Clarens Andres F, Peters Catherine A
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Virginia , Charlottesville, Virginia.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University , Princeton, New Jersey.
Environ Eng Sci. 2016 Oct 1;33(10):719-724. doi: 10.1089/ees.2016.0455.
Environmental engineers have played a critical role in improving human and ecosystem health over the past several decades. These contributions have focused on providing clean water and air as well as managing waste streams and remediating polluted sites. As environmental problems have become more global in scale and more deeply entrenched in sociotechnical systems, the discipline of environmental engineering must grow to be ready to respond to the challenges of the coming decades. Here we make the case that environmental engineers should play a leadership role in the development of climate change mitigation technologies at the carbon-water nexus (CWN). Climate change, driven largely by unfettered emissions of fossil carbon into the atmosphere, is a far-reaching and enormously complex environmental risk with the potential to negatively affect food security, human health, infrastructure, and other systems. Solving this problem will require a massive mobilization of existing and innovative new technology. The environmental engineering community is uniquely positioned to do pioneering work at the CWN using a skillset that has been honed, solving related problems. The focus of this special issue, on "The science and innovation of emerging subsurface energy technologies," provides one example domain within which environmental engineers and related disciplines are beginning to make important contributions at the CWN. In this article, we define the CWN and describe how environmental engineers can bring their considerable expertise to bear in this area. Then we review some of the topics that appear in this special issue, for example, mitigating the impacts of hydraulic fracturing and geologic carbon storage, and we provide perspective on emergent research directions, for example, enhanced geothermal energy, energy storage in sedimentary formations, and others.
在过去几十年里，环境工程师在改善人类健康和生态系统健康方面发挥了关键作用。这些贡献主要集中在提供清洁的水和空气、管理废物流以及修复污染场地。随着环境问题在全球范围内变得更加严重，并且在社会技术系统中更加根深蒂固，环境工程学科必须不断发展，以应对未来几十年的挑战。在此，我们认为环境工程师应在碳 - 水耦合关系（CWN）中减缓气候变化技术的开发中发挥领导作用。气候变化主要是由化石碳不受控制地排放到大气中所驱动的，它是一个影响深远且极其复杂的环境风险，有可能对粮食安全、人类健康、基础设施及其他系统产生负面影响。解决这一问题需要大规模调动现有技术和创新新技术。环境工程界凭借其经过磨练的技能组合，在碳 - 水耦合关系方面具有独特的地位来开展开创性工作，以解决相关问题。本期特刊聚焦于“新兴地下能源技术的科学与创新”，提供了一个示例领域，在这个领域中环境工程师及相关学科开始在碳 - 水耦合关系方面做出重要贡献。在本文中，我们定义了碳 - 水耦合关系，并描述了环境工程师如何将其相当专业的知识应用于该领域。然后我们回顾了本期特刊中出现的一些主题，例如减轻水力压裂和地质碳封存的影响，并且我们还展望了新兴的研究方向，例如增强型地热能、沉积地层中的能量存储等等。
