Perpetual Innovation

Category: oil

  • 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).

  • Oil & Gas Spills in North America Since 2010

    Oil & Gas Spills in North America Since 2010

    This was posted over in SustainZine originally, but it does pertain to Innovation. The costs of the old systems of fossil fuels are far greater than the price we all pay at the pump. Plus they are crazy subsidized (one estimate is 1% of GDP directly and about 6% indirectly).

    But here’s the article. *** SustainZine ***

    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 is surprisingly often, 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.

    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).

  • Mysteries of Methane Leak in Florida and Not-So-Clean Fossil Fuels

    There’s a BIG NatGas leak (Methane) in Florida. The source of
    which is not being owned up to. There’s no oil/gas drilling in the area.
    And, until about a year ago, most such leaks might go totally unnoticed. Read
    the Bloomberg article No
    One is Owning Up to Releasing Cloud of Methane in Florida    .
    Oil Flaring at Night in North America (Bakken)
    First Methane. The largest component of natural gas (NatGas) is methane (EIA).
    Various oil formations of fossil fuels are oil, mostly gas, or a combination.
    Even in coal formations there is methane, which has made coal mining especially
    dangerous for explosions and fires.
    When you see the flame stacks burning above oil wells and
    refineries, this is natural gas being flared off. Flaring is far preferred then
    just releasing it, venting, because methane is a wicked greenhouse gas (GHG) at
    82 times the global warming capacity as CO2 in the first 20 years (about 30
    times as potent over 100 years).
    Estimates by industry experts are that as much methane is
    flared (and vented) as used in the USA. If the US consumes about 22% of the
    world’s natural gas (0.8 trillion cubic meters per year of 3.9Tm3 worldwide)
    then it flares/vents the same amount again. The US accounts for twice as much
    NatGas consumption as the entire EU (or Russia). Texas and North Dakota (Permian
    & Bakken) account for 10 to 20 times as much flaring as any other state (Se
    EIA
    2019 report on flaring    ).
    NatGas is Cleaner than… Because of an abundance of NatGas in the US, and it burns massively cleaner than coal in terms of pollutants (air and ash), the US has made a major shift to NatGas for power generation. NatGas has taken the place of coal in many power plants to represent 38.4% of the the US electrical power generation while the other categories are almost on parity with coal (23.5%), nuclear (19.7%) and renewables (17.9%).  NatGas was believed to have only half the greenhouse gas impact as coal as well. But, when all things are considered, this big advantage of NatGas has evaporated into thin air (vented and flared)!. And methane has soared to all time highs, even during the pandemic slowdown. More people, and more people eating higher on the food chain (cows) is a massive methane producer as well. Now the arctic heat wave(s) are starting to thaw permafrost where huge amounts of methane are sequestered. Ouch! 
    Here’s a great visualization from NASA related to sources of methane and other greenhouse gasses. 
    Value
    of NatGas    ? You ask the wise questions, “Isn’t NatGas valuable? Why would
    any sane person or company, flare it into thin air?” First answer is, No.
    NatGas is not valuable unless you can transport it easily to where it could be processes
    (remove impurities) and consumed. For NatGas, a gas pipeline is pretty much the
    only option. Once NatGas reaches a refinery it can be processed into a liquid form (LNG) and even into gasoline or diesel.  Oil is easier to transport via oil tankers (truck or train or
    barge) or via pipelines. So, in the cases of wet gas, the oil (and other
    particulates) can be pumped and profitably sold if the gas can be flared away. In
    this case, NatGas is a byproduct of oil production. In many cases it cost more
    to try to distribute and process the NatGas then the market value once it
    reaches a distribution center and can be sold.
    The government, Federal and/or State,  could and should regulate flaring. In Texas, the
    railroad authority regulates flaring, and they have never refused a flaring request, even
    when a pipeline is readily available. In Russia and Nigeria, 95% of all NatGas
    has to be recovered, not flared. But the influence (and corruption) in the
    extractive industries results in a free pass for friends and family, and only selective enforcement.
    From space, you can now get beautiful nighttime pictures of
    flaring around the world. Check out
    Geology.com    . Wow! But couldn’t a company can simply vent the methane and,
    although far worse in every way, it might go undetected? Actually, not so much
    any more. Newer satellite imagery can detect the methane in the atmosphere and
    methane plumes from natural (swamps) and unnatural sources. This brings us back
    to Florida.
    Bluefield
    Technologies Inc.     analyzes data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite. See image showing more than 300 metric tons of methane released near Gainesville and spreading through Jacksonville area. 
    There are only a couple possibly leak sources of such a massive amount of methane (or NatGas). No one has owned up to it. No one seems to be busy trying to find the source. This might be a common practice for pipelines or power plants? Even if there are no fines, it would be good to know. Don’t ya know?
    #CleanEnergy #NatGas #Flaring #Fracking #Methane

  • Video on Oil: Supply, Demand, Contango, Sustainability, Future

    Elmer Hall produced a video June 1 2020 related to the Oil Contago in April of 2020: Conundrum Of Oil Contango: Supply n Demand, Sustainability and the Future.

    Much like a race with a distinct start and finish, you can look at oil and the future the same way. Although it might take a little longer than 20+ minutes, and not have a definitive finish-line, the oil play has a future that can not be good for the oil producers. By definition, things that are non-sustainable must end — sooner or later. Gracefully or ungracefully. Elmer Hall does a video about oil. The tragic shutdown of economies has also produced a magical moment for people to observe what the air (and water) might look like if we stopped burning coal and oil. Clean air for cities across the world; for some people, the first time in their life when the air was safely breathable.
    So what did the shutdown do for oil demand, and consequently for the oil supply and demand? Oil, at 100M Barrels per day represents about 4.4% (or $4.5T) of the worlds 2019 GDP. With the collapse of demand and price, that represents only about $1T.
    But the true cost of oil and coal is massively higher than we pay at the meter or the pump. This video discusses the likelihood that things will be different post-COVID. The genie is out of the bottle related to telework; workers who can work remotely will not want to go back to grid traffic commutes. People who have breathed clean air will not want to go back to smog and air quality warnings.
    The Oil contango in the 3rd week of April was a once-in-a-lifetime event where owners of the futures contract (in May) would have to take possession of the oil at the close of the contract that week. But, with the world swimming in oil, there was no place to put the oil. So owners who had to get out of the contract — and no place to store it if they kept the contract — were willing to PAY buyers to take the oil. At the worst point they were willing to pay almost $40 per barrel for anyone who would take the oil off of their hands. The price went from about $60pb in 2019 to a low of -$37 in April 2020.

  • PetroCoins, Oil Sands Extraction and Blockchain.

    Oil sands are seriously back in play with patented technology. Combine that with blockchain tech, and you have an investment that you simply gotta get into, or not!…
    Petrotech Energy Inc. is touting both patents and blockchain in a penny, over-the-counter, stock (PQEFF).
    Well, maybe not investing, but here is a hyped-up “sponsored” Ad that looks slightly like an article over at OilPrice.com: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/This-New-Technology-Could-Transform-The-Oil-Industry1.html
    Two things that are interesting in the penny stock that’s now up to $1.50 level. It has patented tech on oil sands extraction that is a closed loop system that sounds interesting. With the dry sands of Utah it apparently has the ability to extract 99% of the heavy oil and leaves only sand as the byproduct. That is pretty cool because oil sand extraction has historically been a very, very dirty and expansive business. They want to expand their patents to the countries where lots of (dry) oil sands deposits live and make a fortune. Unfortunately, two of the biggest candidates are Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Russia and China — not exactly the worlds heaven of intellectual property (IP) protection countries.
    In fact, the bitcoin IP (ICO) backed by oil reserves by Venezuela in an interesting ploy. We thought the initial coil offering should more aptly be called an IKO, for Initial Kleptocurrency Offering.
    A cybercurrency like bitcoin is, however, an interesting way to do business in any world, especially a kleptocratic country. And blockchain is the underlying transaction technology. So the marriage of blockchain to this company has real merit (they call their technology PetroBLOQ). However, bitcoin and blockchain technology are publicly available — open source — technologies.
    Petrotech says that they can produce oil at $22 per barrel. Maybe even as low as $18. That’s impressive for oil sands. Transportation and the extra costs of processing heavy (“dirty” vs “sweet” West Texas type crude) change that dynamic some; but still impressive.
    What’s somewhat funny is this statement: “It extracts over 99 percent of all hydrocarbons in the sand, generates zero greenhouse gases and doesn’t require high temperatures or pressures.”
    Generates “zero greenhouse gases”? It has to be transported, refined, transported to the pump and then burned in a vehicle where it produces between 19 and 20 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon, depending on the type of gas/diesel.
    Yes, more green than the tar sands of Alberta, but certainly not as green as wind or solar. 
    Look, as well, at the trillions of barrels of oil in sands around the world. Even if we could extract it all and burn it, does not mean we should burn it.
    Check out a sister blog on the scenarios associated with the demise of oil (excluding any discussion about greenhouse gas issues).