Hiway to heaven

The advent of horizontal drilling has famously combined with the older hydraulic fracking technique to bring about a revolution in the global energy industry (outside the EU that is, for within the Union poverty generation dominates the political agenda). So while European consumers worry about their energy bills, in North America, the glut of shale gas has caused a collapse in gas prices, to the extent that few in the gas industry can now make money.

However, with the technology being so new, innovation is still an important factor in the economics of shale gas and it is therefore not unexpected that cost is being driven out of the system.

...using a proprietary system called Hiway that only became commercially viable last year, Schlumberger's fracker in chief believes he has knocked a lump out of the infant industry's three major cost components; water, sand, and trucks.

Schlumberger is already using the system on nearly a third of all fracking jobs, and expects that to rise rapidly to 50-70 percent, according to Kyel Hodenfield, the company's vice president for unconventional resources.

"It can vary, but using Hiway we generally say you need 40 percent less proppant," (graded sand mixed with guar gum or lubricating chemicals), he told Reuters in an interview.

"Water is more variable, but it's somewhere between 20 and 50 percent less."

Less sand, less water and less pumping adds up to fewer trucks, Hodenfield explained on the sidelines of the Offshore Northern Seas (ONS) conference in Stavanger, Norway.

Read the whole thing.

IPPR on wind

Updated on Aug 31, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has got together with some green energy consultants to discuss whether wind energy is a Good Thing. Given the nature of the co-authors, I'm sure you can guess their conclusions.

The authors propose what they call a steady state model of the electricity grid.

Adding wind energy to electricity supply without altering demand will displace or push out an equivalent amount of supply from the marginal plant.

Click to read more ...

Lewandowsky's data

Geoff Chambers has obtained Stephan Lewandowsky's survey data which can be seen as an attachment at the bottom of this post. Of course it's anonymised, so we are not going to get to the bottom of the question of the number of sceptics he approached, but you may be interested.

Lewandowsky data

Down on the farm with Yo 'n Dave - Josh 181

Apologies for another Tim Yeo cartoon but he is a bit of a news item at the moment.

Cartoons by Josh

Trouble at the mill

The UK's energy policy still looks as though it is being run by dyed-in-the-wool greens but elsewhere there is growing evidence that normal economic behaviour is starting to reassert itself. For example, solar panel manufacturers in China are on the verge of extinction (H/T/ Iain):

Two years ago, LDK Solar, one of China's largest solar panel makers, built a new, state-of-the-art factory in the central city of Hefei.

Last month, however, 4,500 of the staff were put on gardening leave. They receive 700 yuan a month to stay at home. The factory has shut down 24 of its 32 production lines.

..."There do not seem to be any orders. People are still turning up for work, but mostly just sleeping. The management has not said much, just that the United States has a new policy that is stopping our exports,"

Click to read more ...

The boy who cried warming

A new global warming documentary has hit the airwaves. It's called The Boy Who Cried Warming and seems to be a very slick production.

Watch it here.

Nic Lewis in the Guardian

Nic Lewis has a letter in the Guardian:

You report (Arctic ice melt likely to break record as 100,000 sq km disappears per day, 24 August) that research just published in Nature says that warming in the Antarctic "where temperatures have risen about 1.5C over the past 50 years" is unusual but not unprecedented. That gives the impression that typical temperatures in Antarctica have risen by about 1.5C. In fact, there was no statistically significant increase in average Antarctica temperatures over the 50 years to 2006. (The relevant study, of which I was a co-author, was published in Journal of Climate last year.)

The latest Nature research refers to warming at a location in the Antarctic peninsula. While the peninsula has certainly warmed rapidly over the last 50 years – our paper estimated by slightly more than 1.5C – it represents only a small part of Antarctica by area and even less by ice sheet volume, and its climate is distinct from that of continental Antarctica.
Nicholas Lewis
Bath, Somerset

Get on board for a Green Future - Josh 180

Click image for a larger version

Cartoons by Josh

Lewandowsky's conspiracy paper goes mainstream

Hilariously, the Telegraph has published an article promoting Stephan Lewandowsky's "conspiracy theorist" paper - you know, the one that surveyed readers at all the main non-sceptic blogs and discovered that sceptics were all conspiracy theorists (see first comment here).

The article is written by one Jonathan Pearlman. Bad journalist or green activist? Anyone know?

Fisking Emmott

I recently covered Stephen Emmott's one-man show Ten Billion, a millennarian lecture designed to frighten its audience into reproducing less, consuming less and generally living less.

The show is now the subject of a thorough fisking by BH regulars Geoff Chambers and Alex Cull at the Climate Resistance site.

Googling “3000 litres of water to make a hamburger” leads us to sites like waterfootprint.org, which cite the peer reviewed articles (e.g. Mekonnen & Hoekstra: A Global Assessment of the Water Footprint of Farm Animal Products) which are the ultimate source of these figures. The high water content of hamburgers is explained by counting the rain falling on the grass or other crops consumed by the cow. It could be pointed out in defense of the Big Mac that even if you abolished livestock rearing and went back to hunter gathering, the same amount of rain would still fall on the same amount of grassland, and your voleburger would still have the same water footprint, though presumably without mustard and mayonnaise. It really doesn’t matter whether Mekonnen and Hoekstra have done their sums right; it’s not science – just a Reader’s Digest-style factoid to bring out to impress your dinner party guests over the home-grown roquette quiche.

Stephen Emmott is professor of computer science at Oxford.

Catastrophic reporting - Josh 179

Gross out

When Gordon Hughes gave evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology COmmittee the other week, I was struck by the vehemence with which his evidence was denounced as "balderdash" by Grantham Institute policy wonk Robert Gross. Unfortunately, Dr Gross's explanation of precisely why he thought this eluded me, as his subsequent narrative seemed to me to be little more than handwaving.

Being an inquiring sort, I decided to delve a little bit into Dr Gross's positions on wind power and started to read some of his publications. While I haven't got to the bottom of the dispute with Prof Hughes over the effect of wind on carbon emissions, I did find some interesting bits and pieces about just how you reduce intermittency of wind power by installing lots of turbines - a "wind carpet" in the jargon.

Click to read more ...

Dellers calls for sceptics to fund Mann's libel battle

James Delingpole calls for sceptics everywhere to fund Michael Mann's legal fight against Mark Steyn and the National Review Online.

I kid you not.

UN ruling: EU must reassess renewables policy

Pat Swords points me to this press release from the European Platform Against Windfarms.

The Compliance Committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), which enforces the Aarhus Convention, has released its final findings and recommendations regarding the case presented by Mr. Pat Swords, a chemical engineer from Ireland (1). In a nutshell, the UN is saying that if the EU wants to be in compliance with the said Convention, to which it is a party, it must have its 27 Member States properly reassess their National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAP), and submit them to popular consultation. The Aarhus Convention requires that, in matters affecting the environment, the citizens be consulted in a transparent manner before any policy is embarked upon. The Convention applies principles adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro.

Click to read more ...

Sea level rise - not so much

Thanks to Richard Tol for alerting me to a new paper by Torben Schmith and Peter Thejll of the Danish Meteorological Institute and Søren Johansen of the University of Copenhagen. Johansen is an econometrician and an expert in co-integration, a technique that the new paper applies to the question of sea level rise.

Global sea level rise is widely understood as a consequence of thermal expansion and melting of glaciers and land-based ice caps. Due to the lack of representation of ice-sheet dynamics in present-day physically-based climate models, semi-empirical models have been applied as an alternative for projecting of future sea levels. There are in this, however, potential pitfalls due to the trending nature of the time series. We apply a statistical method called cointegration analysis to observed global sea level and land-ocean surface temperature, capable of handling such peculiarities. We find a relationship between sea level and temperature and find that temperature causally depends on the sea level, which can be understood as a consequence of the large heat capacity of the ocean. We further find that the warming episode in the 1940s is exceptional in the sense that sea level and warming deviates from the expected relationship. This suggests that this warming episode is mainly due to internal dynamics of the ocean rather than external radiative forcing. On the other hand, the present warming follows the expected relationship, suggesting that it is mainly due to radiative forcing. In a second step, we use the total radiative forcing as an explanatory variable, but unexpectedly find that the sea level does not depend on the forcing. We hypothesize that this is due to a long adjustment time scale of the ocean and show that the number of years of data needed to build statistical models that have the relationship expected from physics exceeds what is currently available by a factor of almost ten.

I haven't had time to read the paper (which is not online to the best of my knowledge), but Richard tells me that the authors come up with figure for sea-level rise of 30 cm of sea level rise per degree C of warming -- which is rather lower than Rahmstorf and Vermeer.