UK's largest coal user to co-fire 10% biomass, save 3 million tons of CO2
British power firm Drax, the country's single biggest source of CO2 emissions, announced today that profits more than doubled in 2006 and that it would free 67 million pounds (US$130 million) of investment to cut greenhouse gases.
The investment aims to help Drax's coal-fired power station in northern England - western Europe's biggest - to burn 10 percent biomass by 2009. It follows 100 million pounds of investment, announced in December, to upgrade the plant's six turbines.
The co-firing of biomass will save over three million tonnes of CO2 emissions each year, equalling the output of around 700 wind turbines, says Chief Executive Dorothy Thompson.
When the group earlier said it would consider using untested 'carbon capture and storage' technologies to sequester carbon underground, it faced protests by hundreds of environmental activists at its Yorkshire plant. Now it has decided to give up on the idea and use renewable and carbon-neutral biomass fuels instead.
Biomass for co-firing is obtained either from specially grown energy crops or from agro-forestry residues and is already used in small quantities at coal plants across Europe (database of current co-firing projects, at the IEA Bioenergy Task 32 on Combustion and Cofiring). Drax believes that if every plant in the UK were to use a similar amount of biomass, 21.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide would be saved each year.
European researchers are currently assessing the potential to source biomass feedstocks from the tropics and subtropics, where they can be grown competitively and sustainably:
bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: climate change :: co-firing :: coal :: energy crops :: biomass :: bioenergy ::
A recent project, undertaken by a consortium of 15 academic institutions, amongst them the leading french agency CIRAD, concluded that many countries both in Africa and Latin America can host dedicated energy plantations, because of their large potential for the sustainable production of biomass.
It was estimated that Brazil, would have around 46 million hectares available in 2050: more precisely, the zones concerned are the Brazilian states of Tocantins, Maranhão and Piaui, where the conditions are most suitable for forest plantations.
Central African countries equally had around 46 million hectares available for the sustainable production of biomass. The zones concerned are southern Congo, the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, northern and eastern Angola, western Zambia, western and southern Tanzania, northern Mozambique and the western and central parts of the Central African Republic.
These zones have more than 1000 mm of rainfall a year over more than a third of their area, and a population density of fewer than 80 inhabitants/km2. The pressure on this land is thus extremely low (earlier post).
These sustainably grown biomass fuels can be transported and exported efficiently to world markets (earlier post) where they are competitve with fossil fuels. In fact, over the medium to longer term, solid biomass for co-firing is predicted to be the most economic of all fuels and energy options (earlier post).
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The investment aims to help Drax's coal-fired power station in northern England - western Europe's biggest - to burn 10 percent biomass by 2009. It follows 100 million pounds of investment, announced in December, to upgrade the plant's six turbines.
The co-firing of biomass will save over three million tonnes of CO2 emissions each year, equalling the output of around 700 wind turbines, says Chief Executive Dorothy Thompson.
When the group earlier said it would consider using untested 'carbon capture and storage' technologies to sequester carbon underground, it faced protests by hundreds of environmental activists at its Yorkshire plant. Now it has decided to give up on the idea and use renewable and carbon-neutral biomass fuels instead.
Biomass for co-firing is obtained either from specially grown energy crops or from agro-forestry residues and is already used in small quantities at coal plants across Europe (database of current co-firing projects, at the IEA Bioenergy Task 32 on Combustion and Cofiring). Drax believes that if every plant in the UK were to use a similar amount of biomass, 21.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide would be saved each year.
European researchers are currently assessing the potential to source biomass feedstocks from the tropics and subtropics, where they can be grown competitively and sustainably:
bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: climate change :: co-firing :: coal :: energy crops :: biomass :: bioenergy ::
A recent project, undertaken by a consortium of 15 academic institutions, amongst them the leading french agency CIRAD, concluded that many countries both in Africa and Latin America can host dedicated energy plantations, because of their large potential for the sustainable production of biomass.
It was estimated that Brazil, would have around 46 million hectares available in 2050: more precisely, the zones concerned are the Brazilian states of Tocantins, Maranhão and Piaui, where the conditions are most suitable for forest plantations.
Central African countries equally had around 46 million hectares available for the sustainable production of biomass. The zones concerned are southern Congo, the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, northern and eastern Angola, western Zambia, western and southern Tanzania, northern Mozambique and the western and central parts of the Central African Republic.
These zones have more than 1000 mm of rainfall a year over more than a third of their area, and a population density of fewer than 80 inhabitants/km2. The pressure on this land is thus extremely low (earlier post).
These sustainably grown biomass fuels can be transported and exported efficiently to world markets (earlier post) where they are competitve with fossil fuels. In fact, over the medium to longer term, solid biomass for co-firing is predicted to be the most economic of all fuels and energy options (earlier post).
Article continues
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Plant size morphs dramatically as scientists tinker with outer layer
Researchers from the Plant Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have now announced another important contribution to the field of fundamental plant biology by discovering which part of a plant both drives and curbs growth. The question has been occupying scientists for over a century. Is the mechanism to be found in a shoot's outer waxy layer? Its inner layer studded with chloroplasts? Or the vascular system that moves nutrients and water?
In the March 8 issue of the journal Nature the scientists provide the answer. They succeeded in making tiny plants big and big plants tiny by controlling growth signals emanating from the plant's outer layer, its epidermis (see picture, click to enlarge).
These findings could eventually be used by agronomists to manipulate plant growth pathways to maximize crop yield, or even reduce leaf size or leaf angle in plants that need to be spaced closely together, says the study's lead author, Joanne Chory, Ph.D., professor and director of the Plant Biology Laboratory and investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Chory and her laboratory team have spent years helping to define how a plant "knows" when to grow and when to stop – which is a "big question in developmental biology," she says. For their experiments, they rely on the model system Arabidopsis thaliana, a small plant related to cabbage and mustard whose genome has been decoded. Over the years, the researchers have built up a whole tool kit, learning how to add and subtract genes in order to determine form and function. Among their discoveries is a class of dwarf plants whose size is about one-tenth the size of a single leaf of the full-sized plant:
biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: biotechnology :: plant biology :: plant physiology :: cellulose ethanol ::
Over the past decade, Chory's laboratory and others have shown that these dwarf plants are defective in making or responding to a steroid hormone called brassinolide. Among the genes identified was the plant steroid receptor, BRI1 ("bry-one") that is activated by the steroid. The dwarfed Arabidopsis doesn't express BRI1 at all, unlike normal Arabidopsis, which expresses BRI1 on both the outer waxy, protective epidermis (covering the whole leaf and shoot), and the inner sub-epidermal layer, which contains the chloroplasts that conduct photosynthesis.
In the current study, first author Sigal Savaldi-Goldstein, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Plant Biology Laboratory, and Charles Peto, an electron microscopy specialist in the Laboratory of Neuronal Structure and Function, conducted a series of experiments that addressed an old debated question: what tissues of the leaf drive or restrict growth? The answer was simple: the epidermis is in control.
They found that when they drive the expression of the BRI1 receptor in the epidermis of a dwarf Arabidopsis, while leaving the sub-epidermal layer as it was (without BRI1 receptors), the tiny plant morphed into a full-sized plant. In the second set of experiments, they used an enzyme to break down the steroid hormones in the epidermis, and found that a normal sized plant shrunk into a dwarf. "These are simple experiments, but it took 10 years of work in order for us to be able to ask this question," Chory says.
"A second remarkable finding from the study is that "cells in the outer layer talk to the cells in the inner layers, telling them when to grow or to stop growing. This communication is very important to the life of a plant, which can't move and so must have a coordinated system to respond to a changing environment," explains Savaldi-Goldstein.
More information:
Sigal Savaldi-Goldstein, Charles Peto and Joanne Chory, "The epidermis both drives and restricts plant shoot growth", [*abstract], Nature, 446, 199-202 (8 March 2007).
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posted by Biopact team at 2:24 PM 0 comments links to this post