Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[KJK]

Water Consumption - Sierra Club talking points. We don't use fresh water for our operations, we use brackish (saline) water. It comes from deep underground, usually from aquifers below the formation the oil is in. The well that my pilot plant is using is 450 meters deep and has a TDS of 2500ppm and 7mg/L of extractable oil and grease. Not exactly drinking water. Exceptions to this rule are Syncrude, Suncor and maybe Shell who can get their water from the Athabasca River and pilot projects that MAY be allowed to use fresh water. The 1st two mentioned have been running since the 1960s and are mines not SAGD. They are grandfathered just like any other commercial operation would be. SAGD operational requirements are generally around 90% water recycle ratio and are usually higher. Why spend money to bring in something that you need that already have and can recycle? New technology such as wedge wells will help reduce the water consumption as well.

Tailings Ponds - Sierra Club again. SAGD operations don't have and don't need tailings ponds. There are only 4 operations in Alberta that have them: Syncrude, Suncor Main Plant, Shell and CNRL Horizon. If you see a pond at a SAGD facility it is usually a runoff pond since that cannot be released into the environment without a battery of tests.

Steam is generated by natural gas. All plants except pilot projects must scrub the SO2 from the produced gas before burning it. Anyone who has driven Hwy 63 has seen the steady stream of Westcan trucks hauling molten sulphur to Agrium to be made into fertilizer.

Transportation of Dilbit - I personally don't like spills but I would far rather clean up bitumen than light or intermediate weigh crude.

Case point - One of my coworkers who has 35 years in the industry has an interesting story about cleaning up bitumen. He had never worked with it until the morning he was sent out to clean up a small spill (about 400 sq feet). It was winter, about -20C and when he arrived at the spill site everybody was standing around looking at the spill. He wanted to start work right away and was surprised when the foreman told him to wait 30 more minutes. After 30 minutes the foreman goes over and pokes the bitumen and says "Let's go". They used hook knives to cut the bitumen into strips, rolled it up like a carpet and threw it into the loader bucket. Problem solved and mess cleaned up, total time 3 hours.

Obviously no spill is a good thing but if that had been light crude it would have been a lot larger mess and a lot longer clean up time. I think it is no worse and probably much safer to transport than light crude. As soon as it cools off it stops moving.

SAGD - Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage

http://www.energy.alberta.ca/OilSands/pdfs/FS_SAGD.pdf

KJK

Edit -add link, spelling and punctuation 

 

[KJK]

This is the SAGD plant I was working at last year. I think it looks pretty nice for being the environmental disaster the greenies claim it is.

KJK

 

[Redeye]

(various informative points)

SAGD - Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage

http://www.energy.alberta.ca/OilSands/pdfs/FS_SAGD.pdf

KJK

Edit -add link, spelling and punctuation 

Thanks for the information, really appreciate you putting the time into doing that - and that's a lot of why I'm not terribly anti-oilsands, because I know there's been lots of technological improvements - and there will be many more.  For now, we need the oil, it's going to come from somewhere, and if it's going to fuel our economy to produce it, that's great for the most part.  Most of what I've seen being most negatively portraying the industry targets older operations like Syncrude.

The pipelines take dilbit to upgraders as I understand it - what's then piped south?  There's been a lot of controversy lately about the Keystone XL pipeline and I'm curious as to what makes it any worse than any of the countless other pipelines around, I suspect it's got more to do with it being new than anything else.

 

[KJK]

Thanks for the information, really appreciate you putting the time into doing that - and that's a lot of why I'm not terribly anti-oilsands, because I know there's been lots of technological improvements - and there will be many more.  For now, we need the oil, it's going to come from somewhere, and if it's going to fuel our economy to produce it, that's great for the most part.  Most of what I've seen being most negatively portraying the industry targets older operations like Syncrude.

The pipelines take dilbit to upgraders as I understand it - what's then piped south?  There's been a lot of controversy lately about the Keystone XL pipeline and I'm curious as to what makes it any worse than any of the countless other pipelines around, I suspect it's got more to do with it being new than anything else.

I'm not familiar enough with the Keystone XL to say what exactly it is transporting. There are a couple of different products that go south.

Dilbit can go south, Cenovus is partnered with Conoco Phillips refineries in Borger, TX and Wood River IL. They send straight dilbit to them since they have upgraders on site to allow them to use dilbit. Connacher bought a small refinery in Montana and converted it to use their dilbit.

Syncrude and Suncor and CNRL upgrade their product on site resulting in an extremely high quality synthetic crude some of which is piped south as many refineries down there can use it straight or blend it with regular crude.

More synthetic crude is mixed with light crude, bitumen and heavy/super heavy crude into a blend called Western Canada Select which sells on the exchange just like Brent or West Texas Intermediate.

We don't have anywhere near enough upgrading capacity in Canada and I wish they would build more. However environmental laws are such that it is nearly impossible to make a business case for an new upgrader when an old US refinery can be purchased for very little and converted to run the heavier blends. This complaint was voiced by a number of operators at a big meeting with the VPs of Cenovus last fall and this is what we were told. Conventional heavy crude is also run through Canadian upgraders which magnifies the problem.

KJK

 

[Haletown]

So the vaunted IPCC, the Keeper of the Truth about climate change gets caught again breaking its own cardinal rule of only using peer reviewed literature.

"It is totally unacceptable that IPCC should have had a Greenpeace employee as a Lead Author of the critical Chapter 10, that the Greenpeace employee, as an IPCC Lead Author, should (like Michael Mann and Keith Briffa in comparable situations) have been responsible for assessing his own work and that, with such inadequate and non-independent ‘due diligence’, IPCC should have featured the Greenpeace scenario in its press release on renewables."

http://climateaudit.org/2011/06/14/ipcc-wg3-and-the-greenpeace-karaoke/


Why we continue to flush our taxpayers $$ down the UN/IPCC hole is a mystery.

Fraud is still fraud, especially when the holier-than-thou IPPC does it.

People should be in jail, not just fired.

 

[a_majoor]

A suitable punishment might be sticking them outside to freeze to death:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/print.html

Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decadePhysicists say sunspot cycle is 'going into hibernation'

By Lewis Page

Posted in Science, 14th June 2011 17:00 GMT

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

Ice skating on the Thames by 2025?

The announcement made on 14 June (18:00 UK time) comes from scientists at the US National Solar Observatory (NSO) and US Air Force Research Laboratory. Three different analyses of the Sun's recent behaviour all indicate that a period of unusually low solar activity may be about to begin.

The Sun normally follows an 11-year cycle of activity. The current cycle, Cycle 24, is now supposed to be ramping up towards maximum strength. Increased numbers of sunspots and other indications ought to be happening: but in fact results so far are most disappointing. Scientists at the NSO now suspect, based on data showing decades-long trends leading to this point, that Cycle 25 may not happen at all.

This could have major implications for the Earth's climate. According to a statement issued by the NSO, announcing the research:

An immediate question is whether this slowdown presages a second Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period with virtually no sunspots [which occurred] during 1645-1715.
As NASA notes [1]:

Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715. Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the "Little Ice Age" when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past.

During the Maunder Minimum and for periods either side of it, many European rivers which are ice-free today – including the Thames – routinely froze over, allowing ice skating and even for armies to march across them in some cases.

"This is highly unusual and unexpected," says Dr Frank Hill of the NSO. "But the fact that three completely different views of the Sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation."

Good news for Mars astronauts – Less good for carbon traders, perhaps
Hill's own research focuses on surface pulsations of the Sun and their relationship with sunspots, and his team has already used their methods to successfully predict the late onset of Cycle 24.

"We expected to see the start of the zonal flow for Cycle 25 by now," Hill explained, "but we see no sign of it. This indicates that the start of Cycle 25 may be delayed to 2021 or 2022, or may not happen at all."

Hill's results match those from physicists Matt Penn and William Livingston, who have gone over 13 years of sunspot data from the McMath-Pierce Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona. They have seen the strength of the magnetic fields which create sunspots declining steadily. According to the NSO:

Penn and Livingston observed that the average field strength declined about 50 gauss per year during Cycle 23 and now in Cycle 24. They also observed that spot temperatures have risen exactly as expected for such changes in the magnetic field. If the trend continues, the field strength will drop below the 1,500 gauss threshold and spots will largely disappear as the magnetic field is no longer strong enough to overcome convective forces on the solar surface.

In parallel with this comes research from the US Air Force's studies of the solar corona. Richard Altrock, in charge of this, has found a 40-year decline in the "rush to the poles" – the poleward surge of magnetic activity in the corona.

"Those wonderful, delicate coronal features are actually powerful, robust magnetic structures rooted in the interior of the Sun," Altrock says. "Changes we see in the corona reflect changes deep inside the Sun ...

"Cycle 24 started out late and slow and may not be strong enough to create a rush to the poles, indicating we'll see a very weak solar maximum in 2013, if at all. If the rush to the poles fails to complete, this creates a tremendous dilemma for the theorists ... No one knows what the Sun will do in that case."

According to the collective wisdom of the NSO, another Maunder Minimum may very well be on the cards.

"If we are right," summarises Hill, "this could be the last solar maximum we'll see for a few decades. That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth's climate."

The effects on space exploration would be benign, as fewer or no solar storms would make space a much less hostile environment for human beings. At the moment, anyone venturing beyond the Earth's protective magnetic field (the only people to have done so were the Apollo moon astronauts of the 1960s and '70s) runs a severe risk of dangerous or fatal radiation exposure during a solar storm.

Manned missions beyond low Earth orbit, a stated aspiration of the USA and other nations, might become significantly safer and cheaper to mount (cheaper as there would be no requirement for possibly very heavy shielding to protect astronauts, so reducing launch costs).

The big consequences of a major solar calm spell, however, would be climatic. The next few generations of humanity might not find themselves trying to cope with global warming but rather with a significant cooling. This could overturn decades of received wisdom on such things as CO2 emissions, and lead to radical shifts in government policy worldwide. ®

Links
1.http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

For newer members, short growing seasons generally lead to crop failure, famine, war and revolution. You will live in interesting times.

 

[HavokFour]

A suitable punishment might be sticking them outside to freeze to death:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/print.html

For newer members, short growing seasons generally lead to crop failure, famine, war and revolution. You will live in interesting times.

To add on to Thucydides post, the original release can be found here. Pictures and text included.

http://www.nso.edu/press/SolarActivityDrop.html

EDIT: I decided to rip, capture, and archive the entire thing in case certain politicians get any wise ideas.

 

[Northalbertan]

Redeye, I have been involved in the oil industry in Alberta for around 20 yrs.  For most of that time I have worked on or supervised the service rigs that keep the wells pumping.  I can honestly tell you that the image that the green peacers etc portray us in is almost complete BS.  We have zero tolerance for wellbore fluids hitting the ground.  As in zero, none, nothing.  Not just oil, but the produced water that was mentioned earlier.  We put matting down around wellheads prior to working on them that would absorb any fluids spilled upon them.  If we find a spot on the ground larger than a dime it is cleaned up. 

I have worked all over SK and AB and it is the same anywhere.  Yes a lot of this is because of the poor public image the oil industry has and that's ok.  I like running a clean, safe show for my guys, the companies I work for and the environment, I don't care what motivates the oil companies to pay for it.  They have little difficulty in running environmentally friendly jobsites.  It is less expensive in the long run.  If you dirty a site up you still have to pay to clean it up when you abandon the well and reclaim the lease, so we keep them clean throughout their life.  We don't even allow rain water to run off of our leases unless it has been tested first.

I am speaking for myself of course but with government regulations and the fines involved I think you'll find that pretty much everyone is compliant.  If you want more info feel free to PM me. 

NA

 

[ModlrMike]

A suitable punishment might be sticking them outside to freeze to death:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/print.html

Now read the soft pedal approach from the CBC:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/06/15/science-sunspots-solar-cycle.html

The closing paragraphs for contrast:

Skeptics of man-made global warming from the burning of fossil fuels have often pointed to solar radiation as a possible cause of a warming Earth, but they are in the minority among scientists. The Earth has warmed as solar activity has decreased.

Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, said there could be small temperature effects, but they are far weaker than the strength of man-made global warming from carbon dioxide and methane. He noted that in 2010, when solar activity was mostly absent, Earth tied for its hottest year in more than a century of record-keeping.

 

[HavokFour]

Now read the soft pedal approach from the CBC:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/06/15/science-sunspots-solar-cycle.html

The closing paragraphs for contrast:

I think I'll trust NASA and the US Airforce over some guy from the University of Victoria.

 

[Haletown]

Last week, we were inundated in all the major media outlets carried the Big Story . . .  the oceans are dying, blah, blah, blah.

Experts we were told, scientists, just telling us the truth, blah, blah, blah,

As per Enviro-SOP, they conned the MSM again, fed them a line, a group of mostly Enviro Activists who wouldn't know the truth if it whupped them upside the head "created"
a "scientific report" and did "science by Press Release" knowing the media won't do any basic investigation and just re-broadcast their mesage.

But some people check.

Donna does.

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/06/24/the-activists-the-media-and-the-public/

CBC pays David Suzuki and the rest of his Fruit Fly generation to fill our airwaves with Greenie Propaganda.

But they will never put Donna on the air.

Goes against their code of doing anything dishonest to further their eco religious beliefs.

 

[Haletown]

Al Gore, Divinity School dropout and environmental fraudster.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/24/the-failure-of-al-gore-part-one/

 

[toyotatundra]

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/australia-to-hit-nations-500-worst-polluters-with-tax-companies-to-pay-25-per-ton-of-carbon.html

Australia will force its 500 worst polluters to pay 23 Australian dollars ($25) for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit, with the government promising to compensate households hit with higher power bills under a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions unveiled Sunday.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard sought to reassure wary Australians that the deeply unpopular carbon tax will only cause a minority of households to pay more and insisted it is critical to helping the country lower its massive carbon dioxide emissions. Australia is one of the world's worst greenhouse gas polluters, due to its heavy reliance on coal for electricity.

 

[a_majoor]

I wonder what Australians will do when manufacturing industries close shop and head to India or China (which have no "carbon tax"), or electrical generation is curtailed in order to reduce the exposure to "carbon taxes".

Unintended consequences are so much fun.....

 

[Haletown]

Australia is a  perfect example of what we just avoided in Canada in the last election.

A socialist coalition government that depends for its survival on the support of a couple of Green Party MP's/Senators.  A classic case of the green tail wagging the socialist dog.

Good summary of the situation . . .

http://tinyurl.com/64yq4ck.

The real political battle will now play out.  This isn't law yet and the Opposition now has an opportunity to fix the government on a single clear issue to go to the next polls on.

It's like a gift from Gaia to a smart opposition.

 

[RangerRay]

"Prime Minister Julia Gillard sought to reassure wary Australians that the deeply unpopular carbon tax will only cause a minority of households to pay more and insisted it is critical to helping the country lower its massive carbon dioxide emissions."

Yeah, Gordon Campbell told us the same lie too. 

 

[Sapplicant]

So msn had a nice story that came off as attributing the stage collapse during Cheap Trick's set at Bluesfest to climate change. Interview with David Phillips. I don't have a computer, so I am unable to fetch a link, but, seek and ye shall find. The important thing is that Bun-E's alright, Tommy's alright, Robin's alright, and Rick as well, is alright. They're all alright.

 

[Haletown]

"Prime Minister Julia Gillard sought to reassure wary Australians that the deeply unpopular carbon tax will only cause a minority of households to pay more and insisted it is critical to helping the country lower its massive carbon dioxide emissions."

Yeah, Gordon Campbell told us the same lie too. 

And Gillard is now channeling her inner Gordo and plumbing new lows in political popularity.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/carbon-tax-makes-gillard-australias-least-wanted-2315895.html

 

[a_majoor]

Science only if it supports your side?

http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/07/19/why-did-cern-gag-its-scientists/

Why Did CERN Gag Its Scientists?

That there is a gag in place is not in dispute. The question is why?

    The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN’s proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.

    CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment.

    “I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them,” reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?

    Because, Heuer says, “That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

True, as far as it goes, but it’s hard to imagine any scientist in any field getting gagged by higher-ups if their science backs up the global warming narrative. What we have seen, though, is scientists pushing the global warming thesis despite the faults in their models and the holes in their own data, and overall encouragement across many disciplines to push the AGW line whether it’s directly relevant or not.

Cosmic rays’ impact on earth’s atmosphere and climate is very poorly understood and research is extremely difficult to carry out. To my knowledge, no climate model has ever taken them into account at all, and their impact may be very significant (or not; we don’t really know) even though some research suggests that cosmic rays can trigger cloud formation. It’s important research, and free inquiry about it and its implications is vital as well. CERN should not muzzle its scientists, whatever opinions they form based on the research. Science shouldn’t be held to CERN’s evident politically correct strictures.

 

[a_majoor]

Wonder how much coverage this gets?

http://m.yahoo.com/w/news_america/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html?orig_host_hdr=news.yahoo.com&.intl=us&.lang=en-us

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism
By James Taylor | Forbes - Wed, Jul 27, 2011

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.