Technological adaptations

Australian scientists say discovery could render ammonia from fossil fuels obsolete

by Science.Org 06/11/2021

An electrochemical route to ammonia could substantially lower the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the current thermal Haber-Bosch process. One relatively promising option under study involves reductive formation of lithium nitride, which can be protonated to ammonia. However, the ethanol used to date as a local proton source in these studies may degrade under the reaction conditions. Suryanto et al. report the use of a tetraalkyl phosphonium salt in place of ethanol (see the Perspective by Westhead et al.). This cation can stably undergo deprotonation–reprotonation cycles and, as an added benefit, it enhances the ionic conductivity of the medium.

New Material Derived From Trees Could Pave Way for Better, Safer Batteries

by BROWN UNIVERSITY 11/01/2021

In pursuit of batteries that deliver more power and operate more safely, researchers are working to replace the liquids commonly used in today’s lithium ion batteries with solid materials. Now, a research team from Brown University and the University of Maryland has developed a new material for use in solid-state batteries that’s derived from an unlikely source: trees.

Novel photocatalyst effectively turns carbon dioxide into methane fuel with light

Science Daily 2/02/21 City University of Hong Kong

Decarbonizing has become a prioritized mission in many countries and the science community is working on the 'carbon capture' technologies. If the captured carbon dioxide could be converted into energy, then it would be killing two birds with one stone. A joint research team has developed a new photocatalyst which can produce methane gas (CH4) selectively and effectively from carbon dioxide using sunlight and mimicking photosynthesis.

Engineers' reactor converts gas directly into acetic acid

Phys.Org JANUARY 11, 2021 Mike Williams, Rice University

Rice University engineers are turning carbon monoxide directly into acetic acid—the widely used chemical agent that gives vinegar its tang—with a continuous catalytic reactor that can use renewable electricity efficiently to turn out a highly purified product.

The electrochemical process by the labs of chemical and biomolecular engineers Haotian Wang and Thomas Senftle of Rice's Brown School of Engineering resolves issues with previous attempts to reduce carbon monoxide (CO) into acetic acid. Those processes required additional steps to purify the product.

Goodbye, Centralized Power Grid. Hello, Autonomous Energy Grids

IEEE Spectrum By Benjamin Kroposki, Andrey Bernstein, Jennifer King and Fei Ding 23 Nov 2020

How to build a massively decentralized power grid with AI, renewable energy, and energy storage
The concept and core technology for the autonomous energy grid are being developed by our team at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, Colo. Since 2018, NREL and local utility Holy Cross Energy have been putting the concept into practice, starting with the construction of the first four houses in Basalt Vista. Each home has an 8-kilowatt rooftop PV system with lithium iron phosphate storage batteries, as well as energy-efficient, ­all-electric heating, cooling, water heaters, and appliances. All of those assets are monitored and can be controlled by the AEG. So far, average utility bills have been about 85 percent lower than typical electric bills for Colorado.

Because of the soaring number of grid-tied devices, operators will no longer be able to use centralized control in the not-so-distant future. Over a geographically dispersed network, the communication latencies alone make a centralized system impractical. Instead, operators will have to move to a system of distributed optimization and control.

‘Green hydrogen’ from renewables could become cheapest ‘transformative fuel’ within a decade

Adam Morton Fri 2 Oct 2020 16.00 EDT

“We think electrolysers can get much cheaper much sooner than most expect,” said Kobad Bhavnagri, BloombergNEF’s Sydney-based global head of industrial decarbonisation.

“The way we see it is there is very little demand for hydrogen from fossil fuels with CCS. It doesn’t fit the scale-up model for an emerging industry.”

The International Renewable Energy Agency last year also acknowledged in a report last year that Chinese manufacturers had claimed electrolysers were already available for a cost that had been considered a best-case scenario for 2040.

‘Hydrogen Economy’ Offers Promising Path to Decarbonization

March 30, 2020

The report’s findings suggest that renewable hydrogen could be produced for $0.8 to $1.6/kg in most parts of the world before 2050. This is equivalent to gas priced at $6-12/MMBtu, making it competitive with current natural gas prices in Brazil, China, India, Germany and Scandinavia on an energy-equivalent basis. When including the cost of storage and pipeline infrastructure, the delivered cost of renewable hydrogen in China, India and Western Europe could fall to around $2/kg ($15/MMBtu) in 2030 and $1/kg ($7.4/MMBtu) in 2050.

Ammonia—a renewable fuel made from sun, air, and water—could power the globe without carbon

By Robert F. ServiceJul. 12, 2018

Ammonia—one nitrogen atom bonded to three hydrogen atoms—may not seem like an ideal fuel: The chemical, used in household cleaners, smells foul and is toxic. But its energy density by volume is nearly double that of liquid hydrogen—its primary competitor as a green alternative fuel—and it is easier to ship and distribute. "You can store it, ship it, burn it, and convert it back into hydrogen and nitrogen," says Tim Hughes, an energy storage researcher with manufacturing giant Siemens in Oxford, U.K. "In many ways, it's ideal."

World’s largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly in France

Tue 28 Jul 2020 05.00 EDT Last modified on Tue 28 Jul 2020 05.46 EDT Damian Carrington Environment editor

The world’s largest nuclear fusion project began its five-year assembly phase on Tuesday in southern France, with the first ultra-hot plasma expected to be generated in late 2025.

The €20bn (£18.2bn) Iter project will replicate the reactions that power the sun and is intended to demonstrate fusion power can be generated on a commercial scale. Nuclear fusion promises clean, unlimited power but, despite 60 years of research, it has yet to overcome the technical challenges of harnessing such extreme amounts of energy.

What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power

[1]

The market I'm talking about is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet.
There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change - or any other ethical consideration, for that matter.
This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit.
It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin.

Wooden Turbine Towers Promise To Push Wind Industry To Greater Heights

[2]

By contrast, wood towers have a drastically lower carbon footprint because they trees they are made from absorb CO2 as they grow. The wood is also lighter, and because it comes in stackable sections, it is easier, cheaper and more efficient to transport.

Rivers could generate thousands of nuclear power plants worth of energy, thanks to a new ‘blue’ membrane

12/04/2019

Blue energy’s promise stems from its scale: Rivers dump some 37,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater into the oceans every year. This intersection between fresh- and saltwater creates the potential to generate lots of electricity—2.6 terawatts, according to one recent estimate, roughly the amount that can be generated by 2000 nuclear power plants.

There are several ways to generate power from that mixing. And a couple of blue energy power plants have been built. But their high cost has prevented widespread adoption. All blue energy approaches rely on the fact that salts are composed of ions, or chemicals that harbor a positive or negative charge. In solids, the positive and negative charges attract one another, binding the ions together. (Table salt, for example, is a compound made from positively charged sodium ions bound to negatively charged chloride ions.) In water, these ions detach and can move independently.

By pumping the positive ions—like sodium or potassium—to the other side of a semipermeable membrane, researchers can create two pools of water: one with a positive charge, and one with a negative charge. If they then dunk electrodes in the pools and connect them with a wire, electrons will flow from the negatively charged to the positively charged side, generating electricity.

This dark material: the black alchemy that can arrest carbon emissions

The Guardian 11/29/19

It traps carbon in the ground for centuries, boosts plant growth, provides a sustainable heat source and could even reduce methane emissions from cows. Biochar may not be a silver bullet to combating the climate emergency, but it certainly ticks a lot of boxes.

Following biochar’s recognition in the IPCC 2018 report, earlier this year Redmile-Gordon launched the society’s first trials to see how the material could improve plant growth. He estimates planting 10-20kg of biochar in your garden could offset the carbon from a five-mile return commute in a car for a month.

Biochar is a form of charcoal produced when organic matter – for example wood, leaves or dead plants – is heated at high temperatures with little or no oxygen in a process called pyrolysis. The normal burning or decomposition of these materials would release large amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Instead, creating biochar traps this carbon in solid form for centuries; it becomes a carbon sink that can be buried underground.

Researchers design an improved pathway to carbon-neutral plastics

PhysOrg 11/20/2019

Researchers from U of T Engineering and Caltech have designed a new and improved system for efficiently converting CO2, water, and renewable energy into ethylene—the precursor to a wide range of plastic products, from medical devices to synthetic fabrics—under neutral conditions. The device has the potential to offer a carbon-neutral pathway to a commonly used chemical while enhancing storage of waste carbon and excess renewable energy.

While the prototype is still a long way from commercialization, the overall concept offers a promising way to address several key challenges in sustainability. It eliminates the need to extract more oil to make plastics and other consumer goods based on ethylene, and it turns waste CO2 into a feedstock, adding a new incentive to invest in carbon capture.

Secretive energy startup backed by Bill Gates achieves solar breakthrough

CNN 11/19/2019

The breakthrough means that, for the first time, concentrated solar energy can be used to create the extreme heat required to make cement, steel, glass and other industrial processes. In other words, carbon-free sunlight can replace fossil fuels in a heavy carbon-emitting corner of the economy that has been untouched by the clean energy revolution.

That means renewable energy has not yet disrupted industrial processes such as cement and steelmaking. And that's a problem because the world has an insatiable appetite for those materials. Cement, for instance, is used to make the concrete required to build homes, hospitals and schools. These industries are responsible for more than a fifth of global emissions, according to the EPA.

Breaking carbon dioxide faster, cheaper, and more efficiently

PhysOrg 11/15/19

Now, a team of researchers led by Yongtao Meng, a former UConn graduate student in the lab of Institute for Materials Science Director Steve Suib and now a researcher at Stanford University, has come up with a better way. They created an electrochemical cell filled with a porous, foamy catalyst made of nickel and iron. Both metals are cheap and abundant. When carbon dioxide gas enters the electrochemical cell, and a voltage is applied, the catalyst helps the carbon dioxide (a carbon atom with two oxygens) break off oxygen to form carbon monoxide (a carbon atom with one oxygen.) The carbon monoxide is very reactive and a useful precursor for making many kinds of chemicals, including plastics and fuels such as gasoline.

Data science could help Californians battle future wildfires

The Conversation 11/12/2019

This year, I helped found the Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab at Indiana University, specifically to harness the power of data, technology and artificial intelligence to respond to and prepare for the impacts of climate change.

Through a grant from the federal Economic Development Administration, we are building tools to help federal agencies like FEMA as well as local planners learn how to rebuild communities devastated by wildfires or hurricanes.

By analyzing historical disaster information, publicly available census data and predictive models of risk and resilience, our tools will be able to identify and prioritize key decisions, like what kinds of infrastructure investments to make.

New Organic Solar Cells Set Efficiency World Record

SciTech Daily 11/12/19

A research team from Nuremberg and Erlangen has set a new record for the power conversion efficiency of organic photovoltaic modules (OPV). The scientists from Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the Bavarian Center for Applied Energy Research (ZAE), and the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy (HI ERN), a branch of Forschungszentrum Jülich, in cooperation with the South China University of Technology (SCUT), designed an OPV module with an efficiency of 12.6 percent over an area of 26 square centimeters. The former world record of 9.7 percent was exceeded by 30 percent.

Study shows where global renewable energy investments have greatest benefits

Techxplore 11/12/2019

A new study finds that the amount of climate and health benefits achieved from renewable energy depends on the country where it is installed. Countries with higher carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and more air pollution, such as India, China, and areas in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, achieve greater climate and health benefits per megawatt (MW) of renewable energy installed than those operating in areas such as North America, Brazil, and parts of Europe.

Climate KIC Demo Day 2019 Proves Europe Still Has What It Takes To Lead The Green Revolution

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/11/12/climate-kic-demo-day-2019-proves-europe-still-has-what-it-takes-to-lead-the-green-revolution/ CleanTechnia 11/12/2019

The first company to showcase their idea brought a concrete solution, literally, aiming to transform the archaic concrete industry. Co-founder Leopold Spenner comes from a family with more than 90 years in the concrete business, giving him an innate understanding of the industry and its problems. Spenner explained that one of the biggest issues in the concrete industry today is companies producing excessively strong concrete, resulting in considerably higher costs and carbon emissions. Alcemy uses advanced AI to reduce the time needed to test the strength of concrete from 28 days to just 40 minutes. This makes it possible for companies to test concrete in real-time, and then select the proper mixture for each product — enabling use-specific concrete on a deadline.

Solar and wind energy enhances drought resilience and groundwater sustainability

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12810-5 Nature Communications 11/06/2019

California recently endured a record-breaking drought after 2012 (refs. 20,21), which significantly impacted food production22, reduced hydropower generation23 and caused severe environmental issues (e.g., groundwater depletion, wildfires, tree mortality, land subsidence)......The maintenance of crop revenue and overall resilience of the agricultural sector largely relied on the unsustainable groundwater overdraft, which effectively offset the drought impact, but contributed to severe groundwater depletion (∼3.7 km3/year24). In the energy sector, during this driest year of the drought, decreased surface water availability sent the in-state hydropower generation plunging to 7% of the total electricity generated, substantially below the state’s long-term average of around 18%23. This power deficit was offset by electricity generated through the rapidly growing solar and wind fleet, as well as from increased use of natural gas and electricity purchased from out-of-state sources23. Furthermore, for the first time, in 2012, solar and wind electricity generation exceeded hydropower in California23 due to the declining cost of wind turbines and solar photovoltaic (PV) in conjunction with the popularity and stringency of the Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS), which mandates a certain proportion of renewables in the energy production.

CLEAN ENERGY TECHNOLOGY IS TAKING CUES FROM SUNFLOWER SPIRALS, SCHOOLING FISH AND OTHER NATURAL PHENOMENA

https://ensia.com/articles/clean-energy-technology-wind-solar-biomimicry/ Ensia 8/29/19

For example, scientists at Cornell studying the movements insect wings make as the insects hover found that the wingtips trace out figure-eight patterns, minimizing power consumption. Such energy-saving kinematics could help improve the efficiency of miniature unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) used for surveillance.

In July 2016, a solar-powered airplane flying over the desert region of Andalusia in Spain photographed breathtaking images of the Gemasolar concentrated solar power plant. The plant, operated by Torresol Energy, consists of 2,650 heliostats — mirrors that turn to track the motion of the sun, fanning out around, and reflecting sunlight toward, a 150-meter (490-foot)-high tower. The central tower houses molten salts that can store the energy of that light for extended periods of time.

In a fascinating article published in Solar Energy in 2012, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and RWTH Aachen University in Germany reported that the placement of heliostats for a concentrated solar plant like Gemasolar could be optimized by mimicking the spiral arrangement of florets in a sunflower. This pattern, called Fermat’s spiral, occurs commonly in the arrangement of leaves on stems and florets in flowers.

Solar now ‘cheaper than grid electricity’ in every Chinese city, study finds

https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-now-cheaper-than-grid-electricity-in-every-chinese-city-study-finds CarbonBrief 8/12/2019

Solar power has become cheaper than grid electricity across China, a development that could boost the prospects of industrial and commercial solar, according to a new study.
Projects in every city analysed by the researchers could be built today without subsidy, at lower prices than those supplied by the grid, and around a fifth could also compete with the nation’s coal electricity prices.
They say grid parity – the “tipping point” at which solar generation costs the same as electricity from the grid – represents a key stage in the expansion of renewable energy sources.

Scotland Is Now Generating So Much Wind Energy, It Could Power Two Scotlands

https://www.sciencealert.com/scotland-s-wind-turbines-are-now-generating-double-what-its-residents-need ScienceAlert 7/17/2019

Specifically, turbines generated 9.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity between January and June, enough to supply power to 4.47 million homes – not bad for a country that has around 2.6 million homes to its name.

It's a record high for wind energy in Scotland, and it means the turbines could have provided enough electricity for every dwelling in Scotland, plus much of northern England as well, for the first six months of the year.

Stanford researchers want to reduce climate change by converting methane to CO2 into the atmosphere

https://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-scientists-to-stop-climate-change-by-emitting-more-co2-2019-6 Business Insider 06/06/2019

In Nature Sustainability, Jackson explained that, in theory, a sort of large, complex fan could be used to filter out methane from the air in the atmosphere.This methane would then be converted into carbon dioxide in a chemical process involving heat and microporous zeolites.

Methane removal and atmospheric restoration

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0299-x Nature.Com 05/20/2019

Zeolites and other technologies should be evaluated and pursued for reducing methane concentrations in the atmosphere from 1,860 ppb to preindustrial levels of ~750 ppb. Such a goal of atmospheric restoration provides a positive framework for change at a time when climate action is desperately needed.

China claims to have 'cracked' low cost production of lithium, political implications could be huge

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/6/1/1861942/-China-claims-to-have-cracked-low-cost-production-of-lithium-political-implications-could-be-huge DailyKos 06/01/2019

In an article from May 14, the SCMP reports on an effort by the Chinese government to more easily separate lithium from other metals that are found in the same brines where it is produced. Currently, sorting lithium salts away from salts formed by magnesium requires multiple steps as the compounds are both physically similar and hard to separate with common chemical processes.

China cracks cheap lithium production in electric car breakthrough

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3010200/china-cracks-cheap-lithium-production-electric-car-breakthrough South China Morning Post 05/14/2019

The cost of extracting the mineral has been slashed to a “record low” of 15,000 yuan (US$2,180) per tonne by the new process, a Chinese government report said.
That compares to an international price for lithium ranging from US$12,000 to US$20,000 per tonne – and a long-term contract price of about US$17,000 – over the past year, according to some industrial estimates.