This edition of UEC was particularly very exciting as we had two awesome facilitators that addressed issues on green energy. We had Adejoke Marquis from the faculty of law talk to us about Energy Law and then we had the President of the Innovations Club, Nwankwo Okwuchukwu (Ebuka) talk to us about his 'Greenbox' idea.
Many times, I have had to correct the wrong impression that people have about the UEC. UEC is not for engineers alone. It is for every student of this great university, this is because energy is becoming increasingly important in the life of the modern student. For example, someone like me, a final year engineering student: I need power to function because without my devices I am useless. Right from powering my phone that I use to communicate and get information, to my laptop that i need for my project and since most of my books are soft-copies, I need my laptop always powered. But let's say we forget the engineering nerd who loves to over jack, what about those classes where you just want to leave not because the lecturer isn't trying his best but because the heat in the class is not allowing you to think properly because there is no power, also no public address system and God help you if the lecturer uses slides. All this can be taken care of by finding renewable, sustainable ways to power our homes and devices because let's face it, PHCN has failed us and the most promising way out of our condition is through renewable energy. But the thing about renewable energy and most things in life, it requires the law for people to actually take it seriously.
So the meeting started off with Adejoke Marquis telling us a bit about energy law and how it relates to us. She basically talked about the laws regulating energy with Nigeria as the case study. She gave a brief breakdown of the history of petroleum activities in Nigeria and how far we have developed to our modern energy society. She gave the idea of advantages and disadvantages of petroleum activities on the country as a whole and linked into the new adoption of renewable energy over fossil fuel round the world. The situation in Nigeria and our slow reception of renewable energy into our system because of fear of change and over-dependence on oil was also explained. She also explained the laws regulating renewable energy and pointed out the fact that they are mostly new which is evidenced by our partial reception due to the fading out of our market on the international scenes for fossil oil.
She also pointed out that what is actually obtained as regards renewable energy law is mostly policies and a feature of policy is that it is not a law, it only has persuasive power over the real laws thus there are little or no actual laws regulating renewable energy, just policies that serve as guidelines but never imposes or sanctions towards the creation of new laws.
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| Ebuka addressing us on the greenbox |
Then we had a session with Ebuka Nwankwo, the president of
the innovations club of unilag on the unilever design competition. He had some
really interesting ideas and projects that he was working on which are worth
sharing. One of them was the idea of the green box. There are more than 80,000 chemicals
used in the industrialized world today. Some of these chemicals are toxic to
the human body and accumulation of these chemicals could pose a health hazard.
Combustion produces many of the same stable end products, whether the material
burned is natural gas, coal, wood, gasoline, municipal solid wastes, hazardous
wastes. These waste fumes are released into the atmosphere. These gases are
essentially compounds of nitrogen, Sulphur, carbon etc and can be purified in
some fashion to create an environment free from toxic gases that pose threats
to plants and animals.
A Greenbox is essentially a tool used
to purify the gases from vehicles, manufacturing plants and other devices that
produce fumes (gases in considerable concentrations) so as to keep the
environment free from ecological disasters. It consists of layers of
purification stages , each purification stage filters a particular gas using a
discrete purification element. At the last phase a mechanism ( using a
mechanical nozzle ) is applied to force out the purified gas, thereby avoiding
an unwanted feedback reaction. As opposed to name “Greenbox” it could take any
shape, scale or dimension (not necessarily in form of a box) depending on its
application. The greenhouse box can be produced on a large scale as its
application demands, just as it can be produced on a relatively smaller scale
for application in vehicles, generators etc. The purification process is essentially
carried out by controlled chemical and biological elements systematically
packed inside the box for an easy flow process and the aforementioned elements
can be produced in large quantities and cheaply too. The box is checked,
service and inspected occasionally to enhance its durability.
In an increasingly energy dependent world, the present conventional sources of energy will not be enough to keep up with the demand for energy nor can the environment keep up with the belligerent fossil fuels. Thus the onus is on us to find ways of making legislation enforce the use green energy or the purification of the hazardous wastes produced by the conventional sources of energy using innovative technologies such as the Greenbox.
