Browsing: carbon

Global carbon accounting still prioritizes large industrial emitters and engineered removal systems, yet emerging geochemical evidence suggests a less visible source may be contributing to atmospheric CO2: abandoned coal mines.

Tropical forests currently store more than 60% of the world’s vegetation biomass, making them one of the most critical regulators of the global carbon cycle. Yet new research suggests the Amazon’s ability to retain that carbon may weaken faster than previously understood, not primarily because of declining tree growth, but because climate-driven mortality is accelerating the turnover of forest biomass.

The European Union’s aviation decarbonization strategy is approaching a politically sensitive phase as policymakers consider extending carbon pricing pressure beyond intra-European flights to emissions generated on international routes. The debate is emerging alongside a broader redesign of the EU Emissions Trading System aimed at aligning the bloc’s carbon market with its 2040 climate targets.

Construction-related activity accounts for roughly 23 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to figures cited in New York City’s latest climate initiative, placing material production and building processes among the largest but least regulated contributors to urban carbon footprints.

In Kenya’s Rift Valley, a pilot led by Cella Mineral Storage and Octavia Carbon has completed an early-stage underground CO2 injection, marking only the fourth known instance globally where direct air capture has been paired with geological storage in an integrated system.

Projected compliance costs running into hundreds of millions of dollars per country are emerging as a central fault line in negotiations over a proposed global carbon tax on maritime emissions, as the International Maritime Organization faces intensified lobbying from the United States to delay or dilute the measure.

Europe’s carbon capture and storage landscape is entering a phase where early-stage geological validation is becoming as critical as industrial deployment. Croatia’s allocation of €2.7 million in EU-backed funding for CCS development reflects this shift, targeting foundational data gaps that continue to constrain large-scale carbon storage investment across the region.

China’s coal-producing provinces generate roughly one billion tonnes of carbon emissions annually, a volume nearly double that of Germany, placing regions such as Shanxi and Shaanxi at the center of the country’s decarbonization challenge.

Corinth Pipeworks and ArcelorMittal are positioning recycled and renewably powered steel as a lower emission input for energy pipeline manufacturing, with reported emissions reductions of about 65 percent compared to conventional blast furnace routes.

Photocatalytic conversion of CO2 into fuels, long constrained by low efficiency and unclear mechanisms, is being advanced by researchers at Chiba University through the isolation and quantification of the interaction between photocatalytic and photothermal effects in CO2-to-methane conversion.