New Florence. New Renaissance.

Greening old buildings

BlocPower is a Brooklyn-based start-up that has “greened” more than 1,200 buildings in New York City and has similar projects in two dozen other cities. It uses a lease-to-own platform, offering landlords and homeowners green heating and cooling systems, electric appliances and solar panels. It installs the equipment and manages its upkeep. Landlords make monthly payments that cover those costs and offer returns to investors.

The company reports it has reduced building energy costs by 30% to 50% and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 40% to 70% in current projects. It says it can reduce U.S. greenhouse gases up to 25% in 10 years and recapture up to 30% of the millions of dollars in wasted energy spent.

CNBC

 

 

Shipping Carbon Dioxide

 

Shipping Carbon Dioxide

Early in February, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced that they will build the world’s first ship for transporting carbon dioxide solely from carbon-capture facilities. The demonstration ship, which will be able to haul 1,450 cubic meters of liquefied CO2, is scheduled to be operational by late 2023.

The Japanese shipbuilding giant joins a list of ambitious projects that plan to ship CO2 from the power plants and factories where it’s emitted to sites where the gas can be used or permanently stored. By providing a cost-effective option to transport the greenhouse gas, CO2 shipping could provide an impetus for large-scale deployment of carbon-capture utilization and storage (CCUS).

IEEE Spectrum

Here is a Norwegian version of storing and shipping CO2 - Northern Lights

 

Supercritical geothermal energy

Quaise Energy, a geothermal energy company born from MIT, has set its sights on harnessing the unlimited renewable energy that exists beneath the earth’s surface. To do so, Quaise plans on drilling holes at least twice as deep as the deepest holes ever created (i.e. Russia’s Kola Superdeep Borehole and Qatar’s Al Shaheen oil well, each of which sit at about 7.5 miles deep), which, according to CEO Carlos Araque, would generate power “at a scale far greater than wind and solar.”.

Extremetech

More on Carbon Capture

Occidental Petroleum Corp., the shale giant backed by Warren Buffett, plans to build 70 carbon capture facilities around the world by 2035 that will each remove as much as 1 million tons per year of the greenhouse gas directly from the atmosphere.

Bloomberg

Here is more on other carbon capture and storage initiatives, and the challenges. It describes some of the technology Oxy will be using.

Hydrogen-fired train

The company, formally East Japan Railway, will begin safety testing on the two-car Hybari train in late March. Plans are to start commercial service in 2030.

Hybari runs off hydrogen fuel cells and batteries. Hydrogen is supplied from tanks to a fuel cell system, and a chemical reaction with oxygen in the air generates electricity. The batteries store energy generated when the brakes are applied.

Nikkei Asia

Video on principles of such trains are designed

Relocating farmland to increase carbon capture

Scientists have produced a map showing where the world's major food crops should be grown to maximize yield and minimize environmental impact. This would capture large amounts of carbon, increase biodiversity, and cut agricultural use of freshwater to zero.

The reimagined world map of agriculture includes large new farming areas for many major crops around the cornbelt in the mid-western US, and below the Sahara desert. Huge areas of farmland in Europe and India would be restored to natural habitat.

The redesign—assuming high-input, mechanized farming—would cut the carbon impact of global croplands by 71%, by allowing land to revert to its natural, forested state. This is the equivalent of capturing twenty years' worth of our current net CO₂ emissions. Trees capture carbon as they grow, and also enable more carbon to be captured by the soil than when crops are grown in it.

Phys.org

Image Credit – Nature

 

 

Tesla’s Megapacks in Alaska

Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula has historically relied on gas turbines to distribute power to the community up to four months out of the year. To reduce the community’s reliance on fossil fuels to power the turbines, Homer Electric installed 37 Tesla Megapacks, providing grid stability even in freezing temperatures.

Electrek

 

Creative uses of captured C02

The WSJ describes how captured CO2 will yield useful daily products including vodka

Air Company, a Brooklyn-based startup, uses photosynthesis-inspired technology to create vodka distilled from CO2-derived products. It first creates hydrogen from water using a process known as electrolysis, before feeding it into a reactor alongside CO2 captured from ethanol plants in the Northeast, the company says. The gases then go over a catalyst, says Stafford Sheehan, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. The resulting mixture of ethanol and water is distilled into vodka, Dr. Sheehan says. The company estimates that producing one liter of vodka takes a pound of CO2 out of the air.

More on Air Company and plans beyond vodka

 

Synthetic Biology for Carbon-Negative Chemicals

Acetone and isopropanol have a combined market value of over $10 billion (£7.4 billion). They are widely used as industrial solvents and to make plastics, including acrylic glass and polypropylene. However, they depend on fossil fuel-derived hydrocarbons, resulting in significant carbon emissions during their production.

Michael Jewett’s lab at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, working with LanzaTech, a carbon-capture company based in the same state, used synthetic biology to develop the first sustainable and scalable carbon-negative approach for producing acetone and isopropanol.

Chemistry World

Video on computational synthetic biology at Northwestern U

ML catalogs global solar farms

"Colleagues and I have now published in the journal Nature the first global inventory of large solar energy generating facilities. “Large” in this case refers to facilities that generate at least 10 kilowatts when the sun is at its peak (a typical small residential rooftop installation has a capacity of around 5 kilowatts).

We built a machine learning system to detect these facilities in satellite imagery and then deployed the system on over 550 terabytes of imagery using several human lifetimes of computing.

We searched almost half of Earth’s land surface area, filtering out remote areas far from human populations. In total we detected 68,661 solar facilities. Using the area of these facilities, and controlling for the uncertainty in our machine learning system, we obtain a global estimate of 423 gigawatts of installed generating capacity at the end of 2018. This is very close to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) estimate of 420 GW for the same period."

Singularity Hub