Previous PhD projects
Together, population growth, urbanization and climate change, represent an important challenge for human development. The first two will affect the demand on scarce resources as water, energy and food. The latter will likely affect the availability of those resources >>> read more.
The use of energy in the different activities, such as oil and gas sectors, steel, cement, aluminium smelter, coal mining, power plants, manufacturing, chemical industries, and others, usually cause carbon dioxide (CO2) emission that contributes to the global warming. Global warming damages biodiversity, ecosystems and eventually existing human food systems. By using carbon dioxide capture, transport and storage (CCTS) technology we can significantly reduce emissions from those activities >>> read more.
With significant government and private investment, a variety of capital assets that are built-up in China or imported from abroad have been acquired to enable the country’s fast-growing production activities. The durable feature of capital assets makes today’s built-up capital that can be used for productive purposes over years or even decades. Particularly in China, approximately one-third of the capital assets (in monetary terms) invested during 1995-2015 have been depreciated, while the rest remain effective for future production >>> read more.
My PhD project is part of the MVI project ‘Community Innovation for Sustainable Energy. Aligning technological and societal innovations’ that is funded by NWO. Besides Groningen University, also the TU Twente, the Hanzehogeschool Groningen, and some private enterprises participate in this project. Within this project my role is to study the practices of the Dutch energy cooperatives, and evaluate these initiatives in terms of their actual and potential role in the transition towards a more sustainable energy system. As a result of the cooperation with Dr. Ten and Ecovat, smart grids and storage systems will be focused on in particular >>> read more.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development announced 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 targets. The goals and targets will stimulate action over the next 15 years in areas of economy, society, and environment. Although some countries or sectors may show trends towards compliance with SDGs, the impacts of this trend are diverse, taking into account the trade-offs of SDGs, and the complex international trade relations, as well as the interdependence sectoral relations >>> read more.
For increasing populations, decreasing agricultural land, expanding stress on water and energy resources, and climate unpredictability, south Asia faces the challenges about how to produce more food with the same or less land and water, and increased energy prices, while preserving resources and maintaining environmental sustainability. Water and energy are the two major issues currently faced by irrigated agriculture in Pakistan >>> read more.
China has been the world’s largest energy consumer with oil and natural gas dependency rates of approximately 60% and 33%, respectively, since 2011 due to high rate of growth in GDP and rapid increase in population. Since 2007, as the world’s largest carbon emitter, the United States has been overtaken by China who expects to account for half of the increase in global CO2 emissions through 2035. In December 2009, China’s State Council announced that the carbon emissions of China will be decreased by 40-45% by 2020, compared with 2005 >>> read more.
From a global perspective, the transportation sector has become the second-largest carbon-emitting field after the electricity and heat producer sector, reducing its carbon emissions has become the top priority for sustainable social development. Thus, new energy vehicles with significant energy-saving and emission-reduction benefits are increasingly favored by modern society. Many countries have used purchase subsidies to promote the market proliferation of new energy vehicles in the past few years, such as China, the United States, and Germany >>> read more.
Deltas support enormous flows of materials and energy though its intricate biophysical processes, which makes them among the most important ecosystems to provide a vast range of ecosystem services (ESs) including supporting services of biodiversity and land formation, provisioning services of biomass, fresh water and energy resources, regulating services of climate change mitigation and water purification, and cultural services of aesthetics, education and tourism >>> read more.
As scarce resources, water, energy and food (WEF) are essential for social production, human well-being and sustainable development. The limited water, energy and food resources are gradually posing major challenges to the sustainable development of all countries. How to reveal the complex relationship among the three resources and promote the sustainable development of water, energy and food under the increasingly complex internal and external environment has become an important strategic goal for countries >>> read more.
With the population growing and economies developing, the power consumption has grown rapidly. To meet this growth, the consumption of gas is expected to grow to a quarter of global energy demand. The gas demand has a dynamic fluctuation in seasonal, while using at residential and commercial. It depends on temperature. To meet this fluctuation, the gas supplies should be flexible. Then there comes liquefied natural gas (LNG). Compare to pipeline, LNG is more flexible while transporting. It can transport in cryogenic tankers by roads, ships and rail ways >>> read more.
In the era of globalization, not only the visible energy flows and allocates globally, but also energy, as an important basic raw material and production power embedded in the global production network, redistributed globally in the invisible form. In such case, the concept of energy security is redefined. The newly industrialized countries represented by China are not only the major energy importing country, but also the major manufacturing and trading country >>> read more.
Within the next decades the world will face major threats like global warming, environmental pollution and resource depletion. Human reliance on fossil resources is seen as one of the major contributors to this global change. To ensure a sustainable future we should shift away from a fossil-based society towards a sustainable society. One of the potential solutions for the transition to a sustainable society is the so-called ‘biobased economy’ (BBE). The BBE is an economy fueled by plant-based feedstock to produce chemicals, materials and energy instead of fossil based resources >>> read more.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the greenhouses-gas emissions (GHG) associated with energy production and use accounts for about two-thirds of the global emissions (IEA 2015) . This means a real challenge for deploying pledges on the energy sector that were made at the COP21. These pledges must bring deep emissions reductions while yet sustaining the growth of the world economy, offer a guarantee of energy security, and increase quality of life to the billions of people around the world who need it >>> read more.
With the intensification of global pollution and the differences in economic, technological, and policy, the environment has had an unprecedented impact on the entire international economy and trade. China, as the largest trading nation, has long been exporting high-energy and resource-intensive products for other countries, while high environmental costs hidden behind such ultra-rapid international trade. The amount of this kind of hidden pollution is increasing with the blind expansion of China's trade scale, unreasonable trade structure and trade distribution, and China's domestic environmental pressure will be growing >>> read more.