The European Environment Agency published a report on the cost and toll of air pollution due to industrial facilities to the European Union last November.

The costs are staggering as the 10,000 facilities induced up to 102 and 169 billion euros in 2009 alone.

However, only a small number of these plants are responsible for the vast majority of this pollution. The EEA notes:

Fifty per cent of the total damage cost occurs as a result of emissions from just 191 or 2 % of the approximately 10 000 facilities that reported data for releases to air.

Three quarters of the total damage costs are caused by the emissions of 622 facilities — 6 % of the total number.

This proves that solving the problem of industrial air pollution could be relatively easy.

The energy sector is the most polluting one as it is responsible for 66 to 112 billion euros of damages. Excluding carbon dioxide, the pollution still costs the 27 country members up to 26 to 71 billion euros.

Other sectors like production processes and manufacturing combustion are responsible for much less pollution, and thus much less induced: 23 to 28 billion euros and 8 to 21 billion euros respectively.

Meanwhile, the report notes that carbon dioxide contributes the most to the overall damage costs with approximately 63 billion euros in 2009. But this is not enough:

Air pollutants, which contribute to acid rain and can cause respiratory problems – sulphur dioxide (SO₂), ammonia (NH₃), particulate matter (PM₁₀) and nitrogen oxides (NO_x) – were found to cause €38-105 billion of damage a year.

The bottom line: the European Union needs to change the way it is producing electricity and to improve its few remaining plants to get much cleaner air.

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The increased use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in the production of refrigerators, air conditioners, and other products could play a significant role in accelerating global warming, a new UN report warns.

Without stricter regulations, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report says, the projected emissions of HFCs by 2050 could equal pouring nearly 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — or about one-third of current CO2 emissions.

While introduced in the 1990s to replace ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), HFCs are also potent greenhouse gases — about 1,600 times more powerful in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

And with the increase in world population and the continued growth of emerging economies, annual consumption of HFCs has doubled over the last decade to about 400,000 tons, according to the UNEP report.

The most common type of HFC increased 10 percent annually from 2006 to 2010. “Without intervention, the increase in HFC emissions is projected to offset much of the climate benefit achieved by the earlier reduction in [ozone-depleting substances],” the report says.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Peat, the accumulated turf made up of decayed vegetation, forms in many parts of the world in places like bogs, moors, and swamp forests. Due to its high carbon content, it can be harvested and burned as fuel. There are estimates that the global inventory of peat, covering 2 percent of all land area, contains 8 billion terajoules of energy. A new study has revealed that peat also has a high potential to contribute to climate change. The study, published by researchers from Bangor University in Maine, found that drought causes the release of far more carbon dioxide from peat than previously assumed.

Peatlands of the world lie in regions which are predicted to experience more frequent and severe droughts as climate change deepens. This will lead to the peat drying out and releasing vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. Peat normally contains ample moisture which locks in the greenhouse gas. As it dries, the peat becomes exposed to the air where CO2 can be released.

The new study was published in the journal Nature Geosciences by Dr. Nathalie Fenner and Professor Chris Freeman of Bangor University. They found that not only with drought increase the rate of CO2 release, but that the release will also continue after the drought has concluded and the peat is re-wetted. This is because the new rainwater will drain away the dried out peatlands as dissolved organic carbon, where it can also be released.

“As our global climate and rainfall patterns change, our peatlands may not have sufficient opportunity to recover between these drought-induced episodes of CO2 loss,” explains Dr Fenner. “What we previously perceived as a ’spike’ in the rate of carbon loss during drying out, now appears far more prolonged- with a potential peak after the initial drought period is over.”

Other potential problems from future droughts in peatland may be the deterioration of drinking water quality from the dissolved organic carbon. Peatlands can often be found upland in the northern hemisphere and their waters may travel down gradient to reservoirs or into the groundwater. Also, the loss of carbon may lead to degradation of the peatland itself. More lowland flooding may be possible as the peatland’s natural sponge-like quality diminishes. Habitat and species loss may also occur.

“The previous focus of research in this area has been on the drought period, and our own work identified how the release of CO2 occurs,” explains Prof Freeman, who leads the Wolfson Peatland Carbon Capture Laboratory at Bangor University. “We were initially surprised at finding that the effects are so prolonged- we think what’s happening is microbial and that this activity has been triggered by the introduction of oxygen into previously waterlogged conditions. Once the water returns, conditions have changed and the microbes are further able to thrive until conditions eventually return to normal.”

Article by David A. Gabel, appearing courtesy Environmental News Network.

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A regional cap-and-trade program launched in the northeastern U.S. three years ago has saved customers nearly $1.1 billion on electricity bills, helped create 16,000 jobs, and has retained more than $765 million in local economies by reducing the demand for fossil fuels, according to a new analysis.

While the future of the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) remains in jeopardy — with New Jersey planning to drop out and other states also considering leaving — the study by the Boston-based Analysis Group finds that the project has had real benefits for the ten participating states.

The program requires major power plants to buy allowances at auction for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. From mid-2008 to September, plant owners have spent about $912 million to buy those allowances, generating funds that were used to improve energy efficiency, train workers, and undertake local renewable energy projects.

“We tracked the dollars spent, and RGGI generates greater economic growth in every one of the 10 states that participate in RGGI than would occur without a carbon price,” said Susan Tierney, one of the authors of the study, which will be published in The Electricity Journal. RGGI’s participants include the six New England states, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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In many parts of the world, including areas of India, central Asia and the Sahara desert where the climate is arid and the landscape barren, these standing crops can soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into oxygen. The new research is soon to be published in the European Journal of Plant Science and Biotechnology.

Though maintaining our current forests is a necessary initiative, Prof. Eshel says, it is not enough to off-set human carbon output. In their quest to create forests that diminish carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, many countries have been converting fertile agricultural lands into forests. But these researchers believed that encouraging growth on a piece of land that was traditionally barren, such as desert land, was a step in a better direction.

To conserve fresh water, the researchers used relatively poor quality water considered, such as recycled sewage water and salt water that was the by-product of inland desalination plants. The final piece of the puzzle was to find a plant hearty enough to successfully grow in the desert. The researchers turned to Tamarix, a botanical genus that includes salt cedar trees and is indigenous to the old-world deserts. Some 150 different varieties of the botanical genus were used, grown in both a common garden setting and in densities that mimicked commercial crops.

The genus Tamarix (tamarisk, salt cedar) is composed of about 50-60 species of flowering plants in the family Tamaricaceae, native to drier areas of Eurasia and Africa. They are evergreen or deciduous shrubs or trees growing to 1—18 m in height and forming dense thickets. The largest, Tamarix aphylla, is an evergreen tree that can grow to 18 m tall. They usually grow on saline soils, tolerating up to 15,000 ppm soluble salt and can also tolerate alkali conditions.

Tamarisks are characterized by slender branches and grey-green foliage. The bark of young branches is smooth and reddish-brown. As the plants age, the bark becomes bluish-purple, ridged and furrowed. The leaves are scale-like, 1—2 mm long, and overlap each other along the stem. They are often encrusted with salt secretions. The pink to white flowers appear in dense masses on 5—10 cm long spikes at branch tips from March to September, though some species tend to flower during the winter.

With the first harvest of trees just last summer, researchers have much to process, including analyzing the amount of carbon dioxide the crops have successfully captured from the atmosphere. The answers will determine how much carbon such a crop can offset.

The cut trees themselves might also be used as a source of renewable energy. These biomass or biofuel crops, derived from natural crops, could help to reduce dependence on traditional fossil fuels such as coal. But the question of where to grow crops dedicated to fuel production had to be addressed, since converting agricultural land could have the side effect of creating food shortages.

Arid and previously unused desert lands provide an ideal solution, Prof. Eshel says. To make his approach economically feasible, much more land would be needed than Israel can provide. But similar tracts of land, such as the Sahara Desert, are big enough to grow these types of crops on a larger scale. He adds that what has been done in the Israeli desert can be replicated elsewhere to great effect.

Article appearing courtesy ENN.com .

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Carbon sequestration is the capture of carbon dioxide (CO2). This is the process of carbon capture and storage, where carbon dioxide is removed from flue gases, such as on power stations, before being stored in underground reservoirs. There are also natural sequestration processes such as the ocean. Carbon sequestration describes long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon to either mitigate or defer global warming. It has been proposed as a way to slow the atmospheric and marine accumulation of greenhouse gases, which are released by burning fossil fuels. The lack of a settled legal framework that balances private property rights while maximizing the public good ultimately hinders the large-scale commercial deployment of geologic carbon sequestration, according to research by A. Bryan Endres, a professor of agricultural law at the University of Illinois.

In order to justify the extensive up-front capital investment by firms, issues with the property rights of the subsurface pore space that would permanently house the captured carbon dioxide must be resolved first, says A. Bryan Endres, a professor of agricultural law at Illinois.

“You have a new technology that requires a lot of upfront capital investment, but you don’t have a legal framework for how you’re going to be able to implement this technology with regard to property rights,” said Endres, who also is the director of the university’s European Union Center. “What’s unique about property rights is they’re usually pretty well settled, and yet here we are dealing with a situation where ownership isn’t quite so clear. That’s a key question, because a firm isn’t going to invest money in a carbon sequestration plant before they are confident about who owns the area underneath.”

According to the study, published in the University of Illinois Law Review, ownership of the pore space at the depths necessary for permanent geologic carbon sequestration is still an open question in the vast majority of states.

“Right now, only Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota have assigned the property rights of the pore space to the surface property owner,” Endres said. “While that might make good political sense, I don’t think that makes good policy sense because it creates a patchwork of small land-holdings. With carbon sequestration, the geology is going to determine the limits, not some grid-based property system. This is why we need to have legislative involvement to clarify the situation.”

Like air transport, carbon sequestration should be thought of as a public good — one that has the added potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and curb global climate change.

“It makes more sense to treat it as you would airspace for an airplane, in that it belongs to the state and they can decide who’s going to access it,” Endres said. “It would be a much more efficient system if the state had ownership of it.”

Endres notes that there’s also the potential for states to generate a significant amount of revenue from carbon sequestration, either through an auction or a royalty system.

While this isn’t necessarily the silver bullet to reverse carbon dioxide emissions, Endres says it’s one of many ready-made and already available tools that could slow the growth rate of global climate change.

“This is a technology that will allow us to utilize natural resources like coal while also shrinking its carbon footprint,” he said. “So it’s important to get this framework in place so the industry can really take off, because now you just have a lot of speculation, experimental labs and pilot projects. This is something that needs to get developed sooner rather than later.”

The question of legal rights will be a sharply debated issue for decades still. Both sides will use the facade of property right for their own positions.

Article by Andy Soos, appearing courtesy Environmental News Network.

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Although the burning of natural gas emits far less carbon dioxide than coal, a new study concludes that a greater reliance on natural gas would fail to significantly slow down climate change. The study by Tom Wigley, who is a senior research associate at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), underscores the complex and sometimes conflicting ways in which fossil fuel burning affects Earth’s climate. While coal use causes warming through emission of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, it also releases comparatively large amounts of sulfates and other particles that, although detrimental to the environment, cool the planet by blocking incoming sunlight. As always the final picture of climate effect is very complicated to put together.

Wigley’s computer simulations indicate that a worldwide, partial shift from coal to natural gas would slightly accelerate climate change through at least 2050, even if no methane leaked from natural gas operations, and through as late as 2140 if there were substantial leaks. After that, the greater reliance on natural gas would begin to slow down the increase in global average temperature, but only by a few tenths of a degree.

The burning of coal releases more carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels, as well as comparatively high levels of other pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particles such as ash. Since natural gas emits lower levels of these pollutants, some energy experts have proposed greater reliance on that fuel source as a way to slow down global warming and reduce the impacts of energy use on the environment.

But the effects of natural gas on climate change have been difficult to calculate. Recent studies have come to conflicting conclusions about whether a shift to natural gas would significantly slow the rate of climate change, in part because of uncertainty about the extent of methane leaks.

Wigley’s new study attempts to take a more comprehensive look at the issue by incorporating the cooling effects of sulfur particles associated with coal burning and by analyzing the complex climatic influences of methane, which affects other atmospheric gases such as ozone and water vapor.

By running a series of computer simulations, Wigley found that a 50 percent reduction in coal and a corresponding increase in natural gas use would lead to a slight increase in worldwide warming for the next 40 years of about 0.1 degree Fahrenheit (less than 0.1 degree Celsius). The reliance on natural gas could then gradually reduce the rate of global warming, but temperatures would drop by only a small amount compared to the 5.4 degrees F (3 degrees C) of warming projected by 2100 under current energy trends.

The main direct effect of sulfates on the climate involves the scattering of light, effectively increasing the Earth’s albedo. This effect is moderately well understood and leads to a cooling from the negative radiative forcing, partially offsetting the larger warming effect of greenhouse gases. The effect is strongly spatially non-uniform, being largest downstream of large industrial areas.

For further information:  http://www2.ucar.edu/news/5292/switching-coal-natural-gas-would-do-little-global-climate-study-indicates

Article by Andy Soos, appearing courtesy ENN.

photo:

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Measuring the emission of greenhouse gases from croplands should take into account the crops themselves. That’s the conclusion of a study in the Sept.-Oct. issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality, which examined the impact of farm practices such as tillage on the greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. Expressing emissions per unit of crop yield rather than on a more conventional per area basis produced very different results, says the study’s leader, Rod Venterea, research soil scientist with the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.

In particular, his team found that total nitrous oxide emissions were not significantly affected by tillage practices when expressed on an area basis. When they were calculated per unit yield of grain, however, emissions were significantly greater under no-tillage compared with conventional tillage. A byproduct of many agricultural systems, nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas (GHG) with a heat-trapping potential more than 300 times that of carbon dioxide.

The findings have important implications for how the greenhouse gases generated by agriculture are reported, evaluated, and potentially mitigated. Nitrous oxide emissions were slighter higher under no-till on a per area basis in the study, Venterea explains, but not high enough to differ statistically from those under conventional tillage. “But when we added in the fact that no-tillage also reduced yields, the effect of tillage did become significant,” he says. “The point is that you need to look at both nitrous oxide emissions and yield together.”

While previous studies have shown that practices like fertilizer and tillage management can affect nitrous oxide emissions, relatively few have reported the effects of these practices on crop performance at the same time. In addition, GHG emissions are commonly expressed with respect to area of field: for example, kilogram nitrous oxide emitted per hectare. Recent research has suggested that expressing GHG emissions per unit of yield may be more meaningful, although few studies have actually done that.

To see how yield-scaled calculations might change the picture on emissions, USDA-ARS researchers in collaboration with University of Minnesota colleagues measured the effects of tillage and nitrogen (N) fertilizer management on nitrous oxide emissions, grain yields, and crop N uptake over three consecutive growing seasons in Minnesota. The experiment was conducted in research plots used for corn and soybean production, which were maintained under either no-till or conventional tillage for 18 years.

When the scientists calculated nitrous oxide emissions per unit yield of grain or grain N, they found that emissions under no-tillage were 52 and 66% higher, respectively, than with conventional tillage. In other words, for this cropping system and climate, Venterea says, no-till practices would generate substantially more nitrous oxide than would conventional tillage for the same amount of grain. The effect was due to lower yields under no-till, combined with slightly greater area-scaled nitrous oxide emissions.

Reduced yields under continuous no-till management in parts of the upper Midwest and other regions have been attributed to lower soil temperatures in spring, which may inhibit plant development. In other geographic regions, though, no-till can actually increase yields.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a clear, colorless gas, with a slightly sweet odor. Due to its long atmospheric lifetime (approximately 120 years) and heat trapping effects —about 310 times more powerful than carbon dioxide on a per molecule basis — N2O is an important greenhouse gas.

Nitrous oxide has both natural and human-related sources, and is removed from the atmosphere mainly by photolysis (i.e., breakdown by sunlight) in the stratosphere. In the United States, one of the main human-related sources of N2O are agricultural soil management. N2O is also produced naturally from a wide variety of biological sources in soil and water. On a global basis, it is estimated that natural sources account for over 60% of the total N2O emissions.

Article by Andy Soos, appearing courtesy Environmental News Network.

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The U.S. Department of Energy has selected four projects for continued research into developing carbon capture technologies, with the goal of achieving 90 percent carbon dioxide removal.

While existing carbon capture technologies require enormous amounts of energy — adding as much as 80 percent to the cost of electricity for a new coal plant and significantly reducing the efficiency of the operation — federal officials hope new advancements will reduce that to no more than 35 percent.

According to the department’s Office of Fossil Energy (FE), the $67 million commitment over four years will focus on advanced solvent-based, post-combustion carbon capture technologies, which could provide the most near-term benefits since they can be added to existing power plants.

The projects, managed by the FE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, include a pilot project that uses an amine-based process being developed by Linde LLC; carbon absorber retrofit equipment being tested at a Colorado Springs power plant by the Neumann Systems Group, Inc.; and waste heat integration methods being developed by Southern Company and the University of Kentucky Research Foundation.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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Breeding crops with deeper roots could significantly reduce atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and make crops more drought resistant, according to a study by a researcher at the University of Manchester.

Reporting in the journal, Annals of Botany, professor Douglas Kell calculated that breeding crops whose roots extend 2 meters underground, rather than the 1-meter roots common to many crops, could double the amount of carbon captured from the atmosphere.

Kell reported that creating crops and plants with deeper and bushier roots would also lead to more water and nutrient retention and produce more sustainable plant yields as the world warms and droughts increase in water-stressed regions.

“This doubling of root biomass from a nominal 1 meter to 2 meters is really the key issue,” said Kell.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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