This is the type of technological innovation we look for to continue to solve the problems earlier innovations created, as it has been since civilization began.
An excerpt.
Anti-smog 'bonnet' lays track for clean air
Union Pacific helps demonstrate new device that scrubs air-polluting soot from locomotive smokestacks
By Chris Bowman -- Bee Staff WriterPublished 12:01 am PDT Thursday, August 3, 2006
Smog fighters on Wednesday demonstrated a new, supersized weapon to subdue one of the biggest and dirtiest offenders left standing on the battlefield: the idling locomotive.
Politicians and smog regulators with earplugs gathered in Roseville alongside a rumbling Union Pacific locomotive as a giant mechanical "bonnet" descended on the engine's smokestack and suctioned the dark brown exhaust through treatments that rendered the gases visibly clean.
"What you witnessed was the first demonstration of its kind in the country," said Tom Christofk, Placer County's air pollution control officer, who is credited as the brainchild of the apparatus.
The Advanced Locomotive Emission Control System scrubs the diesel exhaust clean of all but 1 percent of the hazardous sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, or soot, according to its developer, Advanced Cleanup Technologies Inc. of Colton.
The emission control system also removes nearly as much of the nitrogen oxides, the smog-forming gas that chronically drifts from the Sacramento area in violation of national clean-air standards, according to the company.
The train yard is the single largest generator of diesel exhaust in the six-county Sacramento region, according to a groundbreaking state Air Resources Board study released in 2004.
