Ornithology Group

Finding the signal in the noise: Determining North America’s best path forward for sustainable energy

Dr. Thomas Adams
Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Graduate Department of Chemical Engineering McMaster University

One of the largest engineering challenges of our time is finding technical solutions that permit the use of our energy resources in a sustainable way. In order to achieve meaningful and positive change, new energy systems must adhere to the triple bottom line of sustainability. This means that new technical solutions must be economically, socio-politically, and environmentally sustainable, such that they can be rapidly adopted and accepted. The engineering literature is full of a great many technical proposals for new energy systems, but it turns out to be quite hard to objectively look at them all, see through the hype, and decide which are the best and most promising technologies in which to invest our research and development dollars. In this talk, I will present a case study with the results of our recent meta-study covering over 100 candidate electricity generation systems with carbon dioxide capture, in order to determine which are the most promising classes of technologies. I will show how meaningful big picture conclusions can only be made when using certain consistent standards and methodologies, and present some surprising results about where we should be headed in the fossil-based power generation sector. Then, I will show how this methodology can be extended to other kinds of studies, and make a call for energy systems researchers to change how they conduct techno-economic analyses through a new standardization framework such that we can much more rapidly understand how each study fits into the bigger picture. With these changes, we will be able to most effectively direct our research money and effort to make the wisest decisions about how to develop our energy systems across Canada and the rest of North America.

BIO
Thomas A. Adams II, P.Eng, is an Associate Professor and the Associate Chair, Graduate of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University. He received dual bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineering and computer science from the Michigan State University Honors College in 2003. He received his PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 under the supervision of Warren D. Seider as an NSF Graduate Fellow and completed his postdoctoral training at MIT under Paul I. Barton in 2010. He is the chair of the Systems & Control Division of the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering and an active member of the McMaster Advanced Control Consortium and the McMaster Institute for Energy Studies. He is the 2018 recipient of the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering Lectureship Award, the 2017 recipient of the CSChE Emerging Leader in Chemical Engineering Award, as well as a recipient of the Ontario Early Researcher Award, the President’s Award for Excellence in

"The roles of ancient waterways, evolving landscapes, and shifting climates in structuring desert arachnofaunas"

Food Policy and Climate Change will address the global and local forces disrupting our food production systems and explore the effects of a changing climate on agricultural farm workers. Changes in transportation and information technology have globalized our food supply leading to unprecedented choice and abundance for some. At the same time,
these factors combined with changes in precipitation, drought, and human migration exacerbated by climate change have increased the disruption of local food supplies for the world’s most vulnerable. Locally, farmers in New England must adapt to the impacts of a changing climate and the effects on agricultural production in our region. Agricultural farm workers are the backbone of the food production system, and despite the long legacy of agricultural exceptionalism in the United States, they have fewer protections than other workers.

https://www.law.uconn.edu/calendar/symposium/food-our-changing-climate-conference-integrating-science-and-law