Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

water tunnels

As tunneling technology continues to advance, this article says that transportation tunnels get all the press but water tunnels are also becoming much more numerous and common.

Most of the attention in other cities may go to the multibillion-dollar transportation tunnel projects, like the Second Avenue Subway in New York City or the Gateway tunnel between New York and New Jersey. But the sheer number of water tunnels being built or planned exceeds the sexier transportation tunnels. “There are more water tunnels than transportation tunnels,” says Mike Schultz, technical strategy leader for the geotechnical-structural group at CDM Smith.

Egger at Black & Veatch estimates there are about 200 miles of water tunneling in various stages of planning and design in North America, 50 miles of which directly involve Black & Veatch. Jacobs alone is involved in the development of  more 150 miles of water, wastewater and CSO tunnels around the world.

Technology has reduced the price of tunnels enough so that mid-size cities like Fort Wayne and Alexandria, Va., can use a tunnel option to handle their excess water. Technology also has made tunneling a viable option in some cities with soft ground, such as Houston, which couldn’t have considered building tunnels just a decade ago.

Full disclosure: This is the business I am in and I have a business relationship with one of the firms above. Well, not the tunneling business specifically but the water management business. I would much rather see water managed using green infrastructure and ecosystem-based solutions as much as possible, but a backbone of hard infrastructure certainly has its place in urban areas.

“coal plant chicken”

No, coal plant chicken is not grilling chicken using waste heat from a coal plant, although that is not a terrible idea. It’s the idea that coal-fired utilities are competing for slices of a shrinking pie, and they are going to blink out of existence one by one.

Zindler, BNEF’s head of Americas, said about half of all U.S. coal plants lose money on any given day as cheap gas, along with wind and solar farms, push electricity prices lower. Meanwhile, demand for power is flat. The result, Zindler said, is coal plants wrestle to outlast one another, fighting for a bigger piece of the pie. “Every day across multiple regional transmission operating systems, we see power plants staring across at each other and saying ‘Who is going to go first?’ ” Zindler said. “It’s only a matter of time as these plants try to outlast each other.”

Elsewhere in the same article, coal-fired utility executives say this is not true because coal and nuclear are currently the only two cost-effective ways to generate a constant base load. I don’t have the expertise to agree or disagree, but I know that nuclear technology is advancing, and battery technology which can be used to smooth out intermittent loads is also advancing.

farm robots

Farm machinery is getting more high-tech and more automated all the time, due in part ot climate change.

Technological improvements from boosting crop yields to data-tracking systems will be required in coming decades as companies adapt to shifts in weather patterns, according to BMI Research. That may increasingly push agribusiness companies, especially grain handlers and input firms, into acquiring agritech startups.

“The rise of agtech use and ‘precision agriculture’ will benefit or disrupt a number of operations and businesses in the process,” the company said in a report Tuesday.

Farmers and businesses around the world are poised to feel the impact of climate change as supplies get disrupted and farmland and yields come under pressure. At the same time, agriculture, one of the largest sources of gas emissions, will face action from regulators targeting livestock and soil management.

 

more on small modular nuclear reactors

From Bloomberg:

The type of reactor NuScale is targeting would be cheaper to build than current designs and more capable of operating intermittently to back up wind and solar power, Chris Gadomski, a BNEF analyst, said Tuesday on a panel at the summit. NuScale is aiming for commercial operations in 2026 for a plant in Utah comprised of a dozen 50-megawatt reactors. It is the only company with small-reactor design certification pending before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

X-Prize for turning carbon emissions into useful products

There are a number of ideas for turning carbon dioxide into concrete, carbon nanotubes, or other useful products:

Four teams are working on ways to use carbon dioxide in concrete: CarbonCure Technologies Inc. of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; Carbon Upcycling UCLA, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles; Montreal-based Carbicrete; and Carbon Capture Machine Ltd. of Aberdeen, Scotland…

Another four teams are making fuel, plastics or chemical feedstocks: India-based Breathe; C4X of Suzhou, China; CERT, from the University of Toronto; and Huntington Beach, California-based Newlight Technologies.

Two teams are making carbon nanotubes and nanoparticles, which are used in a broad range of products: C2CNT of Ashburn, Virginia, and Carbon Upcycling Technologies of Calgary.

Exxon vs. climate

Exxon is getting in trouble in Massachusetts:

Exxon Mobil Corp. suffered another legal defeat in its attempt to dodge state investigations into whether the company’s public comments about climate change misled investors for years.

Massachusetts’ top court on Friday affirmed a judge’s decision that Exxon must hand over documents dating back to 1976 to Attorney General Maura Healey. The court also agreed that Exxon’s 300 Mobil-branded franchise service stations in the state give Healey jurisdiction over the Texas-based company.

Weighing in on the overall environmental threat at the heart of the dispute, the court wrote that Healey’s investigation concerns climate change “caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions — a distinctly modern threat that grows more serious with time, and the effects of which are already being felt in Massachusetts.”

test tube dog food

It makes sense that dog food would be the first serious commercial application of synthetic meat.

I can’t help thinking of the yeast vats in Isaac Asimov’s 1953 Caves of Steel. That idea has almost literally come true.

Bethencourt compares his company’s production of “clean” protein to that of sake—imagine giant fermentation tanks—right down to using the same ingredient to fuel its protein growth. Koji, a fungus, is the Japanese version of baker’s yeast. It grows rapidly inside tanks, along with sugar and nutrients, at the right balmy temperature. The result is a plant-based protein with a close match to eggs or animal-based meat. Because koji is widely consumed by humans, it already has a GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) designation. Wild Earth’s supply chain is simple—it uses only a handful of ingredients—and easily traceable.

space hotel opening by 2022?

This article is about a space hotel possibly opening in 2022. Sounds cool but apparently ideas like this have come and gone in the past, with no space hotels actually materializing. Still, seems like a cool idea – if going into space is on your bucket list but being an astronaut is not a realistic career choice, this starts to seem like something within the realm of possibility in a typical person’s lifetime. Right now the projected price is, well, astronomical, but you can imagine that coming down in future decades as prices for new technology tend to do.

Then again, I’m watching The Expanse right now and maybe near-future space travel doesn’t look all that fun.