Keystone XL pipeline decision delayed until at least June
The Obama Administration's decision to delay recommendations on the Keystone XL pipeline until at least June is good news for many reasons. Delay is the albatross around Canadian Tar Sands oil's neck as they increasingly run into impediments to getting their highly controversial tar sands oil to global markets.
The Obama administration's decision on the Keystone XL oil pipeline will not be made until at least June, a U.S. official said, which would delay the project for months and frustrate backers of Canada's oil sands.
"We're talking the beginning of summer at the earliest," said the source, who did not want to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the TransCanada Corp project, which has been pending for more than four and a half years. "It's not weeks until the final decision. It's months."
The delay is having the effect of discounting prices for the oil due to insufficient distribution.
The delay is painful in Canada which is suffering persistent, discounted prices for its oil because of tight pipeline capacity. The premier of the Western Canadian province of Alberta warned last week that it faced a $6 billion revenue shortfall due to current pipeline constraints.
Another route being pursued for distribution of the tar sands oil is the huge Asia market. That is being stalled by the entrenched opposition to the Northern Gateway Pipeline; the only viable route from Alberta to the Pacific Ocean North American ports.
Any distribution of the Alberta Tar Sands oil to the EU has been thwarted by the European Commission to label the Tar Sands oil as highly polluting and bound by it's environmental rules.
The stalled decision in the US is starting to look like good environmental and political judgement by the Obama Administration. It gives us more time to build an even greater visible opposition to the XL pipeline.
As a longtime oil [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/oil-petroleum-and-gasoline/index.html ] and gas engineer who helped develop shale fracking techniques for the Energy Department, I can assure you that this gas is not “clean.” Because of leaks of methane, the main component of natural gas, the gas extracted from shale deposits is not a “bridge” to a renewable energy future — it’s a gangplank to more warming and away from clean energy investments.
Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it doesn’t last nearly as long in the atmosphere. Still, over a 20-year period, one pound of it traps as much heat as at least 72 pounds of carbon dioxide. Its potency declines, but even after a century, it is at least 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. When burned, natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, but methane leakage eviscerates this advantage because of its heat-trapping power.
And methane is leaking, though there is significant uncertainty over the rate. But recent measurements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at gas and oil fields in California, Colorado and Utah found leakage rates of 2.3 percent to 17 percent of annual production, in the range my colleagues at Cornell and I predicted [ http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10584-011-0061-5.pdf ] some years ago. This is the gas that is released into the atmosphere unburned as part of the hydraulic fracturing process, and also from pipelines, compressors and processing units. Those findings raise questions about what is happening elsewhere. The Environmental Protection Agency has issued new rules to reduce these emissions, but the rules don’t take effect until 2015, and apply only to new wells.
A 2011 study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that unless leaks can be kept below 2 percent, gas lacks any climate advantage over coal. And a study [ http://assets.climatecentral.org/pdfs/NaturalGas-and-ClimateChange.pdf ] released this May by Climate Central, a group of scientists and journalists studying climate change, concluded that the 50 percent climate advantage of natural gas over coal is unlikely to be achieved over the next three to four decades. Unfortunately, we don’t have that long to address climate change — the next two decades are crucial.
To its credit, the president’s plan recognizes that “curbing emissions of methane is critical.” However, the release of unburned gas in the production process is not the only problem. Gas and oil wells that lose their structural integrity also leak methane and other contaminants outside their casings and into the atmosphere and water wells. Multiple industry [ http://www.slb.com/ ; http://www.slb.com/search.aspx?q=wellbore%20leakage ] studies [ http://www.spe.org/ejournals/jsp/journalapp.jsp?pageType=Preview&jid=EDC&mid=SPE-106817-PA ] show that about 5 percent of all oil and gas wells leak immediately because of integrity issues, with increasing rates of leakage over time. With hundreds of thousands of new wells expected, this problem is neither negligible nor preventable with current technology.
Why do so many wells leak this way? Pressures under the earth, temperature changes, ground movement from the drilling of nearby wells and shrinkage crack and damage the thin layer of brittle cement that is supposed to seal the wells. And getting the cement perfect as the drilling goes horizontally into shale is extremely challenging. Once the cement is damaged, repairing it thousands of feet underground is expensive and often unsuccessful. The gas and oil industries have been trying to solve this problem for decades.
The scientific community has been waiting for better data from the E.P.A. to assess the extent of the water contamination problem. That is why it is so discouraging that, in the face of industry complaints, the E.P.A. reportedly has closed or backed away from several investigations into the problem. Perhaps a full E.P.A. study of hydraulic fracturing and drinking water, due in 2014, will be more forthcoming. In addition, drafts of an Energy Department study suggest that there are huge problems finding enough water for fracturing future wells. The president should not include this technology in his energy policy until these studies are complete.
We have renewable wind, water, solar and energy-efficiency technology options now. We can scale these quickly and affordably, creating economic growth, jobs and a truly clean energy future to address climate change. Political will is the missing ingredient. Meaningful carbon reduction is impossible so long as the fossil fuel industry is allowed so much influence over our energy policies and regulatory agencies. Policy makers need to listen to the voices of independent scientists while there is still time.
You’ll find it below. But first here’s a little context. In a visit to Cornell last fall to give a lecture on energy and climate [ http://www.cornell.edu/video/andrew-revkin-important-science-in-an-urgent-age ], I spent time with both researchers, along with several other scientists there focused on aspects of gas drilling and methane’s environmental impacts. It was clear that there was a very wide range of views — particularly on the impact of gas leakage on climate [ http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/?s=howarth+cathles+greenhouse+cornell ] — that resulted largely from different interpretations of the same data.
I don’t recall hearing anyone discount the importance of cutting gas leakage from wells, pipelines and other gas (and oil and coal) operations. That’s been a prime interest of mine since 2009 [ http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/a-greenhouse-gas-thats-already-a-commodity/ ]. But it’s important for the public to know what is, and isn’t, firmly established to make wise decisions on relevant policies.
Read on for Derry’s piece, which includes some technical terms that I’ll explain in brackets (For starters, CH4 is methane, the main constituent of the fuel we know as natural gas, and of course CO2 is carbon dioxide).
an attendee yelled (watch the video at the preceding link to see how this moment played out; Baldwin clearly won the day, as Randy Olson wrote in a fun “review [ http://thebenshi.com/?p=4353 ].”)
Please read Derry’s piece below, and Ingraffea’s, and see if they clarify your thinking on natural gas and other energy options in the context of global warming:
The Op-Ed piece [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/opinion/gangplank-to-a-warm-future.html (above)] by my colleague Tony Ingraffea again raises the issue of how much (if any) climate benefit may be obtained by shifting to natural gas and away from coal as an electrical power source. A simple top-down analysis, based on global scale changes in carbon dioxide and methane, provides some insight into the potential impact of U.S. shale gas production and displacement of coal on global climate.
U.S. shale gas production began to ramp up around 2007 (the earliest data available from the Energy Information Administration), increasing from 1.99 trillion cubic feet to 8.50 trillion from 2007 to 2011 (latest data available from the agency). The global atmospheric methane value (from the Mauna Loa Observatory) increased from 1796 to 1836 parts per billion (volume) over the same interval. Let’s assume a 3 percent leak rate during shale gas production. Then U.S. shale gas production could account for about 12 percent of the global methane increase over that time (it scales at approximately 4 percent of global increase per 1 percent leak rate). The actual leak rate is poorly known, but in any reasonable case U.S. shale gas production is a small, but not trivial, contributor to the global methane increase over the last several years.
More than 80 percent (perhaps more than 90 percent) of the increase in methane must come from other sources. What are the climate impacts of this increase? Using standard expressions for calculating the approximate change in radiative forcing resulting from the increase in different greenhouse gas concentrations (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Annual Greenhouse Gas Index [ http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/ ]), we can compare the climate impact of increasing CO2 and CH4. [Radiative forcing is the amount of imbalance between energy reaching the Earth and radiating into space [ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/explained-radforce-0309.html ].]
Over the same 2007-2011 interval, the calculated increase in forcing from methane is 0.008 watts per square meter. In comparison, the increase in forcing from carbon dioxide is 0.107 watts per square meter, or a factor of 13 greater.
Even if one accepts the estimates advocated by some of a higher “global warming potential” for methane by a factor of approximately three, the increase in climate forcing by methane is significantly smaller than for carbon dioxide. [Global warming potential is a measure of the comparative capacity of various gases to trap heat [ http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-10.html ].]
Using the more standard approach as proposed by the I.P.C.C., the increased 2007-2011 climate forcing from methane is less than 8 percent of the increase in CO2 forcing. Of that 8 percent, only about 1 percent can be related to U.S. shale gas production.
Although some of the numbers remain uncertain, the basic result is robust. Methane, and in particular shale gas methane, is not a major contributor to climate change.
Further, as is well established, CO2 has a much longer lifetime in the environment than does CH4, and will have climate impacts over a much longer time scale. The 800-pound climate gorilla has been, and remains, carbon dioxide.
For me, the picture is pretty clear. Displacing coal emissions with gas emissions is beneficial from a climate standpoint. Total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 2.6 percent from 2010 to 2011, for example, and part of that decrease is the result of fuel switching. Gas is without any question advantageous from a standpoint of the other environmental damage caused by coal emissions, including heavy metals like mercury, cadmium, uranium and lead, particulates, and sulfur dioxide. However, it should also be very clear that gas production has both local environmental costs and contributes to climate change. Demonstrating that the overall environmental damage is less than that from coal does not imply that gas production and use is cost-free, and the sooner we reduce our dependence on fossil fuel sources of energy of all kinds the better. Coal is worse — that doesn’t mean that gas is great.
Methane leakage rates can and probably will be lowered substantially in the future. One study [ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/04/02/1202407109.abstract ] found that 70 percent of total leakage from 250 wells in Fort Worth, Texas, was occurring at only 10 percent of the wells, suggesting significant potential for low-cost, high-impact intervention. And a recent report [ http://www.wri.org/publication/clearing-the-air ] from the World Resources Institute identifies several promising options for further limiting fugitive methane emissions.
Moreover, even if methane leakage were to remain modest in some areas, long-term climate models suggest that warming trends have less to do with the rate of methane leakage and more to do with other variables, such as the thermal efficiency of future coal plants and whether the switch to gas is permanent or a bridge to zero-carbon energy [ http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/coal-killer ]. Thus, although fugitive methane emissions reduce the short-term emissions benefit of coal-to-gas switching – and should be addressed for that reason – they do not limit natural gas’s potential as a bridge fuel to a low carbon future.
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