processing

Reducing Emissions From Natural Gas Processing

December 4, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Qatar, a small country in the Middle East with a population of about 2.5 million has the highest per capita income of any country in the world. This is largely a result of being one of the world’s top producers of natural gas. The upshot of that is that the tiny country has the dubious honor of being the world’s leading emitter of CO2 per capita.

Texas A&M University has a campus in Qatar and researchers there in collaboration with colleagues at the main campus in College Station, Texas have developed a new reactor technology that can help Qatar process its wealth of natural gas while reducing the country’s carbon footprint.

The technology processes natural gas and captured CO2 to produce both syngas – which is a valuable precursor for many products – and high-quality carbon nanotubes, all without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.

Natural gas reforming is a process by which syngas – a feedstock for liquid hydrocarbons and ultraclean fuels- is produced. The process requires lots of heat and emits CO2. The new technology adds a novel CARGEN (or CARbon GENerator) reactor that advances the natural gas reforming process and includes a catalyst that captures the CO2 emissions and produces nanotubes. The reactor can be driven by either electric or solar power, eliminating the need to burn fuel that ordinarily results in more carbon emissions.

The result is that Qatar’s CO2 emissions would be converted into two products that are important to its economy. In particular, carbon nanotubes are very expensive and extremely versatile, and can be used to manufacture products such as computers and other high-quality materials.

The next step for the researchers is to partner with industry collaborators to further scale up the technology.

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Qatar Researchers Develop Natural Gas Processing Technology That Could Reduce Qatar’s Carbon Footprint

Photo, posted September 30, 2012, courtesy of Jimmy Baikovicius via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

China And Plastic Waste

April 26, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

In January 2018, China enacted its “National Sword” policy which banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that country’s recycling processors. Those processors had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. China took this step because the deluge of soiled and contaminated materials was overwhelming its processing facilities and creating yet another environmental problem for the country, this time not even of its own making.

Prior to China’s ban, 95% of the plastics collected for recycling in the European Union and 70% in the U.S. were sold and shipped to Chinese processors. A combination of favorable rates for shipping in cargo vessels that carried Chinese goods abroad and low Chinese labor rates made it a very profitable enterprise.

Before China’s ban, only 9% of globally discarded plastics were being recycled and 12% were burned. The rest ended up in landfills or simply dumped into the environment. Over the coming decade, as many as 11 million tons of plastic will have to find a new place to be processed or otherwise disposed of. There is already evidence that plastic waste is accumulating in countries that are dependent on exporting. In many places, including a number of American cities, there are curtailed collections and new restrictions on what kinds of plastics are accepted.

Some experts are hopeful that China’s ban might actually have an upside if it leads to better solutions for managing the world’s waste. North America and Europe need to expand processing capabilities and manufacturers need to make their products more easily recyclable. Mostly, the Chinese ban should be a wake-up call to the world on the need to greatly reduce single-use plastics.

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Piling Up: How China’s Ban on Importing Waste Has Stalled Global Recycling

Photo, posted August 8, 2017, courtesy of Sino-German Urbanisation Partnership via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Another Way To Make Solar Cells

March 21, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Millions of rooftops now contain solar panels and the majority of the solar cells that make up those panels today are made from silicon. Silicon solar cells require expensive, multi-step processing conducted at very high temperatures in special clean room facilities. Despite these complications, the price of solar panels has continued to drop dramatically over the years.

But even as the price of solar cells gets lower and lower, there are still widespread efforts to find even better ways to make them. One of those ways is with perovskite solar cells. Perovskites are materials with a characteristic crystal structure and are quite common in nature. Perovskites can be formed with a wide range of elements and can exhibit a variety of properties.

They were first used to make solar cells about 10 years ago and those first cells were unimpressive in most respects. However, there has been steady progress since that time. The potential advantages of perovskite solar cells are that they can be made from low-cost materials and can be manufactured using liquid chemistry, a far cheaper process than what is used to make silicon cells.

Researchers at MIT and several other institutions have recently published the results of research on how to tailor the composition of perovskite solar cells to optimize their properties. What used to be a trial-and-error process can now become much more engineered and should lead to perovskite solar cells with performance that could exceed that of silicon cells.

Silicon solar panels are a huge, worldwide industry and displacing them in favor of an alternative technology is a tall order. But if perovskite cells can be optimized for large-scale manufacturability, efficiency and durability, they could definitely give silicon a run for its money.

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Unleashing perovskites’ potential for solar cells

Photo courtesy of Ken Richardson/MIT.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Finding Methane Leaks With Lasers

May 1, 2018 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Burning natural gas instead of coal is considered to be an important way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In principle, it is. Gas combustion produces much less carbon dioxide than coal combustion.

A Carbon Loophole

February 12, 2018 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Many power plants in Europe and elsewhere are replacing coal with wood. For example, the Drax Power Station in Britain was its largest coal-burning plant and is now using wood pellets shipped from the southern U.S. in its boilers. According to the carbon accounting rules at the EU and elsewhere, the process is considered to be “carbon neutral.” But is it?

The idea is that new trees are being planted in the forests where the trees are cut to be burned in power plants. So, there is carbon neutrality. In principle.

European countries have embarked on a massive effort to switch to generating power from renewable energy. While there has indeed been major growth in wind and solar power in the 28 countries of the European Union, much of the new “green” power has come from burning wood in converted coal power stations.

A group of 200 scientists wrote to the EU last September insisting that bioenergy from forest biomass is not carbon neutral and that there must be tighter rules to protect forests and their carbon. Wood burning has become a loophole in controlling carbon emissions.

There are problems with the claims of carbon neutrality. There is no way to know whether enough new trees are actually being planted to replace those being burned. And then there is the time lag for tree replacement. Trees don’t grow overnight. There are also the carbon emissions associated with harvesting, processing and transporting wood.

There are most certainly ways in which burning biomass can be carbon neutral and can represent real progress over the use of fossil fuels. But caution must be taken to avoid exploiting loopholes in current climate rules that might actually result in increased carbon emissions.

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Carbon Loophole: Why Is Wood Burning Counted as Green Energy?

Photo, posted April 26, 2014, courtesy of Flickr.

‘A Carbon Loophole’ from Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Cryptocurrency And Climate Change

January 23, 2018 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Bitcoin is a form of digital currency. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like dollars or euros. They are produced by people and businesses using computer software to perform the necessary complex calculations. A bitcoin is essentially a line of computer code that’s signed digitally when it goes from one owner to another. Bitcoin is the most prominent example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency.

A New Low-Cost Battery

March 15, 2017 By EarthWise

Batteries have never been more important. Not only do we all depend on cell phones, tablets and laptop computers that run on batteries, but two enormous industries are in major transitions that rely upon battery technology: personal transportation and the utility industry. The electricity grid is increasingly turning to solar and wind power for generation and both will require effective energy storage if they are to truly become the predominant sources of electricity.