A dump truck works near the Syncrude oil sands extraction facility near the city of Fort McMurray, Alberta , The Canadian Press
CALGARY — A new technology that transforms heavy crude oil into pill-sized pellets could cure the oilsands industry’s transportation headaches, according to University of Calgary professor Ian Gates.
The newly patented technique creates self-sealing balls of bitumen of various sizes that can then be moved in coal rail cars or transport trucks with less risk of environmentally harmful spills, thus reducing the need for new pipelines, he said.
The technology was discovered accidentally by Gates and research engineer Jackie Wang at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering.
“We were trying to upgrade and we learned how to degrade,” said Gates on Wednesday.
“For these products, we’ve taken it to degrading the outer surface of pellets … so we have an intact pellet that’s kind of like a black Advil pill.”Gates said Tuesday a pilot project able to generate one barrel per day of the pellets will start up in November, to be followed by a scaled-up commercial demonstration project able to produce about 600 barrels per day.
He estimated it would cost about $1 million to build a machine that could deliver 100 barrels per day of pellets but added the cost per barrel will fall dramatically with larger scale projects.
Canadian National Railway (CNR.TO 0.36%) unveiled a similar-sounding technology earlier this year, announcing it had filed a patent application for CanaPux, a process that turns bitumen into a semi-solid for transportation by mixing and coating it with polymer.
With such a bad wildfire season in BC and with so much disruption in the province, I suppose it’s inevitable that someone (Al Gore? CBC? The Weather Channel?) would step … Continue reading
Germany has spent some 650 billion euros ($780 billion) on subsidies for green power in recent decades. But the country’s climate targets “won’t be a near miss but a booming failure.”
By 2030, the eastern German town of Poedelwitz will likely be razed to get at the rich veins of coal beneath its half-timbered houses. The reason: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s effort to steer Germany toward greener energy, which has unexpectedly meant booming demand for dirty coal.
While Merkel aims to wean the country from nuclear power and boost renewable energy, the shift has been slow—Germany’s 140-plus coal-fired plants last year supplied 40 percent of the country’s electricity—and Poedelwitz is flanked by open-pit lignite mines that feed a 2 gigawatt power plant a few miles away.
“This is unparalleled destruction of the environment,” says Jens Hausner, a farmer who has seen 17 of his 20 hectares consumed by digging equipment that looks like something out of a Mad Max movie. In a bit more than a decade, the hulking machines are expected to claw through the town’s 13th-century church and 40 or so remaining homes.
Fine-tuning the shift toward cleaner energy will be near the top of Merkel’s to-do list if she wins a fourth term as chancellor, as expected, in Sept. 24 elections. Germany began subsidizing wind and solar in 2000, but the pace picked up after 2011, when Merkel initiated her “Energy Shift” in reaction to the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant.
Merkel aims to cut CO2 emissions by 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, and Germany has spent some 650 billion euros ($780 billion) on subsidies for green power in recent decades. But the country will at best get to 30 percent by 2020, according to Berlin climate researcher Agora Energiewende. Emission reductions “won’t be a near miss but a booming failure,” Agora researchers write.
That’s not to say Merkel’s policy has been a failure. Wind power alone has spawned 143,000 jobs, according to the BWE wind industry lobby, versus 135,000 who work in the traditional power sector and coal mining. More than a third of Germany’s electricity now comes from wind, solar and biomass, up from a quarter four years ago. And Germany is ahead of the European average, with emissions down 27 percent from 1990 levels, versus 22 percent for the 28 members of the European Union.
Merkel’s government says clean power investments will make Germany a global leader in the technologies, giving its manufacturers an edge for decades to come. “For all the challenges of the Energy Shift, we’re on track to be at the forefront of a radical switch from a carbon-powered economy, ” her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, said in an Aug. 29 speech in Leipzig.
The upside to the Energiewende can be seen in the North Sea port of Cuxhaven. Within a couple of years, about 1,000 people will work at Siemens AG’s new $240 million plant that manufactures massive turbines there. Those will be towed out into the windswept waters of the North Sea, where they’ll be mounted atop towers made a few hundred meters away by Ambau GmbH.
“We’ve benefitted from the Energy Shift, no doubt,” says Ulrich Getsch, mayor of Cuxhaven, which prevailed over scores of bidders to win the Siemens plant. There’s plenty of room for other green energy companies at the site, says Getsch, who aims to make the town “the hub of a boom.”
Yet the prosperity enjoyed by Cuxhaven and a handful of other towns has been fueled by generous government funding. Klaus Schaefer, chief executive officer of German utility Uniper SE, says subsidies have done little to rein in carbon emissions while forcing German companies to abandon valuable equipment. “It’s difficult to see a lot of winners from the energy transition,” Schaefer says.
Consumers bristle at the cost as Germany has the European Union’s second-highest rates for electricity after Denmark. A green surcharge raises German power bills by some 25 percent, to an average of about 29 euro cents (34.6 U.S. cents) per KW-h this year—more than triple the level in the U.S.
Climate computer model projections of future man-made warming due to human emissions of carbon dioxide are running too hot, says a fascinating new study in Nature Geoscience. Consequently, researchers reckon that humanity has more time to prevent dangerous future climate change than had been suggested earlier by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
This is really good news. This new article shows that climate science is not yet “settled science.”
Of course, this is just one article among many thousands addressing aspects of man-made climate change. While its authors are members in good standing in the climate science establishment, they could be wrong. In fact, on the same day as the Nature Geoscience study was published, the United Kingdom’s Met Office issued a report that says this: “After a period during the early 2000’s when the rise in global mean temperature slowed…the long-term rate of global warming has now returned to the level seen in the second half of the 20th century.”
The Met Office attributes the temperature slowdown in the early 21st century to natural climate variations. Specifically, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation had flipped to its cool phase, thus masking ongoing man-made global warming between 1999 and 2014. If true, this would suggest that the climate models are right after all about the long-term temperature trends and that the carbon budget is smaller than the new study calculates.
So what did the Nature Geoscience researchers do? They began by calculating what the global carbon budget should be in order to keep future temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. Why that level? Because the signatories to the Paris Agreement on climate change committed to “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels.”
The researchers next pointed out that the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, from 2013, estimated that cumulative carbon dioxide emissions since 1870 would have to remain less than 2,260 gigatons of carbon dioxide to stay below the 1.5 C threshold. But as of 2014, cumulative emissions stood at just over 2,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Since humanity is currently emitting about 36 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually, that implies that humanity would blow through the remaining IPCC carbon budget around 2021.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The average global temperature now stands at about 0.9 C above the pre-industrial baseline, which implies that global temperature would have to increase by 0.6 C between now and 2021 if the IPCC carbon budget calculations were right. This is highly implausible since such an increase would be about 10 times faster than than what has actually heretofore been observed.
“Taking an average across ESMs [Earth systems models] suggests that our cumulative emissions to date would correspond to about 0.3 C more than best estimates of human-caused warming so far,” lead author Richard Millar concludes at CarbonBrief. In the London Times another author of the paper—Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford—said, “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”
In other words, climate computer models projected the global average temperature should be about 1.2 C above the pre-industrial baseline for the 2,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide already emitted. Instead, global average temperature is only 0.9 C higher.
Running the models forward from a 2015 baseline yields a carbon budget of around 880 gigatons of additional carbon dioxide before passing through the 1.5 C threshold. That amounts to about 20 years of emissions.
Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway, draws out some additional implications from the study. “The updated 1.5 C is more like what we expected at 2 C, and thus the updated 2 C carbon budget is probably more like we expected for 2.5 C,” he notes. “Given the emissions pledges submitted to Parri Agreement are somewhat around 2.5 C to 3 C across most studies, then the new carbon budgets would imply that 2 C is roughly consistent with the current emission pledges.”
But why reuse the models that have already been shown to be off by 30 percent in their projections? Again, the difference between 0.9 C above the preindustrial baseline and the 1.5 C threshold is 0.6 C. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, global average temperature is rising at 0.17 C per decade, suggesting that the 1.5 C temperature threshold might not be passed for 30 years. The satellite temperature measurements find that the globe is warming at the rate of 0.13 C per decade, implying that the 1.5 C threshold might not be passed for 45 years or so.
Iowa Climate Science Education 