CCS BS

Carbon-capture pipelines offer climate aid; activists wary

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Two companies seeking to build thousands of miles of pipeline across the Midwest are promising the effort will aid rather than hinder the fight against climate change, though some environmental groups remain skeptical.

The pipelines would stretch from North Dakota to Illinois, potentially transforming the Corn Belt into one of the world’s largest corridors for a technology called carbon capture and storage.

Environmental activists and landowners have hindered other proposed pipelines in the region that pump oil, carrying carbon that was buried in the earth to engines or plants where it is burned and emitted. The new projects would essentially do the opposite by capturing carbon dioxide at ethanol refineries and transporting it to sites where it could be buried thousands of feet underground.

Both companies planning the pipelines appear eager to tout their environmental benefits. Their websites feature clear blue skies and images of green fields and describe how the projects could have the same climatic impact as removing millions of cars from the road every year.

However, some conservationists and landowners are already wary of the pipelines’ environmental benefits and safety, raising the chances of another pitched battle as the projects seek construction permits.

“It seems like they are running a casino of risk and we are going to pay for it,” said Carolyn Raffensperger, the director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, expressing fears about a leak that could put North Dakota landowners like herself at risk. "We need to think this through very carefully, and I do not see the players in place to do that.”

The pipelines could fall into a longstanding divide among environmentalists. President Joe Biden and many Republicans are pushing a strategy for tackling climate change that offers a financial boon to industries that use carbon capture and storage to reduce their emissions. But others, such as Greenpeace and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, argue the focus should be completely on developing renewable energy sources and that carbon capture just prolongs dependence on fossil fuels.

Navigator CO2 Ventures, which is planning a pipeline that will stretch over 1,200 miles (1,931 kilometers) through Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Illinois, says it is offering “carbon capture solutions for a greener planet.” While Summit Carbon Solutions, whose pipeline will connect refineries in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota to a sequestration site in North Dakota, says it plans to build the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project. Both hope to start some operations by 2024.

“There’s so much societal momentum that says this is something we want to do — should do, need to do — for the public’s benefit,” said Matt Vining, the CEO of Navigator CO2 Ventures. “My project and many others will get done and should get done.”


Video: Carbon Transfer from Clean, Rich West to Developing World is Major Risk (Bloomberg)

Supporters say the pipelines are a much-needed win for both agricultural businesses and the environment. The two projects are expected to run into the billions of dollars, spurring construction jobs. And they advance a technology crucial to achieving a 2050 goal of net-zero carbon dioxide emissions — in which every gram of emissions is accounted for by providing a way to eventually suck it back out of the atmosphere.

“All sides win. You significantly reduce carbon emissions, but you can also maintain those industries that are the lifeblood of different regions of the country,” said Brad Crabtree, who oversees carbon management policy at the Great Plains Institute, a Minnesota-based organization that works with energy companies to develop environmental sustainability.

Crabtree, who also directs a group called Carbon Capture Coalition, sees it as a way to bridge partisan divides as the country addresses climate change. As evidence, he points to one high-profile Republican backer — North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — who is pushing a plan to make the state carbon-neutral by 2030, “through innovation not regulation.”

The federal government set off the scurry of pipeline plans by increasing, by 2026, tax credits to $50 for every metric ton of carbon dioxide a company sequesters. California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard has sweetened the deal by requiring that distributors in that state buy only ethanol with a low carbon emissions impact; companies that produce such ethanol can get a higher price.

While the practice of storing carbon dioxide in rock formations has been around for almost 50 years, developing technology that captures carbon emissions has proven to be expensive and struggled to gain widespread use.

Ethanol refineries could represent the low-hanging fruit that helps push the technology forward into widespread use. Plants such as corn are natural sponges of carbon dioxide, absorbing the gas and storing carbon as they grow through the spring and summer. When those crops ferment into ethanol, which is eventually mixed with gasoline, it produces a steady, easily-captured stream of carbon dioxide.

“These early plants are relatively easy and that’s a good place to start,” said Greg Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in the development of climate-friendly energy technology. “As that gets shown and proven, you get some transportation networks, then it gets easier to do the harder stuff later.”

Achieving that harder stuff — sucking carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere or catching emissions at power plants — will almost certainly be crucial to beating back global temperature increases. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reached that conclusion in 2018 as it laid out a path to halting temperature increases to 1.5 C (2.7 F).

Despite concerns from Raffensperger and others about potential leaks from the pipelines or storage sites, the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that storing carbon dioxide is safe as long as companies do it carefully. It is injected in a liquefied state into porous rock formations, where it eventually dissolves or hardens into minerals.

Crabtree said there has not been a single human fatality or serious injury in the United States from transporting or storing captured carbon dioxide. He thinks that as long as companies act responsibly, landowners will be convinced the pipelines are safe and can benefit from them.

But Raffensperger still has a range of concerns, including whether a technology that was developed by oil and coal companies can be trusted to make a transformative difference in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Raffensperger’s organization joined over 500 other environmental organizations in an open letter to Biden denouncing carbon capture and storage as a climate solution.

“We don’t need to fix fossil fuels; we need to ditch them,” the group wrote in a Washington Post ad. “Instead of capturing carbon to pump it back underground, we should keep fossil fuels in the ground in the first place.”

Stephen Groves, The Associated Press

Can Israel criminalise Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the US?

Israel threatens legal attack using anti-BDS laws passed by many US states, Palestinian advocates see pivotal moment.

Ben Cohen, left, and Jerry Greenfield, co-founders of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, are known for promoting social causes  [File: Patrick Semansky/AP Photo]

By William Roberts
23 Jul 2021

Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories may prove a pivotal moment in the campaign against Israel’s apartheid system, Palestinian rights advocates say.

The United States-based ice cream maker, known for its creative, chunky flavours and progressive social stances, is already facing a punishing blowback by the Israeli government and rabbinical organisations worldwide.

KEEP READING

Ben & Jerry’s parent firm Unilever ‘firmly committed’ to Israel

Ben & Jerry’s to stop sales in occupied Palestinian territories

Israel will ‘act aggressively’ over Ben & Jerry’s ban, PM says

Palestinians not counting on change as Bennett replaces Netanyahu

Will Ben & Jerry’s, and its parent corporation Unilever, withstand the pressure and maintain its principled stand, or be forced to cave in? The questions will be a closely watched political and legal battle as Palestinian activists press US companies to boycott Israel.

“Ben and Jerry’s made a very courageous decision, and a risky decision,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, DC.

“It’s really significant to focus on the calculation. Businesses don’t usually do stuff like that. This was a big deal,” Zogby told Al Jazeera.

But Alan Jope, the chief executive of Unilever, on Thursday distanced himself from Ben & Jerry’s decision, telling investors “that Unilever remains fully committed to our business in Israel”.

Jope, however, pointed out that Unilever, when it bought the ice cream company in 2000, agreed to allow Ben & Jerry’s and its independent board to continue their social justice activism.

The Israeli government is now threatening to use controversial anti-boycott laws that pro-Israel advocates have won in more than 30 US states to try to punish the ice cream maker for its decision.

If Israel fails in criminalising Ben & Jerry’s actions, that is likely to set a crucial precedent as the world increasingly views Israel as an apartheid state subject to boycotts like South Africa in the 1980s.

“It becomes a political struggle,” Zogby said. “This will be a big test to see whether or not Ben and Jerry’s can get away with it.”
Israel’s reaction

Ben & Jerry’s announced its decision on July 19, saying in a statement posted on its website that continuing sales in occupied Palestinian territories are “inconsistent with our values” and acknowledging “concerns shared with us by our fans and trusted partners”.


Ben & Jerry’s said it intends to stay in Israel, but not the settlements which are widely deemed illegal in international law, although Israel disputes that.

The Israeli government’s reaction was swift. Israel Prime Minister Naftali Bennett telephoned the CEO of Unilever and warned of “severe consequences”. Israel would move “aggressively against any boycott”, Bennett said.

Israel Foreign Minister Yair Lapid issued a tweet threatening to invoke anti-boycott laws in the US to take enforcement action against the ice cream maker.

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the US and the United Nations, followed up on July 20 announcing he had sent letters demanding action against Ben & Jerry’s to the governors of 35 US states seeking to reverse the company’s decision through economic pressure.

“We view this decision very severely as it is the de-facto adoption of antisemitic practices and advancement of the de-legitimisation of the Jewish state and the de-humanisation of the Jewish people,” Erdan said in the letter.
Anti-BDS laws

In the US, dozens of states and localities have passed so-called anti-BDS laws – a reference to the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement.

The laws vary from state to state but generally seek to empower local governments to ban or cancel contracts with companies – like Ben & Jerry’s – that come out in support of boycotts, sanctions, or divestment from Israel.

Many of these anti-boycott laws have been ruled unconstitutional by courts as infringements of the right to free speech, which is protected under US and state constitutions.

“It’s disturbing that we have foreign officials here trying to enlist US lawmakers in cracking down on one of our country’s most time-honoured constitutional rights, in order to suppress growing dissent against Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights,” said Amira Mattar, a lawyer at Palestine Legal, which tracks anti-BDS legislation across the US.

“With public scrutiny comes action, and Ben & Jerry’s decision shows companies are listening and when they take a stand, it shakes the Israel lobby,” Mattar told Al Jazeera.


“It’s no surprise. Ben & Jerry’s is under tremendous pressure and I am sure there are calls to backtrack their support for Palestinian rights,” she said.

In 2019, the online accommodation service Airbnb, under fierce legal and political pressure from Israel and its supporters, reversed a decision to delist properties in Israeli settlements.
Biden against BDS, Congress divided

The official position of the US government and the Biden administration is to oppose any moves to boycott Israel.

“We firmly reject the BDS movement, which unfairly singles out Israel,” US State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters this week.

In the US Senate, a bipartisan pair of senators have re-introduced anti-BDS legislation that has failed to gain sufficient support in the past.

“The boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement is the single most destructive campaign of economic warfare facing the Jewish state of Israel today,” Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, said in June.

The bill seeks to address court decisions striking down state laws by attempting to give states a right to prevent business transactions with participants in the BDS movement. Courts in Texas, Maryland, Arkansas and Georgia have overturned anti-BDS state laws.

BDS gains momentum

Ben & Jerry’s move gives more credence to the worldwide BDS movement and the issue will complicate Bennett’s upcoming visit to the US in August, Palestinian advocates say.

“What has become clear is that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid,” said Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American activist and lawyer.

A United Nations list of more than 100 firms operating in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is a “warning to them of their complicity”, she told Al Jazeera.

On July 21, the Movement for Black Lives joined with the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and the Adalah Justice Project to issue a joint statement in support of Ben & Jerry’s decision.

Israel’s anti-BDS drive against Ben & Jerry’s is likely to “backfire”, said Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

“A lot of activists are working on campaigns across the country targeting different corporations and they are taking notice,” Abuznaid told Al Jazeera.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

Illegal Aliens

Instead of worrying about Latino migrant workers Americans should worry about real illegal aliens. 

  It looks like a combination between a raccoon and a monkey, has a long tail and a taste for chicken. It has popped up around south Argyle, having been seen near Pleasant Valley Infirmary, North Road and near Route 40 in recent weeks. It’s apparently a coatimundi, a small mammal native to Central and South America that somehow has made it to the wilds of Washington County. Coatimundi look similar to monkeys, and Daniels said what he saw was swinging its arms as a monkey does. "I’m a hunter, and I’ve seen a lot of animals in the woods, but I’ve never seen anything like this before," he said. Ash said coatimundi eat mainly fruit, with some meat and eggs, but he said the ones he’s had haven’t targeted live animals. "They’re basically raccoons with a long nose and longer tail," he said. Ash said it’s ironic that the state does not allow residents to own native animals like raccoons or skunk, but residents can own a non-native species like a coatimundi without a permit. He said he’s aware of "three or four" other people in the area who have them.

Norway starts work on carbon storage program — says it’s “absolutely necessary”
The country believes simply reducing our emissions isn't enough -- we'll also need to sequester carbon underground.

 by Mihai Andrei
July 23, 2021
in Environment, Future, News


Norway is investing 1.7 billion euros into a full-scale carbon capture, transport, and storage project. The project named “Longship” is now under construction, and Norway is inviting other countries to join the project.

Image credits: Departments of Energy and Climate Change.
CCS


If we want to ensure a sustainable future without catastrophic climate damage, we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions — especially carbon dioxide. That can be done in several ways; one approach is to replace fossil fuel energy with renewable energy; another is to replace diesel cars with electric cars, or bicycles; changing our diets to less carbon-intensive foods can also make a big difference.

But there’s one area in which reducing emission has proven extremely difficult: factories — especially cement factories.

Cement alone represents around 8% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and, overall, 20% of global emissions come from heavy industries, which are typically factory-based). If cement facilities were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter behind only China and the US. This is where carbon capture and storage (CCS) would come into play.

“According to the UN Panel on Climate Change, the capture, transport and storage of CO₂ emissions from the combustion of fossil energy and industrial production is crucial in order to reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions,” the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy writes on the project’s page.

“For some industries, especially cement production and waste incineration, the capture and storage of CO₂ is the only way to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

CCS is the process of capturing carbon dioxide and sequestering it underground. It works best when the CO₂ is captured from large point sources like (you’ve guessed it) factories. The technology could also be used to extract existing carbon from the atmosphere, but that technique is far less mature.

Image credits: Sask Power.

The aim is to prevent the release of carbon into the atmosphere and instead, inject it into geological formations where it would stay indefinitely.

The problem is that CCS is still expensive, and the technology is still emerging. Without a firm tax on carbon, the technology is pretty much a money sink. Besides, you also require the right geology to inject the carbon.

But Norway, a country that could become carbon-neutral as early as 2030, has the right suitable geological conditions, and is willing to invest money into a pioneering project, with the approval of the Norwegian Parliament. CCS is “absolutely necessary” if the world is to avoid runaway climate change, a state secretary told Dezeen.

“If we succeed in capturing and storing CO₂, it will be significantly cheaper to achieve the climate goals. Longship contributes in making this more feasible and less costly,” the project’s page writes. The carbon dioxide will be buried under the North Sea, into suitable bedrock. There is enough bedrock at the site to store Norway’s current emissions for a thousand years.

The government is also working with several companies. Northern Lights, the organization tasked with transporting the greenhouse gas and storing it under the sea, is already in discussion with several industrial partners. Reportedly, 60 companies are already interested in the project. The first carbon capture will happen at the Norcem cement factory in Brevik.

From Brevik, the CO₂ will be transported by ship to a new reception terminal in Øygarden in Hordaland. Then, the CO₂ will be sent through pipelines and permanently stored in a geological formation about 2,600 meters below the seabed. Northern Lights (a venture that involves Equinor, Shell, and Total) will realize the transport and storage of CO₂ in Longship. However, it's not clear how much such a service could cost.


This is an encouraging step, but in order for CCS to work, it requires international cooperation -- not just for the storage itself, but also for developing and commercializing new technology. Without CCS, reaching our emissions goals is exceedingly difficult -- but we're still just getting started.

According to the Global CCS Institute, in 2020, CCS operations had a capacity of about 40 million tons of CO2 per year, with another 50 million tons per year in development. In contrast, the world emits about 38 billion tonnes of CO2 every year.

NO MORE WHEAT BOARD

Contract squeeze worries farmers

By Freelance writer, Mary MacArthur
WESTERN PRODUCER
Published: July 23, 2021

Farmers across the Prairies face significant yield losses this year because of heat waves and lack of rain. Now they may not be able to fill earlier-signed production contracts. | Randy Vanderveen photo


CAMROSE, Alta — As heat and drought burn up crops across the Prairies, many farmers wonder if they will have enough crop to fill what they thought were modest production contracts.

“I worry about my barley because my barley is 70 percent priced and my canola is at 50 percent priced. A lot of farmers are panicking,” said Gilles Roy, a farmer at Falher, in Alberta’s Peace River region, which has had very little rain since seeding.

Strong feed barley prices before seeding enticed Roy to price much of his barley because good crops of barley are common .

But drought stopped the plants from growing and heat may have stopped the heads from filling. Inquiries into whether he could cancel or buy out his priced contract haven’t eased his concerns.

“I didn’t cancel out of any of mine. It is so expensive, the fee they want to charge you. It is up to $30 a tonne penalty they want to charge you. I will wait until I have it all in the bin and see how much I have.”

Then, Roy will begin negotiations on the missing bushels and any penalty.

“I want to know the terms before I haul one bushel.”

Bryan Woronuk of Rycroft said last year, grain companies were letting farmers out of their contracts with no penalty, just a promise to remember their good deed, but last year’s good will seems to have disappeared.

“I contracted what I thought was a conservative amount of grain and now wondering how it can be filled,” said Woronuk.

It’s a story heard across the Prairies, said grain marketer Derek Squair of Exceed Grain Marketing.

“I have customers who have average-sized crops and are not too concerned, but I have customers in poorer areas who maybe might get 25 percent of an average crop, which is quite devastating financially.

“Feed barley is one that keeps popping up because prices are quite good. We’ve never really seen that strong of prices for feed barley off the combine before. So, I think a lot of farmers will get caught. They maybe went a little further on feed barley because they were such good prices than they normally would and barley seems to be getting hit hard from drought,” said Squair, of Regina.

Not all grain companies are sympathetic to farmers who locked in tonnage and price and now can’t fill those contracts. Grain companies have already sold the grain, planned their sales and are now wondering if they will get grain for the price contracted.

“Some smaller, more nimble companies will let you roll contracts over to next year. They know they will get that volume sometime and they are comfortable with that. Other companies are just holding producers’ feet to the fire and asking for exorbitant buy-out clauses and will not give you a buy-out price,” said Squair.

For farmers who are unsure if they will have enough crop to fill their contract, good communication is key, said Derek Drey, regional manager for Saskatchewan North with FarmLink Marketing.

“The best thing to do is to start an open conversation. It is very difficult to exit out of most of these contracts. Whether you buy out or roll it over to the next crop year, there are different strategies you can work together with your buyer on.

“But unfortunately, it is not a simple phone call to cancel your contract or get even a cost to get out of the contract. That is why there is so much emotional pain right now when it comes to these contract buyouts,” said Drey, who farms west of Saskatoon.

Drey said last year he wasn’t able to fill his canola contract. As soon as he realized he wouldn’t have the required bushels he called the grain company. Luckily for Drey, the company allowed him to roll the contract over to the following year instead of paying out any penalty and money for the missing bushels.

“What that did for our farm is alleviate the cash flow pain of having to put physical funds out to buy out a contract. That was more of a favourable outcome,” he said.

“I have a lot of empathy for my farmer friends right now. It is one extra stress level on top of not having a crop.”

Delivery contracts and priced contracts aren’t just for farmers with a high risk tolerance.

Contracts have become the norm for farmers who want to deliver grain at harvest and receive money to pay bills in the fall, said Squair.

“The industry has gone to the point where you have to do some pre-pricing if you want money at harvest. The cash demand on a family farm is very high so you have to get in the queue. If you don’t pre-price, you are not going to be selling grain until December or January,” he said.

“In order to pay bills, you need to have some sort of forward pricing just to have a spot to deliver. The producers who are the most cash strapped would be on the higher end of that scale, more like 30 percent sold, and those are the farmers that are going to get beat up the most.

“Farmers don’t have much of an option. Good communication is the first option, but the grain company is saying they don’t want to talk to you right now. If they do talk to you they give such a high number to buy out at it is ridiculous.”

Squair worries inflexible positions by grain companies will permanently damage relations in the industry.

“Grain companies that work with producers this year, will negotiate with producers or defer some of the tonnage of payment will make out better in the long run because those customers will be very loyal to those companies that help them through a tough time.

“It is going to make every producer very gun shy to ever do a forward contract again and it is going to hurt the grain companies because they use these forward contracts to plan logistics and trains and vessels and make sure they have everything in place and the sales on the books to move grain in a timely manner,” said Squair.

Marlene Boersch of Mercantile Consulting Ventures said that during a recent producer meeting in Weyburn, discussions turned to the one-sided contracts by grain companies who shift all the risk to farms for everything from lack of grain to poor railway service.

“As a grower, I cannot influence how the rail contracts work out, how the railroad performs and it’s even worse when you talk about problems with ocean freight. You have no negotiating power. Elevator agents who used to have a little bit of leeway in how they serviced their customers, that is no longer the case. Usually head offices in Winnipeg or Calgary said these are the contracts; full stop.”

Farmers and industry associations need to develop a new contract template that is fair to grain companies and farmers, she said.

“The fact that you have no negotiation power from the farmer side of the contract and have a three-page list covering everything from railroad to God knows what, is no longer fair, in my view.”

Grower associations that take check-off money from farmers for pulse, oats, wheat, canola and barley all need to be advocating for contracts that are not tilted in favour of grain companies.

“They live off the farmers’ money. They charge a checkoff. In my mind, you represent the farmers and you must find a better way. You must represent the interests, but it doesn’t happen,” she said.

It’s a sentiment echoed by Roy. The once strong farmer voice has been fragmented into small commodity groups only advocating for their own crop and not with a unified voice for farmers.

“I think farmers are left as an individual entity. We don’t have much of a body to go to bat for us,” said Roy.

Jim Beusekom, president of Market Place Commodities, a Lethbridge grain company, said they have received calls from farmers wanting to cancel their contracts. Some farmers want to buy out of their contract in hopes of cashing in on higher prices than the original contract. Others simply don’t have the grain to fill their contract.

“How do you separate the two? For the most part we take their word for it that they don’t have the crop,” said Beusekom.

Letting a farmer out of a contract is not a simple switch. Beusekom bought the grain and has since sold the grain to his customers.

“I do think it is both our problems.”

Letting a farmer out of a contract doesn’t solve his problem of finding grain. If one farmer doesn’t have a crop, likely neither does his neighbour.

“The farmer has it sold and it’s our grain and we have it sold to someone else.

“Trust me, we are really all in it together.”

Beausekom said many farmers carry crop insurance that helps cover their lost crop and will pay the difference between the contracted price and the now higher price.

“They do have a number of risk management options. We don’t have crop insurance for our company.”

‘I can see the industry disappearing’: US fishermen sound alarm at plans for offshore wind

Fishermen say their concerns, from safety issues to how offshore wind will alter the ocean environment, aren’t being meaningfully considered by regulators

Offshore wind turbines near Block Island, Rhode Island. 

Photograph: Michael Dwyer/AP

Supported by
About this content

Maddie Stone
Sat 24 Jul 2021 

For the past nine years, Tom Dameron has managed government relations for Surfside Foods, a New Jersey-based shellfish company. If you asked him five years ago what his biggest challenge was at work, the lifelong fisherman would have said negotiating annual harvest quotas for surf and quahog clams.

Today, he’d tell you it is surviving the arrival of the offshore wind industry, which is slated to install hundreds of turbines atop prime fishing grounds over the next decade.

While there isn’t a single wind turbine spinning off the coast of the Garden state yet, plans are under way for new offshore wind developments that hope to power more than a million homes with carbon-free energy over the next several years.

The wind farms are expected to create thousands of new jobs, but the price tag looks steep to Dameron, who fears those jobs and climate benefits will come at the expense of his industry. If wind lease areas are fully developed across the mid-Atlantic, Dameron said clam fishermen will lose access to highly productive areas of the ocean, which could send the multimillion-dollar industry into a “downward spiral”.

“I could see the clam industry in Atlantic City disappearing,” Dameron said.
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Dameron’s fears are being echoed by fishermen across the country as they face the arrival of a big new energy business in waters many have fished for generations.

Offshore wind, which has long struggled to take off in the US due to high costs, regulatory uncertainty and fierce resistance from shoreside residents, is now surging forward under the Biden administration. In March, Joe Biden committed to building 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, enough to power 10m homes and avoid 78m metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

With strong political pressure to accelerate offshore wind development as part of the administration’s larger effort to tackle the climate crisis, fishermen feel they are being forgotten. Many say that their concerns – which range from safety issues operating around wind farms to how offshore wind development will alter the ocean environment and affect fish stocks – aren’t being meaningfully considered by regulators.

Offshore wind “is one of the most consistently cited factors as a big risk to businesses and their practices”, said Annie Hawkins, the executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (Roda), a trade association representing commercial fishermen. “It is a huge, huge thing in the minds of fishermen right now.”

While the European offshore wind industry has grown rapidly in recent years, with more than 5,000 turbines generating a combined 25 gigawatts of renewable power capacity as of earlier this year, America has lagged behind. Today, the entire US offshore wind fleet consists of five turbines in state waters off Rhode Island and two research turbines in federal waters off Virginia.

Over the coming decades, the US is expected to catch up by installing thousands of additional turbines in lease areas spanning thousands of square miles of ocean. American fishermen are bracing for the sorts of spatial conflicts that have arisen in Europe, where fishermen are often legally forbidden to operate in the vicinity of wind farms and subsea cables, or have stopped operating in their vicinity by choice due to safety and liability concerns.

In the north-eastern US and mid-Atlantic, where America’s first commercial wind farms will be built, lease areas overlap with highly productive fisheries that add billions of dollars to regional economies. While the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) hasn’t declared any of these wind energy areas off-limits for fishing, as in Europe fishermen worry that turbines and their associated infrastructure, including seafloor transmission cables and concrete foundations, will make it impossible to operate their vessels safely.

“What essentially this is turning into is thousands of miles of closed areas,” said Meghan Lapp, the general manager at Seafreeze Shoreside, a Rhode Island-based fish plant

The beach coastline of Ocean City, New Jersey. A large offshore wind energy project planned off the coast of New Jersey would run cables from the wind farm to potential locations including Ocean City. Photograph: Ted Shaffrey/AP

Along the US west coast, where floating offshore wind technology is expected to be deployed because of the much greater depth to seafloor, suspended transmission cables could impede fishing nets and create a “functional closure” for certain types of gear, said Mike Conroy, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA).

If fishing gear does become entangled with offshore wind equipment “that is an extremely dangerous situation in terms of sinking a boat or loss of life”, said Daphne Munroe, a shellfish ecologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Wind turbines can also interfere with the radar systems fishermen use to navigate.

Fishermen have additional concerns about how commercial-scale offshore wind development will affect fish stocks and the ocean environment. Noise from the construction and operation of wind turbines could potentially drive fish away, while undersea foundations risk becoming artificial reefs that alter the distribution of species in wind lease areas. Wind turbines may also alter ocean currents in a way that affects the mid-Atlantic “cold pool”, a vast area of cold water near the seafloor that allows numerous species, including scallops, clams and flounder, to thrive.

The large-scale, long-term environmental impacts of offshore wind have not been well researched in US waters, and the types of studies needed to address these questions are expensive, said Aran Mooney, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

“There is an OK amount of research funding going into this, but there certainly needs to be more to get at these bigger questions,” Mooney said.

To reach the Biden administration’s goal of expanding offshore wind development, BOEM is moving quickly to review and approve offshore wind farms in federal waters, identify new ocean areas for wind energy development, and hold lease sales. By 2025, the agency aims to have completed an environmental review of at least 16 offshore wind farm construction and operations plans.

The pace of offshore wind development is “going fast relative to the scale of research on these topics”, said Travis Miles, an oceanographer at Rutgers University who is exploring the potential impacts of offshore wind on the mid-Atlantic cold pool. “And it would be really unfortunate to leave our fishing industry behind”

BOEM marine biologist Brian Hooker said in an email that since 2009, the agency had awarded “millions of dollars” for fisheries-related research in the Atlantic on topics ranging from how fish migrate through lease areas to how they are affected by artificial sounds and electromagnetic fields. In its fiscal year 2022-2023 research plan, BOEM proposed a new study to investigate the spatial needs of the commercial clam industry in the New York Bight, a heavily fished area between New Jersey and Long Island where the agency will be holding an offshore wind lease sale this year.

The agency’s proposed sale notice for the New York Bight, released in June, also contains several provisions aimed at helping fishermen. These include a proposal for 2.5-mile-wide fishing vessel transit lanes in the proposed Hudson South lease area and a requirement that wind developers coordinate with the fishing industry and consider any “potential conflicts” when developing construction and operation plans.

Some offshore wind developers are attempting to address fishing industry concerns. Drawing on its experience working with the commercial fishing industry overseas, developer Equinor held a series of meetings with fishermen as it was planning Empire Wind, a proposed offshore wind farm south of Long Island. Based on feedback it received during those meetings, Equinor redesigned the layout for the wind farm to include an open area for fishing at the western edge of the lease area.

“Equinor met us halfway and negotiated something that would work well for everybody,” said Hawkins, who co-organized the meetings and attended them on behalf of Roda.

In recent years in Europe, many spatial conflicts have been avoided by this sort of collaborative planning. But right now, Hawkins said that meaningful negotiations between offshore wind developers and fishermen in US waters the exception rather than the norm. “From our perspective we’ve seen less authentic engagement with fishermen” since the start of the Biden administration, Hawkins said. “It certainly has the appearance of [developers] thinking they’re going to be all right no matter what.”

Hooker said that BOEM will “continue to engage with commercial fishermen to avoid or reduce potential impacts from offshore wind energy development.” BOEM, he said, works with the US coast guard and others at all stages of offshore wind development to determine how navigation and fishing will be impacted, and the agency tries to avoid leasing the most heavily trafficked parts of the ocean.

But according to Hawkins: “The fishing industry feels very strongly that they still do not have a meaningful voice in the process nor an authentic seat at the table.”

Top US scientist on melting glaciers: ‘I’ve gone from being an ecologist to a coroner’

Diana Six, an entomologist studying beetles near Glacier national park in Montana, says the crisis has fundamentally changed her profession

Clouds and rain are seen on Lake McDonald as Glacier national park opens to visitors in June 2020. Photograph: Kent Meireis/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

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About this content

Jyoti Madhusoodanan
Wed 21 Jul 2021 09.00 BST

Diana Six’s love of the outdoors began before she could form words, run, or collect the bugs and fungi that were precious to her as a child. A tough home life eventually led her to drop out of school and live on the streets. But biology classes in community college helped Six discover her calling in studying various forms of life. “They took me right back to how I was as a kid,” she says.


Activists fear Biden’s climate pledges are falling apart: ‘We aren’t seeing grit’

Now an entomologist at the University of Montana, she has spent the last 30 years researching how bark beetles are decimating pine forests. But a constant, haunting depression has taken over her life. A recent trip to Glacier national park spurred her to vent some of this emotion in a tweet that went viral and resonated with many: “Glacier National Park. 97F in June. Little snow left. 75F degree water. Glaciers disappearing. That is what we hear. But the worst is what most never see.”

To Six, the climate crisis isn’t just decimating glaciers and life on Earth. It’s taking her identity with it. She recently spoke to the Guardian about her changing role on the land she loves.

“Idon’t think people realize that climate change is not just a loss of ice. It’s all the stuff that’s dependent on it. The ice is really just the canary in the coalmine. To have 97, 98 degrees in Glacier national park for days on end is insane. This is not just some fluke.

“There are many years where the snow is gone so early that you just don’t see it in the mountains. And water getting that warm is absolutely devastating to fish and algae.

“Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked.

“There have been total losses of a lot of baby birds this year. You see these ospreys and eagles sitting on top of the trees in their nests and those young, they just can’t take the heat. Year after year of that and you lose your birds.
People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not

“People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated, they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.

“I’m also an artist. I recently finished a 10-week art course called Identity in America where the instructor made us use a medium we had not worked with before, because he felt we couldn’t go back to old habits. I ended up drawing myself morphing from being an ecologist to the guys who walked around during the plague to bring out the bodies.
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“When I was forced to actually confront my identity, I realized that I’m no longer doing what I thought I was. My whole life has been documenting how life works, how we can conserve species that are in trouble. I was no longer cataloging life and finding ways to prevent ecosystems from reaching tipping points. I had actually hit my own tipping point. Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner. I am no longer documenting life. I’m describing loss, decline, death. And that is what is accounting for my kind of overwhelming sense of grief.

“This is what really brought home to me that my entire job has changed. I don’t like my new job, but I can’t quit. Even if I quit being a professor and doing research, I’m always going to be a coroner now.

“When I started work, I didn’t think about climate change. It was far enough back that people were still kind of wondering, is it really happening? Then pretty early in my career as a professor, I realized I had to incorporate climate change into most of what I was doing. These tree-killing bark beetles I study have always had outbreaks. It’s not anything new. But when mountain pine beetle developed this most recent outbreak, it was so far out of the norm in size and severity, we couldn’t ignore that.

“I would walk through these forests and almost everything was dead. When you see a beetle kill 70 million hectares of trees across North America, you just have to change your research questions. My focus had to shift from the beetles to how we can help our forests survive this. You have to come at these systems from a completely different direction now.

“We’re coming at things all wrong, trying to save a species by putting it in a zoo or replanting trees. But if you aren’t going to the root cause of the problem it’s still going to happen. That’s not to say that if we didn’t just get our act together and make some major changes, we couldn’t save some of this. We just can’t do it one species at a time.”

This article was amended on 22 July 2021. An earlier version referenced a beetle species killing “70 acres” of trees across North America; this should have been 70 million hectares.

Capturing carbon: West Carleton high school grad hopes to use seawater to slow climate crisis

“What’s special about this project is that it takes CO2 out of the ocean, as well as the atmosphere.”

Author of the article: Rachel Morgan • Capital Current

Publishing date:Jul 23, 2021 • 

Devinder Sarai is a West Carleton grad who is off to Harvard this fall. PHOTO BY ERROL MCGIHON /Postmedia

Big changes need big ideas and these can come from anywhere — even the lush farmland of West Carleton.

Devinder Sarai is working on one such big idea: his goal is to combat the climate crisis that is threatening our planet.

Sarai’s big idea is called Cequest. In essence, the recent graduate from West Carleton Secondary School wants to build a technology that uses seawater to capture carbon dioxide from the air and ocean; turn it into a mineralized bicarbonate; and sink it back into the oceans where it will be sequestered.

The process has the added benefit of adding alkalinity to the oceans to balance out the acidity that poses a risk to our blue planet. Sarai’s even got a fundraising campaign underway to raise enough money to compete for Elon Musk foundation’s XPrize for Carbon Renewal.

“We’re taking CO2 out of the atmosphere,” he told Capital Current. “What’s special about this project is that it takes CO2 out of the ocean, as well as the atmosphere.”

Sarai, who graduated high school in 2020, is building a prototype of his “carbon sequestration factory.” When operational, he says, one factory could remove 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and ocean a year. That could take care of Canada’s annual contribution to global warming.

According to an assessment by the federal government, Canada alone put 730 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in 2019. And Canada contributes about 1.5 per cent of global emissions.

Sarai is a lover of nature and that led to his interest in the environment.

“It’s beautiful in the morning, pristine. Everything’s really nice,” he said. “But, at the same time, to think that on the other side of the country, and especially in the United States, there are wildfires going on. It’s like hurricane season now. And those are getting worse and worse every year. And flooding around the world, all that is happening while I’m still able to enjoy (the outdoors). I try and put myself in that perspective.”

Sarai’s passion for the environment and his participation in a hackathon set up by The Knowledge Society in Ottawa in April led him to the carbon sequestration project. For the hackathon, Sarai’s team focused on reducing carbon emissions by 10 times. The team got a lot of positive feedback for their work in the hackathon, but he was the only one who wanted to take the idea further.

“I have all the parts set up,” Sarai said. “I have several mentors advising in the field, like sciences, business, and then also in terms of just building things that have never really been built before.”

Sarai is working closely with Richard DeVaul, an innovation consultant who has worked with Apple and Google X, Andrew Blanchard, partner at the investment firm Jacket River, and Ottawa-based Ian Lockhart, a senior director of The Knowledge Society.

Sarai’s prototype will compete for a chunk of the $100 million XPrize pot, the largest such incentive in history. The XPrize for Carbon Renewal is a four-year global competition encouraging student teams, small companies and individuals to find ways to sequester carbon directly from the atmosphere or oceans. XPrize will award up to $5 million U.S. to student teams in the fall of 2021.

“That would go a long way towards actually developing a factory,” Sarai said. “But the second thing, I think … would be the credibility that it gives.”

Even if he doesn’t win the XPrize, a bright future lies ahead for Sarai, who is off to Harvard University in the fall to study computer science. He took a year off school after the pandemic put his scholarship on hold. He said he is looking forward to the people he will meet at Harvard and to be able to push himself past his perceived boundaries.

“It’s such a high concentration of bright minds. You’re surrounded by world-class people,” he said. “Who knows what that network will bring. And just cool conversations. Really cool, inspiring people that will just get you to level up as well.”

As for Cequest, Sarai says he has plans to continue developing his carbon sequestration project.

“Building it out, working with a great team across the world because it’s also a business,” he said. “It’s economically incentivized.”

This story also appears in Capital Current, the community news site run by Carleton University’s journalism program.

Space
Inside the simple computer program that could explain why the Universe exists at all



Inside the simple computer program that could explain why the Universe exists at all

Stephen Wolfram is trying to find a rule that dictates the Universe. And in doing so, he might even become the first person to finally devise a complete, fundamental theory of physics. Elegant, or what?


By Marcus Chown

Published: 23rd July, 2021 

Back in the plague year of 1665-1666, Isaac Newton changed the scientific world, discovering the universal law of gravity and the mathematics of calculus. Now, in the plague year of 2020-2021, is history about to repeat itself?

Stephen Wolfram thinks so. The British-born scientist, who lives in the US, claims he has found a route to a fundamental theory of physics that answers some of the biggest questions, such as what is space? What is time? And why does the Universe exist?

“To be fair, a lot of the work was done in 2019 and we were about to start speaking about it in March 2020, but everything locked down for COVID,” says Wolfram. “But it is true to say that we have made more progress towards finding a fundamental theory of physics than I dared believe was possible.”

Wolfram’s starting point was to ask: What is space? “Physicists don’t often ask this question,” he says. “They merely think of space as the backdrop against which the events of the Universe play out.”

According to Wolfram, space is made of a network of ‘nodes’, which are connected to each other. The nature of the connections – how each node is linked to nearby and faraway nodes – can create a space of any dimension. So if the number of nodes increases as the square of the distance from any given node – like the surface area of a sphere – the network has the properties of familiar 3D space.

“I actually believe the Universe started out with infinitely many dimensions and gradually cooled down to the three we have today,” says Wolfram. “But I don’t yet know why there are precisely three.”

Wolfram is interested in what is the minimal ‘stuff’ needed to create the Universe. And in addition to the network of nodes – ‘the atoms of space’ – there is another ingredient, the ‘rules’ that change the network. So, for instance, a rule will say: ‘wherever there is a particular pattern of nodes, replace it with another particular pattern of nodes’.

“It is the application of such rules, over and over again – the continual updating of the space network – that knits together space,” says Wolfram. “The miracle is that this process can also create all the matter in the Universe and all laws of physics we have discovered over the past 350 years.”

Stephen Wolfram © Wolfram Research Inc/Tom Straw

Before examining this remarkable claim, it is worth considering how Wolfram got to this point. Born in London in 1959, he was publishing physics papers at the age of 15. As a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he worked with Richard Feynman, arguably the most notable post-war US physicist. But a crucial event for Wolfram was a discovery he made in 1981 when he used a computer to investigate the consequences of simple computer programs – ones whose output is repeatedly fed back in as their input, like a snake eating its own tail.

The simplest computer programs he could think of at the time were cellular automata. These are one-dimensional lines of squares, each of which can be empty or filled. A rule is applied that replaces a certain pattern of squares with another. In this way, a new line of squares is created. And another new line. And so on.

Most of the time Wolfram found that nothing interesting happened. In some cases, however, there were persistent features that moved across the evolving cellular grid, reminiscent of subatomic particles in the real world. But the big surprise was that there were a few rules that created never-ending novelty and complexity.

This was a light bulb moment for Wolfram. Usually, simple programs have simple outputs and complex programs have complex outputs. But Wolfram had discovered simple programs with complex outputs. His immediate thought was, “Is this how the Universe creates a rose or a newborn baby or a galaxy? Is it merely applying a simple program over and over again?”

In 2002, Wolfram published A New Kind Of Science, a 1,200-page tome with 1,000 black-and-white pictures and half a million words. In it, among other things, he explored the consequences of all 256 possible rules for one-dimensional cellular automata, among which was Rule 30, which generated unlimited complexity. The book was met with hostility from the physics community. Partly, it was because he had published it himself without going through the usual peer review process. But another reason was that other physicists could not see how to use his ideas to predict anything useful.

They had a point. Basically, Wolfram was saying that most of what the Universe is doing is ‘computationally irreducible’ – that is, the outcome can be discovered only by running the computer program for the 13.82 billion years the Universe has been in existence. To many other physicists that was a fat lot of good.

But Wolfram was also saying that, within the Universe-generating computation, there are ‘computationally reducible’ islands, where it is possible to deduce the outcome without actually running the program. “These shortcuts are none other than the laws of physics we have discovered,” says Wolfram.

In the end, Wolfram did not pursue the ideas he had laid out in A New Kind Of Science. On the one hand, he says, there was no demand from physicists. And on the other hand, there was demand for his software such as the computer language Mathematica and the intelligent search engine WolframAlpha, which had made him a billionaire. He therefore spent the next two decades developing them instead.

But in 2019, he met some young physicists who encouraged him to continue his search for a fundamental, computational theory of physics. And, at the age of 60, it was now or never.

From order there was chaos: Wolfram’s Rule 30 found that even a simple rule that determines the colour of cells in a row can generate complexity © Richard Ling/Wikipedia

The problem with cellular automata is that they run on a pre-existing grid. Wolfram realised quickly that he needed something simpler, even more basic. This is how he hit on the idea of a self-updating space network. There are persistent features in the networks, rather like vortices in water, and these are matter. Ultimately, then, everything arises from space. There is nothing else. Actually, that is not entirely true. There is one other thing. “Time, which everyone since Einstein has thought is the same as space, isn’t,” says Wolfram. “Time is actually the process of step-by-step computation.”

One of the problems with Wolfram’s earlier approach was that, if he found the program that is generating the Universe – and he believed it might be no longer than four lines of code in his own computer language, Mathematica – the question would then arise, why this program and not another? Wolfram therefore hit on the idea that the Universe is being generated by
all possible programs running simultaneously.

“At first sight it seems unbelievably messy. How can anything useful come out of this?” he says. “But the miracle is that everything does, including the twin pillars of modern physics: Einstein’s theory of gravity [General Relativity] and quantum theory.”

The key thing is to realise that we are not observing the Universe from outside. That is impossible. Instead, we are pieces of self-updating space network within the overall self-updating space network of the Universe. Not only are we limited in the amount of computation we can do and so unable to perceive most of the irreducible computation going on all around us but we are also limited by our biology, which causes us to impose a single thread of time on what we see. “Despite the fact that all possible rules are actually operating, our sampling will reveal a single rule generating the Universe,” says Wolfram.

Crucially, our fundamental limitations do not permit us to see the atoms of space. Instead, we see them linked together to make a smooth continuum – a continuum, furthermore, that is described by General Relativity. In Einstein’s theory, masses like planets follow the shortest path, or ‘geodesic’, through space-time. Space-time is in turn warped by the presence of energy (strictly speaking, energy-momentum). According to Wolfram, energy in his picture is nothing more than the amount of activity going on at any location in the network, and it is this computation that ultimately bends the geodesics of massive bodies.

Quantum theory, in contrast, describes the microscopic realm of atoms and their constituents, and is notorious for appearing fundamentally incompatible with General Relativity. Specifically, there is no such thing as a unique path through space. Atoms can follow multiple paths, each with an associated probability. According to Wolfram, this multiple history is built into his framework because, each time a piece of space network is updated, it can be updated by not just one rule but multiple possible rules, leading to multiple histories. “Quantum theory is not a bolt-on, as in standard physics,” he says.

Wolfram goes further. He imagines a ‘branchial space’ that encapsulates all these multiple histories. And this requires the tools of Mathematica to visualise, which is one reason why other physicists, not just mere mortals, find it hard to follow Wolfram. However, the key thing Wolfram claims is that General Relativity, with its geodesics bent by energy-momentum in normal space, is exactly the same as quantum theory with its geodesics bent by energy-momentum in branchial space. “General Relativity and quantum theory are basically the same theory!” he says. “I never expected to discover such a lovely result.”

This is indeed an astonishing result. In mainstream physics, only string theory provides a framework that unites General Relativity and quantum theory, and it has big problems, not least the fact that it leads not to a single Universe but to a multiverse of about 10,500 universes. There is a strong hint, however, known as the ‘holographic principle’, that quantum theory and General Relativity are intimately connected and that quantum theory manifests itself as General Relativity in a higher dimensional space. Wolfram sees his work as confirming this connection.

Carlo Rovelli at Aix-Marseilles University works on ‘loop quantum gravity’, a rival of string theory, which attempts to show that space-time, down at the impossibly small Planck scale, is made of finite loops woven together into a complex shifting network. Is there any connection between Wolfram’s work and loop quantum gravity? “Indeed, I have been curious about the same question!” says Rovelli.

Others find Wolfram’s work fascinating. One is Gregory Chaitin, the Argentinian-American who invented a field of mathematics – algorithmic information theory – when he was 15. “I personally think his new work is very interesting,” he says. “And, yes, something like General Relativity and like quantum mechanics emerges rather naturally.”

Chaitin likes the originality of Wolfram’s approach. “What is fun is that this is completely orthogonal [distinct] to what everyone else is doing. Up to now, string theory has been the only game in town that attempts to operate at this level. Now there is another game.”

Artist’s impression of the Universe, with galaxy clusters concentrated at ‘nodes’ 

© Science Photo Library

Wolfram is encouraged by the response to his latest work, which is very different to the response he experienced in 2002. He says lots of the young physicists are attending his seminars, and older physicists are sending their students. He is live-streaming a lot of the development on the web so people can see what he is doing. “I have been surprised at how few people have said this can’t possibly work,” says Wolfram. “It’s been more like ‘I can’t understand this’ or ‘tell us what phenomena we can look for’.”

Wolfram is also not alone, as he was in 2002. He now has a handful of other physicists working with him. Chaitin thinks this is significant. “Unusually for Stephen, he even gives co-author credit to some,” he says. But one of the major differences between now and 2002 is the idea that information-processing is at the heart of the Universe is far more mainstream than it was two decades ago. In a way, nothing Wolfram is doing is contradicting accepted physics. He is merely attempting to go beneath the bonnet of the car to reveal the computation that both generates the Universe and the laws of physics that we observe.

One consequence of Wolfram’s picture is that aliens with different biologies and different senses may see different parts of the Universe-generating computation and therefore deduce different laws from quantum theory and General Relativity. In fact, they may forever be invisible to us, existing in parts of the space network our senses are simply not sampling. “Our view is limited by our size of about a metre in height and our insistence on seeing a single thread of time,” says Wolfram. “But creatures the size of the planet and without this insistence would see something entirely different.”

In the end, it will be predictions of new phenomena that will confirm or refute Wolfram’s computational universe. And at the moment these are lacking. However, Wolfram sees places that may be fruitful in yielding observational predictions. For instance, he believes there could be domains of our Universe with different numbers of dimensions. And, in particular, he suspects the black holes may be able to spin faster than permitted by standard physics and, in doing so, whole chunks of space-time may break off, something which is impossible in General Relativity.

The big question remains, why is there a Universe? And here Wolfram thinks the Universe may exist in the much the same sense that mathematics exists. Mathematics consists of a set of givens, or ‘axioms’, and the consequences, or ‘theorems’, that can be deduced from them by applying the rules of logic. Similarly, the Universe is merely the logical consequence of applying all possible rules to a network of disembodied nodes. “It is inevitable that it exists, in the same way it is inevitable that 1+1=2,” he says.

We, of course, experience the Universe as a solid thing, not an abstract thing like the edifice of mathematics. However, since we are also made of the same stuff as the Universe – like virtual creatures in a virtual reality – everything appears solidly real to us.

Whether or not Wolfram turns out to be the new Newton, the plague year has definitely played to Wolfram’s strengths. “I have always worked remotely from my company,” he says. “This last year has suited me.” He admits there is still a long way to go in getting a fundamental theory of physics. “But I am amazed how far things have progressed in a short time,” he says. “I never imagined it would work this well.”

This article first appeared in issue 365 of BBC Science Focus Magazine – f

About our expert, Stephen Wolfram
 is a computer scientist and physicist. He is the author of A New Kind of Science and created the programming software Mathematica and the computational knowledge engine WolframAlpha.


Authors
Marcus Chown
Social networks
Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brunel University. His books include The Ascent of Gravity, which was The Sunday Times Science Book of the Year; The Magicians; Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand, What A Wonderful World; Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You; Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil; and We Need to Talk to Kelvin and Afterglow of Creation, which were both runner-up for the Royal Society Book Prize.

Read more about the Universe:
The Universe’s 7 biggest mysteries (and why they’re unsolved)

The quest for quantum gravity: why being wrong is essential to science

The six numbers that define the entire Universe

The cracks in cosmology: Why our Universe doesn’t add up

What if the Big Bang was not the beginning?

Ghost stars: The radical theory that could solve the mystery of dark matter

New molten salt battery for grid-scale storage runs at low temp and cost
By Nick Lavars
July 21, 2021

A lab-scale prototype of a newly developed molten salt battery
Randy Montoya/Sandia National Laboratories

As renewable forms of power like wind and solar continue to gain prominence, there will be a need for creative solutions when it comes to storing energy from sources that are intermittent by nature. One potential solution is known as a molten salt battery, which offers advantages that lithium batteries do not, but have their share of kinks to iron out, too. Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have come up with a new design that addresses a number of these shortcomings, and demonstrated a working molten salt battery that can be constructed far more cheaply, while storing more energy, than currently available versions.

Storing vast amounts of energy in a cheap and efficient manner is the name of the game when it comes to powering whole cities with renewable energy, and despite its many strengths, this is where expensive lithium battery technology falls short. Molten salt batteries shape as a more cost-effective solution, which use electrodes kept in a molten state with the help of high temperatures. This is something that the Sandia scientists have been working to change.

"We've been working to bring the operating temperature of molten sodium batteries down as low as physically possible," says Leo Small, the lead researcher on the project. "There's a whole cascading cost savings that comes along with lowering the battery temperature. You can use less expensive materials. The batteries need less insulation and the wiring that connects all the batteries can be a lot thinner."

In their commercial form, these batteries are known as sodium-sulfur batteries, and a few of these have been developed around the world but generally operate at 520 to 660 °F (270 to 350 °C). The Sandia team have set their sights much lower, although doing so required a rethink as the chemistries that work at high temperatures don't lend themselves well to lower temperatures.


The scientists' design consists of liquid sodium metal that sits on the opposite side of a ceramic separator material to a novel liquid mixture made of sodium iodide and gallium chloride, which the scientists call a catholyte. When the battery discharges energy, chemical reactions take place that produces sodium ions and electrons that pass through the highly-selective separator material and produce molten iodide salt on the other side.

Sandia Labs scientists work on a new molten salt battery
Randy Montoya/Sandia National Laboratories

This sodium-sulfur battery proved capable of operating at just 230 °F (110 °C), and proved its worth across eight months of testing in the lab through which it was charged and discharged more than 400 times. Further, it runs at 3.6 volts, which the scientists say is around 40 percent higher than commercially available molten salt batteries. This could equate to versions with fewer cells and therefore a higher energy density.

"We were really excited about how much energy we could potentially cram into the system because of the new catholyte we're reporting in this paper," says study author Martha Gross. "Molten sodium batteries have existed for decades, and they're all over the globe, but no one ever talks about them. So, being able to lower the temperature and come back with some numbers and say, 'this is a really, really viable system' is pretty neat."

The scientists are now turning their attention to lowering the cost of the battery, which could come from replacing the gallium chloride which is around 100 times more expensive than table salt. They say the technology is still five to 10 years away from commercialization, but working in their favor is the safety of the battery, which poses no risk of fire.

"This is the first demonstration of long-term, stable cycling of a low-temperature molten-sodium battery," says study author Erik Spoerke. "The magic of what we've put together is that we've identified salt chemistry and electrochemistry that allow us to operate effectively at 230 °F. This low-temperature sodium-iodide configuration is sort of a reinvention of what it means to have a molten sodium battery."

The research was published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

Source: Sandia Labs via EurekAlert