Tag: Research

University of Central Florida Researchers Unveil Breakthrough in Greenhouse Gas Recycling

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Laurene Tetard and Richard Blair
UCF researchers Richard Blair (left) and Laurene Tetard (right) are long-time collaborators and have developed new methods to produce energy and materials from the harmful greenhouse gas, methane.

In a significant step toward sustainable energy, researchers from the University of Central Florida (UCF) have innovated methods to convert the potent greenhouse gas, methane, into green energy and advanced materials.

Methane, with an impact 28 times greater than carbon dioxide over a century, is a notable contributor to global warming. Its emissions predominantly arise from energy sectors, agriculture, and landfills. Now, UCF’s groundbreaking methods might turn this environmental challenge into an opportunity, as they utilize methane for producing green energy and crafting high-performance materials for smart devices, solar cells, and biotech applications.

Behind these inventions are UFC researchers, nanotechnologist Laurene Tetard and catalysis specialist Richard Blair. Tetard is an associate professor and associate chair of UCF’s Department of Physics. He is also a researcher with the NanoScience Technology Center. Blair is a research professor at UCF’s Florida Space Institute. The two have been collaborating on research projects for the past decade.

Their pioneering technique produces hydrogen from methane without carbon gas emission. Utilizing visible light sources, like lasers or solar energy, and defect-engineered boron-rich photocatalysts, the process emphasizes the advanced potential of nanoscale materials.

Blair highlights the dual benefits: You get green hydrogen, and you remove — not really sequester — methane. You’re processing methane into just hydrogen and pure carbon that can be used for things like batteries.” Traditional methods, Blair notes, produce CO2 along with hydrogen. Their innovation not only tackles methane emissions but also transforms it into valuable hydrogen and carbon. Market applications include possible large-scale hydrogen production in solar farms and methane capture and conversion.

“Our process takes a greenhouse gas, methane and converts it into something that’s not a greenhouse gas and two things that are valuable products, hydrogen and carbon. And we’ve removed methane from the cycle.”

—Richard Blair, research professor at UCF’s Florida Space Institute

Additionally, this technology from Tetard and Blair offers the ability to manufacture carbon structures at nano and micro scales using light and a defect-engineered photocatalyst. Envisioning it as a “carbon 3D printer,” Blair notes the dream is to make high-performance carbon materials from methane.

“It took a while to get some really exciting results,” Tetard says. “In the beginning, a lot of the characterization that we tried to do was not working the way we wanted. We sat down to discuss puzzling observations so many times.”

Countries lacking significant power sources could potentially benefit, requiring only methane and sunlight to leverage the innovation. As Blair summarizes, the process takes a greenhouse menace and turns it into precious, non-polluting commodities.

African Desert is Home to Abundant Forest Growth

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Researchers have found an unknown wealth of trees in an African desert zone supposedly too arid for green growth.

Rural Burkina Faso: Part of the Sahel, but with plenty of trees. Image: By Adam Jones, Ph.D., via Wikimedia Commons
Burkina Faso: Part of the Sahel, but with plenty of trees. Image: By Adam Jones, Ph.D., via Wikimedia Commons.

By Tim Radford, Climate News Network (CC BY-ND 4.0)

With help from high resolution satellite imagery and some advanced artificial intelligence techniques, European scientists have been counting the trees in a parched African desert.

They pored over 1.3 million square kilometres of the waterless western Sahara and the arid lands of the Sahel to the south, to identify what is in effect an unknown forest. This region − a stretch of dunes and dryland larger than Angola, or Peru, or Niger − proved to be home to 1.8 billion trees and shrubs with crowns larger than three square metres.

“We were very surprised to see that quite a few trees actually grow in the Sahara Desert because up till now, most people thought that virtually none existed. We counted hundreds of millions of trees in the desert alone,” said Martin Brandt, a geographer at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who led the research.

He and colleagues from Germany, France, Senegal, Belgium and Nasa in the US report in the journal Nature that they used an artificial intelligence technique called “deep learning” and satellite imagery so advanced that − from space − a camera could resolve an object half a metre or more in diameter, to see if they could answer unresolved questions about all those trees beyond the world’s forests.

Trees outside of forested areas are not usually included in climate models, and we know very little about their carbon stocks. They are  an unknown component in the global carbon cycle”.

—Martin Brandt, lead researcher, University of Copenhagen

Trees matter, wherever they are. In cities, they enhance urban life and sustain property values. In forests, they conserve and recycle water, shelter millions of animals and smaller plants, and absorb atmospheric carbon. In grasslands they conserve soils, offer habitat for species and provide subsistence fuel, food and fodder for humans and animals.
But trees beyond the forests are an unknown factor when it comes to the puzzle of the global carbon budget and the great challenge of containing runaway climate change.

“Trees outside of forested areas are not usually included in climate models, and we know very little about their carbon stocks,” Dr Brandt said. “They are basically a white spot on maps and an unknown component in the global carbon cycle.”

The total identified in the target zone of the Sahara and the Sahel is almost certainly an under-estimate: the technology did not and could not pinpoint trees with a crown or shade area smaller than 3 square metres.

The study adds to the chronicle of surprises delivered by tree and forest research. In the last few years scientists have essayed a global census of woody growths wider than 5cms at breast height − that’s the botanist’s definition of a tree − and arrived at a total of more than 3 trillion.

New map possible

They have also counted the different kinds of tree: more than 60,000 species. They have already made attempts to measure the extent of tree cover in dryland and savannah regions and identified a kind of hidden forest.

They have calculated that a determined global tree planting campaign could absorb enough carbon to make a formidable difference to the challenge of global heating, and they have confirmed that conserved natural forests are, even on the simple basis of human economics, a bargain: forests are worth more to the world when they flourish than when they are cleared.

The new approach − the match of artificial intelligence with high resolution imagery − could one day help identify not just trees, but different tree species. It could, researchers hope, eventually even provide a reliable count of trees in a forest, although where canopies overlap it will always be difficult to number the trunks that support them. It offers the world’s forest scientists a new starting point for a map of all the planet’s trees.

“Doing so wouldn’t have been possible without this technology,” Dr Brandt said. “Indeed, I think it marks the beginning of a new scientific era.” 

Original publication: Climate News Network — LONDON, 27 October, 2020