Tag Archives: basin

Shell Just Scrapped Its Arctic Drilling Plans for "the Forseeable Future"

by EthelChutqbor Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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And just like that, it was over.

After years of botched attempts, mountains of red tape, billions of dollars, and countless face-offs with protestors, Royal Dutch Shell announced today that it is pulling the plug on all oil and gas exploration in the Arctic ocean “for the forseeable future.” From the press release:

Shell has found indications of oil and gas in the Burger J well, but these are not sufficient to warrant further exploration in the Burger prospect. The well will be sealed and abandoned in accordance with U.S. regulations.

“The Shell Alaska team has operated safely and exceptionally well in every aspect of this year’s exploration program,” said Marvin Odum, Director, Shell Upstream Americas. “Shell continues to see important exploration potential in the basin, and the area is likely to ultimately be of strategic importance to Alaska and the US. However, this is a clearly disappointing exploration outcome for this part of the basin.”

There was always a chance this could happen. Given the sky-high costs of drilling and transporting oil in the Arctic, making the venture profitable required a complex soup of numbers to all fall in Shell’s favor, particularly how much oil there really was down there and how much Shell could expect to sell it for. (No amount of gas would likely be profitable.) The press release skimps on details, but it blames “the Burger J well result, the high costs associated with the project, and the challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska.” It also says that Shell is locked into paying $1.1 billion in existing contracts.

Thanks to climate change and the loss of Arctic sea ice, many energy experts have been increasingly bullish on the prospects for Arctic oil exploration. The area could theoretically have the potential to outstrip the Middle East, but as of now it’s now largely untapped. The decision today is a heavy blow to future offshore drilling projects in the Arctic, said Robert Dillon, spokesperson for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has been one of the biggest congressional proponents of offshore oil drilling.

“It’s certainly a disappointment,” he said. “It’s now becoming more and more questionable whether there’s going to be offshore activity at all. A lot of uncertainty of how we go forward in Alaska.”

The decision was also a major win for environmental groups, many of whom have made Shell’s Arctic exploration a central focus of their campaigns over the last year.

“It’s proof positive that it’s time to stop going to the ends of the Earth to search for dangerous, costly fossil fuels,” said Franz Matzner, director the Beyond Oil initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s not safe, it’s not what the science demands if we’re serious about climate change, and Shell just proved that it doesn’t make any sense.”

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Shell Just Scrapped Its Arctic Drilling Plans for "the Forseeable Future"

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The Often Overlooked Role of Natural Gas in the Israel-Palestine Conflict

by FideliaHupp Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Known oil and gas fields in the Levant Basin US Energy Information Administration/Wikimedia

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Guess what? Almost all the current wars, uprisings, and other conflicts in the Middle East are connected by a single thread, which is also a threat: these conflicts are part of an increasingly frenzied competition to find, extract, and market fossil fuels whose future consumption is guaranteed to lead to a set of cataclysmic environmental crises.

Amid the many fossil-fueled conflicts in the region, one of them, packed with threats, large and small, has been largely overlooked, and Israel is at its epicenter. Its origins can be traced back to the early 1990s when Israeli and Palestinian leaders began sparring over rumored natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza. In the ensuing decades, it has grown into a many-fronted conflict involving several armies and three navies. In the process, it has already inflicted mindboggling misery on tens of thousands of Palestinians, and it threatens to add future layers of misery to the lives of people in Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus. Eventually, it might even immiserate Israelis.

Resource wars are, of course, nothing new. Virtually the entire history of Western colonialism and post-World War II globalization has been animated by the effort to find and market the raw materials needed to build or maintain industrial capitalism. This includes Israel’s expansion into, and appropriation of, Palestinian lands. But fossil fuels only moved to center stage in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the 1990s, and that initially circumscribed conflict only spread to include Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey, and Russia after 2010.

The Poisonous History of Gazan Natural Gas

Back in 1993, when Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) signed the Oslo Accords that were supposed to end the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and create a sovereign state, nobody was thinking much about Gaza’s coastline. As a result, Israel agreed that the newly created PA would fully control its territorial waters, even though the Israeli navy was still patrolling the area. Rumored natural gas deposits there mattered little to anyone, because prices were then so low and supplies so plentiful. No wonder that the Palestinians took their time recruiting British Gas (BG)—a major player in the global natural gas sweepstakes—to find out what was actually there. Only in 2000 did the two parties even sign a modest contract to develop those by-then confirmed fields.

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New York City Is About to Get a Lot Hotter

by MackenzI22 Posted on February 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The New York City Panel on Climate Change has released its latest report, and it’s just the kind of reading to warm those frigid winter bones. By the 2080s there could be an 8.8-degree rise in temperature as well as six heat waves a year, sweltering conditions that scientists say will “increase the number of heat-related deaths that occur in Manhattan.”

Compare those predictions to what’s already occurred and it’s easy to be worried. Mean temperatures in New York rose 3.4 degrees from 1900 to 2013, a slug’s crawl compared to the rate of fossil-fueled scorching predicted for the rest of the century. There were an annual average of two heat waves in the 1980s; dealing with half-a-dozen every year sounds like hell.

And because it’s never too soon to dream of the warm season, the report drops this bomb: “It is more likely than not that the number of the most intense hurricanes will increase in the North Atlantic Basin, along with extreme winds associated with these storms.” (The changing climate’s effects on wintry nor’easters is uncertain, it adds.)

There are plenty of other alarming things to parse in the panel’s report, put together by policymakers and NASA. The space agency has picked out these notes and projections:

“Mean annual precipitation has increased by a total of 8 inches from 1900 to 2013. Future mean annual precipitation is projected to increase 4 to 11 percent by the 2050s and 5 to 13 percent by the 2080s, relative to the 1980s base period.”
“Future mean annual temperatures are projected to increase 4.1 to 5.7 degrees F by the 2050s and 5.3 to 8.8 degrees F by the 2080s, relative to the 1980s base period.”
“Sea levels have risen in New York City 1.1 feet since 1900. That is almost twice the observed global rate of 0.5 to 0.7 inches per decade over a similar time period. Projections for sea level rise in New York City increase from 11 inches to 21 inches by the 2050s, 18 inches to 39 inches by the 2080s, and, 22 inches to 50 inches, with the worst case of up to six feet, by 2100.”

It is “virtually certain” swollen seas will ratchet up the frequency and ferocity of coastal flooding, warns the panel. The New York of 2100 could have double the amount of land vulnerable to historic floods than currently outlined in FEMA’s proposed flood-insurance rate maps. (By 2016, people living within the FEMA zones will be required to buy flood insurance if holding mortgages from government-backed lenders.)

Queens faces the biggest threat from the encroaching seas, and next it’s Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Manhattan. To see if your neighborhood could be gentrified by carp, consult this map showing how far historic (aka 100-year) floods could travel in a high-emissions scenario:

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New York City Is About to Get a Lot Hotter

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Harvard is Buying Up Vineyards in Drought-Ridden California Wine Country

by SteveYFLwoyxqh Posted on January 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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I recently wrote a piece about growing interest in California farmland by massive investment funds. But almonds and other tree nuts, the main focus of my article, aren’t the only commodities drawing interest from the smart-money crowd. From what I can tell, a successful California farmland investment require these two conditions: 1) a sought-after commodity, preferably one with a booming export market; and 2) access to water for irrigation—increasingly important as California’s drought lurches on.

Harvard University’s famed $36 billion endowment fund, the biggest of any US university, has found just such a sw in California’s coastal Paso Robles wine region, north of Los Angeles. Reuters reports that the Harvard fund “has spent more than $60 million to purchase about 10,000 acres in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties since 2012, making it one of the top 20 growers in Paso Robles.”

The move would seem to meet my two conditions swimmingly. US wine exports (90 percent of which originate in California), are booming, up 16.4 percent in 2013, the most recent year with numbers. And as with almonds, US wine exports to China have been surging for years, as this chart I assembled last year with colleagues Jaeah Lee and Alex Park shows. And wines from grapes grown in Paso Robles should have no trouble finding buyers—Wine Enthusiast deemed Paso Robles the 2013 “Wine Region of the Year,” and rival Wine Spectator has declared that it’s “emerging as most dynamic wine region in California.”

As for water, while making its land buys, Harvard’s investment company “acquired rights to drill 16 water wells of between 700 and 900 feet deep, two or three times deeper than the average residential well, according to county records,” Reuters reports. ‘Deeper wells will continue to give them access to water as shallower wells run dry.”

Obtaining those permits turned out to be a great move. Reuters reports that the fund acquired rights to drill seven of those wells on August 21, 2013, while “local lawmakers were trying to figure out how to deal with the worsening water shortage” in the region. Soon after the Harvard fund got its pumping permits, the county placed a “ban on new pumping from the hardest-hit part of the basin,” Reuters reports.

Reuters adds that “no environmental advocacy group has accused Brodiaea a Harvard-owned investment firm of trying to profit from the drought.”

In an item last year, the veteran analyst Michael Fritz of the Farmland Investor Center noted the timing of Harvard’s move:

Some market observers have wondered if Brodiaea was a well-timed water play in light of the region’s worsening groundwater shortage. Last August, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors adopted an “urgency” ordinance that prohibits any new development or new irrigated crop production unless the water it uses is offset by an equal amount of conservation. Water levels in the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin have fallen sharply in recent years—two to six feet a year in some areas—causing wells to go dry and forcing many vineyards and rural residents to drill deeper wells, according to local accounts.

Fritz adds that a local investor involved with managing the Harvard wine project told him that “the timing of Brodiaea’s irrigated land purchases in San Luis Obispo County and the subsequent moratorium on new irrigation development was ‘pure coincidence.’”

California isn’t the only region upon which Harvard is placing farmland investment bets, Fritz reported. The fund also has such investments in New Zealand, Romania, Latvia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Panamá, Fritz notes.

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Harvard is Buying Up Vineyards in Drought-Ridden California Wine Country

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Seas are rising in weird, new ways

by NevilleUIGA Posted on December 1, 2014

on the level

Seas are rising in weird, new ways

By on 1 Dec 2014commentsShare

Here’s a fun fact about “sea-level rise”: The seas aren’t actually level to begin with. Because of predictable, long-term patterns in climate, global winds push more water into some oceans than others. This leaves the seven seas (not really a thing) divided into six “basins” (actually a thing). Water in these interconnected systems can slosh around to different areas while the overall volume stays the same — much like water in a bathtub.

Or so we thought!

Last month in the super-sexy-sounding journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists published research suggesting that changes to the Earth’s climate are driving changes in the way sea level rises in some of these ocean basins. Historically, the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere operate as a closed system, with an inverse relationship between the Indian and South Pacific basin and the South Atlantic basin: When one goes up, the other must come down. Using satellite measurements of sea level to track the flux in level, the researchers were surprised to find that, starting in the late ’90s, both basins began to rise in unison.

This is a map of the ocean basins — those big blue and purple blotches at the bottom of the map have been behaving strangely, thanks to climate change. Click to embiggen. Philip R. Thompson and Mark A. Merrifield

The total increase in this basin is about 2 millimeters a year — for you Americans, that adds up to a little more than an inch since 2000. It’s not weird that the oceans are rising, obviously, but it is strange to see such a distinct shift in the way they rise. The scientists trace this weirdness back to changes in the east-west wind patterns — changes for which they have several hypotheses, all of them linked to climate change.

Meanwhile, the other oceans seem to be behaving normally. Though let’s be clear: By “behaving normally,” we mean “rising in predictably terrifying ways as opposed to new weirdly terrifying ways.”

Source:
Science Graphic of the Week: Rising Sea Levels Show Strange Patterns

, Wired.

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Frackers are flooding the atmosphere with climate-warming methane

by Ludmillamet Posted on May 12, 2014

Pee-ew!

Frackers are flooding the atmosphere with climate-warming methane

By

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The free pass that frackers and natural-gas handlers have gotten on their climate-changing methane emissions is really starting to stink to high hell.

We told you in February about the results of a meta-analysis of 20 years worth of scientific studies, which concluded that the EPA underestimates the natural-gas industry’s climate impacts by 25 to 75 percent, due to methane leakage from its gas drilling operations and pipelines. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a potent greenhouse gas.

Two scientific studies published in the past month reveal that the problem is far worse than that.

For a paper published last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, researchers flew aircraft over a heavily fracked region in northeastern Colorado and took air samples. After accounting for pollution produced by landfills, water treatment, and cattle operations, the scientists concluded that emissions from drilling operations were “close to three times higher than an hourly emission estimate” published by the EPA.

Not only that, but cancer-causing benzene emissions were found to be seven times higher than the EPA’s estimates, while emissions of some smog-forming chemicals were found to be double the EPA’s estimates.

“These discrepancies are substantial,” said NOAA researcher Gabrielle Petron, one of the authors of the paper. “Emission estimates or ‘inventories’ are the primary tool that policy makers and regulators use to evaluate air quality and climate impacts.”

The findings from Colorado were published less than a month after the results of similar research from Pennsylvania, at the heavily fracked Marcellus Shale formation, were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here’s how the L.A. Times summed up those findings at the time:

Researchers flew their plane about a kilometer above a 2,800 square kilometer area in southwestern Pennsylvania that included several active natural gas wells. Over a two-day period in June 2012, they detected 2 grams to 14 grams of methane per second per square kilometer over the entire area. The EPA’s estimate for the area is 2.3 grams to 4.6 grams of methane per second per square kilometer.

Since their upper-end measurements were so much higher than the EPA’s estimates, the researchers attempted to follow the methane plumes back to their sources, said Paul Shepson, an atmospheric chemist at Purdue University who helped lead the study. In some cases, they were able to quantify emissions from individual wells.

The Obama administration recently started — belatedly – trying to figure out how to rein in methane emissions. Meanwhile, Colorado and other states have introduced rules designed to clamp down on methane pollution.

These two new studies help reveal just how much hard work lies ahead — and how under-regulated the natural gas industry has been so far.


Source
A new look at methane and non-methane hydrocarbon emissions from oil and natural gas operations in the Colorado Denver-Julesburg Basin, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
Airborne measurements confirm leaks from oil and gas operations, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences
EPA drastically underestimates methane released at drilling sites, Los Angeles Times
Toward a better understanding and quantification of methane emissions from shale gas development, PNAS

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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First oil shale mine in U.S. is coming to Utah

by abram Posted on December 24, 2013

First oil shale mine in U.S. is coming to Utah

By

Jim Davis / Utah Geological Survey

Utah’s Uinta Basin

before

shale mining begins.

As if we didn’t already have enough filthy, inefficient, unconventional oil-extraction techniques in use in North America, here’s one more: oil shale mining.

A Utah company has received the go-ahead from the state’s water-quality department to begin operating the first commercial oil shale mine in North America.

Oil shale is not to be confused with shale oil, or shale gas, or oil sands. So what the hell is it? “Contrary to its name,” explains Western Resource Advocates, “oil shale contains no petroleum but is instead a dense rock that has a waxy substance called kerogen tightly bound within it. When kerogen is heated to high temperatures, it liquefies, producing compounds that can eventually be refined into synthetic petroleum products.”

Companies have mulled oil shale mining in the Mountain States for more than a century, but previous efforts have foundered as energy prices have been too low to justify the large expense associated with the complicated extraction process. Now Red Leaf Resources is ready to give oil shale another crack. Here’s more from The Salt Lake Tribune:

Regulators on Friday issued a groundwater permit to Red Leaf Resources, a Utah company planning to develop a shale mine and below-grade ovens to heat ore mined from state land in the Uinta Basin. …

Kerogen-bearing shale exists in vast abundance under Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, but no one has figured out how to extract oil from it in commercial amounts. With 600 million barrels available under its Utah leasehold, Red Leaf hopes to be the first.

Its initial, small-scale demonstration project “will produce more than 300,000 barrels of oil and prove our clean oil shale technology works on a large scale,” said CEO Adolph Lechtenberger in a news release. …

In Red Leaf’s trademarked EcoShale process, operators dig pits lined with bentonite and clay, fill them with ore and heat it to 725 degrees for a few months.

In-situ, high-temperature petroleum refining in stunning Utah landscapes sounds like a dreadful idea. But water quality regulators say there isn’t enough water in the parched area to give them any cause to worry. “We based our permit decision on the absence of water in the extraction process, the lack of an aquifer and low permeability of the rocks underlying the test site,” one official told the newspaper.

Environmentalists, however, are freaking out. “They take the skin off the planet and are not putting it back,” said John Weisheit of the group Living Rivers. “They are destroying the watershed, the near-surface aquifers.” His group has gone to court to hold up approvals of plans to mine tar-sands oil nearby, but hasn’t been able to block this oil shale project.

We’ll be sure to let you know when this all goes to shit.


Source
Utah OKs nation’s first commercial oil shale mine, The Salt Lake Tribune

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Coal shoulder: BLM sells controversial coal mining lease, but no one’s buying

by fji5enf2 Posted on August 22, 2013

Coal shoulder: BLM sells controversial coal mining lease, but no one’s buying

By Claire Thompson

Kimon Berlin

Wyoming has enough coal trains for now.

Today the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming held a sale for the lease of 148 million tons of coal on public land in the Powder River Basin — and received not  a single bid, a first in the state BLM’s history.

The sale was the first of two that the BLM had planned in the area over the next month, which combined would pave the way for the extraction of 316 million tons of Powder River Basin coal. Cloud Peak Energy had asked the BLM back in 2006 to open the site of today’s lease to mining, presumably to expand on its adjacent Cloud Peak mine. But today, the energy company decided it wouldn’t bid, and no one else stepped up (federal coal leases frequently see only one bidder). Here’s Cloud Peak CEO Colin Marshall in the company’s press release:

We carefully evaluated the estimated economics of this LBA [lease by application] in light of current market conditions and the uncertainty caused by the current political and regulatory environment towards coal and coal-powered generation and ultimately decided it was prudent not to bid at this time. … [W]e believe a significant portion of the BLM’s estimated mineable tons would not be recoverable by us if we were to be the winning bidder in the BLM’s competitive process. In combination with prevailing 8400 Btu market prices and projected costs of mining the remaining coal, we were unable to construct an economic bid for this tract at this time.

In other words, coal in this country is getting more difficult and costly to mine, domestic demand is falling, and Obama has directed EPA to crack down on emissions from coal-fired power plants. Even the coal industry’s hail-mary plan to stay profitable by pushing exports to Asia faces setbacks. We agree with Cloud Peak that starting up a whole new coal-mining operation is probably not prudent at this point.

The BLM’s coal-leasing process is already rife with problems: In June, an Interior Department inspector general’s report found that the BLM routinely underestimates the value of federal coal leases, failing to take into account the more lucrative Asian market. Taxpayers lose out on tens of millions as a result. But this time, even that hefty discount wasn’t enough to get Cloud Peak to bid.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Gas prices are spiking, and it’s not clear why

by Obeey99 Posted on February 21, 2013

Gas prices are spiking, and it’s not clear why

By Philip Bump

Here’s what gas prices have done over the last month:

GasBuddy

This isn’t an unprecedented rise; prices went up last February, too.

GasBuddy

What’s odd, though, is that the recent rise isn’t tied to rising crude oil prices, the traditional reason prices fluctuate.

GasBuddy

So what’s happening? The Washington Post dug into it, noting concerns over Middle East stability, lower production by OPEC, and the continuing high price of oil — though crude prices dropped significantly yesterday.

One key factor is limited refinery capacity.

[S]ome analysts … pointed to refinery issues. Several refineries have been shut down for routine maintenance, and in the eastern United States, several refineries simply went out of business in the past year.

“Atlantic Basin capacity closures have improved refining fundamentals,” the nation’s biggest refiner, Valero, said in a slide presentation at a Credit Suisse conference this month. It estimated that refineries have closed nearly 1 million barrels a day of capacity on the East Coast or in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the past two years, which Valero said allowed it to increase profit margins.

Refinery constraints were a key factor in California’s huge gas price spike last summer. Let’s go back to the law of supply and demand. Less supply means increased demand, which means more profits. Valero’s suggestion that reducing refinery capacity increased profit margins falls squarely in line with that: Less crude oil refined into gasoline means less gasoline, which means a higher price per gallon. Granted, these refineries didn’t all close this month, but combined with other factors, the closures appear to be playing a role — and may help explain why the price of gas is going up independent of the price of crude oil.

Let that be consolation to you next time you go to fill up. It’s just basic supply and demand, manipulated by oil companies. As it always has and always will, the system works.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Have coal companies been ripping Americans off even more than we already knew?

by 7GrittonMaine146 Posted on February 8, 2013

Have coal companies been ripping Americans off even more than we already knew?

By Philip Bump

The coal industry, for as much as it whines and frets and fake-cries about how oppressive the government is, gets a pretty sweet deal. We’ve noted before than companies pay 25 cents a ton for coal from public lands and then can turn around and sell it for $35 a ton. (We’ve also mentioned that they often sell that coal to China, meaning we’re subsidizing the world’s largest consumer of coal, but that’s a whole other issue.)

This was reported as eight pounds of coal, probably.

What makes this so much more galling is that the weepy coal companies might not even be paying for all of the coal they’re extracting. From The Hill:

Interior is looking into whether mining firms lowball the value of coal excavated from federal lands to minimize the fees they pay the government. …

Reuters said mining companies are underreporting the price of coal at mine sites — where royalties are assessed — then selling it to marketers that they often times own. Reuters said those intermediaries then ship the coal abroad, where they fetch higher prices.

[Sen. Ron Wyden (R-Ore.)] and Energy Committee ranking member Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) had asked [Interior Secretary Ken] Salazar to examine those charges in a January letter. They said the government could ill afford to lose out on any revenues, noting coal royalties amounted to $898 million in 2011.

The National Mining Association suggests that the Reuters report was inaccurate. Of course, the NMA also went out of its way to propagate the “war on coal” nonsense, so it can be ignored.

As part of its investigation, Interior will review a decade of coal sales, largely from the Powder River Basin region in Wyoming and Montana that provides much of the coal exported to Asia. The department is also considering a new system that would assess a royalty on coal companies’ proceeds rather than tons of coal mined.

Or, to crib from bad parents from the 1950s: Coal companies, we’ll give you something to cry about.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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