California lagging on its promise for regulations

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Hustling to bring cars that drive themselves to a road near you, Google finds itself somewhere that has frustrated many before: Waiting on the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The tech titan wants the freedom to give the public access to self-driving prototypes it has been testing on public roads since the summer. Before granting that permission, California regulators want Google to prove these cars of the future already drive as safely as people.

The Department of Motor Vehicles was supposed to write precedent-setting rules of the road by last Jan. 1. Nearly a year later, it is still struggling. After all, the agency is geared to administering driving tests and registering cars, not settling complicated questions the technology raises.

If the cars’ advanced sensors and computing power can drive better than humans, do they need a steering wheel and pedals? Would a person even need to be inside? Google says no on both.

Regulators don’t want to be blamed for unnecessarily stalling the arrival of robo-chauffeurs that can see farther, react faster and don’t text, speed or fall asleep. They’ve implored Google and traditional automakers also developing the technology to share safety data, but companies in competition don’t willingly reveal trade secrets.

Delay is not what Google had in mind when it pushed the 2012 legislation that made California one of the few states officially to authorize self-driving cars. Google’s hope was to trade the independence to innovate without government oversight for regulatory certainty.

Three years later, both a company that abhors bureaucracy and a DMV struggling to write rules beyond its expertise are exasperated.

While self-driving cars are not close to being widely available, Google hinted in 2014 it wanted to get self-driving cars into public hands as early as 2016, probably starting with employees outside its small corps of self-driving car experts.

Google’s 73 cars are among the 98 test vehicles that California’s DMV has given 10 companies permission to test publicly.

Though trained test drivers must sit behind the wheel, Google wants to remove the wheel and pedals for the general public. Its argument: It would be safer to take all control away than expect a person to snap safely to attention in an emergency.

Each day, Google runs more than 3 million miles of computerized driving simulations. Engineers devise challenging real-world situations, then see how the cars respond. A “functional safety analysis” assesses what hardware or software might fail and how to minimize those risks.

Public road testing is the last piece. Google reports its cars have been involved in 17 collisions over 2.2 million miles of testing, nearly 1.3 million miles in self-driving mode. While that accident rate appears to be higher than for human drivers (though Google disputes that), accident summaries Google has published say its cars did not cause any accident.

ALBANY, Mo. - One recipe for renewable natural gas goes: Place manure from about 2 million hogs in lagoons, cover with an impermeable material, and let it bake until gas from the manure rises. Then, use special equipment to clean the gas of its impurities and ship the finished product out.

That’s the vision of one of the largest biogas projects of its kind in the U.S. being installed in northern Missouri, part of a long-term effort to turn underused agriculture resources into an engine for environmentally friendly farming practices.

The joint project, involving Roeslein Alternative Energy and Smithfield Food Hogs Production, will first convert manure from hogs on nine farms into renewable natural gas, with a goal of selling it as soon as 2016. The second phase would add native prairie grasses planted on erodible or marginal farm land to the manure to increase the biomass.

Developers expect the first phase to produce about 2.2 billion cubic feet of pipeline-quality natural gas, providing an alternative energy source while also keeping an estimated 850,000 tons of methane, a major greenhouse gas, from escaping into the atmosphere. Plus, the covers mostly eliminate the odor that can permeate the area around large hog farms, reduce the amount of waste-tainted water that leeches into the ground and capture thousands of gallons of clean water for reuse.

“We have the science to make farming work better for the environment. The question is do we have the political will, and the financial will, to do it,” said RAE founder Rudi Roeslein, who has invested $25 million in the project.

A 2014 federal report showed 239 manure-based digesters were operating in the U.S. And the federal Department of Agriculture issued $6 million in grants last month for anaerobic digester projects, as part of the Rural Energy for America Project, an Obama administration effort to spark projects that generate alternative energy and reduce carbon emissions.

But Roeslein, the co-founder of St. Louis-based Roeslein and Associates, which designs and builds manufacturing systems, is not seeking government funding because he does not want to be dependent on federal bureaucracy as the project develops.

The first phase, with an estimated price tag of $120 million, began in 2013, when RAE and Smithfield agreed to

See BIOGAS, Page 9A