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Renewable Energy

Fighting Air Pollution With Innovation and Technology

written by Environmental News Network

Air pollution has become one of the world’s biggest threats to the future of our planet. Chronic air pollution shortens our lives and the lives of the ecology around us. In parts of Asia, where air pollution is most pervasive, food crops and other plants are exhibiting signs of stress due to low air quality.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released estimates on air pollution, revealed that there were 7 million recorded premature deaths attributed to air pollution in 2012, a number more than double previous estimates. WHO’s newly computed estimates confirm the placement of air pollution as the world’s most severe environmental health risk.

In response to this news many cities are being forced to look at new technologies and revisit older strategies. Initiatives to get people to use eco-friendly forms of transportation instead of automobiles have become more commonplace. Additionally the EPA has implemented stricter standards and enforced greater penalties on big polluters in an effort to curb the activity. These strategies have all been helpful but cities are recognizing that they need more and better technology to reverse the WHO’s daunting numbers. A few of these innovative technologies are highlighted here:

Billboards

University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) researchers from Peru have installed a billboard that dissolves pollutants in one of the most polluted parts of Lima. The billboard combines polluted air with water to actively dissolve the pollutants (such as bacteria, dust and germs), using basic thermodynamic principles in water. The residual is released release fresh air. A single billboard does the work of 1,200 trees, purifying 100,000 cubic meters (3.5 million cubic feet) of air daily.

NASA Air Filter

Indoor air can be far more polluted than outside air. NASA has created a filter-less air purification system called Airocide that removes the worst indoor air pollutants. Airocide eliminates virtually 100% of the harmful gasses emitted by home products called Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) out of the air.

Smog-eating Concrete

Italian chemist Luigi Cassar was recently recognized for his pollutant neutralizing cement coating. Cassar’s invention improves air quality and prevents buildings from discoloring as a result of heavy air pollutants. The cement mixture contains substances known as “photo catalysts” that use sunlight to break down the pollutants into less harmful substances. These are then washed away by rainwater thereby cleaning the concrete and surrounding air.

Buildings

This year’s eVolo Skyscraper Design Competition featured several pollution fighting concepts, including the Hyper Filter which is a structure located between skyscrapers in big cities. The Hyper Filter absorbs CO2 and other harmful gases releasing clear concentrated oxygen back into the atmosphere.

05/20/2014 0 comment

Water & Conservation

Industrial-Sized Rain Barrel Research in Washington State

written by Environmental News Network

In an effort to reduce the amount of polluted runoff reaching Puget Sound, the Port of Seattle is hosting a two-year study site for two unique metal boxes, which will bloom into rain gardens and help reduce pollutants.

“The Port of Seattle is working with many partners to restore Puget Sound.” said Commissioner Bill Bryant. “There is no single solution to saving Puget Sound, no silver bullet, but there are hundreds of different things we can do and this is one of them.”

Moving Green Infrastructure (MGIF) is a research/demonstration project to test the water quality performance of two innovative stormwater treatment techniques, a large “rain garden in a box” and a special soil mix with local, volcanic sands. Water quality from a roof in an industrial port area will be tested before and after going through the boxes to see how these two techniques perform. This research/demonstration project is part of growing efforts to reduce the amount of polluted runoff reaching Puget Sound, which is estimated to receive between 14 and 94 million pounds of toxic pollutants every year. Two large steel boxes, called Splash Boxxes, are being installed at Terminal 91. These boxes are a blend of rain garden and cistern, two practices referred to as low impact development, or LID.

“LID works,” said Amy Waterman of Gealogica, “resulting in 98-99% reduction in runoff volume and 83-99% reduction in key pollutants.”

The information from this study will help shed light on the potential for these bioretention planter boxes to improve water quality of polluted runoff in commercial/industrial areas and whether soil mixes used in rain gardens and bioswales could be improved. One box is going to have a unique soil mix with volcanic sands and the other will be a typical rain garden soil mix.

“We developed Splash Boxx for just this type of industrial application,” said David Hymel of Splash Boxx LLC. “We are very pleased to be able to provide the delivery system that tests an exciting new bio retention soil mix design.”

“King Conservation District in partnership with Seattle Public Utilities supported this project with a grant for $49,700 because we think it is important to explore innovative solutions for our stormwater issues,” said Sara Hemphill, Executive Director, King Conservation District.

The water going into each box from the roof runoff will be tested once a month during the rainy seasons for phosphorus, nitrogen, bacteria, zinc, and copper. Splash Boxxes are part of an innovative stormwater research and demonstration project funded by King Conservation District and managed by Sustainable Seattle through a contract with Gealogica LLC. The Port of Seattle is providing the site for two years.

05/13/2014 1 comment

Water & Conservation

In Search of Safe Drinking Water

written by Environmental News Network

Access to safe drinking water is a fundamental requirement for good health and is also a human right. WHO and UNICEF’s indicator is based upon the “use of an improved source”. The authors of a recent study into water contamination postulated that this did not account for water quality measurements or monitor global access to safe drinking water. Researchers Robert Bain and Jamie Bartram from The Water Institute at University of North Carolina sought to determine whether water from “improved” sources is less likely to contain fecal contamination than “unimproved” sources and to assess the extent to which contamination varies by source type and setting.

Studies from online databases published between 1990 and August 2013 in Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish were identified, including PubMed and Web of Science, and grey literature. Using this data, the researchers investigated the risk factors and settings where fecal contamination of water sources was most common.

Studies in low and middle income countries that assessed drinking water for the presence of Escherichia coli or thermotolerant coliforms (TTC) were included provided they associated results with a particular source type. In total 319 studies were included, reporting on 96,737 water samples. The odds of contamination within a given study were considerably lower for “improved” sources than “unimproved” sources.

However over a quarter of samples from improved sources contained fecal contamination in 38% of 191 studies. Water sources in low-income countries and rural areas were more likely to be contaminated. Thus, safety may be overestimated due to infrequent water sampling and deterioration in quality prior to consumption, having profound implications for public health policy.

These findings are important as WHO and UNICEF track progress towards the Millennium Development Goals water target using the indicator “use of an improved source”: this study shows that assuming that “improved” water sources are safe greatly overestimates the number of people thought to have access to water from a safe source, suggesting that a large proportion of the world’s population still use unsafe water.

Access to an “improved source”, such as piped water and bore holes provides a measure of sanitary protection but does not ensure water is free of fecal contamination nor is it consistent between source types or settings. International estimates therefore greatly overstate use of safe drinking water and do not fully reflect disparities in access. An enhanced monitoring strategy would combine indicators of sanitary protection with measures of water quality.

New Hopes for Getting the Lead Out of Solar

written by Environmental News Network

Solar energy is arguably our most viable low cost energy source. It is forever sustainable and easily captured and converted. But now the technology may have taken yet another leap forward. To date the foundational technology behind photovoltaics was a structure called perovskite, which has been made with lead. Using tin instead of lead perovskite as the harvester of light, a team of Northwestern University researchers has created a new solar cell with “good efficiency”. This good efficiency solar cell is low-cost, environmentally friendly and can be easily made using “bench” chemistry — no fancy equipment or hazardous materials.

“This is a breakthrough in taking the lead out of a very promising type of solar cell, called a perovskite,” said Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, an inorganic chemist and tin expert. “Tin is a very viable material, and we have shown the material does work as an efficient solar cell.”

Solar cells have typically used a structure called a perovskite made with lead as the light-absorbing material. The new solar cell is made with tin instead. Lead perovskite has achieved 15 percent efficiency. It is expected that tin perovskite will reenergize the field by matching and possibly surpassing that efficiency making them the “next big thing in photovoltaics”.

Kanatzidis developed, synthesized and analyzed the material and then turned to Northwestern collaborator and nanoscientist Robert P. H. Chang for help in engineering a solar cell that worked well.

“Our tin-based perovskite layer acts as an efficient sunlight absorber that is sandwiched between two electric charge transport layers for conducting electricity to the outside world,” said Chang. Details of the lead-free solar cell will be published May 4 by the journal Nature Photonics.

Kanatzidis touts their solid-state tin solar cell efficiency rating of just below 6 percent as a very good starting point. Two things make the material special: it can absorb most of the visible light spectrum, and the perovskite salt can be dissolved reforming upon solvent removal without heating.

“Other scientists will see what we have done and improve on our methods,” Kanatzidis said. “There is no reason this new material can’t reach an efficiency better than 15 percent, which is what the lead perovskite solar cell offers. Tin and lead are in the same group in the periodic table, so we expect similar results.”

Perovskite solar cells have only been around — and only in the lab — since 2008. In 2012, Kanatzidis and Chang reported the new tin perovskite solar cell with promises of higher efficiency and lower fabrication costs while being environmentally safe.

European Commission Official Calls for an End to Landfills

written by Environmental News Network

In a passionate call for change, Karl Falkenberg, European Commission Director-General for Environment calls for a closure of landfilling, as we know it. “Separate collection is very much at the heart of this circular economy – [but] we are coming to realize that separate collection is not enough,” said Falkenberg, the at a conference in Brussels on April 29th.

Falkenberg, speaking at the event hosted by TEPPFA, the European plastic pipes and fittings association, added that an EU-wide ban on landfilling would provide “security for recyclers”. The event was the first satellite event before Green Week, an annual conference on European environmental policy, which is to take place from 3 to 5 June, in Brussels.

This would encourage re-use or material recycling, or encourage waste management companies to transform waste into energy, through incineration.

“We need to close the easy door to landfilling,” he said, emphasizing the environmental damage and human health risks posed by this form of waste management.

“China is maybe the best demonstration of the environmental cost of our way of producing. How do we ensure that our air remains reasonably clear, that our drinking water is not making anyone sick? All of this makes real sense,” he said.

Plastic: ‘fantastic’ but ‘drastic’

Falkenberg’s directorate has focused much of its work on plastic, which has been referred to by the EU’s environment commissioner, Janez Potočnik, as both “fantastic”, due to its adaptability, but “drastic”, due to its environmental impact.

Last year the directorate carried out a public consultation on plastic waste, in which respondents called for greater collection and recycling rates and a ban on landfilling. Regulation is expected this year.

“Plastic is one of those materials that can be recycled over and over again. Streams in which we collect need to be organised for recycling,” said Falkenberg, also issuing a call to plastic producers to be careful that the materials that they use are amenable to recycling and do not pose a health risk.

The environment directorate is expected to release a target of 70% plastic recycling by 2020.

“We want clear messages that this is the direction that society is moving”, Falkenberg said, adding that this would allow “sound investment decisions”. “Those are the broad lines we are trying to develop for our circular economy,” he added.

Members of the plastic industry called for a regulatory framework that was “supportive rather than restrictive” of this goal.

05/05/2014 0 comment

Renewable Energy

Oil Underpinnings in Virunga National Park

written by Environmental News Network

Virunga National Park, classified as a World Heritage site sits amongst the Rwenzori Mountains on the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Its spectacular features include its most well known residents, hippos and mountain gorillas. It is believed to have more biological diversity than any other protected area in Africa, no doubt in large part due to its mountain forests, wetlands, savanna grassland, volcanoes and lakes.

Created by Belgian King Albert in 1925, the park has witnessed many tragedies and harbored much crime including heavy poaching, hunting, illegal mining and more.

More recently, in 2010, the DRC government defied international criticism to allocating 85 per cent of the park to oil interests. Oil and gas exploration company Soco, an offshoot of Snyder Oil Corporation in the U.S. believes that reserves currently being explored by several companies over the border in Uganda extend into the park.

More controversially, Soco claims that the oil, which is thought to be mostly under and around Lake Edward, can be extracted from Virunga without doing environmental harm. And the company suggests that its activities can “help raise living standards for local communities to levels sufficient to reduce their pressure and negative impacts on the protected area.” So far Soco says that it has improved a road, built a medical center, and installed a mobile phone mast at Nyakakoma, one of three legal fishing villages in the park.

The DRC government, whose state oil company has a 15% stake in the enterprise, reiterated its support for the oil exploration in a statement in March. This support extends to the government agency in charge of the park, the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN), which issued a permit to Soco allowing the oil-exploration activity.

The ICCN’s best-known employee, de Merode, has in the past publicly voiced opposition to exploiting oil in the park. But back in the capital city of Kinshasa, his bosses have issued Soco a permit to work there — effectively an exemption from a 1969 national law banning resource exploitation in national parks — and received a fee for doing so. Under DRC law, the ICCN is permitted to issue exemptions not only for scientific studies but also for projects deemed to be in the wider national interest.

Whatever the politics in the DRC, internationally there is little support for the idea of seeking oil in an iconic national park that was elevated to the status of a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979. UNESCO warned in 2011 of the “extremely harmful repercussions of this type of activity for the outstanding universal value of Virunga National Park.”

05/02/2014 1 comment

Renewable Energy

The EPA is Enhancing Sustainability: One Great Lake at a Time

written by Environmental News Network

Two Great Lakes Restoration Initiative grants were awarded on Friday totaling $1 million earmarked towards Chicago green infrastructure projects. The projects will improve water quality in Lake Michigan. The infrastructure projects will prevent stormwater from carrying contamination into Lake Michigan.

Great Lakes National Program Manager, Susan Hedman said. “Green infrastructure also helps to prevent flooding, which is occurring more often as a result of the increasingly frequent extreme precipitation events that have hit the Midwest in recent years — a pattern that may intensify as the result of climate change.”

These improvements will directly benefit residents, businesses and the environment. They will enhance Chicago’s overall Green Stormwater Infrastructure Strategy by improving the water and sewer systems, reducing flooding, enhancing sustainability.

“Lake Michigan is one of Chicago’s greatest assets, but it faces many challenges — from contaminated sediment to industrial pollutants to invasive species,” Sen. Dick Durbin said. “The Environmental Protection Agency has invested more than $70 million to ensure the lake stays beautiful and clean for years to come, and today’s announcement is the latest example of the federal government’s commitment to the lake. These grants will help stop almost 5 million gallons of untreated stormwater from running into the Chicago River and Lake Michigan, great news for the millions of Chicagoans who rely on the lake for drinking water or fishing.”

The city will use one grant ($812,000) to install bioswales and permeable pavement at Montrose Beach to filter over 4 million gallons of stormwater annually, greatly reducing the amount of contamination that would flow into Lake Michigan. The city will use the second grant ($188,000) to install green infrastructure in a neighborhood that drains toward the lakefront. This project will prevent almost 900,000 gallons of untreated stormwater from entering the City’s combined sewer system annually and ease basement flooding in nearby homes.

The projects will reduce flooding risk, improve the ability to treat stormwater and urban runoff at its source, and ensure the vital source of fresh water for millions of Chicagoans and it surrounding community. Chicago is among 16 cities to receive funding in the initial round of EPA’s new GLRI Shoreline Cities grant program. These grants can be used to fund up to 50 percent of the cost of green infrastructure projects on public property. Green infrastructure uses vegetation, soil and natural processes to hold and filter stormwater and melting snow preventing flooding and contamination from reaching surface water and groundwater resources. The first round of projects includes rain gardens, bioswales, green roofs, porous pavement, greenways, constructed wetlands, stormwater tree trenches and other measures to improve water quality in the Great Lakes basin.

Read more at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Article by Robin Blackstone.

04/30/2014 1 comment

Renewable Energy

The Andes’ Pulsating Rise

written by Environmental News Network

New research by Carmala Garzione, Earth and Environmental Sciences professor from the University of Rochester suggests that the Antiplano plateau in the central Andes Mountains along with the entire mountain range likely arose in a series of periodic rapid pulses instead of a more continuous gradual surface uplift. According to Garzione, “In geologic terms, rapid means rising one kilometer or more over several millions of years, which is very impressive.”

Researchers have known that as the Nazca oceanic plate slid under the South American continental plate, the Andes mountain range has risen. This process has made the Earth’s crust fold and fault thus shortening and thickening it. Scientists were left wondering about the process and its speed.

Beginning in 2006, Garzione and her team estimated mountain uplift speed by measuring the ancient surface temperatures and rainfall compositions preserved in the soils of the Altiplano plateau in Bolivia and Peru. The plateau sits about 12,000 feet above sea level. Garzione concluded that portions of the dense lower crust and upper mantle act as the crust’s anchor, periodically detaching and sinking through the mantle as the thickened continental plate heats up. Detachment allows the lower-density upper crust to rebound and rise more quickly.

More recently, Garzione and Andrew Leier, assistant professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of South Carolina, used a relatively new temperature-recording technique in two separate studies in different regions of the Andes to determine whether pulses of rapid surface uplift are the norm, or the exception, for mountain formation of mountain.

Garzione and Leier each independently focused on the bonding behavior of carbon and oxygen isotopes in the mineral calcite precipitated from rainwater; their results were similar.

Garzione worked in the southern Altiplano, collecting climate records preserved in ancient soils from low elevations where temperatures remained warm, and at high elevations where temperatures should have cooled as the mountains rose. The calcite found in the soil contains both the lighter isotopes of carbon and oxygen—12C and 16O—as well as the rare heavier isotopes—13C and 18O. Paleo-temperature estimates from calcite rely on the fact that heavy isotopes form stronger bonds. At lower temperatures, where atoms vibrate more slowly, the heavy isotope 13C-18O bonds would be more difficult to break, resulting in a higher concentration of 13C-18O bonds in calcite, compared to warmer temperatures. By measuring the abundance of heavy isotope bonds in both low and high elevation (warm) sites over time, Garzione used the difference to estimate the elevation of various layers of ancient soils at specific points in time.

Read more at the University of Rochester.

Article by Robin Blackstone.

04/24/2014 0 comment

Renewable Energy

New Data on What Greenland Was Like Almost 3 Million Years Ago

written by Environmental News Network

Glaciers and ice sheets are commonly thought to work like a belt sander. As they move over the land they scrape off everything — vegetation, soil and even the top layer of bedrock. So a team of university scientists and a NASA colleague were greatly surprised to discover an ancient tundra landscape preserved under the Greenland Ice Sheet, below two miles of ice.

“We found organic soil that has been frozen to the bottom of the ice sheet for 2.7 million years,” said University of Vermont geologist and lead author Paul Bierman. The finding provides strong evidence that the Greenland Ice Sheet has persisted much longer than previously known, enduring through many past periods of global warming.

Greenland is a place of great interest to scientists and policymakers because the future stability of its huge ice sheet — the size of Alaska — will have a fundamental influence on how fast and high global sea levels rise from human-caused climate change.

“The ancient soil under the Greenland ice sheet helps to unravel an important mystery surrounding climate change,” said Dylan Rood, a co-author on the new study, from the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre and the University of California, Santa Barbara. “How did big ice sheets melt and grow in response to changes in temperature?”

The new discovery indicates that even during the warmest periods since the ice sheet formed, the center of Greenland remained stable. “It’s likely that it did not fully melt at any time,” Bierman said. This allowed a tundra landscape to be locked away, unmodified, under ice through millions of years of global warming and cooling.

“Some ice sheet models project that the Greenland Ice Sheet completely melted during previous interglacial periods. These data suggest that did not happen,” said co-author Tom Neumann, a cryospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We don’t know how much of the ice sheet remained — to estimate it, we’d have to study other ice cores in Greenland that have sediment in the bottom to see if ancient soil is preserved under those sites as well.”

The scientists tested seventeen samples of “dirty ice” — ice with sediment mixed in — from the bottommost 40 feet of the 10,019-foot GISP2 ice core extracted from Summit, Greenland, in 1993. From this sediment, Bierman and a team at the University of Vermont’s Cosmogenic Nuclide Laboratory extracted a rare form of the element beryllium, an isotope called beryllium-10. Formed by cosmic rays, it falls from the sky and sticks to rock and soil. The longer soil is exposed at Earth’s surface, the more beryllium-10 it accumulates. Measuring how much is in soil or a rock gives geologists a kind of exposure clock.

Photo shows a piece of the GISP2 ice core that the researchers analyzed for the isotope beryllium-10, showing silt and sand embedded in ice. Soon after this picture was taken, the ice was crushed in the University of Vermont clean lab and the sediment was isolated for analysis.

The researchers expected to only find soil eroded from glacier-scoured bedrock in the sediment at the bottom of the ice core. But the silt they did find had very high concentrations of beryllium-10 when the team measured it on a particle accelerator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, Calif.

Article by Roger Greenway

04/21/2014 0 comment

Renewable Energy

Moth Study Reveals Hidden Climate Change Impacts

written by Environmental News Network

More and more studies are reporting climate change as the main culprit for not only species adaptation, but also for changes in population size. But a new study shows that population increases or decreases cannot only be attributed to increasingly warmer weather and that multiple factors play a role when it comes to species population.

A 32-year study of subarctic forest moths provides insight on how roles of ecological forces can affect populations, proving increased precipitation and warmer temperatures affects the rate of population growth.

“Every time the weather was particularly warm or particularly wet, it had a negative impact on the rates at which the populations grew,” said Mark Hunter, the Henry A. Gleason Collegiate Professor in the University of Michigan Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

“Yet, overall, most of these moth populations are either stable or increasing, so the only possibility is that something else other than climate change—some other factor that we did not measure—is buffering the moths from substantial population reductions and masking the negative effects of climate change.”

If unknown ecological forces are helping to counteract the harmful effects of climate change on these moths, it’s conceivable that a similar masking of impacts is happening elsewhere. If that’s the case, then scientists are likely underestimating the harmful effects of climate change on animals and plants, Hunter said.

Hunter and six Finnish colleagues report their findings in a paper published in the journal Global Change Biology.

Between 1978 and 2009, Finnish scientists used light traps at night to catch 388,779 moths from 456 species at the Värriö Strict Nature Reserve, 155 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Hunter used a statistical technique to examine how various ecological forces, including climate, affected per capita population growth.

Most recent studies of moth abundance have shown population declines. So Hunter and his colleagues were surprised to find that 90 percent of the moth species in the Lapland study were either stable or increasing.

On one level, the results can be viewed as a good news climate story: In the face of a rapid environmental change, these moths appear to be thriving, suggesting that they are more resilient than scientists had expected, Hunter said.

However, the study also reveals that unknown ecological forces appear to be buffering the harmful effects of climate change and hiding those impacts from view. The results demonstrate that “simple temporal changes in population abundance cannot always be used to estimate effects of climate change on the dynamics of organisms,” the authors conclude.

Read more at the University of Michigan.

Article by Allison Winter.

04/16/2014 0 comment

Renewable Energy

New Process Turns Tree Cellulose into Building Block for Supercapacitors

written by Environmental News Network

Scientists at Oregon State University have found a way to convert tree cellulose into high-tech energy storage devices. Because cellulose is a key component of trees and the most abundant organic polymer on earth this discovery will have a profound impact in industry. Scientists were able to heat the tree cellulose in a furnace in the presence of ammonia to create the building block for supercapacitors for use in industrial electronic applications. Supercapacitors are extraordinarily, high-power energy devices for which production has been held back by cost and difficulty in producing high-quality carbon electrodes.

The new approach just discovered at OSU can produce nitrogen-doped, nanoporous carbon membranes — the electrodes of a supercapacitor — at low cost, quickly, in an environmentally benign process. The only byproduct is methane, which could be used immediately as a fuel or for other purposes.

“The ease, speed and potential of this process is really exciting,” said Xiulei (David) Ji, an assistant professor of chemistry in the OSU College of Science, and lead author on a study announcing the discovery in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

“For the first time we’ve proven that you can react cellulose with ammonia and create these N-doped nanoporous carbon membranes,” Ji said. “It’s surprising that such a basic reaction was not reported before. Not only are there industrial applications, but this opens a whole new scientific area, studying reducing gas agents for carbon activation.

“We’re going to take cheap wood and turn it into a valuable high-tech product,” he said.

These carbon membranes at the nano-scale are extraordinarily thin — a single gram of them can have a surface area of nearly 2,000 square meters. That’s part of what makes them useful in supercapacitors. And the new process used to do this is a single-step reaction that’s fast and inexpensive. It starts with something about as simple as a cellulose filter paper — conceptually similar to the disposable paper filter in a coffee maker.

The exposure to high heat and ammonia converts the cellulose to a nanoporous carbon material needed for supercapacitors, and should enable them to be produced, in mass, more cheaply than before.

A supercapacitor is a type of energy storage device, but it can be recharged much faster than a battery and has a great deal more power. They are mostly used in any type of device where rapid power storage and short, but powerful energy release is needed.

American’s Energy Usage Jumps in 2013

written by Environmental News Network

Despite many individual efforts to decrease energy usage for 2013 increased by 2.3 Quadrillion thermal units over the previous year. These statistics have been monitored and presented by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the most recent energy flow charts measuring renewable, fossil and even nuclear energy.

The annual flow charts are generated by the LLNL and illustrate the nation’s consumption and use of energy. The Laboratory also has released a companion chart illustrating the nation’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. Americans’ carbon dioxide emissions increased to 5,390 million metric tons, the first annual increase since 2010.

Wind energy continued to grow strongly, increasing 18 percent from 1.36 quadrillion BTUs, or quads, in 2012 to 1.6 quads in 2013 (a BTU or British Thermal Unit is a unit of measurement for energy; 3,400 BTU is equivalent to about 1 kilowatt-hr). New wind farms continue to come on line with bigger, more efficient turbines. Most new wind turbines can generate 2 to 2.5 megawatts of power.

Natural gas prices rose slightly in 2013, reversing some of the recent shift from coal to gas in the electricity production sector. Although this did cause carbon dioxide emissions to increase in 2013, “the power industry is building a lot of natural gas plants,” said A.J. Simon, group leader for Energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Gas plants are cheaper than coal plants. Natural gas is going to be a winner into the foreseeable future.”

Overall natural gas use increased by 0.6 quads. Losses in the electricity sector were more than offset by greater gas use in the residential, commercial and industrial sectors. “2013 was a cold winter,” Simon said. “We expect to see continued high gas consumption in 2014, due to another tough winter on the East Coast.”

Nuclear energy was greater in 2013 than in 2012. “The use of nuclear energy fluctuates a little from year to year,” Simon said. “It’s likely that in 2013, fewer reactors were down for refueling than in previous years.” However, a few of the nation’s about 100 reactors have recently closed for good, such as the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Pendleton, Calif.

The transportation sector is using more renewable energy, specifically biomass that is converted to ethanol. “This has been going up over time,” Simon said. “We’re expecting the fraction of biomass in transportation to remain relatively steady.”

The majority of energy use in 2013 was used for electricity generation (38.2 quads), followed by transportation, industrial, residential and commercial. Energy use in the residential, commercial transportation and industrial sectors all increased slightly.

Read more at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

04/03/2014 0 comment

Renewable Energy

Cost of Agriculture Related Emissions Outweigh Benefits

written by Environmental News Network

Revenues associated with ammonia pollution generated by agriculture for export equate to higher than expected health care costs according to Harvard researchers Fabien Paulot and Daniel Jacob. The NASA funded study used computer models to identify harmful ammonia emissions created by the interaction of agriculturally generated ammonia in the atmosphere. It calculates health costs associated with harmful agricultural emissions to be $36 billion a year — equal to about half the revenue generated by those same exports — or $100 per kilogram of ammonia.

The new estimate is about double the current estimate by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which suggests a cost of $47 per kilogram of ammonia. The scientists say the new estimate is on the high end of the spectrum, which reflects the need for more research into characterizing the relationship between agricultural ammonia emissions and the formation of the harmful fine particulate matter — a relationship that’s not as straightforward as previous estimates assumed.

“The effect of ammonia on fine particulate is complex, and we believe that the models previously used in the United States to price ammonia emissions have not captured this well,” Paulot said.

Manure from livestock and fertilizer for crops release ammonia to the atmosphere. In the air, ammonia mixes with other emissions to form microscopic airborne particles, or particulates. The particulates that pose the greatest health risk are those that measure no more than 2.5 micrometers across, or about 1/30 the width of a human hair, which when inhaled can become lodged deep within the lungs. Long-term exposure has been linked to heart and lung diseases and even death. As such, the particles are on the list of six common air pollutants regulated by EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

An increase in ammonia, however, does not translate to an equal increase in particulates. The relationship depends on meteorology as well as the concentration of other precursors to particulate formation, such as sulfate and nitric acid.

To clarify the effect of ammonia on fine particulates, Paulot and Jacob first modeled the agricultural sources of ammonia emissions utilizing a relatively new ammonia emissions inventory. Next they used the NASA GEOS-Chem model of atmospheric composition to simulate the complex chemistry that converts agricultural emissions — in this case ammonia — into fine particulate matter.

This information was then combined with food export data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, averaged from 2000 to 2009. Results show that U.S. food exports account for 11 percent of the total U.S. emissions of ammonia.

World’s River Systems Are Stressed Out

written by Environmental News Network

According to the World Resources Institute (WRI) many, if not most of the world’s rivers are stressed. Determining a systems water stress is based upon measuring the ratio of total water withdrawals to the available renewable supplies within the catchment area. Rivers are an indispensible resource for our communities and ecosystems and we are hugely dependent upon them for agriculture, industry and our natural systems. A stressed river system can severely threaten regional water security and economic growth, and potentially contribute to political instability—especially in the absence of an adequate water management plan.

In addition to water volume removal resulting from over development, rivers are also increasingly faced with nutrient and chemical pollution, flooding and droughts, and human engineered adjustments further exacerbating the crisis mounting in our watersheds.

To address the issue, WRI sponsored the Aqueduct project to evaluate, map and score the world’s one hundred largest river systems affecting 180 nations. Their project defined a high stress system as one that exhibits withdrawal of greater than 40 percent of the available supply every year and an extremely high-stress system exceeds 80 percent. They found that eighteen of the “extremely high” stressed river basins traversed across countries that constitute $U.S. 27 trillion in GDP—clearly the crisis is affecting a lot of people.

Listed by highest population, the river systems exhibiting the highest water stress levels are as follows:

Qom River (Namak Lake) in Iran, Yongding He River in China, Brantas River in Indonesia, Harirud River in Afghanistan, Tuhai He River in China, Sabarmati River in India, Helmand River in Afghanistan, Sirdaryo River in Asia, Rio Maipo in Chile, the Dead Sea in Jordan, Solo River (Bengawan Solo) in Indonesia, the Indus River in Asia, Daliao He River in China, the Colorado River in the United States, the Palar River in India, the Bravo River (Rio Grande) in the United States, Liao He River in China and Huang He (Yellow River) in China.

River basin stress management is vital for our planet’s future. Yet successful management is dependent upon understanding, cooperation and proactive cohesive response from all stakeholders including government, industry and civilians. Using WRI’s maps and assessments communities and governments can make better high-level decisions for more targeted response.