Back from the brink

A sudden outbreak of sanity seems to have taken hold Canada. Firstly the idea of a carbon tax appears to have been killed off for good:

Conservatives kill carbon tax

Conservatives have kiboshed a carbon tax, Environment Minister Peter Kent confirmed Thursday.

"It's off the table," he told reporters Thursday after accepting an award from World Wildlife Fund International on behalf of Parks Canada.

"There's no expectation of cap-and-trade continentally in the near or medium future."

...and then this:

Government delays pulling plug on old-fashioned light bulbs

Tories propose pushing deadline to 2014 over lack of alternatives to incandescents

(H/T to Ross McKitrick, who offers to send a real estate guide)

Ridley and Dyson on shale

Matt Ridley has written a report on shale gas for GWPF. This is an excellent, even-handed look at the pros and cons of this new energy source.

It's hard not to come away with the impression that shale gas is pretty benign compared to the alternatives. For example, the footprint of a shale well is amazingly small...

Click to read more ...

Exit stage left, Huhne...?

Guido Fawkes reckons that Chris Huhne could stand down as the UK's Energy and Climate Change Secretary at the cabinet meeting on Friday, with (relative) right-winger David Laws favourite to replace him.

Windfarms paid to switch off

From the Sunday Times (not online; via commenters)

Wind farm operators in Scotland were paid nearly £900,000 to keep their turbines idle for a night because the National Grid did not need the power.

The payments, up to 20 times the value of the power the wind farms would have produced, were offered by the National Grid because it urgently needed to reduce electricity entering the system.
It was oversupplied with power on a wet and blustery night last month when demand for electricity was low.

The National Grid confirmed it had made the payments. “On the night of April 5 and 6, the demand for power was low but the nuclear generation plants in Scotland were running as expected. There was also heavy rainfall, which meant hydro power plants were operating well, too,” a spokesman said.

PowerPoint postings

A PowerPoint presentation looking at how energy will be consumed in the city of Cambridge in the year 2030.

Look who is quoted on the final slide (hint: it's not me).

War of the Whirls

Fenbeagle has posted a rather lovely set of windmill inspired art...

See the full set here.

The end of the scientific revolution?

Tim Worstall in the Register.

I really cannot understand why we're doing what we are doing on a public policy level. I just don't get why we're pumping tens, possibly hundreds, of billions into technologies like windmills, which we know won't work, to solar which doesn't need subsidies any more, but not willing to put money into other interesting things which might work, like thorium just as one example.

Unless, of course, I'm right in that what we should do about this problem has been hijacked by those who don't in fact want to solve this single, particular, problem of requiring low carbon energy generation but who want to use this agreed upon problem as a means of imposing their vision of the desirable lifestyle upon the rest of us. And so we go with solutions which won't in fact work because they desire that the problem not be solved, but that we should accord with their instructions upon how society should be.

Which is all rather depressing really: rather the end of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution.

Cornell shale study debunked

This looks like a fairly thorough riposte to the Cornell shale gas study. I don't think "debunking" is too strong a word for it. The article lists five things you need to know about the Cornell study. Here's a sample:

Thing #1: The study’s conclusions rely almost entirely on the application of a Global Warming Potential (GWP) factor that’s 45 percent higher for natural gas than the one cited by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

Thing #2: Even the study’s authors admit their data is “lousy.”...

Thing #4: The authors’ estimates on pipeline leakage are based on data and assumptions that are completely irrelevant to the Marcellus Shale...

I always had it in my mind that Cornell was a good university. But it's going to be hard to maintain that idea in the face of stuff like this.

Quality data

The New York Times seems to want to head up the fightback against shale gas, publishing a rather uncritical article about a forthcoming paper about whether gas really is better than coal.

Cornell University researchers say that natural gas pried from shale formations is dirtier than coal in the short term, rather than cleaner, and "comparable" in the long term. That finding -- fiercely disputed by the gas industry -- undermines the widely stated belief that gas is twice as "clean" as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The gas industry has promoted that concept as a way for electric utilities to prepare for climate change regulations by switching from coal-fired plants to gas.

There is a link to the preprint of the paper, which finds that the root of shale gas's problems in leakage of methane during the production process. I particularly liked their description of where they got their methane leakage figures from:

Between 0.6% and 3.2% of the life-time production of gas from wells is emitted as methane during the flow-back period (Table 1)... However, we note that the data used in Table 1 are not well documented, with many values based on PowerPoint slides from EPA-sponsored workshops.

The source of the Table 1 figures for quantity of methane emitted at the Haynesville site - the highest in the table -  is a paper by Eckhardt et al (2009). Oddly, this paper doesn't appear in the list of references. Can anyone identify likely candidates?

Update on Apr 12, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Thanks to a reader for pointing me to this. The company discussed produce oil well data and have an Eckhardt on their books.

Solar looters get more loot

Having fleeced taxpayers once by offering crazy feed in tariffs to solar power companies, DECC is now going to fleece them once again by offering compensation now the subsidies have been somewhat reined in. Huhne really is stark raving mad isn't he?

More on the windy flops

There is a very amusing article on the BBC website about the John Muir Trust report on windfarms, which you read about here yesterday. The report, you may remember, noted that...

During each of the four highest peak demands of 2010, wind output reached just 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity, according to the analysis.

...to which Jenny Hogan of the quango Scottish Renewables has retorted:

no form of electricity [works] at 100% capacity, 100% of the time.

Hilarious.

Epic shale

The shale gas boom just keeps getting bigger and bigger, having now reached what Nick Grealy calls a Wow! moment (H/T GWPF).

And surprise, surprise: China! Largest shale reserves in the world, surpassing even the US by far. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The only way I have been wrong about shale is by underestimating it's impact. But the Chinese figures change everything. World LNG? Toast! Which can't help Australia too much even with 395. Which leads to the other southern hemisphere wonders, although since this site mentioned them both in Q3 2009, it's only the massive scale of the resource that surprises, not the locations:

South Africa  485!

Argentina 774!  Repeat that.  That is not a mistake.  That is technicially recoverable.  That is astounding.

For some, however, this kind of good news just can't go unchallenged and I sense that there is a concerted effort to hype up the idea that there might be some important environmental concerns. Take this article in Time magazine for example, or this forthcoming conference.

Meanwhile, Zeke, writing at Lucia's blog, looks at an old chart of hydrocarbon deposits and the proportion used to date - it's hard to get the two figures on the same chart because mankind has used so little. Zeke wonders what it would look like now we have discovered all this shale gas.

Windy flops

The John Muir Trust is that rare beast, an environmental organisation that is more sane than bonkers. One of their big bugbears is their fellow greens' enthusiasm for windfarms, a position they seem to take a certain amount of relish in tearing to pieces in their recent report on the subject.

The nature of wind output has been obscured by reliance on “average output” figures. Analysis of hard data from National Grid shows that wind behaves in a quite different manner from that suggested by study of average output derived from the Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) record, or from wind speed records which in themselves are averaged. It is clear from this analysis that wind cannot be relied upon to provide any significant level of generation at any defined time in the future. There is an urgent need to re-evaluate the implications of reliance on wind for any significant proportion of our energy requirement.

Delingpole's take on the story is here. Apparently BBC Scotland covered it too.

The good news and the bad

Matt Ridley looks at a couple of recent papers. One of these notes that sea level rise is less than expected and that it is slowing not decelerating. The other looks at deaths caused by biofuel manufacture:

The production of biofuels may have led to at least 192,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million additional lost disability-adjusted life years in 2010. These estimates are conservative [and] exceed the World Health Organisation’s estimates of the toll of death and disease for global warming. Thus, policies to stimulate biofuel production, in part to reduce the alleged impacts of global warming on public health, particularly in developing countries, may actually have increased death and disease globally.

Why electric cars are really coal cars

An interesting look at arguments for electric cars by a Professor of Chemistry:

It is claimed in a Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) report on electric cars that they are in any case cleaner because 80 - 90% of the energy put into them in terms of electricity is recovered in terms of useful power at the wheels, to be compared with 20 - 30% in a conventional oil-powered car. Well, that sounds good, but the reality is that only about one third of the energy in the coal or gas actually ends-up as electricity because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Carnot Cycle limit - the other two thirds being thrown away as heat. Thus the electric car is harvesting in terms of well-to-wheel miles only about 27% of the original fossil fuel energy, so not that much better than the standard car running on petrol or diesel. The difference is merely whether about the same quantity of waste heat energy is thrown away at source or in the vehicle.