Population growth has created an expanding gap between the supply and demand of both energy and chemicals. Nonrenewable fossil sources, such as coal, natural gas, and petroleum, are the source of nearly 86% of the world’s energy and 96% of its organic chemicals. Diminishing reserves of these sources, rising atmospheric CO2 levels, and socioeconomic concerns require a reduction of our dependence...

Abstract Climate‐driven thawing of Arctic permafrost renders its vast carbon reserves susceptible to microbial degradation, serving as a potentially potent positive feedback hidden within the climate system. While seemingly intuitive, relationship between thermally driven losses and organic (OC) export remains largely unexplored in natural settings. Filling this knowledge gap, we present down‐c...

A one-year study was performed at the Vavihill background station in southern Sweden to estimate the anthropogenic contribution to the carbonaceous aerosol. Weekly samples of the particulate matter PM10 were collected on quartz filters, and the amounts of organic carbon, elemental carbon, radiocarbon (14C) and levoglucosan were measured. This approach enabled source apportionment of the total c...

The use of agroforestry crops is a promising tool for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration through fossil fuel substitution. In particular, plantations characterised by high yields such as short rotation forestry (SRF) are becoming popular worldwide for biomass production and their role acknowledged in the Kyoto Protocol. While their contribution to climate change mitigation is bei...

Since the industrial revolution mankind has been dependent on fossil hydrocarbon fuel for a very large proportion of total energy needs. Many of the fluid forms also had lower sulphur content than coal and were therefore more attractive from the environmental impact standpoint. Combustion of sulfur-containing compounds in fossil fuels emits sulfur oxides, which can cause adverse effects on heal...

INTRODUCTION The increasing demand for diesel fuels has resulted in the use of greater percentage of cracked distillates having poor ignition properties. The ignition properties of diesel fuels can be rated in terms of their cetane number and diesel fuels having low cetane number may have poor ignition properties such as diesel knock, difficulties to start engines in the cold weather and so on....

Challenges with cost, cyclability, and/or low energy density have largely prevented the development of solar thermal fuels, a potentially attractive alternative energy technology based on molecules that can capture and store solar energy as latent heat in a closed cycle. In this paper, we present a set of novel hybrid photoisomer/template solar thermal fuels that can potentially circumvent thes...

Liquid scintillation spectrometry of 14C in gasoline/ethanol and diesel oil was carried out using QUANTULUS® and straight mixtures of fuel and an organic scintillation cocktail. A linear correlation was found between the concentration of carbon that originates from the bioethanol (biocarbon) and the fuel mixture's 14C activity in the range 0 – 100 % (m/m) bioethanol content. Because of the good...

An expected global increase in bioenergy-crop cultivation as an alternative to fossil fuels will have consequences on both global climate and local air quality through changes in biogenic emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).While greenhouse gas emissionsmay be reduced through the substitution of next-generation bioenergy crops such as eucalyptus, giant reed, and switchgrass for fossi...