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Towards a Greener Future: Leveraging the Alternate Energy Paradigm
Towards a Greener Future: Leveraging the Alternate Energy Paradigm

November 25, 2022

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As I write this, broad-ranging discussions are underway at the United Nations Climate Change Conference-COP27 at Sharm el-Sheikh. The 27th Conference of Parties (COP) is happening against the backdrop of a year that has witnessed incredible heat waves, devastating floods, formidable storms, and severe famines – indicators of a potentially unprecedented global climate crisis in the wings.

The present scenario is complicated further by the growing worldwide impact of severe inflation across food, water, and energy – resources critical to the survival and continuation of our way of life. While the UN IPCC continues to push for a 45 percent cut in CO2 emissions by the end of 2030 to meet the Paris Conference goals of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5¡Celsius, the costs continue to mount.

We are at a tipping point.

Alternate energy sources and solutions can help mitigate the circumstances in line with the goals described in UN SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) and SDG 13 (Climate Action). Global businesses and organizations need to play a key role here in leveraging the potential of new-age engineering technologies and driving the adoption of solutions. These efforts can help unlock value across the worldwide ecosystem without compromising the ability of current and future generations to maintain and enhance their prosperity, success, and overall quality of life.

The Way Forward: Engineering a Sustainable Alternative Energy Paradigm    

Significant work is underway in this direction across several leading ER&D major worldwide, some of which are already showing great potential in helping deliver a cleaner and greener future. These include:

  1. State-of-the-art Hydrogen Gasification: With a growing recognition of hydrogen as a clean source of energy, engineers worldwide are working towards revitalizing the design of hydrogen generation and storage equipment. New-age containerization solutions, coupled with cutting-edge piping, and structural design and incrementally innovative controls, instrumentation, and conversion, are some of the key focus areas in this direction. Innovation in metering and monitoring solutions is further helping redefine the emerging paradigm in the space. With countries like India leading the space with ambitious targets for leveraging green hydrogen in fertilizer production, energy usage, and urban supply, we will continue to see significant traction in the space over the coming years.  
  2. Clean Fuel Engineering and Emission Treatments: Another exciting area is around CO2 capture and conversion to methanol as a fuel. This involves direct carbon di-oxide capture from the atmosphere with organic liquids, hydrogenation in the bed reactor, refining and methanol separation, distillation, purification, and storage of the methanol generated. The Hydrogen used during the process is recycled, minimizing the environmental impact of the workflow. These efforts are complemented by exhaust cleansing through an ammonia-based single tower design which is capable of absorbing NOx, SOx, and CO2 from gaseous exhausts and recycling the CO2.

Both technologies are available today and are being adopted by leading manufacturers and organizations worldwide.

  1. Green Energy Transition: As customer demand patterns evolve and regulatory pressures continue to mount around sustainability, global businesses need to focus on their green energy transition journeys. In addition to the positive reputation impact, focused measures in this direction have already started yielding significant dividends across multiple balance sheet touchpoints. Containerized battery energy storage systems, modular wind turbines and windfarm rollouts, battery management, and storage solutions, revitalized substation engineering, hybridization (combining solar energy with battery storage and hydrogen) and floating solar panels are some of the offerings that are helping drive the forward momentum for the worldwide thrust for sustained green energy transitions.

Alternate energy paradigms, besides facilitating enhanced energy management outcomes and optimizing operational costs, are a vital component of any successful global measure for minimizing carbon footprints. As we refocus on human needs as the center of our global climate action initiatives, it is evident that any progress in this direction would have to be increasingly powered by reliable alternative energy sources if we are to stand a chance of success. The future will clearly belong to the early adopters of alternate sources, as known fossil fuel reserves continue to become increasingly scarce with every passing day.


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