Energy resources
Research Topic
Language: English
This is a research topic created to provide authors with a place to attach new problem publications.
Research problems linked to this topic
- How can we optimise the food system to support future food production and consumption sustainably whilst reducing environmental impacts?
- What factors, if any, may prevent households with private driveways installing home chargers?
- Understand the full benefits of offshore renewables. To identify and mitigate their environmental impacts by establishing socio-economic evidence to provide information to influence marine policy and development decisions
- How can innovation in chemical production, use, and disposal across the supply chain minimise chemical-related risks, benefiting the circular economy and reducing pollution?
- Can quantum computing approaches to advanced material development provide lighter, stronger, safer, and more efficient batteries and hydrogen storage systems?
- How should policies be designed and schemes implemented to help the food and farming sector preserve and enhance the natural environment, while meeting other priorities such as the commitment to net zero emissions of greenhouse gases?
- What pressures will there be on global natural resources - especially energy, food, water and critical elements - in the short, medium and long term, and with what strategic policy implications for the UK in a changing world?
- Are there health and safety challenges related to maintenance and repair of aging low carbon energy infrastructure, such as offshore wind turbines?
- We would like to understand the impact of operational costs (such as energy or materials along the supply chain) on the decision to locate and/or increase investment activity in the UK.
- How can we model existing data from human, animal, plant, and environmental health indicators to better understand the interconnection and potential impacts of climate change?
- How can we balance different interests at local and national levels, to provide the resources we need, reduce degradation of natural capital and improve the state of the environment?
- What are the trade-offs between primary resource extraction versus reclamation of resources from waste streams in the context of resource security? How circular can the UK economy become?
- Can other land-based approaches to greenhouse gas removal, such as enhanced weathering and biochar, help achieve net zero without negative environmental impacts?
- Determine the socio-economic costs of plastic litter on marine wildlife, ecosystems, and maritime industries. The costs incurred from changing to other materials, including the potential benefits to be made from new industries including small medium-size enterprise.
- Self-sustaining forces - When the UK deploys forces overseas it has to ensure that they are supported by an appropriately robust and effective logistics infrastructure that ensures the timely delivery of consumables and other materiel. MOD is interested in all aspects of technology, or alternative ways of working, that minimise the logistic infrastructure particularly that exposed to risk. Interests span technology for reducing the logistic footprint itself for example through the use of renewable or alternative energy sources, through to the use of additive manufacturing that might reduce the need for a large holding of spares in-theatre.
- What are the impacts of greenhouse gas removals and negative emission technologies on climate and the environment? What are the trade-offs of negative emissions techniques and other interventions?
- What are the broader environmental consequences of changes to the housing and planning system, and what is needed to support a lower-carbon future?
- How can we improve horizon scanning capability for emerging global chemical risks to the environment?
- How do operational fusion power plants compare in risk profile to industrial installations HSE are familiar with regulating?
- How does increased data usage affect power consumption at server and data centres?
- Understand the risks from contaminants of emerging concern, micro and macro marine plastic litter, emergencies (for example oil spills), and man-made underwater noise
- How will climate change/energy insecurity impact the UK’s telecoms networks? To what extent are our networks (directly or indirectly) vulnerable to climate change e.g. voltage instability during heat waves? For further relevant questions on network resilience see BDUK section 3.
- Which practises can most effectively reduce emissions of GHG (including CH4 and N2O) from agriculture, waste, and wastewater, land-use, and F-gases in the UK and internationally?
- What will be the environmental impact of the copper switch-off and recovery of copper wiring? This includes the emissions used to recover the copper wiring, and the emissions savings from reduced need to mine and refine copper?
- How can the UK develop measurement of carbon fluxes from different habitats and farming systems which are in different conditions and using different management approaches? This is especially relevant for peatland and coastal habitats
- How can we develop pathways towards net zero that are socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable? What is the range of viable solutions, and what are the associated co-benefits and trade-offs? This includes developing spatially explicit models and tools to inform decisions at the landscape level, including prioritisation of conflicting land use demands
- What evidence and methods are required to minimise the distortionary effects of carbon border taxes, and overcome the technical obstacles of tracking embedded carbon?
- How can the pathways to decarbonisation of transport be evaluated against the UK’s international climate ambitions?
- Develop innovative and improved abatement technologies for air pollutant emissions and noise generation across all sectors and sources
- How can the UK optimise sustainable growth of biomass for use in power generation (bioenergy) and, with appropriate storage, for removal of atmospheric CO2? How can the negative environmental consequences from biomass production and use (on soil quality, water quality, air quality, and biodiversity) be minimised? What’s the full life cycle analysis for different feedstock? What’s the scalability of different feedstocks within sustainable limits?
- How do low or no emission power methods for 4G mobile masts, such as wind, solar, hydrogen, and other methods, compare to diesel generation power in terms of ;(i) viability, (ii) reliability, (iii) durability, (iv) cost to operate?
- What is the GHG emissions reductions potential from different land-based interventions per unit area per year, how will natural carbon sources and sinks evolve in the future, and what are their timeframes for delivery from implementation? For example, what levels of emissions reductions can be achieved by actions within the new Environmental Land Management Scheme’s outcomes framework, and from forestry, and over what time frames are these delivered?
- What are the appropriate controls and mitigations that need to be built into new carbon capture infrastructure?
- How can we improve measurement of global emissions from international trade? To what extent have improved production