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Houston steps to top of list of U.S. cities with lowest carbon footprints

seeing green

Houston claimed the No. 1 spot among the 50 most visited in the U.S. with the lowest carbon footprint. Sean Pavone/Getty Images

People looking to travel to a sustainable city probably don’t have Texas spots at the top of their lists. Images of oil, cars, and blasting air conditioners spring up. The Texas power grid, no one need remind us, is barely hanging on.

But Texas blew other states away for lowest carbon footprint per capita, landing Houston at the top of the 2022 list compiled by travel blog Park Sleep Fly. Austin followed (No. 3), then San Antonio (No. 4) and Dallas (No. 9). Only Florida appeared twice in the top 10, and none matched Texas with four cities.

Among the 50 most visited in the U.S., those with the lowest carbon footprint are:

1. Houston
2. Los Angeles
3. Austin
4. San Antonio
5. Tampa, Florida
6. Salt Lake City
7. Phoenix
8. Miami
9. Dallas
10. Portland, Oregon

Houston is not exactly a green place, with less-than-ideal utilization of public transportation. It and Dallas tied for third place among least sustainable cities in the same report.

“Public transit isn’t the most popular mode of transportation in Houston, but it does exist,” an online publication called TripSavvy drably admits. The city takes credit for employing “nearly one third” of the nation’s oil and gas extraction workers.

On the renewable side, however, Houston claims more than 100 solar energy companies, and at least half of its corporate research and development centers pursue “energy technology and innovation.” And its huge population spreads the load, leaving only 14.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per resident — the same as Los Angeles. Big cities seem to have an advantage in this rating system.

Austin is just behind Houston at 15 metric tons per capita, neck-and-neck with San Antonio at 15.2. These two cities have smaller populations to distribute their total footprint, but are generally seen as eco-friendly. Austin got a big head start in 1991 with the introduction of the Austin Energy Green Building program — the first of its kind in the whole country — which created an evaluation system for individual building sustainability that’s still in use. Dallas' carbon footprint is the largest of the Texas cities in the ranking, at 16.5 metric tons per capita.

As such a multifaceted issue (especially tied up in economic concerns), sustainability is hard to pin down from city to city. The multiplicity of this list is yet another indicator that Texas as a whole is a much more nuanced place than many people think.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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Engie signs deal to supply wind power for Texas data center

wind deal

Houston-based Engie North America, which specializes in generating low-carbon power, has sealed a preliminary deal to supply wind power to a Cipher Mining data center in Texas.

Under the tentative agreement, Cipher could buy as much as 300 megawatts of clean energy from one of Engie’s wind projects. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Cipher Mining develops and operates large data centers for cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing.

In November, New York City-based Cipher said it bought a 250-acre site in West Texas for a data center with up to 100 megawatts of capacity. Cipher paid $4.1 million for the property.

“By pairing the data center with renewable energy, this strategic collaboration supports the use of surplus energy during periods of excess generation, while enhancing grid stability and reliability,” Engie said in a news release about the Cipher agreement.

The Engie-Cipher deal comes amid the need for more power in Texas due to several factors. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in October that data centers and cryptocurrency mining are driving up demand for power in the Lone Star State. Population growth is also putting pressure on the state’s energy supply.

Last year, Engie added 4.2 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity worldwide, bringing the total capacity to 46 gigawatts as of December 31. Also last year, Engie signed a new contract with Meta (Facebook's owner) and expanded its partnership with Google in the U.S. and Belgium.

Houston researchers make headway on developing low-cost sodium-ion batteries

energy storage

A new study by researchers from Rice University’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Baylor University and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram has introduced a solution that could help develop more affordable and sustainable sodium-ion batteries.

The findings were recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The team worked with tiny cone- and disc-shaped carbon materials from oil and gas industry byproducts with a pure graphitic structure. The forms allow for more efficient energy storage with larger sodium and potassium ions, which is a challenge for anodes in battery research. Sodium and potassium are more widely available and cheaper than lithium.

“For years, we’ve known that sodium and potassium are attractive alternatives to lithium,” Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering at Rice, said in a news release. “But the challenge has always been finding carbon-based anode materials that can store these larger ions efficiently.”

Lithium-ion batteries traditionally rely on graphite as an anode material. However, traditional graphite structures cannot efficiently store sodium or potassium energy, since the atoms are too big and interactions become too complex to slide in and out of graphite’s layers. The cone and disc structures “offer curvature and spacing that welcome sodium and potassium ions without the need for chemical doping (the process of intentionally adding small amounts of specific atoms or molecules to change its properties) or other artificial modifications,” according to the study.

“This is one of the first clear demonstrations of sodium-ion intercalation in pure graphitic materials with such stability,” Atin Pramanik, first author of the study and a postdoctoral associate in Ajayan’s lab, said in the release. “It challenges the belief that pure graphite can’t work with sodium.”

In lab tests, the carbon cones and discs stored about 230 milliamp-hours of charge per gram (mAh/g) by using sodium ions. They still held 151 mAh/g even after 2,000 fast charging cycles. They also worked with potassium-ion batteries.

“We believe this discovery opens up a new design space for battery anodes,” Ajayan added in the release. “Instead of changing the chemistry, we’re changing the shape, and that’s proving to be just as interesting.”

ExxonMobil lands major partnership for clean hydrogen facility in Baytown

power deal

Exxon Mobil and Japanese import/export company Marubeni Corp. have signed a long-term offtake agreement for 250,000 tonnes of low-carbon ammonia per year from ExxonMobil’s forthcoming facility in Baytown, Texas.

“This is another positive step forward for our landmark project,” Barry Engle, president of ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions, said in a news release. “By using American-produced natural gas we can boost global energy supply, support Japan’s decarbonization goals and create jobs at home. Our strong relationship with Marubeni sets the stage for delivering low-carbon ammonia from the U.S. to Japan for years to come."

The companies plan to produce low-carbon hydrogen with approximately 98% of CO2 removed and low-carbon ammonia. Marubeni will supply the ammonia mainly to Kobe Power Plant, a subsidiary of Kobe Steel, and has also agreed to acquire an equity stake in ExxonMobil’s low-carbon hydrogen and ammonia facility, which is expected to be one of the largest of its kind.

The Baytown facility aims to produce up to 1 billion cubic feet daily of “virtually carbon-free” hydrogen. It can also produce more than 1 million tons of low-carbon ammonia per year. A final investment decision is expected in 2025 that will be contingent on government policy and necessary regulatory permits, according to the release.

The Kobe Power Plant aims to co-fire low-carbon ammonia with existing fuel, and reduce CO2 emissions by Japan’s fiscal year of 2030. Marubeni also aims to assist the decarbonization of Japan’s power sector and steel manufacturing industry, chemical industry, transportation industry and various others sectors.

“Marubeni will take this first step together with ExxonMobil in the aim of establishing a global low-carbon ammonia supply chain for Japan through the supply of low-carbon ammonia to the Kobe Power Plant,” Yoshiaki Yokota, senior managing executive officer at Marubeni Corp., added in the news release. “Additionally, we aim to collaborate beyond this supply chain and strive towards the launch of a global market for low-carbon ammonia. We hope to continue to actively cooperate with ExxonMobil, with a view of utilizing this experience and relationship we have built to strategically decarbonize our power projects in Japan and Southeast Asia in the near future.”

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