The Trump administration announced today that it will take steps to repeal a federal policy that would have pushed states to abandon coal and switch to renewable energy. The move was long expected, and it’s likely to be fought in the courts by environmental groups and attorneys general from several states.
The announcement targets the Clean Power Plan (CPP), a core climate change policy passed under President Barack Obama that aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. “The war on coal is over,” said Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt at an event in Kentucky. “Tomorrow in Washington, DC, I will be signing a proposed rule to roll back the Clean Power Plan. No better place to make that announcement than Hazard, Kentucky.”
President Donald Trump had signed an executive order in March directing Pruitt to repeal the CPP, which the administration sees as an overreach in presidential power that kills jobs. In reality, the CPP was Obama’s attempt at tackling climate change by ordering fossil fuel-fired power plants — which are the largest concentrated source of CO2 emissions in the US — to cut carbon pollution by about 30 percent by 2030. Reducing carbon pollution has health benefits — including fewer asthma attacks in children. The regulations would also lead to an estimated $55 billion to $93 billion per year in 2030 in climate and health benefits, Obama’s EPA said. Read More
This latest SCI Energy Group blog introduces the possible avenues of carbon dioxide utilisation, which entails using carbon dioxide to produce economically valuable products through industrial processes. Broadly, utilisation can be categorised into three applications: chemical use, biological use and direct use. For which, examples of each will be highlighted throughout.
Before proceeding to introduce these, we can first consider utilisation in relation to limiting climate change. As has been discussed in previous blogs, the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is crucial. Therefore, for carbon dioxide utilisation technologies to have a beneficial impact on climate change, several important factors must be considered and addressed.
1)Energy Source: Often these processes are energy intensive. Therefore, this energy must come from renewable resources or technologies.
2)Scale: Utilisation technologies must exhibit large scaling potential to match the limited timeframe for climate action.
3)Permanence: Technologies which provide permanent removal or displacement of CO2 emissions will be most impactful¹.
Figure 1: CO2 sign
Chemical Uses
Carbon dioxide, alongside other reactants, can be chemically converted into useful products. Examples of which include urea, methanol, and plastics and polymers. One of the primary uses of urea includes agricultural fertilisers which are pivotal to crop nutrition. Most commonly, methanol is utilised as a chemical feedstock in industrial processes.
Figure 2: Fertilizing soil
One of the key challenges faced with this application of utilisation is the low reactivity of CO2 in its standard conditions. Therefore, to successfully convert it into products of economic value, catalysts are required to significantly lower the molecules activation energy and overall energy consumption of the process. With that being said, it is anticipated that, in future, the chemical conversion of CO2 will have an important role in maintaining a secure supply of fuel and chemical feedstocks such as methanol and methane².
Biological Uses
Carbon dioxide is fundamental to plant growth as it provides a source of required organic compounds. For this reason, it can be utilised in greenhouses to promote carbonic fertilisation. By injecting increased levels of CO2 into the air supplied to greenhouses, the yield of plant growth has been seen to increase. Furthermore, CO2 from the flue gas streams of chemical processes has been recognised, in some studies, to be of a quality suitable for direct injection³.
These principles are applicable to encouraging the growth of microorganisms too. One example being microalgae which boasts several advantageous properties. Microalgae has been recognised for its ability to grow in diverse environments as well as its ability to be cultured in numerous types of bioreactors. Furthermore, its production rate is considerably high meaning a greater demand for CO2 is exhibited than that from normal plants. Micro-algal biomass can be utilised across a range of industries to form a multitude of products. These include bio-oils, fuels, fertilisers, food products, plant feeds and high value chemicals. However, at present, the efficiency of CO2 fixation, in this application, can be as low as 20-50%.
Figure 4: Illustration of microalgae under the microscope
Direct Uses
It is important to note that, at present, there are many mature processes which utilise CO2 directly. Examples of which are shown in the table below.
Summary
Many carbon dioxide utilisation technologies exist, across a broad range of industrial applications. For which, some are well-established, and others are more novel. For such technologies to have a positive impact on climate action, several factors need to be addressed such as their energy source, scaling potential and permanence of removal/ displacement of CO2.
The chemistry of carbon dioxide and its role in decarbonisation is a key topic of interest for SCI Energy Group. In the near future, we will be running a webinar concerned with this. Further details of this will be posted on the SCI website in due course.
Reace Edwards is a member of SCI’s Energy group and a PhD Chemical Engineering student at the University of Chester. Read more about her involvement with SCI here or watch her recent TEDx Talk here.
For food waste, chop material into 1-inch or smaller bits. The author set up a chopping station in his garden using an old sink and garbage disposal attached to an extension cord. Other options include using a blender or chipper-shredder.
Illustration by James Provost, Courtesy Storey Publishing
“Environmentalists who’ve pushed for years for all of California’s power to come from renewables were jubilant as they watched the tracker edge to 100% and slightly beyond.”
We’re oohing and ahhing over these new posters created by the Energy Department’s Loan Program Office (LPO) to highlight some of the awesome clean energy projects it funded over the last seven years.
Inspired by iconic New Deal-era posters, these new images celebrate the financing of jobs and projects that supported more than 10,000 jobs and are providing American homes and businesses with clean energy.
The generation capacity of wind farms newly built in 2015 was a record 63.01 gigawatts (GW), corresponding to about 60 nuclear reactors, according to the Global Wind Energy Council based in Brussels.
“If the [nuclear] industry were a patient, doctors would privately refer to what’s happening to it as “circling the drain.” People don’t typically descend from perfect health to death in a smooth glide path. They rally, then they crater, then the cycle repeats. The good days become less frequent and less encouraging as days pass. If you’ve watched a hospital patient die, the pattern is unmistakable.
The U.S. nuclear industry is circling the drain. It’s suffering from a large number of problems—public disenchantment, risk of meltdown, fuel disposal issues—but its primary illness is simple economics. Nuclear cannot compete financially with other forms of electricity production. It hasn’t been able to do so for four decades, and there’s no reason to believe it ever will.”
Aswe are witnessing the slow dying of the biggest living entity on our planet, the Great Barrier Reef, it is time to take action.
10 things you can do to save the oceans-this includes reducing your carbon footprint, using less plastic, make sustainable seafood choices, and spread the word!
Costa Rica deserves a huge round of applause, and perhaps even a high five, for managing to produce all of its electricity from renewables for 75 days straight. According to the state-owned Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE), the country hasn’t had to burn fossil fuels to supply the grid with electricity so far in 2015, a stretch that has never been previously attained by any nation.
The well known Japanese company Toshiba and its perhaps not as well known co-patriate IHI have been tapped to pilot a new ocean energy project that will deploy a phalanx of underwater turbines that float like kites. The project demonstrates once again how legacy companies are transitioning to new clean tech. At a little less than 100 years old Toshiba is a baby compared to IHI, which traces its…
Liberland could become the world’s first algae-powered city
Back in 2015, a group of disillusioned Czech citizens had this idea that they would secede from the nation and form their own sovereign state: the Republic of Liberland. The small 2.7 square mile site lies between Croatia and Serbia, right over a flood plain of the river Danube.
Several thousand people have since applied for citizenship in the tiny nation, with proposals for the design of the state open to those who dared submit a proposal. In the end it was RAW-NYC who came up with the winning idea; a stacked city of self-sustained blocks would gradually build upwards and outwards from an initial set in what the designers call “Inverted Archeology”.
The city would be pedestrian-friendly, and the unique stacked design would allow for buildings to be placed much closer together than traditional construction would allow. Buildings would be like skyscrapers put on their sides; built in layers and accessible to everyone at all levels rather than simply at the ground lobby as traditional towers would be. These would also be meticulously planned to allow natural light to penetrate all accessible spaces.
To mitigate greenhouse gases created by such a dense urban environment, algae strains that do not require sunlight to grow would be housed on the undersides of the buildings in a vast underground habitat; providing clean energy.
A Denmark-based company will acquire the developer of America’s first-ever offshore wind farm.
Ørsted announced this week it entered into an agreement to purchase Rhode Island-based Deepwater Wind for a price tag of $510 million.
On a conference call, Ørsted CEO Henrik Poulsen said the purchase comes at a time when offshore wind is experiencing international growth.
“We can now say that the cost of green energy is fully competitive with “black” energy. And as such, there is no economic reason for not accelerating the transition to green energy,” Poulsen said. “So yes, we do see a clear acceleration in demand, and I’m not sure that we’ve seen the final acceleration.”
Deepwater Wind’s Block Island wind farm was the nation’s first when it launched in 2016.
The company currently has three other offshore wind projects in development with Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, and New York.
The “Revolution Wind” project, a joint venture between Connecticut and Rhode Island announced this summer, is expected to come online in 2023.
When combined with Orstead’s other assets, the two companies said they hope to deliver offshore wind power to seven states on the east coast by 2030.
(Image Credit: Ryan Caron King / Connecticut Public Radio)
Where President Donald Trump has truly been missing in action is on climate change, even as last month was the hottest in recorded history.Not only has he ignored what has become an existential threat to the United States and the world as global temperatures rise, but under the vaunted rubric of deregulation, Trump has all but worked to promote global warming. Our view.Opposing view.
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