Talisman Terry bites the dust

Two years ago Calgary based Talisman Energy created Talisman Terry's Energy Adventure, a coloring book featuring Terry the “fracosaurus.” Terry, depicted in hard hat and work boots, presents a simplified and propagandistic version of the natural gas extraction process and an optimistic portrayal of what land used for shale fracturing can be turned into. The coloring book has been widely distributed to children for the past couple years as part of Talisman's community outreach in the rural areas of Pennsylvania and New York where the company is actively engaged in drilling the Marcellus shale.

This past Monday (July 11), the Colbert Report poked fun at Terry. By Thursday, as reported in the Calgary Herald, he was history. Talisman Energy, as shown in the screen capture below, has done its best to erase Terry's digital presence.

If you're so inclined, you can check out the colouring book's contents here.

NB Shale Gas Update

For those following the developments in relation to shale gas exploration in New Brunswick, several factors are worth noting.

1) More than $350 million in exploration funding for shale gas has poured into a tiny (population about 800,000) province with a relatively high unemployment rate (6.9 % in April), a concern about out-migration, a humongous hole in the provincial budget, and a provincial debt of approximately $10 billion.

2) The Quebec government just placed a moratorium on shale gas exploration, and the opposition Liberals, have called for a similar moratorium in NB. But there is little indication that the government is interested in a moratorium.

3) The New Brunswick Energy Commission recently recommended expanding unconventional gas development.

4) There has been substantial public opposition, organized in part by the NB Conservation Council (which produced this primer on the topic).

5) Much of the interest is the result of claims stemming from a Geological Survey of Canada estimate made several years ago that touted the amount of gas present in NB shale (67 trillion cubic feet, more than left in western Canada)

6) The New York Times has published a bunch of internal emails and oil industry documents showing that the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying. On the whole, the documents suggest that shale gas may be a Ponzi scheme investment bubble -- where estimates of large amounts of gas are used to generate investment opportunities and more money is made flipping leases than by producing gas.

7) As a result of all this, natural gas reserve estimates are under attack in the US.

8) Comments from a local industry executive (SWN General Manager Tom Alexander) on the implications of the NY Times documents are here.

8) Apache, one of the bigger players in the province (and, perhaps significantly, a US company), recently announced it was withdrawing from NB following disappointing drilling results.

Interesting times .... indeed.

The Price of Gas

And now for a REAL Sociologist, Max Weber

"This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”

—Max Weber, 1905

(from The Oil Drum, April 2011)

Major shifts in fuel are possible

In light of all the latent pessimism present in the previous posts about the Nisbet Report -- that the current strategy of climate change advocacy in the US is unlikely to succeed -- it is useful to revisit a case where significant change in fossil fuel usage did occur.

Most electricity is generated by boiling water in order to create steam that is used to power turbines. The major difference among power plants is the fuel used to boil the water -- whether it be coal, oil, nuclear power, natural gas or whatever. As shown in the graph below (taken from chapter 3 of the IMF's 2011 World Economic Outlook report), the use of oil as a fuel to generate electricity in the OECD countries grew rapidly during the 1960's, accounting for over 25% of electrical power generated in the early 1970's. The proportion of electricity generated from oil has progressively declined to the present level of 2.5%, a 90% decrease over 40 years.



Here is how the report explains the shift:

Most OECD countries saw a big switch away from oil in electric power generation in the early 1980s. After oil prices rose sharply compared with the prices of other fossil fuels in the 1970s, the power sector switched from oil to other inputs (Figure 3.6): some countries went back to coal (for example, the United States); others increased their nuclear capacity (for example, France) or turned to alternative energy sources. .... Today, however, the power sector is no longer an important oil consumer in OECD or emerging market economies. In fact, the transportation sector currently accounts for about 50 percent of total oil consumption. A substantial part of the remainder goes to the petrochemical industry and for other miscellaneous uses outside the power sector. Given current technologies, it is harder to substitute other factors for oil in these sectors, explaining the break in the estimated elasticities.

Back in the 1970's as oil prices rose there was a big debate: was oil a price elastic or an inelastic commodity. In other words, as the price rose, would shifts occur to other fuels or would the higher costs be absorbed and passed on because no suitable substitutes were available. The answer, it turns out, depends. Thus, in the power sector where there were cost effective alternatives, substitution occurred. In the transportation sector, where cost effective substitutes were not available, people adjusted by purchasing more fuel efficient cars rather than adopting a technology powered by another fuel.

In short,
1. Significant energy shifts do occur.
2. Under the right conditions, the shift can occur fairly quickly (the bulk of the decline came in a period of about 10 years), though the entirety of a transition can take decades.
3. Rapid shifts are driven by economics (in this case, substituting a cheaper fuel source) rather than regulatory policy.
4. Shifts are dependent on the availability of substitutes.

More Fracking News

A few days ago I noted the glee attending shale gas in the exploration community -- it's not just in North America, it's all over the world!!! To date, most of the controversy surrounding fracking -- the process used to release gas from shale formations -- has centered on water quality issues. No more.

A recent report by Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, concludes that the carbon footprint of unconventional gas production from shale is worse for the climate than burning coal. His analysis, to be published later this week in Climatic Change Letters, found that somewhere from 3.6 percent to 7.9 percent of methane, the chief component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas (72 times as potent as carbon dioxide according to IPCC), is leaking into the atmosphere at various points along the shale gas production life cycle. As the graph below shows, this makes natural gas from shale the least desirable fuel of the bunch, at least in terms of its impact on the climate.

Not surprisingly, given the stampede to shale gas in the industry, Howarth's report is being refuted in detail before it is even public. See, in particular, this discussion at Energy in Depth.

Additional information on the debate is available here.

Keith Kloor has also weighed in on the debate over at his Frontier Earth blog.

Over the last decade, production of natural gas from shale has exploded from .39 Tcf in 2000 to 4.87 Tcf (or 23 percent of total U.S. natural gas production) in 2010. This 12.5 fold increase in production shows both the rapid growth and absolute importance of the shale gas resource to the United States. As is often the case with resource development, shale gas production also has raised local environmental concerns, largely centering on the amount of water used in the fracturing process and the need to handle, recycle, and treat fracturing fluids in a manner that addresses the risk of spills that can potentially affect water quality.

These developments led the US Energy Information Agency to commission a report, World Shale Gas Resources: An Initial Assessment of 14 Regions Outside the United States. Of the countries covered in the EIA-sponsored study, two groups may find shale gas development most attractive. The first is those countries that currently depend heavily on natural gas imports but that also have significant shale gas resources. These include France, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, South Africa, Morocco, and Chile. The second group is those countries that already produce substantial amounts of natural gas and also have large shale resources. In addition to the United States, this group includes Canada, Mexico, China, Australia, Libya, Algeria, Argentina, and Brazil.

So .... all indications are that interest in New Brunswick shale gas will only intensify.

Fracking in NB

New Brunswick, compared to many areas of the world, has experienced relatively little oil and gas exploration. However, the past few years have seen an uptick in interest in shale based gas (see map above). As a result of a controversy surrounding oil and gas exploration around Sackville, hydro-fracking was a significant, albeit minor, issue in the last New Brunswick election.

The NYTimes has a long article, Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers, based on a significant amount of investigative research documenting the negative effects of fracking as a method of extracting gas. Limiting the ability to explore, as the Sackville residents achieved, is wisest. But, where exploration does occur, the need for significantly greater regulation is obvious.

Freudenburg on the Gulf Oil Spill and more

Noted environmental sociologist William Freudenburg is, unfortunately, in ill health. This hasn't affected his productivity, however, as he completed his most recent book about the Deep Water Horizon drilling accident, Blowout in the Gulf, in a mere 60 days. Despite the rapidity with which the book was written, it doesn't suffer in depth as the work is informed by Freudenburg and Gramling's combined 60 years of research on the oil industry and energy issues. As Charles Perrow noted in his review of the book:

Freudenburg and Gramling put the spill into the perspective of energy dependence, take us gracefully through technical details blurred by the popular press, grasp the local and national politics (offering some political detergents of their own along the way), and give the spill what will likely be its most masterful handling. The authors' years of work on oil drilling and the carbon economy get a dramatic payoff in this very timely book.

Freudenburg presented a lecture based on the book, Learning Lessons from Disaster? The BP Oil Spill and the Future of Energy in America on November 15 and the webpage has a link to a video of the lecture. Unfortunately, the 'rtsp' based link didn't work for me, but the folks at Santa Barabara were nice enough to provide this alternative http based link that did. The talk has four significant sections: 1)a brief discussion of the recently released findings from the Presidential Commission looking into the accident, 2) some basic background on oil, its formation, and the drilling process, 3) a discussion of risk and risk management and, in particular, an analysis of the extent to which BP's behaviours differ from those of other industry players, and ends with 4) a detailed history of US energy policy aimed at illuminating the question of why the US is in the position of drilling for oil in water more than a mile deep. While the effects of his health are evident (Freudenburg delivers the lecture sitting down), he remains the energetic and engaging speaker he always has been. There are reasons his undergraduate lectures frequently end with applause, and those reasons are clearly exemplified in this talk.

Finally, Freudenburg was honoured at Freudenfest 2010: a day long collaborative discussion and celebration of his contributions to sociology, environmental studies, and society held November 6, 2010, at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The Freudenfest webpage includes a program of the events, powerpoint slides from the following presentations, and a gallery of images taken at the event.

*The Said and Unsaid: Disproportionality and How it is Supported through Discourse, Debra Davidson, Dept. of Rural Economy, University of Alberta

*Working with Bill, Robert Gramling

*Social Change in Natural Resource-Based Rural Communities: The Evolution of Sociological Research and Knowledge As Influenced by the Contributions of William E. Freudenburg, Richard S. Krannich, Dept. of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology, Utah State University

*Transcending Human Exemptionalism: Freudenburg's Sociology in Which Nature Matters, Raymond Murphy, University of Ottawa, Canada, and Riley Dunlap, Oklahoma State University, USA

*Resource Dependency and Diversity: From Findings to Metaphors (and Back Again?), Richard C. Stedman, Dept. of Natural Resources, Cornell University

*Political Science: The Intricacies of Activism Among Coastal Restoration Scientists, Lee Clarke, Rutgers University

Brief bits: Military fuel and Skepticgate

The photo, of oil tankers that have been set on fire, accompanies a fascinating NYTimes article U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels which a) describes a wide variety of logistic and tactical problems faced by the military as a result of their dependence on fossil fuel and b) documents policy changes designed to reduce that dependence.

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It seems that Climategate has met its karmic match: Skepticgate. USA Today is reporting officials at George Mason University have confirmed they are investigating plagiarism and misconduct charges made against noted climate science critic Edward Wegman. Wegman is best known in skeptic circles for an influential report critiquing the "hockey stick" graph. Further details are available on the Deep Climate blog, which documented that Wegman's arguments involved passages "lifted nearly verbatim from Bradley’s Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, and then edited in a manner that introduced distortions and errors." As noted in the letter reproduced below, the parallels between Wegman's report and Bradley's book were sufficient that Bradley asked the administration at George Mason to investigate.

The cheap flight search engine Fly.co.uk recently put up the following set of statistics about CO2 emissions.

There are a number of interesting comparisons here, though I'd feel more confident about their reliability if I knew their sources and how the calculations were made.

Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute interviewed Lester Brown on his latest version of "Plan B: 4.0". Lester confirmed in his interview what Johann Hari said in Democracy Now: that local, grassroots environmental campaigns have successfully stopped the development of new coal-fired power plants in the US, just as Climate Camp did in the UK. Furthermore, he said that older plants are being converted to cleaner fuels or shut down because of direct action and public pressure. Interestingly, Lester said that in 2009, more money was invested globally in renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and geothermal than was invested in fossil fuel production, a first in modern history.