Turns out that the Siberian permafrost many of us have been keeping a wary eye on is not the only potential climate timebomb.

There’s also permafrost under the Arctic Ocean, and it’s leaking methane into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. According to a paper in the journal Science, the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf is emitting as much methane as previous methane emissions estimates for all of the worlds oceans. The key question is whether the methane is seeping out gradually or is poised for a major meltdown.

Methane accounts for less than 10 percent of the climate impact of greenhouse gases. It’s about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, however. A little goes a long way toward producing a runaway positive feedback loop.

Al Gore’s inconvenient reminder in the New York Times left me as depressed as ever about our ability nationally and globally to deal with global warming. He updated the ever-infuriating story of self-interested obstructionism, and pointed out some of the fundamental aspects of the global economy that work against international cooperation (let alone census).

The piece was a call to arms, but also pointed out the daunting challenge: “The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing.”

Gore’s concluding call for us to hold politicians accountable begs a couple of questions: do we have the will to do so, and if we do, will our political system let us?

Looks like shapeable ultracapacitors have caught the attention of at least one car maker.

Volvo is looking to build energy storage into the bodies of its cars. In particular, the company is working with researchers at Imperial College London on carbon-fiber panels that are both structural and ultracapacitors.

From a New York Times Wheels blog post:

• According to Emile Greenhalgh, the Imperial College aeronautics engineer who is coordinating the three-year project, “Our lightweight carbon-fiber panels can carry a mechanical load and store energy simultaneously, and we’re working toward achieving a 15 percent weight savings in a Volvo hybrid test car.” The ultracapacitors won’t replace the battery pack in hybrid cars — that’s still down the road — but their presence can make it smaller, lighter and cheaper.

The ICL project is along the lines of work being done by startup Paper Battery Co. and Stanford researcher Yi Cui. The ICL work is focused on multifunctional composite materials that can be used as structural components. The Paper Battery Co. and Stanford research is focused on producing shapeable, high-performance ultracapacitors that can be added to structural components.

An Intel lab is developing nanomaterials for ultracapacitors, according to EE Times Asia (via Technology Review). The lab’s goal is to make devices that store more energy than today’s lithium-ion batteries.

And Mitsubishi Electric has a prototype hybrid ultracapacitor, according to a Nikkei Electronics story. The device has high power and high capacity but a relatively low number of cycles.

Intel and Mitsubishi Electric have a lot of company, as detailed in the new ERN report on ultracapacitors.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about ultracapacitors in the next few years. The devices are poised to transform energy storage by taking over high-power functions from batteries in three key areas:

* Tying wind and solar farms to the power grid
* Stabilizing the grid
* Powering hybrid and electric vehicles

The ERN Research report, Ultracapacitors: Emerging technologies for high-power energy storage, analyzes ultracapacitor technologies for these large-scale applications.

The report details ultracapacitor types, emerging ultracapacitor applications, the components that make up ultracapacitors, the factors that contribute to ultracapacitor cost, performance variables, and future directions.

The report includes detailed profiles of

* 15 startups that are readying potential ultracapacitor breakthroughs
* 27 manufacturers and 29 other companies that have recently developed ultracapacitor technologies
* 52 researchers around the world who are pushing the boundaries of ultracapacitor science and engineering

Some highlights:

One of the hottest ultracapacitor technologies is electrodes made from closely-packed, vertical carbon nanotubes. These prototype electrodes store an order of magnitude more energy than today’s best commercial devices. Players to watch include MIT spinoff FastCAP Systems, research firm ADA Technologies and major ultracapacitor manufacturer Nippon Chemi-con.

Much ultracapacitor development is aimed at driving down costs. This usually means making cheaper carbon electrodes. Players to watch include startup SolRayo, activated carbon maker Reticle, research company TDA Research and University of Kentucky researcher Stephen Lipka.

Electrolytes are another key area, and ionic liquids and lithium are the hot topics. Players to watch include ADA Technologies, Kansai University’s Masashi Ishikawa, Bologna University’s Marina Mastragostino and research company LithChem.

Meanwhile, cutting-edge materials and nanotechnology research promise to push the boundaries of ultracapacitor technology. Researchers to watch include Yonsei University’s Kwang-Bum Kim, University of Texas’ (and Graphene Energy, Inc.’s) Rod Ruoff, MIT’s Yang Shao-Horn and Florida State University’s Jim Zheng.

Given the expected boom in ultracapacitors over the next five years and the differences among application requirements, it’s likely that there will be room for several emerging technologies to reach the market.

Ultracapacitor energy storage capacities are likely to increase by five to 10 times in the next five years, but ultracapacitors aren’t likely to make batteries obsolete. They will, however, replace batteries for many power-intensive applications, including hybrid vehicle acceleration and regenerative braking.

Several laboratory ultracapacitor prototypes are already providing 10 times the power and capacity of today’s commercial ultracapacitors. The key question is how readily these materials can be mass-produced and whether they can be made cheaply enough.

The Department of Energy is looking to open a fourth Energy Innovation Hub. They’ve slotted $34 million in the fiscal year 2011 budget request to create a Batteries and Energy Storage hub. Overall, the budget request provides a boost for renewable energy research, including $300 million for ARPA-E and a $40 million increase in funding for Energy Frontier Research Centers. (see DOE budget boosts research)

Studying geoengineering is emerging as one of the most important tasks facing humanity. Climate scientists are taking the necessary first steps: defining the problem and deciding on how to conduct the research.

A pair of articles in today’s issue of Science — a Policy Forum item and a Perspectives item — contribute to these efforts by raising questions about research into solar radiation management. The policy item addresses the political issues of geoengineering research, and the perspectives item presents an unsettling picture of what it will take to accurately test geoengineering.

On the policy side, Jason J. Blackstock and Jane C. S. Long argue that stakeholders need to collectively define acceptable risk, determine if, when and where to conduct geoengineering research, and decide how to manage the research. “Such questions require a broadly accessible, transparent, and international political process,” the authors write.

They also call for all researchers and research organizations to forswear climactic impact testing unless it’s approved by a broad international process. And they call for all solar radiation management research to be in the public domain.

The difficult and unfinished work of building an international framework for curbing carbon emissions, and the checkered history of global treaties like the ban on the militarization of space, make prospects for developing the necessary international political process for governing geoengineering research uncertain at best.

These questions could be moot, however, if Alan Robock, Martin Bunzl, Ben Kravitz and Georgiy L. Stenchikov’s argument holds up. “Geoengineering cannot be tested without full-scale implementation,” the researchers write.

The researchers have identified two problems with limited field testing of solar radiation management. First, a geoengineering deployment would require repeated injections of aerosols into the stratosphere, which would cause previously injected particles to grow larger. The larger particles would be less effective, and it would take a full-scale deployments to measure the change.

Second, getting the effects of an experiment to rise above background noise would require aerosol injections equivalent to a Mount Pinatubo eruption every four years for at least a decade — in other words, a full-scale deployment.

This suggests that, for the time being at least, geoengineering research should be confined to computer modeling and laboratory experiments.

Geoengineering has hubris written all over it. The notion that we can control a system that we don’t understand clearly — especially such a large nonlinear system — is a dangerous idea.

Someday we might actually gain rudimentary control of the climate, and we might determine that geoengineering is necessary to combat global warming. But we are nowhere near that day. The problem is, carrying out solar radiation management is hardly a daunting task. It’s simply a matter of injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere. A single country or even large corporation could unilaterally alter the planet’s climate.

Most climate scientists, whatever their views on the eventual need for geoengineering, argue that we don’t know enough to do it today and we need to study geoengineering to understand how it would work.

Studying geoengineering is critical for several reasons. We need to know more before we can confidently recognize and understand the effects of our actions. If we are to launch a geoengineering effort, rightly or wrongly, we should at least make informed decisions about how to do it. And studying geoengineering could advance our understanding of unintended human effects on the climate.

Perhaps most importantly, studying geoengineering should give us a basis for deciding which is the lesser of two evils: geoengineering or the irreversible course of global warming.

Turning biomass into liquid fuel isn’t all that difficult, but doing so cleanly and efficiently involves some tricky chemistry. Researchers are working on catalysts that completely convert precursor liquids into final products and that can be readily recovered and reused.

A paper in the current issue of Science details double-sided nanoparticles that accomplish both goals by collecting at the water-oil interface. Accompanying the paper is a perspectives article by University of St. Andrews’ David J. Cole-Hamilton.

The chemistry professor does a nice job of putting things in perspective with a nifty image. He asks us to imagine stirring milk and sugar into a hot cup of tea and then extracting the sugar. He points out that in biofuels processing, the “sugar” is catalysts that are often highly toxic.

So green biofuels processing requires more than just mixing oil and water. It also means finding ways to get the sugar out.

With the backdrop of good (A123 and SAIC) and bad (Boston-Power and Saab/GM) news for battery startups, a market research firm and a venture capital firm have offered predictions about hybrid/electric cars for 2010.

Pike Research’s study calls 2010 a crucial year for hybrid/electric vehicle technology and identifies a challenge: attract buyers beyond the environmentally conscious. Here’s Cnet’s writeup.

Lightspeed Venture Partners’ predicts that hybrid/electric vehicle startups will enter the market, fleet operators will adopt hybrid/electric vehicles, and there’ll be notable progress and increased competition in advanced car batteries.

For every one degree Celsius increase in global temperature, there’s a 10 percent decrease in crop yield.

Crop yields could be down by 1/3 to 1/2 by 2100, when the global population is likely to be considerably larger than it is now, said David Battisti, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. Battisti was a speaker at a geoengineering workshop at MIT Friday.

A recent study shows that U.S. crop yields are likely to decrease somewhere between 30 and 82 percent by the end of the century, depending on the pace of global warming.

Battisti said that rising sea levels and increasingly destructive droughts and flooding caused by global warming aren’t severe enough problems to convince him to consider drastic measures like geoengineering — deliberately altering the climate to counteract our unintended alterations. The impact of global warming on global food production, however, is another matter. “It’s the one thing that scares me,” he said.

There’s not a lot of unexploited viable cropland left, and we already have a billion people malnourished today, he said.

While today’s food security issues probably have more to do with political and economic factors affecting food distribution networks than they do with crop yields, the larger picture Battisti paints is scary. I hope a lot more research focuses on the problem. This also raises the stakes in the biofuel-versus-food debate.

The MIT workshop addressed the questions of whether geoengineering is possible and whether we should attempt it. The consensus was that precious little science has been done on geoengineering, what science is emerging is revealing that geoengineering is highly risky and uncertain, global warming is so bad that we need to consider geoengineering anyway, and we need to get busy with research on the problem. Several scientists expressed concern that we won’t be able to reduce the uncertainty in the time we have left.

The issue of the geoengineering moral hazard — whether taking geoengineering seriously leads people to weaken their resolve on emissions reductions — was also discussed at the workshop (see previous post).