Month: March 2021

Hurricane Data Update: Is the New Normal No Normal?

“Average” storm numbers in Atlantic Basin has been upgraded. More storms, more hurricanes, more major hurricanes.
There are caveats and qualifiers.

Washington Post:

Every 10 years, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration revises the baseline of what weather and climate conditions are considered “normal.” The most recent normals for Atlantic hurricane activity will soon be released, and a preview reveals a spike in storm frequency and intensity.

During the most recent 30-year period, which spans 1991 to 2020, there has been an uptick in the number of named storms and an increase in the frequency of major hurricanes of category 3 intensity or greater in the Atlantic.

That comes as no surprise amid a spate of extreme hurricane activity that has featured seven Category 5 storms swirling across Atlantic waters in just the past five years.

The newly revised climate normals aren’t a forecast of upcoming activity, nor are they necessarily illustrative of any one particular climate or meteorological trend. They’re simply benchmark values.

The National Weather Service calculates new climate normals each decade for all major U.S. cities with sufficient historical data. When you hear your local television meteorologist describe a day as “10 degrees above average,” for instance, this data is where that comes from.

The new hurricane normals are not official yet, though available data clearly shows an uptick in storm frequency and intensity, likely related to a combination of climate change, natural variability and improved storm detection.

“The 1991-2020 climate figures for hurricane season will be discussed, finalized and released in May,” said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and public affairs specialist at the National Hurricane Center. The agency plans to coordinate with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and the Climate Prediction Center before releasing final tallies.

John Bateman, a meteorologist at NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service, said that “right now, what those normals say about Atlantic Basin hurricanes is still being reviewed.”

Between 1961 and 1990, the Atlantic averaged 10 named storms a year, including 1.9 major hurricanes. Those values remained essentially constant in the 1971-2000 climate period.

However, the figures began climbing in the 1981-2010 window, and have escalated significantly since.

Continue reading “Hurricane Data Update: Is the New Normal No Normal?”

Daniel Cohan PhD: The “Systemic Collapse” of Gas in Texas Blackout

Daniel Cohan is an atmospheric scientist and an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University. He has written over 40 scientific publications, dozens of columns in popular media, and an elementary school curriculum about air pollution. A graduate of Harvard University and Georgia Tech, Dr. Cohan served as a Fulbright Scholar to Australia and was a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award. 

I spoke to Dr. Cohan the other day for a deeper dive into what we know at this stage post Blackout.

Daniel Cohan PhD in Talking Points Memo:

As the Texas blackouts stretch into their third day, misleading narratives about what went wrong have spread far and wide. One particularly pernicious one you may have heard is that wind and solar are to blame for the outages.

But what so many of these assertions lack is a fundamental understanding of Texas’ electric power supply, and its mutual vulnerabilities with the state’s gas systems. We’re facing an energy systems crisis here in Texas, not just an electricity crisis.

To understand why, we can begin by looking at how the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) — which operates our electrical grid — generated power on average last year. Nearly half of it came from natural gas. Wind surpassed coal for the first time. And four nuclear units and a bit of solar and hydropower supplied the rest.

That supply provides power for most but not all of the state. The grid is contained within Texas, with very little transmission linking to the rest of the country or Mexico. So what happens in Texas stays in Texas.

The grid can operate just fine with very high levels of wind — over 50 percent at times. With solar power also variable and nuclear power usually fixed, coal and gas plants flex their output to satisfy remaining demand that itself varies with time.

Continue reading “Daniel Cohan PhD: The “Systemic Collapse” of Gas in Texas Blackout”

Orphaned Wells a Billion Dollar Mess

Guardian:

Jill Morrison has seen how the bust of oil and gas production can permanently scar a landscape.

Near her land in north-east Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, where drilling started in 1889, more than 2,000 abandoned wells are seeping brine into the groundwater and leaking potent greenhouse gasses.

The problem is getting worse. As the oil and gas industry contracts owing to the pandemic, low prices and the rise of renewables, more than 50 major companies have gone bankrupt in the last year. Joe Biden’s recent order to pause drilling on federal land could drive that number higher. Morrison, a rancher and the head of the Powder River Basin resource council, said the crash was exacerbating the abandonment issue.

“They drill baby drilled themselves right out of business,” Morrison said. “We’re seeing something we’ve never seen before in the oil and gas industry, in terms of the downturn, and there’s going to be a billion-dollar mess to clean up.”

Unplugged wells, either orphaned well, which have no liable party, usually due to bankruptcy, or idle, abandoned ones, where the company has walked away, but could still be liable, cause rampant methane emissions – up to 8% of US total according to a 2014 analysis. They also leak brine, oil and fracking fluid into the groundwater, and carcinogenic gases, like benzine, into the air, and as their numbers increase the impacts grow.

“Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, it’s a precursor for ozone, and harmful for human health,” said Mary Kang, a McGill civil engineering professor who conducted the study. “Even just a few wells can be responsible for big emissions, and there are all the other associated risks, and impacts to wildlife and ecosystems.”

The impacts aren’t just here in the rangy fields of Wyoming. There are unremediated wells in Los Angeles neighborhoods and Pennsylvania farms. There could be as many as 3.2m abandoned wells in the US, according to a 2018 EPA report, but this is probably an undercount because both federal and state programs for regulating and monitoring non-producing wells are incomplete. There are an estimated 2,500 of them in the Powder River Basin alone.

So many have been left uncapped because the regulations and bonding requirements, the money that companies pay ahead of time as insurance, for those wells are so minimal that it’s nearly impossible to hold drillers responsible or to pay for cleanup. Some companies simply walk away from wells, meaning they are still liable; when firms go out of business, they are not.

The penalties for not cleaning up a well are minimal when there’s nothing but a small bond holding a company responsible. “How do you convince operators to comply when there’s no carrot and no stick?” said Frank Rusco, a director in the US Government Accountability Office’s natural resources and environment team.

That means the profits for drilling go to individual companies while the damages, both environmental and financial, are largely borne by the local community and by state and federal taxpayers. “Unplugged wells devalue property, they’re a mess to work around, it can lead to groundwater pollution, and no one is really tracking it,” Morrison said.

The thinktank Carbon Tracker, reports it could cost $280bn to reclaim wells, and public bonding data indicates that states have less than 1% of that money in secure bonds.

Continue reading “Orphaned Wells a Billion Dollar Mess”

New Video: Texas Blackouts a Failure of “Baseload Power”

The Blackout in Texas was a watershed event that showed us definitively that the whole myth of “baseload power” is just that.
We’ve been told the only way. to be safe from power shortage is to have enough fossil fueled power plants, coal and gas, or nuclear – which are thought magically to never fail.
The polar vortex proved that wrong.


Experts explain above.

New Evidence Points to Possible North Atlantic Changes – Or Does it?

Significant piece in the New York Times (which is graphically rich, so do go to the link) summarizing what we know about AMOC, the Atlantic Meriodonal Overturning Circulation. The current, which most people think of as “the Gulf Stream”, is getting a lot of attention due to some observations suggesting a slowing, which could have global consequences.

New York Times:

Now, a spate of studies, including one published last week, suggests this northern portion of the Gulf Stream and the deep ocean currents it’s connected to may be slowing. Pushing the bounds of oceanography, scientists have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across the Atlantic to better understand the complex network of currents that the Gulf Stream belongs to, not only at the surface, but hundreds of feet deep.

“We’re all wishing it’s not true,” Peter de Menocal, a paleoceanographer and president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said of the changing ocean currents. “Because if that happens, it’s just a monstrous change.”

The consequences could include faster sea level rise along parts of the Eastern United States and parts of Europe, stronger hurricanes barreling into the Southeastern United States, and perhaps most ominously, reduced rainfall across the Sahel, a semi-arid swath of land running the width of Africa that is already a geopolitical tinderbox.
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Colleagues studying ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet were seeing evidence of strange climatic “flickers” in the past. As Earth warmed from the deep freeze of the last ice age, which peaked around 22,000 years ago, temperatures would rise, then abruptly fall, then rise again just as swiftly. Dr. Broecker theorized this was caused by stops and starts in what he called the ocean’s “great conveyor belt”— the AMOC.

The clearest example began about 12,800 years ago. Glaciers that had once covered much of North America and Europe had retreated considerably, and the world was almost out of the deep freeze. But then, in just a few decades, Greenland and Western Europe plunged back into cold. Temperatures fell by around 10 degrees Celsius, or 18 degrees Fahrenheit, in parts of Greenland. Arctic-like conditions returned to parts of Europe.

The cold snap lasted perhaps 1,300 years—before reversing even more abruptly than it began. Scientists have observed the sudden changes in the pollen deposited at the bottom of European lakes and in changes in ocean sediments near Bermuda.

This forced a paradigm shift in how scientists thought about climate change. Earlier, they had tended to imagine creeping shifts occurring over many millennia. But by the late 1990s, they accepted that abrupt transitions, tipping points, could occur.

This didn’t bode well for humanity’s warming of the atmosphere. Dr. Broecker, who died in 2019, famously warned: “The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.”

Continue reading “New Evidence Points to Possible North Atlantic Changes – Or Does it?”

“The Market was Working as Designed”. Texas Grid Architects Don’t See the Problem

Houston, you have a problem.
Dallas, you too.

Harvard Crimson:

After a winter storm in Texas earlier this month left the state’s residents to contend with widespread power outages and skyrocketing electricity prices, William W. Hogan, the architect of the state’s energy market system and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, said the state’s electricity market had “worked as designed” given the conditions in an interview with The Crimson Wednesday.

Hogan, an energy policy professor, has researched the structure of energy markets for several decades and advocated for a specific type of scarcity-based market model in an attempt to reduce prices for consumers. In 2013, Texas chose to adopt Hogan’s model.

Per scarcity-based pricing models, when the power supply is scarce, as was the case during the recent storm, the price of energy increases.

Energy generation dropped during the record-setting storm due to loss of power plants, fallen transmission lines, and damage to the grid. As a result, the price of energy rose, and some Texans whose power remained on saw their energy bills increase precipitously.

One Texas resident, for example, told the New York Times that the cost of his electricity went up 70-fold. He now owes $16,752 for his energy bill, wiping out his savings.

Hogan acknowledged in the Wednesday interview that such situations are “terrible.” Still, he argued the end result could have been much worse.

“The people who didn’t lose their power, they’re much better off than the people who lost it,” Hogan said. “Even if they had to pay bills for it, then that’s going to have to be figured out.”

He added that Texas residents who ended up with high power bills “chose not to have long-term contracts that protected them.”

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Below, Michael Webber PhD of the University of Texas tweeted:

Crimson again:

Kennedy School student Christopher J. Stewart, whose family was in Texas during the storm, said residents’ negative experiences with the energy system during this crisis matched his expectations for a state where politicians have long pushed for cutting costs.

Continue reading ““The Market was Working as Designed”. Texas Grid Architects Don’t See the Problem”