Ocean Shock: Big aquaculture bulldozes Borneo

Matthew Green Reuters 30 Oct 18;

PURU NI TIMBUL, Malaysia, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Swinging his machete with an economy of movement that only the jungle can teach, Matakin Bondien lopped a stray branch from the path of his boat. He hopped barefoot from the prow, climbed a muddy slope and stared once more at what he'd lost.

Not long ago, the clearing had been home to mangroves, saltwater-loving trees that anchor a web of life stretching from fish larvae hatching in the cradle of their underwater roots to the hornbills squawking at their crown. Now the trees' benevolent presence was gone, in their place a swath of stripped soil littered with felled trunks as gray as fossils.

"Do you think we can find any food in this place now?" asked Bondien, a village leader of the Tombonuo people. "The company thinks it can do anything it wants — that we don't count."

The company is Sunlight Inno Seafood. Owned by Cedric Wong King Ti, a Malaysian businessman known as "King Wong," it has bulldozed swaths of mangroves in the Tombonuo's homeland in northern Borneo to make space for plastic-lined ponds filled with millions of king prawns. The shrimp are destined to be fattened for three months, scooped up in nets, quick frozen, packed into 40-foot refrigerated containers and loaded onto cargo ships bound for distant ports.

Read more!

We desperately need to store more carbon – seagrass could be the answer

Marianne Holmer The Conversation 31 Oct 18;

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to avoid a climate change catastrophe. Although efforts are already being made to reduce the production of greenhouse gasses, they are by most estimations not enough.

It is therefore critical that we find ways to drastically reduce the amount of pollutants in the atmosphere. Ecosystems capable of absorbing and storing large amounts of carbon dioxide know as “carbon sinks” are ideal for this.

In principle, all living organisms – all animals, plants, algae and bacteria – consist of carbon and so function as a carbon sink. For example, as long as a tree lives it will absorb and store carbon. Given the sheer volume of all the trees contained in tropical forests, it’s no wonder most people imagine such forests when they think of a carbon sink.

However, once chopped down and turned into firewood, the carbon in those trees will be released and emitted back into the atmosphere as CO₂. So while a forest is a moderately efficient carbon sink, its capacity to retain carbon in the forest floor is limited.

In fact, new research by colleagues and I has found that such forests are actually only the fifth most efficient ecosystem in the carbon storage cycle behind salt marshes, mangrove forests, seagrass meadows and, best of all, tundra.

Read more!

Climate change: Five cheap ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere

Matt McGrath BBC 25 Oct 18;

As well as rapidly reducing the carbon dioxide that we humans are pumping into the atmosphere in huge amounts, recent scientific assessments of climate change have all suggested that cutting emissions alone will not be enough to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 or 2 degrees C.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others have all stated that extracting CO2 from the air will be needed if we are to bend the rising temperature curve before the end of this century.

These ideas are controversial with some seeing them as a distraction from the pressing business of limiting emissions of CO2.

But a new assessment from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says that some of these "negative emissions technologies" are ready to be deployed, on a large scale, right now.

The authors point to the fact that the US Congress has recently passed the 45Q tax rule, which gives a $50 tax credit for every tonne of CO2 that's captured and stored. So their study highlights some technologies that are available at between $20 and $100 per tonne.

1- Coastal blue carbon

Read more!

Philippines: Study highlights potentials of mangroves as major carbon sink

Philippines News Agency 27 Sep 17;

Iloilo City – A mangrove scientist here has underscored the need to protect and preserve mangroves to fight greenhouse gas emissions as his study reveals its potentials “to store more carbon than terrestrial forest.”

“Mangroves are now highlighted as a major carbon sink in relation to the greenhouse gas emission for climate change mitigation,” Dr. Rex Sadaba of the University of Philippines-Visayas who conducted the study from May to August this year.

Carbon sinks remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. “They sequester carbon dioxide and make that into their leaves, into their stem and keep it into their biomass,” he added.

“When the leaves fall, they accumulate into the soil and overtime it is accumulating, the area becomes a sink for carbon. The moment we remove the mangroves here, we increase the decomposition of the organic matter that increases the release of the carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere,” he explained during a roundtable discussions of Iloilo City public-private partnerships on Thursday.

The study “Carbon storage of mangroves in Iloilo and Batiano rivers” conducted this year was the “first ever carbon sink study in the Philippines,” said Engr. Noel Hechanova of the City Environment and Natural Resources Office-Iloilo City in an interview on Friday.

The study covered 44.56 hectares of mangroves, composed of 27.64 hectares from the Iloilo River and 16.92 from the Batiano River.

Batiano River, which hosts 19 mangrove species, has18, 491.83 tons of carbon sink while it has a potential to emit 67,865 tons of carbon dioxide.

The Iloilo River, which has 23 species of mangroves, has sequestered 34,554.78 tons of carbon and its potential carbon dioxide release is 129,817.7 tons.

“Above the ground biomass and carbon is high but the carbon stored in the soil is much higher as a result of accumulation overtime,” his study concluded.

Citing the potential, Sadaba underscored the need to “keep the mangroves intact.”

He recommended the active involvement of stakeholders for the continued protection of mangrove areas and information education campaign.

Read more!

Australia: Seagrass, unsung ecological hero, potential economic powerhouse

Tiger Webb ABC News 26 Oct 15;
Seagrass meadows provide carbon capture and storage at a rate up to a hundred times greater than rainforests. So why aren't they being used as an economic resource? The Science Show investigates.

Paul Lavery is a professor of marine ecology at Edith Cowan University, and he is excited about seagrass.

Despite the name, seagrasses aren't actually grasses—they evolved from terrestrial plants and have more in common, evolutionarily speaking, with lilies. Seagrass often gets mistaken for seaweed, though only the former produces fruits and flowers, and the latter lacks the specialised plant tissue that more easily allows seagrass to absorb nutrients from sediment on the sea floor.

Seagrasses get a lot done simply by showing up. The leaves and stems of seagrass slow water currents close to the seabed, reducing erosion and improving water quality. Seagrass provide shelter from predators and a safe spawning point for fish. Some species of fish spend their entire life cycles in seagrass meadows. Seagrass is also an important source of food. Even dead seagrass—washed ashore and known as wrack—provides habitat and nutrients for crabs.

Lavery has another reason to be excited about seagrass habitats: seagrass meadows are phenomenally productive carbon sinks.

'They pack a huge punch in terms of the amount of carbon they can lock away,' says Lavery, who believes the carbon storage capacity of the soil beneath seagrasses to be, per square metre, between ten and one hundred times that of terrestrial systems. In fact, the amount of carbon dioxide stored in aquatic ecosystems is so great that biologists had to give it its own label: blue carbon.

'Blue carbon is the term that we use to talk about carbon captured by marine vegetated ecosystems,' Lavery says. 'These are salt marshes, mangroves, seagrass ecosystems mainly, we use that to differentiate from carbon captured by terrestrial ecosystems—rainforests, the arboreal forest of the northern hemisphere—which we refer to as green carbon.'

Australia's coastline offers the largest and most diverse seagrass assemblage in the world. 'We are blessed,' says Lavery, 'it's fantastic to work here.'

'But we also have some of the best examples of destroying seagrass meadows in the world.'

Mining and coastal development throw up sediment, blocking the light needed for seagrass to photosynthesise. Run-off in rainier seasons can result in 'nutrient-laden water', which sounds as though it would be healthy for aquatic plants but unfortunately isn't. Oh, and there's the pressures brought about by climate change and trawling.

But, says Lavery, the biggest problem facing Australian seagrasses has to be dredging. As the Australian economy became more dependent on exports, port numbers increased and their size expanded. And that has necessarily involved a lot of sediment dredging.

'If you took all the of the sediment that was going to be dredged,' Lavery mimes with his hands, 'And put those into one cubic metre packing boxes side by side, you could go around the equator three and a half times.'

And that's a problem for blue carbon, because seagrass meadows can only effectively sequester carbon when it's locked away permanently. When deep sediments are disturbed—by dredging or natural causes such as cyclones or flooding—the carbon stored within the sediment can be released. 'You throw it up into this oxygenated and nutrient-rich surface water, and potentially what happens is that bacteria turn it back into carbon dioxide,' Lavery says. 'And that goes back into the atmosphere.'

Biodiversity isn't often seen as sexy, and it can be difficult for policy makers to get het up about erosion. Efforts to engage citizen science in the cause of Australian meadows, laudable though they are, do effectively amount to watching (sea)grass grow. But what if Australia's seagrass meadows were viewed as an economic resource? Enter Lavery and his team, who worked on a very conservative estimate of the amount of carbon the meadows stored and worked out its dollar value, based on prices paid at the global carbon trading market at the time.

'We came up with a value of many billions of dollars,' he says.

Concerns have been raised over the cost and efficiency of carbon capture and storage as a means of carbon emission abatement in Australia. According to Lavery, many of the problems with carbon capture and storage could be cheaply and efficiently solved by the use of seagrass meadows.

Unfortunately for Lavery, he has seen a gradual shift away from the use of seagrass in global carbon trading schemes. 'Which is a great pity, I think, because there's potentially an economic bonanza there, which would also have the win-win situation of conserving and looking after these really important seagrass ecosystems.'

So, what does he see as the way forward? 'I think two things need to happen: scientists need to be able to provide very reliable information on how much carbon is stored and where its stored—and what we desperately need is economists to come in from the other side and make it apparent to decision makers about how this carbon can be factored into trading systems.

'As scientists, we're not very good at that.'

Lavery points to forestry systems that provide an economic incentive for conserving productive ecosystems—particularly through United Nations programmes such as REDD+, which provides financial incentives to countries shown to reduce their emissions from deforestation. But for Lavery, the economic argument is the icing on the seagrass cake.

'Here in Western Australia, the Rock Lobster fisheries are the single biggest fishery that we have. They're dependent on those seagrass ecosystems ... elsewhere with mangroves and salt marshes, it's all interconnected.

'The values that seagrass serve are enormous and this is just one more very compelling reason to be looking after these systems.'


Damaged seagrass meadows release ancient carbon
Anna Salleh ABC Science 21 Oct 15;

Human damage to seagrass meadows leads to the release of ancient carbon stores, a study has found.

Australian researchers studied sea grass meadows in Jervis Bay that had been disturbed by seismic testing in the 1960s.

"We found that in the area that had been disturbed, there had been a 72 per cent decline in the amount of organic carbon," marine ecologist Dr Peter Macreadie for Deakin University and the University of Technology, Sydney said.

The findings suggest protecting and restoring seagrass meadows could be an important strategy in mitigating climate change, say the authors in today's issue of the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

If our findings are common throughout the rest of the world ... then we're talking about a hell of a lot of carbon that's being released.
Dr Peter Macreadie
Seagrass is a flowering plant that forms underwater meadows around coasts on every continent except Antarctica. Seagrass meadows act as a nursery ground for juvenile fish, cycle nutrients, stabilise our coastlines and prevent erosion.

But, they are also very good at sequestering carbon.

"What we've learnt about seagrasses is they can capture and store carbon at a rate of 40 times faster than tropical rainforest," said Dr Macreadie.

He said seagrasses lock away the carbon for much longer than forests on land.

"They store the carbon for millennial timescales," said Dr Macreadie. "It will stay there more or less permanently so long as you don't disturb those ecosystems."

'About 1,000 years' worth of carbon lost'

It had been unclear whether ancient carbon would stay locked in the ground if seagrass meadows were disturbed, or if it would be released again, eventually back into the atmosphere where it could accelerate climate change.

To investigate the issue, Dr Macreadie and his colleagues sampled soil in the areas where the seagrass had been lost and compared it to nearby pristine areas where there had been no loss.

When the researchers dated the sediments they found the sediments were between 1,300 to 3,000 years old.

"About 1,000 years' worth of carbon that had been sequestered had been released and lost as a result of that disturbance," Dr Macreadie said.

He said the findings had implications for the large amounts of seagrass being lost due to coastal development.

"We know that about 50 per cent of the world's seagrasses have disappeared since the 1990s," Dr Macreadie said.

"That's about two football fields of seagrass per hour."

"If our findings are common throughout the rest of the world ... then we're talking about a hell of a lot of carbon that's being released."

How meadows capture carbon

The carbon in the soil of seagrass meadows comes not only from dead seagrass, but also from a host of other life forms such as plankton, as well as sediment from land, all of which are filtered out of the water by the seagrass.

In fact, said Dr Macreadie, previous research has shown, on average globally, about 50 per cent of carbon in seagrass beds comes from the land.

It is believed carbon is able to collect underneath seagrass meadows because of the anoxic environment they create, which prevents aerobic microbes from breaking down the carbon.

In support of this, Dr Macreadie and colleagues also found the microbes in the soil of the Jervis Bay seagrass meadows were different where disturbance had occurred.

"We saw that in the disturbed areas there were much higher abundances of microbes that have the capacity to eat the carbon and break it down," Dr Macreadie said.

There has been growing awareness over the past five years of the importance of seagrasses, salt marshes and mangroves to the carbon cycle.

"They occupy less than 1 per cent of the sea floor but they sequester more than half of the carbon in the ocean, maybe as much as 70 per cent," Dr Macreadie said.

He said the findings suggest protection and replanting of seagrass meadows could prove to be an important strategy to offset carbon emissions.

While the IPCC is yet to officially include seagrass meadows in carbon accounts, he said the Australian Government was making moves to do so.

Read more!

Underestimating the ocean: new evidence from IUCN highlights the carbon-regulating capacity of the ocean

IUCN 9 Dec 14;

Gland, Switzerland, 9 December 2014 – Protecting key carbon-absorbing areas of the ocean and conserving fish and krill stocks are critical for tackling climate change. This is one of the findings of a report released today by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in which top marine scientists describe how atmospheric carbon is captured, stored and moves in the ocean.

The report, The Significance and Management of Natural Carbon Stores in the Open Ocean, underlines the significant role of the open ocean in absorbing, moving and storing carbon and, for the first time, using the latest science, looks in detail at its role in climate regulation. Over half of all absorbed carbon emissions end up in the ocean. The report suggests poor ocean management practices are putting this vital ecosystem service at risk.

At the heart of this report is the new concept of ‘mobile carbon units’ – animals such as plankton, fish and krill, which provide an important service that must be addressed in ocean management. The report defines the critical role that the food chain plays in basic ocean processes, including those that regulate climate. It also warns that the role of the ocean in storing and managing carbon must now be factored into policy and decision making at all levels.

“The world is at a crossroads in terms of ocean health and climate change,” says the report’s co-editor Dan Laffoley, Vice Chair, IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas. “Neglect the ocean and wonder why our actions are not effective, or manage and restore the ocean to boost food security and reduce the impact of climate change. The choice should be an easy one.”

The ocean is already showing signs of stress, tending to more acidic conditions. It is also warming and holding less oxygen, which in turn is leading to dead zones.

“A sick ocean is one that loses its capacity to support planetary processes. As governments convene for climate talks in Lima in the hopes of getting an international carbon reduction agreement back on the rails, these results highlight the need for immediate action on ocean carbon, ensuring that it is taken into consideration in climate policies,” said Carl Gustaf Lundin, Director of IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Programme.

Diatoms, the microscopic plankton that are a food source for many larger organisms, are estimated to transfer about 150 million tons of carbon per year to the deep ocean (at depths of more than 1,000 metres) – the equivalent carbon capture of about 250,000 square kilometres of restored tropical rainforest (as it grows), or an area the size of the United Kingdom. Krill are believed to capture about 22.8 million tons, but ongoing climate change due to human activities could undermine their carbon removal potential. Sargassum, a golden floating seaweed covering large tracts of the vast Sargasso Sea close to Bermuda, is a carbon sink of regional importance and a critical habitat for a number of endangered species, including turtles and eels.

Read more!

Extracting carbon from nature can aid climate but will be costly: U.N.

Alister Doyle PlanetArk 27 Mar 14;

A little-known technology that may be able to take the equivalent of China's greenhouse gas emissions out of the carbon cycle could be the radical policy shift needed to slow climate change this century, a draft U.N. report shows.

Using the technology, power plants would burn biomass - wood, wood pellets, or plant waste like from sugar cane - to generate electricity while the carbon dioxide in the biomass is extracted, piped away and buried deep underground.

Among techniques, a chemical process can strip carbon dioxide from the flue gases from combustion.

The process - called bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) - would make the power plants not only carbon-neutral but actively a part of extracting carbon dioxide from a natural cycle of plant growth and decay.

The technology could be twinned in coming decades with planting forests that absorb carbon as they grow, according to the study obtained by Reuters.

It would be a big shift from efforts to fight global warming mainly by cutting emissions of greenhouse gases from mankind's use of fossil fuels in factories, power plants and cars, but may be necessary given the failure so far to cut rising emissions.

"BECCS forms an essential component of the response strategy for climate change in the majority of scenarios in the literature" to keep temperatures low, according to a report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC, grouping leading scientists, is the main guide for almost 200 governments that have promised to work out a deal by the end of 2015 to slow warming to avert more floods, heatwaves, more powerful storms, droughts and rising seas.

The leaked report is Chapter 6 in a mammoth study due in mid-April in Berlin about solving climate change. It has details of BECCS not included in a draft summary.

SUNLIGHT

In theory, BECCS could extract between 3.0 and above 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air a year, it says, and seems more promising than technologies such as blocking sunlight or building machines to extract carbon from the air.

China, the top carbon producer ahead of the United States, emitted 9.86 billion tonnes in 2012, according to the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

BECCS, also known as bio-CCS, would cost from $60 to $250 a tonne of carbon dioxide eliminated, the IPCC says.

"BECCS faces large challenges in financing and currently no such plants have been built and tested at scale," it says.

Archer Daniels Midland Co has a facility in Illinois, partly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, to inject 333,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year into the ground from a plant producing ethanol from corn.

"Bio-CCS technology is becoming increasingly recognised as a credible option," said Brad Page, head of the Australia-based Global CCS Institute, but added it was only a partial fix. Like all other experts interviewed, he had not seen the draft.

The IPCC is meeting this week in Japan to approve another report about the risks of climate change, from food and water shortages to a slowdown in economic growth.

Most carbon capture and storage focuses on fossil fuels. Saskatchewan Power's Boundary Dam coal-fired power plant in Canada, due to start this year as the first commercial project of its type, will capture a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

Apart from the high costs of BECCS, "the area you need is vast," said Joris Koornneef, an expert at sustainable energy consultancy Ecofys in the Netherlands.

He estimated that it would require 350 million hectares (864 million acres) - bigger than India - to be producing biomass for BECCS to make enough to suck 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air, which would risk taking land from food crops.

Erwin Jackson, deputy head of The Climate Institute, an independent research group in Australia, said governments and companies should do more to research BECCS technologies. "At the moment we're ignoring them and that's risky," he said.

The IPCC says it is at least 95 percent probable that climate change is mainly man-made, rather than caused by natural swings, but opinion polls show voters in many nations are unconvinced.

(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

Read more!

Indonesia: Mangrove to be planted in North Sumatra, Aceh

Apriadi Gunawan, Jakarta Post, 8 Oct 13;

North Sumatra and Aceh provinces have been chosen by foreign sponsors as the locations for a mangrove-planting program for carbon sequestration in Indonesia.

The sequestration program is fully sponsored by eight foreign companies from France and Germany.

The foreign corporations, Danone Group, Schneider Electric, Credit Agricole Bank, Hermes International, Voyageurs du Mondo, La Poste Group and CDC Climat Bank from France and SAP Germany, have agreed to appoint non-governmental group Yagasu to implement the carbon-sequestration program.

Yagasu executive director Bambang Suprayogi said the program was the first of its kind in Indonesia, only the third country in the world after Senegal and India to carry out such a program.

“We must maintain this trust and responsibility and answer it with proof that Indonesia has the capability to run the program,” Bambang told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the Monitoring Livelihoods Project workshop at Grand Aston Hotel in Medan on Monday.

The workshop, which runs until Oct. 11, is being attended by representatives from the sponsor companies as well as other participants from France, Switzerland, Senegal, Mexico, India and Guatemala.

Bambang said that Indonesia was entrusted with managing the program for the next 20 years. He said the main focus of the program was planting as many mangrove trees as possible along the eastern coasts of both provinces. He estimated that at least 5,000 hectares of land would be planted by 2014.

“The cultivation of 5,000 hectares of mangrove trees will involve 2,012 families in 65 villages in 11 regencies and cities in both provinces,” he said.

He expected that Indonesia would be able to absorb 30 tons of carbon with the cultivation of 1,000 hectares of mangrove trees annually.

Livelihoods program director Jean-Pierre Rennaud, from France, said North Sumatra and Aceh were picked for the carbon sequestration due to their ecological wealth. Rennaud added that mangrove tree planting in both provinces was very urgent following the 2004 tsunami.

He said mangroves had many functions, including preventing coastal erosion and absorbing carbon. He said the corporations would continue to monitor and evaluate the mangrove planting program so as to get maximum results and benefits for the community at large.

Yagasu program community coordinator Meilinda Suryani said Indonesia had one of the largest mangrove areas in the world with 25 percent of the world’s total mangrove area of 18 million hectares.

Meilinda said mangrove forests contained a huge amount of organic materials which did not decay, so mangrove forests functioned more as a carbon absorber rather than a source of carbon. “Mangrove trees have more leaves so they have the potential to absorb more carbon than other plants,” she said.

Read more!

Carbon capture progress has lost momentum, says climate change agency

Meeting of senior ministers in Beijing hears that CCS is being left behind due to financial crisis and weakening political will
Jonathan Watts guardian.co.uk 22 Sep 11;

The financial crisis and fading government support for climate action have seriously eroded global plans to capture and store carbon, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned on Thursday.

Sequestration – the depositing of greenhouse gases underground rather than into the atmosphere – was supposed to account for a fifth of the world's emissions reductions under the agency's roadmap for keeping global temperature rise within 2C (4F) by the end of the century.

But delegates including the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, heard at a meeting, held in Beijing, that the global temperature is on course to rise by 3.5C, due to poor progress both on carbon capture and storage, and on acceptance of a carbon price and other carbon-cutting efforts.

IEA deputy executive director, Richard Jones, told the meeting, hosted by the Washington-based Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, that this would wreak havoc on human wellbeing. He added that time was running out to avoid this scenario because of slow progress on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

"Every year that passes makes it more difficult," Jones said. "With current policies, CCS will have a hard time [being] deployed ... There is less of a global push for climate action, and tighter government finances."

According to the IEA, global energy demand has more than doubled in the past 40 years and even with the most favourable assumptions will grow another 35% by 2035, which will take carbon dioxide emissions above 35 gigatonnes per year.

Projects to capture and bury a major chunk of that are behind schedule and finding it harder to secure funds.

To reach the 2C goal, the IEA estimates there will have to be 1,500 large-scale CCS projects around the world by 2035. However, only 74 have been announced, and the trend is in the wrong direction.

"We're seeing a decline in new projects due to a softening global economy and an uncertain carbon price," said Brad Page, head of the Australia-based Global CCS Institute.

Outside Europe, few countries have set a price for carbon. Australia's government is now trying to do just that, and is expected to set a level of about $23 per tonne of carbon.

This alone will not be enough. US energy secretary Steven Chu told the meeting the price of carbon would have to be $80 a tonne for CCS to be economically viable with current technology.

But, he continued, the US has yet to even set a price, which makes it difficult for companies to invest and financial institutions to make loans to CCS projects.

"The US needs a price on carbon sooner rather than later," said Chu. "This is something where we are losing time. It is very important that we get moving."

The US has 24 CCS projects – more than any other country – but they are mostly for enhanced oil extraction, which is more economical but has a relatively limited capacity for carbon sequestration.

Delegates said other forms of CCS need more state aid to get going but cash-strapped governments are backing away from financial commitments. Industry representatives said the sector was plagued by delays, doubts and weak policy support.

China has soared through the global economic crisis with double-digit economic growth but it is cautious about taking the lead with expensive CCS technology. Adoption by the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter is crucial as China is expected to account for a third of the global growth in emissions over the next 25 years. According to the International Energy Agency's plan to keep carbon dioxide in the atmosphere under 445 parts per million, China should have 270 major CCS projects by 2035. So far it has six at the planning stage. Xie Zhenhua, vice-chairman of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, said carbon capture and storage was a "last resort" for China.

With little political and financial capital behind CCS, however, its prospects are diminishing. Delegates said commodities firms – who are profiting from the rise in energy prices – should step in.

"Time has been lost as a result of the financial crisis. No one can deny that," said Martin Ferguson, who called on mining companies to make a greater financial contribution to the development of CCS technology. "Coal companies must look at themselves as beneficiaries of the rise in the price of coal."

Read more!

Singapore's coal-firing plant seems in good hands

Huaneng's Yuhuan plant is spotlessly clean, and lessons learnt there will find their way here
Ronnie Lim Business Times 2 Nov 10;

CLEAN coal - which Tuas Power will use as a feedstock at its upcoming $2 billion clean coal/biomass Tuas Multi-Utilities Complex (TMUC) on Jurong Island - seems an oxymoron. But given technology such as ultra-supercritical coal-firing plants, as well as carbon-capture facilities being developed by its new owner, China Huaneng, Singapore's first coal-firing station coming on stream in 2012 seems in good hands, regarding environment issues.

Dispelling preconceptions of choking fumes and soot spewing from its chimney stacks, Huaneng's Yuhuan coal-firing plant, which our group of Singapore journalists visited, is spotlessly clean. Enhancing its 'green-ness', the plant, along the south-east coast of Zhejiang, is nestled amid rice and vegetable fields with 'bei shan, mian hai' - or mountains behind and the sea in front - which is considered good Feng Shui.

More critically, pardon the pun, Yuhuan's ultra-supercritical power plant has boilers which can operate at higher temperatures and have greater thermal efficiency, therefore it uses less coal to produce the electricity. The plant is considered one of the cleanest, most efficient and advanced worldwide.

With 4,000-megawatt (MW) capacity, the Yuhuan station is also Huaneng's biggest. It is 50 per cent bigger than the 2,670MW Tuas Power (TP), which Huaneng acquired from Temasek Holdings for $4.2 billion in 2008, and about a fifth larger than Singapore's largest genco, the 3,300MW Senoko Energy.

Capitalising on its superior efficiency, the Yuhuan facility is also Huaneng's biggest electricity generator of all its power plants in China. Yuhuan produced a whopping 16.9 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in the first three quarters of this year, or almost 9 per cent of Huaneng's total output in that period, latest figures show.

Yuhuan is an integral part of Huaneng's 'green action' drive to cut its greenhouse emissions, which is important given that 85 per cent of the group's power stations are coal-firing. It has also embarked on developing energy alternatives such as wind, solar and biomass. A Huaneng official says: 'We have an aggressive plan to produce about 35 per cent of our electricity from clean energy by 2020.'

On the coal-firing front, Huaneng is working hard to reduce its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by developing technology such as the ultra-supercritical plants employed at Yuhuan, and also through carbon-capture pilot projects like its Shidongku 2 station, just outside Shanghai.

TP's TMUC project, which was based on Japanese technology, was already at an advanced development stage when Huaneng first came into the picture. Nevertheless, the new Chinese owner has not shied from getting involved.

'Huaneng has extensive experience which TP can tap as it develops the Tembusu project,' a Huaneng official said.

For instance, Huaneng is getting Chinese manufacturers, including boiler makers, involved in TMUC, 'as costs are lower than in Japan', one official said. Tapping its connections, it is also sourcing low-ash coal from South-east Asia for the project. TP's Singapore engineers have also been to the Chinese coal plants, such as at Shidongku, to learn how Huaneng handles its coal.

At Yuhuan, for example, barges unload coal at the plant's jetty from which it is transported via a fully enclosed conveyor system to covered storage silos before use.

'This is exactly what we will do in Tuas as well,' remarks a TP official. Additionally, TMUC's use of carbon-neutral biomass feedstock, such as palm kernel, will help reduce the plant's emissions to a level comparable with those of oil-fired plants.

Yuhuan has China's first 1,000MW ultra-supercritical pressure boilers which, by operating at 600° Celsius steam temperatures, result in a net thermal efficiency of around 46 per cent, or 6 per cent more than the earlier-generation supercritical plants.

'This also means that we burn about 6 per cent less coal to produce the same electricity output,' said a Yuhuan official, adding that the station is planning to add another two super-ultracritical plants to the existing four, with each 'possibly even going up to 1,200MW capacity'.

Parallel to this, at its 2,400MW Shidongku 2 station on Shanghai's outskirts, Huaneng has developed a pilot facility for carbon capture (that is, CC without the S, as in storage), with its 100,000 tonnes per annum CC plant there currently the largest in the world. This was an expansion of its first Beijing CC pilot plant, which captures just 3,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum.

'Beijing and Shanghai were chosen for the carbon-capture pilot plants as they were the most polluted cities,' said Chen Xi, a director at TP's Beijing office.

Still, with most of China's coal plants still focusing on desulphurisation processes, CO2 capture is still relatively new, admits Cao Xuegao, Shidongku's vice-plant manager.

The 150 million yuan (S$29 million) Shidongku CC plant occupies an area of 6,000 square metres and is divided into carbon-capture and refining sections, with the latter processing the carbon into 99.5 per cent pure CO2 for sale to the food and beverage industry (to produce carbonated drinks, for example).

But the CC pilot plant - which barely captures 2 per cent of the CO2 produced by the Shindongku 2 power station - is not commercially viable yet, concedes Mr Cao.

It is a costly process with the carbon capture costing about 300-350 yuan per tonne. But as the CC plant has been barely operational for 10 months, 'we are looking to just break even and not make profits at this stage', he adds.

Huaneng is now working with Xian Thermal Research Institute on how to optimise the CC process to try to further lower costs, he says. This will likely involve a combination of a scaling-up in capacity as well as through technology advances.

'The Beijing and Shidongku CC pilot projects will provide the basis for the study of large-scale CO2 capture and geological storage technologies,' Mr Cao says.

Still, given that carbon capture is still a work-in-progress and not commercially viable yet, it is unlikely that Huaneng will be able to introduce the technology at its Singapore TMUC project for a while yet. Undoubtedly, however, lessons learnt will eventually find their way here.

Read more!

Cashing in on cutting carbon at home

Mira Oberman Yahoo News 18 Mar 10;

CHICAGO (AFP) – Can the promise of a free cupcake or some cold hard cash work better than dire predictions of dying polar bears and rising sea levels at getting people to cut their carbon footprint?

Two US-based startup companies certainly hope so.

Energy brokers in White Plaines, New York have launched what they hope will be a global exchange platform for selling carbon offset credits based on cutting home energy use.

They sold the first credit in January for 21.50 dollars -- yielding a 4.30 dollar brokerage fee -- and expect to sell the second in the coming weeks.

"It's an experiment," said Marissa Miraval, campaign manager for MyEex, which runs myemissionsexchange.com.

The concept is simple: finger wagging hasn't convinced most people to turn the lights off when they leave the room. But paying them a few bucks for putting a sweater on instead of turning up the heat might just do the trick.

Get enough people on board and it can have a real impact on greenhouse gas emissions. And those 20 percent brokerage fee will start to add up.

So far about 2,000 households have signed up and MyEex is working to get its method of using utility bills to track reductions certified as a legitimate carbon offset.

It's not clear whether the system will actually encourage people to cut their energy use or merely reward them for decisions they had already made.

But Miraval said it's worth a try.

"The carbon credit -- that's like the sprinkles on the icing," said Randy Wilson, who earned MyEex's first carbon credit after outfitting his Pennsylvania home with solar panels.

Wilson and his wife decided to get off the grid last year after their electricity company announced that rates were going to go up 30 to 40 percent.

They threw out their son's waterbed, switched to compact fluorescent light bulbs, and started unplugging things like computers when they weren't being used.

Then they installed a 58,000-dollar solar panel system that slashed their electricity bill from 120 dollars a month to zero.

Tax credits brought the cost down to 22,000 dollars and Wilson is earning about 2,700 dollars a year selling renewable energy certificates to area utility companies.

He figures it will have paid for itself in six years. And it saved enough energy in the first six months to power a television for 25,000 hours.

"The whole concept of saving money and getting paid to do it, that just boggles me," he told AFP.

"And when you think of the potential out there, there's hundreds of millions of homes that could at least earn one carbon credit a year."

About 17 percent of total US greenhouse gas emissions come from people's homes: heating, cooling, electricity and the noxious fumes emitted from decomposing household garbage.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that adds up to four metric tons (almost 9,000 pounds) of carbon dioxide equivalent per person every year.

Joanna Smith was amazed at how easy it was to cut back on the electricity bills in her tiny New York apartment after joining Earth Aid.

The Washington-based company offers members points that can be cashed in for rewards like free spa treatments and discounts on everything from yoga classes to energy audits and organic baby clothes.

More importantly for Smith, it tracks utility bills and sends e-mails alerting her to how much energy she's using when she forgets to turn off the lights or unplug things.

"Because of the electronic billing that I have I don't even see a bill anymore," Smith said.

"I really had no concept of my consumption prior to Earth Aid."

Earth Aid, which got its start selling energy efficiency products online, spent two years developing a system which can automatically access and analyze electronic bills from most US utilities.

"We've always had a part passion on our team, a measure of quantification -- getting the facts in front of folks and doing it in a way that doesn't burden people," chief executive officer Ben Bixby said.

More than 160 companies across the country have signed up as reward partners and thousands of people are tracking their energy use with the free service.

One of the most popular rewards is a 25-dollar gift certificate at Founding Farmers, an upscale restaurant in Washington which sources its food from organic and sustainable farms.

"We looked at Earth Aid and just thought it was genius," said Dan Simons, who helped develop the restaurant.

Encouraging people to live more sustainable lives is part of the core mission of the restaurant, he said, and the program is a great way to reach out to a "warm target audience".

"If they care about that they definitely care about the type of food we're doing."

Read more!

Obama Eyes Biofuels, Clean Coal In New Climate Push

Jeff Mason and Timothy Gardner, PlanetArk 4 Feb 10;

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama laid out new steps on Wednesday to nudge the United States toward energy independence, backing measures to boost production of biofuels and bury pollution from coal.

Using the new initiatives to garner support for a climate and energy bill stalled in the U.S. Senate, Obama met with a handful of state governors to press his policies to fight global warming and wean the nation from imported fossil fuels.

"America can win the race to build a clean energy economy, but we're going to have to overcome the weight of our own politics," he said at the meeting, noting China was pushing aggressively to lead in "clean" energy technology.

"We have to focus not so much on those narrow areas where we disagree, but on the broad areas where we agree," he said.

Agreement on a climate bill is still far from certain, and the legislation faces further obstacles after the election last month in Massachusetts that gave Republicans a Senate seat long held by Democrats, depriving the president's party of 60 votes that could overcome procedural hurdles.

Obama has acknowledged that a controversial "cap and trade" system could be separated from other parts of the bill, though he is adamant that a market-based mechanism be put in place to make high polluting fuels more expensive for industry than less-polluting, renewable energy sources.

Biofuels represent one renewable energy source the administration wants to promote, and a new interagency report spelled out ways the country would achieve that going forward.

"By 2022, we will more than double the amount of biofuels we produce to 36 billion gallons, which will decrease our dependence on foreign oil by hundreds of millions of barrels per year," Obama said.

He also announced a new task force to forge a plan for rolling out affordable carbon capture and storage technology in 10 years, including having 10 commercial demonstration projects up and running by 2016.

Carbon capture and storage is meant to capture the emissions from carbon-polluting coal plants and bury them underground rather than spewing them into the atmosphere but the technology is still being researched.

EPA

The Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday ethanol and other renewable fuels must account for 8.25 percent of gasoline sales in 2010 to meet Congress' mandate that nearly 13 billion gallons of renewable fuels be produced this year.

That is lower than last year's 10.21 percent renewable fuel standard that the EPA announced in November 2008..

The United States is far away from its goal of producing 36 billion gallons (136 billion liters) of biofuels a year by 2022, currently producing 12 billion gallons annually, mostly from corn ethanol.

The report offers solutions that would ease the way for ethanol to get from producers in the U.S. Midwest to consumers near the coasts. Such snags include filling stations that have been slow to adopt pumps to distribute a fuel blend that is mostly ethanol, called E85, and a lack of dedicated pipelines for biofuels.

Loan guarantees for ethanol plants could be targeted more effectively to support new biofuels plants, the report said.

The struggling biofuels industry is concerned the Obama administration will move too quickly away from ethanol to biofuels that derive from more difficult techniques using wood chips and other biomass.

The president's backing of ethanol, however, could shore up his support in farm states, where ethanol boosts demand for corn.

Environmentalists and some scientists say production of U.S. biofuels from corn and other grains can drive out production of other crops, prompting farmers in other countries to burn down forests and clear land to grow those crops -- creating new sources of CO2, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.

(Additional reporting by Tom Doggett; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Obama unveils new biofuels, carbon capture, initiatives
Yahoo News 3 Feb 10;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama on Wednesday unveiled a new strategy to reinvigorate US production of biofuels, vowing he would not let nations like China race ahead in building new energy economies.

Obama is embracing a host of traditional sources of power, including coal and nuclear and new energy sources, like wind power, as he attempts to improve dim prospects for cap-and-trade climate legislation in Congress.

He said his government's Environmental Protection Agency had mandated the production of 36 billion gallons of biofuel production in the United States by 2022, up from 11.1 billion gallons produced last year.

Obama argued that increasing production of renewable fuels would reduce US dependence on oil by more than 328 million barrels a year and cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 138 million metric tons a year by 2022.

"The bottom line is this: I am convinced that America can win the race to build a clean energy economy, but we're going to have to overcome the weight of our own politics.

"We have to focus not so much on those narrow areas where we disagree, but on the broad areas where we agree," Obama said in remarks to a bi-partisan group of state governors at the White House.

Biofuels are made from natural resources like plants, vegetable oils or fats, that can be converted to power vehicles for example, and are much more environmentally friendly than traditional fossil fuels.

Obama also announced an interagency task force to study carbon capture techniques to reduce greenhouse emissions from coal fired power stations and to help develop cleaner coal.

"It's been said that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal -- and that's because, as I said, it's one of our most abundant energy resources," said Obama.

"If we can develop the technology to capture the carbon pollution released by coal, it can create jobs and provide energy well into the future."

The president said he wanted 10 commercial carbon capture and storage projects up and running by 2016.

A bipartisan effort to pass a cap-and-trade bill in the Senate to tackle global warming appears under threat, as election year politics and delays for other key administration agenda items create a log-jam on Capitol Hill.

Read more!

Masdar's First Carbon Capture In Abu Dhabi In 2012

Stanley Carvalho, PlanetArk 20 Jan 10;

ABU DHABI - Abu Dhabi state-owned Masdar said on Tuesday its first carbon capture and storage (CCS) project would be cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the United Arab Emirates by the end of 2012.

The UAE is one of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gas per capita. Abu Dhabi has pumped billions into clean energy initiative Masdar as it looks to both cut emissions and prepare the world's third-largest crude exporter for a future less dependent on supply of oil.

The first CCS project would capture emissions from a new UAE steel plant, said Sam Nader, director of Masdar's carbon management unit told reporters.

"The first capture is 800,000 tonnes from the Emirates Steel plant in 2012," Nader said. "A contract will be awarded this year for the first capture."

By 2014, Masdar would have captured a total of five million tonnes of CO2, he added.

Masdar aims to set up a network of pipelines in the UAE to pump carbon from emitting sites to oilfields, where it would be injected into reservoirs to maintain pressure and increase oil recovery. The network should be completed by 2015, he said.

The first phase of the plan is to capture CO2 from industrial units such as the Emirates Steel plant and from power plants.

Masdar is working closely with state-run Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations (ADCO) to transport and inject CO2 into its oil reservoirs. ADCO runs the onshore crude fields for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).

Other emitters that Masdar is targeting for carbon capture are the Emirates Aluminum plant, a gas-fired power station run by the Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority and also a planned hydrogen power plant it is building with BP.

Carbon captured would back carbon credits sold under the UN's clean development mechanism, which allows developing countries to sell emissions reductions from energy intensive industry to help rich countries offset their own contribution to climate change.

The UAE embarked on a CO2 emission reduction programme in 2007. Abu Dhabi aims to slash the emirate's CO2 output by about one-third by 2020 and in doing so to free up more oil for exports.

(Editing by Simon Webb and Keiron Henderson)

Read more!

Giant Carbon "Vault" Proposed Near New York City

Brian Handwerk, National Geographic News 4 Jan 10;

Several new underwater "vaults" that could stash the potent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide have been found—and one of them is right outside New York City, a new study says.

Such close-in vaults would be convenient, but could pose an earthquake risk, experts say.

Some of Earth's largest ancient lava flows lie below the Atlantic Ocean seafloor not far from the Big Apple.

The vault regions include rubble-filled, fractured, and otherwise porous volcanic layers in which massive amounts of liquid CO2 could be safely stored, the research found.

"We're saying, here's a potential reservoir that has favorable characteristics, and it might be worth looking at some more," said study author Dennis Kent, a geologist at Rutgers University.

It's unknown how much the New York City-area reservoir could hold. But scientists estimate that one vault near the beach in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, could store emissions from up to four coal power plants for the next 40 years.

However such underground carbon storage is still in the preliminary phase, with pilot projects underway in Iceland and in the United States' Columbia River plateau, experts say.

Great Jersey Valley

The team used seismic imaging to discover several promising carbon-storage sites within the undersea Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, which stretches along the eastern U.S. and Canadian coasts.

The rocks formed when lava oozed out some 200 million years ago as the supercontinent Pangaea broke apart.

At the time, New Jersey was home to a great rift valley full of volcanic-rock flows. The area looked like today's East Africa, where the Horn of Africa is slowly drifting away from the rest of the continent.

In some cases the rock formations stretch right up to beaches like Sandy Hook. Other sites lie a dozen or so miles offshore, according to the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

High pressures and cool temperatures far beneath the ocean floor should maintain CO2 as a liquid denser than seawater—making leaks unlikely, Kent said.

A thick, overlying layer of seafloor rock and sediment would also serve as an additional natural seal to prevent escape.

But if CO2 leaks did occur, they could hurt marine wildlife and change ocean chemistry.

Quake Risk

Storing carbon close to cities could pose both advantages and risks, experts say.

For one, CO2 could be more easily captured from nearby smokestacks or other polluting sources, without the logistical challenges and expenses of long-distance transport.

On the other hand, keeping CO2 vaults so close to metropolises may be disastrous should anything go wrong.

For instance, the project carries the potential risk of triggering earthquakes, Kent said.

"Even though this is a seismically benign area, by overpressuring [the rock] a bit and changing local stresses, it's conceivable that earthquakes could be triggered."

Read more!

Shell CO2 stocking plans under fire

Martine Pauwels Yahoo News 2 Jan 10;

BARENDRECHT, Netherlands (AFP) – A plan by oil giant Shell to store 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year in a depleted gas reservoir beneath the Dutch city of Barendrecht has drawn the ire of residents and local officials who have vowed to thwart it.

"We are going to do everything to oppose this project," declared Barendrecht deputy mayor Simon Zuurbier, who voiced fears for the safety of the city's 50,000 inhabitants.

"We are taking legal action to get it cancelled and we'll approve none of the required permits."

Anglo-Dutch Shell in November was authorised by the Dutch government to undertake a project to capture and store a portion of the 5.0 megatonnes of carbon dioxide emitted each year by the company's refinery in Pernis, Europe's largest. Pernis is located 15 kilometers (9.4 miles) from here.

Under the scheme, set to get under way in 2012, the CO2 will be carried by a pipeline and, after being compressed, will be injected into a depleted gas reservoir 1,800 meters (5,900 feet) under ground. The reservoir has a capacity of 800,000 tonnes.

Shell has said that over time the CO2 will dissolve or form minerals.

With a positive evaluation of the initiative by government-mandated experts, the project will be extended in a few years to another nearby gas reservoir, with a 9.0 megatonne capacity and part of which lies under Barendrecht city center.

"It's ridiculous to carry out such an experiment in a densely populated area," insisted Zuurbier.

Klaas Brantjes, a member of a residents' association, said that while "we have been given the illusion of security, all the risks are not known."

"The risks that CO2 will escape are real and are especially dangerous as the city is situated in a basin."

But a spokesman for the Dutch foreign ministry, Jan van Diepen, insisted that "the project is safe, otherwise the government would not have given the go-ahead."

The Dutch government is providing 30 million euros to help finance the facility. Shell has declined to reveal the overall cost.

Shell says the carbon capture and storage by injection technique has already been tested in Norway and the United States.

"CCS (carbon capture and storage) is a safe technique in itself," Margriet Kuijper, Shell Manager of Carbon Capture and Storage Projects and Studies, said on the company website.

"It will be carried out with so many safeguards that it can be used anywhere, even in residential areas."

The Netherlands, which emitted 174.5 megatonnes of CO2 in 2008, has a total storage capacity of 1,600 megatonnes.

"It is imperative to capture and store CO2 in order to reach our target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions" by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, van Diepen said.

"If a fifth of the country's energy production is from renewable sources by 2020, which is what the government wants, it would mean that 80 percent would still come from fossil fuels," he said.

"Storing CO2 is therefore inescapable as a transition technology to limit climate damage."

It's an argument dismissed by the environmental group Greenpeace, which has said "the enormous subsidies" allocated to burying carbon gas contribute to "maintaining polluting industries" at the expense of cleaner energy.

Shell has acknowledged that carbon storage operations have an impact on the environment, as they release a quantity of CO2 equal to 5.0 percent of the carbon gas being stored.

Read more!

EU grants 1.5 billion euros for wind farms, carbon capture

Yahoo News 9 Dec 09;

BRUSSELS (AFP) – The EU commission on Wednesday granted 1.5 billion euros (2.2 billion dollars) to offshore wind farms and carbon capture and storage schemes to help relaunch Europe's economy and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"With this decision the commission has laid the foundation for the development of two key sustainable technologies that will be essential in our fight against climate change," EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said, adding that it would also "give a push to the economy and employment."

Six carbon capture and storage schemes (CCS) -- in Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain -- will share a billion euros of the money.

These schemes to bury polluting carbon emissions "will be the first six CCS projects in the world," Piebalgs added proudly of the technology which is in its infancy.

Individual European nations and the private sector are also welcome to help fund such schemes which the European Union hopes will become viable propositions by 2020.

"It's important to start," said Piebalgs. A successful conclusion to UN climate talks ongoing in Copenhagen will help make carbon capture and storage development "much, much faster," he added.

The nine offshore wind power projects, in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, will share 562 million euros.

Several of these are German projects with Belgian, British, Danish and Swedish interests also involved.

Some of the projects cross sea borders, such as the interconnection of German, Swedish and Danish wind farms in the Baltic, linking up the national grids.

The money comes from a four billion euro EU reserve fund set up in May for energy projects to help relaunch Europe's economy.

The EU has also pledged to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels.

Many other candidate projects failed to secure funding on Friday.

Read more!

Top 10 Craziest Solutions to Global Warming

LiveScience.com Yahoo News 4 Dec 09;

World politicians will toss around the best ideas they have to get us out of the climate change mess we're in when they meet at the U.N. Copenhagen summit next week. Many people have suggested novel ways to combat the water pollution, smog, mounds of trash and global warming facing Earth. Here are some of the wackier (or at least, wackier-sounding) solutions ever proposed to solve Earth's problems.

10. Ban Plastic Bags and Light Bulbs

It may sound like a rash decision, but San Francisco, China, Australia and more have all jumped on board. China wants to rid the country of "white pollution" -- the plastic bags that clog city streets and waterways. And Australia hopes to cut its greenhouse gas emissions and reduce household energy bills by phasing out sales of incandescent bulbs. Such measures have gained momentum lately with more governments considering taking measures against the wasteful bags and inefficient bulbs. But before you worry about how you'll carry your groceries or light your home, these measures promote alternatives: recyclable paper bags and reusable cloth ones and more efficient (and cost-saving) compact fluorescent bulbs.

9. Live in Trash

No, this doesn't mean you should stop putting your garbage out every week and start living in an ocean of food wrappers and tissues. Rather, an engineer at the University of Leeds in England has created a construction material out of waste (for example, recycled glass, sewage sludge, and incinerator ash). These "Bitublocks" keep litter out of the landfill and could be used to build houses. They also take less energy to make than concrete blocks, their inventor says. Other scientists have proposed using waste material from poultry farms, such as chicken feathers, to make more environmentally-friendly plastics.

8. Bury the Carbon

Since we have all this extra carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere and warming the Earth, some scientists have proposed taking that excess gas and trapping it somewhere, perhaps underground in aquifers, coal seams or depleted oil and gas fields. (The method is already used to push up dregs from the latter.) To do this, carbon dioxide would have to be separated from plant emissions, compressed and injected into an underground tomb, where it could be kept for thousands of years. There are still questions of the costs involved in siphoning off carbon dioxide from plant gas streams though, and some environmental groups worry about the gas seeping out of the ground.

7. Keep Worms in the Kitchen

They're not just pets (or food for them) - worms can be made useful by putting them to work eating those bits of sandwich crust and apple cores from the garbage and turning them into compost. The compost can then be used in gardens and to plant houseplants. Los Angeles city employees have been keeping a plastic bin of the little wriggling creatures in their office to recycle their lunch leftovers. If you're not wild about keeping a worm farm in your kitchen, you could always compost the old-fashioned way with a bin in the backyard.

6. Fill the Air With Sulfur

Certain types of aerosols, or tiny particles suspended in the air, are thought to have an overall cooling effect on the atmosphere. These particles intercept some solar radiation and scatter it back into space. The cooling effect on the Earth's climate can be seen after a volcanic eruption, which can spew millions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere. Some scientists have suggested that we mimic nature and inject a bunch of sulfur into the atmosphere to counteract global warming. One problem with this plan is the increased amount of acid rain this would generate. Another is that sulfur would have to be regularly injected into the atmosphere to keep up the cooling, or global warming would pick up right where it left off.

5. Plant Fake Trees

Engineers have proposed building a forest of 100,000 fake trees to soak up carbon emissions and combat global warming. The trees - machines really - would suck carbon from the air through filters and then store it. The prototype devices are about the same size as a shipping container, and could remove thousands of times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than an equivalent-sized real tree, say scientists from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. The technology still needs work, though, as does the infrastructure to store the trapped carbon.

4. Grow Algae in the Ocean

Environmentalist and futurologist James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, recently added a scheme of his own to the somewhat zany list of proposed global warming remedies. Lovelock's idea is to use pipes to stimulate mixing in the world's oceans, bringing deep, nutrient-rich waters to the surface to feed huge algae blooms that would suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sink it to the bottom of the ocean as they died. This method would only be a Band-Aid though, Lovelock says, because warming will continue for some time, even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases today.

3. Lengthen Airplane Flights

Besides using up fuel and emitting carbon dioxide exhaust, airplanes also harm the environment by creating artificial contrail clouds of condensed water vapor in their wakes. The clouds act as atmospheric insulation, trapping heat underneath them on the planet. To combat the problem, some scientists have proposed requiring planes to fly at lower altitudes, where contrails are less likely to form. But to fly lower, planes would have to travel longer to reach their destinations. This would also use up more fuel, but advocates say the drop in fuel efficiency would be offset by the gain in reducing contrails. Plus, aircraft engineers could focus on making planes more fuel-efficient at lower altitudes.

2. Give the Ocean a Dose of Iron

Here's the basic idea: Tiny photosynthesizing plankton in the ocean use carbon dioxide from the air to make food. When they die, they sink down to the ocean floor, taking the carbon with them. Because iron stimulates phytoplankton growth, some people have suggesting fertilizing parts of the ocean with iron to create huge plankton blooms to suck up some of the excess carbon dioxide we've emitted into the atmosphere. Several private companies have attempted ventures to dump iron into the ocean to sell carbon credits, but many scientists question just how effective the massive blooms are at trapping and storing carbon. Environmental groups have also warned that iron dumps may harm the local marine ecosystems.

1. Build Earth Some Sunglasses

When you're lounging on the beach on a sunny day with the sun's hot rays beating down on you, you may try to keep out the glare with a pair of sunglasses or a hat. Some scientists have proposed taking a similar strategy with our warming planet: putting a ring of sunlight-scattering particles or micro-spacecraft in orbit around the equator. The idea is that the ring would reduce the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet and counteract some of the warming induced by greenhouse gases. The wild idea would also be an expensive one, with a potential price tag of trillions of dollars.

Read more!

Coal-burning China invests in methane capture

Yahoo News 23 Nov 09;

BEIJING (AFP) – China, a massive consumer of fossil fuels and coal in particular, is trying to modernise its mines by containing emissions of methane and turning the toxic gas into a source of much-needed energy.

Authorities in Beijing have made methane capture a government priority both in the name of safety, as the gas is responsible for many of the deadly blasts in China's dangerous mines, and environmental protection.

China is the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases and the extraction of coal, the source of more than 70 percent of the Asian giant's energy, accounts for a significant proportion of those emissions.

Beijing -- which has come under mounting pressure to commit to deeper emissions cuts, especially in the run-up to climate change talks in Copenhagen next month -- is now pouring millions of dollars into clean coal technology.

"The government grants about 300 million dollars a year in subsidies to mines that set up methane capture units," says Huang Shengchu, director of the Chinese Coal Information Institute in Beijing, a government-linked body.

Mines with such units are cleared of dangerous gas before coal is extracted; the siphoned-off methane is transported through pipelines to power stations where, unlike carbon dioxide, it can be recycled to produce electricity.

Despite the clear benefits of such technology, not all involved in the industry have been converted to the idea of going green.

"Small private structures are reluctant to implement Beijing's policies," Huang noted.

But companies that specialise in clean coal technology say they are optimistic that mining firms will get on board.

"This industry is undergoing a huge modernisation," said Dave McKinnon, project manager for Australian firm Valley Longwall International.

His company has been selling its computer-assisted drilling guidance system for three years in northern Shanxi province, the centre of China's coal-producing heartlands.

The cutting-edge equipment detects methane emissions and, according to the firm, allows for near-total capture.

"Most of my customers buy our technology because the safety standards are more and more strict," McKinnon said.

For years, authorities have been trying to improve safety in the country's coal mines, which are among the most dangerous in the world, with standards often ignored in the quest for profits and the drive to meet surging demand.

Official figures show that more than 3,200 workers died in collieries last year, but independent labour groups say the actual figure could be much higher, as many accidents are covered up in order to avoid costly mine shutdowns.

At least 104 miners were killed in a huge blast at a mine in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang last Saturday, China's worst mining disaster in two years.

Traditionally, methane has been extracted from mines through ventilation systems to prevent high concentrations of the gas in the shafts, which could poison workers and eventually lead to explosions.

But that method allowed the gas to escape into the atmosphere, rather than be put to positive use.

"Methane represents only one or two percent of the consumption of primary energy in China, but it could become quite important in some areas," said Pamela Franklin, of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

In Shanxi, the city of Jincheng stands as a shining example of the benefits of methane capture: since last year, a major power station has been operating there, fed by methane from a nearby mine.

Huang says the 45-million-dollar plant -- capable of continuously producing 120 megawatts of power -- is one of the most significant of its kind in the world. Taxis and buses in the city also run on methane.

Last year, 4.3 billion cubic metres of methane were captured in China, an increase of 26 percent from 2007, according to Ming Yang, an official at the International Energy Agency who co-authored a report on the potential for methane use here.

Read more!

Dutch approve project to store CO2 underground

Yahoo News 18 Nov 09;

THE HAGUE (AFP) – The Dutch government said Wednesday it had approved the experimental below-ground storage of excess CO2 to curb damaging emissions, dismissing concerns of residents who live on top of the project.

The test project would kick off from 2012 with CO2 stored in a spent natural gas field with a capacity of 0.8 megatonnes underneath the eastern town of Barendrecht, a government statement said.

"After the CO2 has been stored there for several years, an evaluation will be done," it said.

"Only if no problems have arisen by then will authorisation be given for storage at a second, larger field... with a capacity of nine megatonnes."

Shell plans to capture and store at Barendrecht CO2 emitted from its refinery at the Port of Rotterdam. The project, the total cost of which was not revealed, will be subsidised by the Dutch state to the tune of 30 million euros.

The municipality of Barendrecht, provincial authorities and inhabitants, concerned about the risk of explosion and earth movement, are opposed to the project and vowed Wednesday to resist it.

"The municipality does not accept the decision," said a statement from Barendrecht, saying it hoped the move would be overturned by parliament, failing which the town would go to court.

"We will not cooperate with the issuing of plans and permits," said the statement, accusing the government of "being blind to the concerns of inhabitants of Barendrecht", thousands of whom live on top of the gas fields.

The government said "the capture and storage of CO2 is essential as a transitional technology to limit climate damage."

The Netherlands, it said, had a storage capacity of some 800 megatonnes under land and another 800 megatonnes under sea.

"This will allow us to store 40 megatonnes per year for 40 years, the equivalent of 20 percent of our current annual CO2 emissions."

Read more!

Forests in the desert: the answer to climate change?

Climate change could be cancelled out in a staggeringly ambitious plan to plant the Sahara desert and Australian outback with trees
David Adam, guardian.co.uk 4 Nov 09;

Some talk of hoisting mirrors into space to reflect sunlight, while others want to cloud the high atmosphere with millions of tonnes of shiny sulphur dust. Now, scientists could have dreamed up the most ambitious geoengineering plan to deal with climate change yet: converting the parched Sahara desert to a lush forest. The scale of the ambition is matched only by the promised rewards – the scientists behind the plan say it could "end global warming".

The scheme has been thought up by Leonard Ornstein, a cell biologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, together with Igor Aleinov and David Rind, climate modellers at Nasa. The trio have outlined their plan in a new paper published in the Journal of Climatic Change, and they modestly conclude it "probably provides the best, near-term route to complete control of greenhouse gas induced global warming".

Under the scheme, planted fields of fast growing trees such as eucalyptus would cover the deserts of the Sahara and Australian outback, watered by seawater treated by a string of coastal desalination plants and channelled through a vast irrigation network. The new blanket of tree cover would bring its own weather system and rainfall, while soaking up carbon dioxide from the world's atmosphere. The team's calculations suggest the forested deserts could draw down around 8bn tonnes of carbon a year, about the same as emitted from fossil fuels and deforestation today. Sounds expensive? The researchers say it could be more economic than planned global investment in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS).

"The costs are enormous but the scale of the problem is enormous," says Ornstein, who is best known for pioneering a cell biology technique called polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in the 1950s. "It's a serious suggestion in that I believe it is the most promising and practical option in terms of current technology to solve the biggest parts of the problem."

The scheme could cost $1.9tn a year, he says. "When that's compared to figures like estimates of $800bn per year for CCS, our plan looks like a loser. But CCS can address only about 20% of the problem at the $800bn price. Mine addresses the whole thing. And CCS would involve a network of dangerous high-pressure pipelines coursing through the most developed neighbourhoods of our civilisations, compared to relatively benign water aqueducts in what are presently virtually uninhabited deserts."

Planting trees to combat rising carbon dioxide levels is controversial on a large scale, because most places where it has been suggested, such as Canada and Siberia, are in the northern hemisphere where the resulting change in surface colour, from predominantly light snow and rock to predominantly dark trees, could soak up more sunlight and cancel out the cooling benefit. Ornstein says subtropical regions, such as the Sahara and the Australian outback, do not have this problem. The areas have only minimal "human occupation, agricultural food and fibre resources and competing natural biomes" the team says. "We must bite the bullet, global warming will not go away by itself ... solar, geothermal and wind power can make modest contributions. All of these are other parts of a fix. But the quicker a forest can be grown, the more time will be available to choose among and to implement such adjustments, and perhaps to develop more attractive substitutes."

Ornstein says several desert-heavy countries are suitable, including large chunks of Saudi Arabia and a string of African nations west of Egypt. The scheme would provide jobs and investment, he says, as well as a long-term source of sustainable wood that could be used as a biofuel to replace fossil fuels. Other plans for the desert region, such as the installation of giant arrays of mirrors and solar panels to generate electricity would not be affected, he says. Tree-planters, and the resulting clouds, would stick to the flatter regions further south.

Since the paper was published a few weeks ago, Ornstein has attempted to seed serious discussions on specialist websites, with little success. Critics have pointed out that the deserts are not total wildernesses, but rich and diverse ecosystems in their own right, which would be destroyed. Ornstein says: "If sacrifices are required to stem global warming, the almost non-existent ecosystems of the central Sahara and the outback seem like reasonable candidates compared to the alternatives."

The scheme does have some support. "It is incredibly important and definitely worth taking seriously," says Rick Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. "While there are many practical and political difficulties of afforestation of regions this large, the benefits could be enormous and go well beyond carbon sequestration."

Read more!