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Inside Climeworks’ big experiment to wrest carbon from the air
In the spring of 2021, the world’s leading authority on energy published a “roadmap” for preventing the most catastrophic climate change scenarios. One of its conclusions was particularly daunting. Getting energy-related emissions down to net zero by 2050, the International Energy Agency said, would require “huge leaps in innovation.”
Existing technologies would be mostly sufficient to carry us down the carbon curve over the next decade. But after that, nearly half of the remaining work would have to come from solutions that, for all intents and purposes, did not exist yet. Some would only require retooling existing industries, like developing electric long-haul trucks and carbon-free steel. But others would have to be built from almost nothing and brought to market in record time.
What will it take to rapidly develop new solutions, especially those that involve costly physical infrastructure and which have essentially no commercial value today?
That’s the challenge facing Climeworks, the Swiss company developing machines to wrest carbon dioxide molecules directly from the air. In September 2021, a few months after the IEA’s landmark report came out, Climeworks switched on its first commercial-scale “direct air capture” facility, a feat of engineering it dubbed “Orca,” in Iceland.
The technology behind Orca is one of the top candidates to clean up the carbon already blanketing the Earth. It could also be used to balance out any stubborn, residual sources of greenhouse gases in the future, such as from agriculture or air travel, providing the “net” in net-zero. If we manage to scale up technologies like Orca to the point where we remove more carbon than we release, we could even begin cooling the planet.
As the largest carbon removal plant operating in the world, Orca is either trivial or one of the most important climate projects built in the last decade, depending on how you look at it. It was designed to capture approximately 4,000 metric tons of carbon from the air per year, which, as one climate scientist, David Ho, put it, is the equivalent of rolling back the clock on just 3 seconds of global emissions. But the learnings gleaned from Orca could surpass any quantitative assessment of its impact. How well do these “direct air capture” machines work in the real world? How much does it really cost to run them? And can they get better?
The company — and its funders — are betting they can. Climeworks has made major deals with banks, insurers, and other companies trying to go green to eventually remove carbon from the atmosphere on their behalf. Last year, the company raised $650 million in equity that will “unlock the next phase of its growth,” scaling the technology “up to multi-million-ton capacity … as carbon removal becomes a trillion-dollar market.” And just last month, the U.S. Department of Energy selected Climeworks, along with another carbon removal company, Heirloom, to receive up to $600 million to build a direct air capture “hub” in Louisiana, with the goal of removing one million tons of carbon annually.
Two years after powering up Orca, Climeworks has yet to reveal how effective the technology has proven to be. But in extensive interviews, top executives painted a picture of innovation in progress.
Chief marketing officer Julie Gosalvez told me that Orca is small and climatically insignificant on purpose. The goal is not to make a dent in climate change — yet — but to maximize learning at minimal cost. “You want to learn when you're small, right?” Gosalvez said. “It’s really de-risking the technology. It’s not like Tesla doing EVs when we have been building cars for 70 years and the margin of learning and risk is much smaller. It’s completely new.”
From the ground, Orca looks sort of like a warehouse or a server farm with a massive air conditioning system out back. The plant consists of eight shipping container-sized boxes arranged in a U-shape around a central building, each one equipped with an array of fans. When the plant is running, which is more or less all the time, the fans suck air into the containers where it makes contact with a porous filter known as a “sorbent” which attracts CO2 molecules.
Courtesy of Climeworks
When the filters become totally saturated with CO2, the vents on the containers snap shut, and the containers are heated to more than 212 degrees Fahrenheit. This releases the CO2, which is then delivered through a pipe to a secondary process called “liquefaction,” where it is compressed into a liquid. Finally, the liquid CO2 is piped into basalt rock formations underground, where it slowly mineralizes into stone. The process requires a little bit of electricity and a lot of heat, all of which comes from a carbon-free source — a geothermal power plant nearby.
A day at Orca begins with the morning huddle. The total number on the team is often in flux, but it typically has a staff of about 15 people, Climeworks’ head of operations Benjamin Keusch told me. Ten work in a virtual control room 1,600 miles away in Zurich, taking turns monitoring the plant on a laptop and managing its operations remotely. The remainder work on site, taking orders from the control room, repairing equipment, and helping to run tests.
During the huddle, the team discusses any maintenance that needs to be done. If there’s an issue, the control room will shut down part of the plant while the on-site workers investigate. So far, they’ve dealt with snow piling up around the plant that had to be shoveled, broken and corroded equipment that had to be replaced, and sediment build-up that had to be removed.
Courtesy of Climeworks
The air is more humid and sulfurous at the site in Iceland than in Switzerland, where Climeworks had built an earlier, smaller-scale model, so the team is also learning how to optimize the technology for different weather. Within all this troubleshooting, there’s additional trade-offs to explore and lessons to learn. If a part keeps breaking, does it make more sense to plan to replace it periodically, or to redesign it? How do supply chain constraints play into that calculus?
The company is also performing tests regularly, said Keusch. For example, the team has tested new component designs at Orca that it now plans to incorporate into Climeworks’ next project from the start. (Last year, the company began construction on “Mammoth,” a new plant that will be nine times larger than Orca, on a neighboring site.) At a summit that Climeworks hosted in June, co-founder Jan Wurzbacher said the company believes that over the next decade, it will be able to make its direct air capture system twice as small and cut its energy consumption in half.
“In innovation lingo, the jargon is we haven’t converged on a dominant design,” Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies technological development, told me. For example, in the wind industry, turbines with three blades, upwind design, and a horizontal axis, are now standard. “There were lots of other experiments before that convergence happened in the late 1980s,” he said. “So that’s kind of where we are with direct air capture. There’s lots of different ways that are being tried right now, even within a company like Climeworks."
Although Climeworks was willing to tell me about the goings-on at Orca over the last two years, the company declined to share how much carbon it has captured or how much energy, on average, the process has used.
Gosalvez told me that the plant’s performance has improved month after month, and that more detailed information was shared with investors. But she was hesitant to make the data public, concerned that it could be misinterpreted, because tests and maintenance at Orca require the plant to shut down regularly.
“Expectations are not in line with the stage of the technology development we are at. People expect this to be turnkey,” she said. “What does success look like? Is it the absolute numbers, or the learnings and ability to scale?”
Danny Cullenward, a climate economist and consultant who has studied the integrity of various carbon removal methods, did not find the company’s reluctance to share data especially concerning. “For these earliest demonstration facilities, you might expect people to hit roadblocks or to have to shut the plant down for a couple of weeks, or do all sorts of things that are going to make it hard to transparently report the efficiency of your process, the number of tons you’re getting at different times,” he told me.
But he acknowledged that there was an inherent tension to the stance, because ultimately, Climeworks’ business model — and the technology’s effectiveness as a climate solution — depend entirely on the ability to make precise, transparent, carbon accounting claims.
Nemet was also of two minds about it. Carbon removal needs to go from almost nothing today to something like a billion tons of carbon removed per year in just three decades, he said. That’s a pace on the upper end of what’s been observed historically with other technologies, like solar panels. So it’s important to understand whether Climeworks’ tech has any chance of meeting the moment. Especially since the company faces competition from a number of others developing direct air capture technologies, like Heirloom and Occidental Petroleum, that may be able to do it cheaper, or faster.
However, Nemet was also sympathetic to the position the company was in. “It’s relatively incremental how these technologies develop,” he said. “I have heard this criticism that this is not a real technology because we haven’t built it at scale, so we shouldn’t depend on it. Or that one of these plants not doing the removal that it said it would do shows that it doesn’t work and that we therefore shouldn’t plan on having it available. To me, that’s a pretty high bar to cross with a climate mitigation technology that could be really useful.”
More data on Orca is coming. Climeworks recently announced that it will work with the company Puro.Earth to certify every ton of CO2 that it removes from the atmosphere and stores underground, in order to sell carbon credits based on this service. The credits will be listed on a public registry.
But even if Orca eventually runs at full capacity, Climeworks will never be able to sell 4,000 carbon credits per year from the plant. Gosalvez clarified that 4,000 tons is the amount of carbon the plant is designed to suck up annually, but the more important number is the amount of “net” carbon removal it can produce. “That might be the first bit of education you need to get out there,” she said, “because it really invites everyone to look at what are the key drivers to be paid attention to.”
She walked me through a chart that illustrated the various ways in which some of Orca’s potential to remove carbon can be lost. First, there’s the question of availability — how often does the plant have to shut down due to maintenance or power shortages? Climeworks aims to limit those losses to 10%. Next, there’s the recovery stage, where the CO2 is separated from the sorbent, purified, and liquified. Gosalvez said it’s basically impossible to do this without losing some CO2. At best, the company hopes to limit that to 5%.
Finally, the company also takes into account “gray emissions,” or the carbon footprint associated with the business, like the materials, the construction, and the eventual decommissioning of the plant and restoration of the site to its former state. If one of Climeworks’ plants ever uses energy from fossil fuels (which the company has said it does not plan to do) it would incorporate any emissions from that energy. Climeworks aims to limit gray emissions to 15%.
In the end, Orca’s net annual carbon removal capacity — the amount Climeworks can sell to customers — is really closer to 3,000 tons. Gosalvez hopes other carbon removal companies adopt the same approach. “Ultimately what counts is your net impact on the planet and the atmosphere,” she said.
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Despite being a first-of-its-kind demonstration plant — and an active research site — Orca is also a commercial project. In fact, Gosalvez told me that Orca’s entire estimated capacity for carbon removal, over the 12 years that the plant is expected to run, sold out shortly after it began operating. The company is now selling carbon removal services from its yet-to-be-built Mammoth plant.
In January, Climeworks announced that Orca had officially fulfilled orders from Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify. Those companies have collectively asked Climeworks to remove more than 16,000 tons of carbon, according to the deal-tracking site cdr.fyi, but it’s unclear what portion of that was delivered. The achievement was verified by a third party, but the total amount removed was not made public.
Climeworks has also not disclosed how much it has charged companies per ton of carbon, a metric that will eventually be an important indicator of whether the technology can scale to a climate-relevant level. But it has provided rough estimates of how much it expects each ton of carbon removal to cost as the technology scales — expectations which seem to have shifted after two years of operating Orca.
In 2021, Climeworks co-founder Jan Wurzbacher said the company aimed to get the cost down to $200 to $300 per ton removed by the end of the decade, with steeper declines in subsequent years. But at the summit in June, he presented a new cost curve chart showing that the price was currently more than $1,000, and that by the end of the decade, it would fall to somewhere between $400 to $700. The range was so large because the cost of labor, energy, and storing the CO2 varied widely by location, he said. The company aims to get the price down to $100 to $300 per ton by 2050, when the technology has significantly matured.
Critics of carbon removal technologies often point to the vast sums flowing into direct air capture tech like Orca, which are unlikely to make a meaningful difference in climate change for decades to come. During a time when worsening disasters make action feel increasingly urgent, many are skeptical of the value of investing limited funds and political energy into these future solutions. Carbon removal won’t make much of a difference if the world doesn’t deploy the tools already available to reduce emissions as rapidly as possible — and there’s certainly not enough money or effort going into that yet.
But we’ll never have the option to fully halt climate change, let alone begin reversing it, if we don’t develop solutions like Orca. In September, the International Energy Agency released an update to its seminal net-zero report. The new analysis said that in the last two years, the world had, in fact, made significant progress on innovation. Now, some 65% of emission reductions after 2030 could be accounted for with technologies that had reached market uptake. It even included a line about the launch of Orca, noting that Climeworks’ direct air capture technology had moved from the prototype to the demonstration stage.
But it cautioned that DAC needs “to be scaled up dramatically to play the role envisaged,” in the net zero scenario. Climeworks’ experience with Orca offers a glimpse of how much work is yet to be done.
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Instead of rocket fuel, they’re burning biomass.
Arbor Energy might have the flashiest origin story in cleantech.
After the company’s CEO, Brad Hartwig, left SpaceX in 2018, he attempted to craft the ideal resume for a future astronaut, his dream career. He joined the California Air National Guard, worked as a test pilot at the now-defunct electric aviation startup Kitty Hawk, and participated in volunteer search and rescue missions in the Bay Area, which gave him a front row seat to the devastating effects of wildfires in Northern California.
That experience changed everything. “I decided I actually really like planet Earth,” Hartwig told me, “and I wanted to focus my career instead on preserving it, rather than trying to leave it.” So he rallied a bunch of his former rocket engineer colleagues to repurpose technology they pioneered at SpaceX to build a biomass-fueled, carbon negative power source that’s supposedly about ten times smaller, twice as efficient, and eventually, one-third the cost of the industry standard for this type of plant.
Take that, all you founders humble-bragging about starting in a dingy garage.
“It’s not new science, per se,” Hartwig told me. The goal of this type of tech, called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is to combine biomass-based energy generation with carbon dioxide removal to achieve net negative emissions. Sounds like a dream, but actually producing power or heat from this process has so far proven too expensive to really make sense. There are only a few so-called BECCS facilities operating in the U.S. today, and they’re all just ethanol fuel refineries with carbon capture and storage technology tacked on.
But the advances in 3D printing and computer modeling that allowed the SpaceX team to build an increasingly simple and cheap rocket engine have allowed Arbor to move quickly into this new market, Hartwig explained. “A lot of the technology that we had really pioneered over the last decade — in reactor design, combustion devices, turbo machinery, all for rocket propulsion — all that technology has really quite immediate application in this space of biomass conversion and power generation.”
Arbor’s method is poised to be a whole lot sleeker and cheaper than the BECCS plants of today, enabling both more carbon sequestration and actual electricity production, all by utilizing what Hartwig fondly refers to as a “vegetarian rocket engine.” Because there’s no air in space, astronauts have to bring pure oxygen onboard, which the rocket engines use to burn fuel and propel themselves into the stratosphere and beyond. Arbor simply subs out the rocket fuel for biomass. When that biomass is combusted with pure oxygen, the resulting exhaust consists of just CO2 and water. As the exhaust cools, the water condenses out, and what’s left is a stream of pure carbon dioxide that’s ready to be injected deep underground for permanent storage. All of the energy required to operate Arbor’s system is generated by the biomass combustion itself.
“Arbor is the first to bring forward a technology that can provide clean baseload energy in a very compact form,” Clea Kolster, a partner and Head of Science at Lowercarbon Capital told me. Lowercarbon is an investor in Arbor, alongside other climate tech-focused venture capital firms including Gigascale Capital and Voyager Ventures, but the company has not yet disclosed how much it’s raised.
Last month, Arbor signed a deal with Microsoft to deliver 25,000 tons of permanent carbon dioxide removal to the tech giant starting in 2027, when the startup’s first commercial project is expected to come online. As a part of the deal, Arbor will also generate 5 megawatts of clean electricity per year, enough to power about 4,000 U.S. homes. And just a few days ago, the Department of Energy announced that Arbor is one of 11 projects to receive a combined total of $58.5 million to help develop the domestic carbon removal industry.
Arbor’s current plan is to source biomass from forestry waste, much of which is generated by forest thinning operations intended to prevent destructive wildfires. Hartwig told me that for every ton of organic waste, Arbor can produce about one megawatt hour of electricity, which is in line with current efficiency standards, plus about 1.8 tons of carbon removal. “We look at being as efficient, if not a little more efficient than a traditional bioenergy power plant that does not have carbon capture on it,” he explained.
The company’s carbon removal price targets are also extremely competitive — in the $50 to $100 per ton range, Hartwig said. Compare that to something like direct air capture, which today exceeds $600 per ton, or enhanced rock weathering, which is usually upwards of $300 per ton. “The power and carbon removal they can offer comes at prices that meet nearly unlimited demand,”Mike Schroepfer, the founder of Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, told me via email. Arbor benefits from the fact that the electricity it produces and sells can help offset the cost of the carbon removal, and vice versa. So if the company succeeds in hitting its cost and efficiency targets, Hartwig said, this “quickly becomes a case for, why wouldn’t you just deploy these everywhere?”
Initial customers will likely be (no surprise here) the Microsofts, Googles and Metas of the world — hyperscalers with growing data center needs and ambitious emissions targets. “What Arbor unlocks is basically the ability for hyperscalers to stop needing to sacrifice their net zero goals for AI,” Kolster told me. And instead of languishing in the interminable grid interconnection queue, Hartwig said that providing power directly to customers could ensure rapid, early deployment. “We see it as being quicker to power behind-the-meter applications, because you don’t have to go through the process of connecting to the grid,” he told me. Long-term though, he said grid connection will be vital, since Arbor can provide baseload power whereas intermittent renewables cannot.
All of this could serve as a much cheaper alternative, to say, re-opening shuttered nuclear facilities, as Microsoft also recently committed to doing at Three Mile Island. “It’s great, we should be doing that,” Kolster said of this nuclear deal, “but there’s actually a limited pool of options to do that, and unfortunately, there is still community pushback.”
Currently, Arbor is working to build out its pilot plant in San Bernardino, California, which Hartwig told me will turn on this December. And by 2030, the company plans to have its first commercial plant operating at scale, generating 100 megawatts of electricity while removing nearly 2 megatons of CO2 every year. “To put it in perspective: In 2023, the U.S. added roughly 9 gigawatts of gas power to the grid, which generates 18 to 23 megatons of CO2 a year,” Schroepfer wrote to me. So having just one Arbor facility removing 2 megatons would make a real dent. The first plant will be located in Louisiana, where Arbor will also be working with an as-yet-unnamed partner to do the carbon storage.
The company’s carbon credits will be verified with the credit certification platform Isometric, which is also backed by Lowercarbon and thought to have the most stringent standards in the industry. Hartwig told me that Arbor worked hand-in-hand with Isometric to develop the protocol for “biogenic carbon capture and storage,” as the company is the first Isometric-approved supplier to use this standard.
But Hartwig also said that government support hasn’t yet caught up to the tech’s potential. While the Inflation Reduction Act provides direct air capture companies with $180 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, technology such as Arbor’s only qualifies for $85 per ton. It’s not nothing — more than the zero dollars enhanced rock weathering companies such as Lithos or bio-oil sequestration companies such as Charm are getting. “But at the same time, we’re treated the same as if we’re sequestering CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant or a coal plant,” Hartwig told me, as opposed to getting paid for actual CO2 removal.
“I think we are definitely going to need government procurement or involvement to actually hit one, five, 10 gigatons per year of carbon removal,” Hartwig said. Globally, scientists estimate that we’ll need up to 10 gigatons of annual CO2 removal by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Even at $100 per ton, 10 gigatons of carbon removal is still a pretty hefty price tag,” Hartwig told me. A $1 trillion price tag, to be exact. “We definitely need more players than just Microsoft.”
New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.