Hydrogen refueler plan Fastrac’ed

Dec 05, 2022

Multiple companies are working on hydrogen-powered agricultural equipment, but supporting infrastructure needs to be built before significant adoption of this emerging technology is possible.

JCB Power Systems decided to look upon this problem as an opportunity, and it designed a mobile hydrogen refuelling unit that can transport hydrogen on farms and construction sites.

Chris Giorgianni of JCB said the company builds electric powered construction machines, including an excavator and a forklift, but as machines get bigger the space requirement for the batteries becomes difficult to provide.

The need to transport electric machines to charging stations can also be a problem.

“Right now, you’ll see some job sites where you’ve got an electric vehicle being charged by a generator that runs on diesel,” Giorgianni said.

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Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.