ReGeo progess

Padma is out, perhaps ReGeo is in. Moving into the phase of trying to display the system's flows in an easily readable way. What do you think of the "flow hexagon"?

Padma Mock-Up

29 days to go until SASBE2009 entries are due. Two sides of A3 and 500 words is a tight space for a project such as this. This is a mock-up of how we might fill the area with information.

Energy Storing Kinetic Monument

Store energy during peak production times. Extra power is used by a winch to elevate a monument in an urban setting.
Release green electricity on demand. As the monument is lowered, the energy is captured by a turbine.

Create awareness for energy issues. The physicality of the monument allows the onlooker to put abstract notions of electricity use and kilowatt hours into a tangible object. The monument also adds a dynamic element to its setting by gently rising and lowering with the electricity supply and demand.

Specifications: (scalable to other situations)
3m x 3m x 15m concrete obelisk
324,000 kg
Storage capacity:
8.83 kWh
Equivalent to:
15 street lights (50 watts) for 12 hours

Post-Oil Wells of Opportunity

click to view larger

This generation has the great honor to transition from the Fossil Fuel Age to renewable resources. During this development, it would be fruitful to reuse oil and gas wells as geothermal energy plants.

Adaptive reuse of society's legacy from previous economic regimes can lead to low-cost and highly sustainable future. No one knows exactly how many oil and natural gas wells there are in the world, but the value is in the tens of millions.

The geothermal activity varies from well to well depending upon factors such as well depth, the thickness of the Earth's crust in that area, and local subterranean temperature. Many of these wells were drilled deep into the earths crust, even as far as 11 km deep.

While a well with a temperature of 200°C can power a city, even wells which produce 37°C can power a neighborhood. Several smaller wells in close proximity can also be combined into one system.

An oil or gas well does not have to be empty to harness geothermal energy: even operating wells can use the heat of rising water or petroleum for geothermal power. In the case of depleted wells, often hot water can be brought to the surface. If a well is hot dry rock, Enhanced Geothermal Systems can be used.

Texas is leading the way towards capturing geothermal power from active and empty oil wells ("Stripper fields" is the Texas lingo for depleted oil and gas wells) of which the state has over 1,000,000. Building off abundant existing oil and gas infrastructure, several transformation studies have been completed with promising results. They have shown that existing oil and gas wells posses temperatures within the range for electrical power production [pdf].

"There are 5,000 megawatts of geothermal power in hot water coming up from abandoned oil wells in West Texas," says Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association, a trade consortium. "All that energy is just being wasted." [link]

Geothermal energy provides clean, renewable baseload electricity available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unlike the inherent uncertainty with wind or solar energy. Geothermal heat as low as 37°C can be used to make electricity in a binary power plant. This method of power generation is very environmentally-friends as binary plants use a self-contained cycle. Nothing from the process is emitted, including "greenhouse gases".

To take advantage of the Fossile Fuel Age's legacy resources, oil and gas wells throughout the world should be evaluated for their geothermal potential. However, I would like to offer a further consideration.

Cities in the temperate regions of the earth not only have a high demand for electricity, but also heat. Geothermal wells cogenerate electricity and heat. In order to effectively use the heat resource, which has a low transmission distance, future communities could be stragetically located on post-oil well sites. Heat accounts for a large percentage of building upkeep costs. It has already been shown that cascading heat from natural resources and industry in places like Denmark and Iceland works.

The energy (and exergy) from the well would then be used several times. Heat would cascade from power generation, to heavy industry, to greenhouses, and finally to dwellings, which only require 40*C.

The vision is for a city which blooms around the geothermal hotspot as desert life is centered around an oasis.

Living Artefact

After much creative brainstorming today, the SASBE2009 team has decided to use the human body as a metaphor for our built environment. Shown here is one way in which it could look; a person in the Child's Pose of yoga facing south. This diagram shows buildings with mixed-uses and passive and active solar gain. In the north (where the butt is) there will be space planned for renewable infrastructure, such as an anaerobic digestor and CHP plant.

SASBE 2009 Student Competition

Three students, an Architect Julia Hidalgo Casanueva of Costa Rica, an Environmentalist Chris-Marije Westerink of the Netherlands, and myself will spend the next 8 weeks preparing an entry into the SASBE2009 Student Compition hosted by the 3rd CIB International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Built Environments.

The challenge is quite broad:

Propose a concept for a living area or single home that produces sustainable energy that equals out energy consumption. This includes energy for mobility, operation of buildings, product and food production, etcetera. We would like you to address the following topics:
* Concept of an energy-producing urban environment or solitary house and all its features
* A vision on the different energy sources
* Energy supply, demand, exchange and storage in time and space
* Integration of the latest available technology and ideas on sustainability
* The scale of being self-supporting
The setting is an urban environment with different means of transport (private and public). You may chose to combine urban functions or make a proposal for a mono-functional setting.

We are choosing to work at the 'living area' scale, perhaps about one square kilometer. It will be a very exciting time of research and creativity!

Here is some inspiration from across the blogosphere:

Eco•Laboratory in Seattle


Milano Santa Monica


Gwanggyo Green Power Center


Energy Producing Greenhouse

Urban Harvest

Urban Harvesting is a theory originating with the Urban Environmental Management group at Wageningen University. The focus is to change from linear to circular urban metabolic activity: All primary resources (solar energy, wind energy, rainwater) and secondary resources (wastewater, waste heat, household and business wastes) that become available inside an urban tissue are captured and used, ie ‘harvested.’

My team's assignment was to design an intervention plan for a neighborhood in Wageningen to transform it into a self-sustaining 'urban tissue'. This meant eliminating external supplies of energy, food, and water by producing them on site.

The project was very interesting. For the consumption information, we unfortunately had to base our assessment on many semi-dubious assumptions. The design we created is financially not feasible, but still a good conceptual model.





Enjoy a short infographic movie of the project. It was written, recorded, and edited in one day, so at times it is a bit rough.