Perpetual Innovation

Category: CO2

  • Oil & Gas Spills in North America Since 2010

    Oil & Gas Spills in North America Since 2010

    A
    question I sometimes ask of people who think that fossil fuels are here
    forever more and that electrification of everything will never
    happen… 

    Has there ever been an oil spill in Yellowstone National Park? If so, how many?

    The answer I get surprisingly often is “none”. It is, after all, a National Park, right? 

    ArcGIS
    does a map overlay with the data of your choice. In this case the data
    is documented oil and gas spills since 2010, by type of spill and the
    SIZE of spill. Map for North America here.
    The size of the circle indicates the size of the spill. Note the big
    circles; size of the circle indicates the size of the spill. Blue is
    refined oil (gasoline, diesel, etc.). Red is NatGas. Since NatGas just
    vents into the atmosphere (unless it catches fire or is flared), it’s a
    “clean” spill. Kinda. Natural Gas is a wicked greenhouse gas, with a
    warming factor of 80x more than carbon dioxide. 

    The next chart just shows oil & gasoline spills. Crude oil in green (ironically), refined petroleum in blue. Zoom in and select a circle to find out more about the spill (year and amount).

    Yellowstone is in the northeast corner of Wyoming. Yellowstone has had two notable oil spills
    since 2010: an oil spill on the Exxon-Mobil pipeline in 2011, and
    another spill in 2015 from the pipeline owned by the True Companies.
    Those spills seem tiny compared to the thousands of spills throughout
    North America. No info from Canada though. There have been many oil
    spills in the Alaska pipelines that run all the way through Canada to
    the US.

    Note that there are tens of thousands of old wells that
    have been abandoned; many have never been capped or have been poorly
    capped. Old wells are leaking massive amounts of oil and natgas. The big
    oil companies sell off the depleted wells to small companies. Those
    companies milk the well for a while and then go out of business. 

    “According to the Government Accountability Office, the 2.1 million unplugged abandoned wells in the United States could cost as much as $300 billion.[2]” from this Wikipedia article on Abandoned Wells in the United States.
    There are abandoned oil wells everywhere: in the gulf, in Pennsylvania,
    in Texas, in California.  And that is in the USA where there are better
    regulations than most countries. Read about the Biden effort to go out
    and cap them at the NRDC. There are lots of other sources, but you get the idea.

    When
    you think of the costs to the environment, the costs to clean up, and
    the costs to not cleanup, the costs are massively greater than what you
    pay at the gas meter or at the pump. And yet the world’s governments
    still subsidize fossil fuels at the rate of $1T per year. According to the IMF, explicit fossil fuel subsidies are about 1% of GDP, but implicit is 6% to 7% of GDP (about $6T USD).

  • Earth Day 2022 Who Killed the Electric Car?

     Earth Day 2022 (April 22, ’22) Who Killed the Electric Car?

    The statistics and the forecasts for Global Warming and
    Climate Change are increasingly dire. The decision – and it is a decision – to do
    business as usual (buy big gas guzzlers) is becoming increasingly costly to the world. And the window to avoid
    the worst warming scenarios is closing. The CO2 and methane that we have been
    pumping into the atmosphere will persist for decades (centuries really)
    continuing to heat a warming world.

    On that note, a documentary is in order for Earth Day 2022, Who
    Killed the Electric Car     (2006). Read about it on Wikipedia,
    watch on many venues including IMDb and Prime Video. It pretty much describes the methods of
    Big Tobacco in its hay day, and the methodology adopted by oil companies for
    about a century. Lots of celebrities. Hard to find a single factoid that is not true.

    General Motors was starting to be very successful with its
    electric car in 2005, rolling it out to meet the aggressive zero emissions vehicle
    (ZEV) standards that California was phasing in at the time. The standard,
    appropriately call CARB, was suddenly watered down and phased out, with both
    the state of California (Schwarzenegger)
    and the Federal government (Bush) chasing after a shiny object: Hydrogen. Cool technology, but… Hydrogen is still not here, and will probably never be truly competitive for most applications.

    GM (and the other Big Autos) killed off their EVs. In GMs
    case, the recalled them all back from their leases (not renewing) and crushed
    them all (but 1). If GM had stayed with their EV program they would have been
    in the same market position as Tesla is now, only 15 years earlier.  GM bought controlling position in a wonderful
    battery technology that would have given the EV 200+ mile range (vs 60 for the antiquated
    lead battery technology they were implementing). But that battery was never
    utilized. This controlling stake in the battery company was later sold to …
    Chevron!

    The documentary investigates who were the murders of the EV
    and who were the accomplices. But the obvious victims are the general public
    and, of course, the environment! We continue to be addicted to oil. Ukraine is
    a stark reminder of what the power bought with oil revenues can do.

    For now, drive less. Plan for a small vehicle. Make sure
    your next vehicle is either electric of plug-in- electric hybrid.

    As we celebrate Earth Day of 2022, think about how easily
    the citizens can be manipulated away from objectives that are better for the
    world into paths that are only good for monopolies and the ruthless.

    Please let us know if there is anything that is factually untrue. Also, are the conclusions sound?

    #EV #PHEF #WhoKilledTheElectricCar #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #EarthDay

     

  • On the VERGE of Sustainability

     VERGE 20 is on this week (starting October 26 2020). GreenBiz sponsor and coordinate this massive event. Anybody and any company that’s got anything to do with sustainability is here. Well, not exactly here since it is virtual this year… But you get the idea.

    Opening session was a wonderful start of the week. Even the singing was impressive. Really!  I said, “Oh, NO!”, when Shana Rappaport started in with a variation of Girl on Fire (Alycia Keyes). Hard song. Not exactly what you are used to at formal conferences. Turned out to be very, very cool. It also kind of elevated the urgency that many of us feel about dragging our feet in the (oil) sands on climate action: This World is on Fire! It also seemed apropos giving the historic fire year (in California, Colorado, etc.)

    VERGE is the ultimate sustainability forum each year with all the leading thought leaders and all the leading companies. Energy, food, transportation, circular economy and more. Great ideas for companies to save money and reduce carbon at the same time (like efficiencies, telework, and more). Many sponsor companies are enabling other organizations to move quickly toward (more) sustainability.

    We are looking for companies that aiming for negative carbon footprints (like Microsoft’s plan to remove all carbon-equivalent of the company’s lifetime of business). This would be moving to carbon neutral (renewable energy and such) and then offering to offset all the emissions from my family, my parents and my grandparents.

    One of the silver linings of the COVID pandemic was the clean air and restored nature in a few weeks human hibernation from industry. Even with the economy slowed down to, maybe 75% capacity (more like 50% in the US), the estimated carbon reduction was only about 8%. So, the argument is that the equivalent of the worst pain of the pandemic (hopefully without the pandemic and without most of the pain) is what we need to accomplish essentially every year for years.

    Just to be clear about the 8% reduction per year that we’re talking about: that’s a reduction in the increase. That’s not reducing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, it is simply slowing down the massive rate that we are adding to it.

    Keynote sessions are free, so the price is right. Plus, you save on the hotel and flight!

    https://events.greenbiz.com/events/verge-conference/online/2020


  • Earth Day 2020, 50 years of Hind sight

    It is the 50th Earth Day and the world is generally locked down while we deal with the Coronavirus pandemic — and how best to ramp back up the world economy.

    50th Earth Day. April 22 2020

    The pandemic is a serious and sobering aspect to the fun and excitement to an otherwise interesting and informative day of rallies, speeches waterway cleanups and more…

    Worldwide we are going on 3M positive COVID19 cases and nearing 200,000 deaths. The US, never to be outdone in anything that seems competitive, has 32% of the cases and more than 25% of the deaths. Deaths in New York and New Jersey just passed 15,000 and 5,000 respectively. New England deaths exceed all other countries. It is hard to imagine this given that the virus had to cross the Pacific (to the west coast) or travel to Europe and then cross the pond to New England. The US has only 4.2% of the world’s population, yet 25% of the worlds deaths, and rising. How can that be?

    COVID19 Positive Cases and Deaths

               As of April 22, 2020
           Cases  %/World
    World 2,621,436 100.0%
     deaths 182,989 7.0%
    7.0%   %/World
    US 837,719 32.0%
     deaths 46,771 25.6%
    Deaths% 5.6%

    COVID has had a big toll on health and live and a wicked toll on the world’s economies. There some linings, and some of them silver, from this
    pandemic – currently and on the other side of it. Let’s think of a couple while
    we address what the other side of COVID might look like. First, if you think
    that we will ever get back to “normal”, you probably haven’t thought it through
    a lot.

    Pollution. The massive slowdown in the world economy has
    allowed the earth to take a breather. There are wonderful satellite views of
    China, Europe and the US, before and after pictures. Business as usual shows
    clouds of pollution followed by a few weeks of complete economic shutdown, and
    pristine-looking skies. Wow! There are similar pictures everywhere. Denver. LA, New York. The clear
    canals of Venice with fish and dolphin. 
    Pollution contributes to hundreds of millions of ailments every year, and to millions and millions of deaths. Let’s say 6 to 10 million people die each year because of air pollution. (See for example, this Forbes article in 2018.) Note that the infographic shows about 2.1M in the USA. Maybe the slowdown in the first quarter of 2020 will result in 1M people saved related to air pollution? 
    Once people get a taste of clean air, they tend not to want to return to smog and pollution.
    A Whole New Economy. The world economy will never be the same. For several reasons. First, what we came to think of as “normal” was never normal. We have undertaken to consume all the world’s fossil fuels in a few short centuries. We are fully beginning to realize the full costs of non-sustainable systems, the business-as-usual economy was never normal.
    Earth Overshoot day is a concept that is especially relevant to the first Earth Day in 1970. The resources we took and consumed from the earth — although maybe not sustainable and renewable — were fully supplied by the 1 planet we inhabit. That is, the 3.7B world population in 1970, staying with the same consumption patters, could live on the earth without depleting her resources. Think of this earth carrying capacity like you do a annual budget, it would be nice if the annual income lasted all year. But the population has more than doubled to 7.7B, and overall consumption has nearly doubled. Right now, the carrying capacity of Earth is exhausted about the end of July, only 57% of the way through the year! That’s 43% deficit spending for the rest of the year. To consume 43% more than the earth’s annual carrying capacity, we deplete resources like trees, fish and more.
    But, in 2020, the earth has gotten a bit of a breather. Overshoot day will improve dramatically!
    The economy will change. There will never be a “new normal”. People have gotten a taste of teleworking. It’s going to be hard to force people back into the offices that require an hour commute each way. Travel will take some time to come back, and business travel will never be the same. Stadium events will take some time to come back. Students have fully embraced online learning, and they will never fully go back.
    Consumption of fossil fuels are down at least 30% during the closed economy, but consumption may only bounce back half when the economy slowly starts to churn back.
    This might be the jump start that we all needed to step up a move toward sustainability. Assuming a 15% jump back, we would need to reduce our carbon footprint by 3% each and every year to have a 40% (overall) reduction by 2030, a 66% reduction by 2040, and near zero by 2050. Good news, we can easily move to 100% renewables by that time. (See Stanford Roadmap to 100% Renewable Energy by 2050 by country and also by major city.) And we can profitably move to 100% renewables if we include the health and death costs of fossil fuels.
    Hind sight is 2020. Every year since the turn of century as been in the hottest 20 some years, with many years breaking all time records. In fact, many months have hit monthly record highs, especially since 2015 (an El Nino year). January 2020 was hottest on record, and the oceans have never been hotter. Remember that carbon dioxide (CO2) persists in the environment for about 100 years from the time we introduce it by burning fossil fuels. As CO2 zooms from about 320ppm a hundred years ago to 415ppm now, the green house gasses will result in atmospheric heating for a century!
    Our linear economy was never “normal”, for this reason, and many others no one should consider using the term “new normal” on the other side of the COVID recession. Hopefully, with 2020, we will have a new respect for science and scientists.
    Let’s leverage this tragedy of COVID to make a real difference in our trajectory of the future.
    May every day be an Earth Day.

  • Amazon? Lungs of the world? Sinking feeling?

    I got into this debate, related to Global Warming, on the “Amazon is sometimes referred to as the Lungs of the world.”
    Here’s a very readable discussion in Newsweek on how much oxygen comes from the Amazon: https://www.newsweek.com/how-much-oxygen-amazon-rain-forest-1456274
    Much like Global Freezing, I don’t know that I have ever heard/seen an actual scientist say this, but the Lungs of the World is still a pretty well circulated myth. Some times it says 20% of the oxygen in the world is produced by the Amazon Rain Forest. Actually, this is probably true, however the rainforest consumes most of the oxygen it produces. Plants (decomposition) consume it, animals in the forest, not so much so. Oxygen in the atmosphere is about 21% (20.95%, actually). And that’s not going to change much, even if the Amazon was burned to the ground… Carbon Dioxide (CO2) on the other hand, that’s not so pretty.
    There’s massive amounts of carbon stored in the trees and peat. That would all get moved from a stored state into the active environment (air and ocean). Same as chopping down 500 year-old native trees and burning them without replanting the same. Same as digging up coal that took 500m years to form and burning it (except that there’s no way to return the coal in coal back to the sync from whence it came).
    So, when the amazon is converted to grassland and ranching, the original carbon store is released into the atmosphere and the ability to store carbon (sync) is broken. Yes, grass is green, but it does a horrible job related to carbon sequestering compared to trees. Plus cows have a habit of belching and farting that releases a wicked amount of methane (32 to 64 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2).
    Of course, there horrific impact on the environment. You could easily call this a crime against humanity and against the environment when native populations are killed and displaced and the rainforest with all it inhabitants of plants and animals are killed and destroyed forever.
    National Geographic talks about the same issue, but follows on to discuss biodiversity: Why the Amazon doesn’t really produce 20% of the world’s oxygen: Of the many important reasons to worry about the thousands of fires raging in the world’s largest rainforest, oxygen supply is not one of them.