The aviation industry is responsible for about 2.5% of global emissions, and its climate impact is about 3.5% of all anthropogenic global warming. While some passengers may buy carbon credits for a little peace of mind after a flight, the issue of aviation emissions still stands on a large scale. Enter electric aircraft, which startup company Wright Electric plans to have in the skies by 2026. Wright Electric will convert existing BAe 146 planes, first made by British aerospace company BAE Systems in the 1980s, into electric planes.

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By reusing existing planes, Wright Electric can speed up certification processes to start flying zero-emissions aircraft sooner. Certifications for new aircraft can take many years. The company will slowly transition each of a BAe 146 plane’s four jets into new, 2 MW motors until the entire plane is converted by 2026.

“The level of power and weight demonstrated with our new 2 MW motor will become the baseline for any new electric aircraft and is a key technology in our megawatt system,” said Jeff Engler, CEO of Wright Electric, in a September 2021 press release about the new motors.

The electric planes, called Wright Spirit, will comfortably carry 100 passengers in a quiet ride, unlike conventionally noisy planes. The planes will have a range of about 460 miles, according to CleanTechnica, which is about a one-hour flight. This may seem quick, but these short flights are often the norm across Europe or even for business travelers. Replacing frequent, short-haul flights for zero-emissions travel could make a big impact.

Wright Electric is focusing on reducing emissions for these short, high-demand flights, particularly Seoul to Jeju, which is the world’s busiest route with 14 million passengers annually, as well as London to Paris, Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo and San Francisco to Los Angeles.

“Aviation has committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but Wright Electric is committed to a 100% reduction in all emissions starting in 2026,” Engler said. “Because we built the world’s largest aerospace propulsive powertrain, we can build the world’s largest zero-emissions retrofit directly serving the world’s busiest routes.”

Wright Electric’s efforts in getting zero-emissions passenger planes off the ground has been noticed by many. The company has received funding, contracts, and/or collaborations with several governmental departments, organizations, and airlines to bring this technology to life, including NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, Viva Aerobus and easyJet.

Flight testing with one electric propulsor will begin in 2023, followed by testing with two electric propulsors in 2024 and leading to flying the fully electric planes in 2026. Wright Electric is also working on developing a flagship plane that will carry 186 passengers with over 800 miles of range. Their goal is to have this larger plane in service by 2030, the company said in its press release.

Source: Paige Bennett, ecowatch.com

Mayor Jim Kenney, Superintendent William Hite, PECO CEO Mike Innocenzo and others joined the Philadelphia Energy Authority (PEA) to celebrate a milestone in Pennsylvania’s equitable transition to clean energy with a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the opening of a new solar training lab at Frankford High School.

Bright Solar Futures (BSF), funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office, PECO and other industry partners, provides access to solar careers for young Philadelphians.

The three-year career and technical education (CTE) vocational program will launch young people into careers in clean energy.

“Philadelphia is committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050, and that effort will create thousands of jobs,” says Mayor Kenney. “We need our young people to have access to those careers, and this lab will ensure they do. Congratulations to the school district, Frankford High School and the Philadelphia Energy Authority on this important milestone.”

“Supporting Bright Solar Futures and the opening of this new solar training lab is at the intersection of two very important priorities for us at PECO – supporting clean energy resources to mitigate the impact of climate change and furthering initiatives to spur the clean energy workforce of tomorrow,” states Mike Innocenzo, president and CEO at PECO.

“We are so proud to be here today at Frankford with these partners and these students. Solar is the fastest-growing job in Pennsylvania, and this lab will ensure equitable access to these jobs,” comments Emily Schapira, CEO of PEA. “Bright Solar Futures students train in solar and battery storage installation, sales and design, along with weatherization, construction basics and job site safety, ensuring that Philadelphia has the best-trained clean energy workforce in the region.”

PEA is an independent municipal authority building an equitable clean energy economy in Philadelphia. PEA has facilitated over $167 million in clean energy projects in Philadelphia since launching the Philadelphia Energy Campaign in 2016, creating more than 1,700 jobs.

Source: Ariana Fine, Solar Industry Magazine

Image credit: Solar Industry Magazine

 

Rivian Automotive Inc, which is backed by Amazon.com Inc, is targeting a valuation of more than $53 billion for its U.S. debut, making the electric vehicle manufacturer potentially almost as valuable as rival Honda Motor.

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The startup is looking to raise up to $8.4 billion, setting it up to be the third-largest initial public offering (IPO) by funds raised in the past decade in the United States. Only three other companies have raised more than $8 billion while going public since 2011, according to data from Dealogic.

Alibaba raised a record $25 billion in 2014, Meta Platforms Inc garnered $16 billion in 2012, while Uber made $8.1 billion in 2019.

Since last year, companies in the EV space have emerged as some of the hottest investments, especially among SPAC investors on the hunt for the next Tesla Inc.

While Rivian has yet to sell any significant volume of its electric vans or trucks, it could likely be valued higher than Ferrari, although less than Honda, General Motors or its backer Ford Motor Co.

Founded in 2009 as Mainstream Motors by R. J. Scaringe, the company changed to Rivian in 2011, a name that is derived from “Indian River” in Florida, a place Scaringe frequented in a rowboat as a youth.

The startup has been investing heavily to ramp up production, including for its upscale all-electric R1T pickup truck, which was launched in September, beating out competition from established rivals such as Tesla, General Motors and Ford.

Rivian, which disclosed nearly $1 billion in losses for the first half of this year, had about 48,390 pre-orders for its pickup trucks and R1S SUVs in the United States and Canada as of September.

It is currently pursuing a two-track strategy: building electric delivery vans for Amazon and developing an electric pickup and SUV brand aimed at affluent individuals.

Amazon, which disclosed a 20% stake in Rivian at the end of October, has ordered 100,000 of its electric delivery vans as part of the e-commerce giant’s effort to cut carbon footprint.

Ford holds a more than 5% share in the EV startup, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

STIFF COMPETITION
Rivian, which confidentially filed paperwork for an IPO in August, will, however, face tough competition from automakers in both the consumer and commercial van markets.

Ford said last week it has more than 160,000 orders for its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck and that an electric version of its Transit commercial van is “completely sold out.”

General Motors is gearing up production of electric delivery vans, SUVs and pickup trucks.

Rivian said it would sell 135 million shares at a price range of between $57 and $62 each. Reuters reported in September that it could seek a valuation of nearly $80 billion and raise up to $8 billion in its U.S. listing.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are the lead underwriters. Rivian will list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “RIVN”.

Source: Reuters, Noor Zainab Hussain, Niket Nishant, Sanjana Shivdas, Editing Arun Koyyur
Image credit: Rivian

Human activity and climate change-fueled disasters have turned 10 of the planet’s internationally recognized forests, also known as World Heritage sites, from carbon absorbers into carbon emitters, researchers have found.

The report from UNESCO found these sites can absorb approximately 190 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year — roughly half the amount of the United Kingdom’s annual fossil fuel emissions. 

But in the past 20 years, many of these sites showed an increase in emissions, some even exceeded how much carbon they were removing from the atmosphere. 

UNESCO researchers said two main factors are causing forests to flip from sinks to sources: climate change-fueled extreme weather events including wildfires, storm and drought; and human land-use pressures such as illegal logging, wood harvesting and agricultural practices such as livestock grazing. 

Given the scale of these forests, Tales Carvalho Resende, project officer at UNESCO’s natural heritage unit and co-author of the report, says this is increasingly a global issue, meaning global action is needed. 

“What the results revealed here is that it’s not necessarily an issue related to a specific country or region, but that it’s really a global issue,” Resende told CNN. “When we see where the 10 sites that have become carbon sources are, they are scattered all around the world, so the takeaway of the findings is that climate action is needed at a global level.” 

From the Congo Basin to the Redwood National and State Parks, the planet’s 257 World Heritage Forests cover more than 170 million acres of land, nearly twice the size of Germany. 

But the report shows that since 2000, the threats of extractive industries, environmental degradation and climate change have been reported in roughly 60% of the World Heritage sites, which have lost more than 8.6 million acres of forests, larger than the size of Belgium. Out of 10 sites they found to have flipped to carbon emitters, three are located in the United States. 

The report’s findings are a timely warning of the limitations of trees and forests as a climate solution. Leaders and negotiators are meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, to discuss ways to limit global warming, and tree planting is one of four top priorities outlined by the UK government, which is chairing the event. 

Protecting forests and tree planting have enormous potential to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, but in a fast-changing world of wild weather, trees in areas prone to wildfires could become part of the problem, rather than the solution, as these UNESCO sites show. 

The authors point out that it’s the first time researchers have quantified how the world’s forests are sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide. Over the centuries, the World Heritage Forests have stored approximately 13 billion tons of carbon, which exceeds the total amount of carbon in Kuwait’s oil reserves. 

“We can now see the important role World Heritage forests play in stabilizing the global climate,” Nancy Harris, research manager for the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch and co-author of the report, told CNN. “And the truth is, we are completely undervaluing and underappreciating them.” 

Most of the sites that sequester the most carbon dioxide were in tropical and temperate regions, such as South America and Australia. Although those sites are still sequestering carbon, researchers said there are signs that more of them could join the rest in becoming carbon sources. 

Wildfires, in particular, have burned vast swaths of these forests in recent years. While fires are a critical part of the forest ecosystem, with many plant species relying on them to disperse their seeds, scientists say fires are intensifying which risks the potential of releasing the carbon long stored within the soil and trees. 

In the last decade, warming temperatures and dry conditions have primed much of the environment for wildfires to ignite. The report pointed to several examples of significant fires that have occurred in the last decade at World Heritage sites, including in Russia’s Lake Baikal in 2016, and Australia’s Tasmanian Wilderness and Greater Blue Mountains Area in 2019 and 2020. 

“We have seen some wildfires in some sites that have emitted more than 30 million megatons of CO2 — that’s more or less what Bolivia emits in from fossil fuels in one single year,” Resende said.

“One single event can actually be the emissions of a whole country,” he added. “And bear in mind, the fact that the emissions that have been accounted for in the study are only within the limitations of the sites, so this means that they represent only a small portion of fires in the broader landscape.” 

The report builds on recently published maps that track the global exchange of carbon between forests and the atmosphere during the 2001 to 2020 period, using site-level monitoring to analyze the forests’ climate impacts as well as the consequences of human activities to these World Heritage sites. 

“Our analysis illustrates how we can stop taking nature for granted and start putting a value on the climate benefits generated by these and other important forest sites around the world,” Harris said.
Forests play a vital role across societies. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which also contributed to the report, nearly 25% of the world’s population — many in developing nations — depend on the forests for their livelihoods. Additionally, forests bring in up to $100 billion per year in goods and services. It’s also home to 80% of Earth’s land biodiversity. 

The forests’ ability to prevent the climate crisis from spiraling out of control makes the threats they face all the more concerning, Resende said. 

World leaders will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, next week for the UN-brokered international climate negotiations, where the focus will be on getting countries to commit to stronger fossil fuel cuts and putting an end date on coal. They will also discuss stronger commitments to protecting and restoring the planet’s forests as carbon sinks and to ultimately halt deforestation. 

“We hope to really trigger climate action, to safeguard these jewels that are World Heritage sites,” said Resende. “These are laboratories for environmental changes as a whole, not only related to climate but also biodiversity. We want to facilitate dialogues with the key stakeholders to actually fund and provide some sustainable investments to these sites.” 

Source: Rachel Ramirez, CNN
Image credit: CNN

The Orlando Utilities Commission has allocated $420 million to solar investments.

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During an event this week, the 2030 “Solar Pledge” was signed by Orange County Government, City of St. Cloud, Orlando City Soccer Club, Orlando Pride, UCF Downtown Campus and Correct Craft.
The pledge asks participants to invest at least 10% solar energy upon signing and requires 100% solar energy for all business facilities by 2030.
“What a great milestone (this is) for Central Florida and OUC,” OUC CEO Clint Bullock said.
The 2030 Solar Pledge came after the City of Orlando first joined OUC with a solar commitment in 2018.
“Solar energy is good for the economy. It’s a green job creator. It’s good for public health and it helps address climate change,” Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said. “In total, we have 52 facilities that are powered by solar energy.”
According to Bullock, OUC has allocated $420 million to solar investments and committed $90 million to energy storage. He said the utility company will continue to encourage other businesses to commit to the solar pledge and encourage consumers to seek out alternative energy solutions.
“We know we will grow this program even further as we go out in the community and ask others to step up,” he said. “Ask others to join us as we invest solar in this community.”


Source: Mark Lehman, News6team, WKMGImage credit: News6team

Iceland (CNN) The windswept valleys surrounding the Hengill volcano in southwestern Iceland are dotted with hot springs and steam vents. Hikers from all over the world come here to witness its breath-taking scenery. Even the sheep are photogenic in the soft Nordic light.

Right in the middle of all that natural beauty sits a towering metal structure resembling four giant Lego bricks, with two rows of six whirring fans running across each one. It’s a contraption that looks truly futuristic, like something straight out of a sci-fi film.

Humans have emitted so much carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere that machines like this are being used to literally suck the gas back out, like giant vacuum cleaners, in an attempt to slow the climate crisis and prevent some of its most devastating consequences.

The Orca plant — its name derived from the Icelandic word for energy — is what is known as a “direct air carbon capture facility,” and its creators and operators, Swiss firm Climeworks and Icelandic company Carbfix, say it’s the world’s largest.

The aim of Orca is to help the world reach net zero emissions — where we remove as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as we emit. Scientists say that simply cutting back on our use of fossil fuels won’t be enough to avert catastrophe; we need to also clean up some of the mess we’ve been making for hundreds of years. Orca is a depressing symbol of just how bad things have become, but equally, it could be the tech that helps humanity claw its way out of the crisis.

“We, as humans, have disturbed the balance of the natural carbon cycle. So it’s our job to restore the balance,” said Edda Aradóttir, a chemical engineer and the CEO of Carbfix. “We are assisting the natural carbon cycle to find its previous balance, so for me, at least, this makes total sense — but we have to use it wisely,” she said.

It opened last month and currently removes about 10 metric tons of CO2 every day, which is roughly the the same amount of carbon emitted by 800 cars a day in the US. It’s also about the same amount of carbon 500 trees could soak up in a year.

It’s a fine start, but in the grand scheme of things, its impact so far is miniscule. Humans emit around 35 billion tons of greenhouse gas a year through the cars we drive and flights we take, the power we use to heat our homes and the food — in particular the meat — that we eat, among other activities.

All this CO2 accumulates in the in the air, where it acts like the glass of a greenhouse, trapping more heat in the atmosphere than Earth has evolved to tolerate. That’s where the technology used for Orca, called carbon capture and storage (CCS), comes in.

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“Carbon capture and storage is not going to be the solution to climate change,” Sandra Ósk Snæbjörnsdóttir, a Carbfix geologist, told CNN.

“But it is a solution. And it’s one of the many solutions that we need to implement to be able to achieve this big goal that we have to reach.” She added: “First and foremost, we have to stop emitting CO2 and we have to stop burning fossil fuels, the main source of CO2 emissions to our atmosphere.”

How the ‘magic’ happens:

The Orca machines use chemical filters to capture the heat-trapping gas. The “fans,” or metal collectors, suck in the surrounding air and filter out the CO2 so it can be stored.

Carbon dioxide’s concentration in Earth’s atmosphere has likely not been this high at any other point in the last 3 million years, according to NASA scientists. But at levels over 410 parts per million, to actually capture a meaningful amount of CO2, a huge amount of air needs to pass through these machines.

“What is happening is that CO2 in the air is an acid molecule and inside the collectors we have alkaline. Acids and alkaline neutralize each other,” Climeworks co-CEO Christoph Gebald told CNN. “That’s the magic that happens.”

In two to four hours, the surface of the filter is almost completely saturated with CO2 molecules — as if there are “no parking slots left,” as Gebald puts it. “Then we stop the airflow and we heat the internal structure to roughly 100 degrees Celsius, and at that temperature, the CO2 molecules are released again from the surface, they jump off back to the gas phase and we suck it out.”

Because of the high temperature that is needed for the process, the Orca plant requires a lot of energy. That’s a problem that’s easily solved in Iceland, where green geothermal power is abundant. But it could become a challenge to scale globally.

The machines at Orca are just one way to remove CO2 from the air. Other methods involve capturing the gas at source — like the chimney of a cement factory — or removing it from the fuel before combustion. That involves exposing the fuel, such as coal or natural gas, to oxygen or steam under high temperature and pressure to convert it into a mixture of hydrogen and CO2. The hydrogen is then separated and can be burned with much lower carbon emissions. However, methane emissions could be a problem when the process is used on natural gas.

The carbon that comes out of CCS can be used for other purposes, for example to make objects out of plastic instead of using oil, or in the food industry, which uses CO2 to put the fizz in drinks. But the amount that needs to be captured vastly exceeds the world’s demand for CO2 in other places, which means the majority of it will need to be “stored.”

At Orca, this happens just a few hundred meters away from its vacuum in several igloo-like structures where the gas is mixed with water and injected around 800 meters underground. There, the CO2 reacts with sponge-like volcanic rocks and mineralizes, while the water flows away.

Emissions crisis:

The latest state-of-the-science report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed that the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half over the next decade and achieve net zero by 2050 to have any chance of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The higher temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees, the more the world will experience an increase in extreme weather events — both in strength and frequency — like droughts, hurricanes, floods and heatwaves.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂

The amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere has fluctuated over time, but human activity since the Industrial Revolution has pushed levels to unprecedented highs.

CCS technology sounds like the perfect solution, but it remains highly controversial, and not just because of the amount of energy it needs. Its critics say the world should be aiming for zero emissions, not net zero.

But scientific consensus is pretty clear: some level of carbon capture will soon become necessary. The IPCC estimated that even if emissions decline dramatically, to keep temperature increases below 2 degrees will require the removal of between 10 billion and 20 billion tonnes of CO2 every year until 2100.

“I don’t think carbon capture is a silver bullet, because there is no silver bullet,” said Nadine Mustafa, a researcher that specializes in carbon capture at the department of chemical engineering at Imperial College London, and is not involved with Orca.

“It’s not that we are going to fix everything by using renewables, or that we’re going to use carbon capture and storage and we’re going to fix everything with that. We’re going to need everything, especially because we’re already behind on our goals.”

The oil and gas link:

Opponents of CCS argue the technology is simply another way for the fossil fuel industry to delay its inevitable demise.

While they are not involved in the Orca plant, fossil fuel giants dominate the sector. According to a database complied by the Global CCS Institute, a pro-CCS think tank, an overwhelming majority of the world’s 89 CCS projects that are currently in operation, being built or in advanced stages of development are operated by oil, gas and coal companies.

Oil companies have had and used the technology to capture carbon for decades, but they haven’t exactly done it to reduce emissions — ironically, their motivation has been to extract even more oil. That’s because the CO2 they remove can be re-injected into oil fields that are nearly depleted, and help squeeze out 30-60% more oil than with normal methods. The process is known as “enhanced oil recovery” and it is one of the main reasons why CCS remains controversial.

Fossil fuel companies are also investing in the newer carbon capture tech that removes CO2 from the air — like Orca’s machines do — so they can argue they are “offsetting” the emissions that they can’t capture in their usual processes. It’s one way to delay fossil fuels’ inevitable demise as the world transitions to renewable energy sources.

There is another way to look at it.

Fossil fuel companies have the big bucks to invest in this expensive tech, and considering fossil fuels are by far the main driver of climate change, it can be argued that they have a responsibility to foot the bill for what could be the biggest environmental disaster clean-up in human history.

The global fossil fuel industry is worth trillions of dollars. In 2019, the last year before the pandemic, publicly listed fossil fuel companies raked in $250 billion in profits, according to data compiled for CNN by Refinitiv. That figure doesn’t include Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, which was not publicly listed until December 2019. On its own, the company made $88 billion that year.

“This is a group who could transition to providing this service to society at large,” said Graeme Sweeney, chairman of the Zero Emissions Platform (ZEP), which is one of the more powerful advocates for CCS in Europe. The group acts as an advisor to the European Commission, from which it also receives part of its funding, and comprises research groups, the European Trade Union Confederation, as well as many of the world’s biggest oil companies, including Shell, Total, Equinor, ExxonMobil and BP. The way Sweeney sees it, providing this tech could even be a chance for the fossil fuel industry to begin to atone for the climate crisis.

“It would be, in a sense, odd, if that was not the contribution that they made,” said Sweeney, who previously worked for Shell for three decades.

Asked whether CCS should be used to allow more fossil fuel production in the future — something climate activists worry about — Sweeney said: “If we regulate this appropriately, then it will produce an outcome which is compatible with net zero in 2050 … what’s the problem?”

One remaining risk in this technology is the impact that storing the carbon may have on the Earth, or at least its immediate environment. In its special report on carbon capture and storage, the IPCC said that by far the biggest risk comes from potential leaks. A sudden and large release of CO2 would be extremely dangerous. In the air, a CO2 concentration of around 10% is deadly, but even much lower levels can cause health issues.

It’s a massive risk to take.

But the idea of using deep sea storage is not new and it has been used for some time. At Sleipner, a gas field in Norway, CO2 has been injected underground since 1996. The site has been monitored closely, and apart from some issues during the first year, it has not shown any problems in its 25 years running.

Snæbjörnsdóttir, who heads the CO2 mineral storage at Carbfix for Orca, said the mineralization process they use in Iceland eliminates the risk of leaks. And the basalt — which is volcanic rock — around the plant makes for an ideal geological storage.

“These rocks are very permeable, so they are kind of like a sponge, and you have a lot of fractures for the CO2-charged fluid to flow through, so it mineralizes quite rapidly,” Snæbjörnsdóttir said.

Standing next to the injection site, Snæbjörnsdóttir grabbed a piece of crystallized calcium carbonate, known here as the Icelandic spar, and held it against the sunlight. “This is nature’s way of turning CO2 into stone, in its most beautiful way,” she said as tiny reflections of light from the rock danced on the walls around her.

“Once you have mineralized the CO2, it stays there forever.”

Source: Ivana Kottasová, CNN

Image credit: Temujin Doran, CNN