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A graduate student at Babson College's School of Business, Eten has developed a business plan around large-scale composting of organic solid waste. His company, Feed Resource Recovery, is one of 10 to be chosen this year for MIT's Ignite Clean Energy competition for aspiring entrepreneurs.

The technology behind Feed Resource Recovery is anaerobic digestion, the breakdown of organic material by bacteria, creating methane in the process. Industrial-scale digesters, which treat the waste, are already in commercial use, including on farms where cow manure generates "biogas."

A zero-emissions lifestyle is tough.

Carbon offsets can help you balance out.

A decade ago, a group of European scientists set out for the UN Climate Convention in Kyoto, Japan – without getting on a plane. Determined not to “contribute … to the problem that the convention was intended to solve,” they traveled across Europe and then through Siberia and China to Japan by train, boat and bike over the course of several weeks.

Even for those of use who aren’t ready to completely swear off traveling by air, the story of the “Climate Train” holds an important lesson about the climate impact of flying: A single international flight can emit as much greenhouse gas per passenger as a year of driving.

At those times when we have no choice but to take a journey by plane, we can still mitigate the harm to the environment caused by the flight by offsetting the emissions from that trip.





Carbon Offsets Defined



By purchasing carbon offsets, you help fund a project that prevents one ton of greenhouse gases from being emitted for each ton that you have caused. Carbon offset providers sell the greenhouse gas reductions associated with projects like wind farms or methane-capture facilities to customers who want to offset the emissions they caused by flying, driving, or using electricity. (Though they’re called “carbon” offsets, they offset all greenhouse gases that cause global warming, from carbon dioxide to methane.)

Calculating carbon emissions is simple enough when you're talking about buying a tank of gas, said Jonathan Pershing, director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, which developed a widely recognized method for companies to figure their overall greenhouse gas emissions. But it gets tricky for a more complex product, such as a pair of jeans.

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"You have to ask, where was that pair of jeans made?" Pershing said. "Was it made with hand labor or a machine, and what was powering the machine? Where did the cotton come from, the United States or Egypt? If it was from Egypt, was it grown with an irrigation system or [rainwater]? All of a sudden, the analysis becomes, at the moment, beyond what we can do."

A small but growing number of consulting businesses have formed to help companies cope with these challenges. Many rely on industry averages to make their calculations, or concentrate only on the manufacturing process and ignore pollution caused by obtaining raw materials and by distribution. Transportation, in particular, poses a difficulty; a last-minute decision to ship a product by air rather than over ground can dramatically boost emissions.

Investors are falling over themselves to finance start-ups in clean technology, especially in energy. Venture Business Research reckons that investment in the field by venture capitalists and private-equity firms has quadrupled in the past two years, from some $500m in 2004 to almost $2 billion so far this year. The share of venture capital going into clean energy is rising rapidly (see chart 1). New Energy Finance, another research firm, reckons that investment of all sorts in the business will reach $63 billion this year, compared with just $30 billion in 2004. The lure of big money is leading investment banks to ramp up their analysis of the latest boom industry.

Clean-energy fever is being fuelled by three things: high oil prices, fears over energy security and a growing concern about global warming. The provision of energy, the industry's cheerleaders say, will change radically over the coming decades. Polluting coal- and gas-fired power stations will give way to cleaner alternatives such as solar and wind; fuels derived from plants and waste will supplant petrol and diesel; and small, local forms of electricity generation will replace mammoth power stations feeding far-flung grids. Eventually, it is hoped, fuel cells running on hydrogen will take the place of the ubiquitous internal combustion engine. It is a bold vision, but if it happens very slowly, or only to a limited extent, boosters argue that it will still prompt stupendous growth for firms in the business.

Analysts confidently predict the clean-energy business will grow by 20-30% a year for a decade.

Despite
keen interest and deep pockets, demand for clean energy-related investments is
so high that cleantech investors around the world are having a hard time spending
all the cash they have at their fingertips, according to a report by research group New Energy Finance.

The
annual report, released Thursday, takes stock of venture capital and private equity
investment in clean energy in 2006 and the first half of this year. It documents
continued off-the-charts growth for the ever-popular sector, with overall
venture and private equity investment in the sector leaping 67 percent to $18.1
billion in 2006.

But
clean energy venture capitalists invested only 73 percent of the total money
available to them in 2006, leaving some $2 billion in their pockets, according to the
London-based group.

A group of environmentally oriented entrepreneurs has landed in an unlikely spot: the coal business.

Their company, GreatPoint Energy, is commercializing a technology to convert coal to natural gas--turning one of the dirtiest fuels into one of the cleanest.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based start-up is in the process of raising a large round of funding to finance its expansion, which will include construction of a demonstration plant next year, company executives told CNET News.com.

It has already raised two rounds of funding totaling $37 million from venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Like many recently formed clean tech companies, GreatPoint Energy is resurrecting a technology--in this case so-called catalytic gasification--that was never fully commercialized. Because of today's higher energy costs and concern over global warming, executives say that process is again worth pursuing.

The company recently completed a trial in a plant in Des Plaines, Ill. It now projects that it can create natural gas cheaper than current market prices--while minimizing the environmental impact of coal.

The first time I met Tim Healy, at a cocktail party in 1999, he was an associate at Commonwealth Capital, a Waltham venture capital firm.

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The next time I bumped into Healy, at a cocktail party last month, the 38-year-old entrepreneur had taken his company, EnerNOC Inc., public on Nasdaq, and he was on his way to Manhattan to ring the stock market's closing bell.

The process Ze-gen is testing is cleaner than incinerating trash and avoids the production of methane--a potent greenhouse gas--from landfills, said Jim Matheson, a general partner at Flagship Ventures.

"In all the hubbub about energy, clean tech and sustainability more broadly, we think waste has been overlooked both from the dimension of the energy value of the waste and the environmental impact," Matheson said.

Ze-gen Inc. opened a demonstration facility in New Bedford on Monday.

Last year, the Boston Business Journal first reported that Ze-gen, a clean energy firm that provides advanced gasification technology to convert industrial and municipal waste streams into synthetic natural gas and low emissions electrical energy, received $500,000 in sustainable energy economic development grant (SEED) from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative's (MTC) Renewable Energy Trust to construct the facility.

Boston utility NStar's plan to let customers buy wind-generated electricity is running into a gale of opposition from a rival "green power" provider, who said yesterday NStar's program would violate state law.

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Although Attorney General Martha Coakley and the Conservation Law Foundation, a Boston legal-environmental group, are backing the NStar plan, Larry Chretien, executive director of the Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance, said it violates the 1997 state utility restructuring law.

That law, Chretien said, limits utilities to being "distribution companies" that deliver power that customers buy through the utility from independent third-party energy producers and means NStar can't legally become the supplier of power through contracts with wind farms in upstate New York and Maine. NStar plans to begin offering wind power by Jan. 1, pending state approval.

The New England Energy Innovation Collaborative, founded in 2006, is a non-profit organization dedicated to building a strong clean energy cluster in the region. Its mission is to foster company creation and growth, and to form a productive, collaborative community of clean energy executives, entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, and policy makers.

Towards this end, NEEIC convenes events and orchestrates activities that bring energy leaders together to expand knowledge and address problems & issues that might inhibit energy business creation and growth

LS9, Inc., the Renewable Petroleum Company^TM, is a privately-held biotechnology company pursuing industrial applications of synthetic biology to produce proprietary biofuels. LS9's products, currently under development, are designed to closely resemble petroleum derived fuels, but be renewable, clean, domestically produced, and cost competitive. In addition to biofuels, LS9 will also develop industrial biochemicals for specialty applications.

Based on an enabling technology portfolio, LS9 was founded in 2005 by two well established venture capital firms, Flagship Ventures and Khosla Ventures, along with two leading scientists, Chris Somerville, Director of the Carnegie Institution and Professor of Plant Biology at Stanford University, and George Church, Director of the MIT-Harvard US-Dept. of Energy GTL Center and Professor of Genetics at Harvard. The company's distinguished scientific advisory board (SAB) includes leaders in the fields of synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, microbiology, enzymology, genomics, bioinformatics, and chemical engineering.

LS9 is headquartered in San Carlos, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley.