Cornell Profs Smackdown Howarth For Second Time

The Cornell research team led by Professor Cathles just took Professor Howarth to the academic woodshed for a second time.  The most recent debunking of Howarth is full of data, and reading it is mandatory.

http://www.geo.cornell.edu/eas/PeoplePlaces/Faculty/cathles/Natural%20Gas/Response%20to%20Howarth's%20Reply%20Distributed%20Feb%2030,%202012.pdf.

For me the single most important point in Cathles piece is the new data about leakage rates and specifically venting at 1578 unconventional gas wells.  Contrary to Howarth's assumption that venting during well completion takes place at 100% of uncoventional wells, the 1578 well data set showed 3% of wells were vented.

Cathles' latest paper further isolates Howarth who stands alone in the science literature.  Beyond the leakage rates that Howarth manufactures with wild assumptions and extrapolations, Howarth alone believes using a 20-year global warming potential factor when performing a coal and gas life cycle analysis is appropriate.

Howarth alone believes it is appropriate to end the life cycle analysis before coal and gas is combusted at an electricity plant.  Virtually all coal is used to make electricity.  It is impossible to calculate fairly the "life cycle" emissions of coal without including the emissions of when coal is actually burnt and that takes place nearly always at a power plant.  

But Howarth alone stops his analysis before coal is burnt. This point alone is enough to discredit entirely Howarth's analysis.

The deception in the Howarth analysis is not restricted to its failure to include emissions after coal and gas are used to make power.  Take a look at Cathles ending segment entitled, "Setting The Record Straight."  

Strong language will be found there like: "Their distortion of this statement is, once again, simply misleading and disingenuous."  That sentence is a good summary of Howarth's study.

President Obama Passes Political Beer Drinking Test

Its Super Tuesday and time to ask, with whom would you want to have a beer? President Obama, Speaker Gingrich, Governor Romney, Senator Santorum, or Congressman Paul?

In the February 27th, 2012 Politico Battleground poll, President Obama's job approval stood at 53% and 74% of voters approved of the President personally.  In other words 74% liked him, even though about a third of those who liked him did not approve of his job performance.

Personal popularity is everything when running for the president of a fraternity or a high school class, but it should not be discounted as a factor in Presidential politics. 

At the Presidential level, the question becomes, with which candidate would you prefer to have a beer? That is a question that President Obama welcomes, whether the Republican nominee is Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, or Paul.

How important is the Presidential beer drinking contest to deciding the winner?  While the economy and the question, "are you better off than 4 years ago?", remain the most important factor in deciding elections, Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush all won the beer drinking contest against George H. Bush, Dole, Kerry, Gore and the Presidency.  One might have to go back to Richard Nixon to find a candidate who became President without winning being liked.

Being liked matters in contests for the Presidency, probably even more than specific policy positions. Personal popularity involves personality, appearance, voice, all ingredients of leadership, whether one likes it or not.

Obama's 74% personal favoribility rating is teflon that deflects political attacks, and, while it won't win the President a second term by itself, his re-election campaign stands on the strong foundation that large numbers of Americans like Barack Obama.

McKibben Gets Fracking Facts Wrong In New York Review Of Books

It is not just Rolling Stones Magazine currently providing a buffet of misinformation about "fracking."

For the New York Review of Books, Bill McKibben writes about "fracking," while reviewing the excellent End of Country by Seamus McGraw (buy it and read it), another book, and Gasland.  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/why-not-frack/.  Since McKibben substantially takes his facts from Gasland and the NYT Drilling Down Series that the NYT Public Editor twice rebuked as misleading and inaccurate, he makes big mistakes that inevitably distort his understanding of "fracking" and our energy choices.

For example, McKibben repeats the NYT claim that Pennsylvania's waters were contaminated with radionuclides.  Possibly because he is unaware of it, McKibben does not discuss the massive testing for radionuclides, done by both the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and 15 drinking water suppliers, that have all proven that Pennsylvania's streams and drinking water have no radionuclide contamination.  None. Zero.

If those test results are news to McKibben, he can thank the NYT that has avoided any significant reporting on the radiation test results that inconveniently refute its sensational original February 27th, 2011 story.  If he wants a taste of real information, McKibben should go to www.pgh20.com, where he will see the monthly results of radionuclide testing done by the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority since March 2011. Again the PWSA testing is only a small part of the total testing done and all have the same results: no radionuclide contamination of in-stream or tap water. None. Zero.

McKibben also mistakenly asserts that the terrible Dunkard Creek fish kill in 2009 was the result of gas drilling discharges. That after all was what Gasland told McKibben and other viewers.  Yet, the EPA, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection all concluded that a coal mining discharge created the water conditions that allowed an algae to bloom that devastated fish populations.  Indeed, following the fish kill, the EPA entered into a consent agreement with a coal mining company to build a $70 million plant to treat a mining discharge a few miles upstream from the fish kill so that it would not be repeated.

Similarly distorted is McKibben's discussion of "lax Pennsylvania regulation" that he agains takes almost verbatim from the NYT Drilling Down Series.

Given his reliance on the NYT for facts, McKibben almost certainly is unaware that Pennsylvania issued the most violations--by a lot--to the gas industry (a total of 1200 in 2010 and 1100 in 2011) of any state in the country, as documented by the February 2012 University of Texas study that reviewed enforcement in 15 states.

He may be unaware that Pennsylvania more than doubled its oil and gas staff, hiring in 2009 and twice in 2010, boosting employee totals from 88 to 202, and opening new regulatory offices in Williamsport and Scranton in 2010.  No other state comes close to the hiring by Pennsylvania to oversee shale gas production, though still more is needed to keep pace with the industry expansion and record keeping needs.

McKibben may also be unaware that Pennsylvania passed 5 regulatory packages from 2008 to 2011 that modernized and strengthened regulations governing gas drilling.  Those packages are:

1. A water plan requirement governing water withdrawals enacted in 2008 to insure that water withdrawals do not damage streams;

2. A drilling wastewater disposal requirement enacted in August 2010 insuring that TDS levels in watersheds do not exceed 75% of the Safe Drinking Water Act TDS level and that required full TDS treatment at the pipe of any new or expanded drilling wastewater discharges.  At this point nearly all shale drilling wastewater is recycled or deep well injected, and none of it is being discharged to rivers.

3. A 150 feet buffer rule enacted in November 2010 that protects Pennsylvania's high quality streams that total 22,000 stream miles from all development.

4. A complete rewrite and strengthening of all gas well drilling rules, including design of the gas wells, materials used, and mandatory disclosure of chemicals.

5. Raising the fee as of 2009 charged drillers to apply for a permit from a ridiculous $100 to as much as $10,000 per application.  The fee raised more than $10 million per year and all funds were used to more than double the gas drilling staff at the Department of Environmental Protection.

Despite key errors, McKibben is not wrong about everything.  McKibben is right that the regulatory model of the regulator as a "partner" with industry is inconsistent with oversight.  Instead regulators must be professional and independent.  They must be neither friend nor foe to those that they regulate.

McKibben is also right that the gas industry must reduce methane leakage to limit greenhouse gas pollution, even though the science literature overwhelming concludes that coal emits twice the heat trapping pollution as gas does when used to make electricity, and nearly all coal is used to make electricity.  Though McKibben does not mention them, the EPA's July 2011 proposed regulations of gas drilling air emissions are crucial bit of 2012 regulatory business.

But gas drilling causes much less impact on water resources than coal mining, oil production, run-off from agriculture, sewage discharges, hydro dams, corn ethanol, antibiotic pollution, and many other things that damage water resources.  The most significant impact on water from shale drilling has been cases of gas migrating to private water wells, as a result of poor drilling (gas migration is not a result of hydraulic fracturing).  The Duke study that McKibben mentions found gas in water at high rates, but also found that frack fluids were not contaminating the same water wells, something that McKibben does not know or did not state in his piece.

The gas migration problem is real, and it is true that too many companies in the gas industry lawyer-up, when confronted with these cases, instead of fixing the problem, and focusing on reducing the risk.  The McKibben piece is another example to the industry of the damage being done by the current handling of this important issue.

McKibben is right that the federal government and states must strongly regulate gas drilling and reasonably tax it.    But McKibben must get the full facts about fracking, and he won't find them in the NYT, Gasland, or Rolling Stones Magazine.

Important to McKibben's mission of stabilizing concentrations of heat trapping pollution, the full facts include the role of low-priced gas, made possible by the shale gas boom, in preventing another wave of 150 new US coal plants that had been proposed as of 2005, and in the announcement of the retirment of 331 coal units since January 2010.  Moreover, so far, the boom in shale gas coincides with a boom in wind and solar in the USA, showing that gas and renewables need not be mutually exclusive.

McKibben's review proves that he needs to get beyond Gasland and the NYT Drilling Down Series.  I would be glad to discuss this vital issue with him if he would like.

Oceans Are 30% More Acidic Due To Carbon Dioxide Loading

A study published in the prestigious journal Science finds that oceans are already 30% more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial revolution and are growing more acidic.  Why?

Massive amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the environment from the burning of fossil fuels and the oceans have absorbed about 67% of the released carbon dioxide, making them more acidic.  The pace of acidification is greater than anytime in planetary history and could lead to the oceans being 150% more acidic by the end of this century.

Why should we care?  The growing acidification of the ocean makes it harder for corals, shellfish, and plankton to build shells, and the loss of those marine organisms could disrupt entire marine ecosystems and fish populations.

The study can be found at: http://m.sciencemag.org/content/335/6072/1058.abstract.  Also see:
http://mobile.businessweek.com/news/2012-03-01/oceans-acidifying-fastest-in-300-million-years.

This study confirms once more that denying global warming and the changes that it has already caused to the environment is deeply irresponsible.

Rolling Stone Magazine Sadly Regurgitates NY Times Greatest Gas "Hits"

Jeff Goodell, the author of "The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom," should split his pay with the NYT gas reporter, because Goodell regurgitates all the NYT's greatest gas hits, including ones that the NYT Public Editor found to be misleading or false.  Goodell even uses many of the NYT reporter's characters--Art Berman, Deborah Rogers, and Anthony Ingrafea--to voice his narrative.

So the reader of Goodell's piece in the March 15, 2012 Rolling Stone is treated once more to the narrative that shale gas drilling is a "ponzi scheme" that has inflated a "bubble" that will crash but, before it does, "fracking" is polluting Pennsylvania's water with radionuclides, where there is little regulation. 

Of course, Goodell does not tell his readers about radionuclide test results or  that Pennsylvania issued 1200 violations to the industry in 2010 and 1100 in 2011, many more than any other state in the country, according to the recent study by the University of Texas.

The only new twist in the Goodell piece is that he tells readers that Chesapeake Energy and its Chief Executive, Aubrey Mclendon, "dominates America's supply of natural gas" the same way the Tea Party financing Koch brothers dominate pipelines and refineries. 
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-big-fracking-bubble-the-scam-behind-the-gas-boom-20120301. 

Normally a company that dominates a market manages to avoid a price collapse of its product.  Chesapeake Energy strangely has used its supposed dominance of America's supply of natural gas to drive the price of natural gas down from $13 to $2.50 for a thousand cubic feet. In Pennsylvania alone, more than 60 companies are producing gas so perhaps Goodell means that Chesapeake Energy dominates the politics of shale gas.

Indeed, by using right from the start the words "dominate" and "right wing billionaire," comparing McClendon to the Koch Brothers, invoking Tea Party as well as the notorious Swift Boat attacks on Senator Kerry's Vietnam military service, Goodell begins with a political horror show for Blue America. He is telling his Blue America readers that Red America is controlling natural gas and to be on guard or, better still, very scared. The piece is more a political scream than a serious energy article, but it will be lapped up by many.

After his political warning to the Northeast and, as the nutty, dangerous Arizona Sheriff Arpaio and Rick Perry endorser would say, to the followers of the Kenyan, Muslim, Socialist occupying the presidency, Goodell is back to the NYT's greatest gas and fracking hits.  Ponzi scheme?

America produced a record amount of natural gas in 2011 and, thanks to shale gas, is the biggest natural gas producer in the world.  Shale gas production has now been booming for 5 years and provides 30% of America's world-leading natural gas suply.  The truly enormous actual production numbers and the collapsed price of gas, despite rising demand for gas, destroy the credibility of the ponzi scheme smear, even without diving into the reserve numbers.

Not satisfied with the ponzi scheme lie, Goodell hurls another rhetorical bomb by charging the industry is a "bubble."  Of course after the "internet bubble" and then the "housing bubble" that nearly created a depression,"bubble" is an explosive, fearful word.  It is also a strange one to use here, because the price of gas is not inflating but has been driven down by huge new production.  Consumers have saved about $1,000 per year in lower heating bills and electricity bills.  These savings are great for all consumers but protect the health and safety of about 25% of Americans, who have difficulty affording heat for their homes, as they have incomes that don't allow purchases of Rolling Stones Magazine.

After a dose of ponzi and bubble, we got to have some radiation to scare us all. While raising one more time the Pennsylvania drinking water radiation scare, Goodell of course does not report the results of massive testing for radionuclides done by drinking water suppliers of both water in streams and water coming out of taps.  The results are incovenient to the drama.

There is no radionuclide pollution of drinking water in Pennsylvania.  Zero. None.  See the tests results that have been documented in numerous posts in this blog. But that truth will never catch up to the lie cleverly spread and repeated.

Just about the only part of the Goodell piece that has some redeeming quality is when it highlights methane migration from poor drilling as a real problem.  It is, and too many companies in the industry lawyer-up and fight victims of gas migration, as opposed to fixing the problem and working to reduce the incidence. But even here Goodell is manipulative.

Gas migration results from mistakes in gas drilling and not in the hydraulic fracturing or fracking phase.  With the important possible exception of Pavillion Wyoming, there is not one case of fracking fluids, when sent down the well, returning from depth to contaminate an aquifer.

The Duke University study of water wells in Pennsylvania that Goodell cites in fact found no fracking fluids had contaminated the water wells tested but methane had. It made two basic findings: frack fluids are not contaminating water wells but methane was found at high rates.

Goodell, however, repeats the methane contamination finding of the Duke study, without telling his readers that Duke found no frack fluids in the water wells.

Goodell ends the piece by saying, without any basis, that using less gas does not mean using more coal.  This assertion is false.  Counting corn ethanol and big hydro, renewable energy provides about 11% of America's total energy, more than nuclear power.  Wind and solar are growing fast and costs are declining, but they provide less than 2% of our total energy.

Approximately 80% of our total energy comes from oil, natural gas, and coal. There is no way that renewables can replace that 80% tomorrow or in the next 10 years.  The most aggressive renewable energy state is California, and it will get 33% of its electricity (not total energy) from renewables by 2020, with about 50% of its electricity coming from natural gas at that point.

When big coal plants close, as they are doing in record numbers, they are being replaced substantially by gas, with renewables also playing a role. Yet, until energy storage breakthroughs occur, intermittent wind and solar can make important contributions but cannot replace by themselves baseload coal plants.  Only gas or nuclear plants can take the place of coal plants that now run night and day.

In 2005, prior to the shale gas boom, America stood ready to build 150 new coal plants.  Most of those proposed new coal plants have not been built and now old coal plants are closing.  Low-priced natural gas, more than anything else, stopped another wave of big coal plants and is now making old, inefficient coal plants close. Pretending otherwise may comfort Goodell but is not real.

Stunning Fact: 331 Coal Units Announced Closing Since January 2010

Keeping track of the number of coal plants and coal units that are closing is not easy.  This blog published in 2011 the Edison Electric Institute's list of coal plant closings at that time.  Yesterday, Stephen Lacey wrote that the owners of 106 coal plants, with 331 coal units at them, had announced that they would retire or have retired since January 2010.  The plants represent 42,895 megawatts or 13% of the coal fleet.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/29/435012/dirty-aging-coal-plants-set-to-close/?mobile=wp.

Other data in the post includes that the retiring plants on average are 55 years old and that they represent 8% of the electricity produced by coal plants or considerably less than the 13% capacity share of the retiring coal plants. The 8% of the electricity produced by coal plants that is retiring represents about 3.3% of all electricity generated from all sources. The retiring plants also account for 9% of the carbon dioxide coming from all coal plants.

It should also be noted that America builds typically 15,000 to 20,000 megawatts of new generation every year.  The closings do not pose any threat to grid reliability.

This data also confirms that the plants retiring are the ones already not operating much, because they are unable to compete for dispatch in competitive markets, during periods of low and moderate demand, which is most of the time.

Lacey's post is based on information from Bruce Niles who is the director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign.

Belief In Global Warming Rises & Warms With Weather

 Belief of global warming is warming again, after a substantial decline from 2009 to 2010,
according to polling by the University of Michigan and Muhlenberg College. The poll found that 62% of the public believed in the reality of global warming, a rebound from 58% in the fall of 2010.
Public belief in global warming had been declining, falling substantially from 72% in the fall of 2008 to 58% in the fall of 2010. See www.ns.umich.edu/new/releases/20247-poll-belief-in-global-warming-rebounds-after-period-of-decline and http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2012/02_climate_change_rabe_borick.aspx.

The pollsters conclude that the personal observations of Americans about the weather is a key factor influencing opinions about the reality of global warming.  Of those believing in global warming 24% pointed to warmer temperatures that they have observed and another 24% mentioned weather changes that they have experienced.  Only 9% mentioned science research as the main basis.

Political registration partially predicts ones belief in global warming.  Among Democrats, 75% accept the reality of global warming, while 47% of Republicans do. Many more rank and file Republicans accept global warming than do elected Republicans and Republican Presidential candidates.  Global warming may be example of how the Republican party has been yanked to an extreme by its activists, while many rank and file Republicans don't agree with the new party orthodoxy.

The poll was conducted in the fall of 2011, obviously before what has been a very warm winter, and so expect to see a further increase in the public acceptance of global warming in the 2012.  Indeed, this winter has been so warm that it almost met the global warming test of a central Pennsylvania Republican friend.

In his words, "I will believe in global warming when I don't shovel snow anymore."

My friend, we are getting there.