Tag Archives: business & technology

By 2017, the world will be burning enough coal for another U.S. and Russia

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 18, 2012

By 2017, the world will be burning enough coal for another U.S. and Russia

By Philip Bump

Shutterstock

Extremely good news for the world: Over the next five years, oil will fall from the top spot as a source of energy.

Extremely bad news for the world: Coal will replace it.

From The Guardian:

Coal consumption is increasing all over the world — even in countries and regions with carbon-cutting targets — except the US, where shale gas has displaced coal, shows new research from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The decline of the fuel in the US has helped to cut prices for coal globally, which has made it more attractive, even in Europe where coal use was supposed to be discouraged by the emissions trading scheme. …

According to the IEA, demand from China and India will drive world coal use in the coming five years, with India on course to overtake the US as the world’s second biggest consumer. China is the biggest coal importer, and Indonesia the biggest exporter, having temporarily overtaken Australia.

According to the IEA’s Medium Term Coal Market Report, published on Tuesday morning, the world will burn 1.2bn more tonnes of coal per year by 2017 compared with today — the equivalent of the current coal consumption of Russia and the US combined. Global coal consumption is forecast to reach 4.3bn tonnes of oil equivalent by 2017, while oil consumption is forecast to reach 4.4bn tonnes by the same date.

The calculus, in brief: The U.S.’s natural gas boom has dropped demand for coal, making U.S. coal cheaper. That cheaper U.S. coal helps drive down costs for the fuel internationally, where it’s already cheap and accessible. So in five years’ time, we’ll be burning as much coal as we do now, plus the amount of coal currently consumed by another Russia and another United States.

Last year, global demand for coal rose 4.3 percent. It’s expected to keep growing until it hits the figures above. A short ton of coal produces 2.86 short tons of carbon dioxide. So the additional 1.2 billion tons of coal we’ll be burning each year means 3.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide produced on top of what we’re producing right now — getting us ever closer to the magic too-late number on carbon pollution.

The IEA report does have some good news. In the U.S., coal production is expected to plummet. And Europe, temporarily crazy for coal, will recover from that psychosis as natural gas prices and coal prices even out and the continent relies more heavily on renewables. But that’s about it. Australia and Indonesia will export more. India will become a dominant force in coal markets.

But the grimmest note is the one the IEA leaves us with:

In the pipeline are almost 300 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of terminal capacity and the 150 mtpa (probable) to 600 mtpa (potential) of mine expansion capacity, more than enough to meet coal demand in a secure way over the outlook period.

For all of the coal that the world’s going to want to burn, there’s more than enough to supply it. Dig it up, light it on fire, watch the smoke rise into the sky.

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

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

View post: 

By 2017, the world will be burning enough coal for another U.S. and Russia

Posted in GE, LG, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on By 2017, the world will be burning enough coal for another U.S. and Russia

Will the FDA keep hiding most data on farm antibiotic use?

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 18, 2012

Will the FDA keep hiding most data on farm antibiotic use?

By Susie Cagle

Livestock antibiotics may beef up our meat, but they may also create drug-resistant bugs that could one day kill us. Unfortunately, the FDA doesn’t want to tell us what it knows about how much antibiotic use is happening on American farms.

Animal Equality

Antibiotics bottles on a pig farm.

Tomorrow, the FDA will hold two public meetings on reauthorization of the Animal Drug User Fee Act, which is due to happen in 2013. One question up for discussion: how much antibiotic info should be publicly released under the act. First passed in 2003, ADUFA took money from frustrated drug companies that wanted to speed up their review process and gave it to the feds to hire more reviewers. (Hiring federal drug reviewers with big drug dollars — not sketchy at all!) The 2008 reauthorization of the act added a provision requiring the FDA to release compiled data on livestock drug use. But this is hardly an open government effort, as Maryn McKenna writes at Wired.

[I]n each year, the FDA released only summed amounts, in kilograms, of all the drugs sold, by all the companies, for all livestock species, across all agricultural uses: growth promoters, prevention, and treatment.

The veterinary pharma companies are not getting together, adding up their sales by drug class for the entire year, and delivering the totals to the FDA. The companies report to the agency individually; they report their data by month, not year; and they report how the drugs are administered, in feed, in water, or by injection.

The FDA receives all this data but is not releasing it, presumably for reasons having to do with its initial ADUFA negotiations with agriculture.

The FDA has already compiled some recommendations for the reauthorization. McKenna:

The recommendations do include a number of things that the agency agrees to change on behalf of veterinary-antibiotic manufacturers, such as agreeing to shorter review times for drug applications, and other “enhancements” of its performance. But there is no sign it has responded to any of the requests made by organizations concerned about the off-farm, downstream, human health effects which occur when those antibiotics are used.

If the FDA doesn’t want to take the public’s comments seriously, it might have to taste the public’s wrath. Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Project filed a lawsuit against the FDA for withholding the animal drug data, despite Freedom of Information Act requests. The FDA claims it’s protecting “confidential commercial information,” a.k.a. trade secrets, which kind of tells us everything we need to know about ADUFA in a nutshell gelatin capsule.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Food

,

Politics

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Original article: 

Will the FDA keep hiding most data on farm antibiotic use?

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Will the FDA keep hiding most data on farm antibiotic use?

Reliance on coal forces another company into bankruptcy

by Myrna Posted on December 17, 2012

Reliance on coal forces another company into bankruptcy

By Philip Bump

vxla

Midwest Generation’s Fisk plant in Chicago.

Oh, is it Monday? Ah. Well, then, there must have been another coal-reliant company filing for bankruptcy. Let’s see … yup, here it is.

The parent company of Midwest Generation, owner of some of Illinois’ dirtiest coal plants, has (as predicted) filed for bankruptcy protection. From Reuters:

Edison Mission Energy, a power company that operates in Illinois and several other U.S. states, has filed for Chapter 11 banktruptcy protection as it tries to restructure about $5 billion in debt. …

Edison Mission Energy has suffered as the 2008 recession cut power demand. Wholesale power prices have also fallen with cheaper natural gas, making it harder for Edison’s coal-fired plants to remain competitive.

If this surprises you: Welcome to Gristmill! Clearly it’s your first time here.

But it never hurts to offer a recap.

Below, you can see what electricity generation in the United States has looked like over the past decade. That dip in 2009, one of the two bankruptcy factors cited above, may not look like much, but it was a decrease in production of 4 percent — a massive drop.

It’s that transition away from coal, though, that is the more obvious shift. Here’s the percentage of electricity generated by coal versus natural gas, year-over-year.

Not included: 2012, when natural gas briefly matched coal’s output percentage.

Fans of coal (all of whom work for the coal industry or the Republican party) suggest that it is government regulation that’s spurring coal’s decline. It isn’t. I mean, the EPA’s standard limiting soot only came out on Friday.

What’s killing coal — and companies like Patriot Coal and Edison Mission — is the market, a market that for years was weighted heavily to coal’s benefit.

There is good news for Edison Mission. In a few years, it will be just one of many coal-reliant companies that closed its doors. Hardly exceptional at all.

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

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Original article – 

Reliance on coal forces another company into bankruptcy

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Reliance on coal forces another company into bankruptcy

Judge reverses course, lets Keystone XL construction continue

by Myrna Posted on December 14, 2012

Judge reverses course, lets Keystone XL construction continue

By Susie Cagle

Keystone XL pipeline injunction, we hardly knew ye.

MCLA

Yesterday, the Texas judge who ordered TransCanada to stop work on Keystone XL pipeline construction in East Texas lifted the injunction. The Los Angeles Times reports:

[Texas County Court Judge Jack] Sinz had signed the temporary restraining order, which took effect Tuesday, after finding sufficient cause to stop work on the pipeline for two weeks. But he changed his mind after hearing from TransCanada’s attorneys, who argued that [plaintiff Michael] Bishop understood what he was doing when he signed off on an easement agreement [permitting pipeline construction on his land] with the company three weeks ago.

“TransCanada has been open, honest and transparent with Mr. Bishop at all times. We recognize that not everyone will support the construction of a pipeline or other facilities, but we work hard to reach voluntary agreements and maintain good relationships with landowners,” Shawn Howard, a TransCanada spokesman, said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “If we didn’t have a good relationship with more than 60,000 landowners across our energy infrastructure network, we wouldn’t be in business.”

Howard added: “Since Mr. Bishop signed his agreement with TransCanada, nothing about the pipeline or the product it will carry has changed. While professional activists and others have made the same claims Mr. Bishop did today, oil is oil.”

Oil is oil: This was precisely the logic Judge Sinz had initially rejected. And on the heels of the initial injunction, the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial to the effect of: Uh no it’s not.

At the heart of Bishop’s case is the fact that although TransCanada considers bitumen and crude oil to be essentially the same, the IRS disagrees. In fact, it exempts companies that transport bitumen derived from tar sands from an 8-cents-a-barrel tax levied on transporters of crude. TransCanada can’t reasonably claim this tax exemption while pretending it’s moving crude oil. More important, we’d like to see the State Department, which is conducting an environmental study of the northern portion of the Keystone XL route, include some analysis of any heightened risks posed by transporting dilbit.

Bishop was undeterred but perhaps sobered — there were no righteous gonna-make-’em-hurt quotes this time out of the former Marine.

“I’m disappointed, but by the same token a lot of ground was gained today,” Bishop told The Times, adding that the lawsuit drew public attention to the pipeline project.

Bishop is right, though — not all is lost in his case just yet. Next Wednesday, Bishop and TransCanada will have their day in court again before Judge Sinz, who could decide to issue another injunction.

Next Wednesday both sides are scheduled to return to the Nacogdoches courthouse for a hearing before Judge Sinz. TransCanada will argue that Bishop should abide by the easement agreement, Howard said. Bishop will argue once more for an injunction to halt construction.

“If I stop them on my property, other landowners are going to sit up and take notice. I look for landowners to start rebelling,” Bishop said.

Bishop may be looking, but will he find them? Some Texas landowners have stood up against the pipeline, while others have also thrown up their hands in defeat.

But while the fight muddles along in the courts, it’s still raging in the trees. Blockading activists show no sign of abandoning their posts, and will only grow their numbers following a training camp in early January.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

More:  

Judge reverses course, lets Keystone XL construction continue

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Judge reverses course, lets Keystone XL construction continue

Tiny twisters could power your town — someday

by Myrna Posted on December 14, 2012

Tiny twisters could power your town — someday

By Susie Cagle

You thought you were cool with your wind turbines, hippies? Canadian inventor Louis Michaud sees your wind turbines and raises you a freaking tornado.

m_bridi

Yes, climate change may be unleashing monster tornadoes upon us now, but those aren’t the tornadoes Michaud wants to “control and exploit.” Today the inventor won a grant through the Thiel Foundation’s “revolutionary” Breakout Labs to develop power-generating twisters.

The Toronto Star reports:

[B]y today’s measure, Michaud’s idea is the definition of radical. Through his company AVEtec — the AVE standing for “atmospheric vortex engine” — the long-term plan is to take waste heat from a thermal power plant or industrial facility and use it to create a controllable twister that can generate electricity.

Here’s how it works: Waste heat is blown at an angle into a large circular structure, creating a flow of spinning hot air. We all know heat travels upward and as it does it spins itself into a rising vortex.

The higher the twister grows, the greater the temperature differential between top and bottom, creating stronger and stronger convective forces that act like fuel for the vortex, eventually allowing it to take on a life of its own.

The result is that hot air initially blown into the bottom of the structure starts getting sucked in so forcefully that it spins electricity-generating turbines installed at the base …

Given the destructive history of naturally formed tornadoes, many people might be freaked out by the thought of having man-made tornadoes intentionally scattered near cities and power plants.

Michaud assured that his twisters are much safer to operate and control than, say, a nuclear plant. And because they’re fuelled by the waste heat that’s initially supplied, all the operator has to do is throttle back or cut off that heat to weaken or stop the vortex.

True to its self-proclaimed radical spirit, Breakout Labs has also backed meat and leather 3D printing from Modern Meadow. Essentially it funds magic.

So hey, is anyone out there working on a protective forcefield for cyclists …?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

View post:  

Tiny twisters could power your town — someday

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Tiny twisters could power your town — someday

As deadline for saving wind industry nears, wind advocates fold

by Myrna Posted on December 13, 2012

As deadline for saving wind industry nears, wind advocates fold

By Philip Bump

I’ve just returned from an expedition to the Yucatan Peninsula to see for myself. And I can confirm: The Mayan prediction of the end of the world is real and the threat is imminent. Two minor caveats, though. The first is that the key date isn’t Dec. 21, it’s Dec. 31. And the second is that all of civilization isn’t at risk — just the U.S. wind industry. So that’s kind of good news, I guess.

What’s putting the wind industry at risk, as you may remember and as the Mayans savvily predicted, is the expiration of the wind production tax credit, an incentive given to electricity producers to use wind energy. It’s a key prop for the industry, allowing it to compete in a sector heavily biased toward long-standing fossil-fuel-based systems. First introduced under President George H. W. Bush, the credit (and other similar renewable credits) has been regularly renewed since. With the production tax credit in place, wind has seen growth. Without it?

ThinkProgress

If not renewed, industry advocacy group the American Wind Energy Association predicts the loss of 37,000 jobs — and perhaps a complete collapse in new wind installations.

Over the course of the summer, the future of the wind PTC was uncertain. In June, even conservative stalwarts like Karl Rove came out in support of extending it. But in September, Mitt Romney, who had yet to begin his post-election tour of middle America, came out forcefully against an extension. With Romney leading the party, the effect was to solidify Republican opposition to the tax credit, greatly complicating the situation for proponents.

Those calling for an extension, including AWEA, have seemed stumped on how to get an extension passed on Capitol Hill. Even Democratic members of Congress have been surprisingly indifferent to the issue — particularly in light of fierce, hypocritical, Koch-backed opposition.

With 18 days left before expiration, the fight is picking up. On Wednesday, former President Clinton brought his campaign mojo to Chicago, celebrating the Midwest’s spike in wind installation. A group of veterans stormed D.C. to push for a renewal and the jobs that would result. Even religious leaders are speaking out, with the Evangelical Environmental Network and others holding a press conference this morning arguing that the transition to cleaner energy sources is a moral imperative, given the health damage done by fossil fuels.

Opponents have also moved into action: Exelon, a nuclear energy provider, is asking its employees to contact Congress to oppose the extension. A coalition of groups linked to fossil fuels held its own press conference today. (Spoiler for everyone, everywhere: Press conferences are always useless and you should stop having them.)

Yesterday afternoon, a breakthrough by AWEA. No, it hadn’t cobbled together enough votes to win the fight. Instead, it agreed to support an appeasement, a gradual decrease in the PTC until it goes away completely. From AWEA’s letter to congressional leaders [PDF]:

Time and again the industry has made the case to Congress for a PTC renewal, and with overwhelming bipartisan support, the credit has been extended in order to drive more efficient, cheaper and cleaner energy. Still, the stop-start nature of short-term extensions has made it difficult to get the industry to a place where it can be fully cost-competitive. …

The industry has undertaken an extensive analytical effort to determine what level of the PTC over a specific number of years would be needed to keep the industry minimally viable. The analysis assumed that the industry would meet ambitious technology-improvement and capital cost targets. Analytical results indicate that a PTC beginning with 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, or 100% of the current level for projects that begin construction in 2013, followed by 90%, 80%, 70%, 60%, and then 60% of the current level for projects that are placed in service in years 2014 through 2018, with no PTC in 2019 or afterwards, would sustain a minimally viable industry, able to continue achieving cost reductions.

This image, yet again.

Neville Chamberlain would be proud. There is no better way to negotiate than to accede to a tremendously weak position early in the process. Opponents of the PTC are unlikely to accept this position as-is, and will instead push for a faster, more severe reduction, making AWEA’s already-bad position even worse. And AWEA concedes a key conservative talking point: that the PTC isn’t needed, that wind can compete on a lopsided playing field in a few years. That’s probably extremely optimistic.

This proposal is also hugely damaging to other renewable energy sources, like solar, which have production tax credits expiring at the end of next year. How will the solar industry defend its extension — an extension which, again, used to be routine — if the wind industry has set a standard of a gradual phasing out?

Another thing: The fossil fuel industry’s $4 billion-a-year subsidy, now in its second century, is not subject to a phaseout. (These subsidies are something that AWEA’s CEO, Denise Bode, knows about; she used to be president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.) A large part of this is because the fossil fuel industry has grown tendrils that reach deep into the American political power structure, a slow, deliberate process. That’s made it hard for the wind industry to win political fights, but it’s not insurmountable. Acquiescing to a phaseout of wind without calling for a similar phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies is bizarre.

At some point within the next 18 days, one of two things will happen. Congress will pass legislation that enacts a phaseout of the wind PTC over time, or Congress will do nothing and the PTC will vanish. Both will damage wind’s massive growth as a provider of both electricity and jobs. The question is how much and how soon.

And how on earth the Mayans saw all of this coming.

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

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Continue reading: 

As deadline for saving wind industry nears, wind advocates fold

Posted in GE, LG, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on As deadline for saving wind industry nears, wind advocates fold

Interior: We’ll maybe finalize those fracking rules next year

by Myrna Posted on December 12, 2012

Interior: We’ll maybe finalize those fracking rules next year

By Philip Bump

Bad news, water lovers: You’re going to need to wait until at least 2013 before you know if you’re drinking fracking fluid.

Last May, the Department of the Interior, America’s most introspective governmental bureau, announced proposed regulations for the fracking process. The proposal was … not very strong. Companies would have to provide information on chemicals used in the process, but only after the fact.

ncindc

The fast-acting Department of the Interior.

Nonetheless, the fracking industry was hella mad, because if you government pencil-necks say companies have to worry about where chemicals end up or, worse, have to tell everyone what chemicals they use, those companies will have to fire everyone and probably resort to a life of crime. And besides, they noted, the existing rules states have are already so oppressive.

But Interior was all, too bad, guys. We’re going to crack down! By the end of the year, you watch, we’ll have final rules.

And, lo, The Hill reports:

The Interior Department no longer plans to finalize rules this year that will impose new controls on the controversial oil-and-gas development method called hydraulic fracturing, a spokesman said.

“In order to ensure that the 170,000 comments received are properly analyzed, the Bureau of Land Management expects action on the [hydraulic fracturing] proposal in the new year,” Interior spokesman Blake Androff said.

So that’s that.

Incidentally, I am not clear why it will take so long to go through those 170,000 comments. The breakdown is almost certainly as follows.

152,000 comments are in support of fracking regulations, but call for them to be tighter than proposed. All 152,000 share 82 percent of the same language; 76,000 include the words “Sierra Club” and 76,000 include the abbreviation “NRDC.” 98.6 percent of them originated from the states of California or New York.
18,000 comments oppose any regulation and are from “regular Joes,” including people named Tex Rillerson, Won Jotson, and, for some reason, Bon Jaynor. In those 18,000 comments, the word “jobs” appears 269,000 times.

So once they’ve sorted those comments out into two piles, measured the height of each, and applied some magic calculus to the result, Interior will announce final rules. Sometime. Maybe 2013. We’ll see.

In the meantime, drink up.

Source

Interior delays ‘fracking’ rules, The Hill

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

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Follow this link – 

Interior: We’ll maybe finalize those fracking rules next year

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Interior: We’ll maybe finalize those fracking rules next year

Oil companies polluting aquifers with EPA’s blessing

by Myrna Posted on December 12, 2012

Oil companies polluting aquifers with EPA’s blessing

By Susie Cagle

Shutterstock

Kind of like this, but underground.

Oil companies: They’re kind of like pet cats, it turns out. They don’t care what you want, they’re only out for themselves, and they love to bury their waste wherever they feel like it. And thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, they’re able to bury it via aquifer injection at hundreds of sites across the country where the EPA says the water is not “reasonably expected” to be used for drinking.

In some of America’s most drought-stricken communities, this practice is polluting what little drinkable water there is left. A new report from ProPublica digs into the EPA’s spotty record on issuing exemption permits for dumping in the nation’s precious aquifers — starting with the fact that the EPA itself hasn’t kept great records on which permits it has issued at all.

Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation’s drinking water. …

Though hundreds of exemptions are for lower-quality water of questionable use, many allow grantees to contaminate water so pure it would barely need filtration, or that is treatable using modern technology.

The EPA is only supposed to issue exemptions if aquifers are too remote, too dirty, or too deep to supply affordable drinking water. Applicants must persuade the government that the water is not being used as drinking water and that it never will be.

Sometimes, however, the agency has issued permits for portions of reservoirs that are in use, assuming contaminants will stay within the finite area exempted.

In Wyoming, people are drawing on the same water source for drinking, irrigation and livestock that, about a mile away, is being fouled with federal permission. In Texas, EPA officials are evaluating an exemption for a uranium mine — already approved by the state — even though numerous homes draw water from just outside the underground boundaries outlined in the mining company’s application.

Wyoming, Montana, Utah, and Colorado have been hit with the most pollution exemptions. Those same states are digging deeper to get at cleaner water, looking into pipelines to pump it in from elsewhere, and/or just still drinking the possibly contaminated stuff. Thirsty Texas communities are considering pricey desalination efforts while the EPA has granted upwards of 50 aquifer exemptions throughout that state.

Most of the exemptions have gone to small, independent companies, but you will not be even a tiny bit surprised to learn that multinational energy giants Chevron, Exxon, and EnCana hold 80 of the permits between them.

To the resource industries, aquifer exemptions are essential. Oil and gas drilling waste has to go somewhere and in certain parts of the country, there are few alternatives to injecting it into porous rock that also contains water, drilling companies say. In many places, the same layers of rock that contain oil or gas also contain water, and that water is likely to already contain pollutants such as benzene from the natural hydrocarbons within it.

Similarly, the uranium mining industry works by prompting chemical reactions that separate out minerals within the aquifers themselves; the mining can’t happen without the pollution …

“The energy policy in the U.S. is keeping this from happening because right now nobody — nobody — wants to interfere with the development of oil and gas or uranium,” said a senior EPA employee who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. “The political pressure is huge not to slow that down.”

But ProPublica also reports the EPA has “quietly” assembled a task force to reconsider the agency’s policies on aquifer exemptions given the rising value of water.

And at least judging by the EPA’s records as provided to ProPublica, there’s no clear trend of aquifer exemptions being handed out with increasing frequency. Permits took a huge dip in the late ’90s and early ’00s, then rose to about 75 annually, then dipped again last year.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Original post:  

Oil companies polluting aquifers with EPA’s blessing

Posted in GE, LG, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Oil companies polluting aquifers with EPA’s blessing

Judge orders two-week halt to Keystone XL pipeline construction

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 11, 2012

Judge orders two-week halt to Keystone XL pipeline construction

By Susie Cagle

We’ve reported before about the Keystone XL blockade activists, but the East Texans who own the land on which the pipeline is being constructed have been some of the project’s most vocal, if less-often-pepper-sprayed, detractors. And today they actually kind of won for a change.

A Texas judge has ordered TransCanada to halt work for two weeks on the pipeline, following a lawsuit from landowner Michael Bishop claiming that TransCanada lied about transporting crude oil when it’s really hauling tar-sands oil.

TransCanada’s all, “Oil is oil, what’s the big deal?” But the judge didn’t see it that way. From the Associated Press:

Tar sands oil — or diluted bitumen — does not meet the definition as outlined in Texas and federal statutory codes which define crude oil as “liquid hydrocarbons extracted from the earth at atmospheric temperatures,” Bishop said. When tar sands are extracted in Alberta, Canada, the material is almost a solid and “has to be heated and diluted in order to even be transmitted,” he told The Associated Press exclusively.

“They lied to the American people,” Bishop said.

Texas County Court at Law Judge Jack Sinz signed a temporary restraining order and injunction Friday, saying there was sufficient cause to halt work until a hearing Dec. 19. The two-week injunction went into effect Tuesday after Michael Bishop, the landowner, posted bond.

David Dodson, a spokesman for TransCanada, said courts have already ruled that tar sands are a form of crude oil. He said the injunction will not delay the project.

Bishop filed suit against the Texas Railroad Commission last week, claiming the agency hadn’t protected the public’s environmental interest when it approved TransCanada’s permits for construction. Many previous attempts by landowners to legally challenge TransCanada’s eminent domain claim to their property have all failed.

Aware that the oil giant will have a battery of lawyers and experts at the hearing later this month, Bishop, a 64-year-old retired chemist currently in medical school, said he is determined to fight.

“Bring ‘em on. I’m a United States Marine. I’m not afraid of anyone. I’m not afraid of them,” he said. “When I’m done with them, they will know that they’ve been in a fight. I may not win, but I’m going to hurt them.”

Meanwhile, activists are planning a direct-action training for Jan. 3-8 and a national demo outside the White House for President’s Day, Feb. 18.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Excerpt from: 

Judge orders two-week halt to Keystone XL pipeline construction

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Judge orders two-week halt to Keystone XL pipeline construction

The fracking boom, as told in six railroad industry graphs

by Myrna Posted on December 7, 2012

The fracking boom, as told in six railroad industry graphs

By Philip Bump

You can learn the story of the fracking boom by looking at one set of data: railroad shipments. Because, you know, it’s 1890.

Our Lisa Hymas explained how and why oil companies are increasingly relying on rail shipments; in short, no new pipelines plus a huge spike in extraction. But how big is that spike? Here is how the Association of American Railroads depicts it [PDF].

Association of American Railroads

Or, if you prefer, here’s the percentage change in carloads of petroleum, year over year.

Association of American Railroads

And in raw number:

Association of American Railroads

The main reason for this boom is fracked oil from the northern Plains states (something we’ve also discussed previously). Fracking requires lots of sand, used to hold open the fissures through which gas and oil make their way to the surface. So as fracked oil has increased, so have rail shipments of sand.

Association of American Railroads

Fracking natural gas has also meant significant declines in coal use. Since you can’t ship coal through a pipeline (very quickly), rail carloads are a good indicator of the strength of coal. Doing so, we see that 2012 has been a particularly bad year for coal.

Or, more starkly:

Association of American Railroads

There you have it. The fracking industry, as told by railroad data.

Incidentally, I’ll note that that first graph, showing how much more oil was shipped in 2012 brought to mind this one we shared yesterday, showing how much warmer 2012 has been than any year prior.

Click to embiggen.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the two graphs were somehow related.

Source

In One Chart, See Why 2012 Was A Historic Year For The US Oil Comeback, Business Insider

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

Read more:

Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Original link:  

The fracking boom, as told in six railroad industry graphs

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The fracking boom, as told in six railroad industry graphs