The Energy Thread

Anyone on ilx work in energy or environment?

Me - currently implementing the first US smartgrid distribution software system.

oh the RMI is great. I took a tour of the building, p dope. also credit "natural capital" for making me able to have conversations with my libertarian dad that at least felt a little productive

Anyone on ilx work in energy or environment?
I do, and I just saw that Obama declined the expansion of Keystone XXL, anyone have thoughts on this?

Does Obama's energy plan amount to tax credits for buying alternative-fuel vehicles, oil companies must drill on leases they already hold and attempting to make 80% of electricity be generated from clean sources by 2035?

I just saw that Obama declined the expansion of Keystone XXL, anyone have thoughts on this?

From what I understand, the GOP either shot itself in the foot with this one or intentionally created a situation where they could call Obama a jobs killer. They attached a rider to the payroll tax bill that would force a 60 day decision on the pipeline, after the State Department had already explicitly stated that they would need more time to do the environmental assessment. The State Dep't also said that, if forced to make a decision before the completion of the assessment, they would reject the project. GOP went forward with the rider.

I think this is how it worked. I assume TransCanada will come back with a new application for a revised route, as the main issue had to do with a particular portion of the pipeline going through environmentally sensitive areas of Nebraska and Oklahoma.

There is no energy plan.

Shakey, sounds interesting. I would love to see that picture. Can you say where you work? Just interested.

I worked on the section of the keystone pipeline that traveled through Kansas to Cushing OK. I was supposed to worked on the remaining portion that ended in Port Arthur,TX. I was laid off when the permits where put on hold two years ago. I never bring up my work around here because well one of the posters on this thread is involved with the protest against my work. But today came as huge blow to me because I was hoping to work in my home state on the last leg of the pipeline so I won't have to travel back to PA.

Jacob, I'm really sorry for the disappointment today's news brought you. I do, however, think the facts support delaying rather than fast-tracking this section of the pipeline. I worked on the TransCanada/PGT natural gas pipeline on the section that ran from just east of Blythe, CA down to Mexicali and over to Rosarito. A major section was pushed ahead before one last impact study was returned - the one that examined the huge influx of transient winter residents to the area just west of Yuma. Which was a serious and costly mistake. It's better to get all the details in up front, especially when messing around with an aquifer. (I've also done considerable work in potable water treatment operations and remediation.)

My understanding was the job was permitted down to Port Arthur and the branch to Houston as well when we finished in Cushing. The pipe for the project is sitting right now in Texas. The debate about the Nebraska section was what brought attention to this end of the project which then stalled everything. I agree that fast-tracking any major construction project is counterintuitive for long time goal of transportation of oil or any energy source. But there is also a lack of understanding from the general public about how pipelines are built and the regulations that are in fact enforced. There are accidents like Enbridge and that's very serious. But after working with numerous oil/lng companies like Exxon, Columbia Gas, Chevron, etc, TransCanada took environmental issues very serious as well as safety. As far as creating job and the misinformation that both parties are throwing at each other, I haven't heard any mention of the fact that any lack of new jobs the Keystone line would or would not create has much to do with keystone's view of unionized work. In Texas most union constractors have had to lower their bids to compete with non-union contractors. This lowers the once high pay scale of construction workers who build the pipelines. Most have left the south or have started working non union jobs. TransCanada does not want non union contractors building the pipelines due to their horrible track record with both safety and following specifications with welding, coating and general construction. What TransCanada plans to do then is split the work between a canadian contractor and two or three union contractors, although this was as of last year. Things might have changed since then.

I'm a low-level analyst for a big elec supplier in the UK, so if anyone wants to bitch about UK elec prices, i'm your man.

I never bring up my work around here because well one of the posters on this thread is involved with the protest against my work

I'm really sorry about the impact of the Keystone decision on your job, Jacob. It's easy to get on the soapbox and talk about how the pipeline "only" creates a few thousand temporary jobs in the U.S., in contrast to the 100,000+ jobs that Trans Canada claimed as recently as a few months ago, and the 10,000+ that Boehner's spokesperson was claiming yesterday. But those few thousand temp jobs are still jobs, and I don't mean to discount that at all.

But I know for a fact that me and the many others who protested against the pipeline weren't protesting against your work. We were (and will continue, frankly) protesting against a status quo that looks to exploit every last deposit of fossil fuel for profit, no matter the consequences. And while the lost temporary pipeline contractor jobs are are bad news, we have to weigh that against the impact of tar sands production on the thousands of indigenous people in the Boreal forest of Canada. They didn't just lose their jobs or an opportunity for a job - they lost their way of life. And then there's the 9 billion or so people in the future that will have to deal with climate change because of the decisions we're making now. At some point we have to make a stand against increasing dirty fossil fuels production.

I know you've probably already heard my enviro-fascist opinions, so it's nothing new to you. I really am sorry, Jacob, and from what I've seen on ILX I know that you're a good person and I wish the best for you. Just want you to know that the people who protest against the pipeline are definitely not fighting against you.

lack of understanding from the general public about how pipelines are built and the regulations that are in fact enforced.

This is so true, not just for pipeline construction but so many other maligned industries. The general populace is not inclined to look into the facts themselves and will latch on to a private mental image of how things work based on media reports that focus on details that generate the most visceral reaction. It's hard not to take protests personally - working in nuclear power generation, I've had to walk through crowds with signs shouting abuse a couple times. But the bigger and longer term impact is how contractors are being forced to lower bids - it's happening across every aspect of the construction industry and I see that as a huge threat to economic recovery actoss the board.

The last "green" energy startup I worked for (down in Ned's neck of the woods) diverted the stream of methane-rich gas from the largest landfill in Orange County that is normally flared off, attempted to use it raw through a genset (to provide power for the entire site), scrubbed it and ran it through two stages of refrigeration to cool it to -280 F. The end product was used to power the buses of Orange County and was in the process of being used by the Port of Long Beach. Heartbreakingly, the plant has been shut down - not because it didn't work, but because Shell Oil (now the primary shareholder of the company that built the plant) found it politically expedient to close it. That experience showed me that even once the last drop of crude is removed from every current resource, we will still have plenty of feedstock for gas-fired power generation to continue for a very long time.

lack of understanding from the general public about how pipelines are built and the regulations that are in fact enforced.

TransCanada took environmental issues very serious as well as safety.

just want to point out that even with regulation and good intentions about the environment/safety, the portion of the Keystone pipeline that's already been approved and built in the United States experienced 12 spills in its first year of operation, more than any other first year pipeline in the U.S. (giant infographic here)

also, that's so great that you work at RMI, benjamin! i'm definitely a huge fan, and i heavily referred to some of RMI's work on energy efficiency when i wrote my thesis a few years back. did you get to work on the Reinventing Fire stuff at all?

well this thread sure got a lot more interesting

ZS I hope you understand that anything I say in this thread is not meant as pro oil. It's just that I have a different perspective on this coming from a family that works largely as blue collar in oil. Welders, labors, teamsters, people who work very hard for what they have. I entered the work as just an experiment and didn't think I would last. I started out as a labor and worked hard and somehow I came to enjoy the challenge. but It's still a foreign world to me. Also the media keeps referring to these jobs as being temporary, which again shows a lack of understanding. The people who build pipelines do not think of their jobs as being temporary. They travel from pipeline job to pipeline job. They might work on one for 6 months, sometimes 3 years, but it's insulting to them to refer to their work as temporary. I'm not insulted just saying.

Would you prefer that keystone sell the oil to a country like China or Russia if the pipeline isn't built? Who both have much lower processing regulations? The idea of that happening is much scarier environmentally. The oil will be sold and used by somebody. Not to mention the fact that when the pipeline was stalled, the new refineries that were being built in Port Arthur were also put on hold which led to the law off of thousand of people in the area. I can image that the same happened in other areas that were getting ready for transmission and production.

I definitely don't think that you're a oil industry shill or anything like that! :) and even if you were, i wouldn't want to stifle conversation on the topic just because i disagree (which is what i rudely did to sanpaku on the BP spill thread, i'm ashamed to say)

One more quick note on the jobs created from Keystone, and also the pipeline construction industry in general:

The figure for the estimated number of jobs created from the Keystone XL pipeline was continually revised down by TransCanada until it landed at 6,000, a number that's in line with an estimate from the State Dept and a Cornell University study which was the only independent analysis of the issue.

those 6,000 jobs have to be placed in the context of the overall growth employment in the oil and gas industry under the Obama administration (an increase of 75,000, from 573K to 648K). even if you look at the pipeline construction sector by itself, employment has risen from 101K to 111K from 2009 to 2011. (those figures come from an analysis of BLS statistics) again, i don't want to discount the value of the Keystone XL jobs to those that need them, but i don't think anyone can accuse Obama of being anything but a great friend to the oil and gas industry.

Would you prefer that keystone sell the oil to a country like China or Russia if the pipeline isn't built? Who both have much lower processing regulations? The idea of that happening is much scarier environmentally. The oil will be sold and used by somebody.

wellll....i have some annoying views on that, probably! :) one rarely acknowledged factor in the debate over keystone xl is that the pipeline is/was intended to export oil to other countries, not to the united states. the NRDC has a really good, succinct article on the issue, but to summarize:

• the portion of the keystone pipeline that's already built terminates in the u.s. midwest, and the only possible buyer is the united states.
• extending the pipeline to the gulf would make the available on the world market, which is precisely the point, because
• canada wants to diversify energy exports since 97% of it currently goes to the united states. extending keystone to the gulf would allow them to sell it on the world market, and would also gain them access to refineries on the gulf that are classified as foreign trade zones (no taxes)

The oil will be sold and used by somebody.

but it's this that really gets to the heart of the matter, and where i'm forced to bust our my wishywashy enviro crap that no one likes to hear. under the status quo, it's true that the oil would be sold and used by somebody. i'm actually optimistic that canada won't be able to route the tar sands oil west to the pacific ocean due to the wave of lawsuits they're currently facing from indigenous people who have been completely fucked by tar sands production. but in general, since fossil fuels were discovered the status quo has been that as long as it's profitable to do so, they will be extracted ad infinitum. but we can't keep doing that. *insert Inconvenient Truth.avi* at some point, the addict has to decide to stop, even though every force in the world is telling him to keep going. if we keep extracting every last bit of fossil fuels, we will cause immense human suffering. my instincts tell me that we will probably do that, but i am also an incredibly cynical and borderline misanthropic person (although i'm trying to get better, i really am!). but i honestly can barely go on living if i don't have a glimmer of hope, and for me that glimmer is that it's possible to steer the ship away from the iceberg before its too late.

i don't think that obama rejected the pipeline because he wants to be a leader on climate change, far from it. he made a calculated political decision and i doubt that he gives a shit about science or the future. but by making the decision, he opens up the possibility of a future where the tar sands production is kept to a minimum and we actually have a chance of mitigating the worst impacts of climate change (it's too late to mitigate many of the impacts, unfortunately).

We actually agree on a lot of things. But I thought one of the problems with the oil from the tar was the refining of it into a usable product? Wouldn't it be worse to sell the oil in crude form to be processed to a country without the strict guidelines we currently have?

(i stayed late at work to type up that tl;dr and i need to run some errands on the way home! i'll respond when i get home because it's a good question!)

Tarsands, like oil spills, are an attractive target for environmental interest groups because unlike, say, radioactive emissions from the normal operation of coal plants (which arguably have much greater impact), they provide visuals that can be photographed.

I'd hope every scientifically literate person agrees the pressing issue isn't incidental spills or temporary removal of overburden, which have impacts lasting decades, but the emissions of greenhouse gasses, which will have substantial impacts for between 100,000 and 500,000 years after the fossil fuel era. Diatoms etc. in the oceans normally sequester carbon in the normal geochemical carbon cycle, but current studies indicate this pathway will become saturated in a century or two and substantial amounts of of carbon will linger in the atmosphere for millenia. These figures are from paleoclimatologist Curt Stager's excellent Deep Future (2011), which is even handed enough to offend all parties in the global warming debate.

There are good figures that tar sands require between the equivalent of a third to two-thirds a barrel of oil energy equivalent just for extraction, mostly to liquify and hydrogenate(if upconverting) the bitumen (basically oil from which all the volatile small molecules have evaporated or been consumed by bacteria, with similar viscosity to vasoline). Most of this additional energy is sourced from cheap Alberta-stranded natural gas, so it has about half the greenhouse emissions compared to using coal-generated electricity for production. I suspect that the all-in carbon emissions for most frontier oil projects (like deep sea or tight shale in undeveloped areas) would be very similar when one considers exploration, transport, and infrastructure, so I'm dubious that tar sands are particularly "dirty" compared to other petroleum with respect to greenhouse gases.

Tar sands don't necessarily require mining and overburden removal. The area in which the Athabasca tar sands are shallow enough to permit this is pretty limited, and is already exploited, so most new/incremental projects are using steam assisted gravity drainage. In SAGD, parallel horizontal wells are drilled one above the other, with steam injected into the upper wellbore and heated bitumen & water pumped from the lower. On the surface, this has a much smaller impact, with a well pad of few acres extracting resources from the surrounding 10+ square miles.

On the other hand, there are some tar sands projects that are potentially worse in emissions than the mining and SAGD developments. Toe-to-Heel Air Injection (THAI), developed when natural gas was getting scarce, injects air and starts combustion of the bitumen itself to produce heat underground. Whereas most SAGD projects can extract roughly 30% of the original bitumen in place, THAI projects burn a lot of it to get at that 30%. The exhaust adds up.

In my opinion, it really doesn't matter a whit whether the tar sands are exploited over 50 years or 100, which is all limiting pipeline capacity would do. Given atmospheric residence times in the hundreds of millenia, the critical issue is limiting the total amount of emissions humanity permits itself during the industrial/carbon age. A vow of chastity on the remaining easy coal, for example.

We'll have to wean ourselves, and I'm with the economists and James Hansen that the most efficient way to price the externality of GH emissions is with revenue neutral carbon taxes applied at the point of extraction or import. Goldman Sachs etc. won't get their cut from permit shuffling as in the Kyoto model, but fuck em.

As for Keystone XL, global politics dictate that it will be built, if only so that the U.S. can utilize the tar sands rather than China. The U.S. government definitely doesn't want the alternative pipeline over the Rockies to the Pacific port of Kitimat (Northern Gateway) to be built, as this would reduce U.S. energy security and leverage over Canadian resources. The State Department's permit denial looks a lot like a political gesture for one of Obama's core constituencies, but I'd expect that calculation to be forgotten on November 7th.

ok, i'm back. Jacob, in reference to your question about international regulations refining tar sands, i guess i'm not sure how rejecting the keystone expansion really affects things. if canada wants to sell the tar sands oil on the international market - and Stephen Harper in the past few hours has made it clear that he intends to push for that - then i would imagine that canada's existing refineries that are equipped to refine tar sands would be quite busy, and they'd probably build more to handle increased quantities? honestly, i don't much about canada's refineries, other than that facilities already exist that can refine tar sands, and given the $$ involved i'm sure they'd find it profitable to build more if needed. but that's a guess.

The State Department's permit denial looks a lot like a political gesture for one of Obama's core constituencies, but I'd expect that calculation to be forgotten on November 7th.

sadly otm

xp Tar sands will refine like any other heavy oil. Its an oil field whose structural trap has eroded away, which allowed volatile components (like gasoline ideal octane) to evaporate or be digested by oxygen requiring bacteria, and leaving behind only the larger waxy molecules (of the sort refined into Vaseline). To crack this wax into smaller liquid hydrocarbons requires a source of hydrogen like natural gas, as in the hydrocrackers of every refinery adapted to heavy oil. Most North American refineries that aren't associated with local light sweet fields are pretty advanced, as Venezuelan and Mexican export blends are on the heavy side.

One can either do a portion of the refining on-site (upgrading the oil to ultra-premium light sweet as Syncrude and Suncor do) or buy diluent like locally produced natural gas liquids/condensates to liquify the bitumen enough for pipeline transport to distant refineries.

Tar is a bit of misnomer, by the way. Bitumen is deficient in the lighter constituents, but tar is the "bottoms" of refining (after all the useful petrochemical feed stocks and liquid fuels have evaporated away in the distillation columns)

Thanks for the science Sanpaku.

think obama just supported fracking

that was some pretty strong language

he definitely did

the writing has been on the wall for a long time

did he really just stick it to the oil industry so openly?

for example

he didn't stick it to the oil industry - domestic exploration has spiked under the Obama administration, and as I walked in late and turned on the tv, he was talking about expanding domestic drilling even more in the coming year

demanding that companies be frank about the chemicals used in fracking doesn't actually prevent the environmental damage that fracking causes

xpost
i guess he was talking about ending the subsidies to the oil industry, but he's been saying that for a while. it doesn't work because republicans oppose it en masse.

xpost again, yeah, and the sad part is that fracking would have been much better regulated (under the Safe Water Drinking Act), except that in 2005, as part of the Energy Policy that Dick Cheney created behind closed doors with the fossil fuel industry (and excluded all environmental groups from), he specifically added a paragraph now called "the Cheney rule" that excludes hydraulic fracturing from being covered under SWDA. so "demanding that companies be frank about the chemicals used in fracking" isn't so much a big advance as finally gaining back ground that never should have been lost in the first place.

Serious question, which clean energy is Obama talking about?

great question. because a lot of people lump in nuclear with clean energy. some really diabolical people also try to include "clean coal" as clean energy, which is preposterous.

looks like he's diabolical. here's what the white house website says:

In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed an ambitious but achievable goal of generating 80 percent of the Nation’s electricity from clean energy sources by 2035. All clean sources – including renewables, nuclear power, efficient natural gas, and coal with carbon capture and sequestration – would count toward the goal.

what a load of shit.

personally, I'm fine with nuclear power but I don't want it near (in?) fault zones like some of the plants in California

i'm fine with nuclear power as long as we have a solid plan on dealing with storage, disposal, and related security concerns for the next several hundred years

i'm not optimistic

I read a pretty good plan in esquire a couple years ago. It had cool graphs and mentioned a good recycling method for minimizing waste

But I can't be too optimistic either

those are "Generation IV", or closed-cycle reactors. they sound nice but won't be ready until 2030 at best, more likely 2045+. also, the economics of Generation IV are likely to be terrible.

oh boy new deep water drilling leases for the Gulf!

rmde

carbon capture and sequestration

This makes me furious - just another path for shifting the burden and the waste to third-world countries that won't benefit from the power generation.

The Press and the Pipeline

A Media Matters analysis shows that as a whole, news coverage of the Keystone XL pipeline between August 1 and December 31 favored pipeline proponents. Although the project would create few long-term employment opportunities, the pipeline was primarily portrayed as a jobs issue. Pro-pipeline voices were quoted more frequently than those opposed, and dubious industry estimates of job creation were uncritically repeated 5 times more often than they were questioned. Meanwhile, concerns about the State Department's review process and potential environmental consequences were often overlooked, particularly by television outlets.

http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/chart-20120125-keystonexl-1.png
http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/chart-20120125-keystonexl-3.png

more of a geopolitical thing, but this Iran/EU oil embargo thing is getting really, really interesting.

Besieged by international sanctions over the Iranian nuclear program including a planned oil embargo by Europe, Iran warned its six largest European buyers on Wednesday that it might strike first by immediately cutting them off from Iranian oil.

China and Iran have been working on a bilateral barter system (oil for goods/services) for 6+ months now. The EU sanction related devaluation of the Iranian rial has been beneficial to Iranian non-oil exports and employment.

Ultimately, these sorts of sanctions have largely just accellerated the shift of Iran from the western to the Chinese sphere of influence.

Charts for Z S:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mdRYVeLh9Co/T0YwKW8olhI/AAAAAAAAA-8/l3qKVSnYXDs/s640/figure57.gif

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vNN4NJuC0Ss/T0YwFO4cd9I/AAAAAAAAA-0/sSZGrVemxG4/s640/figure58.gif

From Dr. Yardeni's Oil Market Intelligence

Thanks for those, Sanpaku! I knew that oil consumption in the developed world had curtailed, but I don't think I realized the extent to which it's dropped off in the past 5 years.

on a somewhat related note,

In the face of an "absolutely unprecedented emergency", say the 18 past winners of the Blue Planet prize – the unofficial Nobel for the environment – society has "no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilisation. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us".

...The paper urges governments to:

• Replace GDP as a measure of wealth with metrics for natural, built, human and social capital – and how they intersect.

• Eliminate subsidies in sectors such as energy, transport and agriculture that create environmental and social costs, which currently go unpaid.

• Tackle overconsumption in the rich world, and address population pressure by empowering women, improving education and making contraception accessible to all.

• Transform decision-making processes to empower marginalised groups, and integrate economic, social and environmental policies instead of having them compete.

• Conserve and value biodiversity and ecosystem services, and create markets for them that can form the basis of green economies.

• Invest in knowledge through research and training.

"The current system is broken," said Watson. "It is driving humanity to a future that is 3-5C warmer than our species has ever known, and is eliminating the ecology that we depend on for our health, wealth and senses of self."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/82268857/Bob-Watson-Synthesis-Paper-for-UNEP