Good morning all and welcome back to the Green New Spiel, the newsletter bringing you the latest stories and developments in the world of clean-tech, green energy and other climate related news.
We are back with some fantastic stories today! Remember to drop us a message if you want us to cover more of a particular sector / space 💡
This week on the Green New Spiel:
✈️ CO2 gives you wings
🍷 More than just fine wines - speeding up cork trees
🇮🇳 India’s energy transition gets a bump
🌎 The WEF’s summary on current state of nuclear power
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✈️ CO2 gives you wings
The startup Twelve has spent the last two years enhancing its first batch of sustainable aviation fuel in their Berkeley lab, leveraging their formula of carbon dioxide, electricity and water which they claim can cut the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90% compared with traditional petroleum-based Kerosene and can burn more cleanly than other existing SAFs .
The company has recently broken ground of a new commercial facility in Moses Lake, Washington, and is aiming for it to be up and running by 2024. The company aspires to be the first of its kind making alternative jet fuel from CO2 and grid power. Alaska Airlines, Microsoft and Shopify already have deals in place to purchase the fuel.
🍷 More than just fine wines - speeding up cork trees
Cork producing trees in Portugal have been used by Corticeira Amorim SA for over 150 years to produce stoppers for the wine and champagne industry. Typically however, cork trees take 25 years to grow before you can remove the bark. However, following a joint study with the University of Evora, Amorim are looking to reduce this to 10 years by using a drip irrigation technique. A similar approach is used for olive trees, but never for a forest-sized plantation such as those where cork is grown.
Speeding up the growth of cork trees has two additional benefits, not just for the cork farmers:
Accelerates the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere
Reduces the amount of trees that need to be cut down for their lumber: cork has slowly been replacing many lumber-derived products across a number of industries
🇮🇳 India’s energy transition gets a bump
The World Bank has approved $1.5 billion in financing to accelerate the development of India's low carbon energy sector. The funding will be used to promote low-carbon energy by scaling up renewable energy, developing green hydrogen, and stimulating climate finance for low-carbon energy investments.
The goal is to increase renewable energy supply, reduce costs, and improve power grid integration to achieve India's committed target of 500GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.
Despite India's low per capita energy consumption, the country's demand is projected to grow rapidly driven by economic and population expansion: it is estimated that India will be the world’s most populated country by 2064, with 1.7bn people.
🌎 The WEF’s summary on current state of nuclear power
The World Economic Forum published a primer on the state of global nuclear power which we would really encourage you all to read. Whilst too long to fully summarise for you today, we would like to leave you with two key takeaways:
Nuclear energy made up around 10% of global electricity generation in 2020, creating more electricity than all the wind and solar PV generation put together, and capacity is continuing to grow
Nuclear energy is the safest form of power generation, along with wind and solar, despite common misconceptions. The three main nuclear disasters (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima) were huge, dramatic events which have been ingrained into the debate, however over the lifetime of the technology, relatively fewer people have been harmed (see here for more data)
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Ciao,
Carlo and Rob