Search for: Go

Green Notes - 08 Sep 08

By Chinthana ⋅ September 8, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

• When it comes to sustainability, there may be lessons to be learned from ancient Mesopotamania. An environmental design company called Timelinks (based in the surprisingly environmentally innovative Dubai) has come up with an idea for a city complex that rivals the pyramids. The 2.3-square kilometer building would be able to house over 1 million people and be “almost totally self-sufficient energy-wise.” By tapping into the planet’s renewable resources, designers assert that it could practically be carbon-neutral, and given that transport within the machine would be connected by an “integrated 360-degree network,” fuel-burning cars would be pointless. Dubai based designer Timelinks has already patented the design and technology incorporated into the project. They have also applied to the European Union for a grant to carry out more work on the project.
• Public discussion of complicated climate change is largely reduced to carbon: carbon emissions, carbon footprints, carbon trading. But other chemicals have large roles in the planet’s health, and the one Dr. Giblin is looking for in Arctic mud, one that a growing number of other researchers are also concentrating on, is nitrogen. Soon after Dr. Vitousek’s report, the journal Geophysical Research Letters branded as a “missing greenhouse gas” nitrogen trifluoride, which is used in production of semiconductors and in liquid-crystal displays found in many electronics. Nitrogen trifluoride, which is not one of the six gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol, the celebrated international global warming accord, is about 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Its estimated worldwide release into the atmosphere this year is equivalent to the total global-warming emissions from Austria.
• One of the world’s first coal-fired power plants equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is set to start up in Germany next week. With the onset of a new CO₂ emissions trading scheme in the European Union, Vattenfall decided to build a demonstration project at its lignite-burning power plant in Schwarze Pumpe. The technology is called oxyfuel, and it basically relies on burning coal in pure oxygen and CO2. By stripping out the nitrogen and other gases, the burning coal produces mostly water vapor and nearly pure carbon dioxide. Because the CO2 will then be separated, squashed to one 500th of its original volume and squeezed into a cylinder ready to be transported to a gas field and forced 1,000m below the surface into porous rock where it should stay until long after mankind has stopped worrying about climate change.