Latest news with #carbon dioxide
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- General
- The Guardian
‘Like something you see in a movie': Trump cuts stir fears of more pipeline ruptures
On a clear February evening in 2020, a smell of rotten eggs started to waft over the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, followed by a green-tinged cloud. A load roar could be heard near the highway that passes the town. Soon, nearby residents started to feel dizzy, some even passed out or lay on the ground shaking, unable to breathe. Cars, inexplicably, cut out, their drivers leaving them abandoned with the doors open on the highway. 'It was like something you see in a movie, like a zombie apocalypse,' said Jerry Briggs, a fire coordinator from nearby Warren county who was tasked with knocking on the doors of residents to get them to evacuate. Briggs and most of his colleagues were wearing breathing apparatus – one deputy who didn't do so almost collapsed and had to be carried away. Unbeknown to residents and emergency responders, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide near Satartia had ruptured and its contents were gushing out, robbing oxygen from people and internal combustion engines in cars alike. 'We had no idea what it was,' said Briggs, who moved towards the deafening noise of the pipeline leak with a colleague, their vehicle spluttering, when they saw a car containing three men, unconscious and barely breathing. 'We just piled them on top of each other and got them out because it's debatable if they survived if we waited,' said Briggs. Ultimately, the men survived and were hospitalized along with around 45 other people. More than 200 people were evacuated. 'It was like we were all being smothered,' said Jack Willingham, director of emergency management in Yazoo county, where Satartia is situated. 'It was a pretty damn crazy day,' The near-fatal disaster was a spur to Joe Biden's administration to, for the first time, create a rule demanding a high standard of safety for the transport of carbon dioxide, a small but growing ingredient of pipelines increasingly captured from drilling sites and power plants. 'There's been a lot of concern about safety among states that permit CO2 pipelines,' said Tristan Brown, who was acting administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration (PHMSA) until January. 'Stronger standards like the ones we drafted last year have the dual benefit of addressing permitting concerns while also improving safety for the public.' But shortly before the new safety regulations were due to come into force early this year, Donald Trump's new administration swiftly killed them off. A crackdown on gas leaks from pipelines was also pared back. This was followed by an exodus of senior officials from PHMSA, which oversees millions of miles of US pipelines. Five top leaders, including the head of the office of pipeline safety, have departed amid Trump's push to shrink the federal workforce. Broader staff cuts have hit the regulator, too, with PHMSA preparing for 612 employees in the coming year, down from 658 last year. There are currently 174 pipeline inspectors within this workforce, PHMSA said, which is 30% less than the number of inspectors Congress required it to have when authorizing the agency's budget in 2020. These 174 inspectors have the task of scrutinizing 3.3 million miles of pipe across the US, or around 19,000 miles per inspector. The indiscriminate nature of cuts at PHMSA 'has real world consequences in terms of undermining the basic foundations of safety for the public,' Brown said. 'A lot of expertise has left and that is worrying,' said one departed PHSMA staffer. 'The attitude from Doge [the 'department of government efficiency'] was 'your job is meaningless, go and work in the private sector.' Many people have thought they can't go through this for four years.' America has more miles of pipeline – carrying oil, propane, gas and other materials – than it does in federal highways and a federal regulator that was already overstretched. Brown said typically just one or two people have the responsibility of inspecting America's transported nuclear waste while a mere dozen staffers have to oversee more than 170 liquified natural gas plants. Each state has its own pipeline regulatory system and inspectors, too, but PHMSA is responsible for writing and enforcing national standards and is often the one to prosecute violations by any of the 3,000 businesses that currently operate pipelines. However, enforcement actions have dropped steeply under the Trump administration, which has initiated just 40 new cases this year, compared to 197 in all of 2024. 'All of these things will contribute to an increase in failures,' said Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. 'A strong regulator helps prevent awful tragedies and I worry we could see increased incidents now. The drop in enforcement is very troubling.' 'Everyone at PHMSA is focused on safety, there's not a lot of fat to trim, so it's hard to imagine that any reduction in force won't impact its ability to fulfill its duties. I can't believe they were ever prepared to lose so many people at once.' In some contexts, US pipelines can be viewed as very safe. A few dozen people are killed or injured each year from pipeline malfunctions but the alternatives to moving around vast quantities of toxic or flammable liquids and gases aren't risk-free. Trains can come off their tracks and spill their loads, as seen in East Palestine, Ohio, while the death toll on American roads from accidents is typically about 40,000 people a year. 'There is some super duper bad stuff that happens on the interstates,' said Briggs. Still, as Caram points out, there is a significant pipeline incident almost every day in the US, ranging from globs of oil spilling onto farmland to raging fireballs from ignited gas. Many of the pipelines snaking under Americans' feet are aging and need replacement, which can lead to failures. There has been a worrying uptick in deaths from pipeline accidents recently, too, with 30 people killed across 2023 and 2024, the most fatalities over a two-year period since 2010/11. 'This is not the time to look at deregulatory efforts, this is not time to look to save money and deregulate,' Caram said. 'The overall state of pipeline safety is really languishing with poor performance. We are not making good progress and we need stronger regulations.' A PHSMA spokesman said the agency is 'laser-focused on its mission of protecting people and the environment while unleashing American energy safely' and is in the process of appointing 'well-qualified individuals' to fill the departed senior officials. 'PHMSA has initiated more pipeline-related rule making actions since the beginning of this administration than in the entire four years of the preceding administration,' the spokesman added. 'Each of these rule makings represents an opportunity for us to promote pipeline safety by modernizing our code and encouraging innovation and the use of new technology.' The agency spokesman added that pipeline firm Denbury, now owned by Exxon, paid $2.8m in civil penalties for its regulatory violations in Satartia and agreed to take corrective actions. PHMSA also warned other operators to monitor the movement of earth and rock, to avoid a repeat of the Satartia incident where sodden soils shifted following days of rain and crunched into the pipeline, severing it. The leak was only confirmed after an emergency responder called Denbury to ascertain what happened, more than 40 minutes after the rupture, according to the PHMSA investigation. Communications between the company and the emergency services has improved since, according to both Briggs and Willingham. Denbury was contacted for comment. Today, Sartartia bears few visible scars. The pipeline is obscured from passing view by trees and blankets of kudzu, the invasive vine. The town's sleepy, tree-lined streets contains a micro town hall, as big as a tool shed, a couple of small churches, a single shuttered store. On a recent summer day a single person was outside, contentedly cutting the grass, as if that harrowing day in 2020 was a surreal dream. 'We will see how it goes with the changes, I hope it doesn't affect the safety we've worked so hard to get,' Willingham said of the cuts at PHMSA. 'We don't want a day like we had in Satartia again. In 35 years in emergency service I have seen some crazy stuff but that was a wild, wild day.'
BBC News
5 days ago
- Business
- BBC News
The 'world-first' plan to grow food above a Wiltshire landfill
Plans have been revealed to grow fruit and vegetables using "cleaned" carbon dioxide in greenhouses above a landfill in what it is claimed will be a "world first".The landfill in Wiltshire is run by Crapper & Sons Ltd, which is currently waiting to get planning permission for the company already captures methane coming off the waste to power its operations and send energy to the national grid, as well as producing now started a community interest company called Sustain Wiltshire, it has said it wants to use the site to grow food for the local area all year round. The plans involve using greenhouses on the site to take advantage of CO2 and heat to produce food such as avocados, which are not usually grown commercially in the produce would then be sold to people living in the local area in towns and villages such as Royal Wootton Bassett, Malmesbury and Brinkworth. Project Director Nick Ash said there are other similar projects across the world but the specific Wiltshire one is a world first."What comes out of the top of the gas engine [the one already generating energy] is quite clean CO2. In Europe, that's already used in greenhouses, so we would get that into our greenhouses."So you'd grow them [vegetables and fruit] in a rich CO2 environment so they'd grow better than in normal air," he explained."They [the plants] will be the using the heat, the light and the power, but they will have no contact with the ground at all."The system at the moment takes the gases from the landfill and extracts the methane for power and cleans the gases - for example, by removing hydrogen sulphide and using bacteria - with cleaner CO2 a by-product of the process. The project will involve flattening a large section of the landfill site to create pits - called "cells" - which will be lined with concrete and have waste put in them to produce gas will then be captured and cleaned so it can be used to produce electricity and pump the CO2 into the greenhouses which will sit above the cells."We plan to totally change the way that we effectively landfill," said Mr Ash."It [waste] would go into fast-reacting gas cells, which would produce gas very quickly, then have the rubbish taken out, then [go into] storage cells that would feed recycling." The company also plans to make the greenhouses portable which will allow the pits underneath to be emptied and have fresh waste put that cannot be recycled right away can have the organic matter rot and produce usable gas, and then that waste can also be processed Ash said that if granted planning permission, the project would change the appearance of the site, with more grass and trees added. The project overall is called the Super Midden, based on midden - a word mostly used by archaeologists to describe ancient rubbish & Sons Ltd said the development could produce 80% of the fruit and vegetable needs of the surrounding area, reducing emissions, food miles and improving food Ash told the BBC he does not think it will fail technically and that the biggest challenge will be "introducing something new".
South China Morning Post
13-07-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
Chinese team says carbon dioxide can turn to sugar, offering solution to global problems
Chinese scientists have developed a method to turn the alcohol methanol into white sugar, which they say could allow captured carbon dioxide to be converted into food. The team's biotransformation system produces sucrose without the need to grow sugar cane or sugar beets – crops that require large amounts of land and water resources. Their method to convert methanol – which can be derived from industrial waste or made by hydrogenating carbon dioxide – into sucrose using enzymes was also adapted to make other complex carbohydrates, including fructose and starch. 07:58 Why is the Chinese government so concerned about food security? Why is the Chinese government so concerned about food security? 'Artificial conversion of carbon dioxide into food and chemicals offers a promising strategy to address both environmental and population-related challenges while contributing to carbon neutrality,' the team said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Bulletin in May. Reducing carbon dioxide to less complex molecules has proven successful, though the researchers said that generating long-chain carbohydrates – the most abundant substances in nature – has proven to be a challenge for scientists. 'In vitro biotransformation (ivBT) has emerged as a highly promising platform for sustainable biomanufacturing,' the team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology wrote. 'In this work, we successfully designed and implemented an [ivBT] system for sucrose synthesis from low-carbon molecules'. Sucrose, or white sugar, is mainly obtained from sugar cane grown in warmer climates, such as Southeast Asia. The second major source is sugar beets grown in colder northern regions.
Daily Mail
07-07-2025
- Daily Mail
Newly engaged Texas couple killed in freak wine cellar accident at their stunning $2.4 million home
A newly engaged couple died in a freak accident at their multimillion-dollar home after breathing fatal fumes released by dry ice they had been storing in their wine cellar. Deborah Putzka Touchy, 67, and Kevin Willis, 68, were found dead on July 4 after neighbors called 911 to their home in the ritzy River Oaks area of Houston. Firefighters noticed the fumes soon after they arrived about 7pm and needed respirators to enter the cellar, where the bodies were discovered. Touchy and Willis were reportedly planning to host a Fourth of July party when they were killed. 'There was dry ice being stored in the wine cellar,' Houston Police Lieutenant Larry said. 'When dry ice melts, it turns into carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, it appears the two people who went into the wine cellar were overcome.' Willis and Touchy got engaged earlier this year and threw an engagement party at the Champion Wine Garden during the Houston Rodeo on March 10. The couple frequently posted photos of themselves at wine tastings and vineyard tours across the country, as well as in France and Italy. Touchy, who described herself as a lawyer and accountant, posted dozens of photos of her wine collection on Facebook and Instagram. Friends took to social media to mourn the couple, who appeared active in the social scene. They were regular attendees of the Houston Rodeo, where they had 'royal seats,' and were members of the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs food and wine society. 'She was a light and a delight. So smart and so self deprecating about her smarts and her achievements,' friend Vickie Elizardo wrote on Facebook. 'She has a tight circle of friends that will never be the same without her.' 'The world is a poorer place and has more shadows without her generosity and sparkle.' Another friend, Tara Dahnke, said she read about the couple's death with interest because she didn't know about the dangers of dry ice - before the horror of discovering their identities. 'I still cant believe this is real. I have been in tears all day,' she wrote on Facebook. 'Big personalities that will not be forgotten. They always brought joy, laughter, and a giving spirit.' The local chapter of the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs society also paid tribute to two of its regulars. 'Deborah was full of energy and bigger than life in Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, rodeo, and Houston wine scene for many years,' the club wrote online. 'She always lit up the room with a huge smile and a warm hug. 'Kevin was a loving and kind person whose genuineness and caring was evident in each and every conversation. They loved each other dearly.' The couple's ivy-covered home on Avalon Place is surrounded by stunning mansions and historic homes. Touchy and her former husband bought the three-bedroom, four-bathroom home in 2000 for $299,250, records show. The house was last estimates to be worth more than $2.4 million and could be worth as much as 10 times what it was bought for 25 years ago. Dry ice, made of frozen carbon dioxide, is colder than frozen water and is often used to cool small areas like wine cellars. 'Carbon dioxide can replace oxygen in closed spaces, creating an oxygen-deficient environment. This can result in suffocation,' warns the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The medical examiner will confirm the couple's cause of death.
CNET
03-07-2025
- CNET
This Portable Air Quality Monitor Will Help Me Track Fourth of July Smoke
CNET's expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise. Switchbot's Meter Pro shows local air quality anywhere you put it and is small enough to fit in a pocket. Tyler Lacoma/CNET From cooking on gas stoves to monitoring air quality during Fourth of July fireworks and summer wildfires, knowing your own home air quality is more important than ever. But it's not always easy, especially without a pricey smart air purifier. But this little tech buddy is going to be my favorite monitor this summer, wherever I want it. The tiny Meter Pro from SwitchBot tracks temps, humidity and most importantly carbon dioxide around my house or my yard, wherever I take it. It works right out of the box, lets me adjust how often it updates, and is available for around $50 with discounts. Here's everything I learned when using it. When I reached out to SwitchBot for a comment, they summed up the Meter Pro handily along with some advice on how to use it, saying, "By tracking CO₂ levels, temperature and humidity, users can make informed decisions about ventilation and indoor temperature and humidity control, leading to better sleep, increased productivity, and overall well-being." As I tested the Meter Pro with carbon dioxide monitoring, I found some air quality surprises in my own home, learned what the app can do and was surprised by how easy the smart meter was to use. Read more: 9 Surprising Things We Learned Monitoring Our Air Quality in 3 Locations A smart air quality monitor for any spot in your home The SwitchBot Meter Pro works well alone or with other smart devices. SwitchBot Switchbot's Meter Pro with carbon dioxide monitoring can work indoors or outdoors (or both with the right add-on), but the carbon dioxide feature makes it a much better indoor option. You can also move it to specific spots where you're worried carbon dioxide may be higher. The monitor works by showing you parts per million, a common method to measure carbon dioxide particles in the air, and updates itself regularly. "The SwitchBot Meter Pro CO₂ Monitor employs Non-Dispersive Infrared (NDIR) technology, utilizing Swiss-made sensors for high-precision CO₂ detection," SwitchBot told me. "It measures CO₂ levels ranging from 400 to 9,000 ppm with an accuracy of ±50 ppm. In addition to CO₂, it monitors temperature and humidity, providing a comprehensive overview of indoor air quality." Those sensor proved accurate, too. And if you're using the standalone device, it's effortless to set up. I unboxed the meter, pulled out the battery tab to activate the battery, and it immediately started displaying nearby air quality. You'll note in my photos that by default the temperature appears in Celsius, but that's no problem. A small button on the top of the meter let me switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit instantly. The hardest part was deciding where to put it. Making sense of air quality numbers SwitchBot's Meter Pro gives you all the details about your room's air quality. Tyler Lacoma/CNET During testing I moved the SwitchBot Meter Pro frequently, positioning it on various counters and tables to see how it changed. I quickly learned the carbon dioxide levels in my home were close to the maximum acceptable level -- anything above 1,000 ppm and it's time to consider making changes like more ventilation or air purification. That's where our lab-tested recommendations can shine. The high numbers weren't entirely surprising. When I tested, we were in the tail end of smoke season here on the West Coast and the air outside was still relatively smoky, something that has a major impact on carbon dioxide levels, even indoors. Also, my home uses natural gas for both fireplace heating and cooking, another factor that bumps up carbon dioxide numbers. As regional fires died down, air quality in my home notably improved, with PPM declining to 600 to 700 ppm. It was even better in some other homes where I brought it for a quick test, indicating there may still be work for me to do to improve air quality. In addition to temperature and carbon dioxide levels, the meter monitors humidity (my ranges in the high desert were pleasantly comfortable during the wetter fall season) and shows you the current weather. That makes it a nice hub for a quick view of what's going into your lungs. Add a mini hub for more control and better battery life SwitchBot's app provides a plethora of information. Tyler Lacoma/CNET Connecting the app via Bluetooth opened a world of possibilities -- well, once I created an account and applied numerous firmware updates, anyway. Using the app, I could adjust how often the meter updates to save on battery life. The battery is rated for around 12 months of use and recharges via USB-C, so it's not a major issue. But I found increasing the frequency of updates let me test air quality more easily with no noticeable drawbacks. You can use the Meter Pro as is, but it gets a sizable functionality boost with the SwitchBot Hub Mini ($40). My model came with one, so I was able to set it up and connect the SwitchBot app. That enabled some of the more advanced features like notifications and remote monitoring, so it's a quality-of-life improvement if you want to spend a bit more. With the hub, the app also lets you set alerts, either via notifications or with sound alarms, based on triggers like when the temperature, humidity or parts per million reaches certain levels. That also lets you do things like get low temperature alerts in rooms (or garages) that are distant from your thermostat so you know when they may need extra heating. Diving into air quality stats, customization and more SwitchBot's preferences allow for lots of readout customization. Tyler Lacoma/CNET The SwitchBot app isn't quite finished yet. As I discovered, you can view the local dew point and vapor-pressure deficit, as well as get weather forecasts if you're willing to provide the app with your address. The app also includes a history chart so you can see patterns over time. Deeper into settings, even more options emerge. You can recalibrate the temperature and humidity settings if they seem a bit off for your climate, then manually adjust your idea of a "comfort" level to control when the monitor warns of a problem. The Hub Mini also provides compatibility with common voice assistants, such as Amazon Alexa. That allows you to set up automations with other Alexa-compatible devices, like a smart thermostat or even a humidifier. While the app does mention the ability to store your long-term air quality data in the cloud for a fee, there's absolutely no need to do this if you are using only the Meter Pro, so subscriptions aren't a concern for this monitor. An air quality monitor for any home SwitchBot's Meter Pro with carbon dioxide monitoring is compact, highly portable and accurately measures air conditions in any part of your home with its Swiss-made sensor. Add the current low cost of $50 to $60 and it's an ideal monitoring solution for anyone who isn't sure what the air is like in their home and wants to keep an eye on air quality this winter. One last note: If you're interested in purchasing this air quality monitor, make sure you're choosing the option with carbon dioxide monitoring. SwitchBot has a similar Meter Pro that does everything but monitor carbon dioxide levels. The new version with carbon dioxide monitoring is a much better package, even with the higher price.
