Tag Archives: wisconsin

Wind industry and enviros team up to study bird deaths

by pfmufle Posted on June 21, 2013

Wind industry and enviros team up to study bird deaths

By John Upton

Shutterstock

This eagle is feeling better already.

Amid growing controversies over birds killed by turbines, a handful of big wind energy companies are teaming up with conservationists to pool data that could help address the problem.

The American Wind Wildlife Institute, a nonprofit partnership of 22 wind companies and nine green groups, has a new project that aims to round up, analyze, and eventually publish hitherto secret data on bird kills at wind power developments. Midwest Energy News reports:

“Our goal is not to identify problems to prosecute,” said Abby Arnold, AWWI’s executive director. “Our goal is to develop a really good analytic tool that experts — biologists, statisticians, ecologists — and the wind industry can use to understand what these impacts are, where they’re occurring, and how we can address them.” …

Most wind developers are required to conduct wildlife impact studies before and after projects are built. The results are typically seen by local regulators but never broadly disseminated beyond that, in part because wind companies worry opponents will use the results in anti-wind campaigns.

After a successful pilot project, AWWI has started collecting post-construction wildlife impact studies from its members, which include some of the nation’s largest renewable developers. GE Energy, Horizon Wind, and Iberdrola Renewables are among the founding partners …

The American Wind Energy Association passed a resolution in support of the project two years ago, encouraging its members to participate. A big reason why wind companies may be embracing the project is that the data will be made anonymous before it’s shared with researchers or the public.

The project could help wind energy companies figure out where best to place their turbines, and which types of turbines they should use, to minimize impacts on birds and bats.

The wind industry still doesn’t rank as a big bird killer:

[A] March 2013 study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin … said more than 573,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year. The American Wind Energy Association maintains that the actual number is less than 200,000 birds annually.

Either way, the numbers are small compared to other known causes of bird fatalities.

According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service [PDF], cars may kill 60 million birds or more each year. Building windows are to blame for more than 97 million bird deaths annually. Communication towers conservatively kill 4 to 5 million birds per year, and it could be ten times more. Power line fatalities could be “as high as 174 million deaths annually.” Pesticides poison at least 72 million birds annually, and up to two million are killed each year in oil and wastewater pits.

One study found domestic cats kill 39 million birds annually in Wisconsin alone, with the national total likely hundreds of millions per year.

Still, if the wind industry gets smarter about siting turbines, that can only be good for wildlife — and it should help the industry itself by quelling opposition from conservationists.

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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Wind industry and enviros team up to study bird deaths

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, wind energy, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Wind industry and enviros team up to study bird deaths

Why tar-sands pipelines are just too risky

by AlvinaiTyler Posted on April 8, 2013

Why tar-sands pipelines are just too risky

By John Upton

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/ Oleinik Dmitri

ExxonMobil’s oil spill in Mayflower, Ark., was just the latest in a string of leaks from pipelines that proved physically incapable of safely carrying toxic tar-sands oil.

With the Obama administration poised to decide whether to build the Keystone XL pipeline to carry Canadian tar-sands oil south to the Gulf Coast, you might well wonder whether that pipeline would be about as safe as a balloon filled with bleach.

Tar-sands oil extraction and transportation is a relatively recent development, but the material already seems to be bursting out of pipelines and into the environment at a frighteningly disproportionate rate. From a Natural Resources Defense Council analysis of federal transportation data:

Diluted bitumen has only been moved on the U.S. pipeline system since the late 90s and federal regulators still don’t provide data with the specificity to evaluate the safety record of pipelines moving tar sands. But a close look at pipeline incident data from states in the northern Midwest, which have seen the greatest volumes of tar sands diluted bitumen over the longest time period, is alarming. Pipelines in North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan spilled 3.6 times as much crude per mile than the national average between 2010 and 2012.

NRDC attorney Anthony Swift and his colleagues have been making a lot of noise about the fact that pipelines are especially prone to spills when tar-sands oil is piped through them. Scientific American recently took a sobering look at those claims:

Critics charge that pipelines carrying diluted bitumen, or “dilbit” — a heavy oil extracted from tar sands mined in northern Alberta — pose a special risk because, compared with more conventional crude, they must operate at higher temperatures, which have been linked to increased corrosion. These pipelines also have to flow at higher pressures that may contribute to rupture as well. …

The chemistry of the tar sands oil could contribute to corrosion as well. In processing, the tar sands are boiled to separate the bitumen from the surrounding sand and water, and then mixed with diluent — light hydrocarbons produced along with natural gas — to make the oil less viscous and able to flow. But even so, the resulting dilbit is among the lowest in hydrogen as well as the most viscous, sulfurous and acidic form of oil produced today.

Some think the Arkansas spill could have resulted from [a] combination of aged infrastructure and added stress from dilbit, although an exact cause has yet to be determined. The breached Pegasus Pipeline involved in the Arkansas incident can carry nearly 100,000 barrels of oil per day from Illinois to Texas. Originally constructed in the 1940s to bring Texas crude oil up to Illinois, it had been reversed in recent years to stream dilbit. The operator, ExxonMobil, retrofitted the 50-centimeter tube to compensate for the demands of pushing tar sand oil through in the opposite direction, but the higher temperatures and pressures may nonetheless have contributed to the rupture or sped up preexisting corrosion, suggest critics such as NRDC’s Anthony Swift.

Not surprisingly, the government of Alberta disagrees with NRDC on this one. (Let’s not forget that the province is currently lobbying American lawmakers to approve Keystone XL.) Again from SciAm:

A study from the Alberta government [PDF], however, casts doubt on the notion that dilbit is worse for pipelines than any other oil is. It found that dilbit is not corrosive at pipeline temperatures of as much as 65 degrees Celsius, although it is highly corrosive at refinery temperatures above 100 degrees C. Nor is the fine sand that remains in some of the dilbit eroding pipelines, though it does form sludges that must be cleaned. The higher temperature operation may even kill off the bacteria that help to corrode pipelines carrying other types of oil. “There is no evidence that dilbit causes more failure than conventional oil,” geologist John Zhou of the provincial government research firm Alberta Innovates said during an interview in November on a trip to the tar sands; Zhou helped prepare the Canadian province’s analysis of dilbit. The U.S. National Academies is currently studying the issue.

As President Obama considers Keystone XL, which analyses will he be paying attention to? Perhaps he ought to ask the residents of Mayflower what they think.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Facebook

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blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

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Why tar-sands pipelines are just too risky

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New culprit in sea-level rise: Pretty Arctic clouds

by Kyung Wilhoite Posted on April 4, 2013

New culprit in sea-level rise: Pretty Arctic clouds

By John Upton

boegh

Clouds over Greenland accelerated last summer’s melt.

Newly published research suggests that Greenland’s ice melted super fast last summer, and the world’s ice could soon melt faster than anybody had anticipated — all because of pretty white clouds hanging low above frigid seas.

Last year’s Greenland ice sheet melt was considered a 1-in-150 year phenomenon — the most dramatic melting season since 1979. It was cause for alarm because, when ice melts, it turns into water that raises the sea levels. If Greenland’s ice sheet totally disappeared, the seas could swell by an estimated 24 feet, drowning many of the world’s coastal cities.

“Of course, there is more than one cause for such widespread change,” said University of Wisconsin atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor Ralf Bennartz, one of the authors of a study published today in Nature that concludes that the clouds that drifted over Greenland last summer bore properties that could be likened to a perfect ice-melting storm. “We focused our study on certain kinds of low-level clouds.”

From the Nature paper:

At the critical surface melt time, the clouds were optically thick enough and low enough to enhance the downwelling infrared flux at the surface. At the same time they were optically thin enough to allow sufficient solar radiation to penetrate through them and raise surface temperatures above the melting point.

In other words, the clouds were thin enough to allow the rays of the sun to pass through and heat up the ice. But when sunlight bounced off the ice and back into the atmosphere, the clouds were low enough and thick enough to lock in much of the energy.

So what does that mean? Was last year’s rapid melt a freak occurrence that will never happen again?

Unfortunately, no. Instead, last summer’s rapid melt could become a new normal.

The discovery tells us that our climate projections have been flawed because they didn’t account for the effects of this common form of Arctic cloud cover. “[T]hese thin, low-level liquid clouds occur frequently, both over Greenland and across the Arctic, being present around 30–50 per cent of the time,” the Nature paper states.

So we will probably be in for more of these devastating Greenland summers, meaning the seas may rise at an ever-quickening pace that exceeds even current expectations. From a University of Wisconsin press release:

Current climate models tend to underestimate the occurrence of the clouds, ICECAPS [PDF] researchers found, limiting those models’ ability to predict cloud response to Arctic climate change and possible feedback like spiking rates of ice melt.

By using a combination of surface-based observations, remote sensing data, and surface energy-balance models, the study not only delineates the effect of clouds on ice melting, but also shows that this type of cloud is common over both Greenland and across the Arctic, according to Bennartz.

“Above all, this study highlights the importance of continuous and detailed ground-based observations over the Greenland ice sheet and elsewhere,” he says. “Only such detailed observations will lead to a better understanding of the processes that drive Arctic climate. “

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie 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 culprit in sea-level rise: Pretty Arctic clouds

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