Month: May 2019

Martin, M.; et al. (2019): Mitigation potential and environmental impact of centralized versus distributed BECCS with domestic biomass production in Great Britain

Martin, M.; Dowell, N. Mac et al. (2019): Mitigation potential and environmental impact of centralized versus distributed BECCS with domestic biomass production in Great Britain. In: GCB Bioenergy. DOI: 10.1111/gcbb.12630.

“New contingency policy plans are expected to be published by the United Kingdom government to set out urgent actions, such as carbon capture and storage, greenhouse gas removal, and the use of sustainable bioenergy to meet the greenhouse gas reduction targets of the 4th and 5th carbon budgets. In this study, we identify two plausible bioenergy production pathways for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) based on centralized and distributed energy systems to show what BECCS could look like if deployed by 2050 in Great Britain.”

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Hemes, K.; et al. (2019): Assessing the carbon and climate benefit of restoring degraded agricultural peat soils to managed wetlands

Hemes, K.; Chamberlain, S.; Eichelmann, E.; Anthony, T.; Valach, A.; Kasak, K. et al. (2019): Assessing the carbon and climate benefit of restoring degraded agricultural peat soils to managed wetlands. In: Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 268, S. 202–214. DOI: 10.1016/j.agrformet.2019.01.017.

“Restoring degraded peat soils presents an attractive, but largely untested, climate change mitigation approach. Drained peat soils used for agriculture can be large greenhouse gas sources. […] Here, we synthesize 36 site-years of continuous carbon dioxide and methane flux data from a mesonetwork of eddy covariance towers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California, USA to compute carbon and greenhouse gas budgets for drained agricultural land uses and compare these to restored deltaic wetlands. We found that restored wetlands effectively sequestered carbon and halted soil carbon loss associated with drained agricultural land uses.”

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Cabral, R.; et al. (2019): A synergistic approach for the simultaneous decarbonisation of power and industry via bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)

Cabral, R.; Bui, M.; Mac Dowell, N. (2019): A synergistic approach for the simultaneous decarbonisation of power and industry via bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). In: International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control 87, S. 221–237. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijggc.2019.05.020.

“There is a need for a rapid and large scale decarbonisation to reduce CO2 emissions by 45% within 12 years. Thus, we propose a method that accelerates decarbonisation across multiple sectors via a synergistic approach with bioenergy with CCS (BECCS), which is able to remove 740 kg from air per MWh electricity generated.”

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Busch, J.; et al. (2019): Potential for low-cost carbon dioxide removal through tropical reforestation

Busch, J.; Engelmann, J.; Cook-Patton, S.; Griscom, B.; Kroeger, T.; Possingham, H.; Shyamsundar, P. (2019): Potential for low-cost carbon dioxide removal through tropical reforestation. In: Nature Climate change 9 (6), S. 463–466. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-019-0485-x.

“Achieving the 1.5–2.0 °C temperature targets of the Paris climate agreement requires not only reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but also increasing removals of GHGs from the atmosphere. Reforestation is a potentially large-scale method for removing CO2 and storing it in the biomass and soils of ecosystems, yet its cost per tonne remains uncertain. Here, we produce spatially disaggregated marginal abatement cost curves for tropical reforestation by simulating the effects of payments for increased CO2 removals on land-cover change in 90 countries.”

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Green Biz: The case for investing in direct air capture just got clearer

“The idea of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as a method of combating climate change is nothing new. For the past 20 years, climate experts have included this strategy in their models showing theoretical pathways for avoiding catastrophic climate change — all of that data has been calculated based on the ability of plants to capture and store carbon in their biomass.”

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Yu, S.; et al. (2019): Plasmonic photosynthesis of C1–C3 hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide assisted by an ionic liquid

Yu, S.; Jain, P. (2019): Plasmonic photosynthesis of C1–C3 hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide assisted by an ionic liquid. In: Nat Comms 10 (1), S. 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10084-5.

“Photochemical conversion of CO2 into fuels has promise as a strategy for storage of intermittent solar energy in the form of chemical bonds. […] Here we demonstrate a strategy for green-light-driven synthesis of C1–C3 hydrocarbons from CO2 and H2O. In this approach, plasmonic excitation of Au nanoparticles produces a charge-rich environment at the nanoparticle/solution interface conducive for CO2 activation, while an ionic liquid stabilizes charged intermediates formed at this interface, facilitating multi-step reduction and C–C coupling.”

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