Banner mockup Mar 13

Butter made from CO2, Not Cows, Tastes like ‘the Real Thing’, claims Startup

Butter made from CO2, not cows, tastes like ‘the real thing’, claims startup. Savor, backed by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, says the product has a lower carbon footprint as it doesn’t need cows/ Guardian Butter made from air instead of cows? A California-based startup claims to have worked out a complex process that eliminates the need for the animals while making its dairy-free alternative taste just as good. Savor, backed by the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, has been experimenting with creating dairy-free alternatives to ice-cream, cheese, and milk by utilising a thermochemical process that allows it to build fat molecules, creating chains of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen. The company has now announced a new animal-free butter alternative. Reducing meat and dairy consumption is one of the key ways that humanity can reduce its environmental impact, as livestock production is a significant source of greenhouse gases, and Savor says its products will have a significantly lower carbon footprint than animal-based ones. The “butter” could potentially come in at less than 0.8g CO2 equivalent per calorie. The standard climate footprint of real unsalted butter with 80% fat is approximately 2.4g CO2 equivalent per calorie. Meat and dairy alternatives have become more and more popular in recent years, but some fall short in terms of flavour. Savor says the flavour of its butter is more exact. “So far, we had informal taste panels with tens of people,” Alexander said. “We expect to perform a more formal panel as part of our commercialisation and scale-up efforts.” The question now is whether buyers will take to such synthetic fats. Getting people to give up their favourite dairy and meat items for more “experimental” foods may pose a challenge. Advocating for the initiative in an online blogpost, Gates wrote: “The idea of switching to lab-made fats and oils may seem strange at first. But their potential to significantly reduce our carbon footprint is immense. By harnessing proven technologies and processes, we get one step closer to achieving our climate goals.    https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/16/us-startup-lab-made-climate-friendly-butter-savor-bill-gates?utm_term=669cc14d36125f9aee52e4302c43af5c&utm_campaign=TheUpside&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=upside_email

Google’s Emissions Climbed nearly 50% in Five Years due to AI Energy Demand. 

Google’s emissions climbed nearly 50% in five years due to AI energy demand. Tech giant’s goal of reducing climate footprint at risk as it grows increasingly reliant on energy-hungry data centres. Guardian Don Milmo Tue 2 Jul 2024    Google’s goal of reducing its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on more and more energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed Tuesday that its greenhouse gas emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years. Google said electricity consumption by data centres and supply chain emissions were the primary cause of the increase. It also revealed in its annual environmental report that its emissions in 2023 had risen 13% compared with the previous year, hitting 14.3m metric tons. The tech company, which has invested substantially in AI, said its “extremely ambitious” goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2030 “won’t be easy”. It said “significant uncertainty” around reaching the target included “the uncertainty around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict”.   Google’s emissions have risen by nearly 50% since 2019, the base year for Google’s goal of reaching net zero, which requires the company removing as much CO2 as it emits.

The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres’ total electricity consumption could double from 2022 levels to 1,000TWh (terawatt hours) in 2026, approximately Japan’s level of electricity demand. AI will result in data centres using 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030, according to calculations by research firm SemiAnalysis. Data centres play a crucial role in training and operating the models that underpin AI models like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers the ChatGPT chatbot. Microsoft admitted this year that energy use related to its data centres was endangering its “moonshot” target of being carbon negative by 2030. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, admitted in May that “the moon has moved” due to the company’s AI strategy.Microsoft’s co-founder, Bill Gates, said last week that AI would help combat the climate crisis because big tech is “seriously willing” to pay extra to use clean electricity sources in order “to say that they’re using green energy”. Big tech companies have become major purchasers of renewable energy in a bid to meet their climate goals.However, pledges to reduce CO2 emissions are now coming up against pledges to invest heavily in AI products that require considerable amounts of energy for training and deployment in data centres, along with carbon emissions associated with manufacturing and transporting the computer servers and chips used in that process. Water usage is another environmental factor in the AI boom, with one study estimating that AI could account for up to 6.6bn cubic metres of water use by 2027 – nearly two-thirds of England’s annual consumption.......read on      https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/02/google-ai-emissions   

Six material innovations Aimed at Slashing Concrete's Outsized Carbon Footprint. 

TECHNOLOGY Six material innovations aimed at slashing concrete's outsized carbon footprint. Dezeen Jennifer Hahn | 21 October 2022  
After Seratech's carbon-neutral cement won the 2022 Obel Award, Dezeen harounded upsix ways in which researchers are working to decarbonise concrete – the single most polluting building material in the world.Currently, concrete's key ingredient cement is responsible for around eight per cent of global emissions, surpassing all other materials except oil, gas and coal. But as the world – and the Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA) – race to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change, a growing number of material innovations are emerging to tackle concrete's carbon footprint. Mostly, these focus on finding low-carbon substitutes for cement, making use of everything from algae-grown limestone to olivine – an abundant mineral that can absorb its own mass in carbon dioxide. But none of these alternatives is currently available at the necessary scale to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, according to Cambridge University engineering professor Julian Allwood. "Despite the enormous range of innovations in cement that are being publicised, there are no substitutes with all the same performance characteristics and scale as Portland cement," Allwood said in a speech at the Built Environment SummitTo help buy the construction industry time to scale up viable alternatives, other researchers are looking at slashing the embodied carbon footprint of buildings by developing clever construction techniques to reduce the amount of concrete needed in their construction. Below, we've rounded up six of the most innovative projects across both approaches.....

1.  Seratech by Sam Draper and Barney Shanks......London start-up Seratech has developed a way of creating carbon-neutral concrete, which involves replacing up to 40 per cent of its cement content with a type of silica made from captured industrial emissions and the carbon-absorbing mineral olivineAll of the emissions associated with the remaining cement are offset by the CO2 that is sequestered by the silica, the company claims, which would make the material overall carbon neutral.The cement substitute is both low-cost and easy to scale, Seratech says, because it can be integrated seamlessly into existing production processes and because olivine is an abundant material – unlike other cement substitutes like ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS).  Find out more about Seratech 

2. Biogenic Limestone by Minus Materials.......Taking a more experimental approach, researchers from the University of Colorado in Boulder have found a way to make cement using limestone that was grown by algae through photosynthesis, rather than limestone that was mined from the earth. When this "biogenic limestone" is burned to make cement, it will only emit as much carbon as the microalgae drew down from the atmosphere during its growth, which researchers say makes the process carbon neutral.......read on, there's three more            https://www.dezeen.com/2022/10/21/concrete-carbon-emissions-material-innovations/                                                                                                     

How Thermal Batteries are Heating up Energy Storage

How thermal batteries are heating up energy storage.. The systems, which can store clean energy as heat, were chosen by readers as the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2024. MIT- Casey Crownhart April 15, 2024   We need heat to make everything from steel bars to ketchup packets. Today, a whopping 20% of global energy demand goes to producing heat used in industry, and most of that heat is generated by burning fossil fuels. In an effort to clean up industry, a growing number of companies are working to supply that heat with a technology called thermal batteries. It’s such an exciting idea that MIT Technology Review readers have officially selected thermal batteries as the reader’s choice addition to our 2024 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. So here’s a closer look at what all the excitement is about. Storing energy as heat isn’t a new idea—steelmakers have been capturing waste heat and using it to reduce fuel demand for nearly 200 years. But a changing grid and advancing technology have ratcheted up interest in the field. “This is a hot area,” says Jeffrey Rissman, senior director of industry at Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy and research firm. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar have seen prices fall dramatically in the past decade. However, these power sources are inconsistent, subject to daily and seasonal patterns. So with the rise in cheap renewable energy has come a parallel push to find ways to store it for applications that require a consistent power source. Thermal energy storage could connect cheap but intermittent renewable electricity with heat-hungry industrial processes. These systems can transform electricity into heat and then, like typical batteries, store the energy and dispatch it as needed.

Rondo Energy is one of the companies working to produce and deploy thermal batteries. The company’s heat storage system relies on a resistance heater, which transforms electricity into heat using the same method as a space heater or toaster—but on a larger scale, and reaching a much higher temperature. That heat is then used to warm up carefully engineered and arranged stacks of bricks, which store the heat for later use. Air blown over the hot bricks can then be used to generate steam, or delivered directly to heat up equipment.  By using common materials and designing equipment that can work with existing facilities, Rondo is working to show that its technology can integrate into a sector where cost is key. “We’re proving this is economical right now,” says John O’Donnell, the company’s CEO. Rondo has been running its first commercial pilot at an ethanol plant in California since March 2023. The company is also scaling up, manufacturing equipment in a factory in Thailand that it’s already announced plans to expand. Rondo is far from the only contender in the thermal battery space, which now includes companies using everything from molten salt and metal to crushed-up rocks to store heat......read on       https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/15/1091042/thermal-batteries-heat-energy-storage/?utm_source=the_spark&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_spark.unpaid.engagement&utm_content=04-21-24&mc_cid=4e62253aa2&mc_eid=172ced6c2a     

US- First New Aluminum Smelter in 45 years could Cut Production Emissions by 75%

The country’s first new aluminum smelter in 45 years could cut production emissions by 75%.Century Aluminum Co. hopes half a billion dollars in federal funding will help it revive a dying industry while making it less polluting. 3 May 2024Aluminum is a crucial raw ingredient in the fight against climate change. But to ensure the transition off fossil fuels is a clean one, the industry needs a serious makeover. A new federally-funded “green smelter” could help make that happen. Making this remarkably versatile metal requires a huge — and near-constant — supply of electricity. Much of it is generated by burning fossil fuels, which is one reason aluminum manufacturers are responsible for about 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. That’s more than twice the amount all of Australia spews annually.   

Cleaning things up poses a huge challenge, one the Department of Energy, or DOE, wants to help solve. In March, the agency announced $6 billion in funding for “industrial demonstration” projects that showcase promising strategies for reducing the climate impact of heavy industry. The need is particularly acute, because heavy industrial processes like aluminum production generate nearly one-third of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.  That could boost a sector on life support. Although the United States once led the world in producing the lightweight and durable metal, most of the country’s aluminum smelters have shuttered since the 1980s due to rising energy costs, falling prices, and a broader trend of American firms sending manufacturing overseas.  And that’s to say nothing of the aluminum required for EVs, power transmission lines, and countless other applications, from cookware to cell phones. Even recycling the stuff requires virgin material, which is mixed into all those melted cans and car parts and other scrap to produce quality metal.....read on    https://grist.org/solutions/the-nations-first-new-aluminum-smelter-in-45-years-could-cut-production-emissions-by-75/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily