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By Robert Kropp
Created 2012-02-03 10:51
In September, when Ceres published a report on the preparedness of the insurance industry for the impacts of climate change, Sharlene Leurig of Ceres said, "2011 has been a painful and important reminder that changing climate will inflict damage across the US. Even before Hurricane Irene, insured losses in the US this year were 40% higher than in the entire year of 2010."
Extreme weather events such as storms and flooding, identified in November by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an early warning signal of the effects of climate change, led to a record for catastrophe losses for insurers in 2011.
"That insurers are concerned about climate risk but don't understand what to do about it, underscores the need for sustained engagement by regulators and shareholders," Leurig continued.
A leader in regulatory engagement has been the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), which since 2009 has required insurance companies with annual premiums of $500 million or more to complete its Insurer Climate Risk Disclosure Survey.
The survey, which is based on questions on performance and risks and opportunities posed to organizations by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), states, "Disclosure of climate change risks is important because of the potential impact of climate change on insurer solvency and insurance availability and affordability across all major categories of insurance."
"As regulators, we are concerned about how climate change will impact the financial health of the insurance sector and the availability and affordability of insurance for consumers," Joel Ario, chair of the NAIC Climate Change and Global Warming Task Force, said in 2009. "This disclosure standard will give regulators the information we need to better understand these risks."
Yesterday, California joined the states of New York and Washington in raising the bar for disclosure of climate risks by insurers, when Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones announced that all insurers with annual premiums of at least $300 million will be required to respond to the NAIC survey.
"This multi-state effort will not only seek to strengthen this survey, but also to ensure the results of the survey continue to be made public," Jones said. "The result should be that insurers can implement best practices, and members of the public can study the impact on consumers."
"Climate change will have major implications for the insurance industry, yet few insurance companies are identifying their potential exposure and strategies for dealing with it," Andrew Logan, insurance program director at Ceres, said. "This weak disclosure means that investors, regulators and consumers have been flying blind without a solid sense of whether the industry is taking the steps necessary to understand and respond to this profound issue. The leadership demonstrated by Commissioner Jones and his colleagues today will go a long way toward closing this information gap."
This article originally appeared on SocialFunds.com.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in no way contends that a draft report on groundwater pollution in Wyoming could apply to hydraulic fracturing in any other part of the U.S., an EPA official told a U.S. House subcommittee.
That includes the Marcellus Shale, a vast area of booming gas drilling in Pennsylvania and other northeastern states, EPA Regional Administrator James Martin said Wednesday.
“The geologic conditions that exist with the Marcellus Shale are significantly different,” Martin told the House Science Committee’s energy and environment subcommittee, which held a hearing in Washington on the draft EPA report.
The report, released Dec. 8, theorized that gas industry activity including hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, may have caused groundwater pollution in Pavillion.
Petroleum companies frack their wells to improve the flow of oil and gas. The process involves pumping water, fine sand and a
relatively small proportion of chemicals down well holes to fracture deposits and create new fissures.
More than 160 gas wells have been drilled in Pavillion. Some have been fracked as recently as 2005.
Pavillion residents have complained for years that their well water stinks of hydrocarbons, and in 2008 they asked the EPA to investigate. The EPA found suspect chemistry in two wells drilled to check for groundwater pollution.
Fracking in Pavillion occurred fairly close to where residents get their drinking water: As shallow as 1,200 feet below the surface in an area where the deepest water wells have been drilled to a depth of about 800 feet, Martin told the subcommittee.
That’s quite different from the geology of the Marcellus Shale, where gas wells are 5,000 feet deep or more.
But Republican Rep. Ralph Hall, of Texas, said the Pavillion report is but one example of an anti-fracking agenda by the EPA.
“It is important to recognize what EPA is doing in Wyoming is not isolated. They are going after fracking everywhere they can,”Hall said.
Although the petroleum industry maintains there are no proven cases of fracking having polluted groundwater, some environmentalists have viewed the Pavillion report as justifying their worries about the practice.
A public health professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Bernard Goldstein, testified that he would support a fracking moratorium until better practices for fracking are put into place.
He said the U.S. sooner or later will extract its accessible onshore gas, and there’s no rush.
“It’s not going anywhere,” Goldstein said. “Unless the Canadians can figure out how to frack underneath Lake Erie, that’s staying with us.”
Other witnesses questioned the validity of the Pavillion study and the EPA’s preliminary findings.
“Once misinformation gets out into the public, it takes on a life of its own and is almost impossible to correct,” said Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and regulatory affairs for the Denver-based petroleum industry group Western Energy Alliance.
Wyoming’s top state oil and gas regulator, Tom Doll, said the EPA consulted only minimally with his agency, the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, on research behind the report.
“We had significantly greater consultation with the state than perhaps Mr. Doll might be aware of,” Martin said.
The EPA has extended a public comment period on the Pavillion report six more weeks through March 12. The agency also is seeking nominations for experts with backgrounds including petroleum engineering, geology, chemistry and hydrology to serve on an upcoming peer review panel for the report.
A Stanford University research team has designed a high-efficiency charging system that uses magnetic fields to wirelessly transmit large electric currents between metal coils placed several feet apart. The long-term goal of the research is to develop an all-electric highway that wirelessly charges cars and trucks as they cruise down the road.
The new technology has the potential to dramatically increase the driving range of electric vehicles and eventually transform highway travel, according to the researchers. Their results are published in the journal Applied Physics Letters (APL).
"Our vision is that you'll be able to drive onto any highway and charge your car," said Shanhui Fan, an associate professor of electrical engineering. "Large-scale deployment would involve revamping the entire highway system and could even have applications beyond transportation."
Driving range
A wireless charging system would address a major drawback of plug-in electric cars – their limited driving range. The all-electric Nissan Leaf, for example, gets less than 100 miles on a single charge, and the battery takes several hours to fully recharge.
A charge-as-you-drive system would overcome these limitations. "What makes this concept exciting is that you could potentially drive for an unlimited amount of time without having to recharge," said APL study co-author Richard Sassoon, the managing director of the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), which funded the research. "You could actually have more energy stored in your battery at the end of your trip than you started with."
The wireless power transfer is based on a technology called magnetic resonance coupling. Two copper coils are tuned to resonate at the same natural frequency – like two wine glasses that vibrate when a specific note is sung. The coils are placed a few feet apart. One coil is connected to an electric current, which generates a magnetic field that causes the second coil to resonate. This magnetic resonance results in the invisible transfer of electric energy through the air from the first coil to the receiving coil.
"Wireless power transfer will only occur if the two resonators are in tune," Fan noted. "Objects tuned at different frequencies will not be affected."
In 2007, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used magnetic resonance to light a 60-watt bulb. The experiment demonstrated that power could be transferred between two stationary coils about six feet apart, even when humans and other obstacles are placed in between.
"In the MIT experiment, the magnetic field appeared to have no impact on people who stood between the coils," Fan said. "That's very important in terms of safety.
Wireless charging
The MIT researchers have created a spinoff company that's developing a stationary charging system capable of wirelessly transferring about 3 kilowatts of electric power to a vehicle parked in a garage or on the street.
Fan and his colleagues wondered if the MIT system could be modified to transfer 10 kilowatts of electric power over a distance of 6.5 feet – enough to charge a car moving at highway speeds. The car battery would provide an additional boost for acceleration or uphill driving.
Here's how the system would work: A series of coils connected to an electric current would be embedded in the highway. Receiving coils attached to the bottom of the car would resonate as the vehicle speeds along, creating magnetic fields that continuously transfer electricity to charge the battery.
To determine the most efficient way to transmit 10 kilowatts of power to a real car, the Stanford team created computer models of systems with metal plates added to the basic coil design.
In the road would probably have little effect, but metallic elements in the body of the car can drastically disturb electromagnetic fields," Fan explained. "That's why we did the APL study – to figure out the optimum transfer scheme if large metal objects are present."
Using mathematical simulations, postdoctoral scholars Xiaofang Yu and Sunil Sandhu found the answer: A coil bent at a 90-degree angle and attached to a metal plate can transfer 10 kilowatts of electrical energy to an identical coil 6.5 feet away.
"That's fast enough to maintain a constant speed," Fan said. "To actually charge the car battery would require arrays of coils embedded in the road. This wireless transfer scheme has an efficiency of 97 percent."
Wireless future
Fan and his colleagues recently filed a patent application for their wireless system. The next step is to test it in the laboratory and eventually try it out in real driving conditions. "You can very reliably use these computer simulations to predict how a real device would behave," Fan said.
The researchers also want to make sure that the system won't affect drivers, passengers or the dozens of microcomputers that control steering, navigation, air conditioning and other vehicle operations.
"We need to determine very early on that no harm is done to people, animals, the electronics of the car or to credit cards in your wallet," said Sven Beiker, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS). Although a power transfer efficiency of 97 percent is extremely high, Beiker and his colleagues want to be sure that the remaining 3 percent is lost as heat and not as potentially harmful radiation.
Some transportation experts envision an automated highway system where driverless electric vehicles are wirelessly charged by solar power or other renewable energy sources. The goal would be to reduce accidents and dramatically improve the flow of traffic while lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
Beiker, who co-authored the APL study, said that wireless technology might one day assist GPS navigation of driverless cars. "GPS has a basic accuracy of 30-40 feet," he said. "It tells you where you are on the planet, but for safety, you want to make sure that your car is in the center of the lane." In the proposed system, the magnetic fields could also be used to control steering, he explained. Since the coils would be in the center of the lane, they could provide very precise positioning at no extra cost.
The researchers also have begun discussions with Michael Lepech, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, to study the optimal layout of roadbed transmitters and determine if rebar and other metals in the pavement will reduce efficiency.
"We have the opportunity to rethink how electric power is delivered to our cars, homes and work," Fan said. "We're used to thinking about power delivery in terms of wires and plugging things into the wall. Imagine that instead of wires and plugs, you could transfer power through a vacuum. Our work is a step in that direction."
Aaron Clark and Grant Smith, Bloomberg News
Friday, February 3, 2012
Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Oil in America has become so plentiful that crude for future delivery is the most expensive in three months compared with supplies today.
The so-called contango reached 38 cents yesterday as West Texas Intermediate crude for delivery in April traded at $96.74 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, compared with the contract for March at $96.36. While the gap is smaller than the 45-cent average over the past decade, the relationship had been in what traders call backwardation as recently as November.
Crude is flooding into storage terminals in Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for WTI futures, as production from Canada and North Dakota increases, curbing the U.S. dependence on imports to the least in more than a decade, according to Energy Department data. Inventories at Cushing climbed 1.48 million barrels to 30.1 million in the week ended Jan. 27, the highest level since Dec. 16, the department said.
"We are starting to a build again mostly because there is a lot of Canadian pressure to come into Cushing," Abudi Zein, a senior vice president at Genscape Inc., a Louisville, Kentucky- based energy-data provider, said during a presentation at the Argus Americas Crude Summit in Houston on Jan. 27.
As stockpiles at Cushing increased 6.5 percent in the past two weeks, WTI's discount to Brent crude on ICE Futures Europe, the European benchmark, widened to $15.71 a barrel Feb. 2 from $9.90 on Jan. 18.
Declining Imports
The U.S. is becoming less dependent on imports from outside North America as domestic crude production and imports from Canada accounted for 55 percent of U.S. refinery demand for oil in November, the highest level for that month in at least 10 years, Energy Department data show.
U.S. imports of oil and refined products dropped 25 percent to 9.44 million barrels a day in 2010 from a peak of 12.55 million barrels in 2005 as output from the U.S. and Canada surged, the use of renewable fuels increased and overall consumption levels declined. U.S. fuel demand fell 9.5 percent in the five years to 2009 because of the recession, improvements in fuel efficiency and changes in consumer behavior.
Canadian oils have become cheaper as Alberta producers boost output and a mild winter has limited disruptions. Syncrude Canada Ltd. increased production by 11 percent in January from the previous month to 313,200 barrels a day, Canadian Oil Sands Ltd. said in a statement on its website yesterday.
North Dakota oil production surged 42 percent to 510,000 barrels a day in November, exceeding the output of OPEC member Ecuador, as energy explorers accelerated drilling in the Bakken Shale formation, according to the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division.
Pipeline Demand
Demand to ship on Enbridge Inc.'s Spearhead pipeline from near Chicago to Cushing in February jumped nearly eightfold from the previous month. The discount for Syncrude oil from Alberta slumped to the lowest since at least 2006 yesterday as producers boosted output. Bakken oil produced in North Dakota dipped yesterday to the steepest discount to WTI since at least 2010.
Shippers requested space for 737,500 barrels a day on the 650-mile (1,046-kilometer) Spearhead line for February compared with 93,300 barrels in January, Calgary-based Enbridge said Jan. 26. The line has a capacity of 193,600 barrels.
Companies also are increasing shipments to Cushing in anticipation of the reversal of the 500-mile Seaway pipeline in June. Enterprise Products Partners LP and Enbridge, which operate the link, said Nov. 16 they plan to reverse flows away from the storage center to ease a bottleneck, giving producers from Canada and North Dakota access to Gulf coast refineries.
Rising Storage
"We can expect to see further inventory builds in Cushing and the contango getting wider," said Torbjoern Kjus, an oil- market analyst at DnB NOR ASA in Oslo. "The key reason is that the Seaway pipeline is going to reverse, and there's competition to get a place booked on that pipeline when it opens."
Alberta and North Dakota crudes have weakened to levels making it profitable to store the grades in Cushing. The discount for Syncrude widened $2 to $8 below WTI yesterday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The discount for Western Canada Select, an oil from Alberta, weakened 75 cents to $28.25 below WTI, the cheapest in nearly a year. Bakken oil's discount widened to $7.25 below the U.S. benchmark, the most since at least 2010.
"You'll see as much volume as possible leaving Western Canada and North Dakota and getting into Cushing markets," Tyler Radcliffe, a Calgary-based vice president of supply and facilities at Trafigura AG, said Feb. 1 during a presentation at the Bakken Product Markets & Takeaway Capacity 2012 conference in Denver.
TransCanada Corp.'s Keystone pipeline also is increasing shipments to Cushing, diverting oil from the line's other terminus in Patoka, Illinois, according to Zein. In December, the 591,000 barrel-a-day pipe shipped 83 percent of volumes to Patoka. In November, the pipe sent 88 percent to Patoka.
by Erica Peterson on February 2, 2012
Three House Republicans, including Kentucky Congressman Ed Whitfield are trying something new when it comes to opposing the Obama Administration’s environmental regulations: they’re asking the White House to stop.
Whitfield and two of his fellow Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget asking the director to delay upcoming rules regulating greenhouse gases. The OMB has been reviewing the draft rules for several months and they’re scheduled to be released soon.
The new rules are expected to require new and modified power plants to reduce the amounts of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide they emit.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the Environmental Protection Agency was able to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, if it determined the gases posed a risk to human health. The EPA reached that determination in 2009.
But Whitfield questions the validity of that study.
“The EPA, let me just tell you, they can determine anything they want to determine over there, and they can make any study come out any way they want to make it,” he said.
He says now is not the time for more regulations.
“I can tell you what. Our air is very clean right now,” he said. “Now that doesn’t mean it cannot be cleaner, sure. But when you have an economy that is struggling, when you have an unemployment rate that’s been above eight percent, 8.5 percent for two, three, four years, this is not the time to impose additional costs on industries.”
The EPA has said it doesn’t expect to finalize the rules this year.
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Instead of complaining about clean air rules, maybe utilities should cheer them.
Sometimes, the rules lead to big gains.
First Energy, a utility based in Ohio, got such a boost Thursday, a week after the company announced it would close six coal-fired plants, blaming new federal rules aimed at slowing emissions of mercury and other toxins.
Without these plants, electricity prices in parts of Ohio dominated by First Energy are expected to nearly double at a power auction scheduled for May.
The reason: There will now be a smaller fleet of power plants available to meet potential power needs. This smaller supply means the price to coax companies like First Energy to make their plants available will rise.
Julien Dumoulin-Smith, an analyst at UBS, predicted rates would rise from $126 for every megawatt available per day to $200. For the 8,000 megawatts of power plant capacity owned by First Energy in the region, that would be an extra $216 million for the year covered by the auction.
Jonathan Arnold, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, said there's a chance prices could approach $500, which would be an enormous windfall for First Energy.
First Energy shares rose 3.3 percent Thursday on a day in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell slightly.
Electric utilities have complained about a raft of new and tightening environmental standards. They argue that the rules are too stringent and that utilities are not being allowed enough time to prepare for them
The rules address several environmental issues: Emissions of toxins harmful to human health, pollutants that lead to smog and acid rain, the amount of water used to cool plants and disposal of power plant waste products.
Utilities argue that the cost of complying with the rules is too high, that electric power supplies could be constrained in certain regions and that electricity bills will rise.
What they don't generally say, however, is that the rules can lead to higher earnings in some cases.
Electric utilities are regulated differently in every state, so the way utilities can benefit differs too. Here's how:
— In states where power prices are set by market forces, fewer plants means lower electricity supply, and higher prices. Companies that have plants that comply with the new rules stand to benefit from higher prices. First Energy has nuclear and modernized coal plants that meet the new standards.
— In states that are regulated, utilities have to ask public utilities commissions for permission to install new equipment or build new plants. But the utilities are allowed to earn a higher return on these big-ticket investments than they are for selling power to customers. To the extent that the new environmental regulations allow regulated utilities to build new equipment, they will likely lead to higher earnings.
But some companies will suffer. For example, utilities in unregulated states that have to pay for upgrades themselves and cannot benefit from higher prices won't be able to offset the cost of the equipment. Similarly, if state regulators refuse to allow utilities in their state to pass the cost of the upgrades or new plants to customers, those companies could suffer too.
The industry also argues that higher prices could also lead to lower power demand and profit.
First Energy chose to close plants that likely would have been unable to operate under the new rules on toxins. These plants are generally older and inefficient, so installing emissions control equipment would have cost the company too much money. These plants were already seldom used, so by closing them the company does not stand to lose much revenue from the small amount of power they generated.
But in the markets First Energy operates, plants earn money two ways: by selling power, and by making power plants available for use during peak periods, even if they are never actually needed.
With the closure of four plants in Ohio, there will be less power available to meet demand. That is expected to drive prices for capacity higher.
"First Energy's nuclear plants and baseload coal plants with environmental controls are the primary beneficiaries of the EPA rules," says Hugh Wynne, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein.
Power prices have been driven lower in recent years by low natural gas prices, which in many markets set the price of electricity. Because of this, prices for capacity have become more important to company earnings.
Customers in northern Ohio will pay higher prices than they otherwise would have in the coming years. The final prices they pay, however, will depend on several other factors, including the price of coal, the price of natural gas, and power demand.
Jonathan Fahey can be reached at http://twitter.com/JonathanFahey .
by Richard Harris
February 2, 2012
The boom in cheap natural gas in this country is good news for the environment, because relatively clean gas is replacing dirty coal-fired power plants. But in the long run, cheap natural gas could slow the growth of even cleaner sources of energy, such as wind and solar power.
Natural gas has a bad rap in some parts of the country, because the process of fracking is not popular. But many people looking at cheap natural gas from the global perspective see it as a good thing.
Henry Jacoby, an economist at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT, says cheap energy will help pump up the economy.
"Overall, this is a great boon to the United States," he says. "It's not a bad thing to have this new and available domestic resource." He says cheap energy can boost the economy, and he notes that natural gas is half as polluting as coal when it's burned for electricity.
"But we have to keep our eye on the ball long-term," Jacoby says. He's concerned about how cheap gas will affect much cleaner sources of energy. Wind and solar power are more expensive than natural gas, and though those prices have been coming down, they're chasing a moving target that has fallen fast: natural gas.
"It makes the prospects for large-scale expansion of those technologies more chancy," Jacoby says.
Natural Gas: 'A Bridge To Nowhere'?
From an environmental perspective, natural gas could help transition our economy from fossil fuels to clean energy. It's often portrayed as a bridge fuel to help us through the transition, because it's so much cleaner than coal and it's abundant. But Jacoby says that bridge could be in trouble if cheap gas kills the incentive to develop renewable industry.
Long-term renewable deployment in the U.S. is going to depend primarily on policy. Is there enough concern about environmental consequences to put in place incentives for renewable energy?
- Trevor Houser, energy analyst, Rhodium Group
"You'd better be thinking about a landing of the bridge at the other end. If there's no landing at the other end, it's just a bridge to nowhere," he says.
In the short run, at least, the wind industry isn't too worried about this. Denise Bode, who heads the American Wind Energy Association, says low gas prices don't undercut current prices for wind, because those are mostly fixed by 20-year contracts, not market prices.
And even if wind is a bit more expensive than natural gas, she says utilities still want it in their mix. Windmills aren't subject to changing fuel prices, so the cost of production is quite predictable. That's not true for natural gas — there's no guarantee that today's cheap prices will stay as low as some predict.
"It's very difficult to really know how certain that is, so you always want to balance that with something that is certain," Bode says.
Reducing Political Will For Renewables?
What really worries her isn't natural gas — it's politics. Wind could lose a huge tax break at the end of this year. And that would have a much more dramatic effect than low natural gas prices.
EnlargeDavid McNew/Getty Images
Wind power advocates say that even if wind is slightly more expensive than natural gas, utilities will still want it in their mix. Windmills aren't subject to variable fuel prices, so the cost of production is predictable, something that's not true for natural gas.
"You'll see very low numbers" for new wind installations if the federal production tax credit expires," Bode says. "In fact, I think EIA [the U.S. Energy Information Administration] projects almost zero for 2013."
The solar industry's subsidies run for several more years, so they are not in that bind, at least not yet. But Trevor Houser, an energy analyst at the Rhodium Group, says these tax credits and other incentives like state renewable standards are key if renewables are to grow and mature during the natural-gas glut.
"Long-term renewable deployment in the U.S. is going to depend primarily on policy," Houser says. "Is there enough concern about environmental consequences to put in place incentives for renewable energy?"
That partly depends on how much of a premium people and companies will be willing to pay for cleaner energy. Right now, with natural gas so cheap, that premium is fairly substantial.
"If those prices hang around for another three or four years, then I think you'll definitely see reduced political will for renewable energy deployment, " Houser says. "But we don't expect prices that low to hang around that long, because low prices are in many ways self-correcting."
Gas is so cheap now that companies that produce it are struggling to make a profit. So Houser expects prices to move up. That will help close the price gap between gas and renewable energy.
Even so, there's still a huge way to go before prices and government policies do enough to significantly reduce emissions of the gases that contribute to global warming.
6:25 PM, Feb. 2, 2012
ALBANY -- It may not be tennis elbow or writer's cramp, but the crush of 46,000 comments the state has received on hydraulic fracturing may have caused its own occupational hazard: scanning shoulder.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation is conducting an ergonomic review of a temporary office for scanning and logging the tens of thousands of responses after an employees' union lodged a complaint last month.
A worker assigned to the "bullpen" -- as the office has been dubbed -- suffered a shoulder injury in January that the union suspects may have been caused by an inefficient setup, said Wayne Bayer, a DEC steward for the Public Employees Federation.
The complaint, Bayer said, led to a shutdown of the scanning for "a day or two" last month. The union claims the injury was likely caused by "improper equipment, improper level of the equipment" or the motion of repeatedly operating the scanners, he said.
Lisa King, a DEC spokeswoman, confirmed that the agency is undertaking the review. Some of the work in the office was "temporarily curtailed during internal analysis of work flow," she wrote in an e-mail.
"An ergonomic evaluation is currently underway for the temporary scanning operation in the 'Bull Pen,' which was established to enter comments concerning high volume hydraulic fracturing," King wrote.
The DEC accepted both electronic and hand-written comments on its 1,500-page review of high-volume hydrofracking, a technique used with gas drilling that involves the use of a high-pressure mix of water, sand and chemicals. The technique is under a de facto moratorium in New York as the agency finishes its review, which has been ongoing for more than three years.
The scanning office was set up to log the hand-written comments, which were accepted until mid-January. Twenty-six different employees from 10 different divisions within the DEC were assigned to work in the office on a rotating shift, according to King, and have so far tallied 46,000 comments.
The magnitude of the responses, thousands of which were received on the final day of the comment period, has presented a logistical challenge for the DEC. It has to respond to any substantive issue raised when it releases a final version of its proposed hydrofracking guidelines and regulations.
The final report is expected this year.
The agency last month canceled a meeting of an outside advisory panel, citing the need to focus on reviewing the glut of comments. In addition to those received on its September 2011 draft review of hydrofracking, the agency received about 13,000 on a 2009 draft.
One thing may be finished soon, though: The results of the DEC's ergonomic review, Bayer said.
"As a minimum until they complete the study, the (agency) should strongly encourage people who were assigned down there to take breaks, not be standing up for long periods of time and make sure that they walk around and do some arm stretches and whatnot," he said.
January 23, 2012
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced recently that it plans to perform water sampling at approximately 60 homes in the Carter Road/Meshoppen Creek Road area of Dimock, Pa. to further assess whether any residents are being exposed to hazardous substances that cause health concerns. EPA's decision to conduct sampling is based on EPA's review of data provided by residents, Cabot Oil and Gas, and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
"EPA is working diligently to understand the situation in Dimock and address residents' concerns," said EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin. "We believe that the information provided to us by the residents deserves further review, and conducting our own sampling will help us fill information gaps. Our actions will be based on the science and the law and we will work to help get a more complete picture of water quality for these homes in Dimock."
The sampling will begin in a matter of days and the agency estimates that it will take at least three weeks to sample all the homes. All sampling is contingent on access granted to the property. EPA expects validated results from quality-tested lab to be available in about five weeks after samples are taken.
In addition, EPA is taking action to ensure delivery of temporary water supplies to four homes where data reviewed by EPA indicates that residents' well water contains levels of contaminants that pose a health concern. EPA will reevaluate this decision when it completes sampling of the wells at these four homes. Current information on other wells does not support the need for alternative water at this time. However, the information does support the need for further sampling.
Natural gas plays a key role in our nation's clean energy future and the Obama Administration is committed to ensuring that the development of this vital resource occurs safely and responsibly. At the direction of Congress, and separate from this limited sampling, EPA has begun a national study on the potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources.
For additional information regarding this site please visit the website at: http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/states/pa.html.
SOURCE: US Environmental Protection Agency
By Climate Guest Blogger on Jan 31, 2012 at 10:03 am
by Lauren Simenauer and Sean Pool, reposted from Science Progress
Policymakers and energy industry experts often talk about clean energy as though it isn’t reliable. In fact, while an MIT study recently found the existing grid would probably be up to the challenge of absorbing clean energy, intermittency does present a real challenge that renewables must address to get to high levels of penetration.
But BrightSource Energy, a major player in the market for concentrating solar power, or CSP, recently announced the installation of new thermal energy storage technology at three of its planned power plants in California. This thermal energy storage technology will go a long way toward solving the intermittency problem for concentrating solar power. BrightSource’s announcement demonstrates that we can in fact get reliable baseload power from the sun [or, even better, load-following power].
The thermal energy storage systems, built using SolarPLUS technology, work by using hundreds of parabolic mirrors to concentrate the rays of the sun on a tank of molten salts, heating the salts to several hundred degrees above the boiling point of water. The superheated salt is then stored in a giant insulated container until the power plant needs to add additional output, at which point it can use the heat stored in the molten salt to boil water to create steam to drive its turbines.
The added storage capacity will allow BrightSource’s new concentrating solar thermal power plants to continue producing electricity up to two hours after the sun stops shining. It will also enable the power plants to produce electricity at a steady and predictable rate throughout the day and will smooth out fluctuations that make managing solar power tricky for grid operators. Even better, the new thermal storage systems will allow the CSP plants to produce twice the electricity on the same amount of land as could be produced by traditional photovoltaic panels. This advance is yet another step toward the near future when solar energy can replace rather than simply supplement energy produced by fossil fuel power plants.
Adding this storage capacity to three existing plants will increase production by 4 million megawatt-hours, according to BrightSource. The company had originally planned to build seven plants at its location in California, but by applying storage technology, it discovered it could decrease the number of plants while producing more energy. The new plants are slated for completion over the next five years.
The deal is awaiting approval from the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC, which tentatively gave the green light to Pacific Gas and Electric to make a power purchase agreement with the Mojave Solar Project amid objections that the agreement would be too costly. But the CPUC has little to worry about with BrightSource and Southern California Edison. The technology BrightSource employs, which consists of mirrors and a water boiler, is cheaper and more cost-efficient than the older CSP technology that the Mojave Solar Project utilizes, and since the plants are air-cooled, they consume low amounts of precious desert water resources. By increasing storage capacity, BrightSource estimates it will actually lower costs for customers.
Additionally, the CPUC should approve the contracts because the deal is a natural consequence of a 2010 California bill, AB 2514, imploring the CPUC to determine good commercial targets for improved energy storage. The bill would hold the commission responsible for identifying cost-effective storage targets for power producers and then creating the appropriate regulations and incentives for storage deployment. BrightSource’s announcement of thermal storage technology shows the company is remaining a step ahead of the game.
Some environmentalist opponents object to the impact that the solar plants will have on Mojave ecosystems. But the storage technology will allow BrightSource to produce as much power with six plants as it otherwise would have with seven. The decision to scrap the seventh plant will translate to even more price cuts for consumers, as well as 1,280 acres of desert spared from development.
In what looks like a win-win for BrightSource, Southern California Edison, the environment, and consumers, solar storage is evolving from a distant dream to the reality of the present. Altogether the Ivanpah project will lead to 1,400 union construction jobs at peak construction, $650 million in worker wages over the life of the project, and avoid 13.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Said BrightSource Chief Executive John Woolard, “We came out very strongly with what I believe is the largest solar storage deal in the world.” If the CPUC approves the landmark contracts, the rest of the nation could also come out very strongly, as the region and the nation reaps the economic and environmental benefits of this new and dynamic industry.
By Edward McAllister and Jeanine Prezioso, Jan 31, 2012 7:36pm EST
(Reuters) - Halfway through what might turn out to be the second mildest U.S. winter on record, major parts of the nation's economy are feeling the impact, for better or worse.
Apparel sales have been dented, ski slopes are emptier, and there has probably been a modest impact on economic figures for everything from payroll numbers to housing starts.
But lower energy prices mean that some consumers and municipal governments will likely benefit as heating charges and snow removal costs decline. And some retailers are betting on the early sale of lawn mowers.
After two brutally long winters, the temperatures this year have been so balmy - forecasters say the average temperatures across the nation have been 3-4 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in January - that many Americans have been wondering whether the cold will arrive at all.
January snowfall is 94 percent below normal in the United States and even Canada has received 64 percent less than usual, according to Planalytics weather forecasters.
Natural gas prices have slumped to 10-year lows as warm weather cuts heating demand, hammering the profits of drillers and forcing firms like Chesapeake Energy and ConocoPhillips to shut in production.
In shopping malls, retailers are struggling to get rid of winter clothing as consumers do without seasonal apparel.
"We are going through peak heating season and temperatures have been well above normal for most of the nation with weather maps going into early February painting a similar picture," said Chris Jarvis, president of Caprock Risk Management in Rye, New Hampshire.
Below is a summary of some of the sectors affected:
Natural Gas Prices
Energy prices offer the clearest signal that the weather isn't behaving normally, as traders scour forecast screens for a hint of how much heat households and businesses will need in the coming days and weeks.
The answer this winter: not much. November, December and January have come and gone without much sustained cold in the major energy demand centers such as the Northeast, swelling gas inventories to more than 20 percent above last year. Even oil demand has been hit slightly.
Heating degree days, a measurement that reflects the strength of energy demand for home heating, are running 12 percent below winter norms and analysts say gas storage levels will remain high unless there is an extreme and prolonged spell into early spring.
To return storage levels to normal by the end of winter, every single day between mid-February and mid-April would need to be 10 degrees colder than normal, according to Jan Schulte, in-house analyst at Thomson Reuters Natural Gas Analytics.
"That is simply impossible," Schulte said.
Above-normal temperatures are forecast for the first half of February, though private forecaster Weather Services International sees colder than normal temperatures across most of the northern and western United States for some weeks after that.
The Economy
The mild winter likely provided a slight temporary boost to the economy as builders broke ground on new home construction earlier than normal, though researchers at JPMorgan recently estimated this impact was minor.
Goldman Sachs estimates the weather probably led employers to add about 20,000 jobs to payrolls in December, about 10 percent of the total gain in employment that month.
Fewer snow storms allowed people to shop more readily. Without the mild weather, there may have been a small contraction in retail sales in December rather than a 0.1 percent increase, Goldman estimates.
Lower spending by households on heating in the fourth quarter subtracted a bit from economic growth during the period. The money, though, may show up eventually in higher consumption of other products and services or in a higher savings rate.
RETAIL
Warm winter weather forced many U.S. retailers to offer deeper-than-usual discounts in January to clear their shelves off winter gear ranging from coats and sweaters to boots and gloves. Meanwhile restaurants and beer sellers might see a kick up in business.
"In this economy, nobody is going to buy unless there is a need for it, and the weather says, 'You don't need it,'" said Scott Bernhardt, chief operating officer of Planalytics, which provides weather data for businesses.
"It's apparel that's hit the most," said Bernhardt, who expects outerwear sales to drop 20 to 30 percent in the month. Demand was weak for items such as snow shovels and rock salt as well, Bernhardt said.
At a Home Depot store in Overland Park, Kansas, where the temperature was an unseasonably warm 65 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, snow shovels, snow blowers and other winter equipment had been relegated to a small corner at the end of the store. Prime selling space has been given over to shiny green lawn mowers.
A Target store in the Kansas City area had snow sleds on clearance last week.
Toro Co, which makes snow throwers, would not provide specifics on demand ahead of its quarterly earnings report. "Certainly the snow thrower products we sell would be negatively impacted by the lack of snow pretty much everywhere," said Kurt Svendsen, spokesman for Toro.
Instead of hats, gloves and snow blowers, what consumers may be after in balmy weather is a nice cold beer.
"Warm weather does always help beer sales in the winter. Hard to quantify how much it's helped the past two months though. Too early to tell," said Harry Schuhmacher, editor and publisher of Beer Business Daily.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
The mild winter is delivering welcome savings to many U.S. local governments still battling drag from the financial crisis and subsequent deep recession.
Cities, counties and other local governments report lower costs on heating bills for schools and other government buildings.
Lower overtime costs for ploughing crews, less use of salt to de-ice highways, and less wear and tear on equipment and roads, have also helped local authorities.
The state of Illinois reported that it saved $50,000 in December on heating the State Capitol and other buildings it controls in the state.
In Chicago, where a single fierce blizzard blew through the city's snow budget in February 2011, the unseasonably warm December and January have barely dented the $20 million allocated for snow costs.
Plows were deployed just nine times in the past two months, versus 17 times during the same two months in the previous winter, while the amount of salt used so far is about half, said Matt Smith, spokesman for Chicago's Department of Streets and Sanitation.
But the city, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel continues to chip away at a nearly $636 million structural budget gap with layoffs and other measures, is not counting yet on any savings.
"Just like every snow flake is different, every winter is different," Smith said, adding "we still have a long way to go this winter."
Kansas City snowfall this season is just three-tenths of an inch, down from the 1981-2010 seasonal average snowfall of 19.5 inches, and following two years when snowfall annually topped 40 inches, according to Kansas State climatologist Mary Knapp.
So far this has saved at least $250,000 in overtime pay, fuel and other snow-removal costs, city spokesman Dennis Gagnon said.
"No one wants to put a number on total savings, because you never know what will happen, and last February we had a big storm," Gagnon said. "If we don't use any salt, and can use it next year, additional savings might be as much as $1.3 million."
The savings in the city's $2.75 million yearly budget for snow removal were being offset by lost revenues tied to a tax on home heating fuel use, Gagnon said.
TOURISM
Business at ski resorts in New Hampshire in the U.S Northeast is down roughly 30 percent from a year ago because of the warmer weather, hurting sales at local inns and restaurants as well as the earnings of staff, said Ben Craig, snowsports school director and resort marketing coordinator for Dartmouth Skiway in the state.
"The warmer weather has certainly impacted business," Craig said. "When people don't see snow in their front yard, it's hard to get excited to go skiing," he said.
The lack of natural snow has forced the Dartmouth Skiway to make more snow than normal, raising costs, Craig said.
"A lot of ski resorts are in more rural areas and they are the biggest economic factor in those areas," he said.
Warm-weather travel is also less on people's minds when they don't see snow on the ground, travel industry executives said.
David Fishman, president of Cadillac Travel in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, said people have to be reminded during warmer winters that they want
to go on vacation, preferably to a place where it's sunnier.
"When it's like this, people don't think about travel as much," he said. "People just aren't as quick to pull the trigger because they are not looking outside or seeing snow or ice."
By Shehab Al Makahleh, Staff Reporter, Gulf News
Published: 00:00 January 30, 2012
Abu Dhabi: The Executive Council recently approved a number of projects that support the UAE's global role as an energy provider.
The Shams solar power plant is scheduled to be operational by August and will contribute 100 megawatts to the Abu Dhabi power grid.
Approval has also been given for the construction of the Sir Baniyas wind farm.
Both of these projects will help to support the government's vision of having 7 per cent of its energy needs supplied by renewable energy.
Article continues below
The Shams solar power station will be constructed approximately 120km southwest of Abu Dhabi and 6km from Madinat Zayed on the road from Tareef to Liwa Oasis.
The first phase of Shams 1 will have a capacity of 100MW, which makes it among the largest parabolic trough power stations in the world.
Shams 1 is expected to be commissioned this year to be followed by Shams 2 and Shams 3 stations.
Shams 1 will displace 175,000 tonnes of CO2 per year and its power output will be enough to power about 20,000 homes.
The station will consist of 258,048 parabolic trough mirrors, 192 solar collector assembly loops with eight solar collector assemblies per loop, 768 solar collector assembly units, and 27,648 absorber pipes. It covers an area of 2.5 square kilometres.
The project is developed by the Shams Power Company, a special purpose vehicle of Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (Masdar) in cooperation with Abengoa Solar and France's Total.
‘Important milestone'
Masdar has 60 per cent stake in the project while Abengoa Solar and Total have 20 per cent each. The power station will be developed under a 25-year build, own and operate contract. The construction cost of Shams 1 is about $600 million (Dh2.2 billion).
The project is financed by 10 regional and international lenders including BNP Paribas, the National Bank of Abu Dhabi and Societe Generale.
Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, earlier said: "The launch of the Shams 1 marks a very important milestone for Masdar and for Abu Dhabi. "I am very proud of the announcement we are making... because this project, which will be the first utility scale, commercial solar power project in the UAE, represents the translation into reality of the vision the Abu Dhabi leadership had for renewable energy in the Emirate."
‘Ambitious project'
"In addition, Shams 1 will allow Masdar to transfer to Abu Dhabi the know-how and expertise we have gained from our involvement in developing world-class renewable energy projects abroad, thus not only opening the door for renewable energy projects in the UAE but also for technology transfer, contributing toward the development of a knowledge-based economy and new job opportunities through the specialisations required to manage and operate the plant," Al Jaber said.
"By participating in this ambitious project alongside Masdar and Abengoa Solar, Total develops its solar energy assets, enriches its portfolio of expertise with this first step in concentrated solar technology, and reaffirms its unique partnership with Abu Dhabi," Philippe Boisseau, President, Total Gas and Power said in a previous statement.
He further said: "We are pleased to be partnered with Abu Dhabi, a country we have been working with for more than 70 years, in its pursuit of energy diversification."
Stewart Ledbetter NewsChannel 5 - WPTZ SLedbetter@hearst.com
POSTED: 4:55 pm EST January 26, 2012, UPDATED: 9:36 am EST January 27, 2012
MONTPELIER, Vt. -- A House committee Thursday unanimously approved a bill imposing a three-year moratorium on an energy drilling procedure known as hydraulic fracturing -- or "fracking" -- anywhere in the state.
Rep. David Deen -- a Westminster Democrat and chairman of the House Water Resources Committee -- says the 9-0 vote demonstrated an abundance of caution over the procedure.
Hydraulic fracturing injects water, sand and a range of hundreds of different chemicals at high pressure more than a mile underground in search of trapped oil and natural gas supplies.
Deen said that depth potentially exposes groundwater supplies to contamination. He said the mix of chemicals used by the industry includes many that are known to be toxic -- or carcinogenic.
State geologists say rock known as Utica Shale lies under the northwest part of the state. No entity has proposed any test drilling in Vermont yet, but a well 100 miles north of the Vermont border with Quebec was found to be viable for commercial gas exploration.
The bill establishing a moratorium on Vermont fracking also directs the Agency of Natural Resources to come back to lawmakers in 2015 with a study assessing the risks and safety record of the industry.
Joe Choquette, a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, said he's urged lawmakers not to approve a permanent ban. "We'd like a go slow approach to let the science of fracking develop and let regulators work out any problems that might occur." he said.
The full House is expected to vote on the measure on Tuesday, sending it on to the Senate.
Gov. Peter Shumlin supports the moratorium.
"Vermonters don't want chemicals pumped into the ground," the governor said, adding he doubts there is much minable oil and gas trapped under the state.
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: January 26, 2012
Adjusting to shifts in the economy, states in the cap-and-trade system known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have slashed the number of allowances that electric power companies can buy to offset their emissions.
The decision, made last week, was intended to shore up the pioneering program as it undergoes its first comprehensive review this year. While the program has been judged a success by most of the participating states, in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, an oversupply of the allowances — in essence, permits to pollute — has limited the program’s impact.
The program, the nation’s first cap-and-trade system, sets a ceiling on carbon dioxide emissions from electric power providers and requires the companies to pay for their heat-trapping emissions by buying the allowances in online auctions held four times a year. Companies that pollute less can benefit by selling off allowances to other companies.
Because of a switch to natural gas from coal by many utilities and a limping economy, however, both the demand for electricity and the plants’ emissions have been lower than expected since the program was first put into effect in 2009, with many of the allowances going unsold.
On Jan. 17, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont announced that they were permanently eliminating 72 percent of the unsold carbon allowances, or a total of 67 million. (Each allowance amounts to one ton of carbon dioxide emissions.) Maryland has also said it intends to retire some unsold allowances, raising the percentage of the unsold permits retired to 93 percent.
The reduction is widely viewed as a prelude to a major change expected by the end of the review period this summer: the potential tightening of emissions ceilings for electric power providers, which are currently set to reduce emissions by 10 percent by 2018. But emissions have already dropped by more than 30 percent below the cap.
“Lowering the number of allowances in the program sounds like the direction the states want to go in,” said Ashley Lawson, a senior analyst with Thomson Reuters Point Carbon, a carbon-market research firm.
Ms. Lawson said that while the regional initiative had so far proved itself as a working cap-and-trade model, the oversupply of allowances led to a lower price for them, easing the pressure on electricity providers to emit even less.
Since they began, the sales of carbon allowances have nonetheless produced almost $1 billion in revenue for the 10 original participating states.
Still, as political winds shifted nationally, with many Republican candidates denouncing cap-and-trade in the 2010 midterm elections, the program came under fire from critics who argued that the initiative imposed additional costs on electric utilities that were then passed on to consumers. Among them was Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who pulled his state out of the program last year, and also contended that it did not reduce emissions.
Officials from supporting states vehemently countered that the benefits of the program far outweighed any costs, and an independent study released last November backed them up. The study, commissioned by four nonprofit foundations and conducted by the Boston consulting firm Analysis Group, concluded that the regional initiative had saved consumers money over all and created jobs. States have often used proceeds from the program to improve energy efficiency in offices and homes and to promote renewable energy installations, the report pointed out.
Although there were differences in how individual states applied the money — New York and Massachusetts heavily invested in energy efficiency programs, while New Jersey used most of the money to offset a shortfall in the state budget — carbon dioxide emissions in the initiative’s 10-state region were 6 percent lower than they would have been without the program, said Susan F. Tierney, one of the study’s authors.
As the program goes forward with 9 states instead of 10, some power companies say that the sweet spot will be lowering emissions without imposing too great a financial burden.
“My hope is that it will be strengthened because we need to address greenhouse gas emissions, but we need to do it in a responsible way so it doesn’t impact utility customers, especially in this economy,” said Bob Teetz, vice president of environmental services for National Grid, an electrical and gas company.
Some environmental groups are advocating changes that would broaden the program to include other industrial and commercial sources of greenhouse gas emissions and link it to similar programs in the works, like the cap-and-trade system being planned by California and some Canadian provinces.
A boost may come from the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans for new performance standards to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. One way for states to comply with the new rules could be to join the initiative or a similar program authorized by the agency.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 27, 2012, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Regional Cap-and-Trade Effort Seeks Greater Impact by Cutting Carbon Allowances.
By Jim Malewitz, Stateline Staff Writer
TODAY'S TAKE
President Obama said in his State of the Union Address Tuesday (January 24) that his administration “will take every possible action” to safely expand shale gas drilling efforts — a loud endorsement of a practice that has divided statehouses, as lawmakers debate how to develop the industry while mitigating its environmental impacts.
“The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy,” Obama said.
Those words could be a boon to lawmakers in shale-rich states hoping to stoke natural gas development by limiting restrictions on the practice of hydraulic fracturing, a method of speeding up extraction of natural gas by blasting deep into wells millions of gallons of water laced with sand and toxic chemicals. Opponents of the technique — commonly known as fracking — say it taints local aquifers, putting water supplies at risk.
In some states environmentalists have turned up pressure on lawmakers to delay the practice or ban it all together.
New York officials have been planning to lift a three-year moratorium on fracking pending the release of new environmental regulations, but ongoing protests of the draft rules have cast doubt on when — or if — that will happen. And in Ohio, where Governor John Kasich has sought to make natural gas production the centerpiece of economic recovery, a rare string of earthquakes near drilling sites has aroused suspicions that fracking is to blame. That has prompted calls for a moratorium that would allow for further study. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week estimated that 72 percent of Ohio voters favored a moratorium, even while near two-thirds of Ohioans back oil and gas drilling because of its economic benefits.
But in his speech, Obama emphasized the economic impacts of drilling. “We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years,” he said. “Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade.”
Briefly acknowledging fracking’s potential impacts on the environment and public health, however, Obama announced he will require drillers on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use.
"America will develop [natural gas] without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk," he said.
The absence of federal action on chemical disclosure has left states to develop their own policies. In December, Colorado became one of now eight states to require disclosure. Its rules, which require disclosure of all fracking fluid chemicals, are the country’s most comprehensive. Other states allow companies to keep secret chemicals that are considered “trade secrets.” Some states, including Pennsylvania, allow the drillers themselves to make that call.
President Obama's optimism about shale gas comes at a time when some companies are scaling back production due to plummeting prices. Bloomberg reported this week that Chesapeake Energy Corp., the nation's second-largest natural gas producer, will reduce drilling while cutting spending in gas fields by 70 percent.
“Today’s Take” provides a quick analysis of the day’s top news in state government.
by ClickGreen staff. Published Thu 26 Jan 2012 11:11
Bubble solution for producing biofuel
A solution to the difficult issue of harvesting algae for use as a biofuel has been developed using microbubble technology pioneered at the University of Sheffield. The technique builds on previous research in which microbubbles were used to improve the way algae is cultivated.
Algae produce an oil which can be processed to create a useful biofuel. Biofuels, made from plant material, are considered an important alternative to fossil fuels and algae, in particular, has the potential to be a very efficient biofuel producer.
Until now, however, there has been no cost-effective method of harvesting and removing the water from the algae for it to be processed effectively.
Now, a team led by Professor Will Zimmerman in the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Sheffield, believe they have solved the problem. They have developed an inexpensive way of producing microbubbles that can float algae particles to the surface of the water, making harvesting easier, and saving biofuel-producing companies time and money.
Professor Zimmerman and his team won the Moulton Medal, from the Institute of Chemical Engineers, for their earlier work which used the microbubble technology to improve algae production methods, allowing producers to grow crops more rapidly and more densely.
“We thought we had solved the major barrier to biofuel companies processing algae to use as fuel when we used microbubbles to grow the algae more densely,” explains Professor Zimmerman.
It turned out, however, that algae biofuels still couldn’t be produced economically, because of the difficulty in harvesting and dewatering the algae. We had to develop a solution to this problem and once again, microbubbles provided a solution.”
Microbubbles have been used for flotation before: water purification companies use the process to float out impurities, but it hasn’t been done in this context, partly because previous methods have been very expensive.
The system developed by Professor Zimmerman’s team uses up to 1000 times less energy to produce the microbubbles and, in addition, the cost of installing the Sheffield microbubble system is predicted to be much less than existing flotation systems.
The next step in the project is to develop a pilot plant to test the system at an industrial scale. Professor Zimmerman is already working with Tata Steel at their site in Scunthorpe using CO2 from their flue-gas stacks and plans to continue this partnership to test the new system.
Dr. Bruce Adderley, Manager Climate Change Breakthrough Technology, said, “Professor Zimmerman’s microbubble-based technologies are exactly the kind of step-change innovations that we are seeking as a means to address our emissions in the longer term, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to extend our relationship with Will and his team in the next phase of this pioneering research.”
The research was supported by the University of Sheffield’s Knowledge Transfer Account, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. It was also supported by the Royal Society Innovation Award 2010, and the Concept Fund of Yorkshire Forward.
By DIANE CARDWELL
Assisted by technological innovation and years of subsidies, the cost of wind and solar power has fallen sharply — so much so that the two industries say that they can sometimes deliver cleaner electricity at prices competitive with power made from fossil fuels.
At the same time, wind and solar companies are telling Congress that they cannot be truly competitive and keep creating jobs without a few more years of government support.
Their efforts received a boost on Thursday from President Obama, who called for a package of tax credits for renewable power as part of a broader energy plan that he outlined while on a campaign swing through Nevada and Colorado.
But the lobbying by the wind and solar industries comes at a time when there is little enthusiasm for alternative-energy subsidies in Washington.
Overall concerns about the deficit are making lawmakers more skeptical about any new tax breaks for business in general. And taxpayer losses of more than half a billion dollars on Solyndra, a bankrupt maker of solar modules that defaulted on a federal loan, has tarnished the image of renewable power in particular.
“Most of the folks I think recognize that this is not a Solyndra effort here,” said Representative David G. Reichert, Republican of Washington, who introduced a bill to extend a renewable tax credit last year. Solyndra was financed under a now-expired program, part of the 2009 stimulus package, that provided government loan guarantees for clean-energy projects, some of which administration officials expected to be risky.
The wind and solar companies argue that the tax breaks they are seeking are different. The tax credits can be taken only by businesses that are already up and running, so taxpayers are less likely to be stuck subsidizing a failing company, proponents say.
“This is a program that doesn’t pick winners or losers,” said Rhone Resch, president and chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “It’s hard to argue against a program like this that is creating jobs.”
Without the new breaks, industry executives warn, they will be forced to scale back production and eliminate jobs in a still-weak economy.
The American division of Iberdrola, a big Spanish producer of wind turbines, is already feeling the impending loss of one tax break that expires this year. “We’ve seen the prospects for new wind farms really fall off,” said Donald Furman, a senior vice president at Iberdrola Renewables, which announced this week that it was laying off 50 employees. “We’re not getting out of the business and we’re not in any financial trouble, but we are doing the prudent thing so that we don’t have issues.”
The tax break that Iberdrola and other wind companies rely on, called the production tax credit, has been in place since 1992 but after repeated extensions is now scheduled to expire at the end of 2012. It allows for a credit of 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated for the first 10 years of a project’s operation, which the industry says is sometimes enough to eliminate the price difference between wind power and fossil fuels.
The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation recently estimated that the production tax credit would cost the government $6.8 billion from 2011 to 2015 for projects in place before the end of this year.
The other tax break, which expired at the end of last year and was especially popular with solar companies, allows renewable energy companies to get 30 percent of the cost of a new project back as a cash grant once construction is complete. Without the cash grant program, a company can still take the 30 percent credit, but must spread the benefit over a period of years. The industry says the grant program is more effective because it encourages a broader range of private investors to help finance its projects.
As of early this year, the cash-grant program, known as the 1603 program, had awarded $1.76 billion for more than 22,000 solar projects, according to the Treasury Department.
Mr. Obama, who has been a steadfast supporter of clean-energy programs, has already begun making a case for new government investment in clean energy projects as a way to foster both energy independence and employment at a time when Capitol Hill evaluates new laws in terms of job creation as well as budget cost or savings.
“Because of federal investments, renewable energy use — sources like wind and solar — has nearly doubled,” Mr. Obama said at a stop at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., where he promoted the increasing use of renewable power by the military and repeated a call for Congress to approve the tax credits. “Thousands of Americans have jobs because of those efforts.”
Mr. Obama used his trip to press for increased use of liquid natural gas in transportation, appearing at a United Parcel Service center in Las Vegas that received a stimulus grant to support natural gas-fueled trucks. He also said that the Interior Department would open up about 38 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to gas and oil exploration and development, selling leases in June. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates drilling there could yield one billion barrels of oil and four trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
According to the American Wind Energy Association, wind projects account for more than a third of all the new electric generation installed in recent years, while over the last six years, domestic wind turbine production has grown twelvefold, to more than 400 facilities in 43 states. A recent study by Navigant Consulting found that this year the industry would support 78,000 jobs, but that the number would fall to 41,000 in 2013 without an extension of the production tax credit.
Solar, too, is growing quickly in the United States. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, more solar was installed in the third quarter of 2011 than in all of 2009 combined. A one-year extension of the 1603 tax-grant program would create an additional 37,000 solar industry jobs in 2012, according to a report by EuPD Research.
Lobbyists for both industries say the new tax breaks need to be passed quickly and are trying to get Congress to include them in a bill to extend the payroll tax cut.
That bill, like all tax cuts these days, has Congress at loggerheads. “But true performance-based incentives, where incentives are only provided when actual production occurs, seem to be maintaining their support,” said Robert Gramlich, senior vice president for public policy for the American Wind Energy Association.
How this will play out in Congress is anybody’s guess, lawmakers say. Mr. Reichert said the credits were not yet part of the negotiations over the payroll tax cut, which is due to expire at the end of February.
Republican leaders may look to revive the Keystone XL oil pipeline — as proposed, the pipeline would run 1,700 miles from oil sands in Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast — as part of a compromise to approve the renewable energy credits, according to lobbyists and lawmakers involved in the discussions.
But there is a lot of ideological opposition to more tax credits, said Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico and the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who supports the extension.
“The rhetoric is that the government should get out of the way,” he said. “That gets translated into opposition to a lot of these things.”
By Steve Hargreaves@CNNMoneyTech, January 26, 2012: 7:19 PM ET
Electric car battery maker Ener1 says the filing will not shut down any of its operations, including a factory in Indiana the government helped finance with a $118.5 million grant.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Electric car battery maker Ener1 filed for bankruptcy Thursday, three years after receiving a $118.5 million grant from the U.S. government.
Ener1 (HEVV), which makes a variety of energy storage devices under different subsidiaries, is the parent company of EnerDel, the car battery division that received the government grant to help build a manufacturing plant in Indianapolis.
Unlike bankrupt Solyndra, the advanced solar panel maker that became a lightning rod for critics of Obama's stimulus spending when it closed its factory and liquidated, Ener1 promised its business will proceed as usual.
The company said the "voluntarily initiated" bankruptcy filing won't impact any of its subsidiaries, including EnerDel.
"The restructuring will not adversely impact their employees, customers and suppliers," the company said in a press release, noting there will be no layoffs as a result of the action.
The company blamed the bankruptcy on a slower than expected demand for electric vehicles.
Making a battery to replace oil
Analysts have also said any electric car battery maker faces stiff competition from Asian firms, which are largely considered to be well ahead of the curve due to their long experience making batteries for electronics. Ener1 was thought to offer one of the best chances for an American company to compete in this field.
The company said that's still the case, and that the restructuring will allow it to reduce its debt and free up $81 million for capital spending.
"Our business partners have an appreciation for our future business opportunities," CEO Alex Sorokin said in a statement. "We expect the new funding to provide ample liquidity for our subsidiaries to meet their ongoing obligations to employees, customers and suppliers."
The Department of Energy, which awarded the grant, agreed.
"While it's unfortunate that Ener1, the parent company, has entered a restructuring process, the new infusion of $80 million in private capital demonstrates that the technology has merit," DOE said in a statement.
Ener1 received the grant in 2009 as part of a $2.4 billion stimulus effort to jump start the electric car industry.
The program was different from the Energy Department program that funded now-bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra and Beacon Power, a maker of energy storage devices. Nonetheless, critics jumped at the chance to highlight another government grant gone bad.
"Sadly, the Department of Energy's jobs record seems to grow worse by the day," Florida Representative Cliff Stearns, a Republican, said in a statement. "It is American taxpayers who are paying the price."
But during his State of the Union speech, President Obama struck a defiant tone, refusing to apologize for the decisions his administration has made, which includes the funding of hundreds of clean energy companies or companies engaged in clean technology research.
"Some technologies don't pan out; some companies fail," said Obama. "But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy."
Stop wrangling over global warming and instead reduce fossil-fuel use for the sake of the global economy.
That's the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in the current issue of the journal Nature (Jan. 26) that the economic pain of a flattening oil supply will trump the environment as a reason to curb the use of fossil fuels.
"Given our fossil-fuel dependent economies, this is more urgent and has a shorter time frame than global climate change," says James W. Murray, UW professor of oceanography, who wrote the Nature commentary with David King, director of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
The "tipping point" for oil supply appears to have occurred around 2005, says Murray, who compared world crude oil production with world prices going back to 1998. Before 2005, supply of regular crude oil was elastic and increased in response to price increases. Since then, production appears to have hit a wall at 75 million barrels per day in spite of price increases of 15 percent each year.
"As a result, prices swing wildly in response to small changes in demand," the co-authors wrote. "Others have remarked on this step change in the economies of oil around the year 2005, but the point needs to be lodged more firmly in the minds of policy makers."
For those who argue that oil reserves have been increasing, that more crude oil will be available in the future, the co-authors wrote: "The true volume of global proved reserves is clouded by secrecy; forecasts by state oil companies are not audited and appear to be exaggerated. More importantly, reserves often take 6 - 10 years to drill and develop before they become part of the supply, by which time older fields have become depleted." Production at oil fields around the world is declining between 4.5 percent and 6.7 percent per year, they wrote.
"For the economy, it's production that matters, not how much oil might be in the ground," Murray says. In the U.S., for example, production as a percentage of total reserves went from 9 percent to 6 percent in the last 30 years.
"We've already gotten the easy oil, the oil that can be produced cheaply," he says. "It used to be we'd drill a well and the oil would flow out, now we have to go through all these complicated and expensive procedures to produce the oil."
The same is true of alternative sources such as tar sands or "fracking" for shale gas, Murray says, where supplies may be exaggerated and production is expensive. Take the promise of shale gas and oil: A New York Times investigative piece last June reported that "the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of industry e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells."
Production at shale gas wells can drop 60 to 90 percent in the first year of operation, according to a world expert on shale gas who was one of the sources for the commentary piece. Murray and King built their commentary using data and information from more than 15 international and U.S. government reports, peer-reviewed journal articles, reports from groups such as the National Research Council and Brookings Institution and association findings.
Stagnant oil supplies and volatile prices take a toll on the world economy. Of the 11 recessions in the U.S. since World War II, ten were preceded by a spike in oil prices, the commentary noted.
"Historically, there has been a tight link between oil production and global economic growth," the co-authors wrote. "If oil production can't grow, the implication is that the economy can't grow either."
Calculations from the International Monetary Fund, for example, say that to achieve a 4 percent growth in the global economy in the next five years, oil production must increase about 3 percent a year.
"Yet to achieve that will require either an heroic increase in oil production, ... increased efficiency of oil use, more energy-efficient growth or rapid substitution of other fuel sources," according to the commentary. "Economists and politicians continually debate policies that will lead to a return to economic growth. But because they have failed to recognize that the high price of energy is a central problem, they haven't identified the necessary solutions: weaning society off fossil fuel."
The commentary concludes: "This will be a decades-long transformation and we need to start immediately. Emphasizing the short-term economic imperative from oil prices must be enough to push governments into action now"
Suggested websites
Nature commentary http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7382/full/481433a.html
Murray http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/faculty/jmurray/jmurray.html
King http://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/who-we-are/professor-sir-david-king/
By Jennifer Oldham - Jan 25, 2012 12:01 AM ET .
(Bloomberg) -- Dave Hynek, a commissioner in Mountrail County, North Dakota, E. Ward Koeser, mayor of Williston, North Dakota, and Viola LaFontaine, superintendent of Williston School District, talk with Bloomberg's Jennifer Oldham about the impact of North Dakota's oil boom on their community. North Dakota's economy outpaced every other state in 2011, with the fastest personal income, employment and home price growth, according to Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States, or BEES, index data. Yet the boom fueling the nation's lowest unemployment rate is also pushing rural North Dakota’s housing, electric, water, police and emergency services to the breaking point. (Source: Bloomberg)
.The gravel road that borders Dave Hynek’s North Dakota farm is designed to carry 10 tractor- trailer trucks a day. In a recent 24-hour period, about 800 passed by.
Some are traveling 90 minutes west to Williston, where schools Superintendent Viola LaFontaine expects as many as 3,800 students this fall, about 57 percent more than her primary schools were built to hold.
North Dakota’s economy outpaced every other state in 2011, with the fastest growth in personal income, jobs and home prices, according to Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States, or BEES, index data. Yet the oil boom fueling the nation’s lowest unemployment rate also has a dark side. It’s pushing rural North Dakota’s housing, electric, water, police and emergency services to the breaking point.
“It’s absolutely destroying our infrastructure,” said Hynek, a Mountrail County commissioner, as he sat in a pickup truck on the 1,400-acre farm where his family has grown wheat, flax and sunflowers for four generations.
“A few years ago, our board set a goal that Mountrail County would be a better place to live and work as this oil play works itself out over the next 30 years,” he said. “Right now, I would be hard-pressed to find people who agree with that.”
Drilling in the Bakken formation, a 360-million-year-old shale bed two miles underground that geologists believe holds a 15,000 square-mile region of oil in North Dakota alone, foisted big-city concerns onto rural communities where everyone knew each other, no one locked doors, and business deals were sealed with a handshake.
Fracking
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which water is pumped down a well with sand and chemicals to crack rock and release oil, allowed companies such as Marathon Oil Corp. (MRO) and Continental Resources Inc. (CLR) to extract the energy.
Prices for gasoline and groceries in Mountrail and Williams counties -- the heart of the boom -- are 30 percent higher than in the state’s largest cities. Lines to eat at local restaurants often top an hour. Finding a plumber or a handyman can take weeks and often cost three times as much as it did three years ago.
In Stanley, about eight miles north of Hynek’s farm, an argument between two men over lunch at Joyce’s Cafe in late August ended when one of them ran outside and punched a wall- sized plate-glass window, shattering it and injuring diners.
‘Now It’s Dangerous’
“There were three rapes here last summer -- that’s in a town with one assault in its history,” said Cory Rice, who bought the restaurant from his grandparents. “It used to be a quiet community. Now it’s dangerous.”
Residents are forced to reconcile their declining quality of life with undeniable gains in prosperity. North Dakota reported the nation’s lowest unemployment rate in December at 3.3 percent, compared to 8.5 percent nationwide, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state is also seeing significant wage gains, with the average annual salary growing 79 percent in Williams County, to $56,857 in 2010 when compared to 2005, and 67 percent in Mountrail County over the same period, according to the bureau.
Higher tax receipts fostered by oil-industry revenue are helping finance a new water pipeline, rehabilitation of the state penitentiary and renovation of the state’s heritage center -- even as calls for more housing and funding for school construction go unheeded.
The state’s three-year-old boom, which attracted thousands of workers to 17 western counties, is progressing so quickly that studies commissioned to determine infrastructure needs are outdated the moment they leave the printer.
‘Population Explosion’
“It’s almost an unmanageable population explosion,” said Vicky Steiner, a Republican state legislator and executive director of the North Dakota Association of Oil and Gas Producing Counties.
Williams and Mountrail counties recently banned construction of “man camps” -- temporary developments for oil workers -- until they can expand sewer, electrical and water systems.
The move put pressure on an already tight housing market, where rents for a two-bedroom without utilities skyrocketed from $350 a month to $2,000. Some workers report paying $4,000 a month for a three-bedroom apartment in Williston, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) south of the Canadian border.
Five hotels are being built in Williston -- home to 14,500 people in 2010 and about 20,000 today -- and officials expect 1,200 apartments and single-family homes to be completed by summer. With 4,000 job openings, even that won’t be enough.
‘Five Steps Backward’
“It’s like you take four steps forward and five backward,” said E. Ward Koeser, the city’s mayor.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)’s local outlet, Taco John’s and other retailers and restaurants -- as well as the city itself -- have trouble finding workers because of the housing shortage, Koeser said. Two recent applicants for public-works jobs in Williston were living in their cars.
Officials anticipate that housing slated to be completed later this year will prompt oil workers to bring their families, who in turn will take restaurant and retail jobs.
Yet the boom is causing some families to split up. Minnesotan Denise Hanson, 32, whose husband got a job driving trucks last spring, moved from Williston back to her home state with her 7-year-old daughter in January, leaving her husband behind in a 12-by-40-foot mobile home.
Safety Concerns
“I was driving home from school and I saw a one-ton pickup shoot across the median pulling a trailer without tail lights,” Hanson said. “Do we risk getting injured and stay here and make money? Or do we go back home and do with less and be safe?”
State housing officials say escalating rents are forcing longtime residents to leave. They can’t find developers interested in building new affordable housing, they add.
“Housing costs of all types are escalating much faster than income growth,” said Mike Anderson, executive director of the North Dakota Housing Finance Agency.
Williston Public School District #1 is scraping to locate housing for 100 homeless students. One family with seven children lives in a recreational vehicle behind a gas station, said Betsy Kelley, the district’s liaison to the homeless.
City and county officials say they’re not getting enough money back from the state -- which collects an 11.5 percent tax on oil -- to finance infrastructure upgrades.
Funding Gap
“No one ever anticipated this type of impact,” said Donald W. Longmuir Jr., a planner and emergency coordinator for Mountrail County. “We’re actually three to five years behind in funding.”
Calls to the county’s volunteer ambulance and fire services tripled since 2009, Longmuir said.
Mountrail’s 1,600-mile road system -- which became so overloaded last spring that officials ran out of “road closed” signs, and postal carriers were unable to deliver the mail to some places -- needs to be rebuilt at a price tag of $600 million, Hynek said.
Williston received $1.5 million in 2011 from the oil extraction tax, which Koeser said “doesn’t even come close” to paying for its infrastructure needs.
LaFontaine, the Williston schools superintendent, said she needs about $87 million to build two elementary schools and one intermediate school and to hire new teachers. State lawmakers voted down a bill last year that would have provided some funding. LaFontaine, who based her estimate of 1,200 new students this fall on new housing construction, asked oil company executives to meet with her recently and asked for help paying for new facilities.
Begging for Money
“I don’t know where else to go to beg for money,” she said. “I’m desperate.”
LaFontaine and Koeser recently visited Governor Jack Dalrymple to request aid and ask that the formula used to return oil taxes to municipalities be revised.
“It’s too early to say whether the Legislature would respond to that,” Dalrymple said in an interview. “About 30 percent of the taxes are returned to the counties and they return those to the cities and townships. Revenue is going up dramatically and that means their share is also going up dramatically.”
The North Dakota Legislature set aside $1.2 billion last spring to help counties cope with the oil boom’s impacts. About $885.3 million remains to be distributed.
Demand for aid is high. The state received 167 applications last fall for $50 million in road improvement grants alone, said Gerry Fisher, assistant director of the state’s energy infrastructure and impact office.
Oil Companies
Oil companies say they’re doing their part to help western North Dakota cope. Houston-based Marathon gave $1 million in Dickenson, Continental donated $500,000 in Crosby, and New York- based Hess Corp. (HES) contributed $25 million to the state for public education, said Ron Ness, president of the Bismarck-based North Dakota Petroleum Council.
“Economic opportunity brings growing pains and changes to a very rural area that hasn’t seen significant economic opportunity for decades,” Ness said. “It’s difficult, certainly, for any of us to keep up with the pace at which people are moving here.”
With 5,349 producing wells in 2010 -- compared with 3,367 three years earlier -- North Dakota is the nation’s fourth- largest oil producer behind Texas, California and Alaska.
The boom also brings other benefits. Last spring, Legislators allocated $110 million for the Western Area Water Supply Authority to build a pipeline from the Missouri River to deliver drinking water to five western counties. The $150 million project -- which will require the authority to ask the Legislature for more funding -- is expected to be complete in three years.
‘Unique Opportunity’
“We have a unique opportunity,” said Jaret Wirtz, the authority’s executive director. “This was never feasible before; there was never enough water or money available.”
Like school superintendents who recently banded together to lobby for state funds, farmers are joining forces in the Northwest Landowners Association to push for more regulated growth.
“I don’t think any of us want it to go away,” said Troy Coons, 48, a farmer and the group’s vice chairman. “We just want it managed and not a free-for-all. Most people want to be treated fair and respectably.”
Hynek and other commissioners in the state’s largest oil producing county expect service needs to continue exploding as more workers flood the area.
“We have 800 wells -- they tell me there’s going to be 6,000 more in five years,” Hynek said. “It scares the hell out of me. They say you’d better get prepared for 50,000 more people.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Jennifer Oldham in Denver at joldham1@bloomberg.net
Washington, D.C. -- Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic effects, including crop failures in the heat-stressed tropics. This has led some to explore drastic ideas for combating global warming, including the idea of trying to counteract it by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. However, it has been suggested that reflecting sunlight away from the Earth might itself threaten the food supply of billions of people. New research led by Carnegie's Julia Pongratz examines the potential effects that geoengineering the climate could have on global food production and concludes that sunshade geoengineering would be more likely to improve rather than threaten food security. Their work is published online by Nature Climate Change January 22.
Big volcanoes cool the planet by placing lots of small particles in the stratosphere, but the particles fall out within a year and the planet heats back up. One proposal for cooling the planet is to use high-flying airplanes to constantly replenish a layer of small particles in the stratosphere that would scatter sunlight back to space. But such so-called sunshade geoengineering could have unintended consequences for climate, and especially for precipitation.
Although scientists know that climate change in recent decades has negatively impacted crop yields in many regions, the study by Pongratz and colleagues is the first to examine the potential effect of geoengineering on food security. Pongratz's team, which included Carnegie's Ken Caldeira and Long Cao, as well as Stanford University's David Lobell, used models to assess the impact of sunshade geoengineering on crop yields.
Using two different climate models, they simulated climates with carbon dioxide levels similar to what exists today. A second set of simulations doubled carbon-dioxide levels – levels that could be reached in several decades if current trends in fossil-fuel burning continue unabated. A third set of simulations posited doubled carbon dioxide, but with a layer of sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere deflecting about 2% of incoming sunlight away from the Earth. The simulated climate changes were then applied to crop models that are commonly used to project future yields.
The team found that, in the model, sunshade geoengineering leads to increased crop yields in most regions, both compared with current conditions and with the future projection of doubled carbon dioxide on its own. This is because deflecting sunlight back to space reduces temperatures, but not CO2. "In many regions, future climate change is predicted to put crops under temperature stress, reducing yields. This stress is alleviated by geoengineering," Pongratz said. "At the same time, the beneficial effects that a higher CO2 concentration has on plant productivity remain active."
Even if the geoengineering would help crop yields overall, the models predict that some areas could be harmed by the geoengineering. And there are other risks that go beyond the direct impact on crop yields. For example, deployment of such systems might lead to political or even military conflict. Furthermore, these approaches do not solve the problem of ocean acidification, which is also caused by carbon dioxide emissions.
"The real world is much more complex than our climate models, so it would be premature to act based on model results like ours," Caldeira said. "But desperate people do desperate things. Therefore, it is important to understand the consequences of actions that do not strike us as being particularly good ideas."
"The climate system is not well enough understood to exclude the risks of severe unanticipated climate changes, whether due to our fossil-fuel emissions or due to intentional intervention in the climate system," Pongratz said. "Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is therefore likely a safer option than geoengineering to avert risks to global food security."
Nearly one-third of CO2 emissions due to human activities enters the world's oceans. By reacting with seawater, CO2 increases the water's acidity, which may significantly reduce the calcification rate of such marine organisms as corals and mollusks. The extent to which human activities have raised the surface level of acidity, however, has been difficult to detect on regional scales because it varies naturally from one season and one year to the next, and between regions, and direct observations go back only 30 years.
Combining computer modeling with observations, an international team of scientists concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions over the last 100 to 200 years have already raised ocean acidity far beyond the range of natural variations. The study is published in the January 22 online issue of Nature Climate Change.
The team of climate modelers, marine conservationists, ocean chemists, biologists and ecologists, led by Tobias Friedrich and Axel Timmermann at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, came to their conclusions by using Earth system models that simulate climate and ocean conditions 21,000 years back in time, to the Last Glacial Maximum, and forward in time to the end of the 21st century. They studied in their models changes in the saturation level of aragonite (a form of calcium carbonate) typically used to measure of ocean acidification. As acidity of seawater rises, the saturation level of aragonite drops. Their models captured well the current observed seasonal and annual variations in this quantity in several key coral reef regions.
Today's levels of aragonite saturation in these locations have already dropped five times below the pre-industrial range of natural variability. For example, if the yearly cycle in aragonite saturation varied between 4.7 and 4.8, it varies now between 4.2 and 4.3, which – based on another recent study – may translate into a decrease in overall calcification rates of corals and other aragonite shell-forming organisms by 15%. Given the continued human use of fossil fuels, the saturation levels will drop further, potentially reducing calcification rates of some marine organisms by more than 40% of their pre-industrial values within the next 90 years.
"Any significant drop below the minimum level of aragonite to which the organisms have been exposed to for thousands of years and have successfully adapted will very likely stress them and their associated ecosystems," says lead author Postdoctoral Fellow Tobias Friedrich.
"In some regions, the man-made rate of change in ocean acidity since the Industrial Revolution is hundred times greater than the natural rate of change between the Last Glacial Maximum and pre-industrial times," emphasizes Friedrich. "When Earth started to warm 17,000 years ago, terminating the last glacial period, atmospheric CO2 levels rose from 190 parts per million (ppm) to 280 ppm over 6,000 years. Marine ecosystems had ample time to adjust. Now, for a similar rise in CO2 concentration to the present level of 392 ppm, the adjustment time is reduced to only 100 – 200 years."
On a global scale, coral reefs are currently found in places where open-ocean aragonite saturation reaches levels of 3.5 or higher. Such conditions exist today in about 50% of the ocean – mostly in the tropics. By end of the 21st century this fraction is projected to be less than 5%. The Hawaiian Islands, which sit just on the northern edge of the tropics, will be one of the first to feel the impact.
The study suggests that some regions, such as the eastern tropical Pacific, will be less stressed than others because greater underlying natural variability of seawater acidity helps to buffer anthropogenic changes. The aragonite saturation in the Caribbean and the western Equatorial Pacific, both biodiversity hotspots, shows very little natural variability, making these regions particularly vulnerable to human-induced ocean acidification.
"Our results suggest that severe reductions are likely to occur in coral reef diversity, structural complexity and resilience by the middle of this century," says co-author Professor Axel Timmermann."
Takver - Climate IMC, Saturday Jan 21st, 2012 11:18 PM
Scientists meeting at the University of Copenhagen have warned that biodiversity is declining rapidly throughout the world, describing the loss of species as the 6th mass extinction event on the earth. The world is losing species at a rate that is 100 to 1000 times faster than the natural extinction rate, with the challenges of conserving the world's species larger than mitigating the negative effects of global climate change.
Related: Climate change and habitat loss threaten biodiversity, extinction rate underestimated | Species biodiversity under threat from the velocity of climate change | UN study says biodiversity loss unstoppable with protected areas alone | Oceans at high risk of unprecedented Marine extinction scientists warn
Related Event: Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction - a film and discussion - San Fransisco on Sunday January 29, 2012.
The scientists and policymakers met last week in Copenhagen to discuss how to organise the future UN Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) - an equivalent to the UN panel on climate change (IPCC). The conference was arranged and hosted in cooperation with the Danish Ministry of Environment and took place at the University of Copenhagen, where more than 100 scientists and decision makers, primarily from EU countries were gathered.
The conference concluded that dealing with the biodiversity crisis requires political will and needs to be based on a solid scientific knowledge for action to be taken to ensure a safe future for the planet. It is estimated that about 30,000 species go extinct each year, some three species per hour. This is not a new crisis. The World Conservation Union in 2004 reported on the Escalating global species extinction crisis.
Two recent scientific papers have emphasised that Climate change and habitat loss threaten biodiversity, extinction rate underestimated. The oceans are also in imminent peril with Marine Extinction looming with Ocean Acidification increasing, with marine scientists warning in June 2011 that the Oceans at high risk of unprecedented Marine extinction, including Extinction of coral reef ecosystems.
Five previous mass extinctions have occurred in the planet's history, the last time being 65 million years ago - the end of the age of dinosaurs. These previous extinction events were driven by global changes in climate and in atmospheric chemistry, impacts by asteroids and volcanism. The present event, the 6th mass extinction, is driven by a competition for resources between one species on the planet – humans – and all others. Accelerating habitat degredation and loss is the primary process. The process is worsened by the ongoing human-induced climate change which particularly impacts fragmented ecosystems.
Human population is basically overpopulating the planet and driving species to extinction through destruction of native habitat and landuse conversion to industrial scale agriculture. Kevin J Gaston in a 2005 paper on Biodiversity and extinction: species and people (PDF) detailed that "The most important agent of change in the spatial patterns of much of biodiversity at present is ultimately the size, growth and resource demands of the human population...giving rise to levels of global species extinction largely unprecedented outside periods of mass extinction."
Researchers have found that bird species most at risk are predominantly narrow-ranged and endemic to the tropics, where species have small ranges and are imperiled by human land use conversions. Most of these species are currently not recognized as imperiled. "Land conversion and climate change have already had significant impacts on biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. Using future land-cover projections from the recently completed Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, we found that 950–1,800 of the world's 8,750 species of land birds could be imperiled by climate change and land conversion by the year 2100." says the research paper on Projected Impacts of Climate and Land-Use Change on the Global Diversity of Birds published in PLoS Biology in June 2007.
Another recent multi-author study has found that preservation of plant biodiversity provides a crucial buffer to negative effects of climate change and desertification in drylands. This is important as Dryland ecosystems cover 41% of the land surface of the Earth and support 38% of the human population.
Scientists have recently calculated the velocity of climate change to be 27.3 km/decade on land, and 21.7 km/decade in the ocean. This rate of movement of thermal climate envelopes poses problems for species facing a high speed migration, or a difficult and abrupt adaptation or extinction. For terrestrial species this involves migration polewards or to a greater altitude. For species that live on the top of mountains, ecosystem islands in the sky, they face a grim future of adapting to a warmer environment or extinction as they compete with species moving up from lower altitudes. Species from the tropics with small ranges are particularly threatened.
Professor Carsten Rahbek, Director for the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, University of Copenhagen said "The biodiversity crisis – i.e. the rapid loss of species and the rapid degradation of ecosystems – is probably a greater threat than global climate change to the stability and prosperous future of mankind on Earth. There is a need for scientists, politicians and government authorities to closely collaborate if we are to solve this crisis. This makes the need to establish IPBES very urgent, which may happen at a UN meeting in Panama City in April."
So, how can you help stop extinctions? The sixth extinction website, a website about the current biodiversity crisis, gives a list of small but concrete measures you can take on a personal level.
These include:
•Donate or join nature conservation organisations
•Buy Stewardship Council products
•Say "No" to Bad Souvenirs
•Use Green electricity
•Visit parks and nature reserves
•Respect the environment
•Don't release pets into the wild
I would add to this list to reduce your carbon foootprint through reduced consumption and encouragement of reuse and recycling.
Establishment of the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) joins the Convention on Biodiversity which came into force on 29 December 1993, and the UN Environment Programme on Biodiversity in tackling the biodiversity crisis on a global level.
Sources:
•University of Copenhagen News, 19 January 2012 - The biodiversity crisis: Worse than climate change
•Centre for Biological Diversity, OVERPOPULATION: A Key Factor in Species Extinction
•Maas, P.H.J. (2010). Stop Extinction! How Can You Help?. In: TSEW (2012). The Sixth Extinction Website. . Downloaded on 22 January 2012.
By Wynne Parry, Published January 22, 2012
Brown seaweed, also called kelp, hold sugars that can be made into biofuels. A new system allows microbes to convert a previously inaccessible form of sugar in leaves like these.
A promising new system can convert fronds of brown seaweed into biofuel, opening up a new possible source of energy that could help replace fossil fuels, like gasoline, scientists reported Thursday, Jan. 19.
The secret: bacteria genetically engineered to break down a previously inaccessible sugar in seaweed, called alginate.
The researchers who developed this new system used it to generate ethanol, a biofuel that is added to gasoline; however, it has the potential to produce not just ethanol but other biofuels, they and others say.
The new system is like a Lego platform, said Yasuo Yoshikuni, a study researcher and chief science officer and co-founder at Bio Architecture Lab in California. With changes to the components in the process, the same microbe-based system could be used to produce a variety of products, Yoshikuni said.
For instance, the system could be used to turn seaweed into a source (also called a feedstock) for other biofuels, which could include butanol — an alcohol, like ethanol, that is blended into gas — or chemicals used in biodiesel, which has properties similar to conventional, petroleum-based diesel. [10 Ways to Power the Future]
"It opens up a vast new potential for biofuel feedstocks," said Tom Richard, director of the Institutes of Energy and the Environment at Pennsylvania State University.
Two questions remain, according to Richard, who was not involved in the study, which is published in tomorrow's (Jan. 20) issue of the journal Science: Is it economically feasible to use seaweed to produce biofuel? And is it environmentally attractive?
"We don't know the answer to either question, what this article demonstrates is that it is technically possible, which is a great first step," Richard said. "And I think in both cases there is reason to think there is a good shot."
Why seaweed?
Seaweed now joins the cadre of plants — from corn to single-celled algae — that offer tantalizingly renewable and domestically produced alternatives to fossil fuels. In the United States, ethanol made from corn is added to gasoline; in Brazil, cars are powered largely, sometimes completely, by ethanol made from sugar cane.
But converting corn and sugar cane into fuel can be problematic, since both are also food crops. Even other potential biofuel sources, like switchgrass, can compete for land in a world whose population is growing and seeking a more resource-intensive diet. [7 (Billion) Population Milestones]
"This is one of the great debates about biofuel: Is there sufficient agricultural land to produce the food we require in society and also produce significant amounts of biofuels," Richard said.
Seaweed is different; it doesn't compete with farming.
"There is a lot of biomass in the ocean, and so far people haven't really found ways to substantially exploit it," said Chris Somerville, director of the Energy Biosciences Institute, who wasn't involved in the study.
Seaweed — a relatively unexploited source of nutrition, particularly in North America — is high in sugars, which are precursors for most biofuels. Seaweed also lacks lignin, a compound that makes cell walls rigid in land plants and that must be removed before such plants can be turned into fuel.
Even so, until now, seaweed appeared to have limited potential as a feedstock for biofuel, since one of its primary sugars, alginate, couldn't be broken down efficiently enough to produce biofuel on an industrial scale.
The bug
Marine microbes already have the ability to break down alginate, transport the products and metabolize them, so Yoshikuni's team first figured out the details of how this happens. Then, they engineered another, more industry-friendly microbe, E. coli, to do something similar, spitting out ethanol at the end of a multi-step process. The last of the steps could be replaced to produce other biofuels, or even chemicals such as plastics and polymer building blocks.
This system also takes advantage of other sugars in the seaweed, mannitol and glucan, since the E. coli already possessed the ability to break down mannitol, and commericially available enzymes can easily break glucan down into a more accessible form, glucose.
This system could be used in any brown seaweed (seaweeds also come in green and red). Yoshikuni's team used kombu, kelp used in East Asian cuisine.
Cultivating seaweed along three percent of the world's coastlines, where kelp already grows, could produce 60 billion gallons of ethanol, according to Dan Trunfio, BAL's chief executive officer.
Both Richard and Somerville said the production of ethanol from seaweed using their microbial system would likely require more work to become cost-effective on an industrial scale.
BAL, which is testing cultivation methods at four pilot seaweed farms off the coast of Chile, is working on commercializing the process to produce ethanol and renewable chemicals, according to Trunfio. Seaweed's advantages, its high sugar content and lack of lignin, make it a viable source for biofuel from a cost perspective, he said.
Looking ahead
There is also the environmental question.
One challenge will likely be seaweed's demand for nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which are not naturally abundant in the oceans, Somerville said. "And generally it is undesirable to fertilize the ocean," he said.
Runoff filled with nutrients creates dead zones, with low oxygen content, as happens in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi River delivers its payload of agricultural fertilizer.
Trunfio argues, however, that seaweed's need for nutrients creates an opportunity, noting BAL's seaweed farms are located near salmon farms, so the seaweed can use salmon waste as fertilizer.
Overall, Somerville was cautious about the implications of the new microbial system.
"Does this change everything? No," Somerville said. "It's the beginning of opening up a new area; it needs quite a lot of additional investigation broadly speaking to see what the real opportunity is."
The battle for the college digital textbook market—including startups like Inkling and Kno—gets a fair amount of attention. But the K-12 textbook business that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) now seeks to revolutionize is much less talked about outside of education circles.
Apple announced this week that it is partnering with the three largest K-12 educational publishers to sell iPad textbooks. It will be entering an $8 billion industry where most of the funds are controlled by state governments and school districts, which can mean long and politically charged funding discussions. Unlike in the college market, startups in the K-12 market have struggled to gain venture capital. One reason, on top of the bureaucracy that companies have to deal with: the digital infrastructure in many K-12 schools is weak, with an average of three students for every device as well as more mundane problems like too few electrical outlets.
That said, there’s clearly some real opportunity: While many assume the K-12 market is largely controlled by the three big companies that Apple is partnering with, in fact, more than half of that $8 billion market isn’t. Here’s a look at some of the challenges and opportunities awaiting Apple.
How big is the K-12 education market?
The market is estimated at $8 billion. There are 50 million K-12 students in public schools in the U.S.
K-12 school publishing—including elementary and high school textbooks and other teaching materials—is the second-largest publishing category in the U.S. after trade. Net sales revenue was $5.5 billion in 2010, according to the Association of American Publishers. (K-12 publishing net sales revenue fell 12.4 percent between 2008 and 2009, but increased by 7.1 percent between 2009 and 2010. Overall, net sales revenue between 2008 and 2010 declined by 6.2 percent.)
How is the K-12 publishing market different from trade and higher-ed publishing?
The main difference is that state governments and school districts procure about 90 percent of the books. “It’s very much unlike the consumer market where we decide to go into Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) and buy a book,” says Jay Diskey, executive director of the AAP’s school division. “A school district will decide it needs a new reading program for its elementary school students and will request proposals from publishers. If the state likes the proposal, the contract is negotiated.”
Publishers don’t always sell the books individually; a parent may not be able to buy a single textbook, for instance. The AAP notes the average net unit price of a K-12 title was $65 in 2010, but extensive pricing data is difficult to obtain because so many books are bought in bulk by state governments and school districts.
Textbook rental doesn’t yet factor into K-12 education the way it does in higher ed, although some private and parochial schools are trying it.
Who are the main textbook publishers?
The K-12 textbook market is often seen as being dominated by just a few big companies, but that’s not entirely accurate, says Diskey. It’s true that three companies—McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP), Pearson (NYSE: PSO) and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the same three companies that are partnering with Apple in its new digital textbook store—capture about 85 percent of the K-12 core textbook market, which is worth roughly $3.2 billion. (The rest of that core market is made up of books from niche publishers on subjects like foreign languages, art and music, and books for technical and vocational schools.)
With the whole market estimated at $8 billion, though, there is still about $5 billion up for grabs outside of core textbooks. That portion includes many players, publishers and technology companies. They publish supplemental materials like workbooks, encyclopedias, books for teachers and reference works, all in print and digital formats. “There is far more diversity in the market than I think a lot of people understand,” Diskey says.
What is the role of digital?
Digital products are becoming a more important part of the K-12 school publishing market. Revenues from digital products increased by 45.6 percent between 2008 and 2010, to $638.7 million, according to the AAP. (The market for print books is still much larger but revenues from print products declined 13.7 percent between 2008 and 2010, to $2.6 billion.)
Spending on e-learning as a percentage of overall K-12 education expenditure is small, according to the September 2011 White House report “Unleashing the Potential of Educational Technology”—it makes up just $0.46 of every $100 spent, for a total of $2.9 billion. (Expenditure on e-learning in higher education is over ten times greater: $5.60 per $100 spent, a total of $24.4 billion.)
K-12 publishers all offer digital products now, but school districts have to decide how to buy them. The digital products are often bundled with print, but “a lot depends on the digital infrastructure in the school district and whether it can support digital learning,” says Diskey. “Not too many states have one-to-one student-to-hardware ratios. In order to have full-blown digital learning, students should have access to their own devices in the same way you had access to your own textbooks when you were in school.”
In fact, the national average ratio of students to hardware devices is three-to-one (three students for every computer, tablet, etc.) “That makes learning very difficult,” Diskey says—and is another way K-12 is different from higher ed. About 90 percent of students arrive at college with at least one electronic device like a laptop. netbook or tablet. “By and large, K-12 students do not arrive with these devices,” Diskey says. This raises questions about who will pay for the devices—family or school districts.
School districts must deal with more mundane issues as well, such as whether there are enough electrical outlets to charge devices. “Behind all this, there’s the backdrop of schools providing textbooks,” Diskey says. In many states, schools are required to fund textbooks, but those mandates don’t always extend to digital materials. It will take “massive funding” to provide the 50 million K-12 public school students with hardware.
January 20, 2012 16:13
Source: Congressional Research Service
The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station and the earthquake that forced the North Anna, VA, nuclear power plant's temporary shutdown have focused attention on the seismic criteria applied to siting and designing commercial nuclear power plants. Some Members of Congress have questioned whether U.S nuclear plants are more vulnerable to seismic threats than previously assessed, particularly given the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC's) ongoing reassessment of seismic risks at certain plant sites.
The design and operation of commercial nuclear power plants operating in the United States vary considerably because most were custom-designed and custom-built. Boiling water reactors (BWRs) directly generate steam inside the reactor vessel. Pressurized water reactors (PWRs) use heat exchangers to convert the heat generated by the reactor core into steam outside of the reactor vessel. U.S. utilities currently operate 104 nuclear power reactors at 65 sites in 31 states; 69 are PWR designs and the 35 are BWR designs
A team of NASA scientists have warned an upswing in solar activity combined with the next El Niño will trigger record global temperatures over the next three years.
The stark forecast was provided as researchers confirm global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.
"We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting," said GISS Director James E. Hansen. "So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record."
The difference between 2011 and the warmest year in the GISS record (2010) is 0.22 degrees F (0.12 C). This underscores the emphasis scientists put on the long-term trend of global temperature rise. Because of the large natural variability of climate, scientists do not expect temperatures to rise consistently year after year. However, they do expect a continuing temperature rise over decades.
The first 11 years of the 21st century experienced notably higher temperatures compared to the middle and late 20th century, Hansen said. The only year from the 20th century in the top 10 warmest years on record is 1998.
Higher temperatures today are largely sustained by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. These gases absorb infrared radiation emitted by Earth and release that energy into the atmosphere rather than allowing it to escape to space. As their atmospheric concentration has increased, the amount of energy "trapped" by these gases has led to higher temperatures.
The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, when the GISS global temperature record begins. By 1960, the average concentration had risen to about 315 parts per million. Today it exceeds 390 parts per million and continues to rise at an accelerating pace.
The temperature analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1,000 meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperature and Antarctic research station measurements. A publicly available computer program is used to calculate the difference between surface temperature in a given month and the average temperature for the same place during 1951 to 1980. This three-decade period functions as a baseline for the analysis.
The resulting temperature record is very close to analyses by the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Hansen said he expects record-breaking global average temperature in the next two to three years because solar activity is on the upswing and the next El Niño will increase tropical Pacific temperatures. The warmest years on record were 2005 and 2010, in a virtual tie.
"It's always dangerous to make predictions about El Niño, but it's safe to say we'll see one in the next three years," Hansen said. "It won't take a very strong El Niño to push temperatures above 2010."
There is a lot of discussion lately about domestic energy production and American energy security. For the Obama Administration, moving towards the goal of energy independence has been a clear priority since day one. When President Obama took office, the United States imported 11 million barrels of oil a day. The President has put forward a plan to cut that by one-third by 2025 by strengthening domestic production of our energy resources, making our homes and buildings more efficient, and transitioning to a wide range of clean energy technologies.
When it comes to domestic energy production, the numbers speak for themselves. Since 2008, U.S. oil and natural gas production has increased, while imports of foreign oil have decreased. Here are the facts:
•In 2011, U.S. crude oil production reached its highest level since 2003, increasing by an estimated 90,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) over 2010 levels to 5.57 million bbl/d.
•U.S. natural gas production grew by an estimated 7.4 percent in 2011– the largest year-over-year volumetric increase – and easily eclipsed the previous all-time production record set in 1973.
•Overall, oil imports have been falling since 2008, and net imports as a share of total consumption declined from 57 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2011 – the lowest level since 1995.
In May of last year, President Obama outlined a series of additional steps to expand domestic oil and gas production as part of his long-term plan to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. More specifically, the President directed the Department of Interior (DOI) to conduct annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve (NPR-A), speed up the evaluation of oil and gas resources in the mid- and south-Atlantic, develop new incentives for industry to develop unused leases both onshore and offshore, extend drilling leases in the areas of the Gulf impacted by the temporary moratorium following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and lease new areas in the Gulf of Mexico.
Significant progress has been made in many of these areas. For instance, in December 2011, DOI held the first oil and natural gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico since the oil spill. The sale, which covered over 1 million acres, attracted more than $338 million in total bids -- about $100 million more than average for Western Gulf sales over the previous decade. During the same month, DOI held a lease sale in Alaska’s NPR-A that generated winning bids of over $3.6 million and covered 17 tracts on over 140,000 acres.
The Administration has also taken historic action to reduce our dependence on oil by making our cars and trucks more efficient. In July of last year, the President announced the next phase in the Administration’s program to increase fuel economy, which will require a performance equivalent to 54.5 miles per gallon for model year 2017-2025 passenger vehicles. Taken together, the standards established under this Administration span Model Years 2011 to 2025. They will save American families money at the pump, for a total of $1.7 trillion in fuel savings over the life of the program. They will clean up our environment, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by more than 6 billion metric tons over the life of the program, while reducing pollutants like air toxics, cause soot, and smog.
These new fuel economy standards will dramatically cut our oil dependence, reducing consumption by an estimated 2.2 million barrels a day in 2025 (eventually reaching more than 4 million barrels a day as the fleet turns over), and saving 12 billion barrels in total over the lifetime of the program. To put that in perspective, it would take a pipeline that carried 700,000 barrels a day nearly 47 years to transport the amount of oil we are saving thanks to these new fuel economy standards.
Of course, the Administration has also been intent on developing and deploying clean energy technologies and positioning the United States as the global leader in the clean energy race. The Recovery Act invested more than $90 billion in clean energy, the largest such investment in America’s history. Those investments have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and spurred thousands of clean energy projects across the country. For example, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program has already supported more than 40 clean energy projects that will ultimately employ more than 60,000 Americans. And because of Recovery Act investments, we are on track to double non-hydro renewable electricity generation from 2008 levels this year.
In short, the Obama Administration’s approach to achieving American energy independence has been a comprehensive and sustained effort, with emphasis on boosting domestic energy production, increasing efficiency, and transitioning to cleaner energy sources.
But what’s abundantly clear is that there are no silver bullets when it comes to this challenge. And the idea, as some in Washington have tried to suggest, that building a pipeline is the ultimate answer to the question of American energy security and job creation is nothing more than a pipe dream. The truth is that just two of the Administration’s programs -- the DOE Loan Guarantee Program and the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards -- will create more than 10 times the amount of jobs generated by the Keystone XL pipeline, which will only generate a few thousand temporary jobs. In terms of reducing America’s dependence on oil, the Administration’s fuel economy standards alone will save more than twice the amount of oil the Keystone pipeline would deliver.
KIT Climate Researchers Studied Ozone Hole Formation - Results in “Geophysical Research Letters“
Extraordinarily cold temperatures in the winter of 2010/2011 caused the most massive destruction of the ozone layer above the Arctic so far: The mechanisms leading to the first ozone hole above the North Pole were studied by scientists of the KIT Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research (IMK). According to these studies, further cooling of the ozone layer may enhance the influence of ozone-destroying substances, e.g. chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), such that repeated occurrence of an ozone hole above the Arctic has to be expected.
About a year ago, IMK scientists, together with colleagues from Oxford, detected that ozone degradation above the Arctic for the first time reached an extent comparable to that of the ozone hole above the South Pole. Then, the KIT researchers studied the mechanisms behind. Their results have now been published in the journal “Geophysical Research Letters”.
According to IMK studies, occurrence of the Arctic ozone hole was mainly due to the extraordinarily cold temperatures in the ozone layer that is located at about 18 km height in the stratosphere, i.e. the second layer of the earth’s atmosphere. There, chlorine compounds originating from chlorofluorocarbons (CFC, e.g. greenhouse gases and refrigerants) and other pollutants are converted chemically at temperatures below -78°C. These chemical conversion products attack the ozone layer and destroy it partly. One of the main statements in the study: If the trend to colder temperatures in the stratosphere observed in the past decades will continue, repeated occurrence of an Arctic ozone hole has to be expected.
The team of IMK researchers analyzed measurements of the chemical composition of the atmosphere by the MIPAS satellite instrument developed by KIT. In addition, model calculations were made to determine concrete effects of further cooling of the ozone layer. “We found that further decrease in temperature by just 1°C would be sufficient to cause a nearly complete destruction of the Arctic ozone layer in certain areas,” says Dr. Björn-Martin Sinnhuber, main author of the study. Observations over the past thirty years indicate that the stratosphere in cold Arctic winters cooled down by about 1°C per decade on the average. According to Sinnhuber, further development of the ozone layer will consequently be influenced also by climate change. He points out that the increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will warm up the bottom air layers near the ground due to the reflection of part of the thermal radiation by the bottom layer of the atmosphere towards the earth’s surface, but also result in a cooling of the air layers of the stratosphere above, where the ozone layer is located.
After the first discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in the mid-1980s, CFCs were rapidly identified to be the cause and their use was prohibited by the Montreal Protocol of 1987. However, it will take decades until these substances will have been removed completely from the atmosphere. “Future cooling of the stratosphere would enhance and extend the impacts of these substances on the ozone layer,” says Dr. Björn-Martin Sinnhuber. It is now necessary to study potential feedbacks on climate change.
The present study is embedded in long-term programs of IMK in this field. In December, the researchers started a new measurement campaign in the Arctic ozone layer in Northern Sweden using a high-altitude aircraft. Again, they encountered extraordinarily low temperatures. However, it is not yet possible to predict whether temperatures will be low enough over a longer term to cause a comparably large degradation of ozone in this winter.
More information: Geophysical Research Letters, volume 38, doi:10.1029/2011GL049784.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a public corporation according to the legislation of the state of Baden-Württemberg. It fulfills the mission of a university and the mission of a national research center of the Helmholtz Association. KIT focuses on a knowledge triangle that links the tasks of research, teaching, and innovation.
URBANA – When the water in the Mississippi River rose to 58 feet with a forecast of 60 feet or higher in May 2011, the emergency plan to naturally or intentionally breach the levees, established over 80 years prior, was put in motion. The flood of 1937 did top the frontline levee and water passed into and through the New Madrid Floodway, but being floodfree since then caused area landowners to oppose the plan being put into action.
"After a delay due to a legal appeal from area landowners, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was finally given permission by the U.S. Supreme Court to open the floodway, but by that time, the Mississippi River was 4 feet higher than planned for," said University of Illinois researcher Kenneth Olson. "The initial additional force and depth of floodwater caused more damage to buildings and more deep land scouring than was predicted. The strong current and sweep of water through the Birds Point, Missouri, breach created deep gullies in 133,000 acres of Missouri farmland, displaced tons of soil, and damaged irrigation equipment, farms, and homes."
Olson has followed the drama of the deliberate flooding closely and believes it will create long-lasting, if not permanent, agricultural damage to hundreds of acres of land. The rushing water gouged large deep gullies on parcels of land adjacent to the blown levees and on some distant fields. The land was also covered with a thick sand deposit and in some areas adjacent to where new crater lakes were formed.
"Reclamation efforts by the Corps of Engineers included patching the frontline and fuse plugs levees with the sand, and topsoil was trucked in," Olson said. "The former 60.5 feet fuse plug and the 62.5 feet front line levee was rebuilt, raising it initially to 51 feet and then, after input from local farmers, to 55 feet. Proper drainage in the area has been restored, but the unanticipated fields with large and deep gullies located five miles from the levee breaches will not be repaired very easily." Olson believes that even if the fields of gullies are reclaimed, the soils are likely to have lower productivity.
"The resulting land surface will have less soil aggregation, less organic carbon, and be more sloping, making it difficult to farm the land," he said. "Some of this lost cropland could be restored as wetlands and wildlife habitat adjacent to the patched levees."
The Impacts of 2011 induced levee breaches on agricultural lands of Mississippi River Valley, coauthored by Lois Wright Morton, is published in the Jan.-Feb. 2012 issue of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation.
Olson previously reported on the extensive ponding and soil erosion that occurred after the heavy spring rains of 2008 that drowned corn and soybean crops in Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana (published in the Nov.-Dec. 2009 issue of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation).
"Over the last 30 years, many soil and water conservation practices and structures were no longer used, and soil erosion standards were met using conservation tillage and no-till systems," Olson said. "Most remaining terraces, contour farming, strip cropping, and waterways were effective. But many waterways were filled above capacity and were eroded by fast-moving water or had significant sediment depositions."
At that time, Olson said that fewer soil conservation structures and retention ponds were being built and maintained than in the past, although in Missouri significant acreage of unprotected agricultural lands was converted to fish and wildlife use.
Olson recommended potential solutions to reduce the flooding impact on agricultural lands in flat watersheds with poorly drained soils, such as creating temporary water storage structures, changing the crop rotation in the upland to include more forages rather than row crops, converting more of the agricultural land to timberland or grassland that can use or store more water, and building higher and stronger levees that are located farther from the riverbanks to widen the river flow channel.
"It would also be logical to accept periodic levee breaks or stop using the floodplain soil for agricultural crop production. Instead the land could be converted to conservation use and restore the periodic water storage function to the natural floodplain."
Olson and his colleagues Mike Reed and Lois Wright Morton contend that strategically placed wetlands, settling basins, nutrient filtering, and levees are effective management for internal control of water and sediment. They point to Sny Island Levee Drainage District as a model for what could be accomplished with additional effort. Their findings were published in the Jul.-Aug. 2011 issue of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation.
"The Sny Island District has developed pioneering ways to reduce local flooding and decrease the sediment and nutrient loads being discharged into the Mississippi River," Olson said.
But Olson adds that more than half of Sny Island's $2 million annual revenue is spent on fuel costs to run their three pumping stations continuously during periods of high water runoff.
"As the price of fuel oil increases, high commodity prices will be needed," he said. "One way to mitigate this treadmill is to build on the diverse habitat created by wetlands, sediment basin, and levees, and purposefully develop an economic tourism plan to increase the recreational use of this region."
WHEN IT COMES TO ACCEPTING EVOLUTION, GUT FEELINGS TRUMP FACTS
COLUMBUS, Ohio – For students to accept the theory of evolution, an intuitive “gut feeling” may be just as important as understanding the facts, according to a new study.
In an analysis of the beliefs of biology teachers, researchers found that a quick intuitive notion of how right an idea feels was a powerful driver of whether or not students accepted evolution—often trumping factors such as knowledge level or religion.
“The whole idea behind acceptance of evolution has been the assumption that if people understood it – if they really knew it – they would see the logic and accept it,” said David Haury, co-author of the new study and associate professor of education at Ohio State University.
“But among all the scientific studies on the matter, the most consistent finding was inconsistency. One study would find a strong relationship between knowledge level and acceptance, and others would find no relationship. Some would find a strong relationship between religious identity and acceptance, and others would find less of a relationship.”
“So our notion was, there is clearly some factor that we’re not looking at,” he continued. “We’re assuming that people accept something or don’t accept it on a completely rational basis. Or, they’re part of a belief community that as a group accept or don’t accept. But the findings just made those simple answers untenable.”
Haury and his colleagues tapped into cognitive science research showing that our brains don’t just process ideas logically—we also rely on how true something feels when judging an idea. “Research in neuroscience has shown that when there’s a conflict between facts and feeling in the brain, feeling wins,” he says.
The researchers framed a study to determine whether intuitive reasoning could help explain why some people are more accepting of evolution than others. The study, published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, included 124 pre-service biology teachers at different stages in a standard teacher preparation program at two Korean universities.
First, the students answered a standard set of questions designed to measure their overall acceptance of evolution. These questions probed whether students generally believed in the main concepts and scientific findings that underpin the theory.
Then the students took a test on the specific details of evolutionary science. To show their level of factual knowledge, students answered multiple-choice and free-response questions about processes such as natural selection. To gauge their “gut” feelings about these ideas, students wrote down how certain they felt that their factually correct answers were actually true.
The researchers then analyzed statistical correlations to see whether knowledge level or feeling of certainty best predicted students’ overall acceptance of evolution. They also considered factors such as academic year and religion as potential predictors.
“What we found is that intuitive cognition has a significant impact on what people end up accepting, no matter how much they know,” said Haury. The results show that even students with greater knowledge of evolutionary facts weren’t likelier to accept the theory, unless they also had a strong “gut” feeling about those facts
For teaching evolution, the researchers suggest using exercises that allow students to become aware of their brains’ dual processing. Knowing that sometimes what their “gut” says is in conflict with what their “head” knows may help students judge ideas on their merits.
When trying to explain the patterns of whether people believe in evolution or not, “the results show that if we consider both feeling and knowledge level, we can explain much more than with knowledge level alone,” said Minsu Ha, lead author on the paper and a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Teaching and Learning.
In particular, the research shows that it may not be accurate to portray religion and science education as competing factors in determining beliefs about evolution. For the subjects of this study, belonging to a religion had almost no additional impact on beliefs about evolution, beyond subjects’ feelings of certainty.
These results also provide a useful way of looking at the perceived conflict between religion and science when it comes to teaching evolution, according to Haury. “Intuitive cognition not only opens a new door to approach the issue,” he said, “it also gives us a way of addressing that issue without directly questioning religious views.”
When choosing a setting for their study, the team found that Korean teacher preparation programs were ideal. “In Korea, people all take the same classes over the same time period and are all about the same age, so it takes out a lot of extraneous factors,” said Haury. “We wouldn’t be able to find a sample group like this in the United States.”
Unlike in the U.S., about half of Koreans do not identify themselves as belonging to any particular religion. But according to Ha, who is from Korea, certain religious groups consider the topic of evolution just as controversial as in the U.S.
To ensure that their results were relevant to U.S. settings, the researchers compared how the Korean students did on the knowledge tests with previous studies of U.S. students. “We found that the both groups were comparable in terms of the overall performance,” said Haury.
For teaching evolution, the researchers suggest using exercises that allow students to become aware of their brains’ dual processing. Knowing that sometimes what their “gut” says is in conflict with what their “head” knows may help students judge ideas on their merits.
“Educationally, we think that’s a place to start,” said Haury. “It’s a concrete way to show them, look—you can be fooled and make a bad decision, because you just can’t deny your gut.”
Ha and Haury collaborated on this study with Ross Nehm, associate professor of education at the Ohio State University. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Roland W. Chalons-Browne CEO, Siemens Financial Services
Wind power is currently a highly relevant energy source, especially offshore wind. Within five years, offshore wind power plants are expected to account for approximately 20 percent of the entire wind-power market. Nevertheless, financing offshore wind projects faces an enormous challenge mainly because offshore wind projects are very capital intensive and, in the current economic environment, many financial players are reluctant to take risks for long-term projects.
The potential of offshore wind for green-energy generation is undeniable. According to a study by the European Environmental Agency (EEA) released in November 2011, the offshore wind capacity in Europe will increase 17-fold by 2020. In addition, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) released a report at its annual offshore wind conference in November 2011 that states that more than 141 GW of offshore wind energy capacity has been built, is under construction, has been approved or is being planned in the EU. At present, Europe has 4 GW of installed capacity – the current expected capacity of 141 GW could, once realized, provide more than 13 percent of Europe’s electricity production.
However, the ambitious sector faces an important challenge regarding the financing of offshore wind farms. As the global economy flattens, comprehensive and affordable financial solutions are becoming an increasingly critical precondition for the completion of wind projects. The EWEA report, for example, points out that financing is one of the most significant challenges to achieve rapid growth in the European offshore wind sector. As a result, large financial backing of the projects is highly needed.
But what are the exact difficulties associated with financing offshore wind parks?
First, offshore wind farms are highly capital intensive. New investments must be made in turbine foundations, electrical equipment, grid connection and installation. Furthermore, offshore turbines need to meet specific technological requirements arising from the hostile operating conditions they face at sea. Moreover, rising prices for copper and steel, which have climbed sharply since 2009, account for high investment and operating costs for offshore wind parks. Offshore wind is around 50% more expensive than onshore wind due to these special requirements.
The high capital costs cause many financial players to shy away from such projects. Under the looming financial crisis, banks are reluctant to provide large-ticket loans and tend to keep long-term projects at arm’s length. In such insecure times, risk-sharing gains further importance. Today, large infrastructure projects are mostly realized by club deals involving several financial players. Therefore, a major challenge is to identify and decide on the right financial parties. Moreover, a substantial effort is required to reach a balance that addresses the mutual interests of the different partners. It is fair to say that the major complication of such projects involves lining up the financial partners rather than identifying the appropriate technology to be used in off-shore wind farms. In such situations, competitive key players are needed to contribute the financial expertise, experience and a reliable network in the financial sphere.
Another uncertain feature of the offshore wind sector is the changing political environment. In general, most governments have laid a political foundation to support renewable-energy projects, including offshore wind farms that consist of tax credits or subsidies. However, this base is often influenced by political debates, compromises and even the personnel changes among the political leaders. Legal conditions may change, funding programs can be quite short, and developments are rather unpredictable.
There are important challenges lying ahead for the offshore wind sector. Although the prospects of wind power, especially offshore, are very bright, the tapping of its potential relies to a great extent on tailor-made financing solutions and experienced financial players as key enablers.
Roland W. Chalons-Browne is President and CEO of Siemens Financial Services GmbH; Munich. Based in Munich, he is responsible for leading Siemens Financial Services business worldwide.
January 19, 2012 at 2:00 PM
Engineering our way out of global climate warming may not be as easy as simply reducing the incoming solar energy, according to a team of University of Bristol and Penn State climate scientists. Designing the approach to control both sea level rise and rates of surface air temperature changes requires a balancing act to accommodate the diverging needs of different locations.
“Basic physics and past observations suggest that reducing the net influx of solar energy will cool the Earth,” said Peter J. Irvine, graduate student, University of Bristol, UK, and participant in the Worldwide Universities Network Research Mobility Programme to Penn State. “However, surface air temperatures would respond much more quickly and sea levels will respond much more slowly.”
Current solar radiation management approaches include satellites that block the sun, making the Earth’s surface more reflective or mimicking the effects of volcanoes by placing aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere.
“These solar radiation management approaches could be cheaper than reducing carbon dioxide emissions,” said Klaus Keller, associate professor of geosciences, Penn State. “But they are an imperfect substitute for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and carry considerable risks.”
How well they work at reducing sea level rise or surface air temperatures depends on how they are implemented.
“Strategies designed to reverse sea-level rise differ from the strategies designed to limit the rate of temperature changes,” said Ryan Sriver, research associate in geosciences, Penn State.
To stop or reverse sea-level rise, the incoming solar radiation would have to be decreased rapidly, but this approach would produce rapid cooling. Adopting a more gradual approach would reduce the risks due to rapid cooling, but would allow for considerable sea-level rise.
The researchers note that people living close to sea level are likely more concerned about sea-level rise than about the rates of surface temperature changes. In contrast, those living far from the oceans, are likely more concerned about rates of surface temperature changes that can influence agricultural or energy usage.
The researchers used a model to analyze the tension between controlling sea level rise and rates of surface temperature changes. They ran 120 scenarios with differing combinations of solar radiation management (SRM) including one called “business as usual,” which has no SRM.
They note that their model includes many approximations. For example, it does not include a mechanistic representation of ice sheets. They also did not consider scenarios that combine solar radiation management and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
They report in the current issue of Nature Climate Change that the forcing required to stop sea-level rise could cause a rapid cooling with a rate similar to the peak business-as-usual warming rate.
“While abrupt cooling may sound like a good idea, it could be more damaging than the increasing temperatures caused by increasing carbon dioxide,” said Keller.
“The rate of cooling can be a problem if it exceeds the capacity of the plants and animals to adapt,” said Sriver.
Another consideration when implementing solar radiation management approaches is that these approaches can require a long-term commitment. The researchers showed that “termination of solar radiation management was found to produce warming rates up to five times greater than the maximum rates under the business-as-usual scenario, whereas sea-level rise rates were only 30 percent higher.”
To avoid such harsh changes, should SRM be discontinued, requires a slow phase out over many decades. This places a commitment on future generations.
The National Science Foundation, Penn State Center for Climate Risk Management and the Worldwide Universities Network at the University of Bristol partially funded this work.
Published: Thursday, January 19, 2012, 10:00 AM Updated: Thursday, January 19, 2012, 3:12 PM
By Aaron Marshall, The Plain Dealer
COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new poll of Ohioans shows that more than seven in 10 want the controversial practice of hydro-fracking stopped until more study of it can be done, according to a Quinnipiac University survey released this morning.
But those polled also said they think the economic benefits of fracking outweigh the risks.
The first statewide poll on hydrofracking -- the practice of pumping millions of gallons of chemical-laced water into shale deposits to crack open oil and natural gas deposits far below the ground -- shows Ohioans anxious about its impact on the environment. By a margin of 72-23, Ohioans say the practice should be stopped until further study.
"Ohio voters are conflicted on hydro-fracking," said a statement from Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "They recognize the economic impact of drilling for fossil fuels in the state, but are worried about potential environmental risks of the specific technique hydro-fracking."
The poll shows Ohioans are convinced that hydro-fracking brings economic development with support by a 64-29 margin that the economic benefits outweigh the environmental risks, and 85-11 support for the notion that it will bring jobs to the state.
The poll of 1,610 registered voters was conducted from Jan. 9-16. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.
Simple Energy Customer Engagement Platform Integrates With Green Button
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Today, Simple Energy announced its integration with the Green Button, a White House coordinated initiative that will provide more than 10 million PG&E, SDG&E, and Southern California Edison customers with their personal energy data and allow them to view the information across a variety of platforms. The Simple Energy Customer Engagement Platform transforms this personal energy data into an online game that allows users to compete with friends and win prizes for increased energy efficiency.
Households in the service territories of California's three largest utilities can now download their energy usage data online with one click, accessing the past year of their energy data. This data can then be seamlessly integrated with the Simple Energy platform, which helps users to understand their energy use with actionable insights and an easy points system that scores them against their Facebook friends.
"We are excited to be able to work with the Green Button initiative to provide millions of customers across California with a social, fun and simple way of understanding their own energy data," said Yoav Lurie, CEO and co-founder of Simple Energy. "By allowing people access to their energy usage data in a meaningful way on platforms where they are already spending their time such as Facebook, we make saving energy into an easy and enjoyable experience."
Simple Energy is the first social energy application to go live to the public, with easy data uploading now available to over 15 million homes in California and Texas. The platform is available as a web application, by email and on Facebook, with a mobile application going live this month. Soon, Simple Energy will be available to more users around the country.
The Simple Energy platform normalizes customer's energy usage, allowing participants to compete with their friends across the country -- similar to a golf handicap. In addition, players can form teams in order to compete on behalf of a cause that they support, such as a school or community organization. Finally, the program follows strict privacy guidelines, comparing normalized scores among users without revealing any personalized, individual details about actual energy use.
For Simple Energy's utility partners, the portal product that allows for seamless integration with their consumer energy data comes standard with the Green Button export and download integration feature. This standard integration will allow utilities that decide to work with Green Button to instantly offer their customers a social, fun and simple way to understand their own energy data.
In addition, the Simple Energy portal product also supports third-party API integration with any outside vendors that utilities may opt to include. The Green Button uses a voluntary industry standard supported by efforts of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, NAESB's ESPI, that was developed for this more sophisticated use case.
The launch of the Green Button initiative follows the completion of an energy efficiency program piloted in San Diego, where the Simple Energy platform succeeded in more than doubling energy savings among participating residential customers during a three-month period.
"The amazing results from San Diego clearly demonstrate that the Simple Energy approach to motivating people to save energy really works," explained Lurie. "People are naturally social and they like competing to win points and prizes. This is an intuitive way for people to easily save energy."
California customers can sign up to access their energy data on the Green Button with Simple Energy today at Simple Energy
About Simple Energy
Simple Energy uses social game mechanics to change how people save energy and how utilities engage their customers. Simple Energy's customer engagement platform and applications combine leading behavioral science research and social game mechanics that encourage energy efficiency. Participants in Simple Energy programs compare their real energy usage with their friends and neighbors, making energy efficiency social, fun, and simple.
Conservation group RSPB Scotland says it is seriously concerned about the impact a recently consented scheme by Scottish Ministers to extend a wind farm will have on golden eagles and white-tailed eagles.
The scheme, to develop six new wind turbines, would be built in addition to the already consented 33-turbine Muaitheabhal Windfarm on the Eisgein Estate on the Isle of Lewis. Each new wind turbine would measure 150m to the tip of the blade and have a blade diameter of up to 120m making them some of the largest onshore turbines in the UK.
The conservation charity says it is concerned that not enough attention is being paid to the cumulative effect of consented and proposed schemes.
Martin Scott, RSPB conservation officer for the Western Isles, said: “The area where the turbines will be built supports one of the highest densities of golden eagles in the world and it is increasingly important for white-tailed eagles.
“We need renewable energy developments, including wind farms, to tackle climate change but any developer would be hard pushed to find a worse place in Britain to develop a scheme of this sort. We are very disappointed that our recommendations seem to have been ignored and that the development has been driven through without robust data being collected.”
Mr Scott explained: “This area supports around a dozen breeding pairs of golden eagles and we believe that chicks fledged here effectively prop up the Scottish population. This is why we treat any threat to them so seriously.
“The area also forms the nucleus of the recent expansion of white-tailed eagles in the Western Isles, following similar increases on Mull and Skye; and satellite-tagged white-tailed eagles from other Scottish sites have been shown to be drawn into the area to forage over prolonged periods.
“We believe that the gradual, incremental, development of windfarms in these areas risk a serious long-term impact on the populations of our largest and most magnificent birds of prey. It is very important that the cumulative impact is taken account of when these schemes are being proposed.
“Whilst we are obviously very disappointed that this scheme has been given the go-ahead, it is vital that a detailed and robust monitoring programme is put in place to ensure that we can improve our knowledge of the way in which eagles react to wind farms.”
In a breakthrough paper published in Science, researchers from The University of Manchester, The University of Bristol and Sandia National Laboratories report the potentially revolutionary effects of Criegee biradicals.
These invisible chemical intermediates are powerful oxidisers of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, produced by combustion, and can naturally clean up the atmosphere.
Although these chemical intermediates were hypothesised in the 1950s, it is only now that they have been detected. Scientists now believe that, with further research, these species could play a major role in off-setting climate change.
The detection of the Criegee biradical and measurement of how fast it reacts was made possible by a unique apparatus, designed by Sandia researchers, that uses light from a third-generation synchrotron facility, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source.
The intense, tunable light from the synchrotron allowed researchers to discern the formation and removal of different isomeric species – molecules that contain the same atoms but arranged in different combinations.
The researchers found that the Criegee biradicals react more rapidly than first thought and will accelerate the formation of sulphate and nitrate in the atmosphere. These compounds will lead to aerosol formation and ultimately to cloud formation with the potential to cool the planet.
The formation of Criegee biradicals was first postulated by Rudolf Criegee in the 1950s. However, despite their importance, it has not been possible to directly study these important species in the laboratory.
In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about 0.8 °C with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades.
Most countries have agreed that drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are required, and that future global warming should be limited to below 2.0 °C (3.6 °F).
Dr Carl Percival, Reader in Atmospheric Chemistry at The University of Manchester and one of the authors of the paper, believes there could be significant research possibilities arising from the discovery of the Criegee biradicals.
He said: "Criegee radicals have been impossible to measure until this work carried out at the Advanced Light Source. We have been able to quantify how fast Criegee radicals react for the first time.
"Our results will have a significant impact on our understanding of the oxidising capacity of the atmosphere and have wide ranging implications for pollution and climate change.
"The main source of these Criegee biradicals does not depend on sunlight and so these processes take place throughout the day and night."
Professor Dudley Shallcross, Professor in Atmospheric Chemistry at The University of Bristol, added: "A significant ingredient required for the production of these Criegee biradicals comes from chemicals released quite naturally by plants, so natural ecosystems could be playing a significant role in off-setting warming.'
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- In a breakthrough paper published in this week's issue of Science magazine, researchers from Sandia's Combustion Research Facility, the University of Manchester and Bristol University report direct measurements of reactions of a gas-phase Criegee intermediate using photoionization mass spectrometry. (visit www.youtube.com/SandiaLabs to see a short video of Sandia combustion chemists discussing the research.)
Criegee intermediates – carbonyl oxides – are implicated in autoignition chemistry and are pivotal atmospheric reactants, but only indirect knowledge of their reaction kinetics had previously been available. The article, titled Direct Kinetic Measurements of Criegee Intermediate (CH2OO) Formed by Reaction of CH2I with O2, reports the first direct kinetics measurements made of reactions of any Criegee species, in this case formaldehyde oxide (CH2OO). These measurements determine rate coefficients with key species, such as sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and provide new insight into the reactivity of these transient molecules.
The detection and measurement of the Criegee intermediate reactions was made possible by a unique apparatus, designed by Sandia researchers, that uses light from a third-generation synchrotron user facility, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source, to investigate chemical reactions that are critical in hydrocarbon oxidation. The intense tunable light from the synchrotron allows researchers to discern the formation and removal of different isomeric species – molecules that contain the same atoms but arranged in different combinations.
In the present case, CH2OO can be distinguished from its more stable isomer, formic acid (HCOOH), because of their differing thresholds for photoionization. The Manchester and Bristol researchers recognized that this apparatus could elucidate not only combustion reactions but also important tropospheric oxidation processes, such as ozonolysis.
Ozonolysis, or the cleavage of carbon-carbon double bonds through reaction with ozone, is a reaction that plays a key role in a number of fields, including synthetic chemistry and tropospheric removal of unsaturated hydrocarbons. In the 1950s, Rudolf Criegee proposed that ozonolysis of alkenes occurs via the carbonyl oxide biradicals, now called Criegee intermediates. Criegee intermediates also have been calculated to be markers of critical chain-branching steps in hydrocarbon autoignition chemistry.
However, until 2008 no gas-phase Criegee intermediate had been observed, and rate coefficients derived from indirect measurements spanned orders of magnitude.
In the Science publication, Sandia researchers reported a new means of producing gas-phase Criegee intermediates and used this method to prepare enough CH2OO to measure its reactions with water, SO2, nitric oxide (NO), and NO2. The ability to reliably produce Criegee intermediates will facilitate studies of their role in ignition and other oxidation systems.
In particular, the present measurements show that the reactions of CH2OO with SO2 and NO2 are far more rapid than previously thought. Moreover, the Bristol and Manchester investigators demonstrated that these kinetics results imply a much greater role of carbonyl oxides in tropospheric sulfate and nitrate chemistry than models had assumed, a conclusion that will substantially impact existing atmospheric chemistry mechanisms. For example, SO2 oxidation is the source of sulfate species that nucleate atmospheric aerosols. Because the oxidation of SO2 by Criegee intermediate is much faster than modelers assumed, Criegee reactions may be a major tropospheric sulfate source, changing predictions of tropospheric aerosol formation.
Published: Jan. 13, 2012 at 12:24 PM
A look at the Greenhouse Gas Emission Tool, via the EPA.
The emissions come from power plants, oil refineries and other big industrial sources.
The Web-based Greenhouse Gas Emission Data tool allows individuals to track emissions by state, location, facility, industrial sector and type of greenhouse gas, based on 2010 data collected from more than 6,700 facilities across nine major industries.
The EPA's data release is mandated by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008, requiring the reporting of greenhouse gas data from large emission sources across those industry sectors.
"The GHG Reporting Program data provides a critical tool for businesses and other innovators to find cost- and fuel-saving efficiencies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and foster technologies to protect public health and the environment," Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, said Wednesday in a statement.
Check out the Greenhouse Gas Emission tool for yourself
McCarthy said it is designed to be user-friendly, so that businesses, industry and non-profits can get a better understanding of where greenhouse gases are being generated and "to build enthusiasm for greenhouse gas reductions."
EPA's findings show that in 2010, power plants, the largest stationary source of greenhouse gases, emitted 2,324,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent, followed by petroleum refineries with emissions of 183,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent.
Carbon dioxide emissions, the database shows, accounted for 95 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, methane at 4 percent and nitrous oxide and other gases at 1 percent.
"Carbon pollution is pretty abstract for most people, and they don't where it comes from and who's responsible," said David Doniger, policy director for the Climate and Clean Air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Los Angeles Times reports.
"These kinds of right-to-know tools are very popular and can make a difference. Once people know the level of greenhouse gases in their backyards, they will demand to know what company officials and elected officials will do about it."
While the EPA's data accounts for 80 percent of the nation's total greenhouse gas emissions for 2010, total greenhouse gas emissions rose 3.9 percent in 2010 to 213 million metric tons, the highest rate since 1988, says the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The EPA is expanding its 2011 reporting requirements to include 12 new industry groups, including underground coal mines, industrial wastewater treatment facilities and geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide.
Geothermal energy developers plan to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of a dormant volcano in Central Oregon this summer to demonstrate new technology they hope will give a boost to a green energy sector that has yet to live up to its promise.
By Don Ryan, AP
They hope the water comes back to the surface fast enough and hot enough to create cheap, clean electricity that isn't dependent on sunny skies or stiff breezes — without shaking the earth and rattling the nerves of nearby residents.
Renewable energy has been held back by cheap natural gas, weak demand for power and waning political concern over global warming. Efforts to use the earth's heat to generate power, known as geothermal energy, have been further hampered by technical problems and worries that tapping it can cause earthquakes.
Even so, the federal government, Google and other investors are interested enough to bet $43 million on the Oregon project. They are helping AltaRock Energy, Inc. of Seattle and Davenport Newberry Holdings LLC of Stamford, Conn., demonstrate whether the next level in geothermal power development can work on the flanks of Newberrry Volcano, located about 20 miles south of Bend, Ore.
"We know the heat is there," said Susan Petty, president of AltaRock. "The big issue is can we circulate enough water through the system to make it economic."
The heat in the earth's crust has been used to generate power for more than a century. Engineers gather hot water or steam that bubbles near the surface and use it to spin a turbine that creates electricity. Most of those areas have been exploited. The new frontier is places with hot rocks, but no cracks in the rocks or water to deliver the steam.
To tap that heat — and grow geothermal energy from a tiny niche into an important source of green energy — engineers are working on a new technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems.
"To build geothermal in a big way beyond where it is now requires new technology, and that is where EGS comes in," said Steve Hickman, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif.
Wells are drilled deep into the rock and water is pumped in, creating tiny fractures in the rock, a process known as hydroshearing.
Cold water is pumped down production wells into the reservoir, and the steam is drawn out.
Hydroshearing is similar to the process known as hydraulic fracturing, used to free natural gas from shale formations. But fracking uses chemical-laden fluids, and creates huge fractures. Pumping fracking wastewater deep underground for disposal likely led to recent earthquakes in Arkansas and Ohio.
Fears persist that cracking rock deep underground through hydroshearing can also lead to damaging quakes. EGS has other problems. It is hard to create a reservoir big enough to run a commercial power plant.
Progress has been slow. Two small plants are online in France and Germany. A third in downtown Basel, Switzerland, was shut down over earthquake complaints. A project in Australia has had drilling problems.
A new international protocol is coming out at the end of this month that urges EGS developers to keep projects out of urban areas, the so-called "sanity test," said Ernie Majer, a seismologist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It also urges developers to be upfront with local residents so they know exactly what is going on.
AltaRock hopes to demonstrate a new technology for creating bigger reservoirs that is based on the plastic polymers used to make biodegradable cups.
It worked in existing geothermal fields. Newberry will show if it works in a brand new EGS field, and in a different kind of geology, volcanic rock, said Colin Williams, a USGS geophysicist also in Menlo Park.
The U.S. Department of Energy has given the project $21.5 million in stimulus funds. That has been matched by private investors, among them Google with $6.3 million.
Majer said the danger of a major quake at Newbery is very low. The area is a kind of seismic dead zone, with no significant faults. It is far enough from population centers to make property damage unlikely. And the layers of volcanic ash built up over millennia dampen any shaking.
But the Department of Energy will be keeping a close eye on the project, and any significant quakes would shut it down at least temporarily, he said. The agency is also monitoring EGS projects at existing geothermal fields in California, Nevada and Idaho.
"That's the $64,000 question," Majer said. "What's the biggest earthquake we can have from induced seismicity that the public can worry about."
Geologists believe Newberry Volcano was once one of the tallest peaks in the Cascades, reaching an elevation of 10,000 feet and a diameter of 20 miles. It blew its top before the last Ice Age, leaving a caldera studded with towering lava flows, two lakes, and 400 cinder cones, some 400 feet tall.
Although the volcano has not erupted in 1,300 years, hot rocks close to the surface drew exploratory wells in the 1980s.
Over 21 days, AltaRock will pour 800 gallons of water per minute into the 10,600-foot test well, already drilled, for a total of 24 million gallons. According to plan, the cold water cracks the rock. The tiny plastic particles pumped down the well seal off the cracks. Then more cold water goes in, bypassing the first tier, and cracking the rock deeper in the well. That tier is sealed off, and cold water cracks a third section. Later, the plastic melts away.
Seismic sensors produce detailed maps of the fracturing, expected to produce a reservoir of cracks starting about 6,000 feet below the surface, and extending to 11,000 feet. It would be about 3,300 feet in diameter.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management released an environmental assessment of the Newberry project last month that does not foresee any problems that would stop it. The agency is taking public comments before making a final decision in coming months.
No power plant is proposed, but one could be operating in about 10 years, said Doug Perry, president and CEO of Davenport Newberry.
EGS is attractive because it vastly expands the potential for geothermal power, which, unlike wind and solar, produces power around the clock in any weather.
Natural geothermal resources account for about 0.3 percent of U.S. electricity production, but a 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology report projected EGS could bump that to 10 percent within 50 years, at prices competitive with fossil-fuels.
Few people expect that kind of timetable now. Electricity prices have fallen sharply because of low natural gas prices and weak demand brought about by the Great Recession and state efficiency programs.
But the resource is vast. A 2008 USGS assessment found EGS throughout the West, where hot rocks are closer to the surface than in the East, has the potential to produce half the country's electricity.
"The important question we need to answer now," said Williams, the USGS geophysicist who compiled the assessment, "is how geothermal fits into the renewable energy picture, and how EGS fits. How much it is going to cost, and how much is available."
By Feed: Food and Water Watch in Gas Industry, January 11, 2012
New York, N.Y. – Senators Tony Avella, Liz Krueger, Tom Duane, Andrea Stewart Cousins, Dan Squadron, and other members of the Senate Democratic Conference joined a group of organizations to call for a legislative ban on hydrofracking as the public comment period for fracking rules in New York comes to a close. Throughout the comment period, New Yorkers have sent a loud and clear message that they oppose fracking at the four public hearings across the state and in thousands of public comments. The Senators and advocates called on Governor Cuomo to withdraw the flawed DEC SGEIS and urged other legislators to approve a ban on the dangerous gas drilling method.
State Senator Tony Avella, author of legislation that would ban hydrofracking in New York State (S.4220), stated, “New Yorkers from all over the state have spoken and the message is loud and clear; hydrofracking is not worth the risk of contamination to our water, farmlands and communities! We cannot allow the State’s environmental health to be jeopardized at any cost, let alone for an empty promise of an economic boom. We have to ban hydrofracking until we can guarantee that there is no risk of contaminating our water supplies and destroying our farmland.”
“At four public hearings and in thousands of public comments, New Yorkers sent a message to Governor Cuomo: fracking is inherently dangerous and should be banned,” said Eric Weltman, Senior Organizer for Food & Water Watch, a national consumer group, who hand-delivered over 4,500 comments in support of a ban. “There is a growing recognition that the state’s proposed regulations will fail to protect New York residents and the state’s drinking water supply from the toxic chemicals used in fracking.”
“Since July, over 70 grassroots groups, dozens of major advocacy organizations, and tens of thousands of people across New York have sent a clear message to the DEC and Governor Cuomo that no amount of regulations will make fracking safe,” said Claire Sandberg, Executive Director of Frack Action. “The vast majority of speakers at public comment hearings across the state used their platform to advocate passionately for a permanent ban on fracking. We hope that Governor Cuomo will take a close look at the extensive and diverse array of reasons New Yorkers are increasingly adamant that fracking be prohibited entirely.”
State Senator Liz Krueger said, “The available facts and science show hydrofracking is too great a risk for New Yorkers. We have seen the disastrous consequences of fracking in other states, with tainted water supplies and whole towns and regions blighted. And even as they tell us it’s safe, these massive corporations are demanding we allow them to pump chemicals into the ground in our state without even letting the public know what those chemicals are. New Yorkers know better, and we must continue to demand that Albany protect our natural resources, and our citizens both upstate and downstate.”
Opponents of hydrofracking have vastly outnumbered proponents at the public comment hearings. The Wall Street Journal reported that anti-fracking speakers outnumbered supporters by a margin of 4-1 at the DEC hearing in Binghamton, located in the Southern Tier, an area the gas industry claims is pro-gas drilling. Additionally, according to a Freedom of Information Law request to the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) revealed that all comments from opponents outnumbered those by supporters by at least a 10-to-1 margin.
“Clearly, from the overwhelming turn out against fracking at the DEC hearings and the sheer numbers of comments submitted on the SGEIS rejecting these terrible regulations, it has never been more evident that the movement against hydrofracking in New York is profound,” said David Braun, Co-Founder of United for Action. “It begs to question though, why are we even considering such a clearly damaging and harmful practice in the first place? Rather than try to regulate it, shouldn’t the real question for a reputable agency like the DEC be, “Is it safe for the people of New York?”
Over 21,000 organizations, doctors, scientists, engineers, and citizens have signed a letter drafted by Walter Hang of Toxics Targeting calling on Governor Cuomo to immediately withdraw the SGEIS due to failure to fulfill Executive Order No. 41 and the major inadequacies identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and many others. Congressman Maurice Hinchey has also called for the withdrawal of the SGEIS saying, “this document falls far short of what is needed to protect local communities from the risks posed by shale gas drilling and does not fully mitigate potential threats, including those to public health, drinking water, air quality, and municipal infrastructure.”
Almost two dozen major cancer advocacy groups including, Lois Gibbs of the Center for Environment, Health, and Justice and anti-cancer advocate, Fran Drescher of the Cancer Schmancer Movement signed author, biologist and cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber’s letter warning the State Legislature and the DEC of the public health risks of fracking.
By the end 2011, 54 municipalities enacted a ban or moratorium on gas drilling. The Binghamton City Council passed a two-year ban on fracking in a 6-1 vote, sending a clear message that the major city in the Southern Tier, the epicenter of proposed fracking activity, does not want it.
“There is little evidence that hydrofracking can be done without posing a serious risk to our drinking water,” said Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins. “We have almost no information about the long term public health affects and the oil and gas industry has been neither cooperative nor transparent with the legislature throughout this process. I have major concerns that if we allow fracking in this State, we may end up doing more harm than good for the people of New York.”
State Senator Thomas K. Duane said, “While I am truly proud of the work that environmental advocates, elected officials and concerned residents and business-owners from Upstate and Downstate have accomplished—passing the first statewide moratorium on fracking in the nation, raising awareness about the technique’s devastating impacts, and mobilizing immense opposition to its use in New York State—I am deeply concerned that DEC continues to move forward with its ill-conceived plan to permit this dangerous drilling. New York must learn from the mistakes of states that already allow fracking and set an example for those that do not; we need a prohibition on fracking throughout our State.”
State Senator Daniel Squadron said, “One thing has been made clear by the thousands of New Yorkers who have spoken: fracking is simply not worth the risk today. The questions raised by the public, scientists, and even logic lead to a clear answer. New York must implement a state-wide ban on fracking now.”
The groups cited media coverage and other evidence that the state’s public comment period showed overwhelming opposition to fracking in New York, as part of a growing statewide movement to ban the practice.
“The SGEIS is just the beginning,” said Wes Gillingham, Program Director with Catskill Mountainkeeper. “The comment period may be over but the clear voice of New Yorkers will continue until reality sinks in with the Governor that New Yorkers do not want fracking.”
Contact: Ana Tinsly, Frack Action, 646-331-4765; Eric Weltman, Food & Water Watch, 718-943-9085/617-304-5330; David Braun, United for Action, 917-514-0700
Posted by Brad Plumerat 04:09 PM ET, 01/13/2012
When it comes to climate change, fossil fuels nab most of the headlines. But a new study suggests the world should also pay closer attention to smaller steps to curb soot and methane. In fact, those measures could make all the difference in whether the world makes or misses its climate targets.
The paper, appearing in the journal Science, focused on 14 fairly straightforward steps to curb soot and methane emissions using existing, proven technologies. This included measures like patching up leaks in natural-gas pipelines and promoting cleaner cookstoves in Africa and Asia. What the researchers discovered was that these measures would have a shockingly large impact almost immediately, reducing global warming by about 0.5ºC (0.9ºF) below current projections in 2050.
Acompanion chart from NASA shows, that could buy us invaluable time in preventing the world from heating up more than 2ºC:The green line shows the temperature increase we can expect if emissions continue rising at their usual pace. The yellow line shows warming if all of the methane- and soot-reduction measures were adopted.
Now, in terms of warming the planet, carbon dioxide — the byproduct of burning coal, oil, and natural gas — is still the most important man-made driver. But methane and black carbon (soot) also play a large, if less-appreciated role. Soot particles, for instance, absorb radiation from the sun and can hasten the melting of snow and ice cover when they fall to the ground. Some scientists think that soot is accelerating ice melt in the Arctic. What’s more, because methane and soot cycle out of the air fairly rapidly (soot can wash out in a matter of days), clamping down on these pollutants would have an immediate impact.
Here’s a list of the methods that the Science authors recommend for curbing methane: “capturing gas currently escaping from coal mines and oil- and gas-producing facilities; reducing leakage from long-distance pipelines; preventing emissions from landfills; updating wastewater treatment plants; draining rice paddies more often; and limiting emissions from manure on farms.” And here are the anti-soot strategies: “installing more filters on diesel vehicles; taking the worst-polluting vehicles off the road; upgrading family cookstoves with cleaner-burning models; building more efficient brick kilns, boilers and coke ovens; and banning the routine burning of agricultural lands now common in many parts of the tropics.”
As a side benefit, the authors point out, curbing soot and methane could have considerable side benefits. The measures listed could prevent 700,000 to 4.7 million premature deaths and also boost crop yields, thanks largely to reductions in ground-level ozone, which is formed when methane interacts with other gases in the air. (Scientists also suspect that soot pollution is disrupting the Asian monsoon cycle, which could have additional effects on farm production.)
What’s more, while these measures aren’t a substitute for cutting fossil-fuel emissions, they might be more politically palatable in the near term. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), for instance, is famous for his climate denialism, but he’s also concerned with the health and air-pollution effects of soot in the developing world. (Of course, as my colleagues Juliet Eilperin and Brian Vastag point out, not all of these soot-cutting strategies are a snap — pilot programs to promote clean stoves in Uganda and India, for instance, have had trouble getting off the ground.)
In any case, this is a reminder that the ongoing U.N. talks over greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t the only path for averting climate change. Right now, assuming all countries follow their stated pledges to cut carbon pollution, the world is still on track to warm some 3.5ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2100, a level that many scientists consider dangerous. But as this handy infographic from New Scientist lays out, there are all sorts of side strategies — from preventing deforestation to regulating aviation and shipping emissions — that could help close the “emissions gap” by 2020 and buy the world some time. Methane and soot turn out to be a very large piece of that puzzle.
By NOAKI SCHWARTZ Associated Press
LOS ANGELES January 13, 2012 (AP)
California has declared war on vampires, but this time it's no Hollywood monster flick.
The state will be the first in the nation to target so-called vampire battery chargers that suck up and waste as much as 60 percent of the electricity they consume. The California Energy Commission voted 3-0 on Thursday to regulate such power-sapping chargers despite objections by consumer product makers.
California's standards take effect next year, and several states in the Northwest are eyeing similar regulations. The U.S. Department of Energy is also working on setting national standards for battery chargers.
"Once again, California is setting the standard for energy efficiency, keeping the state's dominance as the most energy efficient state per capita," said commission chair Robert Weisenmiller.
Manufacturers say the move is the first step toward a patchwork of requirements that could drive up costs and end up costing consumers more for their appliances gadgets.
"It essentially means manufacturers are going to have to retool for California and they may have to retool again when DOE comes out with their final standard," said Jill Notini, spokeswoman for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. "There could be implications for cost of products and choice of products."
California has long been a leader in pushing efficient energy use with the state's energy consumption per capita remaining flat for more than three decades in comparison with the rest of the nation, which has seen a 40-percent increase. The state's energy saving standards are often the basis for later federal standards, according to the commission.
"They're watching California very closely," said Pierre Delforge, a senior engineer with the Natural Resources Defense council, which supports the new standards. "Usually when California does something, they move next."
Proponents say such regulations are long overdue with the popularity of portable electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets. There are now an estimated 170 million chargers in households across the state with an average of 11 chargers per household.
Chargers waste electricity by continuing to draw electricity even when a battery is full and suck energy when laptops, cellphones, digital cameras and other devices aren't plugged in. They also often contain outdated components that don't charge efficiently.
On average, each household has 40 devices that are constantly drawing power. Such standby power consumption accounts for about 13 percent of residential electricity use in California in comparison to 10 percent nationally, said Alan Meier, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
"It's clearly going to rise over time, so California has two reasons to be more concerned about these kinds of devices because our electricity prices are higher and these devices represent a larger fraction of residential electricity usage," he said.
The new standards, which require chargers to consume less energy while providing the same service, will take effect on Feb. 1, 2013. The new regulations are expected to save enough electricity to power nearly 350,000 homes, or a city about the size of Bakersfield. The commission estimates the new standards will save residential and commercial ratepayers $306 million each year.
As far as concerns raised by manufacturers, Delforge said the commission worked with trade and environmental groups for more than a year before adopting the new standards, making some concessions to help product makers meet the new regulations.
"It requires a change in their design, and changes always require more effort and more engineering and more design time, and if they don't have to do it they'd rather focus on other things," he said. "If they had to pay the electric bill, we'd already see these changes in the marketplace."
By MARY ESCH Associated Press
ALBANY, N.Y. January 13, 2012 (AP)
The Environmental Protection Agency says New York regulators should set limits for radioactive materials in gas-drilling wastewater sent to public treatment plants before allowing any hydraulic fracturing of natural gas wells in the state.
The federal agency made that suggestion and others related to radiation from gas-drilling activities in 44 pages of comments submitted Wednesday night on the state Department of Environmental Conservation's proposed rules for high-volume hydraulic fracturing.
DEC Commissioner Joe Martens said Wednesday that the state agency received an unprecedented number of comments on its environmental review, which began in 2008. DEC spokeswoman Emily DeSantis said Thursday that 32,100 comments have been tallied so far and the number is expected to exceed 40,000 when all are counted.
The EPA is conducting its own review of high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," which releases gas from deep shale formations by injecting wells with chemically treated water at high pressure to break up surrounding rock. Initial research results of the EPA study, which focuses on the vast amount of fresh water used and wastewater produced by fracking, will be released this year.
In its comments on DEC's study, the federal agency recommends that the DEC develop a Geographic Information System-based display that shows the location of permitted gas wells and update it at least monthly with the stage of operations on each site. The publicly accessible map should also show public water wells and intakes, EPA said.
Environmental groups, some of which have called for a ban on fracking instead of regulations, say the activity is a threat to drinking water supplies. DEC's proposed rules would ban hydraulic fracturing in the watersheds of New York City and Syracuse, an exclusion supported by EPA.
The industry, citing a long history of problem-free drilling in watersheds and through aquifers, says the state's rules are unnecessarily restrictive.
One of the biggest problems related to a boom in gas development in the Marcellus Shale formation underlying parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia is how to dispose of the millions of gallons of polluted wastewater produced by fracking. Municipal water treatment plants aren't designed to remove some of the contaminants found in the wastewater, including radioactive elements.
While the state's review says flowback water coming out of fracked wells is not expected to contain significant levels of naturally occurring radioactive materials, EPA pointed out its own data from six natural gas companies in Pennsylvania that show elevated levels of radioactive materials in wastewater.
EPA advises that DEC sets a limit for radioactivity in drilling wastewater sent to treatment plants. It also notes that both EPA and DEC have to approve a treatment plant's analysis of natural gas wastewater before the waste is accepted for disposal. The analysis must include identification of any potential effects on the plant's operations.
The federal agency noted that some of the out-of-state treatment plants listed by DEC as potential disposal sites for gas drilling wastewater would be unable to handle New York's wastewater.
EPA also recommends that DEC prohibit the spreading of all gas well wastewater on roads for de-icing because the liquid would have elevated levels of contaminants, including radioactive elements.
Environmental groups criticized the DEC document for its lack of a definite plan for disposal of wastewater.
Permitting for shale gas wells has been on hold since the DEC review began in 2008, and won't be issued until after all the comments are considered and taken into account in a final document, likely later this year.
6:10 PM, Jan. 13, 2012
ALBANY -- Three days was all it took to double the state Department of Environmental Conservation's workload when it comes to hydraulic fracturing.
Comments on the agency's proposed hydrofracking rules skyrocketed from 20,800 on Jan. 9 to an estimated 40,000 by the time a response period closed at midnight Wednesday.
Now the DEC will have the onerous task of responding to the unprecedented number of comments. It's a process that will take months and could serve as one of the final hurdles before the drilling process is allowed in New York.
The state's 1,500-page report on high-volume hydrofracking is 3 1/2 years in the making. DEC Commissioner Joseph Martens said the completion of the report is months -- but not years -- from being finalized.
First, the DEC has to document each comment and respond to ones that provide a substantive critique.
"We're looking to see how (the comments) line up with any conclusions that we have drawn about any aspect of either the technical side of hydraulic fracturing or the socioeconomic side," Martens said in an interview Thursday with Gannett's Albany Bureau. "If they raise questions about our work, we'll explore that and see if we agree or disagree."
Agency staffers are in the process of scanning thousands of last-minute, hard-copy submissions into the DEC's computer system. The responses will then be categorized and sent to the appropriate DEC division for a reply. And with written comments only having to be postmarked by Jan. 11, more were still trickling in recent days.
In the end, all the issues raised in the comments will be summarized and addressed with the final report, according to state law.
Many of the submissions -- including at least 7,000 copies of a pro-drilling form letter submitted by the Joint Landowners Coalition -- will require a single response.
Others that simply profess support or opposition to hydrofracking and do not offer specific comments on the DEC's proposals would not require a response.
But some are highly technical, including 500 pages from the Natural Resources Defense Council, which criticize the proposals as being too weak. Close to 150 pages came in from the Independent Oil & Gas Association, which called the DEC's plan "onerous" and "arbitrary."
High-volume hydrofracking -- the use of a high-pressure mix of water, sand and chemicals to unlock gas from tight shale formations -- has been on hold in New York since 2008.
"(Gov. Andrew Cuomo) should heed these concerns and order officials to revise the plan accordingly," said Bridget Lee, an attorney for environmental law firm Earthjustice, which has warned about the safety of hydrofracking.
"He has a duty both to help the state withstand legal scrutiny, and more importantly to protect the health of his constituents."
While Martens stressed that all technical comments will be considered and analyzed, he expressed confidence that the draft report addressed all the major issues surrounding hydrofracking.
Still, the industry and landowners have taken issue particularly with a variety of setbacks and prohibitions included in the DEC's recommendations.One is a ban on hydrofracking within 4,000 feet of the New York City and Syracuse watersheds. Landowners suggest those bans amount to an illegal "taking" of private property under the Fifth Amendment.
"We didn't look at this from the prospective of: Should every landowner be able to have fracking on their property?" said Martens, who said he doesn't believe the watershed bans violate the Constitution.
"We look at it from the perspective of: What are the natural resources that need to be protected, and how do we go about protecting them?"
The gas industry contends the DEC's proposed rules take as much as 50 percent of the "desirable parcels" off the table in the Marcellus Shale. If the regulations stand, gas companies would have little if any interest of moving into New York, warned Tom West, an Albany-based attorney and lobbyist for several major gas companies.
"This has to do with whether or not any (companies) are going to come back and lease land in New York state going forward," West said. "This has to do with whether or not industry is going to invest in New York state given the very non-competitive standards that have been proposed and the uncertainty of the process."
While the DEC would have the authority to issue permits after it completes its review, there is still plenty of uncertainty surrounding the future of hydrofracking in New York. That includes the possibility of a legal challenge, which groups on both sides of the issue have long hinted as a foregone conclusion.
The DEC's hydrofracking advisory panel, a group of 18 outside stakeholders who have been tasked with coming up with an appropriate fee structure for gas drillers, has yet to begin drawing up any proposals of its own. A meeting that had been scheduled for Thursday was postponed at the last minute, marking the third time a panel meeting has been pushed back in three months.
Martens said the DEC is still pulling together information for the panel to review.
"We owe (the panel) information about the resource needs of the other state agencies," Martens said. "They need that information because that goes really to what is the magnitude of expenses that we need revenue to cover. We owe them information that will allow them to complete the work."
Even after the panel's recommendations are complete, new taxes and fees imposed on drillers would likely have to be passed by the state Legislature, which is bitterly divided on the merits of hydrofracking.
But the biggest remaining hurdle for drilling supporters still rests with the DEC reviewing comments and finalizing its rule proposals.
Martens said he's pleased with the draft report, but the comments could prove helpful.
"I feel like our work was well done," Martens said. "Was it perfect? Not necessarily, and that's what the comment period is all about. I'm sure that there are things we're going to learn from the comments."
Campbell is a staff writer for the Gannett Albany Bureau.
January 11, 2012 22:21
The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) Nuclear Materials Security Index is a first-of-its-kind public benchmarking project of nuclear materials security conditions on a country-by-country basis. The NTI Index, prepared with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), was created to spark an international discussion about priorities required to strengthen security, and most importantly, encourage governments to provide assurances and take actions to reduce risks.
The project draws on NTI's nuclear expertise, the EIU’s experience in constructing indices, and the reach of the EIU’s global network of 900 analysts and contributors. NTI—working with an international panel of nuclear security experts and a number of technical advisors—focused on the framework and priorities that define effective nuclear materials security conditions. The EIU was responsible for developing the Excel-based model and gathering the data.
The NTI Index assesses the contribution of 32 states with one kilogram or more of weapons-usable nuclear materials toward improved global nuclear materials security conditions, using five categories: (a) Quantities and Sites, (b) Security and Control Measures, (c) Global Norms, (d) Domestic Commitments and Capacity and (e) Societal Factors. An additional 144 states, with less than one kilogram of weapons-usable nuclear materials or none at all, are assessed on the last three of these categories.
By MARY ESCH, Associated Press
Published 10:41 p.m., Wednesday, January 11, 2012
ALBANY — Landowners hoping to sign leases with natural gas drillers say the state's proposed regulations put some land off-limits to drilling for no logical reason, under the guise of protecting water supplies.
The Joint Landowners Coalition of New York said in comments submitted to state regulators before Wednesday's deadline that the proposed 4,000-foot buffer around New York City's watershed extends to land on the other side of ridgelines where the water flows away from the city's watershed.
The group also said the regulations are weaker than their leases in some respects. While the Department of Environmental Conservation would allow open pits for storage of some fluids used in the drilling process, the coalition's leases would ban open pits and require steel tanks instead.
"We formed organizations to do the research, hire the experts, and find the most environmentally safe way it can be done," coalition president Dan Fitzsimmons said Wednesday. "We want to protect our land. Gas companies don't always have the best record."
Meanwhile, a group of state Senate Democrats joined anti-fracking organizations in Manhattan on Wednesday to again call on Gov. Andrew Cuomo to withdraw the proposed guidelines and regulations. They urged legislators to pass a bill banning fracking, which stimulates gas production by injecting wells with chemical-laced water at high pressure. They claim it threatens water supplies.
DEC Commissioner Joe Martens said all comments submitted during the four-month comment period will be considered in the final draft of the agency's environmental review and regulations for gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking."
"There has been an unprecedented response to this issue with tens of thousands of comments submitted," Martens said.
Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Drill-deadline-draws-heat-2477419.php#ixzz1jGw7fJY8
Released: 1/9/2012 11:30:00 ,U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Surve, In partnership with: University of Montana
Missoula, MT – Climate change in the form of reduced snowfall in mountains is causing powerful and cascading shifts in mountainous plant and bird communities through the increased ability of elk to stay at high elevations over winter and consume plants, according to a groundbreaking study in Nature Climate Change.
The U.S. Geological Survey and University of Montana study not only showed that the abundance of deciduous trees and their associated songbirds in mountainous Arizona have declined over the last 22 years as snowpack has declined, but it also experimentally demonstrated that declining snowfall indirectly affects plants and birds by enabling more winter browsing by elk. Increased winter browsing by elk results in trickle-down ecological effects such as lowering the quality of habitat for songbirds.
The authors, USGS Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit scientist Thomas Martin and University of Montana scientist John Maron, mimicked the effects of more snow on limiting the ability of elk to browse on plants by excluding the animals from large, fenced areas. They compared bird and plant communities in these exclusion areas with nearby similar areas where elk had access, and found that, over the six years of the study, multi-decadal declines in plant and songbird populations were reversed in the areas where elk were prohibited from browsing.
"This study illustrates that profound impacts of climate change on ecosystems arise over a time span of but two decades through unexplored feedbacks," explained USGS director Marcia McNutt. "The significance lies in the fact that humans and our economy are at the end of the same chain of cascading consequences."
The study demonstrates a classic ecological cascade, added Martin. For example, he said, from an elk’s perspective, less snow means an increased ability to freely browse on woody plants in winter in areas where they would not be inclined to forage in previous times due to high snowpack. Increased overwinter browsing led to a decline in deciduous trees, which reduced the number of birds that chose the habitat and increased predation on nests of those birds that did choose the habitat.
"This study demonstrates that the indirect effects of climate on plant communities may be just as important as the effects of climate-change-induced mismatches between migrating birds and food abundance because plants, including trees, provide the habitat birds need to survive," Martin said.
The study, Climate impacts on bird and plant communities from altered animal-plant interactions, was published online on Jan. 8 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Companies involved won't have to post information until 30 days after process completed
By Gordon Hamilton, Vancouver Sun January 10, 2012
The British Columbia government made good on its promise to provide online details starting Jan. 1 about chemicals being pumped underground by the oil and gas industry when it activated a database called FracFocus.ca.
But companies involved in hydraulic fracturing of shale formations to extract oil and gas won't be required to post information until 30 days after they have completed the process, one of several flaws in Victoria's promise to provide transparent accounting of fracking practices, according to critic Ben Parfitt.
The B.C. Oil and Gas Commission, which is responsible for the site, confirmed Monday that although the website is up and running, it will be at least one or two months before data begins to appear as the posting deadline is 30 days after the completion of operations at specific well sites. Only operations that ended after the Jan. 1 introduction of the posting regulation will appear on the site.
That means residents of northeastern British Columbia won't know what's been pumped into the ground beneath them until the fracking is over, Parfitt, natural resources analyst at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said in an interview.
"From a public interest perspective, I would far rather see a commitment to disclosing before fracking operations even commence, what products they are proposing to pump underground and what volume. They should be able to tell us that. From a health and safety perspective that would be far more effective than what they are proposing now,"
Premier Christy Clark promised the online link to identify chemicals used in fracking last September at the oil and gas industry's annual conference at Fort Nelson.
Hardy Friedrich, communications manager at the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission, said the purpose of the website is to provide the public with information on the chemical composition of the fluids being pumped underground in fracking, the fracture date, the volume of water being used and the well's identifying number. However, if the chemicals being used are proprietary - as is the case with much of hydraulic fracturing underway in North America - the composition of those specific compounds can be exempted under the federal Hazardous Information Review Act
Time will tell, Parfitt said, just how useful the website is in providing information on chemicals used in fracking.
"It's going to be 30 days before we see what level of detail is posted here."
Parfitt said despite the flaws, the website is an important step in broadening public discussion in the province about fracking.
Hydraulic fracturing is described by the oil and gas commission as the process of creating small cracks, or fractures, in deeply buried geological formations to allow natural gas to flow into the wellbore.
The natural gas can then flow to the surface under controlled conditions through the wellhead and be collected for processing and distribution.
It is accomplished by pumping under high pressure a mixture of water, sand and other chemical additives designed to protect the integrity of the wellbore and enhance production.
The process requires huge volumes of water - up into the millions of litres per well.
Although the chemical component can account for as little as .5 per cent of the fluid, volumes can be in the thousands of litres given the amount of water being injected underground, Parfitt said.
He also said disclosure of the volumes of water being used is an important piece of information that will now be open to public discussion.
He noted that two companies alone applied for and received water licences for 10,000 cubic metres of water a day for their operations.
"That just gives a partial flavour for the total amount of water that could be in play," he said.
The website is similar in content to and is based on a U.S. website with the same name,FracFocus
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/website+list+chemicals+used+fracking+sites/5971644/story.html#ixzz1j5I3YWXM
Washington, D.C. — Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian geologic period, there was a mass extinction so severe that it remains the most traumatic known species die-off in Earth's history. Although the cause of this event is a mystery, it has been speculated that the eruption of a large swath of volcanic rock in Russia called the Siberian Traps was a trigger for the extinction. New research from Carnegie's Linda Elkins-Tanton and her co-authors offers insight into how this volcanism could have contributed to drastic deterioration in the global environment of the period. Their work is published January 9 in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
The end-Permian mass extinction saw the sudden loss of more than 90 percent of marine species and more than 70 percent of terrestrial species. The fossil record suggests that ecological diversity did not fully recover until several million years after the main pulse of the extinction. This suggests that environmental conditions remained inhospitable for an extended period of time.
Volcanic activity in the Siberian Traps has been proposed as one of the mechanisms that may have triggered the mass extinction. Gases released as a result of Siberian magmatism could have caused environmental damage. For example, perhaps sulfur particles in the atmosphere reflected the sun's heat back into space, cooling the planet; or maybe chlorine and other chemically similar nonmetal elements called halogens significantly damaged the ozone layer in the stratosphere.
The team designed experiments to examine these possibilities.
Led by Benjamin Black of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the group included Elkins-Tanton, formerly of MIT and now director of Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Michael C. Rowe of Washington State University, and Ingrid Ukstins Peate of the University of Iowa.
The geology of the Siberian Traps is comprised of flood basalts, which form when giant lava eruptions coat large swaths of land or ocean floor with basaltic lava. This lava hardens into rock formations. The team investigated concentrations of sulfur, chlorine and fluorine (another halogen) that were dissolved in tiny samples of ancient magma found within basalt samples from the Siberian Traps. These small frozen droplets, which preserve a record of volcanic gases from the time of the eruption 250 million years ago, are called melt inclusions.
Sulfur, chlorine, and fluorine gasses could have been released into the atmosphere from eruptions spewing out of large fissures, which is common in basalt flood formation. Plumes escaping from these cracks could have reached the stratosphere. If sulfur, chlorine, and fluorine made it to the upper atmosphere, these gasses could have cause a wide array of adverse climate events, including temperature change and acid rain.
Based on their findings, the team estimated that between 6,300 and 7,800 gigatonnes of sulfur, between 3,400 and 8,700 gigatonnes of chlorine, and between 7,100 and 13,700 gigatonnes of fluorine were released from magma in the Siberian Traps during the end of the Permian period.
They say more research on atmospheric chemistry and climate modeling is urgently needed to determine whether these gasses could have been responsible for the mass extinction.
Pacific Southwest Research Station/USDA Forest Service
ALBANY, Calif.—An interactive tool developed by researchers from the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) will help wind energy facility operators make informed decisions on efficient ways to reduce impacts on migratory bats.
Fatalities of migratory bats at wind energy facilities have become a frequent occurrence. Bat migration patterns are poorly understood and the relationship between fatalities at wind energy facilities and migratory behavior are still being studied. Previous research has shown that adjusting the operations of turbines can reduce the number of bats killed at wind energy facilities. However, this strategy has not yet been widely implemented.
Current research found that bat activity depends on time of year and a number of environmental conditions, such as wind direction and speed, air temperature, and moon phase. This suggests that there may be ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of mitigation measures. PSW ecologist Ted Weller and statistician Jim Baldwin developed an interactive tool that allows users to visualize how changes in date and weather conditions affect the probability of bat presence. The tool can be found at: http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/topics/wildlife/bat/batprob.shtml
“Increasing the wind speed at which turbines begin to spin and produce energy to the grid has proven to be an effective way to reduce bat fatalities. However, bat activity levels depend on more than just wind speed,” says Weller, who led the research. “Our work demonstrates the use of a decision-making tool that could protect bats when fatality risk is highest while maximizing energy production on nights with a low chance of fatalities.”
Weller and his research team used devices which detected the bats’ echolocation calls, then linked the presence of bats to the weather conditions measured on-site on a given night. Researchers found that echolocation detectors placed at 22 meters and 52 meters above ground were more effective at characterizing migratory bat activity then those located closer to the ground. Moreover, multiple echolocation detectors were required to accurately characterize bat activity at the facility. They then built models to predict the presence of bats based on date and weather variables.
“Properly deployed echolocation monitoring can be an effective way to predict bat activity and, presumably, fatalities at wind energy facilities,” says Weller. “These days, pre-construction echolocation monitoring is as common as meteorological monitoring at wind energy facilities, so the basic building blocks for these models are available at most proposed sites.”
Researchers conducted the study at a wind energy facility in the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Resource Area near Palm Springs, Calif. The study was a collaborative effort between government, industry, and a non-governmental organization to devise effective solutions to 21st century environmental issues. Cooperators included PSW, Iberdrola Renewables, and the Bats and Wind Energy Cooperative, with primary funding provided by the California Energy Commission Public Interest Energy Research program. Findings from this study appear online in the Journal of Wildlife Management. Read the full article at: http://treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/39603 Headquartered in Albany, California, the Pacific Southwest Research develops and communicates science needed to sustain forest ecosystems and other benefits to society. It has laboratories and research centers in California, Hawaii and the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands. For more information, visit www.fs.fed.us/psw/.
Montreal, Canada (SPX) Dec 29, 2011
Glaciers are retreating at an unexpectedly fast rate according to research done in Peru's Cordillera Blanca by McGill doctoral student Michel Baraer. They are currently shrinking by about one per cent a year, and that percentage is increasing steadily, according to his calculations. But despite this accelerated glacial shrinking, for the first time, the volume of water draining from the glacier into the Rio Santa in Northern Peru has started to decrease significantly. Baraer, and collaborators Prof. Bryan Mark, at the Ohio State University, and Prof. Jeffrey McKenzie, at McGill, calculate that water levels during the dry season could decrease by as much as 30 per cent lower than they are currently. When a glacier starts to retreat, at some point you reach a plateau and from this point onwards, you have a decrease in the discharge of melt water from the glacier," explained Baraer.
"Where scientists once believed that they had 10 to 20 years to adapt to reduced runoff, that time is now up," said Baraer. For almost all the watersheds we have studied, we have good evidence that we have passed peak water." This means that the millions of people in the region who depend on the water for electricity, agriculture and drinking water could soon face serious problems because of reduced water supplies.
November 2010
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
Division of Mineral Resources, Region 8
6274 East Avon-Lima Road, Avon, New York 14414-9519
This fact sheet provides basic information obtained by DEC associated with turbidity and methane issues found in some residential water wells in a neighborhood located north of the Elmira/Corning Regional Airport in the town of Big Flats. DEC issued permits to Anschutz Exploration Corporation (Anschutz) to drill the Dow #1 and Dow #2 natural gas wells and is responsible for overseeing these operations. DEC has no regulatory jurisdiction regarding private drinking water wells with the sole exception of a registration process for water well drillers.
There are a number of reasons why water wells have sudden changes in quality and quantity. Seasonal variations, stress on the aquifer from water wells, mechanical failures and build-up of minerals and/or bacterial compounds are just some of the factors that must be examined when evaluating water well degradation. When DEC was informed on September 13, 2010 of concerns from residents that a nearby drilling operation may have adversely impacted their water quality, DEC chose to investigate those private wells by checking water levels and water turbidity conditions.
Methane
Methane commonly occurs in residential water wells since it is often present in bedrock at shallow depths. Often the well owner is not aware of the presence of methane in the well. Methane is colorless, odorless, and not toxic but there could be an explosive hazard if the well is not properly vented. Water well drillers have informed DEC that they encountered naturally occurring shallow gas during drilling and have been aware of natural gas in area water wells for years. DEC was also informed by a water well driller that methane was present in one residential water well in the neighborhood currently experiencing problems for some time prior to the drilling of the nearby gas wells. Drilling and DEC inspection records from the gas wells in question indicate that pre-existing methane was already present at shallow depths when the wells were drilled.
The way the gas wells were constructed makes it unlikely that gas from deeper formations could migrate through multiple cemented casing strings into any aquifers near the surface. Wells were constructed with three casings cemented back to surface and through all shallow fresh water zones. DEC has provided information and urged residents with gas detected in their wells to vent their wells. Website links for guidance on proper well venting are on the following page.
Turbidity
Several homeowners experienced turbidity in their water wells. Turbidity in private water wells is rarely observed due to gas well drilling operations while using compressed air to drill the surface hole through shallow bedrock aquifers. Turbidity would be temporary and typically cease within hours after drilling through the aquifers. DEC received no complaints from residents of turbidity in the neighborhood currently experiencing problems when the surface holes were drilled in April and July 2010. Once the well casing is cemented through the aquifers, there would be no potential for further disturbance.
Depth of Wells
The water wells experiencing methane and turbidity problems were drilled into bedrock which was encountered at approximately 60 feet or more in depth, and are located more than 2,000 feet from Anschutz’s Dow #1 and Dow #2 wells. DEC has not received complaints from residents with shallower water wells that are closer to the gas wells and screened above bedrock in the sand and gravel aquifer.
Next Steps
DEC will continue to monitor water levels in the neighborhood and keep in contact with the residents about their well conditions. DEC is also coordinating with Anschutz to further evaluate and test the gas well casing and cement integrity to confirm that gas migration is not occurring in the annular space between the casing and borehole wall into the shallow bedrock aquifers. Anschutz has recently completed testing of the casing integrity and running a series of logs to evaluate the potential for gas to migrate behind the casing on the Dow #2 well. The results of the internal pressure testing on the casing and the log evaluations gave no indication of gas migration from zones where gas may be present either inside or outside the casing. Similar logging and testing are currently being conducted on the Dow #1 well.
Additional Resources
For site-specific questions, contact New York State DEC Regional Mineral Resources Supervisor, Linda Collart, at (585) 226-5376 or e-mail at: lacollar@gw.dec.state.ny.us; The Chemung County Health Department contact is: (607) 737-2019; or The Big Flats town contact is: Teresa Dean, Town Supervisor at (607) 562-8443.
For generic health-related information, contact the New York State Department of Health Bureau of Water Supply Protection at (518) 402-7650 or e-mail at: bpwsp@health.state.ny.us
Websites for well venting information:
December 27, 2011, By MIREYA NAVARRO
HORSEHEADS, N.Y. — At the Glamour and Glow boutique in the local mall here, crystal necklaces and fake fur vests have been hot-ticket items the last year.
When the drilling workers head home between long stretches of work in this gas-rich region, explained Christy Spreng, the shop’s owner, they need gifts for their wives and girlfriends. “They know what they want,” she said. “They’ll say: ‘Looks good. Wrap it up.’ ”
Sales are up 60 percent at the boutique this year. At the two Holiday Inns here in Chemung County, occupancy has been at or near capacity for months at a time. And in the nearby town of Big Flats, the regional airport has added flights, parking spaces and restrooms, and is extending a runway to accommodate larger jets.
This new base of customers — workers from Oklahoma, Texas and other parts of the country with long experience in drilling natural gas wells — are drawn to the region by jobs just across the state border in rural Pennsylvania, where a kind of drilling known as horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, has vastly expanded over the last two years.
In the same period, New York State environmental officials have been weighing whether such drilling should be allowed here. Until it does, Chemung County is savoring a hydrofracking boom without the hydrofracking.
The workers stream across the Pennsylvania border in search of amenities that are relatively scarce at the rural drilling sites. “Places are jammed,” said Thomas J. Santulli, the Chemung County executive.
The county’s hospitality, while hardly uniform, as opponents of fracking have made themselves heard, contrasts with the natural gas industry’s reception in some other corners of New York State. A few municipalities have moved pre-emptively to ban hydrofracking, citing the potential for heavy truck traffic, noise and, above all, the risk of contamination of groundwater supplies.
Horizontal hydraulic fracturing involves injecting water and chemicals into underground shale formations at enormous pressure to extract natural gas.
One reason that many in Chemung take the proposed drilling in stride is that gas exploration is nothing new here: dozens of conventionally drilled wells are active in the Trenton-Black River formation. All told, the county already has 3,400 acres of its own land under lease for gas exploration.
Still, the spillover from Pennsylvania is giving the county’s 88,000 residents a taste of how life might change, for better and worse, if the state gives a green light to the far more powerful method of extraction. County workers are busy surveying roads, training law enforcement personnel and visiting drilling centers in northeastern Pennsylvania to learn how their neighbors have dealt with traffic and an influx of thousands of workers.
Some downsides are anticipated in New York State.
A report commissioned this year by the State Department of Environmental Conservation, for example, predicts local housing shortages and a rise in rents as workers migrate to New York to take jobs in well construction and production that cannot initially be filled with local labor.
Some residents are already feeling pinched. “I was looking to spend $600 to $800, and it’s hard to find a decent place for that,” said Mark Stedge, 53, a resident who said he found most rents were more than double what he could pay. “The drillers are willing to pay anything because they need a place to stay.”
Nonetheless, the report said that Chemung and other counties in the state’s Southern Tier where shale gas is assumed to be plentiful can expect a surge in retail sales and tax revenue from those workers once drilling begins.
“These communities have the infrastructure,” said Kent Gardner, president and chief economist of the Center for Governmental Research in Rochester. “They have the commercial buildings, the lodging facilities and access to Interstate 86.”
Such amenities drew Sam Cullen, 33, a drill pipe worker from Harrison, Ark., who works about 35 minutes away in Bradford County, Pa., to the Texas Roadhouse restaurant here one recent evening. “There is nothing there — there’s no entertainment, there’s nothing to do,” he said of that Pennsylvania locale as he sipped a margarita.
Chemung County, Mr. Cullen added, “is where we spend our money.”
Last year, Chemung led all New York counties in the growth of sales tax and hotel tax revenue, as well as in the expansion of its tax base, avoiding the property tax increases and economic doldrums faced by local governments elsewhere in the state. To a lesser degree, Broome County, also right above the hydrofracking hot spots of Bradford and Susquehanna Counties, is also enjoying brisk business.
Mr. Santulli, the Chemung County executive, attributes at least half of its tax revenue growth to the increased activity of the extracting industry on both sides of the border.
He said 28 gas-related companies employing more than 1,000 had leased or bought more than one million square feet of commercial space in the county as a staging area for current and future drilling operations in the region.
Many businesses provide support and technological services for gas fields. One of the biggest, Schlumberger Technologies, is completing a 400,000-square-foot plant in Horseheads that will employ 400 people by next year.
Ann Crook, the manager of Elmira Corning Regional Airport in Big Flats, estimates one of five passengers flying in or out has some tie to the gas industry. Some are workers who head straight to the airport after working their final shift, which has prompted her to invest in some degreasing soap for the restrooms. “They do some serious cleanup here,” Ms. Crook said.
Local critics of the county’s boom are not hard to find. Some local antifracking groups complain that county officials rolled out the carpet for new businesses without requiring detailed environmental impact statements or considering the long-term consequences.
“The revenue is significant,” said Susan Multer, who lives in Horseheads and is a board member for a group called People for a Healthy Environment. “But we believe that the boom will turn into a bust later. The economic benefits will die, and we will be left with the health effects of the industrialization of what’s now our rural, quiet community.”
Some residents argue that the county is already contending with pollution problems that will only get worse if New York State starts issuing permits for the controversial fracking process. A group in Horseheads has sued Anschutz Exploration, a gas drilling company based in Denver, over two conventionally bored wells that the group says contaminated the drinking water.
In another neighborhood, residents are up in arms over a municipal landfill that began accepting drill cuttings from hydrofracking in Pennsylvania last year.
“What would happen if this gets in the water supply?” said Dr. Earl Robinson, a pulmonologist and critical care doctor who can see the landfill from his historic house in the Lowman neighborhood.
Officials with the Department of Environmental Conservation have judged the disposal of the shale waste in municipal landfills to be safe. The department has nonetheless been monitoring the site, and county officials have installed radiation detectors to monitor the cuttings, which they say make up 30 percent of the landfill’s capacity.
The rumbles of dissent are not lost on the drilling workers, whose cowboy hats and encrusted boots make them easy to spot when they drive into Horseheads for a meal or entertainment.
“People look at us like we’re idiots here,” said Jeff Lambert, 27, a drill pipe worker from Oklahoma who has worked in Pennsylvania since August.
“They want to know why we’re up here drilling,” he said. “I say, because you like to heat your home. You can’t get natural gas if you don’t drill.”
By MIREYA NAVARRO
In the heated debate over fracking in New York, it is often forgotten that conventional natural gas drilling has been taking place in the state for decades.
Chemung County, a place I write about in Wednesday’s Times, has been a leader in gas production in the state and is now poised to become a leader in exploration of the Marcellus Shale. Drilling awaits the approval of new state rules governing horizontal drilling combined with high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking – a controversial process because it uses large amounts of water, more than one million gallons per well — and could pose new risks of groundwater contamination.
But conventional vertical and horizontal drilling has its safety issues as well. In Chemung County, where gas companies have been drilling in the Trenton Black River rock formation, a group of 15 residents filed a lawsuit last winter against Anschutz Exploration, a company based in Colorado, over drilling operations at two gas wells that they claim contaminated their drinking water.
The law firm shepherding that suit, filed in State Supreme Court in Elmira, N.Y., is Napoli Bern Ripka, which recently won a settlement of nearly $700 million with the City of New York and its contractors on behalf of more than 10,000 workers saying that they developed respiratory illnesses as a result of their rescue and recovery work at ground zero after 9/11. One of the lawyers, Marc J. Bern, said that the firm has cases pending over natural gas drilling operations in Pennsylvania, Colorado, West Virginia and now New York.
Mr. Bern said he doesn’t take sides in the debate over whether hydrofracking should be allowed — he just argues that “it can be done in a much better way.”
“The industry itself believes that things can be done safer, but they want to do it in the most expeditious and cheapest way and deal with the environmental costs and the contamination later,” he said.
Industry representatives dispute that notion. “That’s why we have standards and recommended practices on drilling and water management,” said John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute, which represents represents more than 400 oil and natural gas companies. “We as an industry are committed to doing this right.”
Officials with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation investigated the Chemung residents’ complaints last year but found that the drilling was unlikely to have caused methane to seep into potable water wells.
“Methane commonly occurs in residential water wells since it is often present in bedrock at shallow depths,” a fact sheet on the case from the department says. “The way the gas wells were constructed makes it unlikely that gas from deeper formations could migrate through multiple cemented casing strings into any aquifers near the surface.”
By JEREMY FUGLEBERG Casper Star-Tribune | Posted: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 6:15 pm
CASPER, Wyo. — From the moment the Pavillion water samples were bottled by testers with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the clock began to tick.
The testers zipped the bottles tightly in clear plastic bags, surrounded them with ice in two small coolers, and shipped them overnight to the agency’s laboratory in Golden, Colo., for analysis.
There, the samples waited as the deadline neared for them to be accurately tested. By the time the samples were tested, the EPA-mandated hold times had come and gone.
“Maintenance of the laboratory floor” caused the hold, according to the EPA’s lab data report on the April 2011 samples.
Key conclusion
The overdue analysis of those samples was part of the data that underpinned the EPA’s eventual conclusions, released in a draft report in early December. The agency’s key conclusion: Natural gas wells in the area, most developed using hydraulic fracturing, might have harmed groundwater.
The report was quickly slammed by the oil and gas industry but trumpeted by environmental groups. Yet the EPA’s own data — including details not mentioned in the draft report — indicate that the agency’s conclusions are partially based on improperly analyzed samples from six private drinking-water wells and two EPA-drilled deep-monitoring wells in Pavillion.
The EPA also found contamination in pure water control samples, didn’t purge the test wells properly before gathering samples and didn’t mention in its report whether it tested water carried by a truck used in well drilling, say officials with the Wyoming Water Development Commission who, because of their expertise on water wells, reviewed the EPA’s publicly available information.
“They didn’t follow their own protocol they would’ve required of other people doing this same type of work,” said Mike Purcell, director of the water development commission staff, which does water planning and infrastructure development in the state.
No dispute
EPA officials don’t dispute the samples went past due for testing, but they stand by the report’s overall conclusions, which suggest hydraulic fracturing might be responsible for Pavillion’s tainted water.
The data and report included flaws and omissions that could torpedo the EPA’s conclusions, said Keith Clarey, water development commission program manager and professional geologist with three decades of experience — including six with the Wyoming state government — working or consulting on environmental issues for energy-related companies.
Typically outdated samples such as those analyzed by the EPA must first be replaced with fresh samples, but that wasn’t done.
Instead, estimates of the sample data were included in the EPA’s collection of information used in the draft report, and only referenced in lab data notes.
“Basically if you want to have valid laboratory results, you want to have them sampled within that certain time period,” Clarey said.
That flawed analysis contributed to half of the EPA’s testing of its deep monitoring wells. While the private drinking water wells got additional testing, the deep wells that provided critical data for the EPA’s conclusions were only tested twice, in October 2010 and April 2011.
Usually such reports are based on many more samples, Clarey said.
“Statistically you need to have 8 to 10 data points at a minimum,” Clarey said. “To only have those two — it’s not really a scientifically valid study.”
To properly test such water wells, they must be first purged three times to make sure fresh water from the surrounding formation flows in for testing, Clarey said.
“We’re not sure they produced out all the water that may have seeped out of the formation during the drilling process or well development,” Clarey said. “So we’re not even sure they’re getting an accurate formation sample.”
The EPA data indicates the agency only flushed the wells one-quarter of the amount needed, he said.
“Which is a no-no,” Clarey said. “That can invalidate the results and force someone from a regulatory agency to go back” to re-test.
Clarey also pointed out a photo in the draft report that shows a water truck that provided water for drilling the well. The report doesn’t indicate if the truck was tested for any contaminants before its water was used.
Also, several samples of distilled water placed with the well water samples showed some contamination — contamination that shouldn’t be in the samples and could indicate the well samples are marred, Clarey said.
The Star-Tribune submitted a series of questions to the EPA regarding Clarey’s questions and conclusions, the water truck photo and the agency’s own lab data report describing the outdated samples and contaminated control samples. The EPA didn’t directly answer the questions but reiterated its conclusion that hydraulic fracturing might have been responsible for some of the contamination found in the Pavillion wells.
“EPA’s analysis is that the best explanation for the chemical signature seen in monitoring wells is the release of hydraulic fracturing fluids into the aquifer above the production zone,” said EPA spokesman Rich Mylott in an email. “Hydraulic fracturing fluids were injected directly into the deeper part of the aquifer. The synthetic substances found in monitoring wells are known to be used in hydraulic fracturing fluids, are not naturally occurring, and many of them were used in the Pavillion field.”
Substances found in the samples from the monitoring wells — including acetone, tert-butyl alcohol, trimethylbenzenes and glycols — weren’t from materials used by the EPA in constructing the wells, Mylott said.
“The evidence indicates that EPA’s drilling activity did not contaminate the aquifer,” he said. “EPA and its contractor used stringent standards for the installation and development of the two monitoring wells, practices that addressed the possibility of influencing sampling results.”
The EPA is in the the midst of the public comment period and members of a follow-on peer review panel not affiliated with the EPA will be picked by a contractor using “criteria provided by the EPA,” said Mylott.
Clarey said the EPA’s data and its draft reports show there needs to be more investigation and sampling of the wells.
Gov. Matt Mead has called for a broader, state-led investigation along with the EPA, and has asked the EPA to consider including Wyoming expertise in its peer review.
“There’s some unusual things about the wells and people are asking some questions,” he said. “The EPA has to come forth with some answers or at least some explanation.”
Inventor's direct current makes comeback as it increases efficiency, lowers emissions
By SARA LEDWITH, Reuters, December 26, 2011
At the start of the 20th century, inventors Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla clashed in the "war of the currents." To highlight the dangers of his rival's system, Edison even electrocuted an elephant. The animal died in vain; it was Tesla's system and not Edison's that took off. But today, helped by technological advances and the need to conserve energy, Edison may finally get his revenge.
The American inventor, who made the incandescent light bulb viable for the mass market, also built the world's first electrical distribution system, in New York, using "direct current" electricity. DC's disadvantage was that it couldn't carry power beyond a few blocks. His Serbian-born rival Tesla who, at one stage worked with Edison, figured out how to send "alternating current" through transformers to enable it to step up the voltage for transmission over longer distances.
Edison was a fiercely competitive businessman. Besides staging electrocutions of animals to discredit Tesla's competing system, he proposed AC be used to power the first execution by electric chair.
But his system was less scalable, and it was to prove one of the worst investments made by financier J. Pierpont Morgan. New York's dominant banker installed it in his Madison Ave. home in the late 19th century, only to find it hard to control. It singed his carpets and tapestries.
So from the late 1800s, AC became the accepted form to carry electricity. For most of the last century, the power that has reached the sockets in our homes and businesses is alternating current.
Now DC is making a comeback, becoming a promising money-spinner in renewable or high-security energy projects. From data centres to long-distance power lines and backup power supplies, direct current is proving useful in thousands of projects worldwide.
"Everyone says it's going to take at least 50 years," says Peter Asmus, a senior analyst at Boulder, Colo.-based Pike Research, a market research and consulting firm in global clean technology. But "the role of DC will increase, and AC will decrease."
The main factor driving demand is the need to conserve energy and produce more of it from renewable sources. Alternating current is generated by rotating engines, but renewable sources such as wind and solar produce DC power. To use it, because of the way our buildings are wired, we first convert it to AC.
Another thing that's happened since Edison's time is the advent of the semiconductor. Semiconductors need DC power, and are increasingly found in household appliances. These have to convert the AC supply back to DC, which is a waste of energy and generates heat. In the early years of industrialization this wasn't an issue, but today it's important, especially in the huge and fastgrowing business of cloud computing.
The companies that handle our information traffic are racking their brains to boost efficiency and cut carbon emissions from their plants. Pike Research expects the green data centre business to be worth $41 billion annually by 2015, up from $7.5 billion now.
Finnish information technology company Academica, for instance, has a data centre in a granite cave beneath Helsinki's Uspenski cathedral. It uses Baltic Sea water to cool the plant and feeds surplus heat to the city's homes. IBM has designed a solar array to power its Bangalore data centre. Microsoft has filed a patent application for a windpowered data centre.
Direct current may be one way to increase efficiency and reduce emissions. Right now, outside a handful of universities, it's not the first thing people are thinking of because there are more basic things to do, says Eric Woods, Research Director for Smart Industry at Pike. But for companies on the leading edge, "it's sort of coming out of the research ghetto."
Pike has not put a figure on how big the DC component of the green data centre market will be. Swiss-Swedish engineering firm ABB, a big DC advocate, says about 35 per cent of demand for green data centres will come from the United States, 30 per cent from Europe, and the rest spread globally.
Every day, says ABB, we all send more than 300 billion emails and 250 million tweets globally. The centres to handle all this data are growing by 10 per cent each year and already consume 80 million megawatt-hours of energy annually -almost 1.5 times the amount of electricity used by the whole of New York City. They're also responsible for about two per cent of global carbon emissions.
DC power could help. At low voltages it has long been used in data centres but will be "game-changing" at higher voltages, ABB says.
Beyond its potential in data centres, DC power's ability to run on renewable energy sources makes it interesting for important plants that need to operate in "island mode" - independent of the grid - in case of a supply failure. Building systems with small, self-contained electricity distribution networks known as microgrids is of particular interest to governments and militaries who worry about terrorist attacks.
"In our view the market (for microgrids) is about to take off," said Pike Research's Asmus, who also sees demand for microgrids in countries that aren't densely covered by AC grids, such as Australia and India, and in developing countries looking to replace costly and wasteful diesel generators.
And it's not just "island mode." Thanks to power electronics - semiconductor switching devices - DC can now be transmitted at high voltage over very long distances, longer than AC. It can be easily used in cables, over ground or under the sea.
High voltage direct current (HVDC) systems are the backbone of plans for smart grids, or supergrids, which aim to channel energy from places where power sources such as sunlight and hydropower are abundant to countries where it is scarce.
Siemens, which vies with ABB for market leadership in HVDC transmission, says demand is increasing fast.
"By 2020, I'm expecting to see new HVDC transmission lines with a total capacity of 250 gigawatts. That is a dramatic increase," says Udo Niehage, CEO of the Power Transmission Division in Siemens' Energy Sector. "In the last 40 years, we've only installed 100 gigawatts worth of HVDC transmission lines."
How would Edison see all this? He might even have foreseen it. "I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy," he reportedly told his associates Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone in the 1930s. "What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."
