Emissions

Postdoctoral associate Milan Klöwer shares how large conferences can impact air travel and personal carbon footprints, reports Sydney Johnson for KQED. “Flying is one of the sectors where there are enormous inequalities,” says Klöwer. “The people that earn the most [money] fly the most, and therefore have personal carbon footprints that are thousands of times larger than the poorest people on the planet. There is a responsibility for people to understand that problem about how they are personally emitting.”

Researchers at MIT have developed a conceptual design for a system that can efficiently produce “solar thermochemical hydrogen,” reports Xinhua. “The system harnesses the Sun's heat to directly split water and generate hydrogen -- a clean fuel that can power long-distance trucks, ships, and planes, while in the process emitting no greenhouse gas emissions.”

WBUR reporter Daniel Ackerman spotlights Sublime Systems, an MIT startup working to develop “construction-ready, emissions-free cement.” Ackerman explains that: “Sublime’s new approach uses electricity instead of heat. That means the process can be powered with renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. The method also prevents carbon dioxide from escaping the carbon-rich limestone during combustion.”

Quaise Energy co-founder Carlos Araque BS '01 MS '02 speaks with PBS Energy Switch host Scott Tinker about the future of geothermal energy. [Geothermal is “truly everywhere so it’s not a resource uncertainty, like there is with oil and gas, there’s always heat, but the technological gap prevents us from getting to it,” says Araque. These gaps “are the one caveat in unlocking this resource for everybody.”

Boston Globe reporter Macie Parker spotlights the new John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Kendall Square, the first building to open in MIT’s redevelopment of the 14-acre Volpe site that will ultimately include “research labs, retail, affordable housing, and open space, with the goal of not only encouraging innovation, but also enhancing the surrounding community.” Parker highlights the green technology included in the new Volpe Center: solar panels; triple-paned glass; electric vehicle charging stations; a rainwater reclamation and reuse system; and green and cool roof technology to lower energy use. 

MIT researchers have devised a new carbon capture system that “relies on the reaction between CO2 in flue gas and a fine mist of electrically charged particles,” reports Karmela Padavic-Callaghan for New Scientist. The researchers believe their design could be “95 per cent efficient at capturing carbon dioxide, while measuring less than 4 meters long,” Padavic-Callaghan notes. “Their analysis also showed that the approach would reduce capital costs of adding carbon capture to power plants by about 2.6 times compared with current technology.”

MIT Energy Initiative Interim Director Robert Stoner speaks with Boston Public Radio hosts Jared Bowen and Andrea Cabral about the MIT Energy Initiative and low – or even no – carbon solutions that could mitigate climate change.

Researchers at MIT have developed a supercapacitor, an energy storage system, using cement, water and carbon, reports Macie Parker for The Boston Globe. “Energy storage is a global problem,” says Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm. “If we want to curb the environmental footprint, we need to get serious and come up with innovative ideas to reach these goals.”

Writing for The Hill, Andre Zollinger, senior policy manager at J-PAL Global, makes the case that “current attention to air pollution can be transformational for how we tackle climate change. Policy leaders in the U.S. and abroad should seize this moment of reckoning over our common struggle for clean air as an opportunity to focus on policies that are known to curb air pollution and simultaneously combat climate change.”

Sean Hunt MS ’13 PhD ’16 co-founded Solugen, a startup working to develop industrial chemicals with environmentally friendly ingredients, reports David H. Freedman for Newsweek. “The company's goals over the next seven years are to reduce the carbon emissions released by industry into the environment by an amount equivalent to eliminating 2 million cars, and to make enough bioplastic to get rid of 5 billion non-degradable plastic bottles,” writes Freedman.

Studies by researchers at MIT have found “that shifting to electric vehicles delivers a 30% to 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over combustion vehicles,” reports Tom Krisher for Associated Press. According to Prof. Jessika Trancik, “electric vehicles are cleaner over their lifetimes, even after taking into account the pollution caused by the mining of metals for batteries,” writes Krisher.

An analysis by the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative and Climate Interactive has found that planting a trillion trees would only prevent 0.27 degrees of warming by 2100, reports Maxine Joselow for The Washington Post. “Trees are great. I personally love to be out in the forests as much as I possibly can,” says Prof. John Sterman. “But the reality is very simple: You can plant a trillion trees, and even if they all survived, which wouldn’t happen, it just wouldn’t make that much difference to the climate.”

Fast Company reporter Adele Peters writes that MIT researchers have developed a new type of concrete that can store energy, potentially enabling roads to be transformed into EV chargers and home foundations into sources of energy. “All of a sudden, you have a material which can not only carry load, but it can also store energy,” says Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm.

MIT engineers have uncovered a new way of creating an energy supercapacitor by combining cement, carbon black and water  that could one day be used to power homes or electric vehicles, reports Jeremy Hsu for New Scientist. “The materials are available for everyone all over the place, all over the world,” explains Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm. “Which means we don’t have the same restriction as with batteries.”

MIT researchers have discovered that when combined with water, carbon black and cement can produce a low-cost supercapacitor capable of storing electricity for later use, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “With some further fine-tuning and experimentation, the team believes their enriched cement material could one day compose portions of buildings’ foundations, or even create wireless charging,” writes Paul.