What is Water?s Role in a Carbon Neutral Future? A Summary of Findings from a Webinar Series.

from ABSTRACT The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs act commits significant resources for hydrogen, making it, moving it, storing it, and using it. This presentation will discuss hydrogen’s role in a deeply decarbonized economy, its potential role in difficult to abate sectors. As the focus of this Webinar is water’s role in a carbon neutral future, the presentation aims to put the water consumption for “Green”, “Pink”, and “Blue” hydrogen into context with other uses for water and energy production. It will focus primarily on Arizona as over the last fifteen years, the Southwest has experienced significant drought conditions, including Arizona. These conditions can lead to necessary changes in the state's water supply availability. However, the state has significant resources for producing hydrogen given the largest nuclear facility in the country and the only one not near a large body of water, blessed with a great solar resource and ample land. The state in a carbon neutral future will also have several use cases for that hydrogen. Furthermore, the state has good geology for storing the hydrogen. However, This presentation will address potential opportunities for water and wastewater systems to help balance renewable energy variability to the grid. Demand and supply-side options will be described, and practical barriers and possible solutions will be presented. ABSTRACT SPEAKER Cultivation of algae biomass is being pursued as a means for renewable production of various commodities, including fuels, polymers, fertilizers, and feeds, using non-arable land and non-freshwater resources. The especially attractive feature of algae, and the basis of much of the R&D investments, is the especially high productivity of algae biomass, which exceeds terrestrial plants by at least a factor of 3, coupled to favorable biochemical composition. However, DOE’s assessments of scale-up potential for all promising algae biofuel technologies to-date have resulted in Nth-plant model costs that exceed that of petroleum-derived products by factors of ~3-5. In light of this significant technoeconomic hurdle, new approaches for algae production are being pursued for incorporating ecosystem services to offset high costs for utilization of the biomass, including CO2 capture and remediation of compromised surface waters. In this presentation, we will discuss specific algae production technologies, including Open Raceway Ponds, attached ‘Turf Algae’ systems, and off-shore cultivation of macroalgae, and their respective connections to specific bioproducts, CO2 capture, and water resource management. Recent findings from researchers at Sandia suggest that cost effective, and in some cases, carbon negative solutions exist for algae industry scale-up, especially for generation of multiple products in a biorefinery context coupled to ecosystem services, such as water clean-up. ABSTRACT SPEAKER Construction is the largest driver of materials demand worldwide, and as a function of this high level of consumption, construction materials are a significant contributor to global environmental burdens. Concrete is the most consumed of these materials, with global production on the order of magnitude of 30 Gt annually. Concrete is composed of cement (a hydraulic binder), water, and aggregates. The broad availability of these resources, their low cost, and the desirable properties of concrete have driven its high demand. However, the chemical-derived and energy-derived CO2 emissions associated with producing cement, coupled with its high production levels to meet concrete demand is resulting in what is estimated as over 7% of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Beyond the noteworthy CO2 emissions from producing cement and concrete, water consumption for the production of concrete is extremely high when considering water as a constituent, water used in energy ABSTRACT SPEAKER Water-borne shipping is the leading transportation mode for U.S.-international trade by weight and value, and globally accounts for nearly 3% of all greenhouse gas emissions. However, decarbonizing the marine shipping sector has proved challenging for many reasons. Because it is already one of the most sustainable ways to ship freight, without more, emissions tied to marine shipping are only expected to increase as freight from more carbon-intense modes is routed to marine transport. Dr. Dundon will discuss the unique challenges of decarbonizing the North American shipping industry, the results of a recent study she led that focuses on decarbonizing the U.S. inland waterways, and the incentives, data, and, information still needed to support the transition to net-zero in the marine shipping industry. ABSTRACT SPEAKER Industrial mineral extraction requires water for a range of physical and chemical processes whereby metals can be produced from ore bodies. This presentation relates to ongoing research being carried out on applying life cycle analysis techniques to evaluate the environmental impact of a range of extraction processes in comparison with recycling and a transition to a circular economy. Accounting for water in the pricing of metals by source as well as mechanisms by which water can be conserved in the production process will also be analyzed. The presentation will finally lay out key environmental governance mechanisms which are being considered to improve the ways in which the mining and metal production sectors can improve water conservation as well as mitigating pollution to waterways. ABSTRACT SPEAKER Transitioning towards a carbon managed energy infrastructure is essential to mitigate climate change. Negative emission technologies, such as direct air CO2 capture (DACC), together with renewable energies will likely to be necessary components in the effort to slow, stop, reverse the flow of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere. We present an approach that combines DACC, long-term CO2 storage, and geothermal energy production: a climate-benign direct air capture, carbon utilization, and storage (DACCUS). ABSTRACT Land use and climatic factors may convert a land surface into a source or sink of atmospheric CO2. This presentation will provide several examples of using large number of field observations, environmental variables, and a variety of models to predict the fate of land surface under changing land use and climate. Our high-resolution predictions of soil organic carbon sequestration rates, bioenergy crop productivity, and loss of soil carbon from surface soils under future emission scenarios, is critical for policy implications. ABSTRACT President Biden has laid out a bold and ambitious goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions in the U.S. by 2050. The pathway to that target includes cutting total greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and eliminating them entirely from the Nation’s electricity sector by 2035. Investment in technology research, design, development, and deployment (RDD&D) will be required to achieve the president’s objectives, including investments in both carbon capture at point sources in addition to carbon dioxide removal approaches that target the accumulated pool of carbon in the atmosphere. Both will be required to achieve net-zero carbon emissions in time and they will require increased deployment in order to move down the cost curve. These efforts combined with effective policy will make these approaches economically viable.