Background: Combustion of fossil fuels contributes to sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions. To deal with this issue, the government of Iran has appointed the oil refineries to upgrade their installations and produce high quality fuels. Thus, this study investigated the status of SO2 emissions in Iran and the capability of advanced technologies to control SO2 emissions. Methods: The status of SO2 em...

The European energy sector has been undergoing significant changes since the beginning of the liberalization process in the UK in 1989. In 2003 major parts of the electricity sector in Europe have been liberalized and the remaining parts will follow during the next few years. This paper focuses on the promotion of renewable energy sources as an alternative to fossil fuels when aiming at a susta...

Concerns about sustainability of fossil fuels and global warming, along with energy security, have provided a strong incentive in recent times towards research and development of carbon neutral alternatives including biofuels and biochemicals. This necessitates the development of efficient “biocatalysts” which can access wide range of products currently derived from petroleum. Current work deal...

The core objective of this paper is to investigate the perspectives of “renewable fuels” mainly from an energetic point-of-view in a dynamic framework until 2050 in comparison to fossil fuels. In addition, the impact on the economic prospects of an improvement of the energetic performance is analyzed. As renewable fuels, various categories of first and second generation biofuels as well as elec...

Finding the basic physical foundation contributing to sustainable development is significantly useful in seeking ways to build an enduring human future. This paper introduces the dissipative structure theory to analyze the entropy budgets of the whole coupled human–Earth system and the key processes of the subsystems, and then presents the formulas to calculate these entropy budgets. The result...

Regional and global air pollution emissions from marine transportation is a growing concern. In discerning the sources of such pollution, researchers have become interested in tracking where along the total fuel cycle these emissions occur. In addition, new efforts to introduce alternative fuels in marine vessels have raised new questions about the energy use and environmental impacts of such f...

Substitution of fossil fuels with alternative energy carriers has become necessary due to climate change and fossil fuel shortages. Fermentation as a way of producing biohydrogen, an attractive and environmentally friendly future energy carrier, has captured received increasing attention in recent years because of its high H2 production rate and a variety of readily available waste substrates u...