Explore the vast range of titles available.

To mitigate dangerous climate change effects, the 195 countries that signed the 2015 Paris Agreement agreed to “keep the increase in average global surface temperature below 2 °C and limit the increase to 1.5 °C” by reducing carbon emissions. One promising option for reducing carbon emissions is the deployment of carbon capture, utilization, and storage technologies (CCUS) to achieve climate goals. However, for large-scale deployment of underground carbon storage, it is essential to develop technically sound, safe, and cost-effective CO2 injection and well control strategies. This involves sophisticated balancing of various factors such as subsurface engineering policies, technical constraints, and economic trade-offs. Optimization techniques are the best tools to manage this complexity and ensure that CCUS projects are economically viable while maintaining safety and environmental standards. This work reviews thoroughly and critically carbon storage studies, along with the optimization of CO2 injection and well control strategies in saline aquifers. The result of this review provides the foundation for carbon storage by outlining the key subsurface policies and the application of these policies in carbon storage development plans. It also focusses on examining applied optimization techniques to develop CO2 injection and well control strategies in saline aquifers, providing insights for future work and commercial CCUS applications.

Efficient and reliable storage, analysis, and transmission of medical images are imperative for accurate diagnosis, treatment, and management of various diseases. Since quantum computing can revolutionize big data analytics by providing faster solutions and security tactics, numerous studies in this field have focused on the use of quantum and quantum-inspired algorithms to enhance the performance of traditional medical image processing approaches. This review aims to provide readers with a succinct yet adequate compendium of the advances in medical image processing combined with quantum behaviors for disease diagnosis and medical image security. Some open challenges are outlined, identifying the performance limitations of current quantum technology in their applications, while addressing the short-, medium-, and long-term development plans of this field in designing future quantum healthcare systems. We hope that this review will provide full guidance for upcoming researchers interested in this area and will stimulate further appetite of experts already active in this area aimed at the pursuit of more advanced quantum paradigms in medical image processing applications.

In recent years, the world has seen both massive destruction caused by natural disasters and immense financial and physical support for the victims of these calamities. So that these natural hazards do not become manmade disasters, effective systems are required to identify needs, manage data, and help calibrate responses. If well designed, such systems can help coordinate the influx of aid to ensure the timely and efficient delivery of assistance to those who need it most. 'Data Against Natural Disasters' seeks to provide the analytical tools needed to enhance national capacity for disaster response. The editors and authors begin with an overview that summarizes key lessons learned form the six country case studies in the volume. Next, they outline the data needs that arise at different stages in the disaster response and explore the humanitarian community's efforts to discover more effective response mechanisms. The country case studies review the successes and failures of efforts to establish innovative monitoring systems in the aftermath of disasters in Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Mozambique, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. 'Data Against Natural Disasters' will be useful to policy makers and others working in port-calamity situations who are seeking to design new monitoring systems or to improve existing ones for disaster response management.

Salt cavern gas storage has become the key project of current and future underground gas storage (UGS) facilities construction due to their efficient peak-shaving and supply assurance capacities. The Sanshui Basin in Guangdong Province, China, is rich in salt resources and has high-purity salt rock, which is a potential area for the construction of salt cavern underground gas storage. To speed up the large-scale construction of underground gas storage in China and promote the sustainable development of the natural gas market, it is very necessary to analyze the geomechanics of the target salt layer and study the feasibility of gas storage construction. Based on comprehensive experiments of rock mechanics and thermodynamics, the strength, creep and temperature-sensitive mechanical properties of the target rock in Sanshui Basin were studied. Then, according to the geological conditions of Sanshui salt formation, a three-dimensional geological model was established to analyze the stability of salt cavern gas storage under the injection-production operation. The results show that the average tensile strength and uniaxial compressive strength of salt rock are 1.51 MPa and 26.04 MPa, respectively, showing lower strength. However, under triaxial compression, the compressive strength of salt rock increases significantly, and there is no obvious shear failure phenomenon observed. Moreover, after the peak strength, the salt rock still has a large bearing capacity. In addition, under the confining pressure of 30 MPa, the strength of salt rock decreases by 8.3% at a temperature of 60 °C compared with that at room temperature, indicating that the temperature has a low, modest effect on the mechanical properties of salt rock. The stability analysis shows that, under an injection-production operating pressure of 10–23 MPa, the displacement, plastic zone range and volume convergence rate of single cavity and cavity group are small, and the cavity shows good stability. Overall, the target salt formation in Sanshui Basin, Guangdong Province, presents a good geomechanical condition suitable for the construction of underground salt cavern gas storage. This study can provide a reference for the development and design of salt cavern UGS.

This paper proposes a methodology to develop generation expansion plans considering energy storage systems (ESSs), individual generation unit characteristics, and full-year hourly power balance constraints. Generation expansion planning (GEP) is a complex optimization problem. To get a realistic plan with the lowest cost, acceptable system reliability, and satisfactory CO2 emissions for the coming decades, a complex multi-period mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model needs to be formulated and solved with individual unit characteristics along with hourly power balance constraints. This problem requires huge computational effort since there are thousands of possible scenarios with millions of variables in a single calculation. However, in this paper, instead of finding the globally optimal solutions of such MILPs directly, a simplification process is proposed, breaking it down into multiple LP subproblems, which are easier to solve. In each subproblem, constraints relating to renewable energy generation profiles, charge-discharge patterns of ESSs, and system reliability can be included. The proposed process is tested against Thailand’s power development plan. The obtained solution is almost identical to that of the actual plan, but with less computational effort. The impacts of uncertainties as well as ESSs on GEP, e.g., system reliability, electricity cost, and CO2 emission, are also discussed.

Considering the different quantitative and qualitative issues of groundwater resources, which are caused by population growth and development, the implementation of comprehensive plans and taking management measures in order to protect and restore groundwater resources are highly recommended. In this regard, the evaluations of various management measures are necessary because based on the results, it is possible to make appropriate decisions about how to control water consumption as the main part of future policies. Hashtgerd study area is located in Alborz province in Iran and requires appropriate decisions regarding how to control the intensive groundwater resources depletion and quality reduction. An average storage deficit of 4.08 million cubic meters per year was realized during 2012–2016 and water quality decreased. The present study has investigated the quantitative and qualitative changes of groundwater resources using MODFLOW and MT3DMS in response to different management schemes. Different management schemes based on a national plan called “the aquifer restoration plan” were applied for the 20-year horizon (2016–2036). It was found that by blocking unlicensed agricultural wells and modifying the licenses for licensed agricultural wells in the entire aquifer area, the storage would increase by an average of 7.23 million cubic meters per year, and nitrate and sulfate concentrations would decrease by 0.06 and 1.14 mg/l per year, respectively. Artificial recharge of the aquifer with treated wastewater was found to have a great impact on reducing pollutants and improving the water quality, though it had no desirable effect on the groundwater level. In this case, nitrate and sulfate concentrations decrease by 0.53 and 2.24 mg/l per year, respectively.

Global development initiatives frequently promote agricultural commodity chain projects to improve livelihoods. In Morocco, development projects, including the Plan Maroc Vert (PMV), have promoted apple production in rural regions of the country. In order to access domestic markets, these new apple producers often use pesticides to meet market standards. Through situated ethnographic inquiry and commodity chain analysis, using a combination of surveys (n = 120) and interviews (n = 84) with apple wholesalers, government officials, along with farmers, this paper works to critique the PMV’s development approach that implicitly values commodification. By exploring interconnected processes of commodification, I link subsidized apple saplings and cold storage infrastructure to the dependence on pesticide usage, which has become a part of daily village life. This has important implications for community health and riparian ecosystems. Alternatively, I propose how we can imagine different development trajectories that decommodify livelihoods by focusing on local knowledge creation and diversification strategies.

This paper evaluates the Spanish open access (OA hereafter) mandate and its effects on Spanish research from 2014 to 2019. First, the degree of compliance with the mandate is studied. Then, classification trees and regression models are applied to determine the factors correlated with publishing in OA and the implications of OA types regarding the impact and visibility of academic articles. Results show that the compliance rate increased by 9% during the studied period, with a prevalence of gold and green OA routes. Moreover, the classification tree points towards the institutions’ nature and the research areas as the variables that better explain OA publishing. We argue that the institutions’ commitment to OA and the different availability of OA journals within research fields influence the decision to publish in OA. Last, we study how these practices affect research’s visibility and impact. We found that, in general, publishing in OA is beneficial for researchers, especially if they choose the green route. Further research at the faculty or departmental level might help discern the best strategies to encourage open-access publishing.

The production of bio-natural gas through anaerobic digestion not only realize the resource utilization and harmless treatment of urban and rural organic wastes, but also reduce the emission of methane and carbon dioxide. However, as an independently industry, bio-natural gas has some prominent challenges compared to household biogas and small-scale biogas projects. For the healthy development of the bio-natural gas industry, system analysis and planning have become particularly important. This study reviews the current development status of the bio-natural gas industry and innovatively analyzes the development direction of industry from a multidimensional perspective. Leading opinions are provided based on system analysis. Three major technological breakthroughs that have supported the success of regional bio-natural gas industry are revealed. The completeness of industrial technology, the objectivity of industrial regional development and the inevitability of the comprehensive benefits of the industrial chain are the major development direction of the bio-natural gas. Finally, according to the three major demands of new energy fuel, electricity and energy storage, two new energy systems based on bio-natural gas and the synergistic development of multiple new energy sources are proposed. This study provides theoretical and practical guidance for the bio-natural gas industry.