Carbon emission reduction: News and technology

[Brian Peacock]

[Brian Peacock]

Not sure I thought this was even possible

An Australian farmer has held the first carbon-neutral cattle sale – here’s how it works
Seven hundred breeding cows and heifers reared in a ‘carbon neutral farming system’ sold in NSW on Thursday. But can a live cow be carbon neutral?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... gloucester

With caveats ....

...The director of Agricore, Hayden Hollis, said annual soil carbon tests across Mackenzie’s farm were conducted in accordance with Clean Energy Regulator (CER) guidelines. While the regulator’s methodology is widely used by the industry, a consortium of Australian soil scientists have called for flaws in the scheme to be “addressed as a matter of urgency”.

Agricore’s data is proprietary and could not be viewed by Guardian Australia.

One of those scientists is Dr Elaine Mitchell from the Queensland University of Technology. She says intervals of at least five years are usually required to detect statistically significant soil carbon changes.

Prof Richard Eckard, an agricultural economist from the University of Melbourne, said soil carbon should be measured on a 10-year running mean to account for seasonal fluctuations, 70% of which is driven by rainfall patterns....

[JimC]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-05/ ... /105999452

Broken Hill's hard-rock geology could hold part of the solution to Australia's energy storage problem as the country shifts to renewables.

A 200-megawatt, $1 billion facility built by Canadian company Hydrostor near the historic mining city will be Australia's first large-scale compressed air energy storage facility, capable of powering up to 80,000 homes for a day.

The Silver City Energy Storage Centre will be able to store energy for about eight hours, longer than lithium-ion batteries, which typically hold about four hours of charge in large grid-scale batteries.

That means solar energy generated during the day can be soaked up and then released through the night.

Abundant daytime renewable energy is wasted because of a lack of storage, and this figure is growing as more renewables come online.

It is estimated Australia will need up to 20 times more energy storage by 2050, and simply adding more lithium-ion batteries is not the solution because of their high cost and the limit on the number of hours they efficiently store energy.

Energy storage is a critical element in the process of increasing our use of renewable energy sources. This is an interesting alternative to large batteries.

[pErvinalia]

I wonder why only 8 hours. Would have thought it would be almost unlimited storage time.

[JimC]

I think that the design is for providing a night's worth of power from a day's solar, so that's the 8 hours expected of normal operations, even if it could be longer in theory.