Today's Sargasso Sea is nutrient starved, except for episodic upwelling events caused by wind-driven winter mixing and eddies. Enhanced diatom opal burial in Sargasso Sea sediments indicates that silicic acid, a limiting nutrient today, may have been more available in subsurface waters during Heinrich Stadials, millennial-scale climate perturbations of the last glacial and deglaciation. Here we...

We address the integration of two greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement options, namely, geological sequestration and microalgae biofixation, using a supply chain optimization approach. A multiscale, multiperiod, mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model is proposed, which accounts for CO2 transportation pipeline network design, algae processing route, and product selection, as well as the sea...

M. Hassan Beyzavi , Casey J. Stephenson and Yangyang Liu have contributed equally to this work. As a C1 feedstock, CO2 has the potential to be uniquely highly economical in both a chemical and a financial sense. In particular, the highly atom-economical acid-catalyzed cycloaddition of CO2 to epoxides to yield cyclic organic carbonates (OCs), a functionality having many important industrial appl...

Amine-based absorbents play a central role in CO2 sequestration and utilization. Amines react selectively with CO2, but a drawback is the unproductive weight of solvent or support in the absorbent. Efforts have focused on metal organic frameworks (MOFs) reaching extremely high CO2 capacity, but limited selectivity to N2 and CH4, and decreased uptake at higher temperatures. A desirable system wo...

Burning fuels in an O2/H2O atmosphere is regarded as the next generation of oxy-fuel combustion for CO2 capture and storage (CCS). By combining oxy-fuel combustion and biomass utilization technology, CO2 emissions could be further reduced. Therefore, this work focuses on investigating the combustion characteristics of single particles from bituminous coal (BC) and pine sawdust (PS) in O2/N2, O2...

A major contributor to increased atmospheric CO2 levels is fossil fuel combustion. Roughly one third of the carbon emissions in the United States comes from power plants. Since electric generation is expected to grow and fossil fuels will continue to be the dominant fuel source, there is growing recognition that the energy industry can be part of the solution to reducing greenhouse gas emission...

[1] Diazotrophic (N2-fixing) cyanobacteria provide the biological source of new nitrogen for large parts of the ocean. However, little is known about their sensitivity to global change. Here we show that the single most important nitrogen fixer in today’s ocean, Trichodesmium, is strongly affected by changes in CO2 concentrations. Cell division rate doubled with rising CO2 (glacial to projected...

New membrane types with well-controlled sub-nanostructures were developed from both polymeric and inorganic materials: carbon-based membranes, functionalized mesoporous oxide membranes and molecular sieving zeolite membranes. Regarding the carbon membranes, a novel carbon membrane with enhanced CO2 affinity was developed. The prepared membrane had a higher separation performance than that of th...

For more than a century human activities have caused an increase in air pollutants inducing an excess of greenhouse gases. In addition, the depletion and rising costs of fossil fuels, due to the increase in energy demand driven by global growth, leads to the search for alternative raw carbon sources. In this particular context, the transformation and utilization of carbon dioxide is today under...

Responses to ocean acidification in plankton communities were studied during a CO2-enrichment experiment in the Arctic Ocean, accomplished from June to July 2010 in Kongsfjorden, Svalbard (78562 N, 11536 E). Enclosed in 9 mesocosms (volume: 43.9–47.6 m3), plankton was exposed to CO2 concentrations, ranging from glacial to projected mid-next-century levels. Fertilization with inorganic nutrients...