Interesting stats on EVs and energy use in the US, developments in wind and tidal power, a plastic recycling microfactory, and an "unprecedented collapse" in EU fossil fuel generation.
Researchers at the University of Central Florida say they've developed a process for using renewable energy sources to convert methane into hydrogen and carbon, without releasing harmful emissions or contaminants. According to this Phys.org article, market applications for this process could include large-scale production of hydrogen in solar farms and the capture and conversion of methane.
This could be a good way to transform methane that's being currently being captured from landfills such as Freshkills Park on Staten Island, NY into usable energy and materials. It would be nice if we could capture methane from industrial emissions or the atmosphere and use it for this purpose as well – but according to this Scientific American article, we're still really far away from being able to do that.
I'm all for exploring every option available to us to shrink our global gas emissions and use renewable sources of energy to power our world. And I really hope that scientists do figure out a way to capture carbon dioxide and methane successfully from industrial emissions and the atmosphere sooner as opposed to later – that would be amazing. In the meantime, I hope the fossil fuel industry doesn't take science stories like this one and use them to justify not taking immediate action to shrink their current insane levels of methane emissions.
The IEA-OES has released a roadmap on how the world's leading nations can develop 300 GW of ocean energy by 2050 – creating 680,000 jobs and removing over 500 million tonnes of carbon emissions in the process.
