New Tax Break for Clean Energy Draws Scrutiny

By -
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/us/politics/climate-natural-gas-hydrogen-new-mexico.html

By Eric Lipton, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: Blackstone, the New York-based asset manager with nearly $1 trillion of investor funds, is moving rapidly into the clean-energy revolution, driven in part by federal tax incentives .... But one of its larger projects — through a subsidiary called Tallgrass Energy — is drawing protests from environmentalists who argue that Blackstone’s effort in New Mexico will not do enough to combat climate change.... Tallgrass intends to spend $600 million to rebuild a defunct coal-burning power plant in northwest New Mexico into one that uses natural gas converted into hydrogen to create electricity that will be sent to households and businesses in four states in the region. The project would be eligible for a generous tax break — generating about $30 million a year in federal subsidies for its electricity generation — because the climate-change-causing carbon generated by the plant would be collected and then buried deep underground, in a process called sequestration. ...the Inflation Reduction Act... increased the carbon capture subsidy by 70 percent, to $85 per ton of carbon that is captured and buried. The New Mexico project is expected to sequester about 380,000 tons of carbon annually.... ...In place of coal, Tallgrass would take natural gas drilled from the New Mexico area and convert that gas into hydrogen through a process called methane reforming, which relies on high-pressure steam to separate hydrogen from the gas. ...The problem with the plan, according to other energy analysts and environmental engineers, is that the process is extremely inefficient: Using natural gas to create hydrogen is very energy intensive. ...Making matters worse, said Bruce Robertson, an energy industry analyst who conducted a study of carbon capture projects worldwide, most of them have failed to live up to promised carbon removal targets, meaning they have not achieved the intended environmental benefits.…

Popular posts from this blog

Lost history of Antarctica revealed in octopus DNA

By -
https://www.science.org/content/article/lost-history-antarctica-revealed-octopus-dna By ERIK STOKSTAD .  Excerpt: Some 100,000 years ago, scientists believe Antarctica’s massive western ice sheet collapsed, temporarily opening waterways between a trio of seas surrounding the continent. New evidence for that scenario comes from a surprising source: octopus DNA. ...About 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, a warm spell called the last interglacial gave our planet a brief break in between several million years of ice ages. The average temperature of the planet was about 0.5°C warmer than it is today—and climate projections predict it will be again within decades. The global sea level was also 5 meters to 10 meters higher than current levels. Many scientists believe  the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and consequent melting could have been a primary reason . ...The findings are consistent with growing geological evidence supporting the ice sheet collapse....
Read more

An architect has found a way to build flood-proof homes

By -
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2023/flood-resistant-home-bamboo/ By Nick Aspinwall, The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Yasmeen Lari spent a …career designing …structures out of concrete, glass and steel before stumbling into her ideal material. It was at a camp for refugees…. Residents there were struggling to secure bricks and wood to build communal kitchens — until she spotted a nearby bamboo grove. “Let’s use it,” recalls Lari…. The material worked so well that over the last decade, Heritage Foundation of Pakistan …has built some 85,000 structures for displaced Pakistanis, including victims of last year’s devastating monsoon rains. That disaster, the worst flooding in Pakistani history, left a third of the country underwater and  destroyed more than 2.1 million homes . The thousands of bamboo structures Lari’s group had erected “all survived,” she said. …Many species of bamboo have been used as a building material in Asia for thousands of years and they are
Read more

Climate Change Drives New Cases of Malaria, Complicating Efforts to Fight the Disease

By -
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/health/malaria-climate-change.html By  Stephanie Nolen , The New York Times.  Excerpt: There were an estimated 249 million cases of malaria around the globe last year,  the World Health Organization said on Thursday , an increase of five million over 2021. Malaria remains a top killer of children. Those new cases were concentrated in just five countries: Pakistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and Papua-New Guinea. Climate change was a direct contributor in three of them, said Dr. Daniel Ngamije, who directs the W.H.O. malaria program. In July 2022, massive flooding left more than a third of Pakistan underwater and displaced 33 million people. An explosion of mosquitoes soon followed. The country reported 3.1 million confirmed cases of malaria that year, compared with 275,000 the year before, with a fivefold increase in the rate of transmission....
Read more