During his visit to Norway earlier this year, Bill Gates was keen to emphasise the innovation that will be needed to reduce the costs of mitigating climate change. One place to start is to educate more experts in the field of data processing.
Fossil fuel vehicles gulp down petrol, and electric cars gobble up minerals. The battery industry is so ravenous for lithium as a raw material that researchers believe the demand could threaten climate goals.
Haulage truck and fuel manufacturers have joined forces with researchers to make heavy transport across Europe more climate-friendly. And all thanks to having SINTEF ‘behind the wheel’.
We need the electricity generated by solar panels in order to meet our climate change mitigation targets. But solar power must be integrated rationally and fairly – something that can only be achieved with effective regulation.
Direct Air Capture (DAC) technologies offer new opportunities for getting closer to our climate change mitigation targets. However, we still have a long way to go before DAC can be fully rolled out as a mitigation measure.
The ice sheet in Queen Maud Land in East Antarctica is not stable. Large amounts of ice have melted in the past, most recently as 5,000 years ago.
Norwegian oil and gas companies are now plugging and abandoning production wells using an artificial ‘lava’. So far, the results have been excellent. Recent laboratory results indicate that the same method can be used to seal subsurface CO2 storage reservoirs.
Wind turbines are contributing to the Southern Sámi losing grazing land for their reindeer husbandry. This livelihood is central to the identity of the Southern Sámi culture and thus to their language, researchers say.
“We see no technical obstacles to being able to produce silicon without CO2 emissions within the next two to three years,” says Maria Wallin at NTNU.
There are plans in Årdal to build a waste incineration plant based on a new technology that captures and stores CO2, thus removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.
At last it is now possible to capture CO2 at industrial scales without state subsidy, and countries across the world should be persuading private industry to identify storage sites that will make a real difference.
Blue, also called “low carbon” hydrogen will make for a much more suitable transition towards renewable energy than natural gas.
The view that natural gas can act as an eco-friendly bridge in the transition from our use of coal to renewable energy has experienced a renaissance in the wake of the European war. Thus, the time is right to review the data behind the politics.
Plastic is useful but also poses an environmental problem. Scientists are now using enzymes from bacteria and fungi to break down plastic.
A stroke of serendipity, courtesy of the weather gods, will save the Norwegian offshore wind sector from the intermittent moods of windpower. But only if wind farms are distributed across large geographical areas.
Norwegian youth from all over the country and across social affiliation point to teen activist Greta Thunberg as a role model and source of inspiration for climate engagement.
If only the Norwegian building and construction industry would embrace a little more digitalisation, this alone would enable Norway to achieve its 2023 emissions target agreed with the EU.
Norwegian greenhouse gas emissions from air traffic are more than twice as high as the worldwide average.
How does the chain of suppliers impact on a company’s climate footprint? This is a key question and, according to a recently established entrepreneur in the field, Norwegian know-how stands ready to offer the world the answer.
Tremendous floods in Pakistan earlier this year forced 600,000 pregnant women to leave their homes for safer ground. It was just one in a series of nearly unthinkable happenings caused by climate change — and a clear message that humankind has to do more to stop it.
The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) put automation, digitalisation and robotisation very much in the driving seat. But something was missing. The introduction of Industry 5.0 will hand control back to you and me.
Up until now it has been a challenge to store the energy we generate when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. But researchers at a laboratory in Trondheim in Norway have succeeded in doing just this – and entirely without any form of advanced battery technology.
In earlier times, cities like Trondheim and Bergen had a ferryman who rowed people from place to place. They were the taxi drivers of the waterways. Now, a new, future-oriented form of water transport will be available to the public.
Is it too late to save our planet? Professor Jianguo Liu is the newest winner of The Gunnerus Award in Sustainability Science. He offers us some hope.
