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How supercomputing power is helping with anti-pollution plans like city-wide car bans

A modeling tool developed at Barcelona’s Supercomputing Center is busy predicting levels of atmospheric pollutants in Spain, Europe, and now Mexico.

Caliope runs on Spain's most powerful supercomputer, the MareNostrum in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Caliope runs on Spain’s most powerful supercomputer, the MareNostrum in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

In about 80 percent of the cities around the world, air pollution exceeds safe levels, according to the World Health Organization, which also says about 92 percent of citizens live in these polluted areas. By far the biggest culprit for the air pollution is traffic.

Named after the Greek goddess of eloquence and the muse of epic poetry, the Calliope air-quality forecast system in Spain can determine levels of the main atmospheric pollutants, such as ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and airborne particles. It provides air-quality forecasts for Europe down to the square kilometer and by the hour.

To be able to achieve those levels of detail, it brings together several systems. These include the Hermes emission model, the WRF-ARW meteorological model, the BSC-Dream8b model, and the CMAQ chemical transport model, all running together on Spain’s most powerful supercomputer, the MareNostrum in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, whose Earth Sciences Department developed the modeling tool.

To generate a set of predictions covering 48 hours, Caliope needs to run the software on about 300 CPUs for six hours.

Using this computational power, researchers are able to alert authorities to upcoming peaks in pollution. Caliope’s predictions are not only crucial in supporting decisions about improving air quality but also help develop simulations to assess the impact on cities of certain measures, such as restricting traffic at times of high health risk.

But there is inevitably an element of uncertainty “because the atmosphere is chaotic and because predictions are not perfect”, says professor Carlos Pérez Garcia-Pando, head of the Atmospheric Composition at BSC Group.

So a big part of his job is to educate authorities on “the capacities of the model and its usefulness”, so that administrations can inform citizens and weigh up what measures to take. What measures might be the most effective is a different question.

At Smart City Expo World Congress, held in Barcelona last November, a representative from the Greater London Authority confessed that the congestion charge to limit the number of cars coming to the city hasn’t worked.

Paris and Madrid are also restricting traffic when a grey veil of dirty air blurs their skylines, because high levels of pollutants can cause asthma, allergies, and circulatory and respiratory diseases.

Pérez García-Pando, whose research focuses on understanding the physical and chemical processes controlling atmospheric aerosols, and evaluating their effects on climate, ocean biogeochemistry, air quality and health, is convinced that solutions need to be “technical and not ideological”.

Although he acknowledges that solutions inevitably come from process of a trial and error, he says precise data is crucial. This is why he and his team are working on improving the accuracy of Caliope’s predictions down to the street level in Barcelona.

The Catalan government is discussing using Caliope in the Catalan region, in collaboration with Catalan meteorology service Meteocat and the Barcelona City Council. The main goal is getting data on the impact of certain measures to see whether it is possible to make decisions about restricting traffic, similar to those taken in Paris and Madrid.

The European Commission recently sent final warnings to Spain to address repeated breaches of air pollution limits for nitrogen dioxide, especially in Madrid and Barcelona.

Meanwhile, the Environment Secretariat of the Government of Mexico City, SEDEMA, announced that it is adopted Caliope to predict air quality in the Mexican capital and evaluate measures to reduce pollution levels.

The system, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment, is also providing services to small private initiatives, and is available via web and an app for iPhone and Android.

It has the potential to improve its performance when BSC’s MareNostrum supercomputer increases its computational power 12-fold to achieve 13.7 petaflops during the first trimester of 2017.


New research into the carbonation of cement could improve its environmental reputation, Kathryn Allen reports.

The recent study, Substantial Global Carbon Uptake by Cement Carbonation, headed by Professor Dabo Guan of the University of East Anglia, UK, claims that cement materials form a significant carbon sink.

Suggesting that only limited attention has been paid to the natural carbonation of cement materials when considering their environmental impact, the team used data on these materials to calculate estimated carbon dioxide (C02) uptake from 1930–2013. These estimations, at both regional and global levels, considered the life of cement materials including demolition and secondary uses.

Published in Nature Geoscience, the study found the estimated amount of carbon captured, from 1930-2013, offset 43% of the C02 emissions released from the production of cement. However, this does not include carbon emissions from fossil fuels used during production. In the same period, an estimated 4.5 gigatonnes of carbon was removed from the atmosphere through the carbonation of cement materials. Carbonation occurs when the calcium components of cement-based materials react with C02 in the air to form calcium carbonate.

When asked about the relevance of the findings, the team said they were important in the mitigation of climate change. Addressing the negative environmental impact of cement materials, the team pointed to the volume of cement being produced, as well as that already in existence, and its potential to absorb C02. The researchers claim 76 billion tonnes of cement was produced globally between 1930 and 2013, with 4 billion tonnes produced, mostly in China, in 2013 alone.

The team describes the vast volume of cement available to carbonate C02 as an overlooked carbon sink. Responding to this claim, Dr Charles Fentiman, Director at Shire Green Roof Substrates, noted that by using the term carbon sink the team ‘seems to be trying for a positive spin to suggest that concrete could somehow offset the C02 generated by burning of fossil fuels for other purposes, such as heating, cars and so on.’ In reality, the net emissions from cement materials is simply lower than previously thought.

Considering the potential to improve the environmental reputation of these materials, Dr Alan Maries, Visiting Professor in Environmental Technology at the University of Greenwich, UK, claimed that while this research may do so, ‘the global production of concrete already exceeds that of all other man-made materials combined by more than an order of magnitude in volume, [therefore] I doubt whether it will affect its use very much. What it will do, however, is take the pressure off cement manufacturers as villains.’

Maries also pointed out that ‘the extent of sequestration of carbon cement-containing materials has been calculated from compositional data and exposure conditions (rather than actually measured), then mathematically modelled making various assumptions. There appears to have been little field measurement to support the calculations.’ However, considering the distinguished authors of the study and the reliable sources of information, Maries suggests that the conclusions drawn are well supported. A similar concern was raised by Dr Andrew Dunster, Principle Consultant at BRE, whose view that the study contains assumptions on quality and exposure of concrete and the speed of carbonation of demolished materials makes him think potential over-estimations of carbonation levels have been made.

The team behind the study has, however, acknowledged that data is lacking in terms of how carbonation is affected by the environment, for example, by coatings and coverings of cement materials. They quote studies that show coatings such as paint can reduce carbonation by up to 10–30% as well as studies that refute this claim.

Carbonation correction coefficients, which are intended to reflect the possible effects of coatings, were used in this study to, in theory, produce accurate results. However, the reliance on estimations in this study has not gone unnoticed.

The researchers hope their findings can be applied practically to future developments. Buildings made of cement materials can be designed to maximize carbonation and recycling and reuse of cement materials will prevent the absorbed carbon from being released back into the atmosphere. Discussing potential applications of the findings, Guan said, ‘We suggest that if carbon capture and storage technology were applied to cement process emissions, the produced cements might represent a source of negative C02 emissions. Policymakers might also investigate a way to increase the completeness and rate of carbonation of cement waste.’

The Search Is on for Pulling Carbon from the Air


Nations worldwide have agreed to limit carbon dioxide emissions in hopes of preventing global warming from surpassing 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. But countries will not manage to meet their goals at the rate they’re going. To limit warming, nations will also likely need to physically remove carbon from the atmosphere. And to do that, they will have to deploy “negative emissions technology”—techniques that scrub CO2 out of the air.

Can these techniques, such as covering farmland with crushed silica, work? Researchers acknowledge that they have yet to invent a truly cost-effective, scalable and sustainable technology that can remove the needed amount of carbon dioxide, but they maintain that the world should continue to look into the options. “Negative emissions technologies are coming into play because the math [on climate change] is so intense and unforgiving,” Katharine Mach, a senior research scientist at Stanford University. Last week at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, researchers presented several intriguing negative emissions strategies, as well as the drawbacks.

Enhanced Weathering with Agriculture

Earth’s surface naturally removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the chemical breakdown of rocks, but the phenomenon occurs extremely slowly. Scientists have proposed speeding up this process—which is called “weathering”—with man-made intervention. At the AGU conference, David Beerling, director of the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation, explained an agricultural technique that could quicken weathering and theoretically benefit crops as well.

In this method, farmers would apply finely crushed silicate rocks to their land. The roots of crops and fungus in the soil would accelerate the chemical and physical breakdown of the silicate rocks, and at the same time, carbon dioxide would be pulled from the air into the soil due to a chemical reaction that occurs as part of the weathering process. Grinding the silicate rocks into the size of pellets or sand grains would speed up natural weathering because it increases the amount of rock surface area available to react.

In addition to capturing carbon dioxide, the weathered rocks would release valuable nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium into the soil, which would help crops grow. The rocks would provide plants with silica as well, which Beerling says could help them build stronger cells to better fend off pests. “You could reduce fertilizer and pesticide use, which would reduce the cost to the farmers as well,” he explains. The enhanced weathering may also help with ocean acidification, according to Beerling.

Some of the carbon dioxide that’s captured would stay in the soil, but much of it would get flushed into the ocean as a compound called bicarbonate. Bicarbonate is basic, which means it could potentially balance out the increasingly acidic oceans.

This technique has major drawbacks, though. Researchers are skeptical of the method because it would cost a lot to grind and transport rocks, and both those steps would require a lot of energy, which could create more emissions. There are also possible impacts on the ecosystem to consider. “I’m concerned about [environmental] disturbance,” says Rob Jackson, professor of earth sciences at Stanford. “This would essentially be a massive mining operation.” Jackson does like the potential benefits, though—like fertilizing soils—in addition to removing carbon dioxide.

Carbon Capture with Ocean Thermal Energy

A different negative emissions technique would take advantage of the ocean’s vast temperature differences: ocean thermal energy conversion. In this approach, cold water is pumped from the ocean’s depth up to the warmer surface, and the temperature difference is used to generate electricity. Researchers have already demonstrated the technique on a small scale. Now Greg Rau at the University of California at Santa Cruz wants to combine it alongside a chemical reaction that would suck carbon dioxide from the air at the ocean’s surface and also generate hydrogen at the same time. The reaction would be helpful in several ways: it would capture CO2, and convert the thermal-generated electricity to an energy form—hydrogen—that could be transported by tanker to land from offshore. And like the enhanced weathering method, this approach would turn CO2 into bicarbonate that would sit down into the ocean, helping to counteract acidification. Rau has also proposed modifying the ocean thermal energy system to avoid any CO2 release that could happen when deep ocean water is pumped to the surface.

So far, Rau has only demonstrated his process in the lab. “His idea is very much in the conceptual stages,” says Chris Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford. “It has the potential to be something, but it’s still very much a niche solution at this point.”

Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage

One of the most developed negative emissions technologies is known as bio-energy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. The process entails growing trees and plants such as switchgrass that suck up carbon dioxide as they grow, burning them for energy in power plants, and then capturing and storing the carbon dioxide released during the burning. The capture and storage would be done by putting a filter in the smokestack, compressing the CO2, and then injecting it underground. BECCS generates energy and removes carbon from the air, which sounds appealing.

But scientists say BECCS would take up a massive amount of land. According to one estimate, BECCS would require about a third of the world’s arable land in order to capture enough carbon dioxide to keep the temperature from rising above two degrees. “I’m skeptical you can ever reach the necessary scale, because you’d need a huge amount of land to keep up with human emissions, and in a world where you have to feed more people than ever before,” says Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University. Plus, some are concerned that BECCS isn’t as effective as it appears—they say that if factors like land-use changes that result from the process are counted, BECCS may not reduce emissions as much as people think. For instance, if people cut down a tropical rainforest to burn its wood for BECCS, they would ultimately create more emissions—at least in the short-term. Or if BECCS takes over land previously used for purposes like agriculture, it could push people to deforest other land for their needs. Also, storing the carbon created by burning biomass requires a lot of energy, which costs money and can generate more emissions.

There are other negative emissions strategies as well—major ones that have gotten a lot of attention, such as directly capturing CO2 from the air with large panels coated with chemicals, and restoring forests so more trees can absorb more CO2. Lesser known ideas are out there, too, such as using wood to build homes and offices so that carbon dioxide is locked away in the walls of buildings. Yet none of the technologies so far have proven to be viable and cost-effective on the scale that’s needed.

Experts say more money and research should go into investigating a broad range of technologies and determining the best options—and they say the work needs to start happening now. In Chris Field’s AGU lecture, he said that if the world wants to use negative emissions technologies to significantly draw down carbon emissions by the latter part of this century, they need to start being deployed as early as 2020 or 2030. “All the negative emissions technologies, except for growing forests, are in the very early stages of development,” explains Field. “If these technologies are going to make a difference, they’re going to have to go from essentially nothing now to a massive scale in decades.”

SHRED Waste Grinders

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Making money from CO2







Artificial Photosynthesis Holds Promise Of Cleaner, Greener Environment

A hybrid system mimics the natural photosynthesis of plants to create a ‘green’ chemical factory that could produce beneficial products, researchers say. The system could help the environment by using CO2 that would otherwise add to atmospheric warming, they say.
(Photo : Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

A system of artificial photosynthesis can collect carbon dioxide before it escapes into our atmosphere as a greenhouse gas and convert it to useful products including drugs and alternative fuels, researchers say.

The breakthrough technology is a hybrid of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that can take in carbon dioxide and use solar energy to convert it into pharmaceutical drugs, biodegradable plastics or liquid fuels.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, developed the system.

The hybrid system mimics natural photosynthesis, the process used by plants to take energy from sunlight and synthesize carbohydrates out of water and carbon dioxide.

In the hybrid system, however, the CO2 and water are used to synthesis acetate, a basic building block for biosynthesis, the researchers explain.

“We believe our system is a revolutionary leap forward in the field of artificial photosynthesis,” says study leader Peidong Yang, a chemist at the Berkeley Lab. “Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground.”

In the system, an “artificial forest” of silicon and titanium oxide nanowires in light-capturing arrays are seeded with bacterial populations, creating a solar-powered environmental-friendly chemistry factory that can use sequestered CO2 as its fuel source, the researchers report in the journal Nano Letters.

The bacteria is Sporomusa ovate, chosen for its excellent catalyst capabilities, they said.

“S. ovata is a great carbon dioxide catalyst as it makes acetate, a versatile chemical intermediate that can be used to manufacture a diverse array of useful chemicals,” says chemist and biosynthesis expert Michelle Chang, who holds appointments at both the Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley.

Technologies are being developed to capture and store carbon dioxide before it adds to the growing problem of the warming atmosphere, but that storage presents its own environmental problems, the Berkeley scientists note.

Their artificial photosynthesis system would be one way to put that stored CO2 to work, using it to synthesize a number of “targeted, value-added chemical products,” says Christopher Chang, an expert in catalysts used in carbon-neutral energy conversions.

Any system for artificial photosynthesis must meet a dual challenge of light-capture efficiency levels and sufficient catalytic activity, the researchers point out.

Their nanowire array/bacteria hybrid system is capable of converting solar energy at an efficiency of around 0.38 percent under simulated sunlight, around the same level as that of a natural leaf, they say, while showing an impressive ability to generate the desired chemical molecules.

“We are currently working on our second-generation system which has a solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency of 3 percent,” Yang says. “Once we can reach a conversion efficiency of 10 percent in a cost-effective manner, the technology should be commercially viable.”

Japan: Report on the Social Experiment of Garbage Grinder Introduction

To fully assess the potential benefits and impacts of food waste disposers, Japan‘s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure & Transport—in cooperation with the Hokkaido government and Town of Utanobori—designated Utanobori as the subject area for a disposal field test conducted over four years, from 2000 through 2003. The study assessed the impacts of disposals on the sewage system, solid waste collection, local economy and environment, as well as the daily lives of town residents. Findings of the technical report on the study included that popularization of disposers would cause no changes to the environmental burden, and that the convenience benefits coupled with the cost of purchasing and installing a disposer provided an excellent value compared to any changes in administrative and disposal operation costs.

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