Moderna reaches deal with Canada to build ‘state-of-the-art’ Covid vaccine manufacturing plant after shortages

PUBLISHED TUE, AUG 10 2021
Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

@BERKELEYJR

KEY POINTS

Moderna said it has reached a deal with the Canadian government to build a vaccine manufacturing plant to supply the nation with Covid shots.

Canada was plagued by Covid vaccine supply shortages earlier this year after it struggled to obtain shots manufactured in other countries.

Moderna said it is in discussions with other governments for similar collaborations.


Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, listens during a news conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Friday, June 4, 2021. Trudeau said that 65% of eligible Canadians have received a first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
David Kawai | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Moderna said Tuesday it has reached a deal with the Canadian government to build a “state-of-the-art” manufacturing plant in Canada to make Covid vaccines and potentially shots for other respiratory viruses after the country was plagued by supply shortages earlier this year.

The plant aims to provide Canadians with access to domestically manufactured mRNA vaccines against respiratory viruses, including Covid, seasonal influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and possibly other vaccines, pending licensure, the U.S. drugmaker said.

It is also intended to be used on “an urgent basis” to support the country with direct access to vaccines during health emergencies, the company said.

Moderna said it is in discussions with other governments for similar collaborations.

“We are excited to expand our presence and continue our long-term collaboration with Canada,” Patricia Gauthier, Moderna’s lead for Canadian operations, said in a statement. “With our industry-leading mRNA technology platform and rapid drug development capabilities, we look forward to being an active participant in Canada’s robust life sciences ecosystem.”

Canada suffered from repeated delays and supply shortages of Covid vaccines this year as it struggled to obtain the shots from other countries that were manufacturing them. The issue forced the government to delay second shots for up to 16 weeks and advise residents to “mix and match” vaccines.

The Biden administration, under pressure from allies worldwide to share vaccines, announced plans in March to ship about 4 million doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine that it was not using to Mexico and Canada.


The supply of vaccines and pace of inoculations has since increased, Canadian health authorities have said, and residents have since gone on to receive their second doses.

Shares of Moderna were down about 3% Tuesday just before the announcement. The stock is up more than 360% year to date.

 CANADIAN SOLAR COMPANY

Heliene to open third module factory in the United States

The plant will produce super-high-efficiency heterojunction solar cell modules for residential and commercial applications.

AUGUST 10, 2021 DAVID WAGMAN

Image: Heliene

From pv magazine USA

Solar module maker Heliene said it will open a third North American manufacturing facility in Riviera Beach, Florida.

The 75,000-square-foot facility is Heliene’s second in the U.S., and increases its manufacturing capacity by 100 MW. The company said it will begin production at the new facility in September, following upgrades to an existing solar production line previously operated by SolarTech Universal. Heliene operates other production lines in Ontario, Canada, and Minnesota.

The company expects to announce in the coming weeks a 350 MW expansion at the Minnesota facility. That expansion is likely to include a multi-million-dollar incentive package from the state.

 

The Race to Build a Commercial Fusion Reactor

By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio  08.10.2021 

Fusion is the process by which the sun and stars generate energy. The blast furnace that is our sun generates temperatures and pressures that drive hydrogen atoms to collide and fuse.

How can fusion be harnessed to generate power here on Earth? One company, General Fusion, is developing magnetic field fusion energy and collaborating with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories on a project to advance fusion energy technologies. General Fusion and the Canadian laboratory are attempting to develop tritium extraction processes for commercial fusion power plants. Elsewhere, the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) also is partnering with General Fusion to develop its Fusion Demonstration Plant in the United Kingdom. Following completion of a new facility at Culham, General Fusion will sign a long-term lease with UKAEA. The demonstration plant will showcase General Fusion’s fusion technology, paving the way for what the company hopes will be its commercial pilot plant.

Jay Brister, chief business development officer at General Fusion, said private investments in fusion energy are increasing, with more than $2 billion committed by private companies to date. “Regulators around the world are also exploring the authorizations which are necessary to support fusion energy,” Brister added. “Fusion energy will benefit countries looking to transition toward net-zero carbon emissions to achieve their climate goals.”

Groups like the Fusion Industry Association “are engaging with government agencies to develop a regulatory framework for commercial fusion energy in the United States. In the United Kingdom, the Regulatory Horizons Council is pursuing a similar path,” Brister noted.

Increased R&D investment in fusion energy is driving a more realistic view of the technology as a viable option to provide abundant and reliable electricity. But obstacles remain, including the need to upgrade the existing power grid to support the diverse energy sources.

“Energy grids are going to evolve over time – especially with the implementation of more renewables,” Brister said. “One of the advantages of fusion is it is energy dense and requires minimal land use. Fusion energy power plants will also reduce the need for long transmission lines because they can be built near the sources of energy demand, making better use of land.”

He added, “The distributive nature of where electricity grids are going – having the ability to provide a localized and dispatchable source in a size that will complement a renewables portfolio will be key. It will be a part of a broader clean energy portfolio.”

Fusion energy proponents say their industry must play a greater role in reducing emissions and solving climate change, along with solar and wind power.

“As the world seeks to combat climate change, energy providers around the globe are upgrading their infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions. A strong energy system needs both firm power and intermittent power. Fusion energy is on-demand and independent from the weather, making it an excellent complement to renewables,” Brister asserted.

Carbon-free “firm” power promises to reduce emissions and meet the growing demand for electricity while replacing aging infrastructure. “Electricity demand is projected to grow by 200 percent by 2050. Fusion energy offers utilities a powerful addition to the mix of electricity generation options to meet this growing demand,” added Brister.

 

Fusion explained. (Source: General Fusion)

 

Magnetized Target Fusion

An electromagnet is a coil of wire wound around a mechanical shape. When electricity flows through the wire, it creates a magnetic field in and around the coil. If the wire is wound several times, the strength of the field is multiplied by the number of wire loops used. However, a copper coil will resist the flow of electricity, dissipating energy as heat. Resistive heating is acceptable if the coil is switched on briefly and then allowed to cool.

Superconducting magnets are made of niobium-titanium with no electrical resistance when kept cold. This allows the wire coil to handle large electrical currents for long stretches without dissipating heat. However, materials like niobium-titanium require large and expensive cryogenic cooling systems to operate.

General Fusion uses a plasma confinement method dubbed Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) that relies on simple electromagnets operating on a pulsed basis. This method achieves fusion, which can then be repeated in a cycle.

It works like this:

• A vessel is filled with liquid metal, which is spun until the metal forms a cavity.
• Hydrogen plasma is Injected into the resulting cavity.
• The plasma is compressed and heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius, and fusion occurs.

“The fusion process heats the liquid metal wall. In our commercial pilot plant, the heat will be extracted from the metal and used to make steam. The steam will drive a turbine – producing electricity,” said Brister.

MTF uses electromagnets in the plasma injector. An injector generates a ring of plasma and, through the swirling motion, it creates a magnetic field that forms a cloud of particles. During the short life of the plasma ring, it is compressed to temperatures and pressures at which nuclear fusion should occur.

The plasma particles flow along the magnetic field lines, which then circulate without ever touching the wall. In this way, the magnetic field prevents hot fusion plasma from touching the liquid metal and cooling. The magnetic field acts as an excellent thermal insulator as the plasma core is heated. During the process, Brister said the walls of the tank remain cool enough to function as part of a power plant.

MTF has four key advantages, General Fusion claims: material durability, fuel production, energy conversion, and energy economics.

• Material durability: The liquid metal liner shields the MTF structure from neutrons released by the fusion reaction, overcoming the problem of structural damage to plasma-facing materials (also called the first wall problem).
• Fuel production: The fusion process starts with filling a tank with liquid metal, spinning the metal until a cavity is formed. General Fusion injects hydrogen plasma into the cavity. “We use high-powered pistons to compress the plasma to fusion conditions,” Brister explained. “High-speed digital controls manage and synchronize the timing of 500 individual pistons. The compression process happens in milliseconds. Fusion occurs as the liquid metal compresses the plasma resulting in a release of energy and tritium, which will be captured and used as fuel.”
• Energy conversion: In the pilot plant, heat would be extracted from metal and used to make steam. The steam will drive a turbine and produce electricity.
• Energy economics: General Fusion claims MTF is straightforward to manufacture and scale because it uses simple electromagnets and does not require expensive lasers.

Superheated plasma is the key to achieving fusion energy (Source: General Fusion)

When, not if

“Fusion is closer than you think,” Brister argues. General Fusion’s demonstration plant in the U.K. will seek to confirm that performance and economics of its MTF technology. “In this way we can scale it to a commercial pilot plant,” he added. To do this, we will create fusion conditions in a power plant-relevant environment without producing power. The [demonstrator] will create neutrons, and the data it creates will provide the information we need to build a commercial pilot plant that generates electricity.”

General Fusion then plans to design and build a commercial pilot plant, with construction scheduled to begin in 2022. The power plant could be operational by 2025. “We will take [lessons from the demonstration] to create the commercial pilot plant that will” generate power. “With the urgency of climate change in mind, we are on course to power homes, businesses and industry with fusion energy by the 2030s,” Brister predicted.

Please visit Power Electronics News to read the full story.

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Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio

Maurizio holds a Ph.D. in Physics and is a telecommunication engineer and journalist. He has worked on various international projects in the field of gravitational wave research. He collaborates with research institutions to design data acquisition and control systems for space applications. He is the author of several books published by Springer, as well as numerous scientific and technical publications on electronics design.

 

Rising seafarer abandonment cases prompt talks on emergency fund

 August 11, 2021

 ITF

Three of the world’s largest seafaring nations are proposing the establishment of a seafarers’ mutual emergency fund to support abandoned crew.

China, Indonesia, and the Philippines have introduced the idea of a mutual emergency fund at the recently held International Maritime Organization (IMO) legal committee as abandonment cases are heading for another record.

The IMO’s legal committee has reported a rise in the number of seafarer abandonment cases since the start of the pandemic last year. Between January 2020 and April this year, the ILO/IMO joint database on abandonment recorded 111 new cases. 85 of these cases occurred last year and the balance of 26 cases occurred in Q1 of 2021. According to the IMO, just 46 have been resolved since, and 27 more have been reported since April. More than 1,300 seafarers were affected.

Abandonment takes place when owners stop paying wages for at least two months, don’t cover the cost of repatriation, or when they leave the seafarer without maintenance and support.

The IMO is looking to establish practical guidelines for flag and port states on how to deal with abandonments in order to quickly resolve such cases.

The details of how the emergency fund would work should be clear for consideration at the next legal meeting in March 2022. It was said that the fund should only cover repatriation and not outstanding wages and that it should also not present unfair advantages for those flag states not fulfilling their obligations.

 

IPCC report takes aim at methane creating further alarm for proponents of LNG-fuelled ships

 August 10, 2021

 CMA CGM

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report yesterday warning that over the next 20 years, global temperatures are expected to reach or exceed 1.5°C of warming – meaning we can anticipate increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons, and intensifying rain and floods. Placed high up in the firing line of the influential report is the harmful effects methane is having on the planet, something that ought to make the many shipowners who have opted for LNG-fuelled newbuilds shudder.

“This report is a reality check,” IPCC working group co-chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte said.

Adopted in 2015, the Paris agreement has aimed to limit global warming to well below 2.0°C – preferring the target of 1.5°C. However, the IPCC report projects the earth will reach 1.5°C of global warming halfway through 2034.

Around 0.3C of the 1.1C that the world has already warmed by comes from methane

“Stabilising the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO2 emissions,” IPCC working group co-chair Panmao Zhai said, adding: “Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate.”

The report has a strong focus on methane, something that is emitted from LNG-powered vessels and by energy majors in creating LNG. The role of methane, aerosols and other short-lived climate pollutants had not been discussed by the IPCC until this week and is now set to get much of the attention that CO2 has had in recent decades.

According to the IPCC, around 0.3C of the 1.1C that the world has already warmed by comes from methane.

The report puts “a lot of pressure on the world to step up its game on methane,” said IPCC report reviewer Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development in Washington, DC.

“Cutting methane is the single biggest and fastest strategy for slowing down warming,” Zaelke said.

In April this year the World Bank issued a report on decarbonising maritime transport in which it specifically recommended countries pull back from investing in further LNG bunkering infrastructure.

Taking a swipe at LNG as a fuel, the bank recommended that countries should avoid new public policy that supports LNG as a bunker fuel, reconsider existing policy support, and continue to regulate methane emissions.

“LNG is effectively liquefied methane, and methane is itself a highly potent GHG. Over 20-year and 100-year time horizons, methane is respectively 86 times and 36 times more potent a GHG than CO2. Therefore, any GHG emissions from unburnt methane released to the atmosphere – called methane leakage – can diminish or even entirely offset the theoretical GHG benefit of the use of LNG,” the bank warned.

Keen to dismiss the methane leakage argument, two LNG bunker lobby groups revealed details in April of an independent, peer-reviewed study that claims GHG reductions of up to 23% are achievable now from using LNG as a marine fuel, depending on the marine technology employed. This is compared with the emissions of current oil-based marine fuels measured from well-to-wake .

This report used the latest primary data to assess all major types of marine engines and global sources of supply with data provided by original equipment manufacturers including Caterpillar MaK, Caterpillar Solar Turbines, GE, MAN Energy Solutions, Rolls Royce (MTU), Wärtsilä, and Winterthur Gas & Diesel, as well as from ExxonMobil, Shell, and Total on the supply side. Methane emissions from the supply chains as well as methane released during the onboard combustion process – also known as methane slip – have been included in the analysis.

Peter Keller, chairman of lobby group SEA-LNG, commented at the time of the report’s release: “Often based on outdated data, methane slip has become an overused argument for those wishing to justify inaction.”

The study claims that by 2030 methane slip will have been “virtually eliminated” as technological improvements continue.

In gt terms, 28.4% of the global ship orde book is for LNG fuel capable tonnage, according to the latest data from Clarkson Research Services.

Big Oil spent $10 million on Facebook ads last year — to sell what, exactly?

A report found that the ads peaked when politicians were poised to act on climate

By KATE YODER
PUBLISHED AUGUST 10, 2021 

A pigeon flies over a Exxon mobil gas station (Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty Images)

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.



Online advertisers are always trying to sell you something, and in the case of slip-on sneakers or leather handbags, that something is pretty clear. But other times, the motive behind a sponsored post is less transparent. Why, for instance, are oil companies buying prime space in your social media feed to prattle on about "innovative" climate solutions and visions of a "lower-carbon future"?

A new report makes the case that the oil and gas industry is trying to sell you a story — one that casts these companies as paragons of sustainability and seeks to delay policies that would address climate change. Last year, the oil and gas industry spent at least $9.6 million on ads on Facebook's U.S. platform, according to an analysis by the think tank InfluenceMap. Just over half of this spending came from one company, ExxonMobil.

"The oil and gas industry is engaging in this really strategic campaign using social media and the tools available, particularly these targeting tools on Facebook, to reach a really broad audience pretty easily," said Faye Holder, program manager at InfluenceMap.

The report looked at roughly 25,000 of these ads, analyzing their messages and whom they were targeting. The decision to focus on Facebook ads, which represent only a fraction of the oil industry's wider campaign to influence the discourse on climate change, was made for data reasons. "We just looked at Facebook," Holder said. "That is because the other social media platforms don't even offer this transparency."

Oil companies have long sought the help of public relations whizzes to burnish their reputations, painting themselves as environmental champions, plastering their logos all over science museums and jazz festivals, and even hiring Instagram influencers to tout the merits of gas stoves. In recent years, climate advocates have honed in on ways to counter these tactics — launching a campaign demanding that PR firms drop fossil fuel clients, for instance, or trolling oil companies on social media. Some climate groups have decided to fight fire with fire, recently funneling $1 million directly into anti-oil advertisements.

The oil industry's more recent ads use subtler messages than outright climate denial to undermine action on global warming, such as portraying natural gas as a green fuel source and arguing that decarbonization would make energy unaffordable. Last year, companies' Facebook ad spending soared when it looked like the federal government might do something to address rising emissions. For example, spending jumped dramatically last summer when then-presidential candidate Joe Biden released his climate plan, and stayed high until after the November election.


Courtesy of InfluenceMap

Those 2020 spending patterns follow a long-time trend: The scale of the oil and gas industry's advertising efforts has historically tracked with politicians' interest in taking action on the climate crisis. The world's five largest oil companies spent $3.6 billion on promotional ads from 1986 to 2015. Spending shot up around 1997, when countries were considering the Kyoto Protocol, an attempt to set legally binding cuts on greenhouse gas emissions. The peak of oil companies' ad blitz occurred in 2010, when Congress was mulling over a national cap-and-trade program (that ultimately didn't pass).

As part of InfluenceMap's analysis, researchers broke down last year's Facebook ads based on the location of targeted users. "In terms of the distribution regionally of the ads, we saw that they were focused towards states with really high levels of production of oil and gas but also swing states," Holder said. "So it sort of plays into that very politically motivated effort." Interestingly, the advertisements tended to target men more than women.

Looking at oil and gas' 25 biggest Facebook ad spenders, the analysis found that each segment of the industry was pushing a slightly different message. Individual companies promoted the affordability and reliability of their products ("Ann chose natural gas, and now she can invest the savings back into her business"). The American Petroleum Institute, the industry's biggest lobbying group, talked more about oil and gas being part of the "solution" to climate change. Finally, pro-fossil fuel advocacy groups argued that the industry was helping communities and the economy ("fracking supports thousands of jobs") and emphasized philanthropic efforts.

The report has prompted some critics to question Facebook's commitments to climate action; the company has tried to highlight its small carbon footprint, announcing earlier this year that its operations were already running on 100 percent renewable electricity. "Despite Facebook's public support for climate action, it continues to allow its platform to be used to spread fossil fuel propaganda," said Bill Weihl, former sustainability director at Facebook, in a statement.

 

As ExxonMobil asks for handouts, startups get to work on carbon capture and sequestration

Jonathan Shieber@jshieber / 6:48 AM MDT•April 22, 20t

Image Credits: sharply_done 

(opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

Earlier this week, ExxonMobil, a company among the largest producers of greenhouse gas emissions and a longtime leader in the corporate fight against climate change regulations, called for a massive $100 billion project (backed in part by the government) to sequester hundreds of millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide in geologic formations off the Gulf of Mexico.

The gall of Exxon’s flag-planting request is matched only by the grit from startup companies that are already working on carbon capture and storage or carbon utilization projects and have announced significant milestones along their own path to commercialization even as Exxon was asking for handouts.

These are companies like Charm Industrial, which just completed the first pilot test of its technology through a contract with Stripe. That pilot project saw the company remove 416 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere. That’s a small fraction of the hundred million tons Exxon thinks could be captured in its hypothetical sequestration project located off the Gulf Coast, but the difference between Exxon’s proposal and Charm’s sequestration project is that Charm has actually managed to already sequester the carbon.

The company’s technology, verified by outside observers like Shopify, Microsoft, CarbonPlan, CarbonDirect and others, converts biomass into an oil-like substance and then injects that goop underground — permanently sequestering the carbon dioxide, the company said.

Eventually, Charm would use its bio-based oil equivalent to produce “green hydrogen” and replace pumped or fracked hydrocarbons in industries that may still require combustible fuel for their operations.

While Charm is converting biomass into an oil-equivalent and pumping it back underground, other companies like CarbonCure, Blue Planet, Solidia, Forterra, CarbiCrete and Brimstone Energy are capturing carbon dioxide and fixing it in building materials. 

“The easy way to think about CarbonCure is we have a mission to reduce 500 million tons per year by 2030. On the innovation side of things we really pioneered this area of science using CO2 in a value-added, hyper low-cost way in the value chain,” said CarbonCure founder and chief executive Rob Niven. “We look at CO2 as a value-added input into making concrete production. It has to raise profits.”

Niven stresses that CarbonCure, which recently won one half of the $20 million carbon capture XPrize alongside CarbonBuilt, is not a hypothetical solution for carbon dioxide removal. The company already has 330 plants operating around the world capturing carbon dioxide emissions and sequestering them in building materials.

Applications for carbon utilization are important to reduce the emissions footprints of industry, but for nations to achieve their climate objectives, the world needs to move to dramatically reduce its reliance on emissions spewing energy sources and simultaneously permanently draw down massive amounts of greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere.

It’s why the ExxonMobil call for a massive project to explore the permanent sequestration of carbon dioxide isn’t wrong, necessarily, just questionable coming from the source.

The U.S. Department of Energy does think that the Gulf Coast has geological formations that can store 500 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (which the company says is more than 130 years of the country’s total industrial and power generation emissions). But in ExxonMobil’s calculation that’s a reason to continue with business-as-usual (actually with more government subsidies for its business).

Here’s how the company’s top executives explained it in the pages of The Wall Street Journal:

The Houston CCS Innovation Zone concept would require the “whole of government” approach to the climate challenge that President Biden has championed. Based on our experience with projects of this scale, we estimate the approach could generate tens of thousands of new jobs needed to make and install the equipment to capture the CO2 and transport it via a pipeline for storage. Such a project would also protect thousands of existing jobs in industries seeking to reduce emissions. In short, large-scale CCS would reduce emissions while protecting the economy.

These oil industry executives are playing into a false narrative that the switch to renewable energy and a greener economy will cost the U.S. jobs. It’s a fact that oil industry jobs will be erased, but those jobs will be replaced by other opportunities, according to research published in Scientific American.

“With the more aggressive $60 carbon tax, U.S. employment would still exceed the reference-case forecast, but the increase would be less than that of the $25 tax,” write authors Marilyn Brown and Majid Ahmadi. “The higher tax causes much larger supply-side job losses, but they are still smaller than the gains in energy-efficiency jobs motivated by higher energy prices. Overall, 35 million job years would be created between 2020 and 2050, with net job increases in almost all regions.”

ExxonMobil and the other oil majors definitely have a role to play in the new energy economy that’s being built worldwide, but the leading American oil companies are not going to be able to rest on their laurels or continue operating with a business-as-usual mindset. These companies run the risk of going the way of big coal — slowly sliding into obsolescence and potentially taking thousands of jobs and local economies down with them.

To avoid that, carbon sequestration is a part of the solution, but it’s one of many arrows in the quiver that oil companies need to deploy if they’re going to continue operating and adding value to shareholders. In other words, it’s not the last 130 years of emissions that ExxonMobil should be focused on, it’s the next 130 years that aim to be increasingly zero-emission.

Climate change is exacerbating the homelessness crisis and we are not ready

By Sean KiddContributors
Mariya Bezgrebelna
Mon., Aug. 9, 2021

TORSTAR

As any one of us who has seen a person without housing suffering on sweltering summer sidewalks can see, climate change has profound implications for homeless populations worldwide. Extreme temperatures, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events destroy homes and livelihoods, creating homelessness and climate-driven migration.

Major weather events also hit homeless populations the hardest — both due to a lack of adequate shelter and already compromised physical and mental health. The result is illness, injury, and death with the greatest impacts felt by those most marginalized — including girls, women, and Indigenous populations.

People experiencing homelessness and inadequate housing in Toronto are bearing the brunt of these impacts locally, as our summers become more sweltering. They join populations suffering worldwide, be it people fleeing from fires in Australia, surviving floods in Kenya, or with culture and livelihoods threatened in the Arctic.

Our responses to date have been reactive, Band-Aid approaches. In Toronto we have relied upon emergency warming and cooling centres. Many organizations also engage in outreach activities, providing water and other supplies. Weather disaster response plans and efforts to build climate resilience in cities seldom address impoverished populations.

In Toronto we see minimal public access to water, a problem that the pandemic has compounded. The cooler, green spaces of our city that offset the asphalt and concrete “heat island” effect have become even less accessible to local homeless populations through aggressive encampment responses.

Several approaches that are much more promising need to be considered as our governments and communities are forced to come to terms with climate change. Two words capture what is needed: planning and prevention.

First, we need to build upon some of the initial, promising efforts to end chronic homelessness. Not having people subsisting in street environments obviates the need for emergency responses to their exposure to weather extremes. Access to affordable housing and supportive housing models are proven means through which this can be achieved.

Preventing homelessness for those at risk of losing housing is also critical — for once the “vicious cycle” that attends the loss of housing commences, effective responses become increasingly complex and expensive.

Building climate resilience and response plans that incorporate homeless populations, in collaboration with people with lived experience, can help ensure that these measures are effective for all. Better predictive data is also essential so we can move from chasing crises to preventing them.

As the weather worsens, these problems will compound. It would be a mistake to think that here in Toronto we are immune to the climate-driven migration and large-scale displacement that are expanding in low and middle-income countries. Some hard realities are coming, and how we prepare for the most marginalized amongst us will be directly related to how well we as a society are prepared.

Sean Kidd is the chief of psychology at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Mariya Bezgrebelna is a Ph.D student of psychology at York University.

 

Scientists Turn Harmful Methane Into Methanol at Room Temperature

AUGUST 9, 2021

An illustration of the cage structures of two iron-based zeolites used in the study. The red and gold spheres (representing oxygen and iron, respectively) make up the active site. The cage structure, in gray, is formed of silicon, aluminum and oxygen. The blue sphere quantifies the size of the largest molecule that can diffuse freely in and out of the active site cage (the diameter of methane is ~4.2 Å). Credit: Benjamin Snyder

A “tantalizing” ” principle borrowed from nature turns harmful methane into useful methanol at room temperature. A team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Leuven in Belgium has further elucidated the process in a new study in a recent edition of Science.

The discovery may be an important step toward a methanol fuel economy with abundant methane as the feedstock, an advance that could fundamentally change how the world uses natural gas. Methanol – the simplest alcohol ­­– is used to make various products, like paints and plastics, and as an additive to gasoline. Rich in hydrogen, methanol can drive new-age fuel cells that could yield significant environmental benefits.

If natural gas, of which methane is the primary component, could be converted economically into methanol, the resulting liquid fuel would be much more easily stored and transported than natural gas and pure hydrogen. That also would greatly reduce the emissions of methane from natural gas processing plants and pipelines. Today, escaped methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide, nearly negates the environmental advantages of natural gas over oil and coal. The team’s new study is their latest to advance a low-energy way to produce methanol from methane.

Benjamin Snyder (right) and his former PhD adviser, Edward Solomon, a professor of chemistry at Stanford and of photon science at SLAC. Credit: Linda A. Cicero

“This process uses common crystals known as iron zeolites that are known to convert natural gas to methanol at room temperature,” explains Benjamin Snyder, who earned his doctorate at Stanford studying catalysts to address key facets of this challenge. “But, this is extremely challenging chemistry to achieve on a practical level, as methane is stubbornly chemically inert.”

When methane is infused into porous iron zeolites, methanol is rapidly produced at room temperature with no additional heat or energy required. By comparison, the conventional industrial process for making methanol from methane requires temperatures of 1000°C (1832°F) and extreme high pressure.

“That’s an economically tantalizing process, but it’s not that easy. Significant barriers prevent scaling up this process to industrial levels,” said Edward Solomon, Stanford professor of chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Solomon is the senior author of the new study.

Keeping the zeolites on

Unfortunately, most iron zeolites deactivate quickly. Unable to process more methane, the process peters out. Scientists have been keen to study ways to improve iron zeolite performance. The new study, co-authored by Hannah Rhoda, a Stanford doctoral candidate in inorganic chemistry, uses advanced spectroscopy to explore the physical structure of the most promising zeolites for methane-to-methanol production.

“A key question here is how to get the methanol out without destroying the catalyst,” Rhoda said.

Choosing two attractive iron zeolites, the team studied the physical structure of the lattices around the iron. They discovered that the reactivity varies dramatically according to the size of the pores in the surrounding crystal structure. The team refers to it as the “cage effect,” as encapsulating lattice resembles a cage.

Hannah Rhoda with the resonance Raman spectroscopy equipment, which shoots a laser into a sample to obtain vibrational information from the exact site being studied. Researchers in the current study used this technique to help assign the Fe(III)-OH and the Fe(III)OCH3 poisoned sites, which illuminated the mechanism. Credit: Courtesy of Hannah Rhoda

If the pores in the cages are too big, the active site deactivates after just one reaction cycle and never reactivates again.  When the pore apertures are smaller, however, they coordinate a precise molecular dance between the reactants and the iron active sites – one that directly produces methanol and regenerates the active site. Leveraging this so-called ‘cage effect,’ the team was able to reactivate 40 percent of the deactivated sites repeatedly – a significant conceptual advance toward an industrial-scale catalytic process.

“Catalytic cycling – the continual reactivation of regenerated sites – could someday lead to continual, economical methanol production from natural gas,” said Snyder, now a postdoctoral fellow at UC-Berkeley in the Department of Chemistry under Jeffrey R. Long.

This fundamental step forward in basic science will help elucidate for chemists and chemical engineers the process iron zeolites use to produce methanol at room temperature, but much work remains before such a process might be industrialized.

Next up on Snyder’s list: tackling achieving the process not only at room temperature but using ambient air rather than some other source of oxygen, such as the nitrous oxide used in these experiments. Dealing with a powerful oxidizing agent like oxygen, which is notoriously hard to control in chemical reactions, will be another considerable hurdle along the path.

For now, Snyder was both pleased and amazed by the illustrative powers of the sophisticated spectroscopic instrumentation in the Solomon labs that were leveraged for this study. These were invaluable to his understanding of the chemistry and the chemical structures involved in the methane-to-methanol process.

“It’s cool how you can get some very powerful atomic-level insight, like the cage effect, from these tools that weren’t available to previous generations of chemists,” Snyder said.

Reference: “Cage effects control the mechanism of methane hydroxylation in zeolites” by Benjamin E. R. Snyder, Max L. Bols, Hannah M. Rhoda, Dieter Plessers, Robert A. Schoonheydt, Bert F. Sels and Edward I. Solomon, 16 July 2021, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abd5803

University of Leuven researchers on this study were Max Bols, Dieter Plessers, Robert  Schoonheydt and, Bert F. Sels. This research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, a Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO).