Biden announces historic oil reserve release, along with other steps, to reduce gas prices
Source: CNN
(CNN)President Joe Biden is announcing an unprecedented release of oil from US reserves and taking steps to punish oil companies for not increasing production from unused leases on federal land, the White House says. The steps are an attempt to reduce gas prices while also putting an onus on oil companies to increase supply. The dramatic step confronts what has become a looming political problem months ahead of the midterm elections.
"After consultation with allies and partners, the President will announce the largest release of oil reserves in history, putting one million additional barrels on the market per day on average -- every day -- for the next six months," the White House said. "The scale of this release is unprecedented: The world has never had a release of oil reserves at this 1 million per day rate for this length of time. This record release will provide a historic amount of supply to serve as bridge until the end of the year when domestic production ramps up."
The release would amount to 180 million barrels of oil. Biden earlier in the month announced a coordinated release of oil from the reserves in conjunction with other nations. He also released around 60 million barrels in November, which he said at the time was the largest release from the reserve in US history. Neither move had a significant effect on gas prices, which have continued to rise as global limits on Russian energy exports have caused prices to spike.
The United States consumes around 20 million barrels of oil per day, with global consumption hovering around 100 million barrels. Biden's planned releases would put more oil on the global market, potentially bringing down costs.The President is also calling on Congress to "make companies pay fees on wells from their leases that they haven't used in years and on acres of public lands that they are hoarding without producing." For months, the Biden administration has publicly pushed back on the idea that regulations are holding oil producers back from more domestic production, pointing to millions of acres worth of land with approved permits for oil and gas production.
How hot is too hot, and how dry is too dry, for the Earth's forests? A new study from an international team of researchers found the answers—by looking at decades of dying trees.
Just published in the journal Nature Communications, the study compiles the first global database of precisely georeferenced forest die-off events, at 675 locations dating back to 1970. The study, which encompasses all forested continents, then compares that information to existing climate data to determine the heat and drought climatic conditions that caused these documented tree mortality episodes.
"In this study, we're letting the Earth's forests do the talking," said William Hammond, a University of Florida plant ecophysiologist who led the study. "We collected data from previous studies documenting where and when trees died, and then analyzed what the climate was during mortality events, compared to long-term conditions."
After performing the climate analysis on the observed forest mortality data, Hammond noted, a pattern emerged.
A new type of lightweight, 3D-printed heat exchanger with a maze-like design is more compact and efficient than its conventional counterparts, its developers say.
A team led by engineers from the University of Glasgow have developed the system, which exploits the unique properties of microscale surfaces to create a high-performance heat exchanger.
Heat exchangers, devices which transfer heat between fluids without mixing them, have a wide range of practical applications. Heat exchangers which transfer thermal energy between fluids are used in systems including refrigeration, fuel cells and the types of internal combustion engines used in cars and aircrafts.
In a new paper published in Applied Thermal Engineering, the researchers describe how they developed and built the prototype system, which they estimate to be 50% more effective than a market-leading conventional heat exchanger despite being one-tenth of its size.
The system owes its effectiveness to the design of architected surfaces over which liquids flow through the exchanger. The cube-shaped exchanger draws water through a core studded with tiny holes arranged in a gyroid configuration.
Due to their advantageous properties, organic semiconductors could be very promising photocatalysts for producing solar fuels. In fact, these materials can be synthetically tuned to absorb visible light, while simultaneously retaining energy levels that are desirable for driving various processes. While photocatalysts based on organic semiconductors have attained promising results, the understanding of the physics underpinning their functioning is still relatively limited.
Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Imperial College London and the University of Oxford have been trying to develop organic semiconductor-based photocatalysts that can efficiently harvest solar energy and could thus be used to produce hydrogen more sustainably. Their most recent paper, published in Nature Energy, shows that heterojunction organic semiconductor nanoparticles can generate remarkably long-lasting reactive charges, thus they could efficiently drive sacrificial hydrogen evolution.
"We chose to use organic semiconductors to fabricate our photocatalysts because their bandgaps can be synthetically tuned to absorb strongly in the visible spectrum," Jan Kosco, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "All else being equal, the more light a photocatalyst absorbs, the more efficiently it can convert solar energy to hydrogen."
Most stable photocatalysts fabricated from inorganic semiconductors, such as TiO2 and SrTiO3 almost exclusively absorb UV wavelengths and have little to no activity under visible light. This can be problematic, as less than 5% of solar energy is carried via UV wavelengths. This fundamentally limits the efficiency of these inorganic semiconductor-based photocatalysts to less than 5%.
Kosco and his colleagues set out to explore the potential of organic semiconductors for driving hydrogen evolution and the photophysics underpinning their functioning further. Their study builds on their previous work on bulk heterojunction organic semiconductor nanoparticle photocatalysts.
Detectable levels of uranium found in two-thirds of U.S. water systems
UPI, Health Daily, April 8, 2022
Two-thirds of U.S. community water systems have detectable levels of uranium, and the highest levels are in Hispanic communities, according to a new study.
"Previous studies have found associations between chronic uranium exposure and increased risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, kidney damage and lung cancer at high levels of exposure," said researcher Anne Nigra, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.
Even at low concentrations, uranium, a radioactive metal, is an important risk factor for chronic diseases, but there has been little research on chronic uranium exposure from tap water. About 90% of Americans rely on community water systems.
To learn more, Nigra's team analyzed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency records for 139,000 public water systems that serve 290 million people a year.
Between 2000 and 2011, 2.1% of those water systems had average annual uranium concentrations that exceeded EPA maximums. Uranium was detected in water systems 63% of the time during compliance monitoring.
Biden waiving ethanol rule in bid to lower gasoline prices
PUBLISHED TUE, APR 12 2022 5:41 AM EDT
KEY POINTS
-- President Joe Biden is visiting corn-rich Iowa on Tuesday to announce he’ll suspend a federal rule preventing the sale of higher ethanol blend gasoline this summer as his administration tries to tamp down prices at the pump that have spiked during Russia’s war with Ukraine.
-- The Environmental Protection Agency will issue an emergency waiver to allow widespread sale of 15% ethanol blend that is usually prohibited between June 1 and Sept. 15 because of concerns that it adds to smog in high temperatures.
-- Senior Biden administration officials said the move will save drivers an average of 10 cents per gallon at 2,300 gas stations.
-- Members of Congress from both parties, as well as industry groups, had urged Biden to grant the E15 waiver.
President Joe Biden is visiting corn-rich Iowa on Tuesday to announce he’ll suspend a federal rule preventing the sale of higher ethanol blend gasoline this summer as his administration tries to tamp down prices at the pump that have spiked during Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Most gasoline sold in the U.S. is blended with 10% ethanol. The Environmental Protection Agency will issue an emergency waiver to allow widespread sale of 15% ethanol blend that is usually prohibited between June 1 and Sept. 15 because of concerns that it adds to smog in high temperatures.
Senior Biden administration officials said the move will save drivers an average of 10 cents per gallon at 2,300 gas stations. Industry groups say most of those stations are in the Midwest and the South, including Texas. ... Biden is to announce the move at a biofuel company in Menlo, west of Des Moines. Iowa is the country’s largest producer of corn, key to producing ethanol.
The waiver is another effort to help ease global energy markets that have been rocked since Russia invaded Ukraine. Last month, the president announced the U.S. will release 1 million barrels of oil per day from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve over the next six months. His administration said that has helped to slightly reduce gas prices lately, after they climbed to an average of about $4.23 a gallon by the end of March, compared with $2.87 at the same time a year ago, according to AAA. ... Members of Congress from both parties, as well as industry groups, had urged Biden to grant the E15 waiver.
Interior Department to resume oil and gas leasing, charge higher fees
Source: Washington Post
As pressure increases on the Biden administration to lower the price of fuel, the Interior Department announced on Friday plans to hold its first onshore oil and gas lease sales since President Biden took office.
The department said it plans put 144,000 acres up for lease in the coming months and will charge oil and gas companies higher royalties to drill on federal land, raising the fees for the first time. Under the plans unveiled Friday, royalty rates would increase to 18.75 percent from 12.5 percent for oil and gas lease sales.
The long-awaited announcement follows a report the department issued last fall, which called for royalty fees to be more in line with the higher rates charged by most private landowners and major oil- and gas-producing states. The Biden administration’s willingness to move forward with oil and gas leasing angered climate activists, who called the department’s plans a betrayal of the president’s pledge to ban new drilling on public lands.
According to the latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued last week, the world is on pace to burn through its remaining “carbon budge”” by 2030 — putting the ambitious goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) out of reach. Drilling on federal land and offshore is responsible for almost a quarter of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions.
(EurekAlert) Imperial (College London) researchers have developed a hydrogen fuel cell that uses iron instead of rare and costly platinum, enabling greater use of the technology.
Hydrogen fuel cells convert hydrogen to electricity with water vapour as the only by-product, making them an attractive green alternative for portable power, particularly for vehicles.
However, their widespread use has been hampered in part by the cost of one of the primary components. To facilitate the reaction that produces the electricity, the fuel cells rely on a catalyst made of platinum, which is expensive and scarce.
Now, a European team led by Imperial College London researchers has created a catalyst using only iron, carbon, and nitrogen – materials that are cheap and readily available – and shown that it can be used to operate a fuel cell at high power. Their results are published today in Nature Catalysis.
Lead researcher Professor Anthony Kucernak, from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial, said: “Currently, around 60% of the cost of a single fuel cell is the platinum for the catalyst. To make fuel cells a real viable alternative to fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, for example, we need to bring that cost down.
A team of researchers affiliated with a large number of institutions in the U.S. has attempted to determine the vulnerability of bird populations to alternative energy production. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes studying the impact on bird populations in California.
While touted as green technology, alternative energy sources are not always Earth friendly. Production of solar panels, for example, results in pollution emitted into the environment. More widely known are the adverse impacts of wind and solar farms on animals, particularly birds. Birds can be killed when they try to fly through the rotating blades of wind turbines and they can die from overheating when they fly over large solar farms. They can also die due to displacement from their natural environment. In this new effort, the researchers veered from simply counting the number of birds that are killed by alternative power sources and looked instead to gauge the impact of the combined toll that alternative power plants are taking on populations of vulnerable bird species in California.
Russia cuts off 2 EU nations from its gas in war escalation
Source: AP
By YESICA FISCH and JON GAMBRELL
POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — Russia opened a new front in its war in Ukraine on Wednesday, cutting two European Union nations that staunchly back Kyiv off from its gas, a dramatic escalation in the conflict that is increasingly becoming a wider battle with the West.
One day after the United States and other Western allies vowed to speed more and better military supplies to Ukraine, the Kremlin upped the ante, using its most essential export as leverage. European gas prices shot up on the news, which European leaders denounced as “blackmail.”
In a memo, state-controlled Russian giant Gazprom said it was cutting Poland and Bulgaria off from its natural gas because they refused to pay in Russian rubles, as President Vladimir Putin had demanded. The company said it had not received any such payment since the beginning of the month.
The gas cuts do not immediately put the countries into dire trouble since they have worked on getting alternative sources for several years now and the continent is heading into summer, making gas not as essential for households.
Scientists at the NRL (Naval Research Laboratory), a research facility of the United States Marine Corps and the United States Navy, wirelessly transmitted 1.6 kilowatts of electrical energy over one kilometer. To do this, they converted electricity into microwaves, which were then sent to a receiver in a directed beam. To precisely focus the microwave beam, the researchers used a dish as a transmitting antenna. According to the NRL, this is “the most significant demonstration of power beaming in almost 50 years”.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
Renewable electricity met 100% of California's electricity demand for the first time ever on Saturday, most of it from large amounts of solar power now produced along Interstate 10, an hour east of the Coachella Valley.
While partygoers celebrated in the blazing sunshine at the Stagecoach music festival, energy demand statewide hit 18,672 megawatts at 2:45 p.m., and a whopping 37,172 megawatts were available to meet it. Of that, a whopping 101 percent of the power provided came from renewables, according to a continuous tracker provided by California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, a nonprofit that oversees the state's bulk electric power system and transmission lines.
Two thirds of the 18,000 megawatts needed was provided by solar power loaded into the energy grid — or 12,391 megawatts. The milestone lasted almost 15 minutes before edging back down to about 97 percent renewables.
Staggering declines in bird populations are taking place around the world. So concludes a study from scientists at multiple institutions, published today in the journal Annual Review of Environment and Resources. Loss and degradation of natural habitats and direct overexploitation of many species are cited as the key threats to avian biodiversity. Climate change is identified as an emerging driver of bird population declines.
"We are now witnessing the first signs of a new wave of extinctions of continentally distributed bird species," says lead author Alexander Lees, senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom and also a research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "Avian diversity peaks globally in the tropics and it is there that we also find the highest number of threatened species."
The study says approximately 48% of existing bird species worldwide are known or suspected to be undergoing population declines. Populations are stable for 39% of species. Only 6% are showing increasing population trends, and the status of 7% is still unknown. The study authors reviewed changes in avian biodiversity using data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature's "Red List" to reveal population changes among the world's 11,000 bird species.
'Killer worm' found in UK as gardeners and farmers warned to 'kill but don't touch'
5 May 2022
Experts have warned Brits to keep an eye out for two new species of killer flatworms that could pose a risk to some native earthworm species as well as the soil ecosystem.
These hammerhead worms only measure about 3cm long. But despite their tiny size, it's thought they could be a danger to British species that gardeners and farmers rely on.
Flatworms can kill common garden insects including snails and earthworms, as scientists warn they could become an invasive species, reports Glasgow Live.
The Mirror has previously reported how the trade in imported plants is already said to be responsible for the spread of more than 10 species of flatworms around the world from their native Asia with one type having been found in France and Italy, the other on an island near Africa, said to threaten biodiversity in gardens and farms, according to scientists.
Electricity Shortage Warnings Grow Across U.S.
Source: Wall Street Journal
From California to Texas to Indiana, electric-grid operators are warning that power-generating capacity is struggling to keep up with demand, a gap that could lead to rolling blackouts during heat waves or other peak periods as soon as this year.
California’s grid operator said Friday that it anticipates a shortfall in supplies this summer, especially if extreme heat, wildfires or delays in bringing new power sources online exacerbate the constraints. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, which oversees a large regional grid spanning much of the Midwest, said late last month that capacity shortages may force it to take emergency measures to meet summer demand and flagged the risk of outages. In Texas, where a number of power plants lately went offline for maintenance, the grid operator warned of tight conditions during a heat wave expected to last into the next week.
The risk of electricity shortages is rising throughout the U.S. as traditional power plants are being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage. Power grids are feeling the strain as the U.S. makes a historic transition from conventional power plants fueled by coal and natural gas to cleaner forms of energy such as wind and solar power, and aging nuclear plants are slated for retirement in many parts of the country.
An Iowa Powerbroker Plans to Make a Windfall from Piping Ethanol Emissions
By Tom Philpott
May-June 2022 Issue
(Mother Jones) For most of his 30-year career, Iowa farmer Dan Wahl never knocked heads with his state’s agribusiness goliaths. He was too busy tending his crops and cattle on 640 acres of land. But then, in September 2021, a subsidiary of a private equity firm called Summit Agricultural Group started mailing packets to farmers in his area, pitching its plan to build a 2,000-mile pipeline through 30 Iowa counties as a way of breathing new life into the state’s troubled ethanol industry. The pipeline, dubbed the Midwest Carbon Express, would slash across Wahl’s farm on its way to grab carbon dioxide generated by 31 corn ethanol plants in five states. It would carry the CO2 to North Dakota, where the gas would be buried underground. By burying ethanol’s carbon waste, the project would make the fuel more climate-friendly, and by bolstering the ethanol trade, it would boost the price of corn, benefiting the state’s farmers, the pitch goes.
Wahl didn’t take the idea seriously at first. But then he heard from some neighbors that Summit was prepared to appeal to the Iowa Utilities Board to seize any land not ceded through voluntary easement. That suddenly sounded to Wahl like a credible threat. After all, Summit’s founder and CEO, Bruce Rastetter, is a heavyweight in Iowa politics with close ties to the state’s past and current governors who have appointed members of that very board.
An agribusiness magnate, Rastetter has deftly leveraged his wealth to gain political influence. His generous campaign donations to and chummy relations with his home state’s GOP power structure inspired Politico to deem him the “real Iowa kingmaker.” Now he’s making what could be his biggest play yet. Summit’s Midwest Carbon Express project would take advantage of federal tax credits meant to mitigate ¬climate change—and it is poised to net him and his investors a massive windfall.
Researchers at University of Limerick have developed a new material that has the ability to capture toxic chemicals from the air.
The material is capable of capturing trace amounts of benzene, a toxic pollutant, from the air and crucially use less energy than existing materials to do so, according to the researchers.
The sponge-like porous material could revolutionize the search for clean air and have a significant impact in the battle against climate change, the researchers believe.
Professor Michael Zaworotko, Bernal Chair of Crystal Engineering and Science Foundation of Ireland Research Professor at University of Limerick's Bernal Institute, and colleagues developed the new material, with findings reported in Nature Materials.
