Al Gore ist ein sehr guter Geschäftsmann, das muss man ihm neidlos zugestehen. Er hat es nicht nur geschafft mit CO2-Zertifikaten viel Geld zu verdienen, er ist auch ein Investor in Grüne Industrien. Ein Investment geht in die Stahlproduktion in Schweden. Sie soll zukünftig mit Wasserstoff funktionieren. Den könnte Schweden wegen seiner Wasserkraft aber auch seiner Kernenergie preiswert herstellen. Jetzt zahlt sich sein Kampf endlich aus und nach der langen Vorbereitung kann er nun gute Geschäfte mit dem Stahl machen. Die FT berichtet:
“H2 Green Steel raised €1.5bn in equity on Thursday from investors including GIC and Temasek from Singapore, Al Gore’s Just Climate fund, and the Hy24 hydrogen fund backed by Airbus, Axa and Baker Hughes, among others. The Swedish start-up will use the proceeds, as well as €3.5bn in debt financing that it raised last year, to build a plant in the Swedish town of Boden, just below the Arctic Circle. The plant will produce hydrogen from renewable energy. It will then use the hydrogen to produce green steel for customers ranging from Mercedes-Benz and Cargill to Scania and car parts maker ZF. Henrik Henriksson, chief executive, told the Financial Times that although H2GS was “95 per cent” focused on the plant in Boden it was also considering opportunities in four more countries alongside miners Vale and Anglo American and utility Iberdrola. The projects under consideration were primarily to produce green hydrogen and fossil fuel-free sponge iron — purified iron ore that can be readily turned into other products. “We are looking seriously at all four of them,” Henriksson said of the projects. “When we go outside Sweden, we would like to have somebody who would have a solid base in that country,” he said. “We bring first-mover advantage, they the local knowledge.””
+++
Nun soll es doch keine weitere Öl- und Gasförderung in Alaska geben. US Präsident Biden kassiert damit Pläne seines Vorgängers Trump ein, wie CNN berichtet.
“The Biden administration announced Wednesday it will cancel seven Trump-era oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and protect more than 13 million acres in the federal National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, stymieing a years-long attempt to drill in the protected region.
The cancellation will affect Alaska’s state-owned oil development agency, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, which bought the leases covering about 365,000 acres on ANWR’s Coastal Plain during the Trump administration.
[…]
President Joe Biden echoed Haaland’s comments in a statement and said that his administration will “continue to take bold action” on climate change.
Wednesday’s actions, Biden said, “will help preserve our Arctic lands and wildlife, while honoring the culture, history, and enduring wisdom of Alaska Natives who have lived on these lands since time immemorial.”
+++
Im Klimapodcast Mission Klima des NDR geht es um CO2- Speicherung unter dem Meer. Eine Technik, die in Deutschland verboten ist, Länder wie Norwegen aber schon Jahrzehnte praktizieren. Interessant an dem Podcast ist die wissenschaftliche Einschätzung, ob CO2 wieder in die Atmosphäre gelangen kann. Dieses Risiko ist minimal laut Prof. Klaus Wallmann vom Geomar in Kiel. Andere Länder sind also schon lange dabei oder steigen wie Dänemark gerade ein. Und wie schon beim Import von Strom aus Kernenergie ist man in Deutschland extrem flexibel, denn Deutschland plant CO2 in anderen Ländern zu verpressen. Nimby pur.
+++
Der Ausbau der Solarkapazitäten in Deutschland nimmt stark zu, wie Solarbranche.de berichtet. Nicht überall sind Solarparks willkommen. Laut Tagesschau haben sich die Bürger des Ortes Münchehofe in Brandenburg gegen den Baut von 8 Windrändern und 40 Hektar Solarfläche ausgesprochen:
“64 Prozent der Wahlberechtigten wollen nach Angaben der Stadt weder Windräder noch Solaranlagen. Knapp 65 Prozent der Münchehofer haben sich an der Abstimmung beteiligt. Alle Einwohner ab 14 Jahren durften dabei abstimmen. Bürgermeister und Gemeindevertretung von Münchehofe wollen sich nun gegen den Neubau von beidem starkmachen.”
+++
Die auslaufende Förderungen von E-Autos im gewerblichen Bereich hat laut ADAC zu einem Plus bei den Zulassungen im August 2023 geführt.
+++
Es hat nicht lange gedauert. Nachdem Patrick Brown über gewünschte Papiere geschrieben hatte (wir berichteten) rechtfertigt sich jetzt Magdalena Skipper von Nature. Daily Mail:
“Dr Magdalena Skipper, the top editor at Nature, accused Patrick T. Brown, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and doctor of earth and climate sciences, of ‚poor research practices‘ that are ‚highly irresponsible‘.
Brown claimed in an article for The Free Press that editors at Nature and Science – two of the most prestigious scientific journals – select ‚climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives‘ and favor ‚distorted‘ research which hypes up dangers.
He referred to an article he authored which was published in Nature last week and said the study – titled ‚Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California‚ – focused exclusively on climate change and intentionally ignored other key factors. Brown said researchers often ‚tailor‘ their work in such a way to ’support the mainstream narrative‘.
In a scathing response, Skipper said: ‚The only thing in Patrick Brown’s statements about the editorial processes in scholarly journals that we agree on is that science should not work through the efforts by which he published this [study].”
+++
Why wind and solar power are running out of juice
Green energy and the push to electrify everything have been in the news recently but for all the wrong reasons.
Instead of the green energy nirvana politicians and green energy advocates have promised, economic and physical reality has begun to set in.
Start with the economic realities.
Wind turbine manufacturers like Siemens and General Electric have reported huge losses for the first half of this year, almost $5 billion for the former and $1 billion for the latter.
+++
Vor wenigen Tagen (möglicherweise am 1. September 2023) brachte die Deutsche Welle eine Doku zu Blackouts in Deutschland. Seltsamerweise ist das Video nun offline. Ob wohl jemand aus Berlin bei der Deutschen Welle angerufen hat? Wir geben Euch so viel Geld und Ihr beunruhigt die Welt und Investoren mit der Idee von Stromausfällen in Deutschland? Haha. Zum Glück hat Net Zero Watch eine Zusammenfassung zum Video gebracht. Frage an alle: Gibt es das Video noch irgendwo anzuschauen?
Does politics have a plan to provide Germany with sufficient energy to avert a potential blackout? These are some of the key questions explored by this documentary.
The energy transition is one of the biggest challenges for politics and society in Germany. Germany wants green power from solar, wind, biomass and hydroelectric generation to account for 80 per cent of its energy mix by 2030. Is this a realistic target?
Germany wants out of fossil fuels: no coal, no gas, no nuclear power plants. Instead, the country wants to commit fully to renewables. But does this bring with it the threat of a major power blackout? Germany is gradually realizing where the sticking points are. Take grid security: This is much easier to guarantee in a power network with just a few dozen large power stations than in a decentralized network with multiple small-scale electricity producers such as rooftops with solar panels or wind turbines. „It’s now a matter of having to intervene several times almost every day to guarantee grid security,” says the spokesperson for one major network operator. If grid security can no longer be maintained, the threat of a nationwide blackout suddenly becomes very real.
Another problem is reliability. Because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, there might be too little power available on particular days and at particular times of the year. This also raises the possibility of unforeseen power failures. One potential remedy could be power storage. There are many different ideas about how to securely store energy in order to bridge power gaps in the renewables’ supply: pumped-storage power plants, hydrogen storage, gigantic batteries. But, if these technologies exist at all, they do so only on a very small scale: Current storage capacity in Germany is 40 gigawatt hours – enough to supply the country for up to 60 minutes. And if there’s still no wind and the sun still isn’t shining? Does politics have a plan to provide Germany with sufficient energy to avert a potential blackout? These are some of the key questions explored by this documentary.
+++
Thamarasee Jeewandara , Phys.org:
The impact of ocean alkalinity enhancement on marine biota offers hope for carbon dioxide removal
Marine biologists are increasingly seeking methods to mitigate anthropogenic climate interference by implementing strategies for ocean carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Ocean alkalinity enhancement parameter is an abiotic approach aimed at carbon dioxide removal. Attempts to increase the carbon dioxide uptake capacity of the ocean can be established by dispersing pulverized mineral or dissolved alkali into the ocean surface.
Nevertheless, the impact of this action remains largely unexplored. In a new report now published in Science Advances, James A. Gately and a research team in ecology and development biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, U.S., studied the impact of limestone-inspired alkalinity on the bioecology of two phytoplankton functional groups—the coccolithophore (single-celled) Emiliania huxleyi a producer of calcium carbonate, responsible for large-scale calcium carbonate production, and the diatom specimen Chaetoceros sp., a silica producer in modern oceans.
Emiliania huxleyi, a single-celled marine phytoplankton is illustrated on the cover page of the Science Advances issue, and the two taxa (coccolithophore and diatom) together showed a neutral response to limestone-inspired alkalization relative to their growth rate and elemental ratios. The team additionally noted abiotic precipitation, which removed nutrients and alkalinity from the solution to offer an understanding of biogeochemical and physiological responses to ocean alkalinity enhancement in order to provide evidence of its greater impact and its capacity to influence marine ecosystems.
The 2015 Paris Agreement: Carbon dioxide removal strategies on land and in the ocean
At the 2015 Paris Agreement relative to the International Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, researchers and industry leaders set a goal to limit the increase in the average global temperature well below 2°C—above pre-industrial levels, while limiting temperature increases to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
To meet this target, the panels suggest incorporating carbon dioxide removal approaches in the ocean much like on land, alongside emission reductions to achieve the required removal of 9 gigatons of CO2 per year. The process of ocean alkalinity enhancement or artificial ocean alkalinization, alongside enhanced/accelerated weathering offers an abiotic technology for ocean carbon dioxide removal. This protocol has received much attention due to its large scope of carbon storage to potentially mitigate ocean acidification.
Antacids for the oceans?
Ocean alkalinity enhancement is also known as ocean alkalinization and accelerated weathering; an abiotic ocean carbon dioxide removal process that facilitates large carbon storage potential with possible ecological benefits to mitigate ocean acidification. Using this technique, oceanographers aim to restore the alkalinity much like restoring alkalinity through rock weathering, which occurs naturally on Earth on geological time-scales.
The team deduce that increasing the total alkalinity via ocean alkalinity enhancement can permanently remove carbon dioxide to establish a quasi-natural method of restoring ecosystems for fragile habitats such as coral reefs affected by oceanic acidification. In this study, Gately and colleagues examined the biogeochemical and physiological response to limestone-inspired ocean alkalinity enhancement using two biogeochemically important representative species.
The impact of alkalinization on the carbonate system
During ocean alkalinity enhancement experiments, the starting conditions for both the E. huxleyi and Chaetoceros species were within the range of targeted model predicted scenarios. The total alkalinity differed during the experiments between the two biotic experiments with varying results for the two species due to their diverse nutritional uptake. pH values also increased in the biotic experiments, although this increase was more pronounced.
The scientists explored the trends in nutrient evolution and the physiological and biogeochemical responses of the two species. For example, the growth rates of the two species were well constrained and comparable to those regulated in moderate and high total alkalinity treatments.
Outlook
In this way, James Gately and colleagues conducted a range of experiments on the biological responses underlying changes in seawater carbonate chemistry, and pH focused on ocean alkalinity. The biogeochemistry responses to ocean alkalinity remain largely unknown. Adding alkalinity to the surface ocean can lock carbon dioxide into diverse forms of dissolved inorganic carbon to promote an influx of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the ocean for global carbon cycling.
While initial findings indicated that the limestone-inspired alkalinity enhancement had little effect on the physiology and biochemistry of the Coccolithophore and diatom physiology, the experiments only considered two species, and effects of alkalinity on this limited selection might occur on longer timescales.
The in-lab experiments provided steps toward understanding the oceanic ecosystems responses to ocean alkalinity enhancement. Further experiments should be conducted on phytoplankton communities and phytoplankton functional groups to explore the potential ecosystem impact of ocean alkalinity enhancement and evaluate the risks of additional carbon dioxide removal technologies.
Paper: James A. Gately et al, Coccolithophores and diatoms resilient to ocean alkalinity enhancement: A glimpse of hope? Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg6066