The Biden Administration and China Work to Address the Superpollutant N2O.

[NNadir]

Joe hasn't gone anywhere; he's still working.

From the Inside Climate News Feed:

Biden Administration Targets Domestic Emissions of Climate Super-Pollutant With Eye Toward U.S.-China Climate Agreement

Subtitle:

Reducing nitrous oxide emissions from U.S. chemical plants could reduce greenhouse gas emissions at little cost. Similar plants in China offer a “far bigger prize.”

Some excerpts:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The first details of a potential, and possibly massive, climate agreement between the U.S. and China were announced at a climate summit at the White House on Tuesday.

The initiative could significantly reduce emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent and largely overlooked greenhouse gas that also harms the ozone layer. Targeting this N₂O pollution from a limited number of chemical plants in the two countries offers an opportunity to quickly reduce a large volume of greenhouse gas emissions at little cost.

Biden administration officials and climate scientists who track so-called super-pollutants say bilateral efforts targeting industrial N2O began after Inside Climate News reported on these emissions from factories in the U.S. and China, showing how a powerful source of greenhouse gas emissions could be easily eliminated...

... Nitrous oxide is the third leading driver of climate change after carbon dioxide and methane. On a pound-for-pound basis, N2O is 273 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO₂. Unlike other climate super-pollutants like methane, it is long-lived, remaining in the atmosphere for more than a century.

Nitrous oxide is also the leading human-caused pollutant that depletes atmospheric ozone, which protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun...

...The White House said that Ascend Performance Materials, the largest producer of adipic acid in the United States, installed additional pollution controls at its Florida plant that have virtually eliminated N₂O emissions...

This is all well and good, but in fact, the largest emitter of N₂O is in fact agriculture, this in a fashion on which our food supply depends. This is a result of the use of the Haber-Bosch process which produces ammonia for fertilizer, producing it using hydrogen produced by the steam reforming of dangerous natural gas generally, and in places like China, from steam reforming of coal. At high pressures and temperatures in the presence of catalysts hydrogen reacts with nitrogen to form ammonia.

(The subject of the history of the development of the Haber Bosch process is the subject of a wonderful book by the incomparable Vaclav Smil: Enriching the Earth, which I recommend highly.)

A sink for N₂O destruction is exposure to ionizing radiation; in fact the gas can be used is certain kinds of dosimeters. It's one of the reasons that I favor high temperature Brayton cycles with air as a working fluid in a radiation field in nuclear plants, if and only if, the system catalytically destroys more nitrogen oxides than it forms. It is in fact, this property, lability in radiation fields that is responsible for the fact that destroys ozone.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Concentrations of this potent greenhouse gas are higher than all major model projections.

https://research.noaa.gov/2024/06/12/nitrous-oxide-emissions-grew-40-percent-from-1980-to-2020-accelerating-climate-change/

Lovely.

[JoseBalow]

2. I hope they don't ban music festivals