The skies may have rained on this year’s big climate summit in Belém, Brazil, but engineers have invented plenty of exciting climate tech this year worth celebrating. Here are some of the year’s top IEEE Spectrum climate technology stories:
Richard Zare, Xiaowei Song et al.
Ammonia is a crucial ingredient for human civilization, powering agriculture, explosives, and next-generation cargo ships. Researchers have turned to classical laboratory chemistry and artificial intelligence in search of more efficient ammonia production. In January, freelance contributor Alfred Poor reported on a real-world demonstration of a passive technology that captures ammonia from the wind, no batteries included or needed.
Daniel Kunz
At IEEE Spectrum, we love any story that puts electrons to good use, and freelance contributor Rachel Berkowitz found a startup using piezoelectric catalysts to zap forever chemicals that contaminate our waterways. Most systems spend a lot of energy mechanically filtering out the harmful, long-lasting chemicals, but these researchers propose to use the kinetic energy of natural water flow to drive their system, along with their clever chemical harnessing of electrons. Take that mechanical engineers! And forever chemicals, of course.
Original photo: Emily Waltz
Thought that the only greenhouse gas you had to worry about was carbon dioxide? Beware: Some fluoride-related gases have heat-trapping abilities thousands of time greater than CO2. One in particular, SF6, happens to be the main insulator in high-voltage circuit breakers necessary all across our electrical grids. Energy editor Emily Waltz had the story on how to use supercritical CO2 gas instead, keeping toxic SF6—responsible for about 1 percent of global warming in 2018–out of our supply chain and atmosphere.
Chris Philpot
It’s one thing to prevent emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and quite another to trap carbon from the air. Longtime contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs dove into the question of just how much carbon society might remove from the atmosphere for The Scale Issue. The resulting infographic identifies places we can inject CO2 underground, how much people have managed to capture so far, and the scale of the remaining challenge.
Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters/Redux
It will take more than engineering to mine Greenland’s rare earth elements, which are valuable for many types of climate technology, wrote mining consultant and former deputy director of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Flemming Getreuer Christiansen in a guest article: It will take political clarity now lacking. Like so many other exciting engineering problems, politics are the limiting factor.
Nicole Millman; Original art: Daria Ustiugova
And finally, because IEEE Spectrum readers know we should balance the technical side of our lives with poetry, a meditation by fiber-optic engineer and poet Steven Searcy on the joys and electrons of summer.
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