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We’re keeping the focus on climate and energy in our Geo Quiz today. We’re looking for a northern European country that’s home to the world’s latest experimental carbon-neutral power plant.
This plant tries to capitalize on the energy released when salt water and fresh water mix through a membrane. The process is called osmosis, and it’s based on the chemical attraction between salts in sea water and fresh water molecules.
Researchers say they can extract electricity from that. They think it could be feasible in places where lots of fresh water meets the sea. The country that’s home to the prototype osmosis power plant has plenty of such places.
It has a long, convoluted coastline with lots of rivers rushing down from high coastal mountains. So which northern European country hopes to turn osmosis into electricity?
The answer’s coming up…
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For today’s Geo Quiz, we’re looking for a northern European country that’s home to a new prototype clean energy project.
This Scandinavian country has lots of rivers and lots of coastline. Together those provide lots of places where fresh water and salt water mingle. And that’s the potential source of energy that a new power plant hopes to harness. The World’s Marina Giovannelli has the story and the answer.
The prototype “osmotic power” plant is in Norway. Tofte, Norway to be specific, just outside the capital of Oslo. It cost roughly seven million dollars to build. And it’s generating only a tiny amount of energy – roughly enough to run a coffee maker.
Stien-Eric Skilhagen: “At the moment we aren’t producing that much. This is the first plant ever built and the most important part is that we are in fact able to produce power just by exploiting osmosis, so that is a great milestone by itself.”
Stien-Eric Skilhagen is with the Norwwegian energy company Statkraft. Osmosis may sound sort of like magic. But it’s actually a natural process in which water passes through a semi-permeable membrane… like the membrane of a cell.
In this case, the new power plant uses a membrane to capture the energy in the chemical attraction between fresh water… and the salt in sea water.
Rick Stove works for an American company that designed part of the technology used in the plant.
Rick Stove: “Nature likes to dilute things, so there is a driving force associated with that.”
The prototype plant in Tofte is the first real world use of the technology. The process itself is entirely emissions-free. And Statfraft says that globally, osmotic power could produce as much electricity as China’s used in 2002.
But there are big barriers. For one thing, the osmotic process would need to be at least five times more efficient than it is now. And because it uses huge amounts of both fresh and salt water, there’s a potential for big environmental impacts. Eric Hoek teaches environmental engineering at UCLA.
Eric Hoek: “Because no body has done this yet, it’s a bit of speculation. As to the actual impacts, I believe that’s part of what Statkraft is trying to figure out. That if they go ahead and build a plant, they want to know we are not trading this problem for another.”
Although this plant is the first of its kind, the idea has been around for more than three decades. It was pioneered by Israeli-American scientist Sidney Loeb. Menachem Elimelech teaches chemical engineering at Yale University.
Menachem Elimelech: “He just was a professor obsessed with one idea and just loved what he was doing.”
Elimelech says Sidney Loeb died last year at the age of 92, just before his invention of osmotic power was put to its first real test.
For The World, I’m Marina Giovannelli.
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