Carbon emission reduction: News and technology

[macdoc]

Wind turbine blades could be turned into giant batteries, says Swedish firm
Sinonus’ tech can charge carbon fiber, a component of turbine blades, and use it to store energy like a battery.

Updated: Jun 14, 2024 07:32 AM EST

https://interestingengineering.com/ener ... es-battery

and planes, and cars and ......

snip

A research study at Chalmers University concluded that reducing the battery weight in electric vehicles could increase their range by a whopping 70 percent. Moreover, the technology could also be used to power airplanes with electricity.

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Sinonus is also keen on using its carbon fiber to make electric vehicles, where it doubles up as an energy storage unit. An added advantage of the tech is that its lower energy density makes it safer than lithium-ion batteries, and it does not contain any volatile components.

[Brian Peacock]

EU-regulated ‘sustainable’ funds invest £14bn in biggest polluters.

[Brian Peacock]

Future impact of proposed fossil fuel projects must be assessed, UK court rules

The climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account when deciding whether to approve projects, the supreme court in London has ruled.

The landmark judgment, handed down on Thursday, sets an important precedent on whether the “inevitable” future greenhouse gas emissions of a fossil fuel project should be considered.

The case was initiated by the campaigner Sarah Finch, who challenged Surrey county council’s decision to extend planning permission for an oil drilling well at Horse Hill, on the Weald. She argued it should have accounted for greenhouse gas emissions from using the oil when assessing the environmental impacts of the project, not only the drilling site itself. These are known as “scope 3” or downstream emissions. The council argued it had discretion to decide what the full impact of a project would be.

While the lower courts were not sympathetic to Finch’s arguments, the majority of the supreme court said it was “plain” that the combustion emissions of an oil project were part of its overall environmental effects.

“The whole purpose of extracting fossil fuels is to make hydrocarbons available for combustion,” three of the five judges agreed. “It can therefore be said with virtual certainty that, once oil has been extracted from the ground, the carbon contained within it will sooner or later be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and so will contribute to global warming.”

The court noted that the law governing environmental impact assessments in the UK did not impose a geographical limit on impacts. “In principle, all likely significant effects of the project must be assessed, irrespective of where (or when) those effects will be generated or felt. There is no justification for limiting the scope of the assessment to effects which are expected to occur at or near the site of the project.” ...

[Brian Peacock]

Belching livestock to incur green levy in Denmark from 2030

Farmers in Denmark will have to pay for planet-heating pollutants that their cattle expel as gas, after the government agreed to set the world’s first emissions tax on agriculture.

The agreement – reached on Monday night after months of fraught negotiations between farmers, industry, politicians and environmental groups – will introduce an effective tax of 120 kroner (£14) per ton of greenhouse gas pollution from livestock in 2030, which will rise to 300 kroner per ton in 2035.

The revenues are to be pooled in a fund to support the livestock industry’s green transition for at least two years after the tax comes into effect.

“We are writing a new chapter in Danish agricultural history,” said the farming minister, Jacob Jensen.

Agriculture is responsible for about one-third of planet-heating pollution – about half of which comes from animals – but lawmakers have so far been reluctant to rein in its emissions. Angry farmers have brought traffic to a standstill in European capitals several times this year, in sometimes violent protests that forced EU leaders to water down rules designed to clean up the sector...

[JimC]

There's a type of seaweed that grows in Tasmanian waters, from which an extract is made which, when fed to cows, inhibits methane production. As a side benefit, the cattle gain weight a little quicker, because the methane emissions are a significant loss of food energy.

[Brian Peacock]

That's interesting. Cows are the whales of the land.

[Brian Peacock]

[URL,=https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... dApp_Other]‘Reform or go out of business,’ carbon offsetting industry told[/URL]

The carbon-credit market must reform or “go out of business”, leading scientists have concluded in an international review of the offsetting industry.

The market for carbon offsets shrank dramatically last year after a series of scientific and media reports found many offsetting schemes had little environmental impact.

However, if comprehensively reformed, offsetting could still generate billions of dollars for action on the climate and biodiversity, experts concluded.

The Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG), headed by the former UK chief scientific adviser Sir David King and made up of some of the world’s leading scientists, has produced a new assessment of the voluntary carbon market and how it can rebuild trust.

The unregulated sector should adopt rigorous scientific standards to produce carbon credits, ensure financial benefits were clear to local communities involved with projects, and prioritise carbon-removal projects that suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, the CCAG said.

King said it was clear that there were deep problems with the current system for producing many carbon credits and that unless the voluntary carbon market changed, it would go out of business and be replaced by a system with higher standards.

“The voluntary carbon market is very reluctant to take this fully on board. Our report is totally independent of them. It is going to be challenging, but our simple message is that unless you do this, you’re out of business,” he said. “Trust has been lost and it’s got to be regained.”...

[macdoc]

Canada to debut world-first carbon-free aluminum production technology
Elysis’ inert anode technology eliminates carbon from electrolysis cells, releasing only oxygen and trapping carbon dioxide.

Updated: Jul 01, 2024 09:25 AM EST

https://interestingengineering.com/inno ... technology

[Brian Peacock]

Far right using climate crisis as bogeyman to frighten voters and build higher walls

A disrupted climate and diminished natural world are widening the dividing lines of ideological debate. Left unchecked, this will undermine democracy.

That may not be the first thing on the minds of British voters as they go to the polls on Thursday. It is probably also a minority view in the rest of Europe or the US, where people are too much in the thick of a polycrisis to consider anything outside politics and economics as usual. But from a distance, in my case from the Amazon rainforest, there is a very different explanation for the tremors being witnessed in the old world and the new.

How rising emissions distort our political ecosystems is not nearly as well understood as the scientific certainty that they are heating our world. Hundreds of academic papers detail the tipping point risks of an anthropologically altered climate, but very few look at the feedbacks on governance and ideology. One thing, however, is certain: all of the world’s systems – biological, physical, economic and political – are coming under more climate stress and the longer this is left unabated, the greater is the likelihood that something will break.

Democracy is starting to look almost as fragile as the rainforest. Politicians in the traditional parties will not face the fact that they are no longer living in the stable climate in which that political system was created. The right wants to go back to a past that no longer exists. The left wants to move towards a future that it will not dare to fund.

Meanwhile, market zealots and xenophobes, fuelled by fossil fuel money, are using the unfolding chaos to frighten voters and take the opportunity to replace social safety nets and environmental protections with higher walls and rapacious extraction...

[macdoc]

American Airlines invests more in ZeroAvia, commits to purchase 100 hydrogen-electric engines

| Jul 2 2024 - 6:04 am PT
13 Comments

https://electrek.co/2024/07/02/american ... c-engines/

[macdoc]

fingers and toes crossed on this succeeding

A breakthrough in inexpensive, clean, fast-charging batteries
First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

Date:July 3, 2024
Source:University of Chicago
Summary:
Scientists have created an anode-free sodium solid-state battery. This brings the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage closer than ever.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 131808.htm

[macdoc]

Very very innovative

Power from flower: Albanian farm plants suck EV battery metal from soil
A plant can accumulate up to 2 percent of its body weight in nickel.

Updated: Jul 05, 2024 09:35 AM EST

https://interestingengineering.com/inno ... nts-for-ev

snip

Plant species such as Odontarrhena decipiens, which has distinct yellow flowers, can accumulate nickel to up to 2 percent of their biomass. According to Viridian’s website, a 1,000-hectare farm could capture between 250-550 metric tons of nickel. This could be worth US$3-7 million

double win

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Power from flower: Albanian farm plants suck EV battery metal from soil
A plant can accumulate up to 2 percent of its body weight in nickel.

Updated: Jul 05, 2024 09:35 AM EST
Ameya Paleja
Ameya Paleja

18 hours ago
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Power from flower: Albanian farm plants suck EV battery metal from soil
Odontarrhena decipiens.

Royal Botanic Garden Kew

The growing popularity of electric vehicles has led to an increased demand for nickel. While mining more ore is one way to meet this demand, many startups are also turning to farming instead to address an industrial need with a much more sustainable approach.

Since the Industrial Age, humanity has known only one way of meeting the demand for more metals—mining. The trend has followed until today, and even as the world is looking to adopt electric vehicles to reduce emissions, mining of lithium, nickel, and cobalt is at an all-time high to meet the production demand.

Mining is energy-intensive and powered by carbon-emitting fossil fuels. This only leads to more emissions. Mining for a tonne of nickel to be used in a non-polluting EV can generate up to 59 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

So, startups are now turning to plants that can concentrate nickel from the soil. Scientifically, this is referred to as phytomining. It has the dual benefit of preventing mining while still extracting the metal of interest.

What is phytomining?
Phytomining uses specific species of plants to concentrate metals of interest from the soil. The farming is done on soils where the metal is already present, but the concentration is not high enough to warrant mining.

Once the plants reach maturity, they are dried on the field and then heated to break down the organic material. Later, the ash can be used to extract the metal of interest.

The concept isn’t entirely new and has been attempted in other forms, such as using microorganisms to concentrate the metal instead or certain species of plants to clear soil of certain contaminants.

In recent years, though, startups such as Metalplant and Econik have undertaken phytomining in hundreds of hectares to sustainably source nickel. Another startup, Viridian, has also patented technology for its plants that it claims hyperaccumulates nickel from the soil.

Plant species such as Odontarrhena decipiens, which has distinct yellow flowers, can accumulate nickel to up to 2 percent of their biomass. According to Viridian’s website, a 1,000-hectare farm could capture between 250-550 metric tons of nickel. This could be worth US$3-7 million.

Plants of the Odontarrhena species are used for nickel concentration. Image credit: Wikimedia
Cleaning up carbon
Metalplant has taken its phytomining a step further by using its farms to sequester carbon. The startup uses another technique called enhanced rock weathering, where large volumes of rock dust are applied to the farms.

As the rock dust dissolves, it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and makes bicarbonate, which can store the gas for many millennia.

Metalplant’s co-founder Sahit Muja is a mining billionaire using olivine, a magnesium iron silicate from his nearby stone quarry, in the phytomining setup at Tropojë in Albania. In June, the company used a few dozen tonnes of olivine dust on its nickel-concentrating farms.

Olivine is also rich in nickel, and the company hopes it will improve the yield of the plants. Metaplants expects its farms to yield up to 400 kg of nickel per hectare, and this yield is expected to improve in the future.

More importantly, it also fixes about 200 tonnes of CO2 in the process. This could lead to a carbon-negative way to source the nickel, which EV makers can use to offset the total impact of their production process.

[Brian Peacock]

[Brian Peacock]

Biomass power station produced four times emissions of UK coal plant, says report.

The Drax power station was responsible for four times more carbon emissions than the UK’s last remaining coal-fired plant last year, despite taking more than £0.5bn in clean-energy subsidies in 2023, according to a report.

The North Yorkshire power plant, which burns wood pellets imported from North America to generate electricity, was revealed as Britain’s single largest carbon emitter in 2023 by a report from the climate thinktank Ember.

The figures show that Drax, which has received billions in subsidies since it began switching from coal to biomass in 2012, was responsible for 11.5m tonnes of CO2 last year, or nearly 3% of the UK’s total carbon emissions.

Drax produced four times more carbon dioxide than the UK’s last remaining coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, which is due to close in September. Drax also produced more emissions last year than the next four most polluting power plants in the UK combined, according to the report.

Frankie Mayo, an analyst at Ember, said: “Burning wood pellets can be as bad for the environment as coal; supporting biomass with subsidies is a costly mistake.”...

[Brian Peacock]

Canada’s 2023 wildfires produced nearly a decade’s worth of blaze emissions

Canada’s “record-shattering” wildfires last year produced nearly as much greenhouse gas emissions in one season as would be expected over a decade of fires in normal circumstances, data has shown.

The fires, in Canada’s “wildest season ever”, were made at least three times more likely by the climate crisis, and produced about 2bn tonnes of CO2, about a quarter of the total global emissions from wildfires last year, according to data in the State of Wildfires report, published on Wednesday.

The health impacts from last year’s fires will also continue to be felt for decades.

Carbon dioxide from wildfires is a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions globally, reaching about 8.6bn tonnes last year, considerably more than the 4.8bn annual emissions of the US from all sources. However, the net impact of fires is likely to be reduced by the regrowth of vegetation taking up carbon from the atmosphere.

Matthew Jones, a research fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, and lead author of the report, warned that damage from intensifying wildfires would continue to increase unless the world succeeded in bringing down greenhouse gas emissions. Wildfires not only kill people, wildlife and livestock, and devastate trees and other landscapes, but can cause widespread and dangerous air pollution.

They are also an increasingly important contributor to the climate crisis, through their greenhouse gas emissions and destruction of carbon stored in vegetation and soil.

“These fires are something we should all be concerned about,” he said. “The full effects of last year’s fires will not be seen for a long time.”...