There’s an old saw in the trash business that says, “everybody wants their trash picked up but nobody wants it put down.”
That’s not a perfect analogy for what’s happening with renewable-energy projects in New York and New England but the sentiment behind it is familiar.
Someday, U.S. electrical power generation may come from 100% renewable energy consisting almost entirely of wind and solar. But predictions of that happening within 10 or 20 years are unrealistic. There are simply too many obstacles standing in the way, among them: the massive investment of capital that would be required, the disruption of entire industries, technical challenges, and considerable societal and environmental impacts.
Capturing carbon dioxide from the fossil-fuel industry is key to slowing dangerous global warming, energy chiefs said in Davos as climate concerns dominated the annual business forum more than ever before.
Oil and gas producers are under mounting pressure to help prevent a damaging rise in temperatures, and carbon capture is increasingly luring investors as a tool to curb emissions.
A greenhouse gas that can cause 12,000 times more warming per tonne than carbon dioxide is rising unexpectedly in the atmosphere, despite reports by its major producers, China and India, that they've mostly eliminated emissions of the gas.
Atmospheric gas measurements at five stations around the world show that emissions of HFC-23 or trifluoromethane reached a record high in 2018 of 15,900 tonnes, reports a study led by Kieran Stanley, a visiting research fellow at the University of Bristol.
University of Alberta researchers have developed techniques that save a significant amount of time in developing more efficient carbon capture technologies, which may help lower the costs to use the technologies and increase their adoption as a way to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions.
U of A engineering professor Arvind Rajendran and his team developed a two-step screening process that assesses carbon capture materials called zeolites in seconds rather than a day.
WASHINGTON - Almost two years after Congress passed a law more than doubling tax credits for power and industrial plants that build systems to prevent carbon dioxide emissions, efforts to begin construction are on hold.
Companies have announced plans to build more than 20 so-called carbon capture facilities, but all are waiting for the Internal Revenue Service to issue guidance on the specifics of how the tax credit can be claimed.
As we ring in the new decade, it has become ever more apparent that the next ten years will be crucial to leaping on decarbonization efforts. Time is not on our side. We cannot favor one technology over another. An all-of-the-above approach is necessary. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies must be part of the portfolio of solutions to decrease emissions from energy-intensive sectors and existing infrastructure, as well as remove CO2 already present in the atmosphere.
