Category: Climate change innovation

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Battery powered freight ships

There are a great number of different sectors which need to be tackled if we are to move towards net zero as a world. One of the hardest is the ships that transverse the world oceans, allowing the global economy to run. Is this finally an area which cuts will be possible?

Might electric freight ships start replacing fossil fuel run ships?

Many sectors of the global economy have been fully sorted – or at least solutions exist which will take carbon to zero over time – I will include a quick overview below, but for the rest of the article look below the bullet points:

  • Power- it is (in most of the world) cheaper to scrap a standing coal powerplant and replace it with brand new solar and wind, than to continue to use the coal. While replacing coal with gas does lead to a reduction in emissions, it is not enough, and this too is more expensive to run long-term. Letting go of gas will be harder, as it will require very large batteries to replace gas as the base load – but economics as well as global warming are rapidly changing this too.
  • Agriculture- many of our current methods for agriculture have high emissions, however through a variety of methods, it is predicted that this sector can rapidly move to net zero. From additives in cattle diet (made from seaweed) which vastly reduce methane production) to less fertilizers, and spreading various rocks on the land which will lock carbon into the soil (good for climate change and the farmers yields), as well as electrical equipment, solutions exist, we simply need to use them (they are too expensive currently for parts of the world, but prices are coming down.
  • There are other areas, like fugitive emissions, which need to be dealt with, and industries like cement (currently emitting aound 3%) where new ways of making it can vastly drop its emissions. Also around 2% currently comes from deforestation – this needs to stop and be reversed by trillions of trees being planted worldwide (this must use local trees, both to avoid unintended side effects, and to make sure new forests support local fauna)
  • Transportation accounts for much of the rest, at roughly 30% of human emissions, and 72% of this (around 21% of human emissions) is road transportation. Now, while much infrastructure is needed for electric vehicles to work, electric cars lorries and buses are all incredibly successful. The industry is in its relative infancy compared to combustion engine vehicles, but its incredible simplicity, as well as its instant savings mean that in almost all the world they would already give savings over the lifetime of the vehicle.

Much of what is left is the last 9% or so which is used in transportation. Air transport accounts for around 3% currently, but is a hard place to decarbonize as it is such an energy intensive process, though many companies have passenger jets for journeys are to 500 miles coming in the next decade.

This leaves sea transportation. Much of the worlds freight goes by sea. It is far cheaper (in most instances) to make lots of a product in one location in the world and then ship it to where it is needed. Currently this is highly polluting, but progress is being made here too.

COSCO electric container ship is one of the first to hit the market. Powered by 2 900kw propulsion motors, it reduces carbon emissions by 32 tonnes every 24 hours. Powered by a battery unit (housed in 20-foot containers) which has a capacity of 50mwh or 50000kwh). These containers are easily swappable, which means in places like a river where swapping them out is relatively easy, they are ready to replace all other freight and given the huge savings are likely to relatively quickly.

These ships will be able to run on full power for around 24 hours. Given that container ships tend to travel at around 20 knots (37km per hour or 22 miles per hour) this is a rang of around 500 miles. If the swapping of this battery can be done quickly, the travel along the coast should be able to able to continue relatively quick, particularly if these battery swapping stations can be stationed as near the shipping route as possible.

Now this container ship takes around 700 containers, which suggests to me, that you could put in say 10 container batteries, barely reduce the capacity and allow this same ship to cross the Atlantic and more. Now 700 containers is a small container ships with some carrying 7 times as many. A 5000 container ship takes 1.5 -2 million gallons of oil, 1 gallon weighs about 3.3kg, so we are talking 5000 tonnes at the lower end, that means that even on our smaller shop we are talking 500 tonnes of oil, 10 batteries has to compare favourably.

If well made and competition arrives soon, it is likely that these ships will arrive surprisingly fast, as the advantage to companies using them will give them to great an advantage over competition, requiring extremely rapid adoption.

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We are all encouraged to cut our carbon footprint – so is ecotourism out?

There is a great deal of time in the media given over to cutting our carbon footprint. To be clear, this is essential – we need to cut our carbon footprint as much as we possibly can.

My family have recently bought an electric car (second hand) and this has probably reduced our emissions by 2.5 tonnes a year directly (let alone indirectly, which is often far higher – think of the carbon footprint of extracting refining and transporting the petrol from the earth to your car – usually easily doubling the carbon emissions coming out of the tail pipe).

While they cause much pollution, air travel allows support of wilderness like no time before, we must not lose it.

We are currently in talks of having a heat pump installed (I hope that this goes well) and perhaps having the same people install our solar panels and thermal solar panels (those who have been reading this blog for a long time will remember me getting them a long time ago, it has been bizarrely hard to find someone to install at a sensible price).

These moves probably combine to reduce our housing emissions to near zero – we have carbon neutral electricity as well a to reduce our gas use to zero.

So why do I run a website that is intended to simplify wild travel? It is simple! No one has yet found a model which pays locals for the wildlife that lives on the doorstep. Tourism is good at doing this. Now it is true that most wildlife is a significant distance away, which means that air travel is required. However, if as a country, we reduce our housing carbon footprint by 5+ tonnes each, per year (on average the emissions per person is around 5 tonnes per year, so for a family of 4 this is a reduction of about 25%) then a flight, preferably in cattle class and on a modern efficient plane, is not going to greatly increase our carbon footprint.

More important, if everyone in the west stops ecotourism trips, what benefit is there for locals in western Africa to retain their rainforest? A small number of visitors is likely to greatly increase the standard of living of remote communities, as well as giving incentive for thousands of square miles of rainforest to remain standing.

Carbon offset schemes are also a good idea, though much care must be taken in picking what to support (and often doing it directly is better). As this website grows, I hope to set up a scheme that does it properly. You should be looking for projects which will either reduce emissions (new green electricity generation, reforestation- with native crops, that will be left standing, and many more)

The fact of the matter is, that if all of us who are lucky enough to live in the west stop engaging in eco-travel, this removes the incentive for countries around the world to retain their wilderness and wildlife. Worse, ecotourism can give livelihoods in wild places all over the country which if removed, would require entire ecosystems to be cleared. We must be careful, and keep our carbon footprint for this travel low, but feeling smug about not flying will not keep rainforests standing, coral reefs intact, mangroves where they are and many many more

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A group of young people are suing Montana for choosing corporations over citizens – what will happen

Increasingly, young people are taking to court to make governments listen. The scientific evidence for climate change has been known by many people for at least 70 years (and suggested far earlier).

We need more action to follow from judgements like this.

It does seem reasonable for children to sue their parents generation, for the costs that their short sightedness will cost.

Alarmingly, the trial comes shortly after the states legislature (republican majority) passed a new rule that the fossil fuel industry wanted, which blocks local government from encouraging renewable energy, and at the same time, increases the cost to challenge the fossil fuel industries.

It is not expected to have a big effect in the Montana state, but over the 2 weeks laid out devastating evidence for both the audience in the house and those outside.

Lawyers for the Montana Attorney General (a republican) tried repeatedly to get the case thrown out over procedural issues.

The state has a 1972 protective constitution which requires officials to maintain a “clean and healthy environment” which is only included in a few other states laws.

Unfortunately the state district judge, has already narrowed the case, as a result if they win, show would not order officials to formulate a new approach to climate change. Instead, she would issue “declaratory Judgement” stating that officials violated the state constitution.

It is thought that if the plaintiffs win, even if there is little direct action as a result, it could cause ripples which might well cause the change needed. The trial ended 2 days ago, and we are just waiting for the ruling.

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European bee-eaters have returned to Norfolk once again

I wrote last year about a group of European bee eaters which nested in Norfolk last year

https://seeanimalswild.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=7304&action=edit

Should you wish to read it, I have included a link to it above.

This years bee-eaters in a short video

These birds are beautiful, and for some time, have been an exciting moment when encountering them in Spain or eastern Europe. Unfortunately, their more regular visits to our shores is yet more signs of climate change.

The fact that they have returned to the same nest site may well suggest a group which intends to make this their annual nesting ground.

3 have been spotted, which include a nesting pair.

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Chevron has created a large set of carbon offsets and they appear worthless, says research

Chevron has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030 through a carbon offset scheme. It is notable, that Chevron sells a product which is totally incompatible with carbon zero emissions.

This new research suggests that their carbon offsets are worthless, and therefore the emissions of Chevron will not change at all.

Corporate Accountability, a non-profit which did the research, found that 93% of the offsets that Chevron bought and counted are so environmentally problematic as to be worthless.

A carbon offset scheme is considered worthless, if its linked to a forest or plantation (or green energy project that does not lead to additional carbon capture. In other words, it is great to pay countries to keep their forests standing, indeed this is essential, not one new tonne of carbon is pulled out of the air by protecting the forest, so the carbon Chevron releases has not been removed from the air.

This is for a simple reason – it is not capturing new emissions. It is fantastic to not cause new emissions, but stopping new emissions is not the same as catching carbon to offset emissions that you are creating.

How did Chevron think this was acceptable.

Carbon offset is very simple: if I emit 1 million tonnes of carbon, and then pay to replant a rainforest in Tanzania that can take 1 million tonnes out of the atmosphere, this carbon remains locked as long as the rainforest continues to stand. Another idea would be to capture 1 million tonnes of carbon and bury it deep in the earth, to lock it away for millions of year.

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France has decreed that every carpark with more than 80 car spaces must have a solar canopy

Across France this is around 11gigawatts, or over the year almost 10 terawatt hours of electricity generation per year. This is a very sensible idea, as it is a second use of the land.

Might this become a common site in the UK as well as France (where it is required on all new car parks over 80 spaces)

In the south of England, there are now 2000 panels placed over car parking spaces. These offer a capacity of almost 1MW hour. Each parking space covered, has a capacity of about 2kw. In the UK, the countries target of solar by 2030 is to have 40gw of solar capacity, up from 15gw currently. It is estimated, that almost half the remaining target would be met by carpark roofing – which suggests that we could hit far more than 40gw of solar.

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A new way of modelling wind turbines, could lead to an 1% increase in the amount of wind power generated – for free

Usually in order to increase the power generation from anything, it needs new hardware – if you wanted to increase the amount of power from a set of solar panels on your roof there is little you can do, without replacing them (this of course pre-supposes that the panels are in a good location, and are not in the shadow of a tree).

That is why this is incredibly exciting. The idea of being able to roll our new rules about how wind turbines work, and instantly make 1% more energy is incredible.

It is true that, currently, wind only accounts for about 6.5% of electricity generation. Conversely, it accounts for 24% of renewable generation – which is quite likely to be a percentage that grows as we move towards 100% renewable electricity generation.

So, with this change it will only account for 6.565% what difference is that?

Well, last year the world generated 28500 terawatt hours, which means that 0.065% increase is 18.5 terawatt hours extra created through 100% green sources.

Now, between 2020 and 2022, the average carbon emissions per kwh was around 370g. As such, were all of this energy created in the USA (it is not the most expensive or the least, so we are going to use it as representative – even though this power would be generated around the world) this much extra green energy would save 0.370 time 18.5 time 10 to the power of 9 (there are 1,000,000,000 kwh in 1 terawatt hour) which means that this little modeling trick would have saved roughly 7 million tonnes of carbon emissions. Now while this is relatively small in global terms (with 50 gigatonnes of emissions in 2020) it is still not insignificant – indeed, it is equivalent to the total emissions of Botswana, or indeed Latvia in 2021. That strikes me as an easy move, perhaps looking at this in a different way, perhaps more importantly, for wind farm companies, this energy is worth roughly £340 million ($450 million)

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Will flying ever be green?

The world has got far smaller since the advent of the aeroplane. While many people that are writing on environment and wildlife (like me) would encourage you to avoid flying, By all means reduce it as much as possible, if your journey can be done in the car or by train do it this way. I understand the desire to fly – in just a few hours you can be on the other side of Europe.

Currently in development, while not a passenger jet, could replace many of the private jets around the world, with a rang of about 250 miles and carrying 11 people

However, most European trips can be done either on the train or in the car. Indeed, by train it is often faster than by plane – when you include the waiting time, baggage reclaim, and the time taken getting to and from the airport.

Continue reading “Will flying ever be green?”
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AA says charging is less per mile than petrol? when has it not been – only in very specific circumstances is this not true

So at the current time, tesla charges 50p per kwh (for almost everyone charging at home will account for most, so supercharging probably only accounts for about 10% but we will look at this later).

How does this compare? in the UK fuel is currently 165p for diesel and 147p for petrol.

Now one needs to compare like for like – it is unreasonable to compare a tesla s with a fiat punto, these are not comparable cars. So We will do it car by car. Please note, as teslas are only every electric, I will be comparing them to their nearest petrol BMW competitor – BMW does have electric cars in competition – though generally these get lower miles per kwh.

As such, I have compared the 4 main tesla cars to their nearest equivalent BMW (fair warning lots of numbers below

Continue reading “AA says charging is less per mile than petrol? when has it not been – only in very specific circumstances is this not true”
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