Extinction Rebellion launches campaign of financial disobedience

Group stages debt and tax strikes to expose ‘political economy’s complicity’ in ecological crisis

Activists from Extinction Rebellion gather by the Bank of England before marching through central London in September. Photograph: Barcroft Media/Getty Images


Matthew Taylor
Mon 23 Nov 2020 THE GUARDIAN

Extinction Rebellion is launching a campaign of financial civil disobedience aimed at exposing the “political economy’s complicity” in the unfolding ecological crisis.

The group – which has staged some of the UK’s biggest civil disobedience protests over the past two years – is turning its attention to what it says will be a sustained campaign of debt and tax strikes. It is also asking people to “redirect” loans from banks that finance fossil fuel projects to frontline organisations fighting for climate justice.

Gail Bradbrook, a co-founder of XR, which was set up two years ago, said: “It’s time to tell the politicians who prop up this way of living: no more. We want an economy that grows health and wellbeing, not debt and carbon emissions. An economy that prepares and protects us from shocks to come, rather than making them worse. An economy that shares resources to meet all our needs, regardless of background. An economy that lets us live.”

Organisers hope that in the coming months the “Money Rebellion” will involve thousands of people in the “redistributing debt” scheme and the debt strikes.

XR says it also has a growing number of small businesses that are planning to divert a portion of their taxes to help fund investment into green, sustainable business models and initiatives rather than pay them to the government.

Bradbrook said: “We need a grownup conversation about why our political economy is killing life on Earth.”

XR says the Money Rebellion is the latest stage of its campaign centred around three demands – that the UK government tells the truth about the scale of the climate and ecological emergency, that if commits to zero carbon emissions by 2025 and that it agrees to a binding citizens’ assembly to devise policies to address the crisis.

The group has held three major events since its launch, bringing motor traffic in parts of central London to a standstill. Organisers say that despite its success in raising awareness of the escalating climate crisis, the government has failed to respond appropriately.

MOON BASE
SCIENTISTS WANT TO BUILD A LUNAR HABITAT INSPIRED BY ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE

A Pantheon for a new age.
Allan Baxter/Photodisc/Getty Images
PASSANT RABIE 15 HOURS AGO


IT'S BEEN MORE THAN 50 YEARS since humans first landed on the Moon, and humanity is preparing for a lunar comeback within the next four years with the upcoming NASA Artemis mission.

This time around, NASA plans to make camp. But to establish a lunar settlement, NASA needs to build a permanent habitat for astronauts to live and work on the Moon. To do it, they are taking inspiration from an ancient people who have gone down in history for their building prowess: The Romans.

In a new study, scientists lay the groundwork for building a habitat on the Moon inspired by a Roman temple but which uses only material found on the lunar surface.

The study was published Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

As the date for sending astronauts back to the Moon creeps closer, scientists have been trying to come up with different ways to build a lasting lunar settlement. So far, their ideas range from building a habitat made from mushrooms to suggesting that astronauts use their own pee to create a mixture of concrete to build on the Moon.

Key to any lunar construction is that it require as little packing from Earth as possible. It costs as much as $10,000 to put one pound of material into orbit. So the less construction material imported from Earth, the better.


These large, ancient structures inspired the scientists with an idea for a sustainable lunar habitat. Woolf et. al

In the new study, the scientists suggest using building material found on the Moon — lunar regolith and rock. The lunar material would provide for protection from exposure to cosmic rays while on the Moon, and from atmospheric pressure, they say.

To build the habitat, the regolith would have to be cast into blocks, which would then be piled on top of each other to keep the building in a state of compression. For this design, the only material that would need to be transported from Earth is a thin plastic film — to help seal the small gaps between the regolith blocks so that the air doesn't leak out.

The structure of the habitat itself would be built like the ancient Roman Pantheon. This Roman temple still stands as the most well preserved and influential building from its time.


The lunar habitat would have an oculus similar to that of the Romans' Pantheon.Francesco Riccardo Iacomino/Moment/Getty Images

Like the Pantheon, the lunar building would feature a top circular oculus — or opening in the center of the dome — to allow in sunlight to grow crops. The oculus has to be small enough to let in a beam of focused sunlight, and would be sealed with a transparent pressure window, according to the study design.

The sunlight would then be collected over a circular aperture, and reflected down to a focus in a 60° symmetric cone.


A diagram shows how the sunlight capture would work in the habitat.Woolf et al.

At 50 meters in diameter, the lunar habitat is fit to house around 40 people and visitors, the researchers say. And while the entire construction process may take up to three years, the habitat itself can last up to a millennia, according to the paper.

Location will be everything. The authors suggest the structure be built near the Moon's polar region, where traces of water deposits have been found. Doing so would let astronauts have easy access to critical lunar resources when needed, they say.

The habitat attempts to solve two of our biggest hurdles to establishing a permanent Moon population — safety from the harsh space environment and a place to grow the plants humans will need to survive. Perhaps future humans will one day look out on the heavens from these habitats' oculi — much like the Romans once did thousands of years ago on Earth.

Abstract: 

We describe a polar Moon base habitat using direct solar energy for construction, food production and atmospheric revitalization. With a growing area as large as 2000 m2, it could provide for 40 or more people. The habitat is built like the ancient Roman Pantheon, a stone structure with a top circular oculus, bringing in focused sunlight that is spread out to crops below. The conical, corbelled structure is built from cast regolith blocks, held in compression despite the large internal atmospheric pressure by a regolith overlayer 20–30 m thick. It is sealed on the inside against leaks with thin plastic. 

A solar mirror concentrator used initially to cast the building blocks is later used to illuminate the habitat through a small pressure window at the oculus. Three years of robotic preparation of the building blocks does not seem excessive for a habitat which can be expected to last for millennia, as has the Treasury of Atreus made by similar dry-stone construction. 

One goal of returning to the Moon is to demonstrate the practicality of long-term human habitation off the Earth. The off-axis, paraboloidal reflecting mirror is rotated about the vertical polar axis in order to direct horizontal sunlight downward to a focus. 

In this way, the heavy materials needed from Earth to build and power the habitat are largely limited to the solar concentrator and regolith moving and moulding equipment. By illuminating with a reflector rather than with electricity, the solar collection area is 20 times smaller than would be needed for PV cells.

GIZ ASKS
What Is the Biggest Scientific Fraud of the Past 50 Years?


Daniel Kolitz
Yesterday 2:06PM
Illustration: Chelsea Beck/Gizmodo

Giz Asks

In this Gizmodo series, we ask questions about everything and get answers from a variety of experts.

When you’re a journalist or club promoter or financier, fraud is always a gamble—you might be publicly disgraced and have your venal misdeeds replayed over and over in Netflix documentaries and prestige podcasts, but you might also get away with it. When you’re a scientist—working in a field whose bedrock principle is replicability—fraud is pointless: you are likely going to be found out. Incredibly, some have still taken those odds, like Elizabeth Holmes, for instance, whose endeavor thrills/mystifies precisely because it was so obviously doomed, at least in retrospect. But Holmes is far from the first fraudster to plague the annals of science. For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of historians of science for their take on the biggest scientific fraud of the last half-century.


Robert N. Proctor
Professor of the History of Science and Professor by courtesy of Pulmonary Medicine at Stanford University

The “world’s greatest scientific fraud” would have to be the Council for Tobacco Research, the cigarette industry’s chief instrument for denying that cigarettes cause cancer. That began in 1954, as part of Big Tobacco’s effort to distract from the evidence that cigarettes cause death. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into this effort, with the money going to top scholars at the world’s leading universities. Basically anyone willing to say that something other than cigarettes was causing cancer.

Twenty-seven Nobel laureates took money from Big Tobacco, and every major university was showered with cash. The University of Michigan recently stripped the name of CTR’s chief scientist Clarence Cook Little from its buildings, recognizing his nefarious role in promoting cigarette-friendly science. And some rather nasty ideas about eugenics.

Tobacco’s deception is “the greatest” because it paved the way for other kinds of scientific fraud. If Big Carbon today claims that “we need more research” to find out whether the climate is warming, that’s a trick learned from Big Tobacco. Countless other polluters have learned these tricks: hire scholars to deny, delay, and distract, and then call for “more research” to explore “both sides” of a purported “controversy.” Big Tobacco knew that their day of reckoning would come, but they cannot have known how widely their fraud would be imitated. It would be hard to name a more deadly scientific fraud, and for that reason we can rank it “the greatest.”“If Big Carbon today claims that “we need more research” to find out whether the climate is warming, that’s a trick learned from Big Tobacco.”

Katherine A. Pandora
Associate Professor, History of Science, The University of Oklahoma

I would nominate the opportunistic 1998 and 2002 research articles by Andrew Wakefield and his twelve co-authors that claimed that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine was linked with the development of autism as the biggest fraud of the last 50 years. The disregard of scientific authorities and the media for strict scrutiny of Wakefield’s claim that was short-handed to “vaccines cause autism” had severe international consequences in terms of vaccine hesitation for childhood illnesses over the last two decades, and still presents ramifications today for the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccine research.

The Wakefield studies were examples of fraud committed out in the open, which makes the freedom with which they flourished especially unnerving. They had basic design flaws, such as the lack of a control group and reliance on non-blinded data. Baseline factors such as small sample size and the use of case studies resulted in flawed interpretations—data derived from such configurations can be suggestive but are not robust enough to bear the weight of strong causal claims. Ethical lapses went unacknowledged and financial conflicts of interest were left unaddressed. And, given the absence of replicable findings, subsequent discussions of the results were, literally, unsupportable. These kinds of methodological weaknesses—the kind that are addressed in introductory courses on research design at the undergraduate level—should have disqualified the study from publication without major revisions if not outright rejection.

Upon being published in such a prestigious journal as Lancet, the purported research findings spread like an opportunistic infection, exploiting environmental vulnerabilities: the lack of knowledge about autism; the fears of (often novice) parents responsible for making judgments about risks to their young children; problematic journalistic practices fostered by media hype; and public suspicion about the profit-driven practices of the multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry. Remove these conditions, and a second bulwark against fraud exists—and yet these remain areas of concern.

Wakefield’s malfeasance was necessary but not sufficient for fraud to be committed. The disregard for scientific and journalistic safeguards was also required, for safeguards are only effective when enacted. The retraction of the papers by Lancet and the sanctioning of Wakefield along with the post-mortem analyses of what went wrong have been crucial to trying to remediate the deleterious consequences of this breach of trust. But an even larger issue is embedded within this particular research failure that needs to be given serious consideration: studies that have the potential to have an outsize negative influence across millions of lives due to deceit or error should not only meet basic standards of good research, but also be subjected to, and be able to stand up to, an even more careful level of scrutiny. Good enough isn’t.

“I would nominate the opportunistic 1998 and 2002 research articles by Andrew Wakefield and his twelve co-authors that claimed that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine was linked with the development of autism as the biggest fraud of the last 50 years.”

Felicitas Hesselmann
Research Assistant, Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin

On the one hand, all cases (and even allegations) of scientific fraud or misconduct are big in their own way: They are very serious and stressful events that can feel extremely disruptive and distressing for the people involved, they can result in grave personal consequences not just for the accused, but for many researchers and students that have worked with them in the past, trusted them and relied on them. Many researchers who were accused of impropriety, even if they were later acquitted, report suffering adverse health effects in the process.

On the other hand, no fraud case I can think of has been so big as to fundamentally change the course of research. Many researchers have a strong belief that science has a way of working itself out: Fraudulent claims, even if they are never explicitly detected, will simply not be replicated or corroborated in subsequent research, they will not lead to productive follow-up questions and eventually just be drowned out. What is more, many fraudulent claims aren’t even particularly outlandish or groundbreaking; they often are somewhat middle of the road, reflecting the overall state of research; or they are things that everybody expects to become possible before long, and fraudsters just claim to be a little faster. There are cases where fraudulent “findings” have been found to be actually reliable by subsequent research, because they were mirroring the state of research and possible outcomes so well. (This of course also begs that larger question of: what is fraudulent research anyway?) It is rare that cases involve claims that would fundamentally alter our understanding of the world if they were true. That also makes intuitive sense: If you are faking banknotes, for example, you mostly also want to make it look as much alike to the original as possible, although you might occasionally also get away with putting Princess Diana on a ten pound note.

In addition, misconduct cases are big, i.e. consequential, only in relation to particular academic communities and their field-specific knowledge. A cancer biologist, hypothetically, will not be very affected by the revelation that almost everything musicology claimed to know about Beethoven’s compositional style was fraudulent, even if that would shake musicologists to the core of their very being. Claiming that some cases are “bigger” than others, in that sense, would also mean to prioritize some types of knowledge and research over others, which is a fight I would prefer not to pick.“...many fraudulent claims aren’t even particularly outlandish or groundbreaking; they often are somewhat middle of the road, reflecting the overall state of research; or they are things that everybody expects to become possible before long, and fraudsters just claim to be a little faster.”

HOMEMADE SCIENCE 

Studies explore fluids in pancakes, beer, and the kitchen sink

by American Physical Society

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Mechanical engineer Roberto Zenit spent the summer of 2019 trying to solve a problem that now plagues science departments around the world: How can hands-on fluid dynamics experiments, usually carried out in well-stocked lab rooms, be moved off campus? Since the pandemic hit, leading researchers like Zenit have found creative ways for students to explore flow at home.

Zenit's answer, ultimately, came down to pancakes. He teaches a fluid dynamics lab class at Brown University, and one experiment requires students to measure viscosity, which is often done by measuring how quickly small spheres fall through thick liquids and settle at the bottom. But Zenit realized he didn't have to do it that way. The kitchen is rich with viscous fluids, and all he had to do was pick one.

Why not pancake batter?

This fall, students in his class, wherever they were sequestered, had to mix up pancake batter, pour it on a horizontal surface, and measure how quickly the radius expanded. "By measuring the rate at which this blob grows in time you can back-calculate the viscosity," said Zenit.

Zenit described the experiment during a mini-symposium on kitchen flows at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics. In addition to his viscosity-through-pancakes project, the symposium included new research on how fluids mix with each other and how they incorporate solid particles (as in batter or dough). Researchers from the University of Cambridge described new findings on hydraulic jumps—those eerily smooth circles of water, surrounded by turbulence, that form directly beneath a running kitchen faucet.

Chemical engineer Endre Mossige, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, organized the symposium. "Kitchen flow experiments are so easy to do," he said. "You need so little equipment to extract such useful information about fluid dynamics."

The kitchen is a natural place to look for inspiration, said Jan Vermant, an engineer at ETH Zurich. "In the kitchen we do a lot with high-interface materials," he said. "You have to mix fluids and air and make emulsions, and work with bubbles. This is a fundamental problem of food projects, and one known by chefs all over the world."

Vermant reported on his group's recent work, which tackled a beer problem by turning it into a fluid dynamics problem. He studies thin films, and in recent research he's been studying the stability of foam in beers and breads. Beermakers, he said, check on the fermentation progress of new brews by looking at the stability of foam. But, he said, the process is very "hand-wavy." When he began looking at beer brewing through the lens of fluid dynamics, he found a rich research environment.

Beer bubbles contain a rich variety of environments: capillary flows, soap films, and protein aggregation. "Basically, they have all the mechanisms one can design as an engineer," he said. His group found, to their surprise, that even though most beers have foam, different beers have different mechanisms behind those foams. Some foams act like soap films; others develop robust protein networks at the surface.

"They each highlight different aspects of the problem nicely," said Vermant. In subsequent work, his group took a similarly close look at interfacial phenomena in breads—and similarly found a variety of behaviors. "They have this rich diversity of mechanisms to stabilize foam structures," he said.

Vermant said the work isn't just about beer and bread; it may also serve as inspiration for new materials. "We can mimic those systems and might make foams using the same principles as beer foams," he said, which could be useful for applications ranging from spray insulation to protective foams for crops.

At Brown, Zenit said not every student successfully completed the experiment. "Some of them took my advice too literally, and did it in a hot pan," he said. Cooking the pancake changed the viscosity—freezing the batter in place—which meant the students don't have usable data. (But they did have breakfast.)

He said turning to pancakes during the pandemic has opened his eyes to different ways to teach fundamental ideas like viscosity. "In the regular experiments, you drop this sphere in a container and measure it," he said. The fluid, he says, is reduced to its measurement. With batter, the student experiences the concept. "With the pancakes, you get to feel the viscosity."
 
Explore further  Study reveals science behind traditional mezcal-making technique

More information: meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DFD20/APS_epitome

Provided by American Physical Society

TESLA NON UNION SWEATSHOP
Tesla factory workers exempt from California's new virus curfew


Tesla factory workers in California will be exempt from new coronavirus restrictions taking effect Saturday in the state because they are considered essential, after CEO Elon Musk feuded with authorities over an earlier shutdown.


"The limited stay-at-home order does not apply to employees deemed essential workers—manufacturing is listed as an essential workforce," said California's Department of Public Health, specifying in particular transport products and equipment.

The exemption will allow Tesla's auto assembly plant to avoid a new curfew across much of California while continuing to abide by a health plan already in place.

The 10:00 pm to 5:00 am stay-at-home order, apart from essential activities, will take effect Saturday evening and remain in force through December 21.

Some 94 percent of the population is affected by the curfew, including residents of Alameda, where the electric car manufacturer's plant is located.

In May, Musk feuded with authorities over the reopening of the California plant and threatened to move his headquarters and future projects to Texas or Nevada.

He at one point announced the restart of production on Twitter and challenged authorities to stop him.

Last month, Tesla said profits in the previous quarter more than doubled as the electric car giant forecast deliveries hitting 500,000 this year.

COVID-19 infections have spiked nationwide in the United States, prompting a number of states to take measures to try to slow its spread.

US case numbers surpassed 12 million on Saturday.


Explore furtherMusk threatens removing Tesla from California over virus restrictions

Idaho is top pick for Energy Department nuclear test reactor

by Keith Ridler

The U.S. government said Thursday that Idaho is its preferred choice ahead of Tennessee for a test reactor to be built as part of an effort to revamp the nation's fading nuclear power industry by developing safer fuel and power plants.

The U.S. Department of Energy said in an email to The Associated Press that the site that includes Idaho National Laboratory will be listed as its preferred alternative in a draft environmental impact statement planned for release in December.

The Versatile Test Reactor, or VTR, would be the first new test reactor built in the U.S. in decades and give the nation a dedicated "fast-neutron-spectrum" testing capability. Some scientists decry the plan, saying fast reactors are less safe than current reactors.

A news release by the Energy Department earlier Thursday listed both Idaho and Tennessee as possible locations without selecting one as being favored.

However, Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho shared a tweet by the Energy Department's Office of Nuclear Energy identifying Idaho as its top choice for the reactor.

"Having the VTR at (the Idaho National Laboratory) will allow American companies to perform nuclear testing here in the U.S.—another step toward energy independence," Risch commented with his retweet.

The Energy Department, after some initial confusion when contacted by the AP, confirmed Idaho was its preferred choice for the project.

The test reactor, if it advances and Idaho remains the top choice, would be built at the department's 890-square-mile (2305-square-kilometer) site in eastern Idaho that includes a nuclear research lab.

"The Versatile Test Reactor continues to be a high-priority project for DOE to ensure nuclear energy plays a role in our country's energy portfolio," Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said. "Examination of the environmental impacts reflects DOE's commitment to clean energy sources and will serve as an example for others looking to deploy advanced reactor technologies."

The final environmental impact statement is due in 2021, followed by what's called a record of decision finalizing the selection of the site. Plans call for building the reactor by the end of 2025.

The Department of Energy's draft environmental impact statement also examines building the test reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee as an alternative.

The department had a fast reactor, the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, operating in eastern Idaho until it was shut down in 1994 as the nation turned away from nuclear power.

Most nuclear reactors in use now are "light-water" reactors fueled by uranium and cooled with water.

Some scientists are wary of fast reactors, noting they're cooled with harder to control liquid sodium and likely fueled by plutonium, increasing potential nuclear terrorism risks because plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons.

Revamping the nation's nuclear power is part of a strategy to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by generating carbon-free electricity with nuclear power initiated under the Obama administration and continuing under the Trump administration, despite Trump's downplaying of global warming.


Explore further Energy Department wants to build nuclear test 'fast' reactor

© 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Invention lets rotting veggies make a greener world

by Peter Grad , Tech Xplore

Credit: James Dyson Award

For generations, kids have been coaxed into finishing their vegetables after their parents sternly advised them that it is not nice to waste food when people are starving elsewhere in the world. But someday soon, kids may have a comeback: "If we eat those vegetables, we can't help fight climate change, reduce the carbon footprint or help provide power to underserved regions of our world."

Those kids—and the rest of us—will have Carvey Ehren Maigue to thank. The engineering student has designed a material composed of fruit and vegetables that collects light and converts it into electricity. Where it differs from solar panels, which trap mainly visible and infrared light, is that it utilizes ultraviolet waves.

The 27-year-old student at the Philippines Mapua University in Manila extracted organic luminescent compounds from rotting fruits and vegetables and suspended them in a resin compound. Ultraviolet light passing thought the resin is converted into visible light. And unlike solar panels, Maigue's device, called Aureus, does not need to face the sun since it can effectively use ultraviolet light that is dispersed and scattered off of surfaces.

Aureus uses solar panels to convert the visible light it generates into electricity.

Maigue's creation was the winning entry in this year's James Dyson Award in the category of sustainability. The Dyson award was established by inventor James Dyson, a billionaire and Britain's richest man, and is open to college students worldwide. Some 1,800 entries were submitted in the category this year.

"We need to utilize our resources more and create systems that don't deplete our current resources," Maigue said. "With Aureus, we upcycle the crops of the farmers that were hit by natural disasters such as typhoons, which also happen to be an effect of climate change. By doing this, we can be both future-looking and solve problems that we are currently experiencing now."

He noted that the principles behind Aureus are the same as those behind the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the Northern lights (or Southern lights if you are in Australia). Charged atomic particles emitted by the sun entering the Earth's atmosphere interact with other atoms and release photons, or particles of light. Brightly colored neon lights also demonstrate the same principle.

Aureus would be applied to skyscraper windows to essentially create vertical solar energy farms. Maigue explained that modern buildings use window coatings that deflect ultraviolet light and often redirect it towards passersby below. Aureus could capture that light and put it to good use.

"I want to create a better form of renewable energy that uses the world's natural resources, is close to people's lives, forging achievable paths and rallying towards a sustainable and regenerative future," Maigue said.

Credit: James Dyson Award

Aureus is not yet ready for mass production. Maigue said he is undertaking further research in efforts to boost the useful portion of useful luminescent particles derived from fruits and vegetables from 80 percent to 100 percent.

So for now, traditional solar panels and windows will lead the growing movement toward renewable energy resources. And kids will still have to finish their vegetables.

Explore further Sunny prospects for start-up's clear solar energy windows

More information: www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-US/ … gy-uv-sequestration/

© 2020 Science X Network

The motivation for sustainable aviation fuels

by Susan Bauer, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

PNNL developed a proprietary catalyst to convert ethanol, produced from waste carbon, to a jet fuel approved for use in commercial aviation.

 Credit: Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Global air travel consumes more than 100 billion gallons of jet fuel annually. That's expected to more than double by 2025 to 230 billion gallons. Despite the current pandemic, these projections reflect future anticipated passenger demand. Airlines want to meet market demands while simultaneously reducing their carbon emissions.

In fact, airlines around the world have committed to carbon-neutral growth beginning in 2021. As part of that commitment, U.S. airlines have set a goal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent by 2050 compared to 2005 levels.

Reaching that goal will not be easy. Electric planes won't make much of a dent because the batteries can only power the smallest of light planes. The only way to achieve emission reduction goals is with liquid fuels that have a lower carbon footprint: Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF).

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's John Holladay co-authored a recent report that presents a pathway to low-cost, clean-burning, and low-soot-producing jet fuel.

"Today, there are seven approved SAF pathways, but their use is limited. Airlines really want to use SAF but it needs to be cost-competitive with petroleum-based fuels, since fuel makes up about 30 percent of the operating cost of an airline," said Holladay, the transportation sector manager at PNNL who helped develop a waste-carbon-based fuel used in a Virgin Atlantic flight.

The report, Sustainable Aviation Fuel: Review of Technical Pathways, was authored by PNNL, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and University of Dayton for the Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. It outlines research needs for producing more jet fuel from renewable and wasted resources.

The report presents new insights resulting from a study of the aviation industry, commercial jet fuel, its composition, specifications and certification process, and the challenges and successes with approved chemical pathways that convert biomass to jet fuel. The report also assesses process improvements, technoeconomic analysis, and supply chain issues.

Solving another problem
============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================
As detailed in the report, the cost of sustainable raw materials can likely be reduced by looking at non-traditional biomass. The classic idea of corn or specific crops grown to produce fuels is giving way to using non-traditional waste materials. Environmental problems like municipal solid waste, sewage, waste gasses like carbon monoxide, and even deconstructed plastics are rich sources of carbon that can be converted into jet fuel.

Fats and agricultural waste or forest residues are other types of discarded material, which can be treated with existing biological or thermal processes to produce high-quality intermediates.

"It costs cities and companies money to manage and treat these wastes, but when we can convert these liabilities into a high-value product, the value proposition changes altogether," said Holladay. "When we include these low-cost feedstocks, there becomes enough biomass to scale to industrial levels of production. Some feedstocks are even free, and that reduces the cost of SAF significantly."

Optimizing jet fuel properties

In the near-term, expanding production capacity of existing approved fuels is critical. But eventually, providing a fuel that has improved properties, within the bounds of specifications, further improves the possibility for market pull, according to the report.

"We don't have to just mimic petroleum-based fuel," said Holladay. "If we're going to make a new fuel, we might as well make a fuel that's better. And with the additional research and development suggested in this report, we can."

The report calls for a deeper understanding of the critical fuel properties of the four hydrocarbon families that make up jet fuel. These families are described in chemical terms as aromatics, n-alkanes, iso-alkanes, and cycloalkanes. The latter two families of molecules provide all the properties needed in jet fuel. The first two, aromatics and n-alkanes will often be coproduced; however, their primary production is not an optimal research area for SAF.

SAF must first and foremost must be safe for use in air travel. This includes producing a clean fuel that doesn't harm the jet engines, that doesn't freeze at high altitudes, and has a low flashpoint for safely refueling on the ground. With safety in mind, there are new opportunities for reducing soot formation by reducing the amount of aromatics in the fuel.

"In the end, we need SAF that are safe, inexpensive, and have high energy content," said Holladay." The report recommends that research focus on ways to make low-cost iso-alkanes and cycloalkanes that can enable better SAF performance."

Blending the two can give fuel higher energy content than jet fuel while meeting the density specification required, so planes can fly farther on less fuel. They also can burn cleaner by diluting the aromatics in fuel. Aromatics create soot and the tell-tale contrails that contribute to atmospheric warming.

There are many types of iso-alkanes and cycoalkanes that could be used in jet fuel, but they are expensive and some cycloalkanes may freeze in extreme cold temperatures experienced at cruising altitudes. Recommended research goals include better understanding combustion and molecular properties of cycloalkanes and how they could be produced inexpensively and approved for use in jet fuel.

It's the fuel… and a lot more

The report also notes the critical fuel properties required for certification processes. Jet fuel certification is time consuming and expensive and can only be accomplished by understanding the critical fuel properties required and their impact.

The authors also note that biorefineries, which will convert low-cost biomass and wastes, must be versatile and produce a variety of jet and other fuels. Technology must enable these refineries to be cost- competitive when operated at a much smaller scale than petroleum refineries. Supply chains—from feedstocks and infrastructure to storage and delivery—must also be accounted for when considering the full cost of the fuel. Those topics need to be addressed in research and in analysis of technical and economic benefits to the SAF industry.

The report encourages U.S. researchers to engage with partners in Canada and Mexico to take advantage of synergies across North America. Canada is home to a third of the world's certified sustainable forests, and Mexico has a warm climate that facilitates growth of sustainable feedstocks. Both countries can contribute to biomass feedstocks and offer unique opportunities for collaboration.


Explore furtherMicrosoft, Alaska Airlines team up for alternative jet fuel

More information: Sustainable Aviation Fuel: Review of Technical Pathways Report. www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/ … ical-pathways-report

Provided by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Researchers develop more efficient method to recover heavy oil

by Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

Novel chemical flooding method. Credit: Yuichiro Nagatsu/ TUAT

The current global supply of crude oil is expected to meet demand through 2050, but there may be a few more drops to squeeze out. By making use of a previously undesired side effect in oil recovery, researchers have developed a method that yields up to 20% more heavy oil than traditional methods.

Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) team published their results on August 24 in Energy & Fuels, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

The researchers focused on heavy oil recovery, which involves extracting highly viscous oil stuck in porous rocks.

"The total estimated volume of recoverable heavy oil is almost the same as the remaining light reserves in the world," said paper author Yuichiro Nagatsu, associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at TUAT. "With the depletion of light oil resources and rising energy demands, the successful recovery of heavy oil is becoming increasingly important."

Generally, less than 10% of heavy oil may be produced from the reservoirs by natural flow after drilling the well. To yield more oil, water may be injected into the reservoir to maintain pressure in order to keep the flow moving. Engineers may also make the water more alkaline by adding sodium hydroxide or sodium carbonate to help the oil flow better. Called chemical flooding, this process often fails to yield much heavy oil, as it is too thick for even the enriched water to sweep up. Heavy oil can also be made to flow more easily through heat, but that's not a tangible solution for deep or thin reservoirs, according to Nagatsu.

"It is important to develop non-thermal chemical flooding for the recovery of heavy oil," Nagatsu said. "The key problem of chemical flooding in heavy oil reservoirs is an inefficient sweep as a result of the low mobility of the oil."

Because the viscosity of water and heavy oil differ so greatly, Nagatsu said, contemporary sweep methods are inefficient for heavy oil recovery.

To correct this inefficiency in chemical recovery, Nagatsu and his team injected calcium hydroxide into their model reservoir. The compound helps oil to flow more smoothly but is considered undesirable because it reacts with the oil to produce a metallic soap where the water and oil interface.

"The metallic soap behaves as a viscoelastic material in the pore and blocks the preferentially swept region and improves the sweep efficiency," Nagatsu said.

The metallic soap stops the sweeping flow from moving into already swept areas, forcing the forward recovery of heavy oils locked deep in rocks and crevices. In experimental testing, the method yielded 55% of oil in the reservoir, compared to a 35% recovery using alkaline water and a 33% recovery using regular water. Nagatsu noted that this method is inexpensive, can be used in a range of temperatures and it does not require energy-consuming techniques to perform.

The researchers plan to study the effectiveness of this method across crude oil viscosity ranges and in different ranges of oil reservoir permeability in laboratory experiments before moving to field tests. They would also like to engage with industry to further develop the technology for practical application, Nagatsu said.


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More information: Yuichiro Nagatsu et al, Chemical Flooding for Enhanced Heavy Oil Recovery via Chemical-Reaction-Producing Viscoelastic Material, Energy & Fuels (2020). 

DOI: 10.1021/acs.energyfuels.0c01298

Provided by Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

General Motors Aligns With Biden, Pulls Out of Lawsuit Supporting Trump

BY KATHERINE FUNG ON 11/23/20 

General Motors announced Monday that it will no longer support the Trump administration in its legal efforts against California's clean-air standards and will instead work with President-elect Joe Biden.

In a letter to the nation's largest environmental groups, CEO Mary Barra said GM will pull out of the lawsuit seeking to strip California of its right to set its own clean-air standards and urged other automakers to do the same.

Barra said the company agrees with Biden's plan to expand electric vehicle use and to reduce climate-warming emissions from vehicles.

"We believe the ambitious electrification goals of the President-elect, California, and General Motors are aligned, to address climate change by drastically reducing automobile emissions," Barra wrote.

"We are confident that the Biden Administration, California, and the U.S. auto industry, which supports 10.3 million jobs, can collaboratively find the pathway that will deliver an all-electric future," she continued. "To better foster the necessary dialogue, we are immediately withdrawing from the pre-emption litigation and inviting other automakers to join us."

A GM worker is shown on the assembly line at the General Motors Lansing Delta Township Assembly Plant in Lansing, Michigan, on February 21. GM announced on Monday it was withdrawing support for a Trump administration lawsuit challenging California's right to set its own clean-air standards.BILL PUGLIANO/STRINGER

The announcement is a shift from GM's previous relationship with the Trump administration. Barra met with Donald Trump during his first weeks in office to urge him to loosen Obama-era standards on emissions and fuel economy standards.

Last year, automakers such as General Motors, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Subaru, Isuzu, Suzuki, Maserati, McLaren, Aston-Martin and Ferrari intervened in a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Defense Fund against the Trump administration for climate action rollbacks, siding with the president after he revoked California's authority to set tighter restrictions.

Five other companies—BMW, Ford, Volkswagen, Volvo and Honda—backed California instead and advocated for stricter standards.

After BMW, Ford, Honda and Volkswagen signed a deal with the state's air pollution regulator, the California Air Resources Board, Trump said his administration would revoke California's ability to set clean-air standards stricter than the ones issued by federal regulators.

In response to GM's decision, the head of the Air Resources Board, Mary Nichols, called it "good news," telling the Associated Press that it had "been a while" since she last spoke with Barra, who called Nichols Monday morning.

Nichols is also a leading candidate to head the Environmental Protection Agency in the Biden administration.

"Now, the other automakers must follow GM and withdraw support for Trump's attack on clean cars," Dan Becker of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the environmental groups Barra addressed in the letter, told the AP.

Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment but did not hear back before publication.