Today, Energy Tech Stocks [ETS] has the fifth installment from our interview, outlining my LED stock picks. He quotes me at the start saying that it's "going to be a gigantic market" about LEDs. It is, but only when compared to the current size of the market... you can ramp up a lot from a very small base.
SEB Venture Captial and the Norwegian oil company have agreed a letter of intent for the share in Mestilla. Owners of Lithuanian agricultural company Linas Agro will be the other shareholder, with a 57.5% stake, a Statoil statement said.
Construction at the plant began early last year in the free economic zone near the coastal town of Klaipeda. Plans call for production by autumn 2007.
The raw material is vegetable oil pressed on the spot from the rape see of locals in the Norwegian model. No shortage is anticipated in this area near Northeast Europe’s breadbasket.
Lithuanian regulators must approve the Statoil stake.
Bienvenida es la reflexión de Manuel Caminante, aunque denoto cierto recelo de quienes han venido a meter el GOL. Es decir, Al Gore y todos los empresarios que empiezan hacer negocio con el Cambio Climático.
Actualmente, los Medios de Comunicación de masas son capaces de generar una Cultura de Masas . No es que la Cultura de las Masas sea reflejada en ellos, sino que ellos son capaces de instaurarla.
Cuando los Medios de Comunicación introdujeron la Publicidad como forma de autofinanciación, delegaron su autonomía y soberanía a las Corporaciones económicas que los sustentaban. El medio de conseguir el sustento económico –la publicidad- terminó siendo el objetivo . Esto se vio favorecido porque el propio sistema capitalista tendía a depender de una comunicación peculiar, que Guy Debord denominó “La Sociedad del Espectáculo”. En la obra con este título, Debord señala que en la sociedad capitalista moderna, orientada al espectáculo, la vida de los hombres escapa a su propia reflexión. Domina el espectáculo en detrimento del diálogo y la comunicación directa. La sociedad del espectáculo es el modelo de vida socialmente dominante. Y este modelo tiene sus propios códigos comunicativos, que fueron divertidamente tratados en la película “El show de Truman”, que en realidad era un tremendo drama (sobre todo porque estos códigos son perfectamente reconocibles y dominantes en la vida de cada uno de nosotros). Nuestra vida convertida en un constante anuncio publicitario. Pasamos de ser ciudadanos a convertirnos en clientes-consumidores.
El entorno informativo creado en la era electrónica transforma la cultura en negocios, pero también los negocios en cultura. Esta visión la desarrolló Marshall McLuhan en su libro “La cultura es nuestro negocio”, donde denomina la publicidad televisiva como “Arte cavernario del siglo XX”, ya que (al igual que las primeras obras rupestres) no ha sido creada para que se la examine profundamente (sino para producir un efecto) y porque no expresa pensamientos privados sino metas colectivas.
En la Introducción de “Comprender los Medios de Comunicación” (también de McLuhan) de la edición de 1995, Lewis Lapham resumía las ideas del autor respecto a la Publicidad de la siguiente forma: “McLuhan observa, correctamente, que son las malas noticias –escándalos sexuales, desastres naturales y muertes violentas- las que hacen vender a las noticias buenas –es decir, los anuncios publicitarios-. Las malas noticias son la invitación a que los incautos pasen y vean…”.
Por tanto, tenemos como resultado unos medios de comunicación de masas en manos de Corporaciones con intereses comerciales y de control social. Se convirtieron en la voz de sus amos. Estos medios han generado códigos comunicativos culturales acordes a sus intereses, que han terminado por filtrarse en nuestro lenguaje diario y ha afectado nuestra forma de percibir nuestro entorno (1).
Y en esto estábamos cuando llegó el Cambio Climático…
El cambio climático
Al igual que la gastronomía ibérica, el Medio Ambiente ha eclosionado en los medios en forma de Cambio Climático . Y el repunte –que no el detonante- lo tenemos, quizá, en el mediático Al Gore y su oscarizado documental.
Después de décadas silenciados y algo más (2), recibimos esperanzados algunos hechos significativos. Los resultados de investigaciones científicas están siendo recopilados por diversas organizaciones con acceso a los medios de comunicación y la repercusión consecuente en la opinión pública y en la agenda política. Ejemplo de ello son El Informe Stern (3) o los informes de los distintos grupos del IPCC (4). Pero la Sociedad del Espectáculo precisó de un Maestro de Ceremonia para presentar los hechos a la “audiencia”, el Karlos Arguiñano del Cambio Climático: Al Gore, un exvicepresidente usamericano metido a tareas divulgativas sobre ‘la pésima situación medioambiental en el planeta’ (5). Igual alegría, o más, nos hubiese dado que este exvicepresidente de los USA hubiese firmado el Protocolo de Kioto durante su permanencia en el Poder. Lo cierto es que el documental que ha realizado aparece cuando la evidencia del deterioro medioambiental es tangible y ha dejado de ser un mensaje abstracto, “paranoico y trasnochado”, de unos jóvenes desorientados. “Una verdad incómoda” (supongo que no tengo que aclarar que es el título del documental) utiliza el lenguaje propio de la “Sociedad del espectáculo”. Una circense presentación, con abundantes y llamativos datos –especialmente en su presentación-. Para finalizar con una serie de recomendaciones que podríamos denominar, por ser diplomáticos, como tíbias y prácticamente irrelevantes, insulsos consejos que apenas llegan a parche mal pegado. Puro “Arte cavernario” (6).
Efectivamente, este documental aparece en un momento propicio, con una Cultura de Masas receptiva al mensaje. Por un lado, la evidencia del deterioro ambiental no se puede seguir negando -aunque algunos insisten, carecen ya de asideros-. Pero por otro, a través de los medios de comunicación, centenares de multinacionales responsables del Cambio Climático habían comenzado años atrás su lavado de imagen, anticipando la “demanda verde”. Algunos ejemplos: British Petroleum usa como color corporativo el verde para recordarnos su “compromiso con el Medio Ambiente”; Acciona nos recuerda constantemente a través de masivos consejos publicitarios sus oxímorones prácticos; y claro, “pensar en verde” supone nuestra incapacidad de apartar nuestra atención de la cerveza Heineken… ¿el alcohol será nuestra salida? Etc.
El sistema socioeconómico que nos ha llevado a este punto de inestabilidad medioambiental para los humanos carece de los instrumentos comunicativos adecuados. Los Medios de Comunicación de que dispone el Sistema están diseñados para autoperpetuarse, pero, aparentemente, la inercia de estos medios impide cualquier posible autocorreción. Al menos, por el momento.
Lo mas llamativo, a mi entender, es que hoy se habla de Cambio Climático como un ente con vida propia. De “cómo enfrentarnos al Cambio Climático”. De “cómo combatir el Cambio Climático”. Gran éxito para los medios de comunicación de masas. Han doblegado, una vez más, el lenguaje, poniéndolo al servicio de sus amos (los amos de los medios). Mediante este uso del lenguaje, consiguen desenfocar la atención de ‘la Masa’ a la que se dirigen (y dirigen).
Además, en su necesidad de captar la atención, los Medios de Comunicación han conseguido la vulgarización del conocimiento sobre el Cambio Climático , por el cual se tiende a dar por ciertas las previsiones mas extremas y catastrofistas. También se usa el constructo Cambio Climático como Cajón de Sastre y como ‘Sparring’. Todo es atribuible a él y a él debemos combatir. Este miedo generalizado hace que el ciudadano medio tienda a atribuir, por ejemplo, cualquier inclemencia atmosférica al “Cambio Climático”. Todo esto puede tener varios efectos negativos.
Por un lado, los propios defensores de nuestro ecosistema (organizaciones, científicos, personas involucradas activamente, etc.) puede que hallemos pruebas que refuten algunos de los efectos ‘sobreatribuidos’ al Cambio Climático. Supongamos, por ejemplo, que demostrásemos (lo que es complicado) que “el Katrina” podría haber ocurrido sin el Cambio Climático. De hecho, podría haber ocurrido porque es probabilísticamente posible. Este resultado, sin duda, sería utilizado y amplificado por los negacionistas. Sin embargo, y sin la necesidad de un titular emotivo, lo constatable es la correlación entre el Cambio Climático y el aumento de número de fenómenos atmosféricos perversos (como el Katrina), así como su intensidad.
Igualmente, la visión catastrofista puede llevar a la inacción como individuos y como sociedad. Si ya no hay vuelta atrás, ¿para qué complicarnos la vida?
Enfocando a través de la metáfora
Pero el más perjudicial de todos los efectos que la Comunicación de Masas ha introducido sobre el constructo Cambio Climático , a mi juicio, ha sido convertirlo en término estelar y, en consecuencia, focalizar la mayor parte de la atención sobre él. Siguiendo nuestra humana y creativa tendencia al uso de metáforas, y siendo consciente de la dudosa pertinencia de algunas de ellas, podríamos introducir el término Cambio Climático en una que podría denominarse “Metáfora del Síntoma de Infección” . El Cambio Climático, la estrella del show mediático, es un SÍNTOMA del mal estado de nuestro medio ambiente, de nuestro ecosistema –que nos sustenta y del que el ser humano forma parte-. Es como la tos, la fiebre o la diarrea, que son síntomas de la existencia de una infección o inflamación. Mal médico sería el que se centrase en hacer desaparecer el síntoma y se olvidase del foco que lo genera. Padre equivocado o madre equivocada sería la que se centrase en tratar la tos del hijo o la hija, olvidándose de buscar y atajar el origen de la posible infección o inflamación que la origina. Pero esto es, desgraciadamente, lo que ha ocurrido con el manejo de la información medioambiental desde los Medios de Masas.
El desenfoque actual del problema en los Medios de Comunicación, así como el lenguaje utilizado (inherente a un sistema económico dominado por el Mercado), evita que asumamos nuestra responsabilidad o que tomemos conciencia de las acciones que realizamos y que inciden sobre el origen del problema: el imposible crecimiento continuo que el Sistema impone.
Pero el optimismo puede seguir presente entre nosotros. Si alguien ha llegado a estas líneas finales será consciente que ha utilizado un medio de comunicación de masas: la Red de Redes, en cuyo seno se están desarrollando lenguajes, metáforas y comunicaciones alternativas a las impuestas por el Poder económico. Caminemos pues.
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(1) Ejemplo que sintetiza todo esto es una de las perlas que Pascual Serrano nos dedica en su libro “Perlas, patrañas, disparates y trapacerías en los medios de comunicación”, cuando una persona que está observando extasiada la granadina Sierra Nevada en su esplendor blanco, ante los micrófonos de un medio de comunicación afirma “habría que pagar por ver esto”. El ciudadano se había convertido en un consumidor que se sentía culpable por disfrutar gratuitamente del ‘espectáculo’ de la naturaleza.
(2) El más mediático de los movimientos ecologistas ha sido sin duda Greenpeace. A pesar de su protagonismo, o también por él, no se libró de sufrir acciones violentas (al igual que la mayoría de los grupos ecologistas) por parte de Empresas Privadas e, incluso, provenientes de Estados occidentales autodenominados ‘democráticos’: http://www.greenpeace.org/mexico/copy-of-participa-y-ap-yanos
(3) Asesor Económico del Gobierno Británico, emitió un informe a cuyo resumen se puede acceder en castellano: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/2/9/stern_shortsummary_spanish.pdf
(4) http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC
(5) Lo entrecomillo porque no es lo mismo que decir ‘la pésima situación medioambiental del planeta’ . En esta última, que es la más utilizada por los medios, se elige una visión antropocéntrica. De tal forma que parece que la situación del medioambiente también es pésima para el planeta, lejos de ser una verdad objetiva (el planeta puede albergar multitud de medio-ambientes diferentes al actual, manteniendo distintos tipos de vida sobre él).
(6) Sin embargo, a pesar de todo, considero que Al Gore nos envía un mensaje profundo y oculto en su documental: “Soy una persona concienciada, soy una persona que se involucró en la lucha medioambiental. Llegué a lo mas alto del Gobierno del país mas poderoso del mundo y… descubrí que no tenía Poder para cambiar lo importante”. La democracia usamericana perdió el poder en manos de las Corporaciones. Si aceptamos esta interpretación, el documental se apartaría del sentido de “Arte Cavernario” definido por McLuhan.
Los científicos, dirigidos por Robert Linhardt, impregnaron diariamente papel de celulosa poroso con nanotubos de carbono. Con esto, junto con un electrolito para transportar corrientes eléctricas, los investigadores crearon condensadores de alta capacidad o supercondensadores, baterías y dispositivos híbridos que almacenan y proporcionan energía. Como fuente de energía, los supercondensadores proporcionan corrientes y voltajes comparables a otros supercondensadores y dispositivos de almacenamiento de energía flexibles.
Los investigadores crearon una batería de papel, litio y aluminio y la utilizaron para producir y dirigir luz. También desarrollaron una fuente de energía híbrida que combina los supercondensadores y las baterías. Estos papeles funcionaban incluso si se enrollaban sobre sí mismos, se retorcían o se doblaban, en un amplio rango de temperaturas y con electrolitos diferentes.
Posibles aplicaciones al cuerpo humano
Los científicos descubrieron que incluso la sangre y el sudor eran electrolitos adecuados para los supercondensadores, lo que sugiere muchas aplicaciones biológicas y médicas. Según los investigadores, los papeles nanocompuestos pueden servir como fuentes de energía adaptables a muchas formas y tamaños debido a su flexibilidad.
Juan Antonio Rubio, director del CIEMAT, se mostró contrario a la opción del "Almacenamiento Geológico Profundo" por la que han optado algunos países, como Estados Unidos o Finlandia. Rubio cree que aunque este tipo de almacenes permanentes ofrecen garantías de seguridad, períodos de confinamiento tan largos como los que se manejan son excesivos.
On infrastructure bottlenecks, he said the creation of infrastructure in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu has not kept pace with the growth of windmills in the region.
The market thumbs up reflects confidence in International Power’s decision to firm up its foothold in Europe’s wind power sector, which has been growing rapidly. Last year the wind power capacity in the European Union increased by 19.0%, and is expected to continue to grow, boosted by a new European Commission commitment. In March an agreement by European Union governments committed their countries to binding targets to ensure that 20.0% of all energy will come from renewable sources by 2020.
If Mr. Holser, a research chemist, and his colleague Steven F. Vaughn, a plant physiologist, are successful, they will have found more than ecologically friendly ways to fight weeds and grow grass.
They will have found innovative uses for a byproduct of the production of biodiesel fuel, glycerol. This, in turn, could help transform the biodiesel industry into something that more closely resembles the petroleum industry, where fuel is just one of many profitable products.
“Just like petroleum refineries make more than one product that are the feedstock for other industries, the same will have to be true for biofuels,” said Kenneth F. Reardon, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “Biorefining is what the vision has to look like in the end.”
Glycerol is used in a variety of products, including foods, soap and dynamite. But as biodiesel fuel production in the United States has risen, the market for glycerol has become saturated.
If scientists like Mr. Holser, who works at the United States Department of Agriculture’s research center in Athens, Ga., and Mr. Vaughn, who works at the department’s National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Ill., can expand the number of valuable uses for the syrupy liquid, biodiesel makers could sell their glycerol instead of paying someone to haul it away.
“Every week I get at least one or two calls from biodiesel producers who have all this glycerol and don’t know what to do with it,” Mr. Holser said.
Glycerol, also called glycerin, is not the only byproduct of biofuel production that is the subject of experiments. Scientists are also looking at profiting from the leftovers from the production of corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol, made from materials like switch grass, corn husks and prairie grass. Around the country, scientists, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are becoming increasingly interested in making more than fuel out of the raw materials for biodiesel fuel and ethanol.
“The opportunity, as we think about increasing our consumption of biologically derived fuels, is to consider what besides fuels can we make,” said Erik Straser, general partner of MDV Mohr Davidow Ventures, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif.
Some researchers, like Mr. Holser, are simply trying to find new uses for the regular byproducts of biofuels: distillers’ dry grain from corn ethanol and lignin from cellulosic ethanol.
Other researchers are trying to develop technologies and processes that could yield different, more valuable byproducts. And still others are placing their bets on “biorefineries.”
In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, not far from the Coors brewery in Golden, Colo., PureVision Technology is making lignin. A natural compound that helps provide strength and rigidity in plants, lignin makes up 15 to 25 percent of most plants.
Most plans for cellulosic ethanol processing call for burning the lignin to generate steam and heat to run the process. As a fuel, lignin is worth around $40 a ton.
PureVision has devised a way to make a different form of lignin — one with a molecular composition that could make it an attractive material for a variety of industrial products like glues, sealants and detergents.
Ed Lehrburger, PureVision’s founder and chief executive, said he thought his lignin could sell for $300 a ton or more. Mr. Lehrburger said his company was collaborating with a wood and paper products manufacturer that is interested in using the lignin for a biobased glue for its laminates, plywoods and other products.
“Lignin is going to be one of the big drivers of the switch from oil-based to biobased products,” Mr. Lehrburger predicted.
In Ames, Iowa, Victor Lin has created a technology that changes the production process for biodiesel. Among other attributes, Mr. Lin’s invention yields a higher quality form of glycerol, which could be more easily converted into useful industrial materials. A chemistry professor and the associate director of the Center for Catalysis at Iowa State University, Mr. Lin is also the founder of a company, Catilin, which is backed by an initial $3 million in venture financing from MDV.
The production of biodiesel fuel requires a catalyst. Mr. Lin created a catalyst that is safer and easier to use than the one commonly used now, reducing the cost of producing biodiesel and its impact on the environment (requiring less water, for instance).
Dr. Lin and his colleagues are trying to turn the resulting glycerol into a substance called 1,3 propanediol, or PDO, the base material for a substance used in upholstery, carpets, clothing and other applications. DuPont uses PDO to make its Sorona line of fabrics.
The price of glycerol, now 20 to 50 cents a pound, could drop as low as 5 cents a pound as biodiesel production increases.
Mr. Kraus said the higher quality glycerol made with the new process could command a much higher price. “What we see,” he said, “is an opportunity to make something that might cost 80 cents a pound.”
In another lab at Iowa State, Robert C. Brown is using distillers’ dry grain —a main byproduct of corn ethanol that is largely sold as animal feed — to produce hydrogen and a compound called PHA. Mr. Brown hopes his version of PHA, which is biodegradable, could be used for surgical gowns and gloves that must now be disposed of as medical waste.
“Critics of corn ethanol like to say the process isn’t very efficient,” Mr. Brown said. “Part of that is because your products aren’t just fuel.” Finding other high-value applications, he added, lets producers “justly say, this is not a waste stream; it adds to the profitability of the plant.“
Back in Peoria, Mr. Vaughn is also looking at making products from distillers’ dry grain, including another biofuel. The grain is more than 10 percent oil, and one ton of it can yield 30 gallons of biodiesel.
Interest in the biorefinery model is not limited to research scientists and start-up companies. Archer Daniels Midland is expanding some of its wet mill plants, which already churn out ethanol and a variety of other corn-based materials like high-fructose corn syrup, amino acids and sorbitol, to make industrial products. It has begun making propylene glycol, a widely used compound, from glycerol.
“As petroleum prices increase and we try to become more independent with regard to energy and petroleum in general,” said Mark Matlock, senior vice president for research at the company, which is based in Decatur, Ill., “there are other opportunities that come up for industrial chemicals as well as fuels.”
But despite the many uses for byproducts, the biorefinery model is more difficult than it may seem. “The dream is the multiproduct biorefinery,” said Jim McMillan, manager of biorefining process research and development at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. “The challenge is that the market for the fuels is like two orders of magnitude bigger than for even a fairly big chemical” that could be produced alongside the fuel.
Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an 'incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.
Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.
Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.
The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.
The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a “dry glue” effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.
Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attact.
Because the Casimir force causes problems for nanotechnologists, who are trying to build electrical circuits and tiny mechanical devices on silicon chips, among other things, the team believes the feat could initially be used to stop tiny objects from sticking to each other.
Prof Leonhardt explained, “The Casimir force is the ultimate cause of friction in the nano-world, in particular in some microelectromechanical systems. Such systems already play an important role - for example tiny mechanical devices which triggers a car airbag to inflate or those which power tiny 'lab on chip’ devices used for drugs testing or chemical analysis. Micro or nano machines could run smoother and with less or no friction at all if one can manipulate the force.”
Though it is possible to levitate objects as big as humans, scientists are a long way off developing the technology for such feats, said Dr Philbin.
The practicalities of designing the lens to do this are daunting but not impossible and levitation “could happen over quite a distance”.
Prof Leonhardt leads one of four teams - three of them in Britain - to have put forward a theory in a peer-reviewed journal to achieve invisibility by making light waves flow around an object - just as a river flows undisturbed around a smooth rock.
Via: Telegraph
by Roger Highfield
The rapid absorption of the water , he said, showed how easily a much-less benign substance - carbon dioxide - could be stored once he and a team of researchers started pumping it into the half-mile-deep shaft.
"Everyone assumes we're going to store carbon dioxide inside of a cavern but the key is the tiny holes in this rock," said Schilling, a professor of mineral and rock physics. "We're going to press in the carbon dioxide and push out the salty water that's already there."
Schilling is spearheading a project near this small town about 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, west of Berlin that could change the way countries and industries store carbon dioxide, a fast-growing type of pollution, for generations to come.
Even as the drive to reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming picks up, a number of countries are increasingly turning to coal as a major source of energy. The push for wide-scale development of coal that is quickly gaining in China is also growing steadily in some parts of Europe and the United States, forcing governments and businesses to consider how to dispense with carbon dioxide, a harmful side-product.
Several countries already bury carbon dioxide in sites off shore. At an undersea saline aquifer off Norway, Statoil buries carbon dioxide extracted from natural gas to avoid paying pollution taxes to the Norwegian government. Other projects involve oil fields, like those at Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where operators pump carbon dioxide back underground as part of efforts to extract hard-to-reach hydrocarbons in aging wells.
But existing oil and gas wells might only be able to accommodate a few decades worth of carbon dioxide. Offshore aquifers, even though they are vast, would require enormous lengths of pipeline to carry carbon dioxide out to sea.
"Putting CO2 offshore has the obvious advantage of public acceptability," said Jeff Chapman, chief executive of the Carbon Capture & Storage Association in London.
"But we know that there are centuries worth of space for storage onshore," he said, citing examples of promising sites in China, Germany, Poland and the United States.
Schilling's three-year experiment, called CO2Sink, makes Ketzin an important test of whether carbon dioxide might safely and durably be buried inland, where underground storage space could be almost endless. It involves pumping 100 tons of the gas each day into the sandstone beneath this flat Brandenburg countryside and monitoring the ecosystem for adverse results.
If the carbon dioxide stays put, as Schilling expects, that would give a major boost to carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, an emerging technology that would allow industries based on fossil fuels to meet stringent emissions requirements - and stay in business for decades.
"I won't say it's not dangerous, but it's less dangerous than people think," Schilling said. Ketzin, he added, could be "writing a piece of history."
Shell, Vattenfall, E.ON, Statoil and RWE are contributing money and expertise to the project, which is overseen by the National Research Center for Geosciences in Germany, Schilling said. But he said that the bulk of total financing, about €30 million, or $41.5 million, comes from the European Union and Germany, which is heavily dependent on burning coal for its electricity and where the government faces widespread opposition to nuclear power, the main alternative to coal.
Some environmentalists favor the technology because it might be the only way to control carbon dioxide emissions at a time when developing countries like China are burning ever-greater amounts of coal to fuel their booming economies.
"The growth of coal plants is absolutely scary," said Sanjeev Kumar, a carbon emissions expert with the environmental group WWF in Brussels. "If we can make fossil fuels as green as we can, then we should try to get carbon capture and storage to work on a global level."
EU policy makers still are considering whether to make it mandatory for all new coal plants to incorporate the new, cleaner technologies after 2020.
That is not fast enough for Kumar, who is lobbying for an immediate moratorium on new coal plants in Europe unless they are constructed so that carbon dioxide technology can be incorporated as soon as it becomes available.
But a number of environmentalists are concerned that further development of the technology for commercial use will simply encourage industries and governments to rely more heavily on coal. They argue that funding should be channeled into the development of renewable energies rather than on prolonging the use of fossil fuels and accumulating vast amounts of underground waste.
"You've got to consider the load on future generations to take care of these storage sites," said Gabriela von Goerne, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace in Germany. "We believe this technology does not solve our problems at all."
Environmentalists said they were also skeptical that the new technology made underground carbon dioxide storage secure. One potential hazard is that concentrated carbon dioxide is heavier than air. Large quantities of escaped gas have, in the past, settled in low-lying areas with tragic results.
In 1986, about 1,800 people were suffocated at Lake Nyos, Cameroon, when a massive cloud of carbon dioxide escaped from the formerly volcanic site. Environmentalists have warned of similar dangers if leakages occur and gas settles in dips and valleys, where people live.
Leaks from carefully selected storage sites, properly monitored, would not carry those same risks, backers of the technology say.
"If CO2 ever does get to the surface, it's not going to be in our lifetimes or much of our near-descendants' lifetimes," said Chapman of Carbon Capture & Storage Association.
At the CO2Sink project, Schilling said he expected only about 1 percent of the 60,000 tons of carbon that is to be buried at Ketzin over the next three years to escape over the next century, and about at most 5 percent over the next millennium - amounts he said would be benign.
Any leaks would be most likely to occur at the bore hole, but around-the-clock monitoring would ensure problems are quickly fixed, he said. The carbon dioxide used in the experiment will be provided by Linde, which provides gas for carbonated beverages.
But people who live in and around Ketzin are worried about having carbon dioxide stored directly underneath their feet. The latest effort to bury gas in the neighborhood reminds many residents of environmental sacrifices already made in the name of industrial progress. During the mid-1960s, leaks of carbon monoxide from a former underground gas storage site at Ketzin required the permanent evacuation of a nearby village, Knoblauch.
"They already have a garbage factory in Ketzin and now this as well," said Beatrice Görtz, 35, who lives with her toddler, Mia, in Neu Falkenrehde, a hamlet two kilometers from the injection site. "I can't imagine that it's positive."
Among experts, there are growing concerns that public opinion could turn against the technology in the same way it did against nuclear power and genetically modified foods.
David Reiner, a lecturer in technology policy at Judge Business School at Cambridge University who has coordinated public opinion polls on carbon storage in six countries, said that if the public remained in the dark about the way carbon storage was supposed to work, there was no way of knowing how they would react to wide-scale development.
"Many people have an initial negative impression," he said, "although once they learn more we tend to see a more positive inclination."
