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AbstractMany countries foresee the ability of offshore geologic settings to meet anticipated long-term national CO2 storage needs. Although the costs of operating offshore are significant, they may be offset by reduced issues of risk, property ownership and long-term liability. Continued interest in offshore CCS (e.g., EU, Australia, Japan, and U.S.A.) has focused on aspects familiar to onshore work: storage capacity, risk, monitoring, and containment assurance. Over the last decade, the Gulf Coast Carbon Center at the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology conducted numerous studies of storage potential along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and the northern Gulf of Mexico (GOM). Much of the work focused on regional geologic characterization, capacity assessment, and identification of potential risks and migration pathways. In general, capacity estimates indicate that the offshore storage resource has been under- appreciated as a national resource in the United States, but is receiving more attention. Current research efforts focus on the offshore northwestern GOM where the bulk of potential storage capacity resides. The work has also focused attention on the significant role of regional structural compartmentalization on storage capacity, pressure evolution, potential migration pathways, and long-term containment.

This case provides an overview of the electric power industry in the United States, including history, regulation, markets, competition, nuclear power, the environment, the economy, and new technologies.

Wide area monitoring (WAM), wide area protection (WAP), and wide area control (WAC) systems will enhance the future of smart grid operation in terms of reliability and security. In part I of this paper, a proposed architecture for a hybrid ac/dc smart grid hardware test-bed system was presented. Design details of the various components and their connectivity in the overall system architecture were identified. In part II of the paper, the focus is on the design of monitoring, control, and protection systems and their integrated real-time operation. Various control scenarios for system startup and continuous operation are examined. We have developed a control system based on wide area measurements. The advanced measurement system based on synchrophasors was also implemented using DAQs real-time synchronous data. The developed system features a wide variety of capabilities such as online system parameters calculation and online voltage stability monitoring. These are implemented as an experimental case to enhance wide area monitoring systems. Moreover, the protection system was designed inside of the real-time software environment to monitor the real-time wide area data, and make a comprehensive and reliable coordination for the whole system. Ideas related to the interaction of a dc microgrid involving sustainable energy sources with the main ac grid have been also implemented and presented. The implemented system is explicit and achievable in any research laboratory and for real-time real-world smart grid applications.

Abstract This paper provides the first estimates of China's global developmental finance institutions in general and China's policy bank lending to foreign governments for energy in particular. According to the China Global Energy Finance database, between 2000 and 2017, China Development Bank (CDB) and China Export-Import Bank (CHEXIM) provided $225.75 billion in overseas energy development finance. We find that: China's ‘policy banks’ and funds have doubled the availability of global development finance –and hold more assets than the major Western-backed MDBs operating in developing countries. With the onset of a new family of funds and multilateral development banks co-financed by China, China is poised to be the largest development lender in the world as Western-backed MDBs appear stagnated in their ability to increase their capital bases. China's global energy portfolio is heavily exposed to country, macroeconomic, climate, and social risks, however. To mitigate such risks and meet the broader sustainable development challenge for the 21st Century, China's development finance will need to shift the composition of its global energy lending in a significant manner.

The exploration of the Earth's oceans is aided by autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). AUVs in use today include floats and gliders; they can be deployed to profile salinity, temperature and pressure of the ocean at depths of up to 2 km. Both the floats and gliders typically control buoyancy by filling and deflating an external bladder with a hydraulic fluid delivered by an electrical pump. The operation time of an AUV is limited by energy storage. For floats, such as the Argo float, the operating duration is approximately 5 years with the capability to dive once every 10 days. For electric gliders, such as the deep G2 Slocum, the mission duration can be up to one year with lithium primary batteries. An energy storage system has been developed that can harvest energy from the temperature differences at various depths of the ocean. This system was demonstrated on an Argo style float and has been implemented in a thermal version of the Slocum glider. The energy harvesting system is based on a phase change material with a freeze thaw cycle that pressurizes hydraulic oil that is converted to electrical energy. The thermal Slocum glider does not use an electrical pump, but harvested thermal energy to control buoyancy. The goal for the thermal Slocum glider is for persistent ocean operation for a duration of up to 10 years. A thermal powered glider with an energy harvesting system as described can collect conductivity, temperature, and pressure data and deliver it to the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) Glider Data Monitoring System and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Telecommunications System (GTS). Feeding into operational modeling centers such as the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the U.S. Naval Observatory (NAVO), this data will enable advanced climate predictions over a timespan not currently achievable with present technology. Current testing of the thermal powered Slocum glider is to determine the durability of the technology and quantify the glider system design. Previous issues with this technology included energy storage system management and glider mechanical limitations. Our objective is to learn how to fly an energy harvesting thermal glider that interacts with the ocean environment efficiently. We would also like to establish the latitudinal range of operation. This thermal powered Slocum glider, dubbed Clark, after the famous explorer duo Lewis and Clark, has been deployed off of St. Thomas for flight dynamics and durability testing. The following paper will discuss the deployment and testing of the thermal powered Slocum glider. We will also discuss the advantages of ocean energy harvesting technology for oceanographic research.

Abstract The ecological footprint is a measure of the resources necessary to produce the goods that an individual or population consumes. It is also used as a measure of sustainability, though evidence suggests that it falls short. The assumptions behind footprint calculations have been extensively criticized; I present here further evidence that it fails to satisfy simple economic principles because the basic assumptions are contradicted by both theory and historical data. Specifically, I argue that the footprint arbitrarily assumes both zero greenhouse gas emissions, which may not be ex ante optimal, and national boundaries, which makes extrapolating from the average ecological footprint problematic. The footprint also cannot take into account intensive production, and so comparisons to biocapacity are erroneous. Using only the assumptions of the footprint then, one could argue that the Earth can sustain greatly increased production, though there are important limitations that the footprint cannot address, such as land degradation. Finally, the lack of correlation between land degradation and the ecological footprint obscures the effects of a larger sustainability problem. Better measures of sustainability would address these issues directly.

Currently, the world is facing two significant challenges: low-carbon development and overcapacity. Government departments must reexamine their development strategy of energy industry. Implementing environmental regulatory policies and technological innovation can help alleviate coal industry’s overcapacity, while sustainable development requires joint actions of governments, enterprises, and the market. Based on the evolutionary game theory, this study constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model of local government, power industry, and coal enterprise. Under the premise of bounded rationality, the evolution path of each player in the game under the market incentive environmental regulation is analyzed, and the influence of the change of parameters of each player on the result is numerically simulated. The study found that strengthening environmental regulation by local governments is an inevitable choice to promote the transformation and upgrading of coal industry and power industry. In addition, reducing law enforcement costs and technological innovation costs are the fundamental point of the coordinated development of the three parties. Technological innovation in the power industry will reduce the probability of coal companies’ choosing clean production strategies, while seeking low-cost clean production technology and financial support is the key to coal companies’ optimization of production capacity.

A balance between industrial pollution and economic growth becomes a major policy issue to attain a sustainable society in the world. To discuss the problem from economics and business perspectives, this study proposes a new use of DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) as a methodology for unified (operational and environmental) assessment. A unique feature of the proposed approach is that it separates outputs into desirable and undesirable categories. Such separation is important because energy industries usually produce both desirable and undesirable outputs. This study discusses how to unify the two types of outputs under natural and managerial disposability. The proposed DEA approach evaluates various organizations by the three efficiency measures such as OE (Operational Efficiency), UEN (Unified Efficiency under Natural disposability) and UENM (Unified Efficiency under Natural and Managerial disposability). An important feature of UENM is that it separates inputs into two categories and unifies them under the two disposability concepts in addition to the proposed output separation and unification. This study incorporates an amount of capital assets for technology innovation, as one of the two input group, into the measurement of UENM. Then, it compares UENM with the other two efficiency measures. This study is the first research effort in which DEA has an analytical capability to quantify the importance of investment on capital assets for technology innovation. To confirm the practicality of the proposed approach, this study applies the three efficiency measures to a data set regarding manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries of 47 prefectures in Japan. This study empirically confirms the validity of Porter hypothesis in Japanese manufacturing industries, so implying that environmental regulation has been effective for betterment on the performance of Japanese manufacturing industries. Another important finding is that the emission of greenhouse gases is a main source of unified inefficiency in the two groups of industries. Therefore, Japanese industries, examined in this study, need to make their efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution substances by investing in capital assets for technology innovation.

On December 22, 2008, a dike containing coal fly ash at the Tennessee Valley Authority Kingston Fossil Plant (TN, USA) failed, and within months, dredging operations began to remove ash-contaminated sediments. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in the bioaccumulation of metals in three mussel species during and after dredging operations. Mussels were caged for approximately 1 year during dredging and after, and then mussel condition index values and As, Cd, Cr, Pb, Ni, Se, Hg, U, Fe, Mg, Al, Sb, Ba, Be, Co, Cu, Mn, Mo, Ag, Sr, Tl, V, and Zn concentrations in soft tissue were determined via inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometery. Overall, the differences observed in metal bioaccumulation and mussel health suggest that mussels in the immediate downstream area of the dredging site may have been impacted, as evidenced by a significant decrease in mussel condition index values, but that this impact did not result in increased tissue concentrations of metals.