Search

one more minute

Slides 37-55 outline FPG's current carbon capture system in Kaoshiung and its future plans for CCS systems in Mailiao, including an experimental system of biodegradable carbon capture. These initiatives, largely through Formosa Smart Energy Corp. also attempt to use AI models to regulate carbon capture for optimal production. 

See slides 40-42 for new initiatives on carbon capture. They list plans to build deep water carbon capture pits, being sited in Yunlin as of 9.2022.

The carbon capture system they have in place at Nanya seems to have reduced the amount of naptha necessary to manufacture butyl ether, a chemical used in solvents and pesticides, through reinjection of that carbon dioxide into source feedstocks (Enhanced Oil Recovery).

“國際碳捕捉技術發展

依據全球碳捕捉與封存研究所(Global CCS Institute, CCSI)最新發布之「2022年全球碳捕捉與

封存發展現況報告(The Global Status Of CCS 2022)」，⾄2022年全球共有30個⼤型CCS綜合

專案已經營運，其中有22個採⾏強制採油技術(Enhanced oil recovery, EOR)，利⽤⼆氧化碳灌

注⾄快枯竭的油氣⽥，獲取更多殘存油氣，以增加效益，其餘8個專案封存於陸地或海洋深層

鹽⽔層，顯示現階段應⽤仍以EOR技術為主，除可減少碳排外，更可增加獲利。

自動翻譯

 Capture Technology Development

According to the "2022 Global Carbon Capture and Storage Storage Development Status Report“ (The Global Status Of CCS 2022), by 2022 there will be 30 large CCS comprehensive

The projects are already in operation, and 22 of them adopt enhanced oil recovery (EOR), using carbon dioxide irrigation. Inject into the depleted oil and gas to obtain more residual oil and gas to increase efficiency, and the remaining 8 projects are sealed in land or deep ocean

The salt water layer shows that the current application is still dominated by EOR technology, which can not only reduce carbon emissions, but also increase profits.” (Slide 38)

Heavy reliance on technosolutions to reach emission reduction and climate goals. Shift from oil as fuel to oil as material. Cooperation between industry, academic, and technical research organizations to research new carbon capture systems. Longevity of the petrochemical industry within climate politics is a high priority for FPG, but also the efficiency of petrochemical inputs. Climate change action is being pursued, but more so in capture of carbon emitted and repurposed within chemical reactions, as opposed to omitted through reductions in production

We're still doing this Galileo schtick? Absolutely the worst model for the science-authority relationship, but scientists (well, at least physical scientists) still love it.  More to come...

First: Another list on another google doc and just looking at it https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1UTQvW_OytC37IatMNR5qJK7qKfSylNpI2fT3pdteVZA/mobilebasic gets me started: we're all barely keeping up and just trying to direct the firehose into some readily available container like a google doc because we can't drink any more and it's the easiest thing to hand.  I'm happy with the dangerous "we": all we humanists and all them scientists are trying to do kaelidoscopics at speed, saving the excess for future analysis while trying to do the analysis right now and get something in print right now which is aleready too late.  "They" have better containers (infrastructure) and that matters, but I think it's important to note the shared space of urgency and excess and ask about the effects these have on analysis, ours and theirs and: ours.

It has to be hurried, the only take worth anything these days is the hot take, for scientists, science journalists, science analysts. An exaggeration, but I'm rushed. We know that air pollution (two words harboring such complexity and excess on its own: PM2.5, ozone, NOX, etc.etc.) impacts health in numerous ways, in and beyond our repiratory system; we know that those physiological logics are compounded by cultural logics, in their complexity and excess: race poverty geolocation healthcare access nutritional needs etc. etc. A kaleidoscopic intersectional analysis that, to get good reliable outcomes, takes time.

A need for generosity.

So as I make my way down the list in the google doc and read that some group or some lab shows the COVID-19 intersects with air pollution and makes for worse outcomes for African Americans I'm predisposed toward belief, for many good reasons, compounded by the rush. And the data and the correlations between, say, increased mortality in areas of northern Italy where there are higher levels of airpollution is certainly believable, compelling -- for NO2 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720321215?via%3Dihub

and air pollution generally

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749120320601

That kind of crunching of large data sets seems believable -- and has been stamped as peer reviewed. So what do we do with this article in The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-covid-19-and-death-the-perils-of-bypassing-peer-review-136376

critical of a Harvard School of Public Health study available as a preprint on medrxiv --

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.05.20054502v2

-- that concludes that "an increase of only 1 μg/m3 in PM2.5 is associated with an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate (95% confidence interval [CI]: 2%, 15%)"?  The Canadian researchers in The Conversation are not convinced:

"It is almost impossible to try to adjust for the influence of all these factors, as this study tried to do, because the interactions between these variable are so complex. Accounting for these factors could only be done in studies using information from individual-level information."

"Proper peer review must not be bypassed — and the onus for respecting its role falls not just on journalists but also on scientists to communicate the correct information accurately."

I'm suspicious -- and if I had more time I would be more suspicious of my suspicions -- for two reasons: one, a lot of those studies on the google docs list are preprints.  But more importantly, the call for "individual-level information."  What does this mean? I don;t think anyone is working with "individual level information" in all of these studies, so why does this one become a target?

1. Because it's Harvard PH, of Six Cities study fame, first linking air pollution to increased mortality and the key reference point for US air pollution regulation. There's a long history of the oil industry and their scientists just trying to pick holes and cast doubt on these studies out of Harvard.

2. The criticism smacks of the most recent devious strategy of the air regulation opponents, which is to call for individiual level data in epidemiological to be released in the name of "transparency." Which can't be done.

So who are these Canadian guys and are they up to something more than "just raising questions and being good scientific skeptics"?

UPDATE 1 HOUR LATER:

So I looked them up: Mark Goldberg was a member of the Reanalysis Team of the Health Effects Institute that validated the Six Cities Study: 

https://theasthmafiles.org/content/hei-validation-six-cities-study

Unlikely, then, that he is some undustry beard...

ENVOI

p.232: "In these pages, I have repeatedly emphasized the complicity between subject and object of investigation. My role in this essay, as subject of investigation, has been entirely parasitical, since my only object has been the Subaltern Studies themselves. Yet I am part of their object as well. Situated within the current academic theater of cultural imperialism, with a certain carte d'entree into the elite theoretical ateliers in France, I bring news of power lines within the palace. Nothing can function without us, yet the part is at least historically ironic. What of the poststructuralist suggestion that all work is parasitical, slightly to the side of that which one wishes adequately to cover, that critic (historian) and text (subaltern) are always "beside themselves"? The chain of complicity does not halt at the closure of an essay."

p217: "[Subaltern Studies] can never be continuous with the subaltern's situational and uneven entry into political (not merely disciplinary, as in the case of the collective) hegemony as the content of an afterthe- fact description. This is the always asymmetrical relationship between the interpretation and transformation of the world which Marx marks in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. There the contrast is between the words haben interpretiert (present participle—a completed action—of interpretieren— the Romance verb which emphasizes the establishment of a meaning that is commensurate with a phenomenon through the metaphor of the fair exchange of prices) and zu verandern (infinitive—always open to the future—of the German verb which "means" strictly speaking, "to make other"). The latter expression matches haben interpretiert neither in its Latinate philosophical weight nor in its signification of propriety and completion, as transformierien would have done. Although not an unusual word, it is not the most common word for "change" in German—verwandeln. In the open-ended "making-other"—Veranderung—of the properly self-identical—adequately interpretiert—lies an allegory of the theorist's relationship to his subject-matter."

p217: "If it were embraced as a strategy, then the emphasis upon the "sovereignty,... consistency and...logic" of "rebel consciousness" (EAP, 13) could be seen as "affirmative deconstruction": knowing that such an emphasis is theoretically nonviable, the historian then breaks his theory in a scrupulously delineated "political interest."19 If, on the other hand, the restoration of the subaltern's subject-position in history is seen by the historian as the establishment of an inalienable and final truth of things, then any emphasis on sovereignty, consistency, and logic will, as I have suggested above, inevitably objectify the subaltern and be caught in the game of knowledge as power. Even if the discursivity of history is seen as a fortgesetzte Zeichenkette, a restorative genealogy cannot be undertaken without the strategic blindness that will entangle the genealogist in the chain. Seeing this, Foucault in 1971 recommended the "historical sense," much like a newscaster's persistently revised daily bulletin, in the place of the arrogance of a successful genealogy. 20 It is in this spirit that I read Subaltern Studies against its grain and suggest that its own subalternity in claiming a positive subject-position for the subaltern might be reinscribed as a strategy for our times.

What good does such a reinscription do? It acknowledges that the arena of the subaltern's persistent emergence into hegemony must always and by definition remain heterogeneous to the efforts of the disciplinary historian. The historian must persist in his efforts in this awareness that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic. It is a hard lesson to learn, but not to learn it is merely to nominate elegant solutions to be correct theoretical practice."