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WHEN A DISCUSSION ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY ARISES, more often than not, it’s the latest and greatest technological advances that enter the conversational fray. But what about the tech that has already been invented and is just as capable of contributing to emissions reductions? Is it strictly new tech driving investments or is existing tech being put to use in new places?
To try and provide some perspective on those questions and more, we’re bringing you a sustainability double-feature this month. In our cover story, “Low Carbon, No Problem,” Leslie Nemo explores some of the issues facing industrial decarbonization and shares some promising stories. One of the clear answers, she wrote, is that technology exists that’s ready to “plug in and provide resources like heat or even CO₂ itself in a cleaner way. While some of the sector needs technology that hasn’t been invented yet, the barriers to this equipment taking hold are more economic and political than anything else.”
Our second feature looks to the horizon, exploring a pathway that could help unlock the clean hydrogen economy. In “A Greener Path for Hydrogen,” long-time contributor Michael Webber and Emily Beagle, professors at the University of Texas, Austin, explain the promise of methane pyrolysis, which “combines the relative efficiency of steam methane reformation with the relative cleanliness of electrolysis.”
Investments are taking hold and some startups such as Graphitic Energy and Monolith are already moving the technology forward. It may well be a glimpse into the clean energy future, should the right pathways align.
Monolith’s Olive Creek 1 is a first-of-its-kind commercial-scale facility that produces carbon black and hydrogen through a plasma pyrolysis process. It’s also the first carbon black production facility to be built in the U.S. since the 1980s.
Photo: Monolith
Elsewhere in this issue, our writers continue to bring you the latest in engineering innovation. Read on to see how understanding material flow could help engineers prevent defect formation in friction stir welding, what a new dopant addition technique means for producing transparent conductive thin films, and how underwater autonomous vehicles and machine learning are helping detect and map shipwrecks.
But engineering isn’t always serious business. It can be expressive and artistic as well. Jakob Grosse-Ophoff is using his engineering skills to recreate human movement with dynamic moving sculptures.
Meanwhile, in this month’s piece from Engineering for Change, learn how the CoolVeg Foundation is bringing a refrigeration solution to low-resource areas, with the help of swamp coolers and stacked crates.
While New York City residents are used to seeing window washers darting along the surface of skyscrapers, don’t forget that engineers are often up there too. ASME’s Video Production Team recently spent some time with a rope access technician with Thornton Tomasetti to learn what it takes to perform detailed exterior building inspections that traditional methods can’t reach.
There’s a lot more than that in the pages that follow, so please read on. And as always, if there’s something that you would like to see in an upcoming issue, our team of editors is just an email away at memag@asme.org.
—Louise Poirier, managing editor
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