Creativity has the power to save the planet from existential threats such as climate change, food insecurity and the waste management crisis

Vasanth

The world&rsquo;s population reached 8 billion in 2022. Most of the people are in emerging markets, which are also where there&rsquo;s still a need to make the most of scarce resources. The role of creativity in this is paramount.
A great example of a contemporary creative talent who helps his country leverage its limited resources is Burkina Faso architect Di&eacute;b&eacute;do Francis K&eacute;r&eacute;, winner of the world&rsquo;s most prestigious architecture award, the Pritzker Prize, in 2022. He&rsquo;s known for using eco-friendly and locally-sourced materials to design buildings engineered to maximize shade and ventilation and minimize heat, rain and power consumption. He believes that a building is like an organism and needs to breathe. This is a relevant philosophy in a country located in the semi-arid Sahel region between the Sahara and the savannah. Other emerging markets could learn a lot from him, which is why the global architectural community has recognized him.
Creativity has the power to save the planet from existential threats such as climate change, food insecurity and the waste management crisis. Nations are finding creative ways to tackle the climate crisis, for instance by recycling used wind turbine blades into a bridge in Cork County, Ireland, and into bike shelters in Aalborg, Denmark. Denmark&rsquo;s CopenHill is the world&rsquo;s first clean-energy power plant with a ski slope on its roof. The biophilic design of Singapore&rsquo;s Gardens by the Bay increases the city&rsquo;s green cover, minimizes heat, absorbs rainwater, and uses wood and horticultural waste from around Singapore to generate energy.
But once again, arguably the more important innovations are happening in emerging markets, the regions that stand to bear the brunt of climate and environmental dangers. Kencoco is a Kenyan enterprise that collects coconut waste in the form of shells and husks and processes it into charcoal briquettes that can be used for cooking and heating. This prevents deforestation by ensuring that trees do not have to be cut for fuel, and also improves the health of rural Kenyans because their charcoal briquettes burn much more cleanly than firewood, kerosene and wood charcoal. They are lower-cost too. Sierra Leone entrepreneur Alhaji Siraj Bah on the other coast of Africa has been inspired to implement the same technology in his country. Let&rsquo;s hope for the same in every corner of the emerging world.
While climate change is an existential threat, so is food insecurity. Creativity can help us overcome this too. One of my favorite creative solutions for tackling food insecurity comes from Bangladesh. Local bank United Commercial Bank thought of an ingenious way to help farmers open bank accounts: by using their own food produce as deposits to open bank accounts. Not the food produce they usually sell, but excess food that they would otherwise discard. While opening bank accounts takes the farmers a step closer to escaping their cycle of poverty, the food produce they deposit is also sent to a supermarket where it becomes part of the food sold. This reduces food waste substantially in a country that has a lot of food insecurity, hence working to solve a problem precisely where it&rsquo;s severe.
Developed markets are not immune to poverty and food insecurity, as the sheer numbers of homeless people in Paris and Portland show us. French supermarket chain Intermarch&eacute; tackled this creatively a few years ago by repackaging and selling perfectly edible fruits and vegetables that are usually discarded due to their unusual shapes. By marketing the Grotesque Apple, the Ridiculous Potato, the Hideous Orange, the Failed Lemon, the Disfigured Eggplant, the Ugly Carrot and the Unfortunate Clementine, they reduced food waste throughout the country. Once again, let&rsquo;s hope that this solution does not simply end with one country but is taken around the world, as food insecurity is indeed a global problem.
Yet another global threat we face is the waste management crisis, including but not restricted to plastic waste. Entire social enterprises are emerging whose raison d&rsquo;etre is waste reduction. Ocean Sole is a Kenyan enterprise that collects tens of thousands of discarded flip-flops from the coast and recycles them into rubber sculptures. The flip-flops are reincarnated as sculptures of elephants, giraffes, bison, alligators, buffalo, blue whales, crabs, frogs, turtles, gorillas, flamingos, and more. Some of them become keychains, doorstops, coasters, bracelets, juggling balls and yoga mats. When all of these are sold, they generate income for local communities, while also keeping beaches and oceans free of rubber that can kill marine life and cripple aquatic ecosystems.
The multinational organization Liter of Light puts discarded plastic bottles to an innovative use. It converts them to solar lamps, house lights, street lights and bottle lights through open source technology that can be replicated by anyone. This provides a reliable off-grid solar light source to communities that have limited or no access to electricity. So far, this has benefited communities in 15 countries from Brazil to Egypt to the Philippines.
This article is an excerpt from the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3MLBVV9">The Creative Human</a> by Vasanth Seshadri.&nbsp;illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

The role of creativity in our sustainable development

The tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu comprises 9 islands and just under 12,000 people. It’s best known for earning a twelfth of its GDP from licensing the .tv url domain. But in December 2022, it was in the news for a different reason. It announced plans to build a complete digital twin of itself in the Metaverse. That will be a life-sized rendering of the complete physical features of the 9 islands and its unique culture and language. It’s the natural next step from the digital twins of factories, ports, airports, malls, hospitals, stadiums, automobiles, military technology, solar farms and wind farms that we see today.

The tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu comprises 9 islands and just under 12,000 people. It’s best known for earning a twelfth of its GDP from licensing the .tv url domain. But in December 2022, it was in the news for a different reason. It announced plans to build a complete digital twin of itself in the Metaverse. That will be a life-sized rendering of the complete physical features of the 9 islands and its unique culture and language. It’s the natural next step from the digital twins of factories, ports, airports, malls, hospitals, stadiums, automobiles, military technology, solar farms and wind farms that we see today.
The ostensible purpose of Tuvalu’s digital twin is that, in the event of rising sea levels submerging this vulnerable nation, its 12,000 citizens can physically live elsewhere while preserving their memories of their homeland in the Metaverse.
But to take this as an indication that our future is in the Metaverse is to miss the whole point.
I believe that the real point Tuvalu is trying to make is, don’t let this be our only option. We would rather live in a world where the global community does what is necessary to ensure that such a catastrophic sea level rise will not happen and our country (and many like it) will continue to exist physically.
The biggest reason why digitalizing our whole world is not a sustainable solution is that the Metaverse itself generates enormous carbon emissions. This is a real-world impact of something that otherwise exists only virtually. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and EU Parliament member Eero Heinäluoma are among the many who have voiced concerns about the environmental impact of the Metaverse.
The Metaverse in its intended form is real-time, responsive, immersive, interactive and scalable. Each user’s current state will need to be remembered after logout and recreated when that user logs back on. This means massive data and compute requirements. Even Netflix which simply streams 2D video content needs a large number of data centres in every corner of the world to stream video data without delays to its hundreds of millions of viewers. Imagine needing to serve real-time 3D content without discernible delays to billions, and you’ll understand the sheer impact the Metaverse will have on real-world carbon emissions.
That’s not all. Many metaverses (individual small-m metaverses like Roblox, Decentraland and Axie Infinity that will constitute the intended final big-M Metaverse) depend on cryptocurrency. For example, gaming platform Roblox has its proprietary Robux cryptocurrency and the popular game Axie Infinity has its own AXS Shards which are their only accepted in-game currencies. These are in addition to the most well-known cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin. The barrier to entry for creating a new cryptocurrency is low and anyone with enough time can learn how to do it.
Regardless of which cryptocurrency we are talking about, mining each coin generates carbon emissions. Minting non-fungible tokens (NFTs) which are often used as gamified objects is also highly carbon intensive. Buying and selling the coins and NFTs also generate emissions. The emissions are significant enough that NFT marketplaces like OpenSea charge transaction fees that are literally called gas fees.
There are efforts to reduce these carbon emissions such as the Merge event in September 2022 in which the Ethereum Blockchain (where the ETH cryptocurrency and 95% of the world’s NFTs are minted) migrated its entire platform from the Proof-of-Work protocol to the Proof-of-Stake one which is more carbon efficient by a factor of thousands. However, the kind of scale of the intended Metaverse will still require an enormous number of cryptocurrency coins and NFTs to be minted, which will generate enormous total emissions even if the emissions per coin or NFT is low.
Another likely environmental impact of the Metaverse is the electronic waste that will be generated. Headsets and haptic feedback devices will be created in their hundreds of millions and they will all need to be disposed of. This will add to the already humongous waste from the disposal of computers, phones, tablets and smartwatches that we see today.
And then, there’s the simple fact that we need a livable real world that provides sustenance even before we can think of escaping into a virtual world. Surely, we don’t want to emulate the post-apocalyptic world of Ready Player One in which climate change has turned the real world into a desolate wasteland and billions escape into the Oasis while continuing to let the real world deteriorate.
This is why we need to see Tuvalu’s efforts in the correct light. It’s in the same spirit as when Tuvalu Foreign Minister Simon Kofe addressed the COP26 summit in November 2021 remotely while standing knee-deep in seawater. Or when the Maldives Parliament held an underwater meeting in 2009. It’s a call to arms to the rest of the world to prevent catastrophic sea level rise, not an attempt to accept that sea level rise and exacerbate it through a carbon-intensive escape plan into the Metaverse.
By taking this in the right spirit and accelerating all our efforts to fight climate change, the rest of the world (which has 8 billion people as opposed to just the 12,000 of Tuvalu) has a chance to save not just Tuvalu, but all of us.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability &amp; Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
<h6>Cover photo: An arial view of Tuvalu by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ist4u/">Tomoaki Inabi</a> on <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ist4u/5685924064/in/pool-tuvalu/">Flickr</a>, (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA 2.0</a>)</h6>

Why Tuvalu’s digital twin plan is a cry for help, not a sustainable solution

We hear a lot about the Metaverse today. Though it was first coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, it exploded in popularity starting from 2021, as evidenced by search volume and academic papers containing the term.
The Metaverse can mean many things. It could mean fully immersive virtual worlds, or augmented reality that blurs the lines between truth and fiction, or marketplaces for NFTs.


We hear a lot about the Metaverse today. Though it was first coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, it exploded in popularity starting from 2021, as evidenced by search volume and academic papers containing the term.
The Metaverse can mean many things. It could mean fully immersive virtual worlds, or augmented reality that blurs the lines between truth and fiction, or marketplaces for NFTs.
A little-talked-about aspect of these various iterations of the Metaverse is their environmental impact.
Many small-m metaverses (self-contained virtual worlds as opposed to the overarching big-M Metaverse that’s in the process of being built) run on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin or AXS. The reason cryptocurrencies have the term “crypto” in them is that they are mined by solving complex cryptographic puzzles computationally. This requires a tremendous amount of computational power which generates massive carbon emissions.
And then, there’s the enormous world of NFTs. Whether it’s NFT art such as the thousands of pieces by Mike Winkelmann (better known as Beeple) or NFT-ized videos such as the basketball highlights sold as NFTs on NBA’s Top Shot, a huge number of transactions take place every day. Some of these transactions are about minting NFTs (i.e. publishing the digital asset on the Blockchain to create the NFT in the first place) whereas some are about buying and selling them in the secondary market. These transactions all need to be validated by the Blockchain.
One of the two ways of validating these transactions is the Proof-of-Work protocol. This involves computers that solve complex cryptographic puzzles, similar to the process of mining cryptocurrencies. As discussed above, solving these cryptographic puzzles is computationally very intensive, which means enormous carbon emissions.
Thankfully, there’s a different protocol called Proof-of-Stake which is not about solving cryptographic puzzles but about how much stake (in terms of the quantity of the associated cryptocurrency) each validating entity possesses. The carbon emissions associated with Proof-of-Stake are much lower, even millions of times lower according to some sources.
However, the Ethereum blockchain (on which 95% of NFTs are minted) has been following a Proof-of-Work protocol, which means that NFT minting, buying and selling thus far have been extremely computationally intensive and therefore emissions-intensive.
Due to the above-mentioned factors, politicians such as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and EU Parliament member Eero Heinäluoma have been vocal about the carbon footprint of cryptocurrency and have called for accountability and a reduction of emissions from the sector.
The importance of cryptocurrency and NFTs to the Metaverse means that achieving an immediate greening of cryptocurrency and NFTs can make or break the future of the metaverse.
Thankfully, there is progress. The Ethereum blockchain is planning something called The Merge which is expected to take place in September 2022. This includes migrating its entire platform from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. This is expected to deliver a substantial reduction in the carbon footprint associated with mining the ETH cryptocurrency and also with minting, buying and selling the astonishing number of NFTs that run on Ethereum.
And then, there’s the computational power needed to build entire virtual worlds.
According to many, the end-goal is to build one overarching big-M Metaverse akin to The Oasis in the book and movie Ready Player One or the eponymous matrix in The Matrix. It’s anybody’s guess just how much carbon will have to be burned to get there. Even an individual metaverse platform such as Roblox or Decentraland (technically not metaverses as they are centralized whereas the true Metaverse will be decentralized) generates ongoing carbon emissions each time a user performs an activity.
As the technology to build the Metaverse (or metaverses) advances, it’s critically important that we build sustainability into the innovation process to find green ways to create this brave new world.
Green data centres powered by renewable energy are one way. As billions of people enter the Metaverse and each user has a dynamic “state” or circumstances that need to be preserved the next time they log back on, data storage requirements will be stratospheric. Powering those data centres with polluting fossil fuels is out of the question. Renewables such as solar and wind will be the way to go. Which leads to the issue of intermittency that has plagued solar and wind thus far. Further innovation to improve storage of solar and wind power will be critical.
It’s also important for the builders of the Metaverse to incorporate the circular economy into everything they do. Recycling programs for electronic waste such as used servers and VR headsets need to be in place. Hazardous materials also need to be disposed of responsibly or recycled to the fullest extent possible to reduce their negative impact on the environment.
If we fail to take the necessary steps to green the Metaverse as we build it, we run the risk of emulating the least desirable aspect of Ready Player One: escaping into a virtual world because we’ve destroyed the real world through climate change.
Illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Virtual worlds, real emissions: building an environmentally sustainable Metaverse

What is energy leapfrogging? A supposition that parts of the world that missed the fossil fuels revolution don’t need it. That they can jump (or leapfrog) directly from wood-charcoal-biomass to renewables like solar, wind and hydropower. This is a concept originally gleaned from telecommunications, claiming that parts of the world that missed the landline revolution can leapfrog it and embrace the mobile revolution directly.

In 2014, the remote eastern Indian village of Dharnai became an unlikely poster-child of sustainability when Greenpeace provided it with a solar micro-grid. Disconnected from the national grid for decades, this enabled Dharnai to explore a source of power other than wood, charcoal and biomass. With not a fossil fuel in sight. International media was glowing in appreciation of this development.
However, the on-ground realities were more sobering. Power from the solar micro-grid was quickly guzzled up by energy-intensive appliances such as refrigerators and televisions, often leaving homes with no energy for lamps. The more affluent parts of the village were guilty of most of this guzzling, leaving the less affluent parts in darkness. There was an anecdote of a boy who typically studied in the early mornings before leaving to work in the farms, but was no longer able to study because the one lamp in the house no longer had any power to keep it on.
When then-Chief Minister of Bihar state, Nitish Kumar, visited the village a month later for what was meant to be a victory lap, he was met with protesting villagers demanding “real electricity”, an insulting insinuation that solar power was “fake electricity”.
Within months, the solar experiment was jettisoned, Dharnai was connected to the national grid and reliable electricity was provided. The downside: yet another village became dependent on fossil fuels.
This is an inconvenient reminder that energy leapfrogging is not the panacea we often think it is.
What is energy leapfrogging? A supposition that parts of the world that missed the fossil fuels revolution don’t need it. That they can jump (or leapfrog) directly from wood-charcoal-biomass to renewables like solar, wind and hydropower. This is a concept originally gleaned from telecommunications, claiming that parts of the world that missed the landline revolution can leapfrog it and embrace the mobile revolution directly.
Energy leapfrogging was widely embraced as a silver bullet a few years ago and the success stories started piling up. Kenya’s solar micro-grid successes were a big part of US President Barack Obama’s discussions with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta when the former visited Kenya in 2015. Bangladesh’s solar homes project provided electricity access to 4 million homes in 2016.
But as the Dharnai example shows, leapfrogging has run into some limitations.
Firstly, renewables have an often-cited disadvantage of being time-bound. The sun doesn’t shine all the time. The wind doesn’t blow all the time. Better storage technologies need to be invented to resolve this, and it’s easier said than done.
Secondly, a huge investment (e.g. a huge area of solar panels) is needed to generate enough power for agricultural and industrial use, which are pillars of economic development. Not to mention the power-thirsty appliances like air-conditioners and refrigerators without which no modern city can exist. The Benban Solar Farm in Egypt spans over 37 square kilometers (large enough to be seen from outer space) but can power only 420,000 Egyptian homes, a small fraction of the country’s 102 million people.
It’s not fair to expect emerging nations to sacrifice economic development for the sake of sustainability after developed nations achieved such development precisely by generating huge quantities of energy. It would be a case of the first people who reached the top kicking the ladder away so that others cannot climb it. So, given that economic development of emerging nations is a moral imperative, and also given that renewables-driven economic development requires huge economic resources, you need to ask whether these emerging nations have the resources. Can they afford to set aside thousands of square kilometers of their land for massive solar farms and wind farms?
Thirdly, even if yield and storage are improved significantly through new innovation, it’s possible that the increased availability of energy may inspire more energy-intensive usage of energy (e.g. more homes in emerging markets may start purchasing air-conditioners, refrigerators and electric stoves) and this brings us back to square one in terms of energy demand and supply.
Fourthly, at the moment, renewables are still more expensive than fossil fuels, making them prohibitive for many emerging markets. In 2018, the Fiji government partnered with a Japanese company to provide off-grid solar power to the village of Naceva. Only 15 of the 42 households participated because the installation fee (about US$50) was too high.
Thankfully, this is the limitation that’s easiest to solve. Every new technology goes through a typical process of evolution in which it’s initially more expensive than its predecessors, but consistent innovation leads to its costs eventually dipping below those of its predecessors, incentivizing more people to embrace the new technology and ultimately leading to its mainstreaming.
None of the challenges I’ve outlined above are meant to be justifications to avoid renewables or delay their rollout. They are meant to be a realistic portrayal of the challenges that lie ahead, waiting for our ingenuity to solve them. Expecting emerging nations to respond to these challenges by limiting their industrial or agricultural progress is a new form of colonial thinking considering that developed nations never faced such challenges when they developed. Working with emerging nations to alleviate these challenges should be the approach of developed nations.
As for the emerging nations themselves, incentivizing innovation and entrepreneurship among their hungry, young and talented citizens will unleash extraordinary abilities and innovation, ultimately solving the climate crisis and showing the rest of the world how it’s done.

Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Look Before You Leap: Things to watch out for while attempting energy leapfrogging

Over the past decade, the Ghanaian government has been proactive in driving renewable energy adoption. Its Renewable Energy Act of 2011 continues to guide its efforts well into its second decade. It provides a framework to support the development and use of renewable energy sources and help attract investment in these sources.

Paulo Coelho’s 2013 best-seller, Manuscript Found in Accra, made the capital of Ghana famous. It was about a philosophical manuscript that provides solace to a group of people at a time of great uncertainty about the future.
Now the mid-sized West African nation may well provide us with a new blueprint. One that shows us our energy future. Over the past decade, the Ghanaian government has been proactive in driving renewable energy adoption. Its Renewable Energy Act of 2011 continues to guide its efforts well into its second decade. It provides a framework to support the development and use of renewable energy sources and help attract investment in these sources.
Part of Ghana’s approach is to use energy consumption taxes to finance the development of renewable sources such as biomass, solar, wind and hydropower (all of which Ghana is naturally abundant in). Ghana is also partnering with Switzerland to develop commercial and industrial solar energy projects, along with a project to provide 5 million Ghanaian households with environmentally-friendly cookers and solar-generated electricity.
Yet another effort the Ghanaian government undertakes is to back local players that are driving electrification across the nation. As an example, local player Black Spider Ghana provides solar energy technology to residential communities, farms, hospitals and industries to both rural and urban areas. Small-scale solar power plants are a key pillar of such electrification, especially in rural areas.
Lest we get the impression that such developments are happening in just one African nation, let’s look further north. The 150 MW Noor Ouarzazate Power Plant in Morocco is the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant project. It’s located in the heart of the Sahara, one of the most sun-drenched regions in the world. Covering an area of 2,500 hectares (6,178 acres), it started providing clean energy to the national grid in 2019.
A cursory look around Africa reveals that renewables are not just a moment but a movement all over the continent. Ethiopia is aggressively investing in hydropower through new dams such as the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam across the Blue Nile. South Africa has invested 50 billion rand (US$2.8 billion) on 25 renewable energy products since 2011. Egypt has set itself the goal of achieving 42% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2035. Kenya is investing in off-grid solar power to drive rapid electrification across its rural communities. You get the drift.
A key learning from Africa’s approach is the importance of leapfrogging. This is a concept originally gleaned from telecommunications, positing that countries that missed the landline revolution can skip (or leapfrog) it entirely by going straight to the mobile revolution. That way, the lack of landline infrastructure in these countries becomes irrelevant. Asia and Africa are considered the vanguards of mobile leapfrogging.
Applying the same concept to energy, it’s claimed that economies that missed fossil-fueled development don’t need it. They can leapfrog it and jump straight from charcoal-wood-and-biomass based energy to renewable energy. Africa is once again a vanguard of this.
Another crucial learning from Africa is that, often, local is better. Not just local in terms of country-level, but drilling down to community-level. In Kenya, where remote communities are often not connected to the national grid, entrepreneurs have installed hundreds of thousands of Solar Home Systems (SHS) that provide energy to homes, completely independent of anything that happens on the grid. Solar mini-grids are another innovation being attempted with some success in Kenya. Microfinance initiatives have kept pace to fund entrepreneurs in these emerging spaces.
There are challenges though. Availability of sufficient power, for instance. Even in the sun-rich Sahara, an enormous area of solar farms is needed to power North African cities, especially given their summer air-conditioning requirements. The Benban Solar Farm in Egypt spans over 37 square kilometers (large enough to be seen from outer space) but can power only 420,000 Egyptian homes, a tiny fraction of the country’s 102 million people. For other forms of renewables like wind and tidal, availability is time-bound, introducing an additional barrier to generating sufficient energy. Further innovation to increase power generation of renewables while improving storage is of paramount importance.
Another challenge that commonly rears its head is geopolitics. Hydropower dams on rivers that flow through several countries are a frequent source of geopolitical wrangling. When Ethiopia started filling the reservoir of the above-mentioned Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in 2020, Egypt pointed out that Ethiopia had done so without a legally binding agreement on equitable allocation of the Nile’s waters. Egypt escalated this to the international community, and the United States considered withholding aid to Ethiopia until this issue was resolved. The presence of another country (Sudan) downstream from Ethiopia along the Blue Nile adds a potential third dimension to the same conflict.
In addition to the fact that there are so many countries in Africa, each with its own interests, another issue is that these countries are not exactly awash in cash to spend on ever-more ambitious renewable energy projects. Funding from the international community can help with this, as can innovative localized solutions like microfinance and more efficient energy subsidies.
Though challenges remain, the drive and ingenuity to tackle these challenges are also abundant across Africa. From the scorching Sahara to the south Atlantic, from the Gulf of Aden to the Cape of Good Hope, governments and entrepreneurs are buzzing with ideas and efforts. Africa will continue to herald a sunrise of technologies and approaches that help us solve the climate crisis. A sunrise as iconic as the sun-on-the-acacia-tree image that represents the continent in many of our minds.
It would be poetic indeed if the continent where human life began is also the place that shows us how to stay alive.

Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Manuscript Found in Accra: How Africa can provide a blueprint for our energy future

We simply do not have the option of ignoring solar, wind and electric vehicles if we are to achieve carbon neutrality and solve the climate crisis. This leads us to the inevitable conclusion: Our ability to achieve breakthroughs in waste management will determine our success in green energy and ultimately our ambitions of a carbon-neutral future.

Solar panels have an average lifespan of about 25 to 30 years. It was after the year 2000 that solar panels started to be increasingly widespread, with the worldwide power generation attributed to solar power rising exponentially from less than 5 gigawatts (GW) in 2003 to over 75 GW in 2016.[<a href="https://www.greenbiz.com/article/what-will-happen-solar-panels-after-their-useful-lives-are-over">1</a>]
Putting two and two together, it’s inevitable that as we approach the year 2030 and beyond, we will be dealing with a huge amount of used solar panels that are no longer functional. In the absence of immediate innovation in reuse and recycling, they will end up in landfills. Estimates claim that this could add up to 78 million metric tons of disposed material by 2050.[<a href="https://www.irena.org/publications/2016/Jun/End-of-life-management-Solar-Photovoltaic-Panels">2</a>]
It’s not very different when it comes to used wind turbines. Most wind turbine blades can be used for up to 20-25 years, but are often replaced after 10 years with larger and more powerful designs.[<a href="https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1209">3</a>] A 2017 study suggested that 43 million metric tons of decommissioned wind turbine blades will need to be disposed of by 2050.[<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316556892_Wind_turbine_blade_waste_in_2050">4</a>]
The meteoric rise of electric vehicles heralds a similar problem: potentially millions of lithium ion batteries that are discarded when electric cars, buses and trains reach the end of their lifecycles. The EU is working towards 30 million electric cars on European roads by 2030. Factoring in the rest of the world (including enormous markets such as the US and China), you can see where this is going.
What makes it an even tougher problem is that the substances that stand to be released back into the environment are not exactly harmonious with it. Solar panels contain heavy metals such as lead (which can cause brain and kidney damage) and cadmium (which is carcinogenic) that are in danger of being leached into water and consumed by humans and other flora and fauna. A similar danger exists with lithium from lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars. Though wind turbines are not particularly toxic, the toughness of its fibre glass-plastics mix means that many of them may end up in landfills, which always come with dangers such as pollution of land and waterways.
But we simply do not have the option of ignoring solar, wind and electric vehicles if we are to achieve carbon neutrality and solve the climate crisis.
This leads us to the inevitable conclusion: Our ability to achieve breakthroughs in waste management will determine our success in green energy and ultimately our ambitions of a carbon-neutral future.
The most obvious solution is recycling. But this has some challenges.
Solar panels are predominantly made of glass which is a low-value material. This glass is embedded with impurities such as plastics, lead, cadmium and antimony which makes it next to impossible to recycle it with current technology. Only a small percentage of the materials in a solar panel, such as copper and aluminium, are high value materials that can also be recycled. Silicon and silver are high value materials but the processes to separate and purify them have not been fine-tuned yet, which leads to the silver and silicon often being shredded and dumped in landfills along with the glass.
But these challenges have not prevented companies like the Phoenix, Arizona-based We Recycle Solar and the French water and waste company Veolia from developing solar panel recycling technology. In 2018, Veolia opened Europe’s first plant dedicated entirely to recycling photovoltaic panels.
Wind turbines also offer good prospects for recycling. Turbine blades are commonly made of fibreglass which has wide applications in construction. Housing materials, playground equipment, carpentry, roofs and pedestrian bridges are some of the applications that have been proposed.
The Danish city of Aalborg has saved a step by reusing portions of wind turbine blades themselves as bike shelters without having to extract and recycle the fibreglass that comprises them. University College Cork in Ireland is attempting something similar by repurposing a decommissioned wind turbine blade as a bridge.
In September 2021, wind energy pioneer Siemens-Gamesa announced the world’s first recyclable wind turbine blades ready for commercial use offshore. It plans to install and pilot these blades at the Kaskasi offshore wind farm in the German North Sea in 2022. GE Renewable Energy and Vestas are two other renewable energy pioneers betting big on recyclable wind turbine blades.
Lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles come with their own set of opportunities and challenges for recycling. Though lithium has low value in the recycling market due to wide availability of the raw material, the other common materials in a lithium-ion battery such as nickel, cobalt and manganese have high value. This gives it a viable recycling market. However, the fact that each lithium-ion battery uses several distinct materials in close proximity means that each material has to be delicately extracted without reacting adversely with one another. This requires new skills that millions of workers need to learn.
All this, and we are still only talking about the waste generated by decommissioned items at the end of their lifecycles. A discussion of the waste generated by mining the raw materials and manufacturing these items in the first place will require a separate article in itself. Just as an example, lithium mining is known to have caused contamination of groundwater, soil and air in several regions of the world such as Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto.
The waste management challenges outlined above are NOT meant to give us excuses to avoid renewables and stick to the technology that created the climate crisis. They challenge us to respond to them the way our species always has: through innovation, ingenuity and inventiveness.
This innovation has infinite possibilities but broadly falls into two categories. The first is innovation in the recycling technology needed to extract and reuse the vast majority of the materials in electric vehicle batteries, solar panels and wind turbines. The second is innovation in the technology and composition of the items themselves such that they use different materials that are more easily reused or recycled.
As of now, the first kind of innovation (recycling technology) is in its early stages, with many issues yet to be resolved, such as the high percentage of solar panel material that’s unrecyclable with current technology. We need more efforts in this space. We cannot simply conclude that recycling is impossible in some cases and throw in the towel. The examples we discussed above pertaining to innovative reuse of wind turbine blades show that it’s possible with lateral thinking.
The second kind of innovation (the technology and composition of the items themselves) is already happening to a larger extent. Sodium-ion batteries are being explored as an alternative to lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles. Their biggest advantage is that sodium is abundantly and cheaply available and doesn’t have to be mined in an environmentally damaging way like lithium. The world’s largest lithium-ion battery manufacturer, China’s CATL, has announced plans to commercialise sodium-ion batteries by 2023. Nickel-hydrogen batteries, vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) and iron-air batteries are other alternatives currently under exploration.
Likewise, alternatives to silicon in solar panel photovoltaic cells are also being explored. This will tackle the issue we discussed above of our inability to extract and purify silicon from the panels. Cadmium telluride has been proposed as an alternative, but as mentioned above, cadmium is carcinogenic. Perovskite solar cells (PSC) have emerged onto the scene in the past couple of years, but their often-cited advantages are about increased efficiency and lowered costs rather than greater environmental friendliness. Besides, their shorter lifespans may actually increase the solar waste problem.
When more businesses, governments and universities invest in green innovation, our chances of solving all these above-mentioned problems increase manifold. Let’s first acknowledge that these are problems worth solving, worth investing our best brains and resources into. That would be the first step in delivering the kind of breakthrough innovations needed to solve the waste management issues and unleash the full potential of every green technology we are embracing today.
Our species has progressed not by wilting at the challenges of new technology, but by addressing and solving them with gusto. That’s exactly what we need once again.
Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Don’t waste this chance: How waste management innovation is pivotal to our green future

There are several everyday ways in which Singapore has ensured that sustainability and environmental consciousness are ingrained in its citizens all their lives. Singapore is also known as one of the greenest metropolises in the world. The globally recommended percentage of green cover in cities is 33%. In 2020, Singapore didn’t just match this recommendation, but obliterated it with 46.5%. In this article, the emergence of Singapore as a climate action leader is discussed.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Posters carrying these three words are commonplace in Singapore schools and already were in the 90s when I was growing up. The discipline to not litter is also ingrained in Singaporeans from a young age through the simple act of fining us for each act of littering, to the point where a mild mockery of Singapore as “a fine city” emerged among western expats here. But mockery aside, this discipline means that even when Singaporeans travel overseas, we simply don’t have it in us to litter indiscriminately. It also comes naturally to us to turn off the tap immediately after using it, switch off the lights each time we leave a room, and so on.
These are everyday ways in which Singapore has ensured that sustainability and environmental consciousness are ingrained in its citizens all their lives. Singapore is also known as one of the greenest metropolises in the world. The globally recommended percentage of green cover in cities is 33%. In 2020, Singapore didn’t just match this recommendation, but obliterated it with 46.5%.
Why am I saying all this? Not to blow the trumpet, but to lay the background for Singapore’s recent emergence as a major player in the world’s fight against climate change. Sir David Attenborough had a special mention of Singapore’s green creds in his 2020 documentary A Life on Our Planet. World Economic Forum founder Dr Klaus Schwab discussed climate change with Singapore government officials when he visited the country in February 2021, as did US Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited in August 2021.
Singapore’s nickname is The Lion City because “singa” means lion and “pur” means city in many Indian languages. In recent years, this lion has started to roar for the planet. Here are a few ways in which the pint-sized city-state has become a tip of the spear of climate change mitigation.
1) Singapore&#x27;s prowess in R&amp;D makes it a hub for renewable energy such as solar and wind. It&#x27;s increasingly common to see solar panels dotting the roofs of houses and office buildings. Singapore recently opened the <a href="https://www.straitstimes.com/multimedia/graphics/2021/05/singapore-largest-solar-farm-water/index.html">Tengeh Floating Solar Farm</a> which is one of the world&#x27;s biggest floating solar farms. Hydrogen fuel and Carbon capture, Utilization and storage (CCUS) are two other fields in which <a href="https://www.edb.gov.sg/en/business-insights/insights/singapore-exploring-hydrogen-carbon-capture-technologies-in-decarbonisation.html">Singapore is providing its R&amp;D expertise</a>. This ability to provide brain power to the most critical industries has its roots in Singapore’s origins as a country lacking natural resources, which made it develop its homegrown human capital and its ability to attract talent from the rest of the region and world.
2) Electric vehicles are another sector in which the city-state is already making a mark. Its goals of installing 60,000 charging stations by 2030 and transitioning to a fully electric vehicle fleet by 2040 are driving it forward (pun intended) in this field. Homegrown firm <a href="https://www.bluesg.com.sg/">BlueSG</a> is emerging as a world leader in electric cars. Another local player, <a href="https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/garage/singapores-scorpio-electric-raises-us63m-to-develop-electric-motorcycle">Scorpio Electric</a>, has started manufacturing electric motorcycles that incorporate AI and smart data analytics to increase energy efficiency.
3) Emerging players in the power sector are offering green options to Singapore’s environmentally-conscious power consumers. <a href="https://www.geneco.sg/">Geneco</a> offers plans in which consumers can choose to have 25%, 50%, 75% or even 100% of their monthly power consumption offset by carbon credits or International Renewable Energy Certificates (I-RECs). One of its competitors, <a href="https://www.senokoenergy.com/households">Senoko Energy</a>, offers a 100% solar energy plan as well as hybrid plans.
4) Industries that are not strictly energy-related but contribute immensely to reducing carbon footprint, such as plant-based protein, are on the rise in Singapore. <a href="https://tindle.com/">TiNDLE</a> (plant-based chicken) and <a href="https://eatkarana.com/">KARANA</a> (plant-based pork) are just two of the many Singapore food tech SMEs that specialize in plant-based protein. If their products continue to take the place of traditional meat in the global supply chain, emissions from the global agricultural industry can be cut substantially.
5) Singapore’s green buildings like the Marina Bay Supertrees, Parkroyal and CapitaGreen are an inspiration to property developers around the world. These buildings use photovoltaic cells to power themselves through solar energy, minimize water usage, circulate cool air to reduce energy consumption, and have actual trees on their rooftops and balconies to add to the city’s green cover.
6) Urban farming is sprouting up (another pun intended) in Singapore now. This takes the form of rooftop farms, indoor vertical farms and greenhouses. Even a parking lot came in handy for the <a href="https://www.citiponics.com/">Citiponics</a> rooftop farm in central Singapore. These urban farms not only reduce the environmental impact of agriculture but also increase the tiny nation’s food security.
7) Singapore is poised to lead the world in carbon credit exchange through the <a href="https://www.climateimpactx.com/">Climate Impact eXchange (CIX)</a> global carbon exchange and marketplace. When businesses that cannot immediately achieve zero carbon emissions aim to offset their emissions with carbon credits, there’s a danger of buying those carbon credits from dubious providers who sell low-quality credits. Low-quality credits come from activities that did not achieve any real carbon reduction (e.g. “preserving” a forest that was never in danger of deforestation). But the chances of a business greenwashing itself through such credits is substantially reduced with a Singapore-based exchange, because Singapore can be trusted to audit every carbon credit and ensure that only high-quality credits (earned through truly effective carbon-reducing activities) are traded on the exchange. This trust is a result of Singapore’s decades of ethical commercial practices, a world-leading low level of corruption, and a well-documented ease of doing business.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means. There are several other ways in which Singapore is playing a big role, such as the effort by Singapore banks such as DBS and OCBC to accelerate green finance and ESG investing, and a Green Finance Industry Taskforce (GFIT) convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). At all levels of the country, be it government or business or individual citizen, there’s a holistic effort to do the things that matter.Singapore does not embrace the cause of climate change out of ideology. Singapore has always been pragmatic. As such, it follows the science, recognizes that climate change is an existential threat, and identifies that it has the right skills and circumstances to help the world. These skills and circumstances include a trusted business environment, cutting-edge R&amp;D pedigree and a highly-educated workforce. It makes sense to apply these skills for the greater good.
In addition to the obvious value of mitigating an existential threat on behalf of the whole planet, Singapore stands to create new tens of thousands of new jobs in sunrise industries for its citizens and for those who choose to make it their home. Making the world a better place while achieving prosperity embodies the idea of doing well while doing good. That’s the dream of many governments and indeed many businesses. It’s easier said than done, but it looks like Singapore might have a real shot at it.
Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

The lion roars for the planet: Singapore’s role in the fight against climate change

In this article, Vasanth Seshadri explains how the climate emergency can inspire fiction, and secondly that this fiction can drive real awareness of the emergency.









The 2021 movie &ldquo;The Tomorrow War&rdquo; directed by Chris McKay and starring Chris Pratt was an action blockbuster with aliens and battles and enough explosions to make Michael Bay sit up and take notice. But the more discerning viewers would have noticed a climate change message in this movie. Without spoilers, I&rsquo;ll just say that a 1.5-degree temperature rise and the resultant thawing of ice in an uninhabited part of the world was a pivotal event in the story.
Winter is coming. These three words would remind even a casual viewer about Game of Thrones. There are fans who say that Game of Thrones had a climate change message. Just like in the real world, an existential threat was at the doorstep of the entire world, accompanied by a climatic (and possibly climactic) change. Just like in the real world, there were deniers until the very last moment, and by the time any action was taken, it was almost too late.
These are just two examples that show firstly that the climate emergency can inspire fiction, and secondly that this fiction can drive real awareness of the emergency.
Humans have always been a storytelling species. Imagine saying that persistent long-term effort is important for success. Yawn. But imagine telling the story of the hare and the tortoise. All of a sudden, a moral is forever ingrained in the mind of the listener. Likewise, consider the difference between merely saying &ldquo;don&rsquo;t be greedy&rdquo; and telling the story of the farmer who killed the goose that laid golden eggs. Both of these are from Aesop&rsquo;s Fables, one of the greatest treasure troves of stories ever told. Such stories with moral values exist in every culture, with the Bible and the Ramayana two other prominent examples that come to mind.
The nature of humans as a purveyor and connoisseurs of stories means we have a much better chance to inspire people to take action on the climate crisis if we tell stories. Not just any stories, but stories with sustainability and climate change messages at their very core.
The term climate fiction, or cli-fi, was coined by literary critic Dan Bloom as recently as 2011. A decade on, there are debates about whether cli-fi is a genre in itself or a subgenre of science fiction. But that has not prevented passionate cli-fi writers from conceiving provocative works of fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson is a pioneer of cli-fi with novels like New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future. The Climate Fiction Writers League founded by cli-fi author Lauren James is a closely-knit community who share the belief that fiction is one of the best ways to inspire immediate climate action.
Typically, cli-fi novels are set in the future or near future and have dystopian overtones of the kind of world we might end up living in if we are not careful. There&rsquo;s a distinct difference between such climate fiction which has the climate crisis front-and-centre, and the examples I cited at the start of this article which weave it seamlessly into a wider story. Both these kinds of fiction do a different but equally effective job of drawing attention to the climate emergency. Thus, both have their roles and one isn&rsquo;t inherently better than the other.
Many writers believe that acceptance of cli-fi as its own standalone genre independent of sci-fi is crucial for its continued growth and its contribution to real-world climate change mitigation efforts.
It would also help if more climate change stories take the form of movies and TV shows. Documentaries like Cowspiracy, Seaspiracy and Kiss the Ground are abundant on TV, but where are the fictional stories with climate change at their core? I&rsquo;m not the only one bemoaning this. Greta Thunberg, arguably the most famous climate activist in the world today, opined at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August 2021 that &ldquo;there&rsquo;s a big lack of storytelling when it comes to the climate crisis&rdquo; and urged the film and TV industries to do more.
The reason storytelling can be a big differentiator is that people have ever-decreasing attention spans. There&rsquo;s a little anecdote I often like to share. Typically, whenever we want to say that someone has a short attention span, we say they have the attention span of a goldfish. That was an apt metaphor in the year 2000 when human attention span was 12 seconds and goldfish attention span was 9 seconds. But in 2021, human attention spans are 8 seconds. Perhaps a particularly inattentive goldfish today can be described as humanlike!
Given this reality, there&rsquo;s a danger that narratives about the climate emergency may end up as background noise to a large number of people, at precisely the time when we cannot afford for it to become background noise. Awareness is the very first step before action even becomes possible. The fight for awareness becomes tougher when a never-ending Times Square of information competes for eyeballs and mindspace. Well-told stories can cut through the clutter and, who knows, even save the world.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem

Stories that save the world: how fiction can drive climate change awareness

So, who’s right? Supporters of CCUS who believe that this is a superb green innovation, or critics who believe that it’s greenwashing?
In this article, Vasanth explores both sides of the equation.

The orca is familiar to nature lovers as a species of whale. But in September 2021, a new Orca emerged in Iceland that should also rightfully be a favourite of nature aficionados. It’s the world’s largest CO2 direct air capture facility.
Orca literally sucks. This modular system of stackable container-size structures built by climate startup Climeworks AG sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere using giant fans. Another startup, Carbfix, then injects the CO2 deep into basaltic rock formations, where the CO2 crystallizes into a mineral in about two years, permanently storing or sequestering it into the ground. This tag-team is expected to capture 4,000 tons of CO2 each year from the atmosphere. The long-term goal is to capture 300 million tons or 1% of the annual global CO2 emissions each year. Companies ranging from Microsoft to Audi work towards neutralizing their carbon emissions by purchasing carbon removal services from Climeworks.
This is one of many examples of Carbon Capture and Storage/Sequestration (CCS), an emerging green technology that’s playing a small yet crucial role in taking us closer to a carbon-neutral future. A related concept is Carbon Capture and Usage/Utilization (CCU) which, as the name suggests, involves capturing CO2 and utilizing it to make substances like biofuel, concrete and plastics that are put to various uses. Together, they form the sunrise industry of Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS).
Fans of CCUS are excited by the technology for a number of reasons. One is that the skillsets needed to sequester CO2 into the ground are similar to those needed to extract oil from the ground. Both involve drilling deep into the ground to access hard-to-reach spaces. The main difference is that one involves inserting a substance into these spaces, the other involves removing a substance from them. That’s a simple difference that’s easy to adapt to.
This means that the massive job losses feared by many in the fossil fuels industry may not come to pass. Millions of oil and gas workers will find new jobs that are a seamless fit with their old skills. It’s not easy for lifelong oil rig workers to learn to build solar panels, but it’s easier for them to learn to store CO2 in the same kinds of subterranean formations that they took oil out of.
This is part of why the biggest players in the oil and gas industry are investing in CCUS. BP is driving the Net Zero Teesside CCUS project in the northeast of England with the aim to decarbonize a cluster of carbon-intensive businesses and deliver the UK’s first zero-carbon industrial cluster by 2030. BP is also partnering with Australian energy player Santos for the Moomba CCS project in South Australia. ExxonMobil is working with ten other companies to build a large-scale CCS hub in its hometown of Houston. Not to be outdone, Shell is developing CCS projects all over the world from Canada to Australia to Norway to the Netherlands.
Another advantage cited by supporters of CCUS is that it gives industries some breathing space. Industrial players large and small will not face an immediate pressure to make every one of their activities instantly carbon neutral. If it’s not possible for them to rapidly re-engineer all their processes to emit zero carbon, they can neutralize their carbon emissions with the negative carbon emissions achieved through CCUS. 1,000 tons minus 1,000 tons is net zero, goes this argument.
But it’s precisely this argument that has created a lot of critics of CCUS. The critics believe that CCUS is a form of greenwashing, a temporary and unsustainable stop-gap solution, a case of sweeping the dirt under the carpet. They believe that it gives industries an easy way out so that they can continue to follow the very processes that generate massive CO2 and make no effort to re-engineer those processes, as they can always remove the CO2 through CCUS.
Critics of CCUS have another frequent argument: Nature has given us abundant ways to capture and store carbon. The tundra stores an enormous amount of carbon and will continue to do so as long as human activity doesn’t damage or destroy this ecosystem. Green carbon in the form of rainforests is another carbon sink. In fact, rainforests are the first ecosystems that come to mind for many when they think of nature-based carbon sinks.
But there’s one form of nature-based carbon capture and storage that’s far more efficient than any rainforest: Blue carbon. This refers to oceanic and coastal ecosystems such as mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes. These have three primary advantages. Firstly, per hectare, blue carbon ecosystems can store up to 10 times the carbon that green carbon ecosystems do. Secondly, blue carbon ecosystems can store it 40 times as fast. Thirdly, blue carbon is stored for thousands of years, whereas green carbon is released when trees die, which is a few decades at most. All these advantages are related to the fact that blue carbon ecosystems store a larger percentage of carbon in their soil, whereas green carbon ecosystems store more of it in their biomass of trees, plants and animals.
Given all these stupendous natural carbon sinks, why invent technology-based solutions to do the exact same task, ask critics of CCUS.
So, who’s right? Supporters of CCUS who believe that this is a superb green innovation, or critics who believe that it’s greenwashing?
The answer could be in a simple realization: These are false choices. There’s no choice between CCUS and re-engineering industrial processes. We need both. Likewise, there’s no choice between CCUS and nature-based carbon sequestration. We need both.
Guarding against a possible temptation to be satisfied only with CCUS, industrial players in every sector and every part of the world need to simultaneously re-engineer their processes. They need to innovate to embrace the circular economy in everything they do.
Similarly, while we invest in CCUS technology, we need to simultaneously take every possible step to safeguard our natural carbon sinks, from the tundra to the rainforests to the mangroves to the salt marshes.
If our house is dirty, we cannot clean it up by choosing to clean just the floor but not the ceiling. Or by just pruning the garden but not washing the dishes. We need all of the above.
Likewise, the climate crisis cannot be mitigated by selectively cherry-picking options. We need a multi-pronged assault on this multi-dimensional existential threat. CCUS can play a crucial role and it’s worth our while to invest and innovate in this emerging technology.
As is the case with any new technology, a number of challenges remain to be solved.
Firstly, we need to ensure that the captured carbon is used or stored safely. The last thing we want is an accident that releases an enormous amount of the stored carbon into the atmosphere at one go, causing a sudden spike and its resultant damage to ecosystems. Orca’s approach of crystallizing the carbon into solid mineral is currently the most promising solution to ensuring this. Gaseous or liquid carbon has a higher chance of being released inadvertently. Enhancing the mineralization process of carbon dioxide is an important area of research. Further advancements in this area will be crucial in powering the future of CCUS.
Secondly, the processes of capturing carbon, storing it, and converting it into biofuels or plastics, all require energy themselves. It would be a wasted opportunity if these processes cause more fossil fuels to be burned. Powering these activities through renewable energy is the ideal solution. Again, Orca provides a positive example as it’s powered by a geothermal power plant.
Thirdly, a common use of the captured carbon today is Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) which involves pumping carbon dioxide into oil fields to increase their oil output. This may well lead to increased usage of oil and therefore increased carbon emissions. As such, this can only be at best a stop-gap arrangement. Other ways to use or store the captured carbon will have to take precedence, sooner rather than later.
Fourthly, CCUS technologies are still on the expensive side. As of September 2021, Climeworks charges up to $1,200 per ton of CO2 it removes and stores. But the company is working towards getting the cost down to $200 to $300 per ton of CO2 by 2030. The critical target is to make it more affordable for carbon emitters to purchase carbon removal services from companies like Climeworks than for the same carbon emitters to pay fines and penalties for their emissions.
None of these challenges are insurmountable. Hurdles of this magnitude have existed in the vast majority of new technologies that have become mainstream in human history. In fact, these challenges should galvanize an entire generation to find ways to make CCUS work better. It already sucks, but we need to make it suck big time.
Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Energy &amp; Sustainability writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Vasanth Seshadri

Vasanth Seshadri

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