Posts Tagged ‘Haynesville’
New Zealand Coal Mine Explosion Traps Dozens – ABCNews.com
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Three Britons among the missing as New Zealand pit blast leaves 29 miners feared trapped half a mile underground
A powerful explosion in a New Zealand coal mine has trapped more than two dozen miners underground.
“There has been an explosion,” New Zealand’s Grey District mayor Tony Kikshoom said. “They don’t even know at what depth of the mine it is. It’s too early to make any calls, but it’s not good news at the moment.”
Some 27 miners are believed to be alive somewhere in the mine, and rescuers are currently assessing the best way to get to them.
“Power went out at the Pike River coal mine,” Barbara Dunn, the communications manager for the Tasman
District of New Zealand told ABC News. “An electrician initially went in to see what had happened and he discovered a loader driver had been blown off his machine from an explosion.”
That loader driver was reportedly hundreds of feet away from the explosion — an apparent sign of the blast’s strength.
Two miners who were working in a different part of the mine have stumbled out of the mine’s entrance and said three more could be behind them, a police report said.
A special rescue team, known as the West Coast Mine Rescue Team, has assembled at the mine “to assess what the requirements might be to go into the mine and effect a rescue,” New Zealand Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee said.
“So at this stage we’re trying to stay out of their way. They are the experts,” he said.
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State sues Feds in Mountaintop Removal Limits – More mountaintop removal?
West Virginia says it is filing a lawsuit against two federal agencies that seeks to reverse the stricter controls on mountain-top coal mining adopted in 2009 by the Obama administration.
Announcing the action on Wednesday against the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, Gov. Joe Manchin III said that the regulations were unlawful, usurped state rights, were based in inadequate science and harmed the state by preventing new mining projects.
He condemned what he called the administration’s “attempts to destroy our coal industry and way of life in West Virginia.”
Mr. Manchin, a conservative Democrat, is a popular governor but is in an unexpectedly close race for the Senate seat left open by the death of Robert C. Byrd. His Republican opponent, John Raese, has accused him of wavering in his dedication to the coal industry, a mainstay of the state’s economy.
Mr. Manchin has fiercely denied the charge, and the announcement on Wednesday, made with the coal association chief at his side, was an opportunity to highlight his support for coal and also distance himself from President Obama, who is unpopular with many voters in the state.
Responding to the move, the E.P.A. said that its policies on mountaintop mining were legally and scientifically sound. It added that in negotiations over the last year and a half, “state officials have not engaged in a meaningful discussion of sustainable mining practices that will create jobs while protecting the waters that Appalachian communities depend on for drinking, swimming and fishing.”
The agency’s environmental concerns were affirmed by an independent advisory panel, it added.
Mountaintop removal, in which hundreds of feet are blasted off hills to gain access to coal seams, has become a major mining method in West Virginia, Kentucky and nearby states, but also a source of bitter conflict. Producers say it saves money, but critics say it is destroying the landscape as the removed dirt and rocks are dumped in valleys and toxic chemicals are released.
Federal permits for such mining operations had been granted comparatively easily in the past. But in 2009, the E.P.A., citing evidence of environmental harm as well as a growing public outcry, began requiring more stringent environmental reviews of new proposals and taking stronger action to protect streams under the Clean Water Act.
In announcing the suit, Mr. Manchin said that of 23 mining permits that were pending in 2009, only two had so far been approved to go forward.
The E.P.A. has also said it may withdraw or drastically alter a permit that the Bush administration had approved for a large proposed mine in West Virginia known as Spruce 1. A final decision on that project will not be announced until late this year.
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Why Isn’t There a Google of Energy? – RenewableEnergyWorld.com
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New York, New York — We often wonder when the next Google of clean energy will materialize. When will the lone inventor finally emerge from his garage to change the world and solve our energy problems? What stealth company will bring the establishment to its knees? Our recent experience with IT makes these questions seem relevant. But some analysts say they ignore the realities of energy.
“It’s a dangerous distraction,” says Mark Bünger, a research director with Lux Research. “There’s such a long distance between invention and implementation in these really physical technologies.”
It’s convenient to compare solar cell manufacturing to chip manufacturing or smart meters to personal computers. But a variety of factors make these sectors very different, says Bünger.
Firstly, the regulatory barriers in energy mean that projects often take a long time to develop. This will make the transition to renewables less like the IT Revolution and more of an evolution. Secondly, while information technologies were being deployed within an entirely new framework, energy technologies are competing against well-established incumbents. And thirdly, the capital needed to roll out renewable energies is orders of magnitude greater than in IT.
There’s basically zero variable cost associated with information technologies. And that’s exactly the opposite of most renewable energy technologies,” Bünger says.
The path to commercial adoption in energy is littered with all kinds of financial, political and regulatory barriers. These make it difficult for entrepreneurs and start-up companies to bring technologies to market.
This brings us to the “Valley of Death,” the gap between venture capital and project finance. The Valley of Death is where a technology is too capital intensive for a venture capital firm to continue investing, but too risky for a bank or private equity firm to bring it to scale. This gap is particularly wide in renewable energy where many technologies are still unproven and up-front capital needs are much higher.
If a framework for financing next-generation renewables is not established, say experts, new game-changing technologies will get stuck in this lonely Valley and wither away before they reach their potential.
That’s what this week’s podcast is all about: How to cross the Valley of Death.
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Thanks to all for the sellout in Dallas!
A Letter to Our Friends at the Angelika screening in Dallas,
Thanks for being so enthusiastic about “Haynesville” and for all your notes of encouragement.
We are working to get back to your fair city and to spread the “Haynesville” message about a clean energy future.
For those who were shut out from getting in, thanks for being so patient. We owe you one.
Keep checking in for updates on further screenings.
Warm Regards,
Team Haynesville
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Wonderfuel: Welcome to the age of unconventional gas
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FORGET coal, it’s too dirty. Forget nuclear power, it’s too expensive and controversial. Forget renewables, they’re too unpredictable. To meet our energy needs and cut carbon emissions we need an abundant source of clean, cheap energy, available night and day and in all weathers.
We may be in luck. Natural gas is such a fuel, and it’s sitting right under our noses in abundance. Predominantly methane, it’s the cleanest-burning of all fossil fuels (see chart), so using gas rather than coal to generate electricity could halve greenhouse gas emissions from traditional coal-fired power plants.
But hang on a minute: aren’t natural gas reserves depleting just as quickly as oil? And aren’t most reserves found in countries that might not want to share their riches with the rest of the world? Back in 2006, a political spat in Europe led Russia to temporarily cut off its supply of gas to Ukraine. All of a sudden, gas seemed to have just as many problems as other fossil fuels.
While that may have been the case four years ago, things are changing fast. New technology to extract natural gas from what’s euphemistically called “unconventional” deposits means previously gas-poor countries in the Americas, Asia and western Europe could have enough cheap gas to last for another 100 years at present rates of consumption (see diagram).
Unconventional gas tends to be trapped in impermeable hard rock or sandstone, contained within coal seams, or – most promisingly for gas producers – in shale deposits. For Vello Kuuskraa, president of Advanced Resources International, an energy industry consultancy based in Washington DC, unconventional gas “has the potential for changing the long-term outlook for natural gas in a very dramatic way”.
The world consumes around 3 trillion cubic metres of natural gas each year, and the European Union says reserves from proven and conventional sources will run out in 2068. Unconventional reserves could buy us at least an extra 60 years at current rates of consumption. According to research in the late 1990s by Hans-Holger Rogner at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, there could be 900 trillion cubic metres of unconventional gas worldwide, half of which is shale gas. Of this, the International Energy Agency estimates 180 trillion cubic metres will be recoverable.
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Oil by the numbers – Houston Chronicle Editorial
While waiting and hoping for an end to the spill, let’s address our insatiable demand
The oil spill has left the central Gulf of Mexico awash in goo and the nervously watching American public buried in a blizzard of numbers: 20,000 barrels per day gushing into Gulf waters; 20,000 workers striving around the clock to plug the spill; nearly 1,400 vessels mobilized for the effort; millions of feet of boom to corral the oil; a million or so gallons of dispersant to break it up. And much more of everything in prospect as the effort continues to plug the runaway well and stop the mess from widening.
We’ll offer one number that hasn’t received the attention it deserves: 20 million. That’s roughly the number of barrels of oil consumed each day by this country’s cars, trucks, heavy equipment — everything.
It’s a big number. To put things in perspective, if the BP spill is flowing at 20,000 barrels per day, that makes for an environmental catastrophe, but it amounts to a statistical rounding error when compared with daily U.S. oil consumption. It’s roughly one-tenth of 1 percent of what we use daily.
We bring this up to call attention to the obvious: If this country is serious about reducing our oil dependency and, by inference, the amount of drilling at great depths offshore, we’ll have to make some major inroads on the demand side. Short of that, shutting down drilling and production for any length of time in the Gulf of Mexico is a nonstarter. Gulf production provides us with 30 percent of the oil we produce domestically. Take it away without cutting consumption and you get only one thing: increased dependency on foreign oil, much of it controlled by countries that don’t like us.
The Gulf spill has turned into a vexation for the Obama administration, framed curtly by the president’s frustration-filled plea to White House aides to “plug the damn hole.”
We share Obama’s pain. But that plug may not come for a while yet. Let’s make the best use of the interim, Mr. President: Put it to use marshaling public opinion in the cause of cutting the nation’s demand.
Here’s another number that might help: 700 billion barrels of oil equivalent. That’s a rough estimate of how much natural gas this country has, mostly trapped in shale formations from Texas to Colorado and in the West Virginia-Pennsylvania-New York region. It’s accessible without drilling through deep waters and the product is twice as clean as coal.
Maybe now is the time, Mr. President, to have a look at the energy independence plan put forward by the wildcatter T. Boone Pickens — especially his proposal to convert our nation’s fleet of 8 million 18-wheeler trucks from imported diesel to domestically produced natural gas.
That would take time, and it wouldn’t be cheap. A new infrastructure would have to be put in place. But it would make better use of a fuel that this country has in abundance, and which is more accessible than deepwater oil.
Focusing on future options (including nuclear power) beats the alternative of simply wringing your hands and wagging fingers at the oil companies, Mr. President. There’ll be time enough for blaming after the Deepwater Horizon well is plugged and the Gulf’s cleanup is under way.
Now is the time to point the way forward with cleaner alternatives that help build that bridge to a sustainable energy future we all want.
We believe the American people are primed for a mission that makes us more secure and creates good jobs while cleaning up the environment. It’s your moment to lead, Mr. President. Take full advantage of it.
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EOG Well in Pennsylvania Had ‘Blowout,’ State Says
June 4 (Bloomberg) — A Pennsylvania natural-gas well operated by EOG Resources Inc. had a “blowout” last night, sending natural gas and drilling fluids onto the ground and 75 feet (23 meters) into the air, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection said.
EOG said in a separate statement the well had a “control issue” at about 8 p.m. New York time yesterday and was secured by 12:15 p.m. today. No injuries were reported, the company said.
A “blowout,” the industry’s term for a surge of pressurized oil or gas that causes an eruption at a well, is what caused an explosion and fire at BP Plc’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico April 20, resulting in the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.
Environmentalists were quick to compare the two blowouts and call for tighter regulation of the growing use of hydraulic fracturing to extract gas from shale formations. Drillers using the process inject a mixture of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to crack open shale and unlock gas deposits.
“We see a lot of parallels,” said Amy Mall, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York- based advocacy group. “This is a very complex process with a lot of risks and involves a lot of complicated technology. The strongest standards need to be in place.”
There is a need for federal regulation of drilling in shale formations so there is a “minimum standard”, Mall said. Pennsylvania is in the processing of revising its rules on fracturing, “but not every state is,” Mall said.
Regulation to Rise?
ClearView Energy Partners LLC, a Washington-based policy analysis firm, said it expects members of Congress who are critical of hydraulic fracturing to use the EOG accident as grounds for greater regulation.
“Odds for explicit regulation have now increased,” Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy wrote today in a research note.
The well is located in the Marcellus Shale gas formation in Clearfield County, about 11 miles from Penfield, Pennsylvania, EOG said. Buffalo, New York-based National Fuel Gas Co. said today one of its subsidiaries is an equal partner with EOG in the well.
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Gulf Coast Towns Brace as Huge Oil Slick Nears Marshes – New York Times
COCODRIE, La. — Oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico unabated Saturday, and officials conveyed little hope that the flow could be contained soon, forcing towns along the Gulf Coast to brace for what is increasingly understood to be an imminent environmental disaster.
The spill, emanating from a pipe 50 miles offshore and 5,000 feet underwater, was creeping into Louisiana’s fragile coastal wetlands as strong winds and rough waters hampered cleanup efforts. Officials said the oil could hit the shores of Mississippi and Alabama as soon as Monday.
The White House announced that President Obama would visit the region on Sunday morning.
Adm. Thad W. Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard, who is overseeing the Obama administration’s response to the spill, said at a news conference Saturday evening that he could not estimate how much oil was leaking per day from the damaged underwater well.
“There’s enough oil out there that it’s logical it’s going to impact the shoreline,” Admiral Allen said.
The imperiled marshes that buffer New Orleans and the rest of the state from the worst storm surges are facing a sea of sweet crude oil, orange as rust. The most recent estimate by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20 and sank days later, was gushing as much as 210,000 gallons of crude into the gulf each day. Concern is mounting that the flow may soon grow to several times that amount.
The wetlands in the Mississippi River Delta have been losing about 24 square miles a year, deprived of sediment replenishment by levees in the river, divided by channels cut by oil companies and poisoned by farm runoff from upriver. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita took large, vicious bites.
The questions that haunt this region are how much more can the wetlands take and does their degradation spell doom for an increasingly defenseless southern Louisiana?
Many variables will dictate just how devastating this slick will ultimately be to the ecosystem, including whether it takes days or months to seal the leaking oil well and whether winds keep blowing the oil ashore. But what is terrifying everyone from bird watchers to the state officials charged with rebuilding the natural protections of this coast is that it now seems possible that a massive influx of oil could overwhelm and kill off the grasses that knit the ecosystem together.
Healthy wetlands would have some natural ability to cope with an oil slick, said Denise Reed, interim director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of New Orleans. “The trouble with our marshes is they’re already stressed, they’re already hanging by a fingernail,” she said.
It is possible, she said, that the wetlands’ “tolerance for oil has been compromised.” If so, she said, that could be “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
To an untrained eye, the vast expanses of grass leading into Terrebonne Bay, about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans, look vigorous. Locals use boats as cars here, trawling though the marsh for shrimp or casting for plentiful redfish. Out on the water, the air smells like salt — not oil — and seabirds abound and a dolphin makes a swift appearance.
But it is what is not visible that is scary, said Alexander Kolker, a professor of coastal and wetland science at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. Piloting a craft through the inland waterways, he pointed out that islands that recently dotted the bay and are still found on local navigation maps are gone. Also gone are the freshwater alligators that gave the nearby town Cocodrie its name — French settlers thought they were crocodiles.
All evidence, he says, is that this land is quickly settling into the salt ocean.
The survival of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is not only an environmental issue here. Since successive hurricanes have barreled up from the gulf unimpeded, causing mass devastation and loss of life, just about every resident of southern Louisiana has begun to view wetlands protection as a cause of existential importance. If the wetlands had been more robust when Hurricane Katrina’s waters pushed up from the ocean, the damage might not have been as severe.
But they were not. Levees holding back the Mississippi River have prevented natural land replenishment from floods. Navigation channels and pipeline canals have brought saltwater into fragile freshwater marshes, slowly killing them, and the sloshing of waves in boats’ wakes has eroded natural banks.
Since 1932, the state has lost an area the size of Delaware. Not all the damage is caused by humans: the hurricanes of 2005 turned about 217 square miles of marsh into water, according to a study by the United States Geological Survey.
Garret Graves, director of the Governor’s Office of Coastal Activities, said that since Hurricane Katrina, extraordinary efforts at restoration had been made and, to some extent, had slowed the decline. But, he said, a severe oil dousing would change that.
“The vegetation is what holds these islands together,” Mr. Graves said. “When you kill that, you just have mud, and that just gets washed away.”
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Green Energy Rush Hit by Headwinds
OFF THE COAST OF KENT, England—A phalanx of sleek white windmills, rising nearly 400 feet out of the North Sea, is just the start of one of the world’s most audacious green-energy programs.
The turbines are part of a project expected to be the world’s largest offshore wind farm when it is completed later this year. But only for a while, because it’s a prelude to something much bigger. In a few years, its developer, Swedish energy company Vattenfall AB, plans to start a new project farther offshore, in deeper waters, with turbines as tall as London’s 580-foot Gherkin skyscraper.
Just one problem: Vattenfall has no idea how it’s going to build it. “The equipment we need to operate in such rough waters doesn’t exist yet,” says Ole Bigum Nielsen, the project manager.
Europe is making a huge bet on wind energy. Because there is little room in its crowded countryside for sprawling wind-tower complexes, planners are increasingly looking to the sea. Europe’s current 2,000 megawatts of offshore generating capacity will grow at least 40,000 megawatts by 2020, enough to power more than 25 million households, the European Wind Energy Association predicts.
Britain is making the biggest wind wager. By offering generous incentives, the U.K. already has built more offshore wind power than any other nation. Now it is planning a wave of vast new wind farms, in some of Europe’s stormiest waters.
The U.K.’s commitment is driven by stringent European Union targets. To meet them, Britain will have to raise the share of its electricity that comes from renewable sources to about 30% by 2020. It’s just 7% now. The U.K. also adopted a “carbon budget” a year ago, committing to reduce emissions to at least 34% below 1990 levels by 2018-2022.
Some dismiss the windmills as quixotic. Wind energy needs massive subsidies to be economic. The cost to carry out Britain’s plans is estimated at $150 billion. Some predict a consumer backlash against resulting higher energy bills. And many more challenges await, judging from those the project at Kent faced, ranging from the need to protect marine worms to a design flaw that causes turbines to sink into their foundations.
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Wikipedia’s Entry on Global Energy Consumption
In 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (474×1018 J) with 80 to 90 percent derived from the combustion of fossil fuels.[1] This is equivalent to an average power consumption rate of 15 terawatts (1.504×1013 W). Not all of the world’s economies track their energy consumption with the same rigor, and the exact energy content of a barrel of oil or a ton of coal will vary with quality.
Most of the world’s energy resources are from the sun’s rays hitting earth. Some of that energy has been preserved as fossil energy, some is directly or indirectly usable; for example, via wind, hydro- or wave power. The term solar constant is the amount of incoming solar electromagnetic radiation per unit area, measured on the outer surface of Earth’s atmosphere, in a plane perpendicular to the rays. The solar constant includes all types of solar radiation, not just visible light. It is measured by satellite to be roughly 1366 watts per square meter, though it fluctuates by about 6.9% during a year—from 1412 W m−2 in early January to 1321 W m−2 in early July, due to the Earth’s varying distance from the sun, and by a few parts per thousand[clarification needed] from day to day. For the whole Earth, with a cross section of 127,400,000 km2, the total energy rate is 174 petawatts (1.740×1017 W), plus or minus 3.5%. This value is the total rate of solar energy received by the planet; about half, 89 PW, reaches the Earth’s surface.[citation needed]
The estimates of remaining non-renewable worldwide energy resources vary, with the remaining fossil fuels totaling an estimated 0.4 YJ (1 YJ = 1024J) and the available nuclear fuel such as uranium exceeding 2.5 YJ. Fossil fuels range from 0.6-3 YJ if estimates of reserves of methane clathrates are accurate and become technically extractable. Mostly thanks to the Sun, the world also has a renewable usable energy flux that exceeds 120 PW (8,000 times 2004 total usage), or 3.8 YJ/yr, dwarfing all non-renewable resources.
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