Posts Tagged ‘Energy’
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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Natural gas: Fuel of the future – CNNMoney.com
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The world seems awash in natural gas.
In the United States, new production from once hard-to-tap shale rock is booming in places like Texas, Louisiana and the Northeast. There are also plans to construct a mammoth gas pipeline through Canada to bring Alaskan North Slope gas to market.
In Australia and Qatar, liquefied natural gas terminals have started supplying fast-growing Asian countries, and more are under construction.
In Africa, rich natural gas deposits off the coast of Angola are slated for both the domestic market and export to Europe, which still gets a big part of its supply from Russia’s huge reserves. Plans are also underway to supply both Europe and Asia with the sizable gas reserves in Iran and Iraq.
Forecasting agencies, long known to play it safe before touting new trends, are only predicting a modest increase in gas’ share of the world’s overall energy mix by 2030.
But some analysts are saying it could be much higher, with big implications for the electricity markets – and coal-fired power plants in particular.
How much do we have?
In the United States, it’s this shale natural gas that’s got everyone so excited.
This gas has been known about for some time, but new drilling and extraction technology has now made it commercially viable. There are some concerns over the environmental impact of this drilling, especiallywater pollution, but the sheer amount of new gas is getting major attention.
“We’ve basically won the lottery,” Michael Ming, president of Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, an organization that studies new natural gas developments, said during a recent Time Inc. conference on energy technologies.
The amount of gas reserves in these new shales could double the nation’s known stockpile of natural gas, according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates.
Yet the U.S. Energy Information Administration is only forecasting a rise in natural gas production of under 20% by 2030. And as our overall energy use is expected to rise as well, natural gas’ share of our overall energy mix will be little changed. EIA’s estimates are in-line with other private forecasts.
Ming is among those who believe estimates for natural gas use are too small. He pointed to estimates from 10 years ago that said just 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas was likely in Texas’ Barnett Shale. That estimate is now 50 trillion cubic feet.
“There’s a lot of conservatism right now,” he said in an interview with CNNMoney. “We’re just at the very tip of this pyramid.”
What we use it for
Natural gas can be used for many things – to power cars, heat homes, cook, or generate electricity.
It’s this last use that will likely represent the biggest opportunity for gas in the next couple of decades.
For the last several years utilities have scrapped plans to build coal-fired power plants in favor of natural gas plants, which emit about half the carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas. This move has become known in the power industry as the “dash to gas.”
But that dash has been only half-hearted, said Peter Tertzakian, chief energy economist at ARC Financial, a Calgary-based private equity firm.
Over a decade ago utility execs were promised natural gas would be abundant and cheap. But the production didn’t pan out as planned, and gas prices spiked even before oil prices did earlier this decade.
Prices have since dropped significantly, partially due to all the new shale gas, but utility execs are still leery this resource is for real.
‘It’s a question of believing,” said Tertzakian, who also thinks the estimates for future natural gas use are low. “Once they believe the trend, gas demand is more likely to gain momentum.”
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Five Questions: Kallenberg sits on the Chris Garcia Hotseat – Statesman.com, Cox Newspapers
We spoke to Gregory Kallenberg, director of the documentary “Haynesville: A Nation’s Hunt for Energy.”
The film “takes place in the Louisiana backwoods, and follows the momentous discovery of the largest natural gas field in the United States — and maybe the world. It examines the historic find — a formation called the “Haynesville Shale” — from the personal level as well as from the higher perspective of the current energy picture and pending energy future.” (Kallenberg is a former reporter for the American-Statesman.)
More about the movie and its trailer HERE.
How did you come across this subject and what made it seem worthy of its own movie?
Gregory Kallenberg: Well before anyone knew the massive scale of the Haynesville discovery, there was this buzz going around northwest Louisiana. You couldn’t go anywhere without people whispering about “secret wells” and leasing checks being written for “millions of dollars.” It was this surreal “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” moment that makes you want to pick up a camera, hit the REC button and see what happens. At that point, the film was going to be a story about people’s experiences with this weird boomtown hysteria. Once we found out that all of this was true AND the impact of this find would have national impact, we knew we had a film that could address the bigger issue of energy, its human cost and what role that energy could play in our energy future.
What’s the film’s narrative and who are the main players?
The movie documents the discovery of the largest natural gas field in the U.S. The find, called the Haynesville Shale, has an estimated $1.75 trillion in gas and contains more energy than Brazil and Mexico combined. The film follows the beginning fervor of the Haynesville Shale and its effect on three people’s lives. Kassi, a single mom, fights for her community’s environmental rights. Pastor Reegis is an African American preacher who believes that God has delivered the Haynesville Shale and its riches to his congregation. And Mike, a self-described “country boy,” wrestles with the idea of giving up his pristine land in exchange for becoming an “overnight millionaire.” At the same time, you see academics, environmentalists and pundits discuss the broader impact of this find.
Your movie arrives amid a flux of activist docs about energy, conservation and food production. What does yours add to the dialogue?
“Haynesville” is unique in that it avoids the current trap of being a histrionic first-person, hyper-biased film. My goal as a filmmaker was to make a balanced piece about energy and its human cost and larger perceived benefit. I want people to see that energy is an amazingly complicated issue with very few easy answers. What’s most important to me is that people walk out of this film and start the conversation that will lay the foundation for our energy future. For the first time in history, I believe all of us have the power to chart the course for a clean energy future, and I hope “Haynesville” helps start that movement.
What do you think should be done with the Haynesville Shale? Are you conspicuously stepping aside from the argument or does the film make your point?
While I hope the film communicates my point, I will provide a bit of a spoiler here. I personally think we should have gotten off of coal yesterday. The extraction of coal is environmentally obscene and the emissions from coal are borderline poisonous. That said, I only believe in the use of vast energy sources like the Haynesville if we can figure out how to extract in as safe a way as possible that’s fair to landowners and environmentally responsible. If the gas industry and the environmental movement can work together on this, then we have a good shot at a clean energy future.
You screened the movie in Copenhagen at the big climate summit. What was the response? Are you galvanizing people and opinion?
Our screening in Copenhagen was an amazing experience for three reasons: 1) I had the unique opportunity to show my film at the world’s premiere environmental conference. 2) I saw an audience made up of environmentalists and energy lobbyists nodding together at the screen and, afterwards, coming together and discussing the film’s message. And 3) I fulfilled my life’s dream of eating Danish danishes and, I’m happy to report, they were way better than I ever imagined.
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Review: “Kallenberg Excels With Heartfelt ‘Haynesville'”
FROM CollegeMovieReview.com:
I sit here speechless (which doesn’t happen often) after watching Haynesville, a fascinating documentary on the Haynesville Shale, called “this century’s gold rush,” located in the northwest corner of Louisiana. The Haynesville Shale is a massive deposit of natural gas thousands of meters beneath the ground, just waiting to be accessed. This reserve of natural gas, with the others already known in the States, is large enough to power the nation’s electricity for the next 104 years (which is pretty important considering that Americans use more energy and electricity than any other country in the world)! This natural gas has so many implications both positive and negative, not only for the people of Northwest Louisiana, but for the entire country.
Basically, this documentary takes everything we ought to know (but don’t) about energy: its extraction, consumption, storage (or the lack thereof), cost, uses, and effects—like pollution—and puts all of it into 72 mind-blowing minutes. “By coincidence or by God’s will, the United States is given a chance to have the cleanest fuel that will bridge it over to the next generation of fuels and technologies. That is right in front of us.”
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Public Radio’s Julie Moody Interviews “Haynesville” Director
From intro by KUT’s Julie Moody:
“Haynesville” played at SXSW film. It had one screening only, but if you are interested in the subject, and you should be, you can purchase the DVDhere. The film has already played at the Copenhagen Climate Summit and had its world premiere at Doc/Fest in England, where it was honored with a Green Doc Award nomination. Director Gregory Kallenberg is one of the nicest filmmakers that call Austin home.I think my favorite movie of this year’s SXSW Film fest was “The Happy Poet”, but “Haynesville” is a close second, and completely different from the other so let me just say this, both are very good films. See them both if you can.
Listen to the entire interview…
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I Feel Another Coal Rant Coming On – HaynesvillePlay.com
Coal is getting under my skin again. Two things in particular are bothering me: coal ash and the myth of “clean coal.”
In catching up on articles this past weekend, I read an article in Sierramagazine about the problems associated with the coal ash ponds created by the huge coal-fired electric plant in Colstrip, MT. As coal is burned, it leaves behind a certain amount of residue, but unlike the wood in our fireplace, coal ash is filled with dangerous heavy metals and toxins, including mercury. Some of the ash is turned into building materials, but much of it wastes away in holding ponds along with sludge from srubbers that remove a portion of the pollutants from the smokestacks. Unfortunately these ponds lead to even more pollution as the chemicals in the water both leech into the groundwater and evaporate into the air.
I also saw a piece in the New York Times about the difficulties in cleaning up the massive coal ash spill in Kingston, TN. This massive spill in 2008 made us all aware of the dangers of these holding ponds. Outside of the sheer magnitude of the cleanup (the article notes that the disaster spilled “5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash across 300 acres into the Emory River and an affluent shoreline community near Knoxville(,) enough ash to cover a square mile five feet deep.”), the cleanup crews are having trouble finding appropriate dumping grounds for the sediment. The spilled ash is horrible stuff, filled with heavy metals that can lead to cancer, and not many landfills can handle it, especially not in these massive volumes. The one landfill that does take the sludge, located in tiny Uniontown, AL, has received so much rain lately that it has to deal with 100,000 gallons of tainted water per day as a result. The cleanup contractors are looking across the southeast for sites to process the tainted water, including in my home state of Louisiana. That situation is not yet resolved.
It is hard for me to believe the environmental furor over hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, a practice that has not created a single documented instance of groundwater contamination, when there are hundreds of these toxic retention ponds at coal plants all over the country, many of which are classified by the EPA as “high hazards” or disaster sites (see map below). I can certainly understand the desire to avoid other potential new hazards, but the outrage directed towards fracking, especially in the Northeast, would be much better spent preventing the spread of toxic pollution associated with coal-fired power plants.
Which brings me to the oxymoron of “clean coal.” It makes my head hurt to try to find two words that go less well together. That large scale carbon sequestration and storage (CSS) has not yet been demonstrated is fairly well known, but what happens if it is finally possible? The amount of carbon captured for storage from coal generating plants would be huge. We would quickly run out of places to store it. On top of that, coal plants would have to burn lots more coal just to power the CSS process. Talk about a win-win for the coal industry!
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Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid – NPR.org
The U.S. electric grid is a complex network of independently owned and operated power plants and transmission lines. Aging infrastructure, combined with a rise in domesticelectricity consumption, has forced experts to critically examine the status and health of the nation’s electrical systems.
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Small Town, Big Find: The energy debate gets personal in ‘Haynesville’ – Austin Chronicle
By Joe O’Connell
The Rev. Reegis Richard was wandering through a field, hungrily eyeing a dilapidated former school and dreaming of the possibilities, when a Haynesville producer climbed over a fence out of curiosity. Five minutes later, a camera crew was set up, says documentary director Gregory Kallenberg.
It was the sort of serendipitous moment that has guided his documentary, which explores how a massive shale natural gas find in Louisiana is both fueling the dreams of Louisiana’s downtrodden and crushing them, while providing a potential solution to our nation’s energy thirst.
Richard sees the bucketloads of cash the find is bringing to the area as the fulfillment of a personal prophecy to save his dirt-poor African-American neighbors. “He truly believes God gave him these riches,” Kallenberg says. “He wants to give back to a congregation that literally has nothing. He ends up being this incredibly inspirational character. His passion I hope comes through on the camera.”
It does, as the preacher uses the sudden riches to bring the school back to life on screen. Kallenberg interweaves Richard’s story along with those of Mike Smith, a good old boy who finds himself a sudden multimillionaire from the shale his 300 acres of land contains, and – perhaps the doc’s most gripping character – Kassi Fitzgerald, a single mother who turns into a driven community activist to make sure both her economically depressed neighbors and the environment are treated fairly.
Kallenberg, who cut his teeth as an Austin American-Statesman technology reporter as the tech boom was blossoming in the late Nineties and later jumped into that boom full force at Austin’s NotHarvard.com, approached the film originally with a clear eye for the personal narrative, a storytelling philosophy that took root further in his days as a University of Texas film student. He originally followed 11 people affected by the Haynesville find. “As with most documentaries like this, some stories fizzled, and once some saw how obtrusive a camera can be, some people opted out,” he says. “I was left with about seven really compelling ‘personal’ narratives.” The final three stories made the cut “because they are such strong characters, and they embodied all sides of what was happening during this crazy time in Louisiana.”
Kallenberg had moved to Shreveport in 2007 and was in search of a next project. Haynesville fell in his lap while he was enjoying the legendary strawberry pie in Strawn’s Eat Shop. “I was sitting in this cafe, and these farmers out of central casting come stumbling in like they just left the creek at Sutter’s Mill,” he says. “I think it was the fervor as they discussed this secret gas well that put me into eavesdropping mode.” The northeast Louisiana discovery was not yet in the news, so Kallenberg, camera in hand, jumped in at an opportune time to tell the story. “It turned out this thing was real,” he says. “It blew up on me.”
The final film is one Kallenberg sees as significant in a much larger sense. “This issue of energy has become so prevalent,” he says. “It’s complicated. I really think the film transcends being just about these people but also how we are going to handle our energy future. My personal belief is there’s a lot of energy under the feet of Louisiana. We’ve got to work with the industry, and we have to dictate how it’s going to be extracted in a fair way, an environmentally safe way.”
That battle is portrayed in the film by single mother Fitzgerald, who never completed high school. She throws herself into tireless research and grassroots footwork once she realizes the oil companies are paying different amounts to different neighbors for gas rights, primarily based on the person’s economic situation. “She tries to overcome her lack of education by pure gumption,” Kallenberg says. “She comes really close to winning against greater odds. She ends up suing Exxon and wins the ability to move from federal court to parish court. Nobody told her that Exxon’s a big fucking conglomerate.”
Kallenberg makes an interesting choice with the oil industry’s side of the tale. “When it came to presenting the larger energy story, I wanted to be very careful and present it the right way,” he says.”I wanted it to be a compelling argument, and I wanted it presented by people outside of the oil industry. As a result, the bigger views on energy are delivered by academics like Tad Patzek, pundits like Austinite Robert Bryce, and world-renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben.”
The doc’s goal is more about engaging discussion about our energy future than pushing any one agenda – though Kallenberg is clear in his distaste for coal as an energy source. Haynesville screened at December’s Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, an event that hit home for him the importance of this chance project. “There were hardcore energy lobbyists on one side and hardcore environmentalists on the other,” he says. “It was heartening to see both sides look at the screen and nod at it. Haynesville really shows the issue from all levels. There is an intimate, tertiary exploration of the issue as these people on the ground grapple with consequences of the find. But Haynesvile also zooms out to a macro level, where you get to see what this energy could mean in getting us to a clean, renewable-based energy future. At the end, I really wanted to leave my audience in a place where they could start a conversation … and what they envision as an energy future.”
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A Natural Choice – Washington Post – Editorial
IN AMERICA’S climate debate, one of the most promising developments of recent months has been the growing recognition in Washington that natural gas may play a key role in curbing carbon emissions. The resurgence of gas comes through the discovery of massive deposits in Appalachian shale formations and elsewhere — a reserve that offers the prospect of stable domestic supplies and relatively low prices. Since burning natural gas produces half the emissions of burning coal, switching the two fuels could put a significant dent in America’s carbon footprint.
The rumor this month was that such arguments had swayed the White House and that President Obama would back policy aimed at discouraging coal and encouraging natural gas at a speech he delivered to the Business Roundtable on Wednesday. The rumors didn’t bear out. That’s too bad. With climate-change legislation still stalled in Congress, nudging gas forward is something that the government can do quickly and relatively cheaply to meet its medium-term emissions goals if current trends persist.
To be sure, America doesn’t want to depend too much on one commodity. Drastically ramping up the amount of natural gas burned to generate electricity would require infrastructure investments in certain regions as well as retrofits of certain plants or the construction of entirely new ones.
But existing gas-fired plants are running at only about 25 percent capacity, in part because many are switched on only when demand spikes. The Congressional Research Service reports that doubling the use of existing plants could replace about a third of coal-fired power, getting America a third of the way to its goal for 2020. For reasons of infrastructure, that might be too optimistic a scenario. But BP — which has a stake in natural gas — estimates that retiring the 80 dirtiest coal plants and replacing them with gas-fired power would get America 10 percent of the way to its 2020 emissions target and increase domestic gas consumption by only 5 percent.
Even if you don’t trust BP’s numbers, a range of attractive policy options is available, starting with tax incentives to decommission old coal plants. Natural gas is so competitive, it might not take much more than that. However, policymakers might also consider coupling that with some carrot to switch to gas. States that demand that utilities derive a certain portion of their electricity from clean sources could also allow natural gas to count in such requirements, discounting for the carbon emissions it does produce. Federal legislators contemplating a similar, national standard might also consider this.
In the long term, natural gas is only a bridge fuel as America weans itself off carbon, since it still produces plenty of emissions. With a rising carbon price, natural gas will become too expensive to burn. But it can provide the country some time to bring to market the cleaner technologies on which America eventually must run.
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Obama Eyes Biofuels, Clean Coal In New Climate Push
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama laid out new steps on Wednesday to nudge the United States toward energy independence, backing measures to boost production of biofuels and bury pollution from coal.
Using the new initiatives to garner support for a climate and energy bill stalled in the U.S. Senate, Obama met with a handful of state governors to press his policies to fight global warming and wean the nation from imported fossil fuels.
“America can win the race to build a clean energy economy, but we’re going to have to overcome the weight of our own politics,” he said at the meeting, noting China was pushing aggressively to lead in “clean” energy technology.
“We have to focus not so much on those narrow areas where we disagree, but on the broad areas where we agree,” he said.
Agreement on a climate bill is still far from certain, and the legislation faces further obstacles after the election last month in Massachusetts that gave Republicans a Senate seat long held by Democrats, depriving the president’s party of 60 votes that could overcome procedural hurdles.
Obama has acknowledged that a controversial “cap and trade” system could be separated from other parts of the bill, though he is adamant that a market-based mechanism be put in place to make high polluting fuels more expensive for industry than less-polluting, renewable energy sources.
Biofuels represent one renewable energy source the administration wants to promote, and a new interagency report spelled out ways the country would achieve that going forward.
“By 2022, we will more than double the amount of biofuels we produce to 36 billion gallons, which will decrease our dependence on foreign oil by hundreds of millions of barrels per year,” Obama said.
He also announced a new task force to forge a plan for rolling out affordable carbon capture and storage technology in 10 years, including having 10 commercial demonstration projects up and running by 2016.
Carbon capture and storage is meant to capture the emissions from carbon-polluting coal plants and bury them underground rather than spewing them into the atmosphere but the technology is still being researched.
EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday ethanol and other renewable fuels must account for 8.25 percent of gasoline sales in 2010 to meet Congress’ mandate that nearly 13 billion gallons of renewable fuels be produced this year.
That is lower than last year’s 10.21 percent renewable fuel standard that the EPA announced in November 2008..
The United States is far away from its goal of producing 36 billion gallons (136 billion liters) of biofuels a year by 2022, currently producing 12 billion gallons annually, mostly from corn ethanol.
The report offers solutions that would ease the way for ethanol to get from producers in the U.S. Midwest to consumers near the coasts. Such snags include filling stations that have been slow to adopt pumps to distribute a fuel blend that is mostly ethanol, called E85, and a lack of dedicated pipelines for biofuels.
Loan guarantees for ethanol plants could be targeted more effectively to support new biofuels plants, the report said.
The struggling biofuels industry is concerned the Obama administration will move too quickly away from ethanol to biofuels that derive from more difficult techniques using wood chips and other biomass.
The president’s backing of ethanol, however, could shore up his support in farm states, where ethanol boosts demand for corn.
Environmentalists and some scientists say production of U.S. biofuels from corn and other grains can drive out production of other crops, prompting farmers in other countries to burn down forests and clear land to grow those crops — creating new sources of CO2, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.
(Additional reporting by Tom Doggett; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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