Journal editor resigns over 'problematic' climate paper

[dZeus]

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I've also read claims that the shale gas/oil reserves in the US have been greatly overstated as a ploy by speculators that buy up land/drilling rights and try to resell it for a profit, and at the same time pushing it as a 'national energy independence/security issue' to get around any environmental regulations/concerns. The cost for extracting this shale gas and oil apparently is much higher than what is publicly claimed and many wells are already drying up (after 3-6 years).

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A good example of the US shale gas scam:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/28/us-energy-giant-idUSTRE7BR0G420111228

[dZeus]

The "yet to be discovered reserves" are badly named. "Yet to be explored" may be better. The difference? Well, there are many places where there are at least 99% chance of hydrocarbons which are known but exploratory wells have yet to be dug. Israel has just explored with a number of wells the Leviathan field which is now proven at 4.3 bbl + large amounts of gas and this is only one sector of several. Cyprus is starting one exploration on 1 October out of 12 areas, believed by geologists at up to 30 bbl +gas. (This is in the same basin as Leviathan and Noble state that it is quasi-certain that vast quantities of hydrocarbons are there but they don't forecast the oil/gas ratio.). Then you can see http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/20/big...lds_slide.html.

The big problem with shale oil/gas is fracking (see the thread on this)

As for any form of international carbon trading, I'm agin it. It is corruption personified, for sure. Countries should reduce carbon emissions under a scheme similar to the phase out of CFCs with the Montreal Protocol. It worked!

surprise, surprise... Did the IEA just lower their estimates of reserves?

[Greebe]

I can assure you that CFCs were very difficult and still are. It is simply not true that there were substitutes: they were all developed after the Montreal Protocol was signed, with one minor exception. There are still ozone-depleting substances being manufactured and used and will continue, even in developed nations, because there are no substitutes. Most of the substitutes are very powerful greenhouse gases, with the exception of LPG used in domestic fridges in Europe. In many cases, we had to resort to old pre-CFC technology because of the lack of substitutes (e.g., highly toxic sulfur dioxide in chillers) or to use not-in-kind technologies, such as powder inhalers for asthmatics instead of metered-dose inhalers etc. I worked for well over 20 years on just this problem and am still occasionally informally consulted.

I agree that nuclear energy, mixed with RES, including waste-to-energy, is the only viable option. Interestingly, Switzerland has just found some weaselling. Their knee-jerk and foolish reaction to Fukushima was to decree to shut down all nuclear plants by (I think) 2025. However, parliament just gave the green light which will allow NEW nuke plants to come into service after 2025! The way the original ordinance was worded allowed this wriggle-room. The anti-nukes are furious!

Nuclear waste is more a political than a technical problem. The technology is well-known but governments/parliaments take a NIMBY attitude (re-election issues on a charged emotive subject).

Have to agree with Brian on this one. There were no substitutes for many applications like inhalers and yet Halon which is something like 10x more destructive than CFC freon is common.

The gas reserves the US sits on are massive. I've known about this since the '70's, did a report on the local power co-op DP&L when they bought out Edison Electric and capped all the natural gas wells throughout the entire west central Ohio area. The total back then was measured in the billions of quads.

[Brian Ellis]

Let me recount the story of one CFC substitute:

Prior to the Montreal Protocol (1987), CFC-113 and 1,1,1-trichloroethane (TCA) were both very popular industrial solvents used in open-top vapour degreasers, which, almost by definition, allowed vapours to escape into the air. In developing countries, there was also carbon tetrachloride, banned in developed countries because of severe hepatotoxicity concerns (life was cheap in Asia!). There was no in-kind substitute for CFC-113 but trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE) were available as substitutes for TCA, but were more toxic and therefore disliked.

HCFC-141a was developed as a substitute for TCA, less toxic but higher global warming potential. Similarly HCFC-225 was developed as a substitute for CFC-113. Both of these were ozone-depleting, but less so than their prototypes. They were accepted in the early 1990s as an interim solution but were, themselves, deemed as controlled substances in the Protocol, but with a phase-out date of 2010 instead of 1996.

This put industry in a tizzy with no long-term solution envisageable as substitutes for the original solvents.

In about 1996, three multinationals, Albemarle, Dead Sea Bromine and Great Lakes Corp. proposed a substance, 1-bromopropane or n-propyl bromide (nPB), with physical characteristics somewhat between CFC-113 and TCA. Nothing was known about its toxicity or environmental characteristics. It was deemed to be potentially ozone-depleting (OD). All the known OD substances have a long half-life, counting in years, allowing them to diffuse into the ozone layer. nPB has a half-life of 3-4 weeks and it was initially thought that so little would diffuse upwards that its OD potential would be negligible, so it was never incorporated into the Montreal Protocol.

Then someone thought that nPB could be transported into the ozone layer, not diffused. How? The answer was obvious, by the updraft of thunderstorms, especially tropical ones that were often 18 km high, "bubbling" into the stratosphere and ozone layer. If this happened, its ozone-depleting potential would be as bad as many other OD substances or even worse. Meteorologists confirmed the possibility, even probability. The Parties to the Protocol wanted to know more. A Science Panel was charged to produce a reliable model, which they failed to do. The Technical Panel was charged to produce estimates of geographical usage. A Working Group was formed, which I was nominated to chair. We obtained figures of then-current OD and non-OD solvent usage in as many countries as we could and, taking into account the relative costs and likelihood of substitution under different scenarios, we calculated the potential usage of nPB in each country. This averred far higher in tropical countries than was formerly thought in both "most likely" and "worst-case" 2010 scenarios. We published a 60-odd page report but the Parties could take no action without the Science Panel report.

At about the same time (2000-2001), anecdotal reports started to trickle in that some workers exposed to nPB displayed symptoms of neurotoxicity, despite the manufacturers quoting recommended exposure levels of 200 ppm. A French company making nPB but not marketing it as a solvent suggested 10 ppm would be more appropriate. The solvent vendors dropped it to 100 ppm. The US authority, OSHA, did not give a legally binding figure pending research by the National Toxicology Program, still not complete (AFAIK). The recommendations were gradually dropping to 50, then 25, now 10 ppm (in California 5 ppm); these figures are impossible to respect with the low-cost open-top degreasers.

The bombshell blew up in 2012: research in Japan, corroborated in the USA, showed that nPB is carcinogenic and also reprotoxic (low sperm motility.

Did this affect usage? NO! Sales today are almost as high as our WG's "worst case" scenario in mid latitudes and are higher than foreseen in tropical and sub-tropical climates (India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brazil, Mexico etc.), so it is probable that "we" are depleting the ozone layer by thousands of tonnes of nPB reaching it, while "we" are possibly killing off many workers exposed to it (in a few years).

This is how industry works, defying common-sense in the absence of regulation!

[dZeus]

What do you base your oil supply figures on? I've read that the IEA has greatly overstated oil reserves (as in putting a huge amount of 'yet to be discovered reserves'), not taking into account that most of the cheap and easy to get oil supplies have already been explored. The problem is not as much peak capacity of oil exploration, but the price necessary to pump it up. My understanding is that we won't be running out of oil (probably ever), but that the oil will gradually be more and more expensive up to the point where the current economy and society needs to drastically change as it greatly depends on this cheap form of energy.

I've also read claims that the shale gas/oil reserves in the US have been greatly overstated as a ploy by speculators that buy up land/drilling rights and try to resell it for a profit, and at the same time pushing it as a 'national energy independence/security issue' to get around any environmental regulations/concerns. The cost for extracting this shale gas and oil apparently is much higher than what is publicly claimed and many wells are already drying up (after 3-6 years).

While 'global warming' is indeed a way to window dress a push for higher energy efficiency, it also creates a risk of introducing a global carbon emission rights system where banks/investors have another way of skimming of money of the productive part of the economy. This was narrowly avoided with the blowing up of the København climate conference.

Here's another big update on overstating shale reserves

[Brian Ellis]

Here's another big update on overstating shale reserves

The case in question is oil, not gas. Fracking for gas is easier than for oil, because the sand-propped rocks allow the easy passage of a gas, while the relatively viscous oil with a high surface tension is much slower to seep through. It does not surprise me that seismic faults blocks the flow of hydrocarbons. In fact, we have the same problem in the Cyprus EEZ 12 field, where the gas-bearing stratum is fractured into three vertically-isolated areas due to seismic slippage. However the key phrase is "Just 600 million barrels of oil can be extracted with existing technology" Don't think a) that technology is not improving on a daily basis or b) that this seismic problem can be extrapolated elsewhere (the three EEZ 12 sub-fields are exploitable individually without reducing the initial estimates.