Aviation, marine, and trucking are among the most difficult transportation sectors to decarbonize. NREL researchers are developing processes to convert widely available biomass and waste feedstocks into sustainable biofuels that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 100% compared to petroleum-based fuels.
Today, President Biden is taking steps to coordinate leadership and innovation across the federal government, aircraft manufacturers, airlines, fuel producers, airports, and non-governmental organizations to advance the use of cleaner and more sustainable fuels in American aviation. These steps will help make progress toward our climate goals for 2030 and are essential to unlocking the potential for a fully zero-carbon aviation sector by 2050. Today’s executive actions across the Departments of Energy, Transportation, Agriculture, Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the General Services Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency will result in the production and use of billions of gallons of sustainable fuel that will enable aviation emissions to drop 20% by 2030 when compared to business as usual. Together with President Biden’s Build Back Better Agenda, these new agency steps and industry partnerships will transform the aviation sector, create good-paying jobs, support American agriculture and manufacturing, and help us tackle the climate crisis.
Scientists are turning to a combination of data collected from the air, land, and space to get a more complete picture of how climate change is affecting the planet’s frozen regions.
Trapped within Earth’s permafrost – ground that remains frozen for a minimum of two years – are untold quantities of greenhouse gases, microbes, and chemicals, including the now-banned pesticide DDT. As the planet warms, permafrost is thawing at an increasing rate, and scientists face a host of uncertainties when trying to determine the potential effects of the thaw.
Earth is said to be in a perfect "Goldilocks zone" away from the sun (not too cold, and not too hot), which enables life to thrive on the planet's surface. But Earth's balmy temperatures would not be possible without the greenhouse effect, which traps solar energy on Earth's surface and keeps the planet warm.
March 21 (Renewables Now) - DHL Express will procure about 320,000 tonnes of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) from Finnish renewable fuels producer Neste Oyj (HEL:NESTE) in the next five years as the German courier and package delivery service provider aims to reach 30% of SAF blending for all air transport by 2030.
Ørsted and Maersk, global leaders in their respective industries of renewable energy and shipping, are partnering on a green fuels project along the Gulf Coast.
Ørsted plans to develop a 675 MW Power-to-X facility in an unidentified location. The facility would be supported by 1.2 GW of onshore wind and solar farms.
Energy from biomass plays a large and growing role in the global energy system. Energy from biomass can make significant contributions to reducing carbon emissions, especially from difficult‐to‐decarbonize sectors like aviation, heavy transport, and manufacturing. But land‐intensive bioenergy often entails substantial carbon emissions from land‐use change as well as production, harvesting, and transportation. In addition, land‐intensive bioenergy scales only with the utilization of vast amounts of land, a resource that is fundamentally limited in supply. Because of the land constraint, the intrinsically low yields of energy per unit of land area, and rapid technological progress in competing technologies, land intensive bioenergy makes the most sense as a transitional element of the global energy mix, playing an important role over the next few decades and then fading, probably after mid‐century. Managing an effective trajectory for land‐intensive bioenergy will require an unusual mix of policies and incentives that encourage appropriate utilization in the short term but minimize lock‐in in the longer term.
For decades engineers have dreamed of programming organisms to sustainably produce ethylene, a chemical that is nicknamed “the king of petrochemicals” for its importance in plastics. Now, one hopeful pathway to this petrochemical is nearing reality, via a photosynthetic bacterium that is genetically specialized to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO2) into ethylene. But before industry can load up on tanks of living green liquid, researchers are first overcoming some metabolic barriers around ethylene production.
Much to the annoyance of her physicist father, Meredith Doyle chose to study chemistry.
She chose that field, in part, to follow her own path, but also because chemistry builds everything in the world. And more than anything, Doyle wants to change the world as quickly as humanly possible. It is not surprising, then, that she is working on one of the biggest, most urgent global challenges—one that has infiltrated landfills, oceans, rain water, and fish worldwide: plastics waste.
There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for 800,000 years — since before our species evolved.
On Saturday (May 11), the levels of the greenhouse gas reached 415 parts per million (ppm), as measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Scientists at the observatory have been measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1958. But because of other kinds of analysis, such as those done on ancient air bubbles trapped in ice cores, they have data on levels reaching back 800,000 years.
