CO2 for oil swap brings carbon capture viability closer

September 14, 2013 — andyextance
Oil and gas producer Denbury makes its case for its 300-mile plus “Green Pipeline” that transports CO2 for use in extracting more oil from old fields. University of Texas, Austin’s Carey King and colleagues have looked at the economics of using a larger network to store CO2 in underground saline aquifers.

For 314 miles from Donaldsonville, Louisiana, to Alvin, Texas a 24-inch diameter pipeline slithers under the landscape, dwarfing even the giant invasive snake species menacing the US. And while the Hastings Oil and Gas Field sits at the Texan end of the pipe, fossil fuels don’t flow along it: CO2 does. Rather than emit the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, in Louisiana, Mosaic Phosphates Company’s Faustina Plant sends it to Texas. There the pipeline’s owner, Denbury, uses the CO2 to swill more oil out of the ageing Hastings field, leaving most of the CO2 trapped underground instead.

Denbury estimates that from 2014 it could get 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a day from industrial sources. Though that sounds a lot, it pales against the roughly 15 million tonnes the whole US emits each day. But what if Texas’ coal-fired power plants were hooked up to pipelines to both produce more oil from old fields and keep CO2 locked out of the atmosphere?

A team of University of Texas at Austin scientists have been looking at the financial details of how such a network might work. Though it could trap much more CO2 than burning the oil it gets out will emit, they find that such a scheme likely could not yet support itself. “If you capture CO2 from multiple coal-fired generators to produce oil and you want to have a net storage of CO2, the costs are still greater than the revenues,” UT Austin’s Carey King told me. “But the oil revenues do pay for the majority of the costs.”

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Posted in Action, CCS, climate, economics, environment, Geology, Global warming, Modelling, news. Tags: , , , , . 4 Comments »

Does lower home energy use mean England and Wales are keen to be green?

September 7, 2013 — andyextance
Change in average England and Wales household energy consumption in local areas 2005-11. Darker areas are where household energy consumption has fallen most.

Change in average England and Wales household energy consumption in local areas 2005-11. Darker areas are where household energy consumption has fallen most.

Thanks to William Blake, an important part of England’s national identity revolves around the idea of the country being ‘a green and pleasant land’. And now, data released by the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) last month hints green outlooks could be helping people in Wales and England cut greenhouse gas emissions. The ONS found that average household energy consumption in the two countries fell by a quarter between 2005 and 2011. And while the possible reasons it suggests for this include people acting to cut their energy bills, it also stresses they could be doing it out of environmental awareness. In full, the ONS puts forward the following five factors as explanations:

• Household improvements such as better loft and cavity wall insulation have improved energy efficiency

• Introduction of energy rating scales for properties and household appliances, allowing consumers to make informed decisions about their purchases

• Improved efficiency of gas boilers and condensing boilers to supply properties with both hot water and central heating

• Generally increasing public awareness of energy consumption and environmental issues

• The price of gas and electricity in the UK overall increased in all years apart from 2010, between 2005 and 2011

As I live in England, the world ‘household’ brought to mind other changes the news often tells me are going on that might also play a role. They are: The number of households in the UK is increasing, and the number of people in each household is decreasing. It could be that the lower energy consumption per household is just because there are fewer people per household to consume the energy. But households are shrinking much more slowly than energy consumption, with average size reducing by just 4% from 2.4 to 2.3 between 2001 and 2011. Or there could be many more households consuming, which would result in an overall increase in emissions. But in 2011 there were 26.3 million households in the UK, a 7% increase since 2001.

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Posted in climate, economics, environment, Global warming, news, renewable energy, science, Trade. Tags: , , , . 5 Comments »

Bouncing lasers off satellites backs faster Greenland melt

August 31, 2013 — andyextance
NASA's Goddard Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory in Greenbelt, Maryland, routinely bounces lasers off satellites, to perform Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR). This facility works with other SLR telescopes around the world. Credit: NASA

NASA’s Goddard Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory in Greenbelt, Maryland, routinely bounces lasers off satellites, to perform Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR). This facility works with other SLR telescopes around the world. Credit: NASA

Japanese and Taiwanese researchers have used old satellite technology to add a decade onto modern gravity-based measurements of Greenland’s ice loss. They used measurements gained by tracking satellites with lasers, getting ‘rough data’ compared to more modern technology, but still confirming an acceleration already seen between the 1990s and 2000s. “There was no mass loss in the 1990s, but there was an acceleration after the year 2000,” says Kosuke Heki from Hokkaido University in Japan.

Though we don’t notice it, Earth’s gravity changes slightly across its surface, because mass isn’t shared equally over it. The link Isaac Newton famously discovered between mass and gravity means that where there’s more mass – for example, where ice sheets sit – gravity is stronger. Since their launch in 2002, twin satellites called Tom and Jerry have been chasing each other around the planet in a game of orbital cat-and-mouse to track these changes. They bounce microwaves from one to the other that scientists can use, among other methods, to track hair’s-breadth changes in the distance between them caused by changes in gravity.

Using Tom and Jerry, also known as the GRACE experiment, scientists have already shown the severity of global warming’s impact on Greenland. They found evidence that Greenland’s ice mass loss is now five times faster than it was in 1992. But for the data from the 1990s there were no gravity measurements. Instead, the researchers worked out the ice mass using laser or radar signals that had been bounced off the glaciers to record their shape, which is known as altimetry . Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in environment, Glaciers, Global warming, Greenland, news, satellites. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Fossil fuels are more than just a bad habit

August 24, 2013 — andyextance
The benefits fossil fuels bring make them probably the hardest addiction ever to kick. Credit: Don Hankins, via Flickr Creative Commons licence

The benefits fossil fuels bring make them probably the hardest addiction ever to kick. Credit: Don Hankins, via Flickr Creative Commons licence

I’m increasingly realising how much of a creature of habit I am. I have the same bizarre sticky brown yeast extract goo on toast for breakfast each morning. I watch films in my lounge most evenings. And I wonder: How much of my personality is just a collection of habits? What about yours, and all of ours? Could our whole society just be a giant collage of habits? And most relevant to this blog: how much of the human greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming come from our habits?

Recently, I’ve been keeping track of how long I spend doing things, which has been helping me swap what I think are bad habits for better ones. It’s tempting to suggest fighting climate change in a similar way. Many people talk about how we burn fossil fuels to propel our cars or run our gadgets as a bad habit, and even an addiction. But it’s more complicated than other addictions. Fossil fuels have been to our society more like food and a salary are to us individually – they’ve helped produce many of the healthiest aspects of the modern world. They’ve powered more than a century of rapid social and technological progress, and given many countries their current rich, well-fed figures.

For an article I’m writing about employment prospects in the UK’s chemical industry, I recently spotted the table below. It shows ‘gross value added’ (GVA), a measure of the money contributed to the economy, per person across the country’s different industries. It was striking to me that while bankers may get all the headlines for their wealth, the energy industry has the greatest earning power per head in the UK.

Oil and gas extraction help the "Mining and Quarry; Energy & water" sector make the largest contribution per head to the UK economy, as they employ relatively few people relative to their large economic output . Credit: Office for National Statistics

Oil and gas extraction help the “Mining and Quarry; Energy & water” sector make the largest contribution per head to the UK economy, as they employ relatively few people relative to their large economic output. The ‘total’ figure is the overall GVA for the UK, averaged across all industries. Credit: Office for National Statistics

Much like I’d quickly struggle without food or money, today sharply taking fossil fuel energy away from our societies would immediately threaten our existence. In fact, some think even the small changes already happening taste bad. Again in the UK chemical industry, there are worries that higher costs from clean energy are making it less competitive with other countries. Part of the way it would like to avoid this issue is through unconventional natural gas supplies, presumably extracted through controversial ‘fracking’ methods. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Action, agriculture, Campaigning, climate, economics, environment, Global warming, Greenland, media, news, Politics, renewable energy, science. Tags: , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Continuing the fight for CO2 monitoring

August 17, 2013 — andyextance
  • This is part two of a two-part post. Read part one here.
Dave Keeling had to balance his work measuring CO2's rise in the air and tracking its movements through the Earth's systems with fighting to get the money to fund his work. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Dave Keeling had to balance his work measuring CO2’s rise in the air and tracking its movements through the Earth’s systems with fighting to get the money to fund his work. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

By 1963, having directly measured a steady increase in CO2 levels over five years, Dave Keeling felt he had clearly shown the value of such non-stop monitoring. But that message hadn’t reached government decision makers. And so Dave swung into the first battle in the war to continue tracking the key greenhouse gas that has flared up repeatedly in the following decades.

Thanks to four new instruments called spectrophotometers, Dave had been able to use the same molecular movements that allow CO2 to absorb heat to measure it. Though his most famous site was at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, one was also installed in Antarctica. Another sailed on a ship and the final one stayed at Dave’s lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography analysing samples collected in vacuum-filled five litre flasks from aircraft and elsewhere. Thanks to funds from 1957-1958’s International Geophysical Year a team of scientists was busy collecting a “snapshot” of CO2 data that Dave’s boss at Scripps, Roger Revelle, wanted.

So in 1961, Dave moved his family to Sweden for a year to work out exactly what the measurements were showing. He took a fellowship at the Meteorological Institute, University of Stockholm working with its new director Bert Bolin, who had earlier worked on the first computerised weather forecast. With measurements ongoing, annual ‘breathing’ cycles of rising and falling CO2 and the increasing trend underlying them became ever clearer.

Together, Dave and Bert found CO2 concentrations were going up by 0.06 ppm per month on average. Bert also undertook a series of complex calculations by hand to work out CO2 movement and cycles in its levels. In doing so he was showing how oceans, plants on land, and human fossil fuel burning contributed to the patterns that would later need computer models for fuller analysis. This, Dave felt, clearly showed why non-stop CO2 monitoring was needed rather than just snapshots. But by 1963 the shipboard spectrophotometer had come home, and Dave had also called back the one in Antarctica. And with funding cuts biting at the Weather Bureau, now part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the staff at Mauna Loa fell from eight to three. And soon afterwards, a problem with Dave’s equipment proved too much for the overstretched team to fix.

“Suddenly there were no precise measurements being made of atmospheric CO2 anywhere,” he recalled. “I had seen the budget cut coming early in 1963 and had tried to prevent its terminating the CO2 program at Mauna Loa Observatory. I even went to Washington to plead for supplemental funding. This had no tangible effect, however, until the cessation of measurements actually occurred. The National Science Foundation (NSF) then found funds to pay for an additional technician at Mauna Loa. I learned a lesson that environmental time-series programs have no particular priority in the funding world, even if their main value lies in maintaining long-term continuity of measurements.” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Acidification, Action, agriculture, climate, El Niño, environment, Global warming, history, Modelling, news, Oceans, Politics, science, volcanoes. Tags: , , , , , , , . 13 Comments »

What Dave Keeling did ahead of his curve

August 10, 2013 — andyextance
Dave Keeling in front of the pier at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, which houses a variety of measuring equipment. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Dave Keeling in front of the pier at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, which houses a variety of measuring equipment. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

On 18 May 1955, Charles David Keeling – Dave to most – set up camp near a footbridge over a river in Big Sur State Park in California. Armed with a set of five litre flasks containing nothing but vacuum, he planned to suck up air samples regularly over the 24 hours. At the time it may have seemed the latest uncertain step of a young man unsure how best to combine his interest in science and love of the outdoors. But instead it became the start of a lifelong quest to accurately measure the main gas that man is changing the world’s climate with: CO2.

“At the age of 27, the prospect of spending more time at Big Sur State Park to take suites of air and water samples instead of just a few didn’t seem objectionable, even if I had to get out of a sleeping bag several times in the night,” Dave wrote in his autobiography. “I did not anticipate that the procedures established in this first experiment would be the basis for much of the research that I would pursue over the next forty-odd years.”

Growing up in the midwest US near Chicago, Dave’s interest in science was kindled at age five, when his economist father introduced him to the wonders of astronomy. To show Dave how the seasons came about, together in their living room they circled a globe around a lamp, serving as the sun. Going through school during the Second World War, Dave took a special class in preflight aeronautics as well as the conventional sciences.

He then enrolled in the University of Illinois early, during the summer, to fit in a year of study before he reached the conscription age of 17. With limited science options available at this time of year, he chose to major in chemistry. “I didn’t particularly like chemistry and repeatedly doubted that I had made the right choice,” he recalled. But before the year – 1945 – was out, the war was over, and so Dave could continue his course. Chemistry students were expected to study economics, but Dave felt that he’d had enough economics at home. So he opted out of chemistry, ultimately getting a general liberal arts degree.

Yet he was still offered a place to study for a chemistry PhD at nearby Northwestern University with a friend of his mother’s. He took it without applying for any others, but later realised his previous studies had left him unprepared. “Accepting so soon was probably a mistake,” he wrote. Required to take a minor subject as part of his studies, Dave chose geology. His supervisor even suggested he might like to make this his major, though Dave declined, graduating in chemistry after a gruelling five years. And while his skills were in great demand from the post-war chemical industry Dave wanted a job that would let him work outside. So he applied for geology roles at universities, managing to find one at the California Institute of Technology. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Acidification, climate, economics, environment, Geology, Global warming, news, Oceans, science, Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , . 19 Comments »

Climate change can make us more violent

August 1, 2013 — andyextance
Civil wars, like the one in Somalia that destroyed this tank, could become more common as the world warms. Image taken by Charles Roffey, used via Flickr CreativeCommons license.

Civil wars, like the one in Somalia that destroyed this tank, could become more common as the world warms. Image taken by Charles Roffey, used via Flickr CreativeCommons license.

US economists have drawn together 45 sets of evidence spanning 10,000 years to show that warmer temperatures and more extreme rainfall can cause greater human conflict. University of California, Berkeley’s Ted Miguel says this “could have critical implications for understanding the impact of future climate change on human societies”.

“Many global climate models project global temperature increases of at least 2°C over the next half century,” Ted told me. “Our findings suggest that global temperature rise of 2°C could increase the rate of intergroup conflicts, such as civil wars, by over 50% in many parts of the world, especially in tropical regions where such conflicts are most common.”

Scientists have long puzzled over whether data backs climate as a cause of violent events such as the fall of the Roman empire. Global warming has brought an ‘explosion’ of interest from researchers, from archaeologists to psychologists, in climate-linked violence. And the types of conflict vary from fights between two people to civil wars and collapse of whole civilisations. But some studies see political, economic and geographical factors as more important than climate.

How researchers assess their data in these studies could introduce problems. For example, it can often be argued that ‘correlation does not imply causation’, meaning that links between two data sets might be caused by other factors. For example, reading ability might seem to improve as shoe size does, but one doesn’t cause the other – getting older causes both. To find any real, bizarre, link between shoe size and reading ability, you would need to look at people with the same age – or ‘control for’ age.

So Ted and his Berkeley teammates only brought together data that could be used to find causal links, although not all the original studies they started from had done this. Bringing together data from many different studies, collected all over the world, considering different types of violence, gives their findings stronger backing than each lone study. They called on records collected in many places that had taken measurements repeatedly in each place, and analysed them from scratch to reach their own conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in agriculture, climate, Drought, economics, environment, Global warming, history, Modelling, news, Politics, Precipitation, psychology, science, temperature records. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

How a beer bottle helped reveal rapid past climate change

July 27, 2013 — andyextance
According to Willi Dansgaard "A sophisticated experimental set-up on the lawn became the beginning of a new field in geophysics." Credit: Centre for Ice and Climate, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.

According to Willi Dansgaard “A sophisticated experimental set-up on the lawn became the beginning of a new field in geophysics.” Credit: Centre for Ice and Climate, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.

On Saturday June 21, 1952, in a garden in Copenhagen, Denmark, raindrops fell through the slim neck of a beer bottle, splattering and splashing as they hit its bottom. But the bottle wasn’t carelessly left behind – Willi Dansgaard had inserted a funnel into its neck so he could use it for an experiment. He was watching it closely, collecting rain to later measure in his lab. Each drop brought Willi closer to revealing the secrets of Earth’s history, by giving scientists a way to work out temperature from ancient ice. In doing so, he would help show how climate can change much faster than experts had thought possible.

Willi was born in Copenhagen in 1922, living and studying physics and biology there until going to work for the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) in 1947. The DMI sent Willi and his wife Inge to Greenland, first to study the Earth’s magnetic fields, and then to help improve the reliability of weather forecasts. Their time there left the pair with ‘deep impressions of the course of Greenland nature, its forces, its bounty, its cruelty, and above all its beauty,’ Willi wrote in his autobiography. ‘We were both bitten with Greenland for life, but after a year the need for further education forced us to turn homeward.’

So in 1951, Willi took a job at the biophysics research lab at the University of Copenhagen, where his first job was to install a mass spectrometer. Able to distinguish between chemicals using weight differences, mass spectrometers are often described as atomic-level weighing scales. But they actually measure molecules’ weight by firing them through an electromagnetic field at a detector, similarly to how bulky old TVs fire electrons at their screens. Though mass spectrometers existed since the early 20th century, Second World War US efforts to produce uranium for an atomic bomb had boosted their power. Willi set up the type of machine that had been invented in the course of that work, so his department could detect tracers used in medicine and biology.

By 1952, Willi knew that his mass spectrometer could separate forms of the same chemical elements – or isotopes – that could differ in weight by as little as a single neutron. And faced with a wet weekend in June, he wondered whether the amount of these isotopes in rainwater could change from one shower to the next. ‘Now when I had an instrument that ought to be able to measure it, there was no harm in trying,’ he writes. ‘I placed an empty beer bottle with a funnel on the lawn and let it rain.’

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Arctic, climate, environment, Glaciers, Global warming, Greenland, history, Icebergs, news, Precipitation, science, sea ice, temperature records, Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , , , . 19 Comments »

Speeding poor countries’ progress could halve farming emission growth

July 18, 2013 — andyextance
Improving agricultural productivity - particularly without increasing fertiliser use - could help cut greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Credit: IIASA

Improving agricultural productivity – particularly without increasing fertiliser use – could help cut greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Credit: IIASA

If the world’s poorer countries progress faster towards farming like richer ones the improved food availability could help fight climate change. That’s according to Austrian and Australian scientists who say that they have looked at climate change’s links to both animal and crop farming in the most depth yet.

Hugo Valin from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, and his colleagues studied cutting the gaps between farming output in rich and poor countries. They say halving this ‘yield gap’ for crops, and reducing it by a quarter for animals, could halve the increase in worldwide greenhouse gas emissions from farming between 2000 and 2050. But they have also found that improved farming methods could raise how much food people eat, meaning that emission reductions aren’t as much as they would be otherwise.

“The widespread idea is that intensifying crop farming is beneficial to the environment because it spares land,” Hugo told me. “We show that it is more complex than this. Intensification also stimulates consumption because it allows farmers to supply more food at affordable prices.”

Farming produces about a third of all ‘man-made’ greenhouse gas emissions, though a lot of them are actually from farm animals’ belches and farts and manure. The rest come from chemical reactions of fertiliser used on crops in soil, and also gases released from soil, plants and trees when forests are converted into farmland. Four-fifths of these emissions happen in developing countries. The world’s population is set to grow from around 7 billion people today to between 8.3 and 10.9 billion by 2050. We need more food for those extra people, which will add to the greenhouse gases farming puts into the air each year. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in agriculture, Animals, Biological gas emissions, climate, economics, environment, Global warming, Grazing, Methane, Mitigation, Modelling, news, Nitrous oxide, science. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Scientists spotlight rock’s role in carbon capture success

July 13, 2013 — andyextance
Equipment for monitoring seismic activity being deployed in a borehole at the Weyburn CO2 storage site in Saskatchewan, Canada. Credit: University of Bristol

Equipment for monitoring seismic activity being deployed in a borehole at the Weyburn CO2 storage site in Saskatchewan, Canada. Credit: University of Bristol

Climate change is a problem that many would like to bury – and indeed ‘burying’ CO2 deep underground might be needed to get it under control. And injecting the greenhouse gas among the rocks below us on a large scale is a serious option, if the storage sites are chosen carefully. That’s according to a study of three sites where ‘carbon capture and storage’ (CCS) has been done, published by University of Bristol’s James Verdon and his teammates this week. “Too often CCS is seen as a binary thing – it’ll either be brilliant or hopeless, depending on whether you are for or against,” James told me. “This study shows that every CCS site will be different – there won’t be a one size fits all solution.”

Scientists think it will be dangerous if global temperatures go more than 2°C above the pre-industrial average from 1850-1899. That’s recognised by governments in a non-binding climate change target in the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, where many also pledged actions to cut their CO2 emissions. But we continue to pump out ever more CO2, making the chances of sticking to the target through emission cuts alone ever slimmer.

CCS, which captures CO2 where lots would otherwise be released and then stores it where it can’t reach the air, is an alternative approach. Though the cost of the technology needed to do this has meant projects have been delayed and even abandoned, eight large-scale CCS projects are operational today. James has worked at two: Weyburn in Canada, and In Salah in Algeria. At a meeting of British CCS scientists he mentioned this to Andy Chadwick from the British Geological Survey in Nottingham, who had worked at the Sleipner CCS project in Norway. They realised that comparing the sites could help answer one of the biggest potential issues around CCS beyond cost: how rocks respond to CO2 injection. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CCS, climate, environment, Geology, Global warming, Methane, news, science. Tags: , , , , , , . 3 Comments »
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