In this episode of Physics World Weekly, we’re joined by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who explains her motivations for providing the money for a new student scholarship fund. The British astrophysicist, who co-discovered radio pulsars in 1967, donated all $3m of her Breakthrough Prize to launch the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund. Aimed at students from underrepresented groups studying PhDs in physics, the fund will be administered by the Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics World).
Later in the podcast, our general physics editor Hamish Johnston is in conversation with a couple of attendees at an event at the University of Birmingham affiliated with the Intercontinental Academia (ICA). Misha Smolkin speaks about his interdisciplinary approach to uniting quantum field theory, quantum information and quantum gravity. While philosopher of physics Al Wilson speaks about what physicists stand to gain from developing an appreciation for the philosophy of science.
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The Casimir force can be tuned and even reversed by placing a chiral optical material between two similar surfaces – according to calculations by Qing-Dong Jiang and Frank Wilczek at the University of Stockholm. The duo’s finding gets around a famous “no-go” theorem, which says that the Casimir force between two similar surfaces must always be attractive. The research could be of practical use because the Casimir force can inhibit the operation of nanomechanical devices.
When two uncharged conducting plates are placed nanometres apart in a vacuum, the Casimir force tends to pull them together. This happens because a vacuum is not empty; rather, it bubbles with virtual photons that appear and then vanish. The gap between the plates acts as an optical cavity, which means that the number of virtual photons at wavelengths resonant with the cavity will be enhanced. This tends to increase the radiation pressure in the gap. Photons at non-resonant wavelengths, however, are suppressed and this leads to a drop in the pressure. The overall effect is a lowering of the radiation pressure in the gap – compared to outside the gap – and this tends to pull the plates together.
For two similar plates, calculations show that the Casimir force must always be attractive, drawing the plates towards each other. Recent theoretical and experimental studies have shown that it is possible to create scenarios with repulsive Casimir forces using objects made of different materials or with different shapes.
Chiral loophole
In their study, Jiang and Wilczek identify a loophole in the no-go theorem, which they say would allow for strong repulsive Casimir forces between two isotropic plates. To do this, the duo devised a setup with an optically active material is placed in the gap. This material is chiral, acting differently on photons of opposite circular polarization. The result is that virtual photons with opposite polarization have different velocities in the medium and this means they make different contributions to the overall radiation pressure between the gap.
With the chiral material in place, Jiang and Wilczek, calculate the Casimir force will oscillate between attractive and repulsive – depending on the distance between the plates. What is more, the repulsive force can be up to three times stronger than the regular attractive Casimir force. They also showed that the magnitude of the force can vary in response to an external magnetic field – providing a second way of tuning the force.
Jiang and Wilczek say that optically active chiral materials are relatively common, which could make it easy for physicists to test the idea in the lab.
Nanotechnology has become synonymous with next-generation design and innovation – so what does that look like and what kinds of technologies are undergoing the most radical or profitable reinventions at the moment? I headed to Nanotech 2019 at Tokyo Big Sight where more than 40,000 attendees gathered to view show-stopping exhibits and talks by representatives of 500 organizations from 21 countries across the world.
An urgent need exists for continuous, non-invasive monitoring of heart function in patients at risk of congestive heart failure. An important diagnostic indicator of congestive heart failure is reduction in the left ventricle ejection fraction (the amount of blood pumped out by the left ventricle in each heartbeat). As such, a team from the University of California has invented an integrated cardiorespiratory (ICR) system for continuous ejection fraction measurement using a wearable device containing a number of acoustic sensors (WO/2019/045996). The ICR system performs signal processing to characterize acoustic signals generated by cardiac haemodynamic flow, cardiac valve and tissue motion, and uses advanced machine learning methods to provide accurate computation of ejection fraction.
Deep learning network identifies, removes image artefacts
Philips has published details of an ultrasound system that uses deep learning networks to enhance ultrasound images by identifying artefacts for removal (WO/2019/034436). By analysing orthogonal information — in this implementation, the structural information of a B mode image and motion information of the same field-of-view as that image — the system eliminates haze artefacts in B mode images of the carotid artery. In another embodiment, the neural network reduces haze artefacts by reducing time-gain control at the depth of artefacts.
Hybrid NMR–OCT device improves analysis of excised tissue
Clear-Cut Medical has devised a hybrid system that combines nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) to enable real-time imaging and analysis of surgically excised tissue (WO/2019/030620). Imaging using NMR creates a pixel map of the tissue surface, with each pixel colour-coded according to its probability of containing malignant tissue. Based on these probabilities, the system uses OCT to extract microscopic images from locations in the suspicious pixels. It then analyses these images to make a diagnosis based on the cellular microstructure of the tissue.
Software generates 3D brain map from MRI data
NEUROPHET has developed a method and program for generating a 3D brain map based on MR imaging (WO/2019/050226). The approach involves acquiring a brain MRI of a subject, segmenting this image into multiple regions, and using the segmented image to generate a 3D brain image. Based on the properties of each region in the 3D image, the method generates an individual 3D brain map of the subject. This map can then be used in simulations of electrical stimulation of the subject’s brain, for example, to help electrode positioning for therapeutic applications. The segmentation process includes a step in which the subject’s brain MRI is input into a deep-learning model that has been trained using a number of processed brain MRI images.
Data processing enhances shear wave elastography
Researchers at the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research have described processing methods for data acquired using probe oscillation shear wave ultrasound elastography (WO/2019/032803). This elastography method uses continuous vibration of the ultrasound probe to generate shear waves in the tissue and pulse-echo ultrasound detection to track the resulting shear waves. The described approach can effectively separate the shear wave signals from signals corresponding to residual motion artefacts from the transducer vibration. The filing also details systems and methods for real-time visualization of shear waves propagating in the subject.
CT fluoroscopy promises ultralow dose
CT fluoroscopy is an invaluable tool for use in CT-guided interventions. LiteRay Medical of Madison, WI, has described a system for ultralow-dose CT fluoroscopy (WO/2019/055288). The method involves acquiring pairs of projections of an interventional device using CT fluoroscopy, by rotating the gantry of a CT scanner. Each pair of projections is obtained at a predetermined angular separation, which is greater than the angular separation used for a full-dose CT scan of the target object. The full-dose scan acquires at least twice the number of projections per gantry rotation than used for projection pairs of the interventional device. The position of the interventional device is identified in real time for each pair of projections, using back-projection of images of the device from the respective projections pair. The system can also superimpose a 2D or 3D image of the interventional device on a CT image of an anatomical region at the identified device position.
Curing blindness remains a major challenge in medicine. Degenerative diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration are characterized by dysfunctional photoreceptors, which leads to the impairment of light detection in the retina. For patients with blindness caused by such diseases, one approach to restoring vision is a retinal prosthetic implant.
These bionic retinal implants provide electrical stimulation that elicits neuronal activity from the retina, perceived by the brain as visual objects called phosphenes. However, patients with such implants only see blurry images in shades of grey that cover a small part of the visual field.
A team of scientists from Germany has now proposed a modelling framework to better understand the effects of retinal stimulation. They hope that their work will enable improved bionic vision for future recipients of retinal prostheses, by making bionic retinal implants work faster and produce sharper, coloured images — essentially restoring natural sight.
Find out more in this video abstract by Daniel Rathbun and Eberhart Zrenner, published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.
Video courtesy of D L Rathbun et al Spike-triggered average electrical stimuli as input filters for bionic vision—a perspective J. Neural Eng. 10.1088/1741-2552/aae493
Particle physicists at CERN have measured charge-parity (CP) violation in the D0 meson for the first time. Announcing the finding today during the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference held in La Thuile, Italy, the result has a statistical significance of 5.3 σ – exceeding the 5σ “gold standard” for a discovery in particle physics. It is the first time that CP violation has been seen in charm mesons and opens up the possibility of searching for physics beyond the Standard Model.
According to conventional cosmological models, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Matter and antimatter should have then annihilated, leaving only photons. However, the clear domination of matter in our visible universe indicates that our understanding of the physics of the early universe is incomplete.
One possible explanation for the dearth of antimatter was proposed by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa in 1973. They suggested that the weak nuclear force — responsible for some types of radioactive decay — could act differently on matter and antimatter. This asymmetry is thought to contribute to what physicists refer to as CP violation, which means that the laws of physics change slightly when a particle is replaced by its antiparticle and when all three directions in space are reversed.
CP violation was first observed in 1964 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US in particles called neutral K mesons, which contain a strange quark. Experiments at the BaBar detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in the US and the KEK-B accelerator in Japan in 2001 also observed the phenomenon in neutral B mesons, which contain a bottom quark. Each finding led to a Nobel prize — one in 1980 for discovering CP violation in neutral K mesons and the other in 2008 for the theoretical framework of broken symmetry in particle physics that predicted CP violation in B mesons.
Taking the difference
One of the smaller experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the LHCb is designed to study the physics of B-mesons. But particle collisions taking place in such experiments also produce other mesons, including the D0 — a neutral meson that consists of a charm quark and an anti-up quark — and its antiparticle.
In late 2011, the LHCb team found the first hints of direct CP violation in D0 meson when searching for the decay of the D0 meson and its antiparticle into either a kaon/antikaon or pion/antipion pair. Using data from the first year the LHC was operational, the asymmetry value was reported at approximately -0.82% with a statistical significance of 3.5σ. However, further measurements brought that value closer to zero, therefore giving no significant CP asymmetry.
We’re very excited about this result
Tim Gershon
In the latest analysis, LHCb physicists used the LHC’s full dataset between 2011 and 2018, finding an asymmetry value of -0.154% with an uncertainty of 0.029% at a statistical significance of 5.3σ. “Looking for the two decay products gave us the required sensitivity to measure the tiny amount of CP violation expected for such decays,” says LHCb’s spokesperson Giovanni Passaleva. “Measuring the extent of the violation then boiled down to counting the D0 and anti-D0 decays and taking the difference.”
Eckhard Elsen, CERN’s director for research and computing, calls the result a “milestone” in the history of particle physics. “Ever since the discovery of the D meson more than 40 years ago, particle physicists have suspected that CP violation also occurs in this system, but it was only now, using essentially the full data sample collected by the experiment, that the LHCb collaboration has finally been able to observe the effect,” he says.
While this latest measurement is consistent with Standard Model predictions, Tim Gershon from Warwick University, who works on the LHCb experiment, told Physics World that the findings “open up new possibilities” to expand the programme of CP violation in charm mesons to test if there is physics beyond the Standard Model. “We’re very excited about this result,” adds Gershon. “It is testament to the analysis that has been carried out and the ability to counter possible biases in the measurement that could impact the results.”
The stakes are high and, of course, extraordinary scientific claims require thorough verification
Thomas Browder
The LHCb experiment is currently undergoing an upgrade during the LHC’s two-year shutdown. Gershon adds that when it turns on in 2021 then the experiment will be able to record data at a rate 10 times greater than previously possible, allowing physicists to collect as much data in one year then they have in total to date. “This will make our measurements more precise to allow us to study additional processes,” adds Gershon. “For example, we will be able to measure the amount of CP violation in the mixing process when D0 mesons flip into their antiparticle, and vice versa, which has excellent sensitivity to physics beyond the Standard Model.”
Checking and verifying
Thomas Browder from the University of Hawaii who works on the Belle-II detector at the SuperKEKB particle accelerator in Japan told Physics World that the recently fully operational SuperKEKB facility will also produce large amounts of charm quarks and will be able to “check and hopefully verify the LHCb result on charm CP violation.”
“We congratulate LHCb and CERN on their new result on CP violation in the charm quark sector, which suggests an unexpected path to new physics” adds Browder “The stakes are high and, of course, extraordinary scientific claims require thorough verification”.
Around one-quarter of Americans identify as evangelical Christians and a majority of this group reject man-made global warming. Now a study shows that being presented with clear factual information endorsed by a trusted – evangelical – source can change the minds of climate sceptics.
That source was Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, US, and an evangelical Christian. Hayhoe is well known for outreach work where she communicates the facts about climate change, explains the impacts and tackles many long-held misconceptions. If addressing an evangelical audience, Hayhoe provides a Christian perspective and highlights the difference between faith and science.
“I don’t believe in climate change, and I never have because it is not a religion,” says Hayhoe, who was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2014. “As a scientist I look at the data and the facts and they are clear: climate is changing, humans are responsible, the impacts are already serious, and there are solutions if we act now.”
So are evangelical Christians more receptive to changing their minds if the facts on climate change are presented with a Christian perspective? And does the presentation have to be given by a fellow evangelical Christian? To answer these questions, Katharine’s father Doug Hayhoe from Tyndale University College and Seminary in Canada, Mark Bloom from Dallas Baptist University, US, and Brian Webb, from Houghton College, US, measured how much people’s opinions shifted after listening to Katharine Hayhoe give a presentation on climate change.
I don’t believe in climate change, and I never have because it is not a religion
Katharine Hayhoe
Doug Hayhoe and his colleagues recruited undergraduate students from three different evangelical institutions: Houghton College, Dallas Baptist University and Tyndale University College. The students completed a survey asking them key questions about global warming, including whether they thought global warming was happening, whether it was natural or human-caused, whether it was harmful, and whether they were worried about it. In addition, they provided information about their political and theological perspectives.
Then the students watched a recorded climate change lecture given by Katharine Hayhoe at Houghton College in February 2015. Some of the students saw an extended lecture where Hayhoe provided a Christian framework, and others watched a shorter talk that just presented the climate change facts. Afterwards, the participants repeated the climate change survey. The students at Dallas Baptist University also completed another survey one month later.
In all cases, Doug Hayhoe and his colleagues measured a significant change in views after students listened to Katharine Hayhoe’s lecture. The greatest change in view occurred at the institution with the most politically conservative respondents, Dallas Baptist University; the percentage of students who thought global warming was happening rose from 51% to 87% after seeing the presentation. But gains were significant at all institutions, with concern about global warming rising sharply, from below 50% to over 70%.
It appeared not to matter whether the students had seen the longer version of the talk – with the Christian framework – or the shorter, straight facts version.
“This suggests that a presentation by a climate scientist not identified as an evangelical, but an equally gifted communicator, may be just as effective when sponsored or hosted – and therefore implicitly validated – by an evangelical community such as a church or Christian university,” says Doug Hayhoe, whose findings are published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL).
Hayhoe believes the work suggests that clear factual presentations endorsed by a trusted source can be highly effective. “We would encourage faith-based community leaders – academics, pastors and so on – who are concerned about stewardship and climate change to use videos like this with their constituents,” he says.
More broadly, the findings indicate that people are more open to changing their mind about controversial topics when information is endorsed by their own community. “If true this carries enormous implications for outreach and engagement to groups and on topics far beyond the scope of our study,” Hayhoe adds.
Researchers have designed a tile set of DNA molecules that can carry out robust reprogrammable computations to execute six-bit algorithms and perform a variety of simple tasks. The system, which works thanks to the self-assembly of DNA strands designed to fit together in different ways while executing the algorithm, is an important milestone in constructing a universal DNA-based computing device.
The new system makes use of DNA’s ability to be programmed through the arrangement of its molecules. Each strand of DNA consists of a backbone and four types of molecules known as nucleotide bases – adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine (A, T, C, and G) – that can be arranged in any order. This order represents information that can be used by biological cells or, as in this case, by artificially engineered DNA molecules. The A, T, C, and G have a natural tendency to pair up with their counterparts: A base pairs with T, and C pairs with G. And a sequence of bases pairs up with a complementary sequence: ATTAGCA pairs up with TGCTAAT (in the reverse orientation), for example.
The DNA tile
An essential building block in DNA nanotechnology for programmable self-assembly is the DNA tile, which binds through the above Watson-Crick complementary domains to several neighbours arranged on a 1, 2 or 3D lattice. Only a few DNA tile types (each with the same motif but making use of different sequences) are needed to program the self-assembly of large, micron-sized, crystalline structures in which each tile appears periodically.
In this work, the DNA tile set is a collection of short (42 nucleotide) DNA strands designed to fit together into a fabric like a jigsaw puzzle. “Unlike a jigsaw puzzle, however, where each piece fits exactly in one place, our algorithmic tiles can fit together in many different ways depending on the ‘input’,” explains Erik Winfree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who co-led this research study. “The input here is another self-assembled DNA structure, called ‘DNA origami’, which can be designed to carry DNA strands representing any six-bit binary number of choice.”
An arbitrary six-bit Boolean circuit
The input structure in fact acts as a seed for the crystallization of the DNA tiles, forming a DNA nanotube that carries out a computation based on how the tiles fit together, he adds. “Roughly speaking, each new layer of growth on the nanotube represents one more iteration of a six-bit Boolean circuit. We can program the circuit by choosing which strands from a master set are mixed together in a given experiment.
The researchers say they can program a master set of 355 DNA tiles (by selecting the right subset of 100 strands) to compute an arbitrary six-bit circuit. “There are 244 (17 trillion) such circuits possible and although not all of these are interesting, we implemented 21 circuits that display a surprisingly wide range of behaviours,” says Winfree.
“My favourite is an odd little circuit that acts like a clock. It starts with 000010, goes to 011001 and then to 001010. Next, and in a strange order, it goes to 60 other bit patterns before returning to 000010 and repeating the sequence.”
The experiment is limited to six-bit inputs because of certain technical engineering constraints, related to the geometry of the DNA nanotubes, explains study co-lead author David Doty of the University of California, Davis. “With the right DNA tile design though, there’s every reason to think that we could make systems processing far more bits as reliably, or even more so, by amplifying our error-correction techniques in ways we already know.”
A randomized circuit. Demin Liu (Molgraphics) and Damien Woods (Maynooth University)
As well as the clock, the other circuits the team ran include: a circuit that determines whether a six-bit binary number is a multiple of three; one that determines whether it is a palindrome (that is, reads the same forwards and backwards); one that tests whether the numbers of 1s is even or odd; one that tests for equality with 21 (that is, 010101 in binary); and a circuit that sorts all the 1s to the left and the 0s to the right.
Randomized circuits
The researchers also made some randomized circuits. These occur when molecules are included for more than one function that could be computed at a specific location, explains Winfree. “For example, we considered a molecule that binds to input (0,1) at bit positions 3 and 4, outputting (1,1). If we also include a molecule that binds to (0,1) at bit positions 3 and 4, but presents outputs that encode (0,0), then the computation that occurs depends on which of these two molecules arrives first (which is a random process).
“We can then design such circuits that grow random patterns – such as a single bit that performs a random walk up and down the array of bits.”
Such circuits are important in theoretical computer science, he says.
“Programming at the bench”
All the DNA circuits are made directly in a test tube, which essentially contain billions of completed algorithms, each resembling a knitted scarf of DNA tiles. The pattern on the scarf provides the solution to the algorithm that was run.
“In previous work researchers might have designed a new system and then waited days or even weeks for the DNA stands to be created by a DNA synthesis company and shipped to their lab,” explains study co-lead author Damien Woods, now at Maynooth University in Ireland. Woods performed this study while at Caltech and then at INRIA in France. “We wanted to write programs and then run them immediately. To do this, we designed a set of 355 DNA strands that could implement any program in our six-bit circuit model and then stored these formulations in the fridge.”
Running the circuits is then fairly simple, he tells Physics World. “We write the circuit design in a text file and a computer program converts the circuit description into list of a 100 or so names of our stored DNA strands. We then select these strands and mix them in a test tube with other strands that encode the six-bit input to the circuit. We then read out these circuits by imaging the patterns on them using an atomic force microscope.”
The researchers, reporting their work in Nature, say that if they could reliably scale up their six-bit DNA circuit to much larger numbers, it might be used to make a universal set of DNA tiles that could be reprogrammed to grow any type of structure describable by an algorithm.
“In this scenario, you could, for instance, write a standard computer program that draws a smiley face or flower to the screen,” says Doty. “That program is simply a sequence of bits. If you encode those bits into a seed structure (as our experiment’s seed encoded six bits), the tiles would execute the program and use its output to know exactly where they need to grow to make a smiley face or a flower.”
“Digitalization is creating a deluge of data,” former Labour politician, and current chief executive officer of Sensyne HealthPaul Drayson told attendees at a briefing led by the Oxford Local Enterprise Partnership (OxLEP) in the House of Commons in London, UK, on Tuesday 19th March. While this is true in a number of sectors, in health the nature of the data subjects – human patients with all their unique nuances and inconsistencies – raises additional challenges in data quality where they may often be missing fields and errors in the data. “The only way to deal with this is AI and machine learning.”
The briefing “Where next for digital health?” presented a tour de force of some of the business success stories forged in the alliance of digital technologies and healthcare providers. As well as the use of AI to extract meaningful trends from vast quantities of data, speakers highlighted the role of virtual reality and apps, such as software to guide patients to reliable information online, circumnavigating websites that can escalate patient anxiety. Pointing out some of the problems with “Dr Google”, founder of doctors.net.uk and chief executive officer of the Cognitant group Tim Ringrose said “Online misinformation can cause more harm than good.” He added that a lot of patients are looking for something that will direct them to the information their doctor would give them, but if you go to your GP you are likely to be handed a print out of the relevant web page, a practice that can seem archaic in the context of the way many people now access information.
These technologies have benefits for both providers and users of health services. As Ringrose highlighted better informed patients can be dealt with more efficiently, and apps that help patients manage their conditions from home can greatly help ease the strain on health service resources. He also described use of virtual reality, not only in pain relief – such as the use of a virtual world of ice and snow fights to attenuate the activity of pain receptors during a dressing change for a heavily burnt 911 fire fighter – but also for training surgeons. Virtual reality exposes trainees to the emotional as well as the practical experience of surgery without the need to wait for a medical emergency.
Despite the solutions digital technologies offer they also raise new challenges. “In AI politics and technology come together,” said Drayson. “Technology for all AI algorithms introduces bias and if we don’t think about it we miss a very important point. There’s no reason why AI shouldn’t be regulated in the same way as a new pill for instance – we shouldn’t accept black boxes.” Drayson went on to point out that awareness of ethical issues in AI programming highlights additional requirements around alignment with societal values, and the possible unintended impact of buying into AI technologies from abroad. “Can we develop our own software in ways that are in tune with the NHS [National Health Service] and our society and values or will we get an NHS colonized with software from other countries?”
Silicon Valley in Oxfordshire
OxLEP believe Oxfordshire has a crucial role to play in securing homegrown digital technologies for the UK. The county is home to scores of digital health companies and many allied stakeholders across industry, academia, the NHS and the voluntary sector. As several of the speakers at the briefing point out, Oxford benefits from world class expertise in engineering, information science, and medicine – the key ingredients for developing digital technologies for healthcare – and the colocation of the University just across the road from the hospital helps researchers, doctors and nurses to reach a unilateral interdisciplinary understanding of technology requirements and capabilities. “People who come say it’s like coming to Silicon Valley in Oxfordshire,” said Lord Drayson.
The University of Oxford’s Innovation Technology Transfer has already helped to build 25 companies including Drayson’s Sensyne Health, illustrating a change in the role of universities, and the University of Oxford in particular, which are increasingly playing a key part in the incubation of businesses. However, Drayson points out that the strength of digital technology businesses tends to scale exponentially with the number of members so that the winner takes all. “Do MySpace and Friends Reunited even exist still?” he asked, taking facebook as an example. As a result these businesses face an additional hurdle beyond the so-called valley of death between lab and clinic. To compete internationally presenting a good option is not enough, digital technology businesses need to be number one.
The European Commission (EC) has outlined a new approach to moving to a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy by 2050. It says this would cost perhaps €1.42 trillion per annum. Much of that would have to be spent anyway, however, to replace existing capital items, including power plants and vehicles. And, if geared to a net-zero emission target, that investment would reduce and avoid some costs, using energy more efficiently and phasing out the use of increasingly expensive fossil fuels.
Taking expected economic growth patterns into account, the EC calculated that, on the basis of their plan, the current rising trend in energy-related EU household expenses as a share of income was “expected to peak at about 7.5% around 2025-2030 before declining thereafter under all scenarios as the benefits of the energy transition materialize in full”. As a result, “by 2050, households would spend 5.6% of income on energy-related expenses, i.e. nearly 2 percentage points lower than in 2015 and lower than the share in 2005”.
The programme would also, of course, avoid the ever-growing heath, social, environmental and economic costs of climate change. To that end the EC outlines a plan for joint action focused on seven strategic building blocks:
Energy efficiency measures, which should play a central role, reducing energy consumption by as much as half by 2050 compared to 2005.The EC notes that, while energy efficiency will play a central role in decarbonizing industrial processes, “much of the reduced energy demand will occur in buildings, in both the residential and services sectors, which today are responsible for 40% of energy consumption”, with a large majority of homes using renewable heating – green electricity, district heating, renewable gas or solar thermal.
The large-scale deployment of renewables, leading to wider electrification and to a high degree of decentralization. “By 2050, the share of electricity in final energy demand will at least double, bringing it up to 53%, and electricity production will increase substantially to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, up to 2.5 times of today’s levels depending on the options selected for the energy transition,” says the EC. That, it believes, will “give an important role to consumers that produce energy themselves (prosumers), and local communities, to encourage residential take-up of renewables”.
Cutting emissions from transport, which is responsible for around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. To achieve this, the EC says “a combination of decarbonized, decentralized and digitalized power, more efficient and sustainable batteries, highly efficient electric powertrains, connectivity and autonomous driving offers prospects to decarbonize road transport”. But it warns that “batteries have so far a low energy density, and for now their high weight makes the technology ill-suited for aviation and long-distance shipping” and also for long-haul trucks and coaches, while “railway remains the most energy efficient solution for carrying freight over medium to long distances”. Hydrogen-based technologies such as electric vehicles and vessels based on fuel cells may become competitive in the medium to long-term, according to the report. “Liquefied natural gas with high blends of bio-methane could also be a short-term alternative for long-distance haul”, it says, while “in long-distance shipping and heavy-duty vehicles, not only bio-fuels and bio-gas but also e-fuels can have a role provided that they are carbon-free throughout their production chain”. And finally, “aviation must see a shift to advanced biofuels and carbon-free e-fuels, with hybridization & other improvement in aircraft technology having a role in improving efficiency”.
A competitive EU industry and circular economy. The EC says “recovery and recycling of raw materials will be of particular importance in those sectors and technologies where new dependencies might emerge, such as a reliance on critical materials like cobalt, rare earths or graphite, whose production is concentrated in a few countries outside Europe”. It adds “renewable hydrogen and sustainable biomass can be a feedstock for a number of industrial processes, such as steel production and certain chemicals, with Carbon Capture and Utilization also being an option for industry, producing e-fuels”.
Developing smart network infrastructure and inter-connections. The EC looks to smart electricity and data/information grids, and where needed, hydrogen pipelines, supported by digitalization and further sector integration. That clearly will require a lot of political negotiation across the EU.
Reaping the full benefits of bio-economy and creating essential carbon sinks. That involves expanding biomass production/use, while also ensuring natural carbon sinks are “maintained or even enhanced”. Not an easy task, especially as the EC also wants to avoid imports, since they raise concerns about “emissions from land use change in exporting countries”. It says “a net-zero emissions economy will require increasing amounts of biomass compared to today’s consumption”, with up to an 80% rise in bio-energy use by 2050 compared to today. However, “even with improved sustainable management practices, existing EU forests alone could not deliver that amount without a substantial decline of the EU’s forest sink and its other ecosystem-services, which needs to be avoided”. Indeed, the EC says “maintaining and further increasing the natural sink of forests, soils, and agricultural lands and coastal wetlands is crucial for the success of the Strategy, as it allows the offsetting of residual emissions from sectors where decarbonization is the most challenging, including agriculture itself”. New farming methods and patterns may help to cut emissions, while afforestation and restoration of degraded forest lands and other ecosystems can, the EC says, boost sequestration. But even so, it will be hard not to destroy sinks.
Tackle remaining carbon dioxide emissions with carbon capture and storage (CCS). That seems to have been downgraded somewhat. CCS was “previously seen as a major decarbonization option for the power sector & energy intensive industries,” says the EC. “Today this potential appears lower, considering the rapid deployment of renewable energy technologies, other options to reduce emissions in industrial sectors and issues concerning social acceptance of the technology itself. However, CCS deployment is still necessary, especially in energy intensive industries and – in the transitional phase – for the production of carbon-free hydrogen. CCS will also be required if CO2 emissions from biomass-based energy and industrial plants are to be captured and stored to create negative emissions.” So the message is, keep at it, if only as a research focus, but with Biomass with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) present “only post-2050 in 2°C scenarios”, although it might be needed earlier in a 1.5°
Power to X and carbon sinks
While CCS, and BECCS, have been demoted somewhat, “Power to Gas” has risen up the agenda. The EC looks at the role that might be played by what it calls generically “Power-to-X” technologies, which transform electricity into synthetic gases — hydrogen, methane or other gases — and liquids. “Hydrogen produced with carbon-free electricity, combined with CO2 from sustainable biomass or Direct Air Capture, can make a carbon-neutral alternative of the same molecules as natural gas or oil, and thus can be distributed via existing transmission/distribution systems and used by existing installations and applications,” says the EC. The drawback is that this production is energy intensive, but “the potential advantage of power-to-X is that synthetic fuels can be stored and used in multiple ways across different economic sectors, where it is otherwise hard to decarbonize (e.g. industry and transport).”
The EC doesn’t explore this specifically, but another attraction of Power to Gas electrolysis is that it offers a way to get green gas without land use for biomass production or CCS (unlike BECCS). And that offers a way to balance variable renewables – by storing converted excess green power as hydrogen and making power again from it when there are green power lulls.
However, balancing seems to be seen as less of an issue than overall emission reductions. “The deployment of no-regret options such as renewables including sustainable advanced biofuels, energy efficiency, impetus towards circular economy alongside individual options such as electrification, hydrogen and alternative fuels or new approaches to mobility, are not sufficient for a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy by 2050,” warns the EC. “Under such technology scenarios, emissions reduce only by 80% by 2050 compared to 1990,” but “the inclusion of more land and forestry sinks could reduce them by 90%”.
In conclusion, the EC stresses the need for more sinks and says “reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions will require maximizing the potential of technological and circular economy options, the large-scale deployment of natural land-based carbon sinks including in the agricultural and forestry sectors as well as shifts in mobility patterns”.
That means pushing nearly all the policy and technology buttons, and the EC also retains nuclear, with around a 15% contribution, although, oddly, it says little more about that in the main report. It seems more interested in talking about “Power to X” and e-fuels, and carbon sinks. The new EC plan is certainly bold. It may still include nuclear but it is talking about a net-zero emission target for 2050 for the entire EU, and that is pretty radical. In my next post I look at the situation globally — at progress so far, and at some of the latest high-renewables non-nuclear scenarios.
