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Global investment of more than $1 trillion in planned LNG plants at risk

Employees work next to tanks for liquefied natural gas at a factory in Xian, China in June. China is a prime customer in a worldwide LNG expansion. (Reuters)

There’s no question that when you burn it, methane, the main component of natural gas, is much cleaner than coal.

With that in mind, you might think a newly released report titled The New Gas Boom should be cause for celebration.

Instead, the fresh analysis from Global Energy Monitor, a group well known in energy circles for keeping track of coal plant construction in Asia, sounds a warning, not just for the climate but for investors in what it calculates as a risky $1.3 trillion US worth of global gas infrastructure.

Effectively, the report warns that rather than being an environment-friendly product that can help solve our climate problems, gas is the new coal.

The explosion in spending on planned new liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities — the vast majority in the U.S. and Canada — combined with new calculations for leakage from the LNG supply chain called fugitive gas — means the world may soon turn against gas in the same way it turned against its solid fuel relative.

“New studies have shown there is significantly more fugitive gas than studies showed five years ago, and the gas is also a bigger contributor to climate change than was understood,” said James Browning, one of the report’s authors.

A 34,000-ton heavy lift vessel carries barges for LNG Canada completing pre-construction work at Kitimat, B.C., last fall to prepare the port for larger vessels once the new $40-billion natural gas export facility is constructed.(YouTube/LNG Canada)

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The methane menace

March 14, 2019

The methane menace

The concentration of methane in the atmosphere has been increasing for more than a decade and now appears to be accelerating. The rising concentration is worldwide, but is more pronounced in the tropics and northern mid-latitudes. What has caused this increase is not yet well understood. It is almost certainly due to rising emissions of the gas, but a decline in the ability of atmospheric oxidative mechanisms to breakdown methane is also possible.

What is alarming is that this increase in emissions was not anticipated in the preparation of the greenhouse gas emissions scenarios that are compliant with the targets of the Paris Agreement.

A research article just published by the American Geophysical Union paints a disturbing picture of the impact on global warming if atmospheric concentrations of methane continue to rise. At present rates, the additional global warming impact of the methane may significantly negate or even reverse progress in reducing global CO2 emissions. This effect may fatally undermine efforts to meet the target of the 2015 UN Paris Agreement on climate change to limit warming to no more than 2°C.

But strangely, the source of the rising levels of this powerful greenhouse gas is something of a mystery.

Where’s it coming from?

Methane is emitted from both anthropogenic sources (primarily the oil and gas industry and large-scale cattle production) and from natural sources such as wetlands. The table below shows the range of annual emissions from both groups of sources.[1]

Anthropogenic and natural sources of methane

By far the largest source of emissions of methane is from wetlands. Emissions from the oil and gas industries and from livestock are about equal in second place.

The article in the American Geophysical Union offers three possible explanations for the global increase in atmospheric levels of methane:

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Early rain as Arctic warms means more methane

February 19, 2019

Early rain as Arctic warms means more methane

Methane bubbles trapped in ice in a Canadian lake. Image: By John Bakator on Unsplash

As spring advances, so does the rain to warm the permafrost. It means more methane can get into the atmosphere to accelerate global warming.

LONDON, 18 February, 2019 − As the global temperature steadily rises, it ensures that levels of one of the most potent greenhouse gases are increasing in a way new to science: the planet will have to reckon with more methane than expected.

Researchers who monitored one bog for three years in the Alaskan permafrost have identified yet another instance of what engineers call positive feedback. They found that global warming meant earlier springs and with that, earlier spring rains.

And as a consequence, the influx of warm water on what had previously been frozen ground triggered a biological frenzy that sent methane emissions soaring.

One stretch of wetland in a forest of black spruce in the Alaskan interior stepped up its emissions of natural gas (another name for methane) by 30%. Methane is a greenhouse gas at least 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

“The microbes in this bog on some level are like ‘Oh man, we’re stuck making methane because that’s all this bog is allowing us to do’”

As a consequence, climate scientists may have to return yet again to the vexed question of the carbon budget, in their calculations of how fast the world will warm as humans burn more fossil fuels, to set up ever more rapid global warming and climate change, which will in turn accelerate the thawing of the permafrost.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The World Will End in Fire

January 24, 2019

The World Will End in Fire

Proclaiming that the end is nigh has now become the labor of the very opposite of a deluded religious devotee. And the question framed by Robert Frost of whether the world will end in fire or ice is no longer in dispute. The world will soon end in fire, possibly the fire of the Pentagon’s “usable” nuclear weapons, certainly the fire of anthropogenic climate collapse. Not only will the world not end in ice, but the vanishing of ice from the earth is helping to rapidly render this planet uninhabitable for humans and many other species.

As we observe up-close in Dahr Jamail’s new book The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, great masses of ice are melting away. Glacier National Park will soon lack any glaciers. Greenland, that ice-covered land falsely labeled green and distorted by northern prejudice to appear larger than Africa on most western maps, is being transformed into something you can spray through a hose . . . or drown in. Ice that most of us have never seen, but upon which our lives depend, is disappearing, not just quickly, but at a rate that is constantly becoming quicker, and even quicker, and quicker still.

The permafrost in the Arctic, Jamail tells us, is thawing and releasing methane, and could at any moment release methane equivalent to several times the total carbon dioxide released by humans ever. Barring that catastrophe, the feedback loops or vicious cycles are real and underestimated. When the glaciers melt, the streams warm up or dry up, ecosystems collapse, forests burn, and the glaciers melt more. By 2015, forests in California had become climate polluters rather than CO2 reducers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Carbon Capture – Does it Work?

November 26, 2018

Carbon Capture – Does it Work?

Photo Source Nicholas A. Tonelli | CC BY 2.0

Harken! Good news (maybe) “encouraging news” is a better description, as Negative Emissions Technology (“NET”) starts coming into focus. Conceptually, carbon removal or direct air capture removes CO2 from the atmosphere, which would be great for suppressing climate change.

In that regard, Elizabeth Kolbert recently interviewed (Yale Environment 360) Stephen Pacala (Princeton professor) chairman of the US scientific panel studying carbon removal under the auspices of the National Academies. Which means the project has top-notch clearances, in fact, blue chip.

Of course, the big question about direct carbon capture is whether it can fix a very big problem created by humans burning fossil fuels like crazed Madhatters portending an ecological disaster-in-waiting because of excessive levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, possibly leading to human extinction way ahead of schedule, too early, or looked at another way, extinction occurring well ahead of scientists’ models. But really, honestly and truly who in his/her right mind “models” human extinction?

Negative Emission Technology -NET- that removes carbon dioxide (“CO2”) from the atmosphere would be a dream come true, assuming it happens fast enough to prevent already-collapsing ecosystems from further total collapse, e.g., permafrost throughout the Northern Hemisphere, especially in the East Siberian Arctic Sea, ESAS, where subsea permafrost covers massive quantities of methane (CH4) in extraordinarily shallow waters. It’s the world’s largest reservoir, and CH4 is the most potent of the greenhouse gases. Problem: The subsea permafrost protective cap is rapidly thinning because of global warming. Already a Russian/American research team has witnessed alarmingly large columns of methane escaping into the atmosphere in the ESAS.

Therefore, the crucial question of the 21st century: Does technology for carbon removal ultimately measure up to the task at hand, meaning, long-term survival of Homo sapiens?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fracking in the UK

November 9, 2018

Fracking in the UK

Burning fossil fuels is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions (GGE), and, greenhouse gas emissions (water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O)) are the principle cause of man-made climate change. Given this fact, governments throughout the world should be moving away from fossil fuels and investing in, and designing policies that encourage development of, renewable sources of energy. But the British Conservative government, despite public opinion to the contrary, has all but banned the construction of onshore wind turbines and is encouraging fracking in England. The Tories are the only UK political party to offer support for this regressive form of energy production, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens having all promised fracking bans should they gain political office at the next general election.

Hydraulic fracking is the process of releasing gas and oil from shale rock: huge quantities of water, proppant (usually sand) and chemicals are injected at high-pressure into hydrocarbon-bearing rocks, rocks that can be up to a mile down and were once thought to be impermeable. This process of fracturing (or cracking) forces the rocks to crack open, and gas held inside is released and allowed to flow to the surface.

Shale gas is a fossil fuel, and when combusted produces GGE, albeit at around 50% less than coal or oil, but GGE nevertheless. The leading fracking company in Britain is the energy firm Cuadrilla. An organization that according to its website, aims “to be a model company for exploring and developing shale gas in the UK,” they state that they are “acutely aware of the responsibilities this brings, particularly with regard to safety, environmental protection and working with local communities.” Really?

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A Field Guide to the Petrochemical and Plastics Industry

October 29, 2018

A Field Guide to the Petrochemical and Plastics Industry

The shale gas industry has been trying to build demand for fossil fuels from its fracked oil and gas wells by promoting the construction of a new petrochemical corridor in America’s Rust Belt and expanding the corridor on the Gulf Coast. To help demystify terms like “natural gas liquids” and “cracker plants,” DeSmog has begun building a guide to some of the equipment and terms used in the plastics and petrochemical industries.

This guide, which will expand over time, is intended to serve as an informal glossary of sorts and an introduction to what happens to fossil fuels that are transformed into chemicals, plastics, vinyl, Styrofoam and a variety of other materials.

Petrochemical Production and the Climate

This field guide is part of Fracking for Plastics, a DeSmog investigation into the proposed petrochemical build-out in the Rust Belt and the major players involved, along with the environmental, health, and socio-economic implications.

These fossil fuels have a significant global warming impact of their own. The methane leaks associated with the natural gas drilling and distribution industry are so pronounced that many experts say burning natural gas for electricity is worse for the climate than burning coal.

While hydrocarbons that are used as raw materials for petrochemical products aren’t burned (and therefore don’t release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere), that leaky infrastructure still results in methane pollution. Methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, capable of warming the climate about 86 times faster than an equal amount of carbon dioxide during the first decade after it’s released to the atmosphere.

Making petrochemicals also requires a huge amount of energy — some of the largest petrochemical plants like crackers may have their own power plants on site — and that energy comes from burning fossil fuels.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Nature Preparing for a New Ice Age or a Pole Shift?

September 28, 2018

Is Nature Preparing for a New Ice Age or a Pole Shift?

There is a very curious connection between lakes and volcanos in the Arctic. I just posted how there are kilotons of CO2 coming out of volcanos. There is a similar thing now showing up in lakes in the Arctic as well. There are about 300 lakes across the tundras of the Arctic. However, a scientist reportsthat she has never before ever seen a lake like this one. The lake looks like it is boiling. It is making a hissing sound and bubbles are rising to the surface like a pot of water which is on the stove. It is actually producing powerful greenhouse gas called methane that Europe is taxing farmers for because their cows produce it. Who should we tax for this one? Methane gas has escaped from the lake bed and the bubbles are as big as a grapefruit.

There has been a rise in volcanic activity under the ice caps at both the North and South Poles. Nobody knows if this is a prelude to a pole shift or is this simply a foreshadow of climate change and entering into a new ice age. What we do know is that melting ice does not result in rising sea levels, it results in the water evaporating and it comes back as snow which then increases the glaciers once again. The danger is that this entire Global Warming nonsense is ignoring how ice ages are even created!

In fact, The British Daily Mail is reporting that not only was this forecast of Al Gore dead WRONG, the ice cap has actually expanded for the second year in a row covering 1.7million square kilometers MORE than 2 years ago and it is also thicker! In fact, the ice has melted in some areas and is building up in others as if they are gradually starting to move. That is good news for perhaps it means we are entering a mini ice age caused by a volcanic winter rather than melting ice that comes back as an ice age.

From CO2 to Methane, Trump’s Hurricane of Destruction

September 14, 2018

From CO2 to Methane, Trump’s Hurricane of Destruction

Photo Source Becker1999 | CC BY 2.0

While the Trump administration swirls around in a vortex of Tweets, lies and Russiagate, one thing is for certain, while we are all distracted and perplexed by the daily mayhem, Trump and his fossil fuel buddies are getting away with environmental plunder.

It’s not a surprise, really, given that Trump believes man-made climate change is a bunch of stale chow mein, as he notoriously tweeted:

✔

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

3:15 PM – Nov 6, 2012

Unfortunately, Trump has moved beyond his wacky conspiracy theory and sparked a full-on assault on the environmental laws, science and regulatory apparatus which act as our best hope to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In documents uncovered by the New York Times earlier this week, the paper revealed the Trump gang is going to announce a proposal that will make it far easier for oil and gas companies to release methane into the atmosphere. Trump’s gaseous rollback would allow these polluters to stop monitoring and fixing leakage that originates from their pipes.

Leaking methane is catastrophic, and by some estimates the gas accounts for one-third of all warming from greenhouse gas emissions. In the US, leaks account for approximately 32 percent of the industry’s total methane pollution. While methane doesn’t stick around as long as carbon, it has a much more immediate impact and is considered 84 times more potent than CO2 in the first twenty years after being released. Obama did not go nearly far enough in halting the fossil fuel polluters; nonetheless, Trump’s administration is dismantling every meager roadblock Obama’s EPA erected.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Methane and climate: 10 things you should know

September 6, 2018

Methane and climate: 10 things you should know

The graph above shows methane concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere over the past 10,000+ years: 8000 BCE to 2018 CE. The units are parts per billion (ppb). The year 1800 is marked with a circle.

Note the ominous spike. As a result of increasing human-caused emissions, atmospheric methane levels today are two-and-a-half times higher than in 1800. After thousands of years of relatively stable concentrations, we have driven the trendline to near-vertical.

Here are 10 things you should know about methane and the climate:

1. Methane (CH₄) is one of the three main greenhouse gases, along with carbon dioxide (CO₂) and nitrous oxide (N₂O).

2. Methane is responsible for roughly 20% of warming, while carbon dioxide is responsible for roughly 70%, and nitrous oxide the remaining 10%.

3. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas (GHG). Pound for pound, it is 28 times more effective at trapping heat than is carbon dioxide. Though humans emit more carbon dioxide than methane, each tonne of the latter traps more heat.

4. Fossil-fuel production is the largest single source. Natural gas is largely made up of methane (about 90%). When energy companies drill wells, “frac” wells, and pump natural gas through vast distribution networks some of that methane escapes. (In the US alone, there are 500,000 natural gas wells, more than 3 million kilometers of pipes, and millions of valves, fittings, and compressors; see reports here and here.) Oil and coal production also release methane—often vented into the atmosphere from coal mines and oil wells. Fossil-fuel production is responsible for about 19% of total (human-caused and natural) methane emissions. (An excellent article by Saunois et al. is the source for this percentage and many other facts in this blog post.) In Canada, policies to reduce energy-sector methane emissions by 40 percent will be phased in over the next seven years, but implementation of those policies has been repeatedly delayed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival

August 16, 2018

A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival

There is almost unanimous agreement among climate scientists and organizations – that is, 97% of over 10,000 climate scientists and the various scientific organizations engaged in climate science research – that human beings have caused a dramatic increase in the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide released into Earth’s atmosphere since the pre-industrial era and that this is driving the climate catastrophe that continues to unfold. For the documentary evidence on this point see, for example,‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature’, ‘Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming’and ‘Scientists Agree: Global Warming is Happening and Humans are the Primary Cause’.

However, there is no consensus regarding the timeframe in which this climate catastrophe will cause human extinction. This lack of consensus is primarily due to the global elite controlling the public perception of this timeframe with frequent talk of ‘the end of the century’ designed to allow ongoing profit maximization through ‘business as usual’ for as long as possible. Why has this happened?

When evidence of the climate catastrophe (including the pivotal role of burning fossil fuels) became incontrovertible, which meant that the fossil fuel industry’s long-standing efforts to prevent action on the climate catastrophe had finally ended, the industry shifted its focus to arguing that the timeframe, which it presented as ‘end of the century’, meant that we could defer action (and thus profit-maximization through business as usual could continue indefinitely). Consequently, like the tobacco, sugar and junk food industries, the fossil fuel industry has employed a range of tactics to deflect attention from their primary responsibility for a problem and to delay action on it.

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Diet, Ignorance and the Environmental Catastrophe

July 3, 2018

Diet, Ignorance and the Environmental Catastrophe

Climate Change sounds vast and impersonal, but it’s really a very personal matter; a global crisis caused by the individual actions humanity has collectively taken. All too often such actions proceed from a position of ignorance selfishness and habit, and are undertaken with little or no understanding of the effects on the natural environment.

The debate around climate change commonly focuses on transportation, deforestation, and energy – replacing fossil fuels with renewables. This is right and urgent, and some countries are taking steps; however, what is not tackled at all is the devastating impact of a meat/dairy diet, – common to 97% of humanity. According to Reducing Food’s Environmental Impacts Through Producers and Consumers (RFEI), a detailed report published in the journal Science, consumption of animal produce is “degrading terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, depleting water resources, and driving climate change.”

Industrial farming of cows, pigs, sheep and chickens, plus harvesting fish, for human consumption is the single greatest cause of the interconnected environmental catastrophe; unless urgent substantive change takes place this could single-handedly lead to a polluting point beyond redemption. Misinformed, irresponsible lifestyle choices are behind the environmental crisis. The vast majority of people are unaware of the devastating effects of our collective eating habits, and from this position of uninformed ignorance disaster flows; the earth is poisoned, the climate disrupted and all manner of lives are lost.

Animal agriculture is responsible for approximately 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions (GGE), according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This is more than any other sector, including manufacturing and transportation. The principal climate change contaminate is methane (44%), which comes mainly from rearing cattle – the source of 65% of all livestock GGE’s. While methane’s atmospheric life is only decades compared to centuries/millennia for carbon-dioxide (Co2) Scientific American reports that it “warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2,” before degrading to become CO2: So it’s a double whammy, an intensely damaging one.

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World May Hit 2 Degrees of Warming in 10-15 Years Thanks to Fracking, Says Cornell Scientist

April 26, 2018

World May Hit 2 Degrees of Warming in 10-15 Years Thanks to Fracking, Says Cornell Scientist

In 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than coal.

In a sobering lecture released this month, a member of that team, Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University, outlined more precisely the role U.S. fracking is playing in changing the world’s climate.

The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accord in just 10 to 15 years, says Ingraffea in a 13-minute lecture titled “Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,” which was posted online on April 4.

That’s if American energy policy follows the track predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which expects 1 million natural gas wells will be producing gas in the U.S. in 2050, up from roughly 100,000 today.

The Difference of a Half Degree

An average global temperature increase of 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) will bring catastrophic changes — even as compared against a change of 1.5° C (2.7° F). “Heat waves would last around a third longer, rain storms would be about a third more intense, the increase in sea level would be approximately that much higher and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation would be roughly that much greater,” with just that half-degree difference, NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained in a 2016 post about climate change.

A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was leaked this January, concludes that it’s “extremely unlikely” that the world will keep to a 1.5° change, estimating that the world will cross that threshold in roughly 20 years, somewhat slower than Ingraffea’s presentation concludes.

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Stunning new research finds fracking a major source of carbon pollution in Pennsylvania

February 22, 2018

Stunning new research finds fracking a major source of carbon pollution in Pennsylvania

Methane leaks in the state’s oil and gas industry equal 11 coal-fired power plants.

Flaring takes place after a gas well has been drilled and before it is put into operation. CREDIT: Carolyn Cole/L.A. Times via Getty Images — FLARING TAKES PLACE AFTER A GAS WELL HAS BEEN DRILLED AND BEFORE IT IS PUT INTO OPERATION. CREDIT: CAROLYN COLE/L.A. TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

The evidence is now overwhelming that natural gas is not part of the climate solution, it is part of the problem.

A new study finds that the methane escaping from Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry “causes the same near-term climate pollution as 11 coal-fired power plants.” And that is “five times higher than what oil and gas companies report” to the state, according to analysis from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) based on 16 peer-reviewed studies.

Natural gas is mostly methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas, which traps 86 times as much heat as CO2 over a 20-year period. So even a small leakage rate from the natural gas supply chain (production to delivery to combustion) can have a large climate impact — enough to gut the entire benefit of switching from coal-fired power to gas for a long, long time.

Yet even though many earlier studies have found that natural gas production spews out huge amounts of carbon pollution all across the country, just last week, the Trump administration moved to undo an Obama-era rule aimed at limiting the methane leakage from gas and oil production on public lands.

As EDF’s president Fred Krupp told the New York Times, “Gutting the rule would allow unchecked waste of natural gas, unnecessary pollution and the loss of revenue to communities and tribes to address critical needs such as schools and roads,”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New NASA Study Solves Climate Mystery, Confirms Methane Spike Tied to Oil and Gas

January 17, 2018

New NASA Study Solves Climate Mystery, Confirms Methane Spike Tied to Oil and Gas

Global map of percent changes in acres burning

Over the past few years, natural gas has become the primary fuel that America uses to generate electricity, displacing the long-time king of fossil fuels, coal. In 2019, more than a third of America’s electrical supply will come from natural gas, with coal falling to a second-ranked 28 percent, the Energy Information Administration predicted this month, marking the growing ascendency of gas in the American power market.

But new peer-reviewed research adds to the growing evidence that the shift from coal to gas isn’t necessarily good news for the climate.

A team led by scientists at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the oil and gas industry is responsible for the largest share of the world’s rising methane emissions, which are a major factor in climate change — and in the process the researchers resolved one of the mysteries that has plagued climate scientists over the past several years.

Missing Methane

That mystery? Since 2006, methane emissions have been rising by about 25 teragrams (a unit of weight so large that NASAnotes you’d need over 200,000 elephants to equal one teragram) every year. But when different researchers sought to pinpoint the sources of that methane, they ran into a problem.

If you added the growing amounts of methane pollution from oil and gas to the rising amount of methane measured from other sources, like microbes in wetlands and marshes, the totals came out too high — exceeding the levels actually measured in the atmosphere. The numbers didn’t add up.

It turns out, there was a third factor at play, one whose role was underestimated, NASA‘s new paper concludes, after reviewing satellite data, ground-level measurements, and chemical analyses of the emissions from different sources.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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