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

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

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

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Stick it to ‘em: Scientists call for labeling tar-sands oil

Stick it to ‘em: Scientists call for labeling tar-sands oil

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Let’s slap some labels on these puppies.

For the past four years, European Union officials have been mulling a labeling system that would require fuel companies to tell their customers how much carbon pollution is produced by each of the products they sell.

The idea is deeply unpopular with oil companies, which don’t want their customers thinking about such things every time they fill up their tanks. It’s also deeply unpopular with Canada. That’s because the country’s tar-sands oil is particularly dreadful for the climate, something the government would rather not have advertised. The oil companies and Canadian government have called the labeling idea unscientific.

But the idea is popular with an independent group of experts — experts who are better qualified to determine whether or not something is “scientific.” Those would be scientists.

Reuters reports that 53 scientists from such universities as Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia, as well as from European institutions, sent a letter urging the president of the European Commission “to press ahead with a plan to label tar sands as more polluting than other forms of oil, in defiance of intensive lobbying” from the Canadian government:

They say the EU draft law, which would label fuels according to how much carbon they emit over their entire wells-to-wheels lifecycle, is scientifically sound, after criticism from the oil industry that it is not.

In the letter dated December 16, they say the policy would ensure investment in cleaner fuels and for the first time hold the oil industry accountable for carbon emitted during production of the fuels they sell in Europe.

“We live in an era during which it has become clear that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without causing dangerous climate change,” the letter, seen by Reuters, said.

U.S. lawmakers — listen up!


Source
Scientists urge EU action on tar sands – letter, Reuters

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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China doesn’t want our genetically modified corn

China doesn’t want our genetically modified corn

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Genetically modified strains of corn not authorized for sale in China have been showing up in cargoes exported from the U.S., prompting China to reject them.

And we’re not talking about trifling amounts here. In November and December, the country rejected more than 500,000 tons of American corn that had been genetically modified by Syngenta to repel caterpillar pests.

It’s hard to conceptualize that much corn, but it works out to more than a dozen shipments, or nearly a third of the corn shipped from the U.S. to China this year. Another way to think about it: The rejected shipments weighed more than 100,000 elephants.

Here’s the latest from the BBC:

An unapproved strain called MIR162 was found in 12 batches of corn, China’s product safety agency said. …

The agency called on US authorities to tighten controls to ensure unapproved strains are not sent to China. …

China has already approved 15 varieties of genetically-modified corn for imports and MIR162 is awaiting approval.

“The safety evaluation process [for MIR162] has not been completed and no imports are allowed at the moment before the safety certificate is issued,” said China’s vice agricultural minister, Niu Dun.

The rejections follow similar problems for wheat and alfalfa growers and exporters earlier this year, when supposedly GMO-free fields were found to contain strains that had been developed by Monsanto.


Source
China rejects US corn on fears over genetic modification, BBC
China rejects 30 pct of corn shipped in from U.S. this year, Reuters

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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The Obama administration is undermining its own plans for carbon capture

The Obama administration is undermining its own plans for carbon capture

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The Obama administration will soon require new coal-fired power plants to capture the carbon dioxide they produce and store it underground. Coal companies that had long touted “clean coal” turned on the idea, arguing that carbon sequestration isn’t commercially viable.

But don’t you worry about the poor coal industry. The fossil fuel guys have a trick up their sleeve. Here is the AP, reporting on an approach adopted at a new coal power plant in Mississippi:

At first, the idea behind “carbon-capture” technology was to make coal plants cleaner by burying the carbon dioxide deep underground that they typically pump out of smokestacks.

But that green vision proved too expensive and complicated, so the administration accepted a trade-off.

To help the environment, the government allows power companies to sell the carbon dioxide to oil companies, which pump it into old oil fields to force more crude to the surface. A side benefit is that the carbon gets permanently stuck underground.

The program shows the ingenuity of the oil industry, which is using government green-energy money to subsidize oil production. But it also showcases the environmental trade-offs Obama is willing to make, but rarely talks about, in his fight against global warming. …

Four power plants in the U.S. and Canada … intend to sell their carbon waste for oil recovery.

So say goodbye to carbon dioxide, and hello to oil that will be burned to produce more carbon dioxide.

As if it weren’t bad enough that this approach undermines the whole intent of carbon capture, scientists recently linked the practice of injecting carbon dioxide into oil fields to a major flurry of earthquakes in Texas in 2009 and 2010.


Source
To clean up coal, Obama pushes more oil production, The Associated Press

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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New Mexico suing to block horse slaughter

New Mexico suing to block horse slaughter

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Dinner?

Just as a New Mexico slaughterhouse prepares to kill 20 horses, the state has filed a lawsuit that aims to prevent the killings.

Roswell-based Valley Meat Company plans to begin slaughtering horses in the new year thanks to changes in federal rules. It eventually aims to be capable of slaughtering 120 horses a day, with the meat sold as animal feed and to human consumers in Europe and Asia.

The debut slaughter had initially been scheduled for early August but was delayed after the company was targeted by lawsuits and suspected arsonists. A federal appeals court in Colorado last week ruled against environmentalists who had sued to prevent the slaughter of horses in America.

Now New Mexico’s Democratic attorney general, an aspiring gubernatorial candidate, is joining in the pile-on. He described such a slaughter as “completely at odds with our traditions and our values as New Mexicans.” Here’s more about the lawsuit from KOB Eyewitness News 4:

At a press conference on Thursday, Attorney General Gary King said he will sue Valley Meat Company for violating state and federal environmental and safety laws.

According to the suit, Valley Meat repeatedly violated state groundwater monitoring requirements when it operated as a cattle slaughterhouse between 1986 and 2005. The suit also claims Valley Meat failed to renew its permit for discharging wastewater from 2010 until 2012. Over this period of time, the suit alleges that Valley Meat illegally dumped the remains of hundreds of slaughtered animals on the grounds of the plant, forming “massive piles of rotting flesh and bones.”

In a statement to KOB, Valley Meat’s attorney said it was preposterous to sue a company for “anticipated violations” and to rely on “bad science to make defamatory conclusions about a product.”

Valley Meat has felt itself the victim of unfair attention from environmentalists, but it hasn’t been doing a good job of keeping a low profile. Adding fuel to the flames of controversy, a slaughterhouse worker earlier this year posted video of himself shooting a colt in the head. “All you animal activists, fuck you,” he said, before squeezing the trigger.


Source
New Mexico AG suing Roswell horse slaughter plant, KOB Eyewitness News 4
New Mexico sues to block horse slaughter facility, Reuters

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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Big food companies want to call GMO foods “natural”

Big food companies want to call GMO foods “natural”

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Is genetically engineered food natural? The Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group representing some of the world’s biggest food and food-related companies, including ConAgra Foods, Bayer CropScience, and the Coca-Cola Company, thinks so.

And it’s pressing the Food and Drug Administration to see things its way. From a Dec. 5 letter to the feds:

GMA’s members have a strong interest in “natural” labeling for foods containing ingredients derived from biotechnology. Several of the most common ingredients derived from biotechnology are from crops such as soy, corn, canola, and sugar beets. …

[T]here are approximately 65 class action lawsuits that have been filed against food manufacturers over whether foods with ingredients allegedly derived from biotechnology can be labeled “natural.” …

GMA intends to file a Citizen Petition solely direct at asking FDA to issue a regulation authorizing foods containing foods derived from biotechnology to be labeled as “natural.”

An Environmental Working Group rep told The New York Times that the association’s request is “audacious.” The Center for Food Safety is also appalled. “There is nothing natural about genetic engineering,” said Colin O’Neil, the center’s government affairs director, in a press release:

Genetic engineering, by its very definition, is not a natural process. It is an artificial and novel process, which often involves inserting foreign (often bacterial) genetic material into a food plant, crop or animal. The U.S. Patent Office has granted numerous patents on genetically engineered plants, finding that they and novel elements in them are not naturally occurring.

According to FDA policy, food labels can’t be false or misleading. A reasonable consumer would not expect foods labeled “natural” to contain GE ingredients. As such, labeling GE foods with the word “natural” would be exceptionally misleading to consumers.

The same agro-corporations and food manufacturers that want to put the word “natural” on their GMO products are aggressively opposed to putting the word “GMO” on their GMO products. Some labeling is OK, but only if Big Food gets to choose the labels.

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.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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BP engineer found guilty of obstructing justice

BP engineer found guilty of obstructing justice

NOAA

In May 2010, as BP prepared to try to staunch the flow of oil from beneath the wrecked Deepwater Horizon rig by dumping mud over the blowout, some of the company’s engineers knew the effort was bound to fail. But the mud-dumping plan, codenamed Top Kill, moved forward anyway as the world’s media watched on. Sure enough, Top Kill failed to staunch the leak.

One of the engineers who knew the effort would fail, Kurt Mix, later tried to keep that a secret from investigators. When Mix found out that his iPhone was about to be seized, he deleted more than 100 text messages — messages such as “Too much flowrate – over 15,000.” In that message, Mix was warning a colleague that 15,000 barrels of oil was leaking every day, which was too much oil for the operation to handle, and three times the flow rate that BP had stated publicly.

The presumably panicked decision to delete the texts on Wednesday led to the 52-year-old Texan being found guilty by a jury of one charge of obstruction of justice — a charge that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment. He avoided conviction on a second, similar charge. His attorneys vowed to appeal. From the AP:

Mix, who was arrested in April 2012, was the first of four current or former BP employees charged with spill-related crimes and the first of them to be tried.

BP took corporate responsibility for its role in the catastrophe earlier this year, pleading guilty in January to manslaughter charges for the workers’ deaths and agreeing to pay a record $4 billion in penalties. But none of the top executives at the London-based oil giant have been charged with crimes.

David Uhlmann, a University of Michigan law professor and former chief of the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section, said Mix was a “sympathetic defendant” because his conduct seemed relatively minor in the context of a disaster that killed 11 workers and spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf. Uhlmann, however, said the Justice Department appropriately has a “zero-tolerance policy” for those who destroy evidence in a criminal investigation.

“The Gulf oil spill was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Kurt Mix was charged with deleting text messages from his iPhone,” he said. “The government was justified in seeking charges, but there’s a proportionality problem here.”

Props to the feds for going after BP wrongdoers. But it would sure be nice to see some senior execs held accountable for the 2010 disaster, which is still affecting the Gulf of Mexico and its fishermen and shoreline communities.


Source
Ex-BP engineer convicted on 1 obstruction charge, Associated Press
Former BP Engineer Arrested for Obstruction of Justice in Connection with the Deepwater Horizon Criminal Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice

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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Rice seeds could save the day for Filipino typhoon victims

Rice seeds could save the day for Filipino typhoon victims

Yusmar Yahaya

More than 6,000 people were killed when Typhoon Haiyan slammed into the Philippines last month — an epic storm with a ferocity that the country’s leaders linked to climate change. And now the U.N. and nonprofits are scrambling to help save the survivors from famine.

The storm hit at rice-planting time, tearing farmers’ paddies to shreds and stealing their stocks of seeds. From Responding to Climate Change:

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has started to provide the first wave of emergency seeds supplies to residents living in some of the hardest hit rural communities across the Philippines.

These, along with 50kg bags of fertiliser, tools and small irrigation water pumps, will allow farmers to nurture another crop of rice and corn, ready to be harvested in March next year. …

“Nothing could be more beneficial than the seeds we so desperately need to make sure we can plant in time for this planting season,” said Merlyn Fagtanac, a farmer from Dumalag, whose farm and house were destroyed by the typhoon. “We lost everything but at least now we can look forward to the coming rice harvest.”

Her two-hectare rice paddy field has already been cleared and cleaned for planting. She is just one of the 1040 farmers from the Visayas region who will benefit from the seeds.

Oxfam is also among the nongovernmental organizations providing aid. It has been paying Filipinos to prepare fields for planting and it has also been providing rice seeds. From an Oxfam press release issued last week:

International agency Oxfam will start distributing 400 tons of rice seeds in six rural municipalities south of Tacloban today (Thursday 12 December) to help farmers win their ‘race against time’ to avoid missing the next growing season. The distributions will last for a week.

Farmers have a very short time to plant the seeds to catch this year’s second growing season. Water sluices will be opened on Sunday 15 December to those areas irrigated. Oxfam has been supporting farmers to clear fields and irrigation channels that have been affected by typhoon Haiyan in preparation for the planting of the seeds.

The so-called ‘climate-proof’ variety seeds were purchased in Luzon island and are suitable for the low lying area and not dependent upon large amounts of artificial fertilizer or pesticides.


Source
UN delivers ‘emergency seeds’ to Typhoon Haiyan survivors, Responding to Climate Change
Oxfam starts distributing 400 tons of rice seed to farmers in rural areas south of Tacloban, Oxfam

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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Pesticide makers have found a new way to kill bees

Pesticide makers have found a new way to kill bees

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Sulfoxaflor sucks for pollinators.

It’s a new type of neonicotinoid insecticide that was approved by the EPA in May for use on a long list of crops — despite its toxic effects on honeybees, bumblebees, butterflies, and other pollinators. 

Environmentalists, beekeepers, and other groups that were already suing the EPA to try to block the sale of other classes of neonic pesticides have launched a new legal effort to overturn the agency’s recent sulfoxaflor ruling. From legal documents filed Monday:

Scientists have linked the drastic declines in honey bee and other pollinator populations to systemic pesticides, and more specifically, to a category of systemic pesticides known as neonicotinoids. Sulfoxaflor is a systemic pesticide with the same mode of action as neonicotinoids, and one that EPA determined is “very highly toxic” to bees. …

Far from being supported by the required substantial evidence, EPA’s decision is contrary to the record evidence, and in violation of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). EPA failed to rigorously examine the uses and impacts of sulfoxaflor, particularly in light of the environmental stressors already faced by pollinator populations. Further, EPA’s decision considers only the alleged benefits of sulfoxaflor, while wholly ignoring the significant costs that registration will have on the agricultural economy, food security, and the environment.

“This case and brief is a critical part of the story for our nation’s beekeepers and their survival,” said Peter Jenkins, attorney for the Center for Food Safety. “Beyond that, sulfoxaflor threatens native bees, other insects, birds and ecosystem health generally. The many groups joining our brief — and we think all Americans — have a huge stake in ensuring EPA does not continue its ‘business as usual’ approach of green-lighting more and more dangerous insecticides.”


Source
Center for Food Safety Joins Fight Against Newest Bee-killer, Sulfoxaflor, Center for Food Safety

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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Plants will reach point where they couldn’t possibly take another bite of our CO2

Plants will reach point where they couldn’t possibly take another bite of our CO2

John Upton

Plants love carbon dioxide. It’s their oxygen. That’s why forests, meadows, and the like are called carbon sinks — they help draw a fraction of our CO2 emissions back out of the atmosphere and into the soil.

But we can’t expect plants to clean up after us forever.

After running computer simulations, European and Japanese scientists concluded that plants that haven’t been bulldozed, poisoned, burnt up, or attacked by invasive pests will continue to absorb more carbon as atmospheric carbon levels rise. But they found that found that rising temperatures could eventually prevent vegetation from absorbing any more of our CO2 pollution.

That’s because heat waves dry out plants’ water reserves and put so much stress on vegetation that it can start releasing more carbon dioxide than it absorbs. As an example, one of the researchers, Andrew Friend of Cambridge, points to a 2003 heat wave in Europe during which “the amount of CO2 produced was sufficient to reverse the effect of four years of net ecosystem carbon sequestration.”

It appears that plants will hit the CO2 saturation point once the globe warms by about 4 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial times, or 7.4 Fahrenheit. Which is kind of a terrifying number. Although the Earth has warmed a little less than 1 degree C so far, and although world leaders aim to cap warming at 2 degrees C, projections based on our current fuel-burning practices point to warming eventually peaking at about 4 degrees C — or more.

The conclusions of Friend and his colleagues, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that should we hit that 4 C point, carbon dioxide levels could start to really climb as Earth’s plants release more carbon than they absorb.

So there’s one more reason to try to not reach that point. World leaders, listen up!

PNASThe green on this map shows areas where the world’s plants will suck carbon out of the atmosphere — until global temperatures rise more than 4 degrees Celsius. Then we’re in trouble. (Click to embiggen.)


Source
Four degree rise will end vegetation ‘carbon sink’ (University of Cambridge press release), PhysOrg
Carbon residence time dominates uncertainty in terrestrial vegetation responses to future climate and atmospheric CO2, 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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