Energy & the Environment News and Discussions

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India's imports of cheap Russian crude surge since Ukraine invasion
Source: Reuters

NEW DELHI, May 30 (Reuters) - India has received 34 million barrels of discounted Russian oil since Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, according to Refinitiv Eikon data, more than trebling the value of total imports from Russia, including other products, compared with the same period of 2021.

The volumes of India's seaborne oil imports from Russia exclude CPC Blend oil, which is also exported via Russia's Black Sea port, but mostly supplied by Kazakhstan's subsidiaries of western countries as transit volumes. India's oil imports from Russia have been rising since February, as Asia's third largest economy and the world's third biggest oil importer, turned to deeply discounted Russian oil, mostly Urals crude, to cut its imports bill.

The country received more than 24 million barrels of Russian crude this month, up from 7.2 million barrels in April and about 3 million in March, and is set to receive about 28 million barrels in June, according to Refinitiv Eikon oil flows. Surging energy imports helped push India's total goods imports from Russia between Feb. 24 and May 26 to $6.4 billion, compared with $1.99 billion in the same period last year, according to government figures seen by Reuters.
Reuters Graphics


Read more: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy ... 022-05-30/
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EU leaders agree on partial embargo on Russian oil
Source: AP
BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union leaders reached a compromise Monday to impose a partial oil embargo on Russia at a summit focused on helping Ukraine with a long-delayed package of sanctions that was blocked by Hungary.

The watered-down embargo covers only Russian oil brought in by sea, allowing a temporary exemption for imports delivered by pipeline. EU Council President Charles Michel said on Twitter the agreement covers more than two-thirds of oil imports from Russia, “cutting a huge source of financing for its war machine. Maximum pressure on Russia to end the war.”

The EU had already imposed five previous rounds of sanctions on Russia over its war. It has targeted more than 1,000 people, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and top government officials, as well as pro-Kremlin oligarchs, banks, the coal sector and more. But the sixth package of measures announced May 4 had been held up by concerns over oil supplies.

Hungary Prime minister Viktor Orban had made clear he could support the new sanctions only if his country’s oil supply security was guaranteed. The landlocked country gets more than 60% of its oil from Russia and depends on crude that comes through the Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukrai ... 41b03b2ad4
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Solar-Biomass Hybrid System Satisfies Home Heating Requirements in Winter
May 31, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) WASHINGTON, May 31, 2022 – Adding an organic matter power source to a solar energy unit could provide 100% heating for a single-story home during the coldest months of the year and help the environment. In the warmer months, the system could generate electricity surpluses that can be sold back to the grid.

In Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, published by AIP Publishing, researchers in China and the United States outline a computer simulation model addressing the challenge of solar power's inherent intermittency by adding biomass as another renewable energy source to advance a reliable, affordable heating solution while reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

"We demonstrate how this hybrid system provides a cleaner, more energy-efficient heating solution than fossil fuel in single-family homes," co-author Gaoyang Hou said. "The system would be convenient in rural communities, where farms have large amounts of biomass in the form of agricultural waste that can be combined with solar power to close the urban-rural electricity gap and help the environment in the process."

The proposed solar-biomass hybrid system is based on distributed multi-generation technology that integrates photovoltaic-thermal (PV/T) and biomass power sources.

Biomass is produced from renewable organic matter, like corn husks, nut shells, wood pulp, and food and animal waste. A PV/T system, composed of PV panels and thermal collectors, is an emerging technology that converts solar energy into both heat and electricity with higher energy conversion efficiency.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/954209
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Scientists Find World's Largest Plant In Australia
Source: Huffington Post

Researchers were stunned when they discovered a species of seagrass had effectively cloned itself for 4,500 years and covered nearly 80 square miles.

By
Nick Visser
Jun. 1, 2022, 04:22 AM EDT | Updated 5 hours ago
SYDNEY ― Researchers have made a startling discovery beneath the waters off Western Australia. A meadow of sea grass stretching more than 110 miles long was actually a single plant that had spent the past 4,500 years cloning itself to carpet an area three times larger than Manhattan.

The findings, published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, make the colony of Posidonia australis, or ribbon weed, the largest known plant on Earth, scientists said.

Elizabeth Sinclair, a senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia and a lead author of the study, said her team has been testing seagrass meadows around Australia for genetic diversity for years to see how they respond to climate change. When her team visited an area known as Shark Bay, a relatively pristine landscape untouched by development, they went beneath the waves to collect samples of seagrass to see what types of plants were growing across the ocean floor.

The answer was one.

“It’s quite bizarre when you think about it, there’s this plant in one end of the bay and then you move 100 kilometers down to the other end and it’s the same plant,” Sinclair said.
Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/worlds-l ... b53b7ed338
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Leading Scientist Warns That We Cannot Adapt Our Way Out of Climate Crisis
by Fiona Harvey
June 1, 2022

Introduction:
(The Guardian) The world cannot adapt its way out of the climate crisis, and counting on adaptation to limit damage is no substitute for urgently cutting greenhouse gases, a leading climate scientist has warned.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in the US and professor at Texas Tech University, said the world was heading for dangers unseen in the 10,000 years of human civilisation, and efforts to make the world more resilient were needed but by themselves could not soften the impact enough.

“People do not understand the magnitude of what is going on,” she said. “This will be greater than anything we have ever seen in the past. This will be unprecedented. Every living thing will be affected.”

While countries can start to adapt to some of the impacts, for instance with seawalls and flood barriers, and by making their infrastructure more resilient to extreme weather, if global heating is allowed to continue then the world will rapidly reach a point beyond what can be adapted to.

“If we continue with business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions, there is no adaptation that is possible. You just can’t,” she said, in an interview with the Guardian.
Read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -scientist
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Canada ranks third worldwide in permeable landscapes for wildlife
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-canada-wo ... dlife.html
by University of British Columbia
Canada ranks third in the world for animal movement between protected areas, finds new UBC research.

Researchers have created the first global map of where mammals are most likely to move between protected areas, such as national parks and nature reserves. Lead author Dr. Angela Brennan, a research associate at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, says she hopes the data will help countries measure their success at protecting biodiversity over time.

Canada has many areas that are critical to animal movement, and therefore biodiversity, including the Yukon to Yellowstone corridor, and from the Coastal Mountains in B.C. to the North Cascade mountains in the United States. "Animals need to be able to move to find food, water, and mates, to maintain those vitally important flows of genes and other ecological processes across our landscapes," says Dr. Brennan. "Without connectivity—when animal movement is blocked—animal populations become isolated and these flows can stop, putting species and habitats at risk."
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Scientists announce a breakthrough in determining life's origin on Earth—and maybe Mars
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-scientist ... -mars.html
by Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution


Scientists at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution announced today that ribonucleic acid (RNA), an analog of DNA that was likely the first genetic material for life, spontaneously forms on basalt lava glass. Such glass was abundant on Earth 4.35 billion years ago. Similar basalts of this antiquity survive on Mars today.

"Communities studying the origins of life have diverged in recent years," remarked Steven Benner, a co-author of the study appearing online in the journal Astrobiology.

"One community re-visits classical questions with complex chemical schemes that require difficult chemistry performed by skilled chemists," Benner explained. "Their beautiful craftwork appears in brand-name journals such as Nature and Science." However, precisely because of the complexity of this chemistry, it cannot possibly account for how life actually originated on Earth.
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Solar and wind keep getting cheaper as the field becomes smarter

Every time solar and wind output doubles, the cost gets cheaper and cheaper.

Doug Johnson - 6/3/2022, 5:18 PM

As solar and wind energy ramps up in the United States, the industries have gotten better at installing and operating their facilities. This experience can be seen in how the facilities are financed. According to new research, people working in the fields—and adjacent ones—have learned to be more efficient, reducing the overall cost of power. Further, according to Mark Bolinger, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the paper's authors, this so-called learning rate can be extrapolated into the future, and it spells good news for the two renewable sources of energy.

"The people who operate these turbines naturally get better over time as they do more of it. They get more efficient, and it allows them to lower their costs a bit," Bolinger told Ars, adding that the same holds true for the workers manufacturing the facilities. "Some of them have been doing it for a really long time… All things being equal, that should lead to a reduction in manufacturing costs."

There's a large amount of literature on learning rate and learning curve theory, he said. Moore's Law, which pertains to the power of silicon computer chips, says that the number of transistors per silicon chip doubles each year. Bolinger said that the learning rate in these renewable energy operations is similar to that. Learning rate is a measure of how much cost declines for each doubling of cumulative output, he said.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06 ... s-smarter/
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Wind power meets and beats Denmark’s total electricity demand – two days in a row

2 June 2022

Windy conditions in northern Europe have highlighted once again the growing value of wind energy, which provided more than 100% of Denmark’s electricity consumption for two days in a row in May.

Keen-eyed Twitter user Troels Christensen posted on May 28 a screenshot of wind power figures from WindEurope’s Wind Power Numbers Daily tracker.

WindEurope, the region’s leading wind energy trade association, tracks wind generation figures for Europe as well as hourly electricity figures for many European countries.

As can be seen in the screenshot above, Denmark generated 94.9GWh worth of wind energy on May 27, which represented 108.1% of the country’s power demand.

Similarly, as representative of the day’s conditions, the share of wind energy in electricity demand for Western Europe was just under 24%.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-power- ... -in-a-row/


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