Category: carbon
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Dissecting a Coal Mine Exploration Target Report… using a Podcast?
There are many ways to use AI to analyze a technical report, but… with a Podcast? I recently tried this feature with Google NotebookLM, and the result is quite impressive. I recently received a Rare Earth Element (REE) exploration report from a mining company. The company essentially drilled hundreds of test holes and measured the…
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Decarbonizing Last-mile Logistics: A quick summary
Recently I gave a short lecture over Zoom to a group of students at NYU on my thoughts of decarbonizing the last-mile in supply chains. The one-sentence summary? The decarbonizing magnitude is highly dependent on the configurations. If you have the patience, watch the 27-minute video below:
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Why should we improve public transit?
Photo: Luxembourg Station. Recently a reported asked me: “How do you make a case that we should spend money on public transportation?” What a great question. It gives me an opportunity to systematically list all the arguments for that. I would put those into three buckets: (1) Economic benefit. There has been much research on…
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How has the work-from-home world affected the environment?
Photo: Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, summer 2022. The net impact of work-from-home on the environment is actually quite complex, and depends on a number of factors such as commuting patterns and energy consumption at home and at workplace, both before and after the switch. But let’s first discuss where the potential positive and…
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Electric airplane makes sense for one simple reason
It was in the news that an all-electric passenger plane called “Alice” made by Eviation completed its first test flight: Before you get too excited (or throw tomatoes at it, depending on which side you are on), Alice is designed to fly a mere 150-250 miles – As a reference, 200 miles is the distance…
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EV Charging Networks: The Top 8
In the EV book that I co-wrote and co-edited (with Peter Fox-Penner and David Jermain) in 2019, we documented the status of EV charging infrastructure in cities around the world such as Los Angeles, Oslo, and Beijing. Since then, EV adoption has continued to grow by leaps and bounds. In this post, I intend to…
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Choosing the right fuel (III): Whose perspective?
In this post, I will try to flesh out the perspective of a shipping company whose goal is to reduce its carbon footprint. Let us say there a shipping company that owns and operates deep sea bulk carriers. The following areas are of concern, from the greatest to the least: Fuel-related cost (FC): purchase, distribution,…
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Choosing the right fuel (I): fuel and carbon cost
This is a series of post on my work in the field of green marine fuel. First of all, for marine companies that are considering switching greener fuel, choosing the right marine fuel is no easy task. To me, there are two major hurdles. First, there are many possible pathways. Here is a partial list:…
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Steps to calculate the carbon footprint of a supply chain
The steps of calculating the carbon footprint of a supply chain is straightforward: 1- You need to map out your supply chain. This also defines the boundary of your calculation. 2- Collect activity data at each level of your supply chain. For example, an oil company may start at the exploration and drilling stage, and…
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How much do you pay charging an EV on a monthly basis?
I always knew it is a bit cheaper to drive an EV as opposed to a gasoline car (not the owning part, which deserve a separate calculation, but just the day-to-day cost of using it) in New England where I live, but I never bothered to quantify that saving. That is, until today. As you…
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EV in 2022 and Beyond: More Good News, but Uncertainties Too
Recently I was asked to reflect a little on the recent EV movement, so I dug a bit on the latest statistics. 2022 is not over yet, so the latest number we have is from 2021. I was encouraged to find that while everyone was focusing on the COVID in 2021, EV sales actually nearly…
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A Small Innovation, A Big Saving for the Environment
Just a couple of days, I received my new iPhone shipped from Apple. What I was impressed with was not the phone – the phone was good by all means but it was the clever packaging that I was impressed with. You see, in order to create proper cushion for the items shipped in a…
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Green Ammonia is a promising renewable marine fuel
It was in the news that “Amazon’s new net-zero carbon pledge is focused on the oceans, as shipping giants pursue alternative fuels“. That is absolutely the right move. Ships emit about 2% of the total GHG a year, compared to 12% in road transportation (see detailed numbers in my early article), but in absolute volume…
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EV is not just about making cars. It is about the Supply Chain.
JB Straubel, Tesla co-founder and its former chief technology officer, recently gave an interview, where he warned that some auto manufacturers may have not thought through when they announced that they were going to switch to 100% EV by a certain date. Indeed, if you look at how a car is made, whether EV or gasoline ones,…
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Understanding CO2 Emissions for different freight transport modes (renewable as well as non-renewable)
One of the most important questions to ask in transitioning to renewable modes of transport is simply: How much less CO2 are we going to emit by switching to renewables? The other important question is: How much does it cost? I have been researching on that question quite a bit. And I found quite a…
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SHOULD I BUY OR LEASE A TESLA? PART 3: It is not black-and-white (because we do not know the future)
In my last post, I showed that the total cost of buying a Tesla with a loan (or cash) is easy to figure out. However the final value is critically dependent upon one thing: the depreciation of the car when the owner sells it. Unfortunately that quantity is uncertain, because it has not happened yet…
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Carbon foot-printing problem is first of all an information problem
Carbon foot-printing problem is, first of all, an information problem. In a recent report released by World Economic Forum, the first challenge in reducing carbon emission is informational: There is just not enough transparency and clarity on who is emitting how much across a supply chain. Because of those informational barriers, companies will benefit from…
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Last-mile Transport is the Key Driver in Supply Chain Carbon Footprint
Does online shopping have a larger or smaller carbon footprint? Well, it depends. But depends on what? In a most recently-published study by Shahmohammadi et al (2020) published in Environmental Science & Technology, the authors highlight that the last-mile transport is one of the most important drivers of carbon emissions, among other things. What I…
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Road Transportation is the Single Largest Decarbonization Opportunity with a Clear Path Forward
My apology for the unwieldy title. But I chose the long title to highlight one thing: Although there are many decarbonization opportunities with large impact, road transportation offers the clearest path forward. Let me elaborate. First, let’s examine the areas where we need to reduce our carbon footprints. There are lots of high-quality research and…
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Carbon Foot printing: Devil is in its details…
I have been reading up on the carbon foot printing work lately. A lot of interesting findings. Overall, my impression is that the modern e-commerce is not significantly improving our carbon footprint. And with customers’ adaptive behavior (e.g., ordering more, not giving up store trips), it is likely that we can end up with a…