As the world rapidly builds renewable energy infrastructure and transportation networks, the critical minerals' sourcing, processing, and trading will have profound economic, environmental, and geopolitical implications. Ensuring the critical minerals’ supply meets ever-rising demand while navigating the mineral supply chain’s impacts on the environment and society is a daunting challenge.
Although the gestures of the bill were certainly made clear, there is still much discussion and clarification to be had, let’s say, concerning the manufactured in America part. The provisions currently seem to demand that 40% of the manufactured components in the facility to be manufactured within America to be...
This site in Lynchburg, VA evokes tobacco production - but the whole region can embrace clean energy generation. (Photo by Kipp Teague, via Flickr Creative Commons.)
The Tobacco Region of Virginia, as its name shows, knows economic transitions. It can use its expertise in workforce development and industrial support to train workers and incentivize investors to speed the clean energy transition through this historic section of a rapidly changing state.
One proposed solution is to incentivize municipal wastewater treatment facilities to implement anaerobic digestion of biosolids and biogas capturing methods to produce Renewable Natural Gas (RNG), a renewable fuel used in the generation of heat and electricity, onsite or at a nearby centralized facility shared by multiple treatment facilities. This...
A container ship on its way to a commercial port...or is it? (Photo by Ana Ulin, courtesy Creative Commons.)
The Pacific Coast of North America is home to five of the 10 largest continental ports, more than 55 million people and an economic output of $3 trillion (Pacific Coast Collaborative, 2022). Collaboration on the scale of the Pacific Coast can provide a cohesive approach to maritime industry decarbonization to...
