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  The world’s nations agreed at the UN’s Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow last November to “accelerate efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal”. Certain counties watered down the desired wording to this.  New mining projects are being planned in China, India, Australia, Russia and  South Africa . The same countries that wanted the wording changed.  Coal is the most polluting of all the fossil fuels. Almost half the 1,000 companies assessed  in a recent report are still developing new coal assets, and just 27 companies have announced coal exit dates consistent with international climate targets.  The report found 476GW of new coal-fired power capacity is still in the pipeline worldwide. This is equivalent to hundreds of new power stations being built.  China  is responsible for 60% of all the planned new capacity.  The US, which has the world’s third-largest number of coal plants, has not set a national end date for its coal power, and doesn't appear to want to set one.

I t takes more than five times the electricity to heat a home with hydrogen than with a heat pump.  Hydrogen has higher energy systems costs than heat pumps or solar energy because its production requires a lot of electricity. These were the basic findings of a report published in Joule this week.    Low-carbon and zero-carbon hydrogen has been promoted by gas and heating industry representatives as a key solution to replace especially fossil gas in the distribution grid.  It has received significant media attention over the last 2–3 years and featured in some of the many national hydrogen strategies launched recently.  An important question is whether the available evidence supports a case for heating homes with hydrogen. The report    analysed 32 independent studies – those that weren’t carried out by or on behalf of the energy industry – and found no evidence supporting widespread hydrogen use for heating.  The critical issue is the inefficiency of hydrogen production and consumptio

  A Turkish football club has found a way to cut its energy costs and make money from electricity while going green. The roof of the stadium they use is covered in solar panels. They  produce up to  4.2 megawatts from 10,404 panels on the roof of the Ali Sami Yen Spor Kompleksi Stadium in  Istanbul .  The  solar energy  produced from the panels provides between 63 to 65 per cent of the stadium’s electricity use, with the rest coming from the municipal electricity provider. The excess energy is sold to homes in the local area.  Galatasaray football club set a world record in March for the amount of megawatts produced by the stadium’s solar panels, earning it a place in the Guinness World Records.  The club thought it would take a few years for them to start seeing any savings after the  solar panel  system was installed on the 52,000 plus capacity stadium. But the increased price of energy, along with an official inflation rate that is now more than 80 per cent, meant the club started s

  An international team of researchers has found acidity levels increasing three to four times faster than ocean waters elsewhere and a strong correlation between the accelerated rate of melting ice in the region and the rate of ocean acidification.   The team from University of Delaware also identified a strong correlation between the accelerated rate of melting ice in the region and the rate of ocean acidification, a perilous combination that threatens the survival of plants, shellfish, coral reefs and other marine life and biological processes throughout the planet's ecosystem. The  Arctic sea ice in this region will no longer survive the increasingly warm summer seasons. As a result of this sea-ice retreat each summer, the ocean's chemistry will grow more acidic, with no persistent ice cover to slow or otherwise mitigate the advance.

 Sabotage or not the Nord Stream leak has put an enormous amount of Methane Gas into the atmosphere. The amounts can only be speculated because nothing recorded the event. However from looking at typical flow rates and the size the the pipeline it is roughly estimated to be equivalent to the annual carbon emissions from two million cars. Overnight on 26 September, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline’s operators saw a sudden pressure drop, from 105 bar to just 7 bar. Soon after, a 1-kilometre-wide area of the Baltic Sea’s surface was bubbling with the escaping gas. Nord Stream 1 rapidly followed suit. This event, accounts for around 0.14% of the global annual methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, to put the amount in context. In the coming days and weeks, with satellite data, scientists will continue to try to understand how much methane has been released as a result of the leaks. Seismologists already are suggesting that the shockwaves were consistent with the use of high explosives.

  Nitriles as efficient electrolyte additives are widely used in high-voltage lithium-ion batteries. However, their working mechanisms are still mysterious, especially in practical high-voltage LiCoO2 pouch lithium-ion batteries. The LiCoO2/graphite pouch cells with the HTCN additive electrolyte possess superior cycling performance, 90% retention of the initial capacity after 800 cycles at 25 °C, and 72% retention after 500 cycles at 45 °C, which is feasible for practical application.  A group of electrochemists from Tsinghua University have used advanced microscopy techniques to take a closer look at what happens at the molecular scale and identified what is going on, opening up new avenues for even further battery performance improvements. Photo ​Tang, C., Chen, Y., Zhang, Z. et al. Stable cycling of practical high-voltage LiCoO2 pouch cell via electrolyte modification. Nano Res. (2022)