution with reactive species provided from a rock and/or mineral source are oxidized in a fuel cell reaction to produce electricity. Claim 15 recites another variation whereby the water processing step (to generate acidic solution and alkaline solution) of claim 1 is performed by electrolysis, and the electrolysis produces a halogen gas, a hydrogen gas, and sodium hydroxide.  The resulting halogen gas and hydrogen gas are then reacted in a fuel cell to form the acidic solution and produce electricity. Another method, recited in claim 36, captures CO2 by reacting it with sodium hydroxide and generates chlorine gas and hydrogen gas.  The hydrogen gas may be oxidized with oxygen either in a hydrogen gas turbine (claim 43) or in a fuel cell (claim 44), in each case forming water and electricity. The written description of the ‘032 application states:

Another benefit of the process is that some of the steps (e.g., the formation of HCl in a fuel cell) produce useful energy that can be used in other aspects of the process.  The energy may be generated, for example, from hydrogen production during the dissolution of reduced minerals (e.g., minerals comprising iron), electricity production through a fuel cell (e.g., FeCl2-HCl-O2; FeCl2-O2), or heat generated during the dissolution of silicate rocks and minerals.  Because the energy cost is a large component of the total cost for most conventional CO2 capture and storage technologies, the low energy cost of the process represents a valuable technological advancement.

House’s article together with publication of the ‘032 application provides some interesting clues about C12’s technology and business model.  Whatever the company is planning, it wants to do it just about everywhere:  the ‘032 application designates countries and regions for patent protection all over the world, including the U.S., Canada, Europe, Eurasia, Africa, China, Japan, Australia and many others. Eric Lane is a patent attorney and intellectual property lawyer at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego, where he is in the Intellectual Property and Climate Change & Clean Technology practices. Eric is the founder and author of Green Patent Blog, which provides discussion and analysis of intellectual property law issues in clean technology.