A Diffusion Model for Natural Gas Vehicle: A Case study in Japan

AbstractIn this study, scenario analysis for diffusion of future natural gas vehicle (NGV) in Japan was conducted. Natural gas resources are attracting attentions in recent years due to the shale gas revolution. The relative price of natural gas to the price of oil is expected to fall down in the next decades, and NGV possibly has larger economic advantages over conventional gasoline vehicle (GV) for consumers in the future. In terms of CO2 emissions, NGV emits less CO2 than general gasoline vehicles, and some other advantages were discovered via comparison. NGV has started diffusing widely in the world and currently total of 19.9 million NGVs are estimated to be hold in the world. In Japan, NGV's diffusion started in 1990, and there are 43,600 NGVs running on roads in present day. In this research, scenario analyses for diffusion of NGVs in future Japan were undertaken. For the analyses, authors used the Bass model as the modeling framework, and set upped three future scenarios for NGV's diffusion in Japan. The first scenario (Scenario 1) simply applied past experience of diffusion trend from early 1990s to 2013 in Japan with saturation level at current day up to 2050. In the second scenario (Scenario 2), the authors made assumptions that NGVs obtain similar shares as that of diesel vehicles (DVs) in the Japanese market in the last decades until 1995. The third scenario (Scenario 3) assumes that NGV's diffusion in the future is just one tenth of the diffusion level in Scenario 2. Being based on these scenario analyses with detailed results, the conditions and requirements for NGV's diffusion to be optimistically realized are discussed

Measuring Weak Sustainability for the future: Calculating Genuine Saving with population change by an integrated assessment model

This paper presents a future figure of Genuine Saving with population growth (GSn). This was enabled by using an integrated assessment model, similar to the RICE model by Nordhaus. The model consists of sub-models that evaluate various kinds of mineral resources and environmental impacts. Results indicates that GSn is positive i) in OECD during the 21st century, ii) in World and the former Soviet Union and East Europe after 2030, and iii) in Asia and the Middle East and Africa after 2050. GSn is negative in Latin America during the 21st century.Genuine Saving, population change, sustainability, integrated assessment model, impact assessment model, growth model

Analysis of Biomass Waste Cofiring into Existing Coal-Fired Power Plant Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Biomass utilization to generate electricity via combustion simply can be classified into firing and cofiring. Biomass cofiring into the pulverized coal boilers has some advantages compared to dedicated biomass firing in terms of capital cost and combustion efficiency. To understand the cofiring behavior of biomass and coal comprehensively, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method can be used to analyze and solve problems involving fluid flows inside a combustor. A CFD modeling is significantly more effective from the perspectives of time and cost and safety and ease of scaling up; hence, it is usually performed before conducting a physical investigation through experiment. Moreover, the current state-of-the-art CFD modeling-based study is capable of solving the complexity of the interdependent processes such as turbulence, heat transfer via radiation, produced gas, and reactions in both the particle and gas phases during combustion. This chapter focuses on the study of cofiring of biomass, which is palm mill wastes, into the existing coal-fired power plant. Two palm mill wastes are evaluated: palm kernel shell and hydrothermally treated empty fruit bunch. Distributions of temperature and the produced are simulated to find the most optimum and applicable cofiring conditions

Global Zero Emission Scenario: Role of Innovative Technologies

AbstractThis study investigated a zero emission scenario with following two originalities compared to various existing studies. One is that we based on A1T society of SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenario) of IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) compared to existing studies on those of B1 or B2. The second one is that various innovative and radical technologies were considered and incorporated, such as biomass energy with CCS (BECCS), and advanced nuclear technologies including hydrogen or synfuel production. We applied a global modeling, whose energies, materials, and biomass and foods supply costs were minimized by linear programing with time horizon up to 2150. We found following features of energy supply structure in A1T scenario. Since the electric demand in A1T scenario in 2100 is two times larger than the others, 1) renewable energy which solely produce electricity, nuclear, and fossil energy with CCS (FECCS) especially coal are main sources of electricity, 2) renewable which can supply heat, namely BECCS and geothermal, satisfies the sector, and 3) hydrogen from coal is introduced in transport sector. It can be concluded that the zero emission energy systems with global economic growth will be possible, by development and deployment of ambitious advanced energy technologies

Measuring Weak Sustainability for the future: Calculating Genuine Saving with population change by an integrated assessment model

This paper presents a future figure of Genuine Saving with population growth (GSn). This was enabled by using an integrated assessment model, similar to the RICE model by Nordhaus. The model consists of sub-models that evaluate various kinds of mineral resources and environmental impacts. Results indicates that GSn is positive i) in OECD during the 21st century, ii) in World and the former Soviet Union and East Europe after 2030, and iii) in Asia and the Middle East and Africa after 2050. GSn is negative in Latin America during the 21st century

Geotechnical Aspect of Damage In Adapazari City During the 1999 Kocaeli, Turkey, Earthquake

This report summerizes detailed investigation on the structural damage and its geotechnical condition in the Adapazaý City, Turkey, during the 1999 Kocaeli earthquake by the reconnaissance team of the Japanese Geotechnical Society. Damages to individual buildings were investigated along several streets in the downtown area. A little rough investigation was made almost all downtown area, in which damages were classified by its cause, i.e., inertia force or soil liquefaction. These investigations as well as hearing investigation and areal investigation by means of helicopters made clear the area where there was an island a few hundred years ago by which the name of Adapazarý i.e., ada (island) + pazarý (market), came from. In addition, the damage in the Adapazarý City is shown to be strongly affected by the ground condition because damage caused by liquefaciton was observed only outside the old island and areas where significant structural damage was observed were concentrated near the boundary between the old riverbed and island

Using Genuine Savings for climate policy evaluation with an integrated assessment model

This work was partially supported by KAKENHI (15K06686, 18K11736), the Fondation Franco-Japonaise Sasakawa, and the Conseil Régional Nouvelle-Aquitaine.There has been a recent increase in efforts to develop broader models to assess the impact of climate change and climate change policies, both in terms of impact measures (beyond GDP) and in terms of modelling complexity (beyond DICE/RICE models). Climate policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions can have impacts in multiple sectors of the economy, and can change consumption levels over time. We show how the sustainability indicator Genuine Savings can be endogenised within a general equilibrium model and used as a criterion for judging the impacts of such policies in terms of future well-being. Differences in Genuine Savings rates between CO2 emission reduction scenarios are discussed. We show how a broader, Genuine Savings-based assessment of climate change can result in a re-evaluation of the consequences and costs of inaction in terms of various climate change-related policies; and how multiple environmental and well-being outcomes can be analysed within a unified modelling framework.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

KaPPA-View4: a metabolic pathway database for representation and analysis of correlation networks of gene co-expression and metabolite co-accumulation and omics data

Correlations of gene-to-gene co-expression and metabolite-to-metabolite co-accumulation calculated from large amounts of transcriptome and metabolome data are useful for uncovering unknown functions of genes, functional diversities of gene family members and regulatory mechanisms of metabolic pathway flows. Many databases and tools are available to interpret quantitative transcriptome and metabolome data, but there are only limited ones that connect correlation data to biological knowledge and can be utilized to find biological significance of it. We report here a new metabolic pathway database, KaPPA-View4 (http://kpv.kazusa.or.jp/kpv4/), which is able to overlay gene-to-gene and/or metabolite-to-metabolite relationships as curves on a metabolic pathway map, or on a combination of up to four maps. This representation would help to discover, for example, novel functions of a transcription factor that regulates genes on a metabolic pathway. Pathway maps of the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and maps generated from their gene classifications are available at KaPPA-View4 KEGG version (http://kpv.kazusa.or.jp/kpv4-kegg/). At present, gene co-expression data from the databases ATTED-II, COXPRESdb, CoP and MiBASE for human, mouse, rat, Arabidopsis, rice, tomato and other plants are available