Khaled al-Falih said his country, the world’s biggest oil exporter, will also sell renewable energy and its technology abroad.

At a forum seeking investment in the sector, he announced “30 projects to be implemented” in order to reach a goal of about 10 gigawatts of renewable energy production early next decade.

Virtually all of the kingdom’s domestic power currently comes from crude, refined oil or natural gas.

But as part of an economic reform plan to wean the kingdom off oil, the government has embarked on what Falih called an “ambitious” renewables programme featuring solar and wind power.

He has said the projects could cost between $30 billion and $50 billion.

“The percentage of renewable energy by 2023 will represent 10 percent of the total electricity of the kingdom,” he said at the start of the Saudi Arabia Renewable Energy Investment Forum.

“We are seeking for the kingdom, in the medium term, to become a nation that develops, manufactures and exports the advanced technologies of renewable energy production,” he said.

“This is really transformational,” he said, suggesting that the changes coming to the kingdom’s energy sector will be as significant as the discovery of oil in the 1930s.

“You’re really talking about a significant socio-economic transition that’s going to take place” over the next decade or two.

Falih said the energy sector is being completely restructured to include an autonomous board of regulators, and with privatised generation capacity.

He formally opened bids on the first 300-megawatt solar plant under the renewables plan.

The government has shortlisted 51 firms, most of them from abroad, for bidding on that plant and a 400-megawatt wind farm.

Another wind project will be launched in the fourth quarter of this year, followed by more solar projects, he told hundreds of delegates.

Government estimates say Saudi peak energy demand is expected to exceed 120 gigawatts by 2032.

Falih told the forum that nuclear power will also be part of the kingdom’s energy mix.

But details are still being worked out, he told AFP on the sidelines of the two-day meeting.

“We haven’t designed the programme yet. We are working on various options, looking at regulations, establishing the regulatory framework first and making sure we have all the steps before we announce the capacities and the locations,” he said.

“But it will be coming in due course.”—AFP

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“Using our efficient Plastic to Fuel (PTF) conversion units, we are hoping to address the problems of plastics pollution on land and the ocean,” Swaminathan Ramesh, a product of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru and President of Michigan-based EcoFuel Technologies, told IANS in an email.

Ramesh, whose company developed the PTF units in partnership with James Holm, founder of Clean Oceans International, a Santa Cruz, CA, based non-profit, said the goal is to rid the world of plastic waste by creating a market for it.

The researchers presented their results on April 3 at the 253rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Francisco.

Piling plastic waste poses a serious threat to marine life and beaches. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), more than eight million tonnes of plastic finds its way into the oceans annually—which is roughly equivalent to dumping an entire garbage truck of plastic into the oceans every minute.

The UNEP had warned that by 2050, “the plastic in our oceans would weigh more than all the fish combined”.

“Pyrolysis”, the technology used to break down plastic waste to obtain hydrocarbon-based fuel, has been known for years. But this calls for complex and costly refining steps to make the fuel useable.

Ramesh set out to change the game and developed a “metallocene” catalyst deposited on a porous support material that, coupled with a controlled pyrolysis reaction, directly yields diesel without further refining. It is also cost-effective on a small scale, runs at lower temperatures and is mobile.

“Our process—catalytic thermal depolymerisation technology—is by catalytic pyrolysisand, by careful management of heat transfer and reaction kinetics, we have optimised the yields to be around 90 per cent of the desired fuel,” Ramesh explained. The key catalyst for the reaction was developed in his laboratory. Each PTF reactor can convert 100-10,000 pounds of plastic per day.

Storage and transport of plastic waste to land-based sites is no longer needed since the PTF reactor can be placed aboard vessels engaged in retrieval of floating plastic wastes and the converted fuels can be directly used for running these vessels.

A statement released by the American Chemical Society announcing the upcoming demonstration of PTF reactor at Santa Cruz said: “If we can get people around the world to pick this up and use it to shift waste plastics to fuel and make money, we can even eliminate plastic waste before it gets to the oceans by creating value for it locally on a global basis.”

That plastic stream, it said, “can be diverted from the ocean and converted to 20-50 million barrels of liquid fuel annually by the PTF reactors.”

India is reportedly among countries that contribute most to plastic debris in the ocean.

Kerala, which generates 6,000 tonnes of plastic waste every day is already toying with the idea of using waste plastics to make bricks that can be used to make footpaths and pave roads.

Asked if any recycling industry or government agency in India has shown interest in the PTF technology, Ramesh said: “I have not had much success with generating too much interest in India (I have not tried too hard anyway). I am open to any prospects.”

IANS

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“We show that, compared to using conventional fuels, biofuel blending reduces particle number and mass emissions immediately behind the aircraft by 50 to 70 per cent,” researchers said in the study published in the journal Nature.

During flight tests in 2013 and 2014 near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, data was collected on the effects of alternative fuels on engine performance, emissions and aircraft-generated contrails at altitudes flown by commercial airliners.

Contrails are produced by hot aircraft engine exhaust mixing with the cold air that is typical at cruise altitudes several miles above Earth’s surface, and are composed primarily of water in the form of ice crystals.

The tests involved flying NASA’s workhorse DC-8 as high as 40,000 feet while its four engines burned a 50-50 blend of aviation fuel and a renewable alternative fuel of hydro processed esters and fatty acids produced from camelina oil.

A trio of research aircraft took turns flying behind the DC-8 at distances ranging from 300 feet to more than 20 miles to take measurements on emissions and study contrail formation as the different fuels were burned.

“This was the first time we have quantified the amount of soot particles emitted by jet engines while burning a 50-50 blend of biofuel in flight,” said study lead author Rich Moore of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

“Our observations quantify the impact of biofuel blending on aerosol emissions at cruise conditions and provide key microphysical parameters, which will be useful to assess the potential of biofuel use in aviation as a viable strategy to mitigate climate change,” the study said.—IANS

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A new paper, published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies, found that cellulose might become an abundant material to print with.

“Cellulose is the most important component in giving wood its mechanical properties. And because it is so inexpensive, it is biorenewable, biodegradable and also very chemically versatile, it is used in a lot of products,” said Sebastian Pattinson, lead author of a paper, from Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT).

“Cellulose and its derivatives are used in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, as food additives, building materials, clothing—all sorts of different areas. And a lot of these kinds of products would benefit from the kind of customisation that additive manufacturing [3-D printing] enables,” Pattinson added.

When heated, cellulose thermally decomposes before it becomes flowable, partly because of the hydrogen bonds that exist between the cellulose molecules. The intermolecular bonding also makes high-concentration cellulose solutions too viscous to easily extrude.

“We found that the strength and toughness of the parts we got… was greater than many commonly used materials for 3-D printing, including acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and polylactic acid (PLA),” he said.

Cellulose acetate is already widely available as a commodity product. In bulk, the material is comparable in price to that of thermoplastics used for injection molding and it’s much less expensive than the typical filament materials used for 3-D printing.

IANS

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Picture used for illustrative purposes alone

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Even if solar and wind capacity continues to grow at breakneck speed, it will not be fast enough to cap global warming under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the target set down in the landmark 2015 Paris climate treaty, they reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“The rapid deployment of wind, solar and electric cars gives some hope,” lead author Glen Peters, a researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway, told AFP.

“But at this stage, these technologies are not really displacing the growth in fossil fuels or conventional transportation.”

Earth is overheating mainly due to the burning of oil, gas and especially coal to power the global economy.

Barely 1C (1.8F) of warming so far has already led to deadly heatwaves, drought and superstorms engorged by rising seas.

The 196-nation Paris Agreement set a collective goal to cap warming, but lacks the tools to track progress, especially at the country level.

To provide a better toolkit, Peters and colleagues broke down the energy system into half-a-dozen indicators — GDP growth, energy used per unit of GDP, CO2 emissions per unit of energy, share of fossil fuels in the energy mix, etc.

What emerged was a sobering picture of narrowing options.

“Wind and solar alone are not sufficient to meet the goals,” Peters said.

The bottom line, the study suggests, is how much carbon pollution seeps into the atmosphere, and on that score renewable have — so far — barely made a dent.

Investment in solar and wind has soared, outstripping fossil fuels for the first time last year. And renewables’ share of global energy consumption has increased five-fold since 2000.

But it still only accounts for less than three percent of the total.

Moreover, the share of fossil fuels — nearly 87 percent — has not budged due to a retreat in nuclear power over the same 15-year period.

Even a renewables Marshall Plan would face an unyielding deadline: To stay under 2C, the global economy must be carbon neutral — producing no more CO2 than can be absorbed by oceans and forests — by mid-century.

Compounding the challenge, other key policies and technologies deemed essential for holding down temperatures remain woefully underdeveloped, the study cautioned.

In particular, the capacity to keep or pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it securely — a cornerstone of end-of-century projections for a climate-safe world — is practically non-existent.

Vetted by the UN’s top climate science panel, these scenarios presume that thousands of industrial-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities will be up-and-running by 2030.

As of today, there are only one or two, with a couple of dozen in various stages of construction.

Another form of clean energy pencilled into most medium- and long-term forecasts that does not yet exist on any meaningful scale is carbon-neutral biofuels.

The idea is that CO2 captured while plants grow will compensate for greenhouse gases released when they are burned for energy.

On paper, that carbon pollution will also be captured and stored, resulting in “negative emissions” — a net reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere.

But here again, reality is dragging its feet.

“It is uncertain whether bioenergy can be sustainably produced and made carbon-neutral at the scale required,” the researchers noted.

All of these technologies must come on line if we are to have a fighting chance of keeping a lid of global warming, which is currently on track to heat the planet by 3C to 4C (5.4F to 7.2F), the study concluded.

Market momentum alone is not enough, Peters added.

“There need to be a shift in focus,” he said in an email exchange.

“Politician seem happy to support wind, solar and electric vehicles through subsidies. But they are not willing to put prices” — a carbon tax, for example — “on fossil fuels.”

“Unless the emissions from fossil fuels goes down, the 2C target is an impossibility.”

In an informal survey last week of top climate scientists, virtually all of them said that goal is probably already out of reach.—AFP

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