Energy & the Environment News and Discussions

weatheriscool
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Biden announces historic oil reserve release, along with other steps, to reduce gas prices
Source: CNN

(CNN)President Joe Biden is announcing an unprecedented release of oil from US reserves and taking steps to punish oil companies for not increasing production from unused leases on federal land, the White House says. The steps are an attempt to reduce gas prices while also putting an onus on oil companies to increase supply. The dramatic step confronts what has become a looming political problem months ahead of the midterm elections.

"After consultation with allies and partners, the President will announce the largest release of oil reserves in history, putting one million additional barrels on the market per day on average -- every day -- for the next six months," the White House said. "The scale of this release is unprecedented: The world has never had a release of oil reserves at this 1 million per day rate for this length of time. This record release will provide a historic amount of supply to serve as bridge until the end of the year when domestic production ramps up."

The release would amount to 180 million barrels of oil. Biden earlier in the month announced a coordinated release of oil from the reserves in conjunction with other nations. He also released around 60 million barrels in November, which he said at the time was the largest release from the reserve in US history. Neither move had a significant effect on gas prices, which have continued to rise as global limits on Russian energy exports have caused prices to spike.

The United States consumes around 20 million barrels of oil per day, with global consumption hovering around 100 million barrels. Biden's planned releases would put more oil on the global market, potentially bringing down costs.The President is also calling on Congress to "make companies pay fees on wells from their leases that they haven't used in years and on acres of public lands that they are hoarding without producing." For months, the Biden administration has publicly pushed back on the idea that regulations are holding oil producers back from more domestic production, pointing to millions of acres worth of land with approved permits for oil and gas production.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/30/politics ... index.html
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Global team of scientists determine 'fingerprint' for how much heat, drought is too much for forests
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-global-te ... ought.html
by University of Florida
How hot is too hot, and how dry is too dry, for the Earth's forests? A new study from an international team of researchers found the answers—by looking at decades of dying trees.

Just published in the journal Nature Communications, the study compiles the first global database of precisely georeferenced forest die-off events, at 675 locations dating back to 1970. The study, which encompasses all forested continents, then compares that information to existing climate data to determine the heat and drought climatic conditions that caused these documented tree mortality episodes.

"In this study, we're letting the Earth's forests do the talking," said William Hammond, a University of Florida plant ecophysiologist who led the study. "We collected data from previous studies documenting where and when trees died, and then analyzed what the climate was during mortality events, compared to long-term conditions."

After performing the climate analysis on the observed forest mortality data, Hammond noted, a pattern emerged.
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3D-printed heat exchanger 'more efficient' than conventional designs
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-3d- ... ional.html
by University of Glasgow
A new type of lightweight, 3D-printed heat exchanger with a maze-like design is more compact and efficient than its conventional counterparts, its developers say.

A team led by engineers from the University of Glasgow have developed the system, which exploits the unique properties of microscale surfaces to create a high-performance heat exchanger.

Heat exchangers, devices which transfer heat between fluids without mixing them, have a wide range of practical applications. Heat exchangers which transfer thermal energy between fluids are used in systems including refrigeration, fuel cells and the types of internal combustion engines used in cars and aircrafts.

In a new paper published in Applied Thermal Engineering, the researchers describe how they developed and built the prototype system, which they estimate to be 50% more effective than a market-leading conventional heat exchanger despite being one-tenth of its size.

The system owes its effectiveness to the design of architected surfaces over which liquids flow through the exchanger. The cube-shaped exchanger draws water through a core studded with tiny holes arranged in a gyroid configuration.
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Organic semiconductor-based nanoparticles with long-lasting reactive charges
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-04-sem ... ctive.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore
Due to their advantageous properties, organic semiconductors could be very promising photocatalysts for producing solar fuels. In fact, these materials can be synthetically tuned to absorb visible light, while simultaneously retaining energy levels that are desirable for driving various processes. While photocatalysts based on organic semiconductors have attained promising results, the understanding of the physics underpinning their functioning is still relatively limited.

Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Imperial College London and the University of Oxford have been trying to develop organic semiconductor-based photocatalysts that can efficiently harvest solar energy and could thus be used to produce hydrogen more sustainably. Their most recent paper, published in Nature Energy, shows that heterojunction organic semiconductor nanoparticles can generate remarkably long-lasting reactive charges, thus they could efficiently drive sacrificial hydrogen evolution.

"We chose to use organic semiconductors to fabricate our photocatalysts because their bandgaps can be synthetically tuned to absorb strongly in the visible spectrum," Jan Kosco, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "All else being equal, the more light a photocatalyst absorbs, the more efficiently it can convert solar energy to hydrogen."

Most stable photocatalysts fabricated from inorganic semiconductors, such as TiO2 and SrTiO3 almost exclusively absorb UV wavelengths and have little to no activity under visible light. This can be problematic, as less than 5% of solar energy is carried via UV wavelengths. This fundamentally limits the efficiency of these inorganic semiconductor-based photocatalysts to less than 5%.

Kosco and his colleagues set out to explore the potential of organic semiconductors for driving hydrogen evolution and the photophysics underpinning their functioning further. Their study builds on their previous work on bulk heterojunction organic semiconductor nanoparticle photocatalysts.
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Detectable levels of uranium found in two-thirds of U.S. water systems

UPI, Health Daily, April 8, 2022
Two-thirds of U.S. community water systems have detectable levels of uranium, and the highest levels are in Hispanic communities, according to a new study.

"Previous studies have found associations between chronic uranium exposure and increased risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, kidney damage and lung cancer at high levels of exposure," said researcher Anne Nigra, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.

Even at low concentrations, uranium, a radioactive metal, is an important risk factor for chronic diseases, but there has been little research on chronic uranium exposure from tap water. About 90% of Americans rely on community water systems.

To learn more, Nigra's team analyzed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency records for 139,000 public water systems that serve 290 million people a year.

Between 2000 and 2011, 2.1% of those water systems had average annual uranium concentrations that exceeded EPA maximums. Uranium was detected in water systems 63% of the time during compliance monitoring.
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2022/04 ... 649426293/
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Biden waiving ethanol rule in bid to lower gasoline prices

PUBLISHED TUE, APR 12 2022 5:41 AM EDT

KEY POINTS
-- President Joe Biden is visiting corn-rich Iowa on Tuesday to announce he’ll suspend a federal rule preventing the sale of higher ethanol blend gasoline this summer as his administration tries to tamp down prices at the pump that have spiked during Russia’s war with Ukraine.
-- The Environmental Protection Agency will issue an emergency waiver to allow widespread sale of 15% ethanol blend that is usually prohibited between June 1 and Sept. 15 because of concerns that it adds to smog in high temperatures.
-- Senior Biden administration officials said the move will save drivers an average of 10 cents per gallon at 2,300 gas stations.
-- Members of Congress from both parties, as well as industry groups, had urged Biden to grant the E15 waiver.

President Joe Biden is visiting corn-rich Iowa on Tuesday to announce he’ll suspend a federal rule preventing the sale of higher ethanol blend gasoline this summer as his administration tries to tamp down prices at the pump that have spiked during Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Most gasoline sold in the U.S. is blended with 10% ethanol. The Environmental Protection Agency will issue an emergency waiver to allow widespread sale of 15% ethanol blend that is usually prohibited between June 1 and Sept. 15 because of concerns that it adds to smog in high temperatures.

Senior Biden administration officials said the move will save drivers an average of 10 cents per gallon at 2,300 gas stations. Industry groups say most of those stations are in the Midwest and the South, including Texas. ... Biden is to announce the move at a biofuel company in Menlo, west of Des Moines. Iowa is the country’s largest producer of corn, key to producing ethanol.

The waiver is another effort to help ease global energy markets that have been rocked since Russia invaded Ukraine. Last month, the president announced the U.S. will release 1 million barrels of oil per day from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve over the next six months. His administration said that has helped to slightly reduce gas prices lately, after they climbed to an average of about $4.23 a gallon by the end of March, compared with $2.87 at the same time a year ago, according to AAA. ... Members of Congress from both parties, as well as industry groups, had urged Biden to grant the E15 waiver.

{snip}
Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/biden-w ... rices.html
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Interior Department to resume oil and gas leasing, charge higher fees
Source: Washington Post
As pressure increases on the Biden administration to lower the price of fuel, the Interior Department announced on Friday plans to hold its first onshore oil and gas lease sales since President Biden took office.

The department said it plans put 144,000 acres up for lease in the coming months and will charge oil and gas companies higher royalties to drill on federal land, raising the fees for the first time. Under the plans unveiled Friday, royalty rates would increase to 18.75 percent from 12.5 percent for oil and gas lease sales.

The long-awaited announcement follows a report the department issued last fall, which called for royalty fees to be more in line with the higher rates charged by most private landowners and major oil- and gas-producing states. The Biden administration’s willingness to move forward with oil and gas leasing angered climate activists, who called the department’s plans a betrayal of the president’s pledge to ban new drilling on public lands.

According to the latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued last week, the world is on pace to burn through its remaining “carbon budge”” by 2030 — putting the ambitious goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) out of reach. Drilling on federal land and offshore is responsible for almost a quarter of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... gas-lease/
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Cheaper Hydrogen Fuel Cell Could Mean Better Green Energy Options
April 25, 2022

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/950216

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Imperial (College London) researchers have developed a hydrogen fuel cell that uses iron instead of rare and costly platinum, enabling greater use of the technology.

Hydrogen fuel cells convert hydrogen to electricity with water vapour as the only by-product, making them an attractive green alternative for portable power, particularly for vehicles.

However, their widespread use has been hampered in part by the cost of one of the primary components. To facilitate the reaction that produces the electricity, the fuel cells rely on a catalyst made of platinum, which is expensive and scarce.

Now, a European team led by Imperial College London researchers has created a catalyst using only iron, carbon, and nitrogen – materials that are cheap and readily available – and shown that it can be used to operate a fuel cell at high power. Their results are published today in Nature Catalysis.

Lead researcher Professor Anthony Kucernak, from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial, said: “Currently, around 60% of the cost of a single fuel cell is the platinum for the catalyst. To make fuel cells a real viable alternative to fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, for example, we need to bring that cost down.
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weatheriscool
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Analyzing bird population declines due to renewable power sources in California
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-bird-popu ... wable.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of researchers affiliated with a large number of institutions in the U.S. has attempted to determine the vulnerability of bird populations to alternative energy production. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes studying the impact on bird populations in California.

While touted as green technology, alternative energy sources are not always Earth friendly. Production of solar panels, for example, results in pollution emitted into the environment. More widely known are the adverse impacts of wind and solar farms on animals, particularly birds. Birds can be killed when they try to fly through the rotating blades of wind turbines and they can die from overheating when they fly over large solar farms. They can also die due to displacement from their natural environment. In this new effort, the researchers veered from simply counting the number of birds that are killed by alternative power sources and looked instead to gauge the impact of the combined toll that alternative power plants are taking on populations of vulnerable bird species in California.
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