Geographers researching the development of nuclear power have shifted emphasis from commercialization, cost, risk, public acceptance, and power plant siting in the 1950s through the early 1980s to reactor decommissioning and radioactive waste disposal since then. With nuclear power development on hold in most countries, attention has also been given to nuclear weapons facilities and weapons proliferation in an increasingly dangerous world. (more…)
Nuclear fission and fusion Research and Development continues to account for nearly half of the total spending by IEA countries, al ...
Sir Arthur Eddington’s general address on subatomic energy at the 1930 World Power Conference in Berlin stirred the imagination of ...
Although technology change (usually involving an improvement in energy efficiency) is not inherently a geographic process, it does ...
World energy use has increased steadily over the past several decades. Much of the growth in world energy consumption has been ...
Renewable energy sources cannot run out and causes so little damage to the environment that its use does not need to be restric ...
Although it is significant that many of the above four imperatives are qualitative, not quantitative, such new efforts have begun to add an elevated level of urgency to corporate environmental strategy. Whereas the Bhopal and Valdez tragedies may have precipitated the birth of Corporate Environmental Strategy, global environmental concerns, such as water shortages in China, the energy crisis and electricity grid problems in the northeastern United States, and especially the complexities surrounding the economic impacts and costs of climate change, have begun to add a new turn-of the-century urgency to the debates over Corporate Environmental Strategy. (more…)
Corporate environmental strategy (CES) involves the tools, management programs, processes, and product development choices that all ...
In the pursuit of superior cars, electronic products, and computing, several leading multinational corporations began in the last q ...
There are several options that, ultimately, must be integrated when attempting to realize a change in corporate culture: the legal ...
In this new century, there is considerable pressure on the top six automakers to reduce their environmental and ecological footprin ...
As energy prices increase, industries are more and more aware that energy is an expensive commodity that has to be used effic ...
Reductions in carbon intensity, C/E, the carbon emitted per unit of energy generated, reflect the degree to which societies decarbonize their energy sources. The long-term trend has been a shift from coal to oil to natural gas––hydrocarbons with decreasing C/H ratios emitting progressively less CO2 per joule. However, the increasing use of clean low-carbon fuels is not sustainable without somehow disposing of excess carbon because it opposes the trend in the abundance of fossil fuels, with coal resources being the most abundant followed by oil and gas. (more…)
The global cycling of carbon involves both biological and physical processes. Only the biological components are discussed here. Pl ...
The flux of carbon among terrestrial, aquatic, and atmospheric pools is at least partially controlled by photosynthetic process ...
It is of interest to examine potential sources of greenhouse gases sources or atmospheric CO2 by analysis of the global distrib ...
Climate change caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect is one of the most significant global environmental issues. Increased emiss ...
The global carbon cycle involves both biological and physical processes. Only the biological components are discussed here. Pla ...
Although underground coal mines operations are not as visible as surface mining, their overall environmental impact can be greater than that of the typical surface mine. A key environmental problem is subsidence. Underground mines are large cavities in the rock, and depending on the strength of the intervening strata, the depth of the mine, and the type of mining and roof support, the rock walls can fail, causing cracks and land collapse at the surface. Typically, coal seams at depths greater than about 200 feet are extracted by underground mining methods rather than by surface mining, with the exact depth principally based on the relative amount of coal and overburden. However, before improved technology made surface mining so affordable, the trade-off occurred at much shallower depths; some abandoned underground mines are only 35 feet below the land surface. (more…)
Currently, site reclamation is planned for during the permitting process and is incorporated into the mining operation. However, th ...
Historically, mining companies have extracted the earth’s resources wherever economics made it feasible, secure in their knowledge ...
Before the passage of regulations dictating mined land reclamation and mine water discharge standards, streams and rivers down-grad ...
Anyone who wants to save money on gas should be interested in the process of underground coal gasification, or UCG. It is an al ...
Coal is an important energy source and energy consumption in United States as well as worldwide. It will remain so for many yea ...
Addressing global warming, however, is a highly complex and daunting endeavor. Many climate experts have urged the world to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere around 450 to 550 parts per million (ppm)—that is, no more than 450 to 550 units of greenhouse gases for every million units of air in the earth’s atmosphere. This approach, experts say, could keep average global temperatures at no more than 3.6° Fahrenheit (2° Celsius) above preindustrial levels, which could avoid some of the worst, irreversible consequences of climate change. (more…)
Although some scientists and critics still dispute that human caused greenhouse gases are causing climate change, the majority of s ...
Climate change caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect is one of the most significant global environmental issues. Increased emiss ...
Options for dealing with the threats of climate change include both adaptation to inevitable changes and mitigation, or lessening, ...
Scientists study Earth’s climate not just from observation but also from a theoretical perspective. Modern-day climate models succe ...
Earth’s climate is a complex system of interacting natural components. These components include the atmosphere, the ocean, and the ...
There are various and somewhat complementary reasons to foster the growth of renewable energy sources in Europe. A major incentive for renewable energy sources policies in the past two decades has been to reduce the environmental impact of energy use both locally (e.g., pollutant emission reduction) and globally (e.g., greenhouse gas and carbon emissions reduction). In some countries, concerns about the safety of nuclear power generation have motivated the search for renewable energy sources. Another motivation for replacing foreign fossil and nuclear fuels with domestic renewable energy sources relates to security issues and Europe’s growing dependency on foreign energy sources. (more…)
In Europe, modern renewable energy sources technologies were explored thoroughly for the first time after the oil embargo/ price cr ...
Renewable energy sources cannot run out and causes so little damage to the environment that its use does not need to be restric ...
The development of the ‘‘new’’ wind and solar technologies is of great importance for the future contribution of RESs to energy sup ...
World energy use has increased steadily over the past several decades. Much of the growth in world energy consumption has been ...
Over the last decade, the number of countries researching the potential of biomass and bioenergy for energy services rose rapid ...
Fuel cell vehicles are being developed because they promise to meet the requirements expected of automobiles in a market increasingly constrained by environmental and resource limitations. Air pollution and oil dependence have been persistent challenges for vehicles powered by petroleum fuels (gasoline and diesel). Global warming presents a new challenge in the need to limit carbon dioxide (CO) emissions from fossil fuel combustion. (more…)
There are different types of vehicle propulsion systems and the transportation fuels that have been studied for their potential ...
The internal combustion engine has dominated the car and light-truck market for over 100 years. Although remarkable improvement ...
The commercialization prospects for fuel cell vehicles depend not only on their performance and cost, but also on how well th ...
A fuel cell is an electrochemical device that directly converts a fuel to electricity by means of reactions on the surfaces of ...
The leading automotive brands are being focused to produce electric vehicles because they believe they represent a harmony to the e ...
The spark-ignition and compression-ignition engine and internal combustion engines technologies that are currently employed in motor vehicles were developed more than 100 years ago. These conventional vehicle technologies are fueled by petroleum-derived gasoline and diesel fuels (the socalled conventional fuels). Over the past 100 years, the conventional technologies have been dramatically improved, reducing cost and increasing performance. (more…)
ISO document 14040 identifies four areas for using life cycle analysis (LCA) results: (1) identifying opportunities to improve ...
The fuel cycle for a given transportation fuel includes the following processes: energy feedstock (or primary energy) product ...
There are different types of vehicle propulsion systems and the transportation fuels that have been studied for their potential ...
Because different studies have different system boundaries and parametric assumptions, the studies described in Section 7 resulted ...
For processes that produce multiple products, energy and emission burdens have to be allocated to individual products. ISO 14040 ad ...
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The operations on-board an oil tanker transportation are radically different from those on other types of ships, primarily due to the physical properties of the cargo. The entire cargo operations are highly automated and proceed with no one on-board the ship or shore seeing the cargo physically. Even minor misunderstanding of an order or a miscalculation can cause a major spill in pristine locations. By the same token, a tanker crewed by properly trained seafarers under good management could very well be the safest ship afloat. Although most tanker voyages today are completed safely and go unreported, even a minor tanker pollution accident often gets widespread attention from the media, and the image of a polluted beach laden with dead flora and fauna is a sad and telling picture. (more…)
Tanker transportation and oil transport functions as an important link to facilitate the flow of oil and products from their li ...
Oil tankers can be classified into two broad categories: crude oil tankers and product tankers. Crude oil tankers are typically ...
Most major oil and gas firms engage in both upstream (i.e., hydrocarbon exploration and production) and downstream (i.e., hydro ...
Gasoline is used mainly by cars, motorcycles, and light trucks; diesel is used mainly by heavier trucks, buses, and trains. Togethe ...
The EU has a set of common rules on industries environmental permissions for industrial installations, which extend also to cover f ...
The age of industrialization came into full force through the modern exploration and use of fossil fuels. As one of its most striking phenomena, the rapid expansion of cities throughout the late 19th and the 20th centuries was a direct outcome of the fossil fuel energy economy as well. (more…)
The aim is to work with cities in advancing renewable energy technologies and systems and to help promote the renewable energy indu ...
The Solar City approach originally emerged from a new generation of International Energy Agency (IEA) energy research and developme ...
In the absence of useful and established patterns of practice, a search is under way for new means of reconciling local government’ ...
As a reaction to these historical perspectives, the building industry has witnessed a certain rise in design responses to regio ...
Climate change caused by the enhanced greenhouse effect is one of the most significant global environmental issues. Increased emiss ...