Sustainable Aviation Fuel Grand Challenge: Tracking Metrics and Mid-2024 Dashboard

Since its announcement in September 2021, the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Grand Challenge has had a significant impact in accelerating the acceptance and growth of SAF as a primary strategy in aviation decarbonization.

Since the SAF Grand Challenge was announced, annual SAF domestic production and imports have grown from 5 million gallons in 2021 to 52 million gallons through the first six months of 2024. Fifty-two million gallons corresponds to more than 300,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions reductions.

Based on a database of active projects, between 2.6 and 4.9 billion gallons per year of SAF may be produced by …

Tribal-State Collaboration on Sustainability and Solar Development: A Case Study of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe

Tribal and State governments have a unique and often misunderstood relationship. State government employees are often not aware that Tribes are sovereign entities and not subject to their laws, regulations, or processes on Tribal lands. This lack of understanding causes situations in which consultation with Tribes is overlooked or inadequate, which further strains relationships and can threaten Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. Similarly, a lack of understanding of Tribal processes often leads to the incorrect assertion that the Tribe must follow the State’s processes, including their extensive paperwork. Despite these challenges, there has been more collaboration between Tribal and State governments …

Contaminated Excess Facilities: Use of Key Practices Would Strengthen DOE’s Disposition Planning Efforts

Effective management of DOE’s contaminated excess facilities could reduce the U.S. government’s
environmental liability, which is on GAO’s High Risk List. Deactivating and decommissioning such facilities is crucial for reducing risks and costs as the condition of facilities worsens over time. Since 2016, DOE has been required by statute to regularly plan for deactivating and decommissioning contaminated excess facilities.

Senate Report 118-58 includes a provision for GAO to evaluate DOE’s efforts to develop a plan for deactivating and decommissioning contaminated excess facilities, which is due March 2025 and every 4 years afterward. GAO examined DOE’s approach to deactivating and decommissioning …

Making Decarbonization Financing Work for Homeowners and Contractors

Decarbonizing single-family homes is crucial to meeting US climate goals, as these homes account for 58 percent of the country’s building greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, high up-front costs for electrification, such as heat pump installations, present a significant barrier. In Making Decarbonization Financing Work for Homeowners and Contractors, RMI identifies five key elements that can reshape financing programs to make decarbonization more accessible and appealing to households across America. These include eliminating up-front costs, offering same-day approvals, and ensuring upgrades prioritize efficient electric alternatives over fossil fuel equipment such as gas furnaces and water heaters.

Why is this needed now? …

Building Grids Faster: The Backbone of the Energy Transition

In its Briefing Note, Building Grids Faster: the Backbone of the Energy Transition, the ETC outlines the critical role of power grids for global decarbonisation and highlights the challenges in their development. The note calls on policymakers and industry to fast-track building power grids in order to deliver the energy transition at the pace and scale required to limit warming well below 2°C.

Clean electrification is the backbone of global decarbonisation, meaning power grids, which link the generation and use of electricity, will play a central role. Under net-zero scenarios, the total length of grids must grow by over 50% …

Unaddressed Non-Energy Use in the Chemical Industry can Undermine Fossil Fuels Phase-Out

Around 13% of fossil fuels globally are used for non-combustion purposes. Fossil fuel processing plants, such as petroleum refineries, exhibit interdependent material and energy system dynamics, making the transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems more challenging without addressing the non-energy outputs. This study explores the future role of fossil fuels for non-energy purposes in climate-stringent scenarios with restrictions on alternative feedstock availability, focusing on the primary chemicals sector. Using a global integrated assessment model with detailed refining and primary chemicals sectors, findings across various scenarios reveal that up to 62% of total feedstock use in the chemical sector …

Fighting Fire with Low-Carbon Buildings

Colorado’s forests are vital to the state’s identity. Indigenous peoples used wildfire to manage these forests for millennia, a practice still relevant today. However, climate change, fire suppression, and urban expansion have made severe wildfires more common and more destructive. Forest thinning, the selective removal of small diameter trees, improves resilience to these wildfires, protects drinking water, and conserves wildlife, but is costly. Furthermore, small-diameter trees from thinning have historically had little market value.

Mass timber, which combines wood from small trees into high performance structural elements, offers a solution by offsetting treatment costs and reducing embodied carbon in buildings …

Data Update: City Energy Burdens

In cities across the country, many low-income families and other disinvested communities struggle with high energy burdens, including many homeowners. In this data update, the authors find that 25% of all low-income households in the United States have an energy burden above 15.2%. In many cases, low-income homeowners in particular experience very high energy burdens, with 25% of low-income homeowners having energy burdens over 17.2% and half having burdens over 9.4%.

Owner-occupied housing (especially in single-family homes and buildings with four units or fewer) makes up a significant portion of housing in cities. To reach their goals for climate action …

Lessons from the Nuclear Waste Negotiator Era of the 1990s for Today’s Consent-Based Siting Efforts

This report, part of a series of publications on nuclear waste policy at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA, reveals lessons learned from the experiences of the two prior negotiators that could benefit a recent, congressionally directed effort at the Department of Energy (DOE) to begin a “consent-based” siting program for nuclear waste. Those individuals were authorized to negotiate terms and conditions—including financial and institutional arrangements—with a state or tribe in a written agreement that would then have to be approved by Congress. Importantly, a state or tribe was assured it could explore the potential of …

Fact Sheet: Green Hydrogen’s Impact on Water Supplies

Clean hydrogen has received a lot of interest for its potential use as a tool for decarbonization but has also prompted a lot of concerns. Hydrogen production and use can have serious consequences on water supplies, particularly in areas already facing water scarcity. The production of green hydrogen, as well as certain end uses, can be very water intensive. This 3-page fact sheet outlines green hydrogen’s impact on water supplies.…