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Groundwater used for heating and cooling while being purified
A new project aims to develop a model for using groundwater to heat and cool buildings while the water is at the same time cleansed of pollutants that pose a risk to drinking water.
It almost sounds too good to be true. Nevertheless, there are high expectations for a starting project that will combine two different technologies to ensure sustainable heating and purification of contaminated water.
One of the technologies that will be investigated uses groundwater to cool and heat buildings. In an Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) plant, cold groundwater is pumped up in the summer and used to cool buildings. The water absorbs the heat of the buildings via a heat exchanger and is subsequently stored in underground aquifers. As much as 80 per cent of the stored energy can then be used to heat the buildings during the cold winter months.In the Netherlands in particular, there are many ATES plants, and the geol
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Can an abundant green mineral solve our climate crisis? Exploring power of Olivine
Olivine has an astonishing ability to sequester atmospheric CO2 whenever it is expelled from Earth’s depths via tectonic processes. Now, a University of Copenhagen researcher is working to recreate the mineral’s magic in the lab – an effort that could contribute to solving our climate crisis.
Photo of researcher Kristoffer Szilas, digging up olivin in Greenland. Kent Pørksen
Encased in peridotite rock six kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface, one can find a green and widely occurring mineral – olivine. While olivine contains nickel, used in steel production and batteries, research shows that the mineral also holds an incredible potential to address our climate crisis.
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In a new project, researchers from Aarhus University and Stanford University will develop a sustainable technology for local-scale production of green ammonia.
With a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark of DKK 2.8 million, Danish and American researchers hope to develop a technology that may have a major impact on ammonia production - one of the world s heaviest CO2 emitters.
In the project, called A new twist on ammonia production: more efficient electrochemical synthesis using designer hydrogen-binding mediators , the researchers will take outset in existing electrochemical synthesis technology: Today, the process is totally inefficient, but we ve found a new method whereby we can combine nitrogen and hydrogen, which makes the technology very attractive to look at more closely, says Assistant Professor Emil Drazevic from the Department of Engineering at Aarhus University.