On February 19th, AirUCI faculty Steve Davis presented a Solutions That Scale seminar entitled "The Urban Challenge" that has been widely viewed on YouTube. Steve interviewed Martin Powell, who leads the Urban Development Practice for Siemens Corporation, about the challenges our big cities face over the next decade during the transition in how we generate and consume energy.
News
Here's the latest news from AirUCI — our events, our people, our science.
2021
Friday, February 19, 2021
AirUCI faculty Jack Brouwer is quoted in a San Francisco Chronicle article about using hydrogen technology to store surplus solar and wind energy that is currently being wasted. Jack notes that hydrogen is effective for longer storage because it doesn’t lose energy over time and can be stored underground easily and cheaply. “It’s the only known zero-emissions solution for enabling this massive and long-duration storage on the grid,” he says. “Eventually, we can’t keep installing more and more batteries and make it through the year.” Read the article
Thursday, February 4, 2021
A local Irvine neighborhood has been complaining for years about emissions from a nearby asphalt plant, and now they have data to back their claims. A UCI-based team working with residents was led by Dean Baker, former director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, and included AirUCI researchers. The UCI team used monitoring equipment to capture data about the types of emissions in the area and measured unsafe levels of certain chemical compounds, and they are emphasizing a need for long term monitoring to review the issue. Regulatory agencies are now conducting their own studies. Read the article
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
AirUCI faculty Jim Smith is quoted in a Mashable article on the effectiveness of double masks for the prevention of disease transmission in the era of COVID. Double-masking is largely about fit, he notes, and wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask (or a kn95 mask) helps to conform the underlying, filtering mask to your face, closing any gaps. A surgical mask alone, for example, often has big gaps at the edges, allowing for particles to easily enter and leave. "It leaks like a sieve, it leaks like crazy," said Jim. "Surgical masks need a way to seal better around your face. That's the whole point of double masking, in my view." Read the artocle
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
AirUCI faculty Jack Brouwer is quoted in an article on the potential of green hydrogen to generate power while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The article in Bloomberg Law discusses this as an important option in the transition from carbon-based power sources while dozens of major companies are signing on to back hydrogen as a source of clean energy. Jack has been advocating that the Biden administration consider repurposing existing—and in some cases abandoned—natural gas pipelines to transport hydrogen.
Making that transition would not be technically difficult because most natural gas pipelines are capable of carrying hydrogen, with minor tweaks. “This is what the federal government should be responsible for doing,” Jack said. “This is a shared infrastructure. It enables long-duration storage, it lets you transmit it across mountains—it’s got a lot of features that we like.” Read the article
Monday, February 1, 2021
AirUCI faculty Steve Davis is quoted in an article on Grist on the challenge of de-carbonizing certain industries. For shipping, flying, long-haul trucking, and manufacturing materials like steel and cement, among others, it's often not technologically or economically feasible for these companies to use cleaner sources of energy. Add to this the fact that they also emit large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, they are proving difficult to de-carbonize. However, Steve is proposing methods for capturing and sequestering the carbon they generate, as well as moving toward utilizing substitute ingredients in the manufacture of such products as steel and cement.
Changing these formulas is risky, since steel and cement underpin the built environment. “We don’t really want to play around with the recipe and then see a building fall down,” said Steve, adding that demonstration projects are key. Read the article
Friday, January 29, 2021
An article in Yahoo Finance quotes AirUCI faculty Jack Brouwer on the topic of repurposing natural gas pipelines for transporting hydrogen. With the Biden Administration's new emphasis on sustainable energy, these pipelines will be used less and less but could be converted to moving hydrogen for use in transportation fuels. However, mixing natural gas molecules with hydrogen molecules creates problems that Jack says can be overcome by replacing compressors and steel pipes, which may become brittle and crack over time when exposed to hydrogen.
“We must investigate this for every single pipe we put hydrogen into,” said Jack, “but it’s a phenomenon we can manage because it’s slow.” Problem pipes and compressors could be replaced over the course of years, he said. Or pipes could be protected with coatings applied from the inside by robotic devices called pigs that are currently used for pipeline inspection and maintenance. “Just put some spray-painting equipment on that same device, and there you go, right down the whole pipeline,” Jack said. Read the article
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
A January 27th article in UCI News details a recent study by AirUCI faculty Steve Davis and his team, notably postdoctoral scholar Chaopeng Hong, who have conducted the most thorough inventory yet of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and other land use practices. In their paper published in Nature, they document problems in cultivation and other agricultural practices, but also found many opportunities for mitigation around the world. Read the article
2020
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
Environment and Engineering News published an article on December 8th quoting a new paper from AirUCI faculty Steve Davis on the true costs of wildfires. Official death tolls count only those killed directly by wildfires, but exponentially more deaths are attributed to the smoke and air pollution they generate. The paper also counts tens of billions of dollars in economic disruption and health costs that are not included in official estimates of $24.7 billion in damage, which tallies only property that was destroyed or damaged.
The study represents an expansive way of calculating disaster costs that is essential for the public to grasp as climate change intensifies events such as wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding, notes Steve. "It's been a challenge for people arguing to take action on climate change," he said. "It's very easy to know the benefits of using fossil fuels, but it's a lot harder to tally up all of these diffuse costs that the climate changing is having. This is just one step in trying to do that." Read the article
Thursday, December 3, 2020
AirUCI faculty Steve Davis is among the most highly cited researchers in the world. Last week, Clarivate, an analytics company, announced its annual list of highly cited researchers. To make the list a researcher’s publications need to be in the top one percent of citations in a field in a given year. Twenty UCI researchers are on the list, and 10 are from the School of Physical Sciences, including Steve — many congratulations!
