45 ISSN 1758-3004 10.4155/CMT.10.7 © 2010 Future Science Ltd CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion are the largest net annual flux of carbon in the earth–atmosphere system and represent the dominant source of greenhouse gas forcing [1]. In order to better understand other components of carbon exchange between the land, oceans and atmosphere, improved quantification of fossil fuel CO2 fluxes...

Humans use combustion for heating and cooking, managing lands, and, more recently, for fuelling the industrial economy. As a shift to fossil-fuel-based energy occurs, we expect that anthropogenic biomass burning in open landscapes will decline as it becomes less fundamental to energy acquisition and livelihoods. Using global data on both fossil fuel and biomass burning emissions, we tested this...

Development of regional policies to reduce net emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would benefit from the quantification of the major components of the region's carbon balance--fossil fuel CO2 emissions and net fluxes between land ecosystems and the atmosphere. Through spatially detailed inventories of fossil fuel CO2 emissions and a terrestrial biogeochemistry model, we produce the first estimat...

Quantification of fossil fuel CO2 emissions at fine space and time resolution is emerging as a critical need in carbon cycle and climate change research. As atmospheric CO2 measurements expand with the advent of a dedicated remote sensing platform and denser in situ measurements, the ability to close the carbon budget at spatial scales of approximately 100 km2 and daily time scales requires fos...

This study examines the potential change in primary emissions and energy use from replacing the current U.S. fleet of fossil-fuel on-road vehicles (FFOV) with hybrid electric fossil fuel vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCV). Emissions and energy usage are analyzed for three different HFCV scenarios, with hydrogen produced from: (1) steam reforming of natural gas, (2) electrolysis powe...

Atmospheric CO2 inversion studies infer surface sources and sinks from observations and models. These studies usually require determination of the fossil fuel component of the observation, which can be estimated using anthropogenic tracers such as CO. The objective of this study is to demonstrate a new CO tracer method that accounts for overlapping forest fire and photochemical CO influences, a...

[1] Radiocarbon levels in annual plants provide a means to map out regional and continental-scale fossil fuel plumes in surface air. We collected corn (Zea mays) across North America during the summer of 2004. Plants from mountain regions of western North America showed the smallest influence of fossil fuel-derived CO2 with a mean D C of 66.3% ±1.7%. Plants from eastern North America and from t...

Recently biodiesel has been receiving increasing attention as an alternative fuel due to its environmental benefits. Also, it is derived from renewable sources which are considered as strategic opportunities to favor environmental sustainability, to improve the population’s quality of life and to promote the development of more efficient and equitable economic systems. Since the petroleum crise...

Recently, it has been discovered that heat pump drying is an efficient method of drying for drying industries. Heat pumps deliver more heat during the drying process than the work input to the compressor. Heat pump drying is a more advanced method than the traditional South African industrial and agricultural drying methods, such as direct/indirect sunlight, wood burning, fossil fuel burning, e...

China has invested heavily on alternative energy, but the effectiveness of such energy sources at substituting the dominant coal-fired generation remains unknown. Here we analyse the displacement of fossil-fuel-generated electricity by alternative energy, primarily hydropower, and by trans-provincial imported electricity in China between 1995 and 2014 using two-way fixed-effects panel regressio...