Energy & the Environment News and Discussions

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The path to achieving net-zero liquid fuel
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-path-net- ... -fuel.html
by Monash University
Researchers from Monash University and Hokkaido University have developed a method that converts carbon dioxide into a diesel-range fuel and has the potential to produce a net-zero liquid fuel alternative to power cars more sustainably.

When carbon dioxide (CO2) is added to the manufacturing process of fuel production, it has the capability to produce fuels that reduce or reverse the net CO2 emissions. When the hydrogen required for this process is supplied via solar powered water electrolysis, the entire process becomes completely renewable. The end result is a net-zero carbon emitting fuel product.

The transition to 100 percent renewable energy resources is essential to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions from the use of fossil fuels over the last century. The research, which was recently published in the Journal of Energy Chemistry, offers a diesel-range fuel alternative which has the capability to be applied anywhere in the world.
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First global estimate of the importance of pollinators for seed production in plants
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-global-im ... ction.html
by Stellenbosch University South Africa
About 175,000 plant species—half of all flowering plants—mostly or completely rely on animal pollinators to make seeds and so to reproduce. Declines in pollinators could therefore cause major disruptions in natural ecosystems, including loss of biodiversity.

This is the finding from a paper, "Widespread vulnerability of plant seed production to pollinator declines," published in the journal Science Advances on 13 October 2021.

Dr. James Rodger, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University (SU) and lead author, says this is the first study to provide a global estimate of the importance of pollinators for plants in natural ecosystems.

The study, involving 21 scientists affiliated with 23 institutions from five continents, was led by Dr. James Rodger and Prof Allan Ellis from Stellenbosch University (SU). It is a product of the Synthesis Centre for Biodiversity Sciences (sDiv) in the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research.

Prof Tiffany Knight from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and a senior co-author, says recent global assessments of pollination have highlighted a knowledge gap in our understanding of how dependent plants are on animal pollinators: "Our synthetic research addresses this gap, and enables us to link trends in pollinator biodiversity and abundance to consequences for plants at a global level," she says,.
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Biden Administration Gives Offshore Wind Farms a Big Boost
by Justine Calma
October 13, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/13/227 ... coastlines

Introduction:
(The Verge) Offshore wind farms could be coming to nearly every coastline along the continental US. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland today announced plans to auction off leases to developers for up to seven new areas by 2025. That includes waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Maine, Central Atlantic, New York Bight (between Long Island and New Jersey), and off the coasts of Oregon, California, and the Carolinas.

It’s a big scaling up of offshore wind in the US, which lags far behind Europe when it comes to deployment. The US’ first commercial-scale offshore wind farm just got federal approval in May. Two existing, smaller operations in US waters have a combined capacity of just 42 megawatts. The Biden administration set a goal of pushing capacity up to 30,000 MW by 2030. Europe, home to a majority of the world’s offshore wind, already had nearly that much installed in 2020.

The US’ first offshore wind projects are all along the East Coast. Expanding to other shores will come with new technical challenges. On the Pacific coast, waters get much deeper, much closer to shore compared to the US’ Atlantic coastline. That makes it more difficult to affix turbines to the seafloor. The White House announced in May that it would open up two areas off the California coast to commercial-scale wind farms and indicated that it might turn to new technology for floating wind farms.

Turbines in the Gulf of Mexico will have to contend with hurricanes and soft soils, recent studies from the National Renewable Energy Lab found. Still, shallow water and smaller waves make the Gulf ripe for wind development. New offshore wind industry here could potentially also benefit from existing infrastructure and know-how from the region’s history of offshore oil and gas drilling. The very first wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island was built with the help of ships from Louisiana.

“We are working to facilitate a pipeline of projects that will establish confidence for the offshore wind industry,” said Amanda Lefton, Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, in a statement today. It could still take years to get offshore turbines up and running.
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France's Le Pen says she will take down wind turbines if she is elected
French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said on Thursday she would end all subsidies for renewable energy and take down France's wind turbines if she is elected next year.

Le Pen, who will be the candidate of the Rassemblement National party in the April vote, made it to the second round of the 2017 election, and is expected to do so again, although some recent polls have shown that right-wing talk-show star Eric Zemmour could best her if he decides to run. read more

"Wind and solar, these energies are not renewable, they are intermittent. If I am elected, I will put a stop to all construction of new wind parks and I will launch a big project to dismantle them," she said on RTL radio.
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The scope of the article cited below is very wide. Energy used in transportation is just one aspect. Also discussed in the article itself is the food industry, cement production, steel production, replacement of wood by other synthesized materials, eliminating plastics and leather from fashion, and substitutes for oil through fermentation processes.

A Road Map for Climate Investors
by Arvind Gupta
October 15, 2021

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/a-roa ... investors/

Extract:
(TechCrunch) We will need more than double today’s clean energy output to service growing demand. But until we can store this energy and use it in cars, boats, airplanes and more, clean energy production will not eliminate the need for oil and coal. Energy storage is the main bottleneck for a global electric economy. We need bigger, safer and cleaner batteries that can be used everywhere from the grid to our cars to our homes, and keep the lights on when we need them most.

You and I won’t be buying these batteries, but they will power everything we do buy. From cars to the cargo ships that deliver them to the airplanes that carry us, they will all eventually be electric. Boeing just ordered 100 electric planes from Heart Aerospace, in which it also invested. The world’s first electric cargo ship, the Yara Birkeland, built by Marin Teknikk, is scheduled to have its maiden voyage soon.

…Unfortunately, lithium-based battery technology still only has one-tenth the maximum energy density of gasoline (which is around 50 megajoules per kilogram). It isn’t enough. The closest we can get with lithium-ion technology is the lithium-air battery, which has a theoretical energy density of 40 megajoules per kilogram, but new electrolytes need to be invented for it to work. Like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier to usher in the supersonic era, we need to break through this density barrier to power our green future.

Recent studies have demonstrated that melanin, our skin pigment, has also shown promise as a potent cathode that can make rechargeable sodium batteries a possibility. This would enable large-scale “salt” batteries that can be used to create a safe and clean grid storage solution. Researchers have also used viruses to create nanolayers of different elements to make higher-performance cathodes. Other lines of research have shown that batteries driven by enzymatic catalysts can potentially use sugar water to slowly charge your car or house with bio-electricity. None of the solutions above are within a decade to market; all are in the research stage.
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New study finds black spruce trees struggling to regenerate amid more frequent arctic fires
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-black-spr ... erate.html
by Woodwell Climate Research Center

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that black spruce trees—a key species on the boreal landscape for millennia—are losing their resilience and capacity to regenerate in the face of warming temperatures and increasingly frequent Arctic wildfires. A continuation of this trend could result in a landscape-wide ecological shift that would have a complex and rippling impact on the region, including an acceleration in permafrost thaw, and a loss of valuable biodiversity.

In boreal North America, the thick, spongy soils on which black spruce grows are made of peat moss and lichens that retain moisture very well but when they do dry out are highly flammable. Black spruce rely on fires for regeneration—their cones open up in the heat and drop seeds onto the charred organic soil—but this latest study indicates that more severe fires that burn deeper into these peat soils are leading to a short-circuit of the regeneration process.

In synthesizing data from more than 1500 fire-disturbed sites, researchers found that black spruce's ability to regenerate after fire dropped at 38% of sites and failed completely 18% of the time—numbers never before seen in a species evolved to thrive after fire. Significant shifts in wildfire regimes are pushing black spruce forests to a tipping point, beyond which the iconic species may lose its place as the dominant tree species in boreal North America.
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Seagrass restoration study shows rapid recovery of ecosystem functions
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-seagrass- ... tions.html
by University of California - Santa Cruz
As the dominant seagrass species on the U.S. West Coast, eelgrass supports a wide range of ecosystem services and functions, making its preservation and restoration a top priority for the region. Eelgrass restoration has a spotty record of success, however, and studies of restoration sites have rarely assessed the full range of ecosystem functions.

In a new study published October 6 in Ecological Applications, researchers demonstrated that eelgrass restoration efforts can lead to rapid expansion of restored plots and recovery of ecosystem functions.

The study involved small-scale experimental seagrass restoration efforts in Elkhorn Slough on the Central Coast of California. Researchers transplanted 2,340 shoots of eelgrass from healthy meadows into 117 small plots, and evaluated their success relative to areas without vegetation and natural eelgrass meadows.

"Within a few years, most of the ecosystem functions were near or at the level seen in natural eelgrass meadows, suggesting that these habitats can recover pretty quickly if the conditions are right," said first author Kathryn Beheshti, who earned her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz in 2021 and is currently a California Sea Grant Fellow at the Ocean Protection Council's Climate Change Program.

The restored plots expanded dramatically, resulting in eelgrass beds covering an area 85 times larger than the initial plots. The restored beds began to resemble the natural meadows in structural features such as canopy height and shoot density, in the richness and abundance of species using the restored habitat, and in water quality. The study assessed a suite of seven ecosystem functions, and the researchers also developed a multifunctionality index to assess the overall functional performance of the restored beds.

"We found that overall the restored plots are performing higher than unvegetated plots and just slightly below the natural meadows," Beheshti said.
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Lawyer Who Sued Chevron is Ordered to Prison — Even After Amnesty International Sounded Alarm
October 27, 2021

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/human-rights/

Introduction:
(Democracy Now! via Alternet) The environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger joins us just before he is ordered to report to jail today, after a years-long legal battle with the oil company Chevron and 813 days of house arrest. In 2011, Donziger won an $18 billion settlement against Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Indigenous people in Ecuador for dumping 16 billion gallons of oil into their ancestral land in the Amazon. Since the landmark case, Donziger has faced a series of legal attacks from Chevron and a New York federal judge, who has employed a private law firm linked to the oil company to prosecute him. Earlier this month, he was sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of court, and his request for bail pending his appeal was denied. Amnesty International and United Nations human rights advocates, along with several U.S. lawmakers, are calling for Donziger's immediate release. "Chevron and these two judges, really allies of the fossil fuel industry, are trying to use me as a weapon to intimidate activists and lawyers who do this work," says Donziger. "I need to be prosecuted by a neutral prosecutor, not by Chevron."
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Energy crisis is getting talked about.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/07/business ... index.html
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