We Still Have No Idea How To Eliminate More Than a Quarter of Energy Emissions (technologyreview.com)

Climate discussions typically center on the need to replace fossil-fuel power plants with technologies like wind turbines and solar panels. But a new paper in Science offers a stark reminder that there are still huge parts of the global energy system where we simply don't have affordable ways of halting greenhouse-gas emissions. MIT Technology Review: Air travel, long-distance transportation and shipping, steel and cement manufacturing, and remaining parts of the power sector account for 27 percent of global emissions from the energy and industrial sectors. And the authors say we need much more research, innovation, and strategic coordination to clean up these sources. "If we're really ambitious about meeting our climate targets, we need to be tackling these hard sectors now," says the paper's lead author, Steven Davis, an earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine.

Comments

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. We can power all those items with nuclear power. We are just too scared to develop it from the point of "highly dangerous" to "very safe".

All technology is dangerous at first. But if we let that scare us, we are screwed.

Re: Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we can eliminate all of those energy emissions with nuclear power.

Completely eliminate them. Utterly.

Also War, Poverty, Discrimination, Starvation, Children without Shoes, and the losing Rangers season.

Gone forever. Thanks to our friend, the Atom.

Re:Bullshit

[ShanghaiBill]

Bullshit. We can power all those items with nuclear power.

Nukes can work for cement, which just needs heat for the kiln. But nuclear aircraft? I don't think so. An iron blast furnace uses metallurgical coal (converted to coke), as an integral part of the process. You can't just drop in nuclear as a replacement.

Like TFA says, we need new tech. Business leaders and politicians can't save the world. Only nerds can do that.

Re:Bullshit

[mikael]

It was tried by both Americans and USSR. But the problems were shielding and contamination of the environment. Maybe now, there could be electric engines and nuclear batteries like in The Fifth Element.

#http://mentalfloss.com/article/53184/brief-history-nuclear-airplanes

Re:Bullshit

[MikeMo]

BUT, if we used nukes for everything everywhere it makes sense (like almost everything except transportation), we'd be way better off than we are now. Imagine only using fossil fuels for transportation. Even that will be decreasing and cars and trucks go more and more electric.

One could almost say nukes are REQUIRED for a fully electric vehicle fleet.

Re:Bullshit

[jnaujok]

A nuclear plant could easily power a processing plant to produce methane from the CO2 in the air and water (Sabatier reaction). The high energy density of liquid methane fuel can then be used on aircraft with a net-zero carbon footprint. The net effect is a "nuclear powered airplane."

Many steel plants already use induction furnaces for for melt processes, but the addition of coke to remove impurities is a required part of the process. Using induction heating with a much smaller carbon injection reduces the footprint from steel production, while CO2 capture and electrolytic splitting becomes possible with massive energy sources. In other words, capture the CO2 that does come off, and re-split it to carbon and oxygen, which also lets you re-use the carbon on the next batch of steel. Bonus.

The real killer is concrete production, as the cooking off of CO2 to create portland cement is actually one of the major sources of CO2 in America. Again, capture and reprocessing becomes possible with the availability of cheap power, though I personally think alternatives to traditional cement need to be found.

In any case, abundant energy at low prices derived from an "assembly line" 6th generation walk-away safe nuclear reactor would solve pretty much every one of the problems out there when it comes to carbon emissions and energy. And that merely assumes fission. With Lockheed supposedly producing a "semi-truck sized" fusion 100MW fusion plant that could be parked next to any major factory, the game changes even more.

Re:Bullshit

[ShanghaiBill]

There is already serious talk about electric airplanes.

Electric planes may work for short hops, like Boston to NYC, or London to Paris. But there is no way they can go from SFO to Shanghai without some profound breakthroughs. Long haul is where most aviation energy consumption occurs.

Re:Bullshit

[jnaujok]

Aluminum was more valuable than gold before Deville came along and figured out electrolysis in 1859. Guess what made that process so cheap that we now throw piles of aluminum cans away without a thought -- not that we should?

Cheap electricity.

Guess what? You can extract iron from ore using electrolysis as well.

Iron Metal Production through Bulk Electrolysis
Green Iron

Re:Bullshit

[zieroh]

Nukes can work for cement

Well, sort of. Even if you powered the kilns with nuclear power, you would still have to deal with the CO2 emissions that come directly from the heated limestone, which is roughly HALF of the overall carbon emissions involved in cement production.

Source: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2...

Re:Bullshit

[ShanghaiBill]

A nuclear plant could easily power a processing plant to produce methane from the CO2 in the air and water (Sabatier reaction).

Sure, if by "easily" you mean complicated and extremely expensive. Or are we assuming that nuclear power is "too cheap to meter"?

Many steel plants already use induction furnaces for for melt processes

Those are "mini-mills". They make steel from steel. They don't make steel from ore.

but the addition of coke to remove impurities is a required part of the process.

The coke removes the oxygen, which is MOST of the iron ore. It is the iron that is the impurity.

Re:Bullshit

[BlueStrat]

BUT, if we used nukes for everything everywhere it makes sense (like almost everything except transportation), we'd be way better off than we are now. Imagine only using fossil fuels for transportation. Even that will be decreasing and cars and trucks go more and more electric.

One could almost say nukes are REQUIRED for a fully electric vehicle fleet.

But it leaves many large and powerful environmental/anti-pollution and similar political groups high & dry for primary issues to fund-raise with. Many politicians would lose a great number of issues on which to campaign. Issues are kept 'alive' by both sides for purposes of fund raising, elections, and general demagoguery. Besides, the many thousands of protest signs, flyers, ads, etc are already designed & printed, solving issues means new costs for the next issue.

On the other hand, whatever crisis that ends up being perpetuated by this sort of 'issue protection and maintenance' behavior is extremely unlikely to significantly affect the elite and their minions when the predictable happens due to their power and wealth. It also deepens divides between the people and ratchets up frustration and anger which generate more clicks for the media and fund raising money plus fanatical followers willing to go to extremes to 'win' for the political elite and the groups behind them.

All this means that there are powerful interests on both sides whose interests intersect in that they would rather keep nuclear power as an issue they can keep on using decade after decade. It will take immense pressure to change the political status quo relating to nuclear power as there are many in both parties who would rather keep it as an issue.

Strat

Re: Bullshit

[l0ungeb0y]

Ohhhh nuclear-powered steam-punk aeroplanes! I likes. Everyone on board should be required to wear leather jackets and goggles

Re:Bullshit

[ShanghaiBill]

The absolute best batteries available today are around 1.8 MJ/kg in storage. Compare that with jet fuel which is around 43 MJ/kg. Now cut the range your airplane can fly by a factor of (43/1.8) ~24 and you'll see the issue.

That is not a fair comparison. A battery can convert 95% of its energy to thrust. The best turbofan jets can reach about 36%. So ((43 * 0.36)/(1.8 * 0.95)) = ~ 9.

But that isn't fair either, because when you burn fuel you are no longer carrying the fuel, so the plane gets lighter and uses less fuel per mile further into the journey. The weight of a battery doesn't change. The batteries are deadweight during landing, making landings more dangerous and requiring longer runways.

Batteries need to improve by a roughly a factor of ten to be competitive for long haul aviation. That is unlikely.

A compromise may be to use electrical energy for the takeoff, possibly with a mass driver with the batteries on the ground. This means smaller, quieter, and safer jets (since they don't have to be beefed up for takeoff thrust) as well as shorter runways.

Re:Bullshit

[careysub]

...you make steel from ore, then you need coke...

This is currently true. There are no commercial processes to make iron without carbon as a reducing agent 2FeO + C -> 2Fe + CO2.

But iron can in principle be reduced electrolytically, like we do with aluminum.

There is no middle ground.

The process is currently under development, so there is no middle ground at the moment. This is the sort of thing TFA is discussing.

Three quarters is good

[PopeRatzo]

If the headline is correct, that means we can eliminate 3/4 of energy emissions. That sounds like a win to me.

How to solve the problem

[bobstreo]

Put the companies executives in a dome that is over their production facilities. /s

I'm sure they'll figure it out quickly.

Let's work on energy efficiency!

[ArhcAngel]

With an alarming 68% of all energy produced going to waste regardless of how it was generated it makes more sense to improve how the energy is used.

Re:Let's work on energy efficiency!

[Rick Schumann]

I just looked: 70% of all North American Internet traffic is entertainment like Netflix or YouTube. How much energy all over the world is spent just distracting us?

Simple: Sunset all internal combustion engines

[Rick Schumann]

The solution to the problem is simple enough in concept, but it's also the pink-and-purple-polka-dot elephant in the room; everyone knows that ICEs are grossly inefficient, even if they are powerful, but let's face it: they're over 100 year old technology at this point. We, as a civilization, need to establish a timeline by which we systematically obsolete and replace ICE technology with something else.

Let the market do it.

[Ichijo]

Stop paying people to drive everywhere. Stop telling businesses how many parking spaces they have to provide for their own customers. Stop making poor, compact neighborhood subsidize urban sprawl. And then internalize the negative externality of burning fossil fuels, perhaps with a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend so it isn't a burden on the poor.

I think the market can solve the problem, if we would let it.

First things First

[DumbSwede]

How'bout we do the 3/4 that's doable first, instead of, you know... not doing it because the last 1/4 is hard.

Aviation is already looking at creating electric motor planes that run on batteries.
I go one further and suggest using microwaves emitted from high locations (above most birds) that top off the batteries periodically, maybe even making the batteries essentially a backup for emergency landings (huge weight and efficiency savings).
That of course is just one idea as opposed to "We Still Have No Idea"