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The African Climate Summit – averting the climate crisisPayne Institute Research Associate Juliet Akamboe and Director Morgan Bazilian write about how climate change poses a significant threat to Africa, a continent already grappling with challenges including poverty and a lack of access to basic human needs like clean water, healthcare, education, jobs and electricity. Africa is already witnessing severe environmental consequences with changing rainfall patterns, severe droughts and extreme weather conditions, which are stalling socio-economic development. The inaugural Africa Climate Summit (ACS) taking place in Nairobi, this week is a great forum to discuss the role Africa can play in bridging the gap between the Global North and South in addressing the climate crisis.
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Impact of lossy compression errors on passive seismic data analysesNew technologies such as low-cost nodes and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) are making it easier to continuously collect broadband, high-density seismic monitoring data. To reduce the time to move data from the field to computing centers, reduce archival requirements, and speed up interactive data analysis and visualization, we are motivated to investigate the use of lossy compression on passive seismic array data. In particular, there is a need to not just quantify the errors in the raw data, but also the characteristics of the spectra of these errors, and the extent to which these errors propagate into results such as detectability and arrival time picks of microseismic events. We compare three types of lossy compression: sparse thresholded wavelet compression, zfp compression, and low-rank singular value decomposition compression. We apply these techniques to compare compression schemes on two publicly available datasets: an urban dark fiber DAS experiment, and a surface DAS array above a geothermal field. We find that depending on the level of compression needed, and the importance of preserving large versus small seismic events, different compression schemes are preferable.
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Niger, uranium, and the coup d'etatPayne Institute ESG Researcher Baba Freeman writes about how the recent coup d'etat in Niger, a key supplier of uranium, has created some level of anxiety in the market and brought forward new questions for stakeholders across the industry and the West African sub-region. The event calls for a fresh look at the potential market impact and the way forward to resolving the current disputation in a manner that preserves Niger's development agenda, minimizes political risk to investors, and aids the emergence of a more resilient global critical minerals supply chain.
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Proposed West Africa-Europe gas pipelines will fail without a radical shift in thinkingPayne Institute ESG Researcher Baba Freeman writes about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 injected a renewed urgency into Western European countries' energy security concerns and led to an increase in demand for non-Russian sources of oil and gas. Consequently, Europe is expected to take a larger share of future LNG supplies even as greenfield pipeline projects are being conceived to supply West African gas to Western Europe. These projects include the Trans-Sahara Gas Pipeline (TSGP) and the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline (NMGP) but may not be able to adequately meet these projects' future obligations.
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Investors in African mining ventures must refresh their risk management processesPayne Institute Research Associate Baba Freeman writes about how the frequency of coup d'etats in the Sahel region is troubling and calls for mining investors to refresh their political risk assessment processes. The recent trend of militarization must surely prod investors to further assess the likelihood and possible impact of military interventions and incorporate key takeaways from current events into their risk management tools and processes. While the risk of a total loss of capital due to outright warfare can be assessed deterministically, subjective measures of political instability can substantially impact the "country risk" premium that mining investors must pay over and above the risk-free cost of capital.
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Science of photovoltaics and solar cells: a module developed for hands on learning, TheThis document is a lesson plan for a short module covering: (1) What is a solar energy (2) Energy and wavelength of light (3) The concept of solar cells and how they work (4) The concept of photovoltaics. The module is readily adapted for students in grades 1-12. It was originally drafted for presentation to children aged 7-13 at the Rocky Mountain Camp for Dyslexic Children. The planned activities are therefore hands-on and do not rely on reading or writing skills.
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The Bigger the better?: a comparison of institutional repository statisticsThis poster presents usage data on institutional repositories at research intensive institutions across the United States and South Africa. Both Mines and CMU host institutional repositories to disseminate their communities’ scholarly outputs. This poster compares CMU and Mines with each other as well as with other academic institutions in South Africa. Various elements on the institution, their libraries, and their repositories were compared. We used data on institutional repositories, including size, content type, and numbers of repositories for our comparisons. Data considered in these comparisons also included institution-level data, such as student enrollment.
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Mapping graduate student workshops to career readiness frameworksAlong with campus collaborators, the Colorado School of Mines library has facilitated a workshop series for graduate students since 2019. Recent developments inspired us to reexamine past workshop offerings in the context of career readiness. To understand strengths and weaknesses in workshop coverage, we compared our past offerings to frameworks from the Perkins Collaborative Research Network (PCRN) and the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). The results of this effort highlight strengths and weaknesses of the workshop series as a whole and its composition of library-led topics and externally-led topics. This paper examines our analysis, the results of which will help guide future workshop topic selection to better prepare graduate students for their lives after graduation.
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Renewable energy in Africa: Kenya's success and its possible implementation in AngolaPayne Institute student researcher Yara Alexandra Lima writes about how Africa represents some of the world's largest reserves of both renewable and non-renewable energy sources, however, it accounts for half of the world's power deficit. Many African countries are working towards developing their energy sector and, consequently, improving their economic, social, and political framework. This paper will discuss the key strategies employed by Kenya to develop its energy sector and increase its electrification rate, and the possibility of applying these policies in other African countries, namely Angola.
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Rising costs' impact on renewable power generationPayne Institute Program Manager Brad Handler and student researcher Mason Shandy write about how the inflationary pressures that have gripped the global economy over the last 18 months, along with central banks' efforts to lessen them, are weighing on the economics of building new power generation. Despite recent evidence of some moderation in these inflationary pressures, it is reasonable to expect that they will persist for some time. These higher costs disproportionately impact development of variable renewable energy (VRE), such as wind and solar, and in emerging market (EM) economies.
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Colorado (CDPHE/AQD) rule making verifying methane emissions reportingPayne Institute Faculty Fellow Jim Crompton, and Student Researchers Ebenezer Manful-Sam, Wyatt Lindsay and Pierluigi Nichilo write about how reducing greenhouse gases, especially methane emissions, from oil and gas production activities is one of the major themes of regulatory actions both at state, provincial and federal levels in North America as part of society's path for addressing climate change. One of the biggest barriers for methane reduction is not financial or technology, but rather a lack of rigorous and transparent data. In 2021, Colorado's Air Quality Control Commission adopted a rule that limits how much greenhouse gas can be emitted per barrel of oil and gas produced.
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Ambitious EPA rules to face stark permitting realityPayne Institute Program Managers Anna Littlefield and Brad Handler, and Director Morgan Bazilian write about how in early May EPA proposed major new carbon emissions standards for coal and many gas-fired electric power plants. Prominent among the options is carbon capture and storage (CCS)—this represents a unique and significant possibility for the technology. The proposal highlights the pressing need to accelerate permitting of CO2 pipelines and injection wells.
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China's consolidation of rare earth elements sectorPayne Institute student researcher Tinzar Htun writes about how today China is the biggest global supplier of rare earth elements (REEs), accounting for around 70 percent of global mine production (1.2 million tons) in 2022. More importantly, China holds the dominant role in the downstream process of REE, separating and processing. The partial shutdown of the Lynas facility in Malaysia will grant China near-exclusive control over the production and distribution of REEs in the global market.
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Applying post-quantum cryptography – survey and application of machine learningPayne Institute student researcher Mack Osborne writes about how quantum computing poses a considerable threat in the world of cyber security. Policy makers are largely unprepared for a post-quantum world, significantly due to a lack of understanding and awareness. The goal of this paper is to improve understanding and provide a new and effective way to analyze post-quantum cryptography, for researchers and security engineers alike.
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The mining boom is coming, but where can their workers live?Payne Institute Research Associate Caitlin McKennie writes about how building out a robust talent pipeline for the mining sector through providing quality jobs to workers and advancement opportunities (i.e., training, upskilling, and next skilling efforts) will be a central factor for ramping up domestic critical mineral production and strengthening U.S. energy security. Yet, the labor force associated with nonfuel mineral mining in the U.S. has remained roughly stagnate over the last five years, and aligns with new statistics coming from employers.
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Sage CampusThe SAGE Campus platform provides 18 different courses with roughly 220 hours of online learning modules. The author reviewed the service from the perspective of a college student to see if it was an appropriate learning environment. The primary audience for the courses are graduate students in the social sciences, but undergraduate and graduate students of all disciplines may find courses that are worthwhile to investigate. At the time of the review, the course topics covered content such as information literacy, data management and other data science skills, research design, and how to get published. Many librarians and teaching faculty may recommend students take these courses to supplement their education. Students can learn through these courses in a self-paced manner, and there are no scores or grades associated with completion of a course. Overall, the SAGE Campus platform provides a low-stress way for students to enhance their understanding of many topics relevant to research in the social sciences.
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Global Registry of Fossil FuelsThis resource provides a new way for people to investigate greenhouse gas emissions data from a wide variety of countries and from a global perspective. The creators of the database are aiming to inform corporate investors and policy makers, but it will be found by high school students and college students needing data for their papers concerning global warming. When researchers come across a new resource that provides global information on fossil fuel production and storage, the user should be cognizant of a bias to the presentation of the data. This resource is not immune to that issue. Overall, this resource is recommended, but the user should look carefully at the publishing source, the Carbon Tracker Initiative, to understand its motivations for creating this resource.
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Cooking up open access LIS journalsThis recipe is intended to help librarians start, build, grow, and maintain an open access journal in the field of library and information science (LIS). There are many recipe variations when it comes to the creation of open access journals. Most of this recipe will use the Journal of Creative Library Practice (JCLP) as a model because the author is more familiar with recent details of the technology and procedures. In the case of JCLP, several members of the Library Society of the World (LSW) are also involved in that project.
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Critical mineral mining and sustainable development in AfricaPayne Institute student researcher Mama Nissi Abanga Abugnaba writes about how as a continent with abundant natural resources, such as large reserves of vital minerals, Africa could play a critical role in facilitating the energy transition. This will be possible through a just energy transition that supports the retention of jobs, social aid for affected workers, upskilling of current employees, environmental restoration, and the development of local businesses. April 10, 2023.
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Burning landfill in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan detected by VIIRS NightfirePayne Institute Earth Observation Group Director Christopher Elvidge writes about a landfill burning in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan as seen through the VIIRS Nightfire satellite imaging systems as part of their global monitoring program.
