As global warming gradually melts away the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, the oil and gas deposits buried in that inaccessible region are becoming a lot less theoretical to the five northern nations with claims to those riches. “For better or worse, limited exploration prospects in the rest of the world combined with technological advances make the Arctic increasingly attractive for development,” said Paul Berkman, … who specialises in the politics of the Arctic [The Guardian]. Now, a new study has estimated how much oil and gas may lie beneath the Arctic seabed, declaring that it contains about 30 percent of the planet’s undiscovered natural gas reserves and 13 percent of its undiscovered oil.
Researchers estimate that the Arctic holds about about 83 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, but say that’s not enough to challenge the dominance of the oil-rich Persian Gulf states. Meanwhile, the researchers say that the Arctic’s estimated 1,550 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is concentrated in marine territory claimed by Russia, ensuring that Russia will continue to be the world’s largest producer of gas. “These findings suggest that in the future the … pre-eminence of Russian strategic control of gas resources in particular is likely to be accentuated and extended,” said Donald L. Gautier, lead author of the study [AP].
Russia has not been shy about pressing its claim to the polar region: In 2007 two Russian civilian mini-submarines descended to the seabed to collect geological and water samples and drop a titanium canister containing the Russian flag [AP]. The other four northernmost nations — Canada, the United States, Norway, and Denmark (via Greenland) — have also sought some jurisdiction over parts of the Arctic.
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New oil and gas drilling in the Arctic ocean off the coast of Siberia could be powered by floating nuclear power plants, according to Russia’s nuclear energy agency, and off-shore plants may also be built to provide energy for remote towns and military outposts.
The Russian nuclear agency has reportedly signed a deal to build four plants for towns in the far northern Siberian Republic of Yakutiya, and is currently constructing its first floating nuclear plant for a defense facility by the White Sea. But environmental groups are most alarmed at the prospect of using the portable plants to power oil and gas drilling. The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, the oil firm which is also Russia’s biggest company. It would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years [The Guardian].
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If the human race continues on its present industrial course, by 2040 we will have added more than 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the air–which will have caused an average global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the scenario described in two new studies, both published in Nature, that paint an ominous picture of global warming. A worldwide temperature rise of just a few degrees may not sound like much, but it would lead to wide-scale environmental disruptions including floods and droughts, and more than 100 nations support the goal of keeping temperature rise below 2C [BBC News].
The studies, which used computer models, take a different approach than other research on figuring out how much carbon dioxide in the air is too much. Instead of the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air at any given time, they looked at the total amount spewed out over many decades to arrive at a tipping point of 1.1 trillion tons [AP]. As study coauthor Myles Allen explains, the analysis shows that humanity is hurtling towards that tipping point. Industrial activity since the mid-18th century has already emitted 500 billion tonnes of carbon, so we are halfway there. “But don’t let this fool you,” says Allen. “On current trends we’ll burn the next 500 billion in less than 40 years.” If we carry on regardless, we will exhaust what Allen calls the “carbon budget for the human race” by 2040 [New Scientist].
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In large industrial experiments across the globe, factories and power plants are trying to capture the carbon dioxide that streams out of their flues in order to bury it deep underground. Researchers believe the greenhouse gas will stay put for thousands of years and therefore won’t contribute to global warming, but the costs and long-term effects of the procedure are still unclear. The experiments currently underway are expected to determine whether carbon capture and storage will allow nations to continue burning fossil fuels for energy without ill effects.
In France this month, the first retrofitted power plant will begin to use its new carbon capture and storage technology. The system used by the natural gas-burning power plant will transport and store 60,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year in the nearby depleted gas field at Rousse – once the biggest onshore natural gas field in Europe, but which is now almost empty [The Guardian]. The carbon dioxide will flow through existing pipelines that once brought natural gas to the power plant. While the first new power plant using carbon capture and storage opened last year in Germany, some environmentalists say that the French plant’s retrofit is an important example of how existing industries can be adapted to a future that requires clean energy.
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In preparation for future oil shale mining projects near the Rocky Mountains, six oil companies have gained rights to billions of gallons of water in the American West, potentially jeopardizing water supplies throughout the region, according to a new report by Western Resource Advocates [pdf], an environmental group. It is still preliminary to speculate on the implications of the findings, but many are concerned that if the companies put their rights to use, water will be shifted away from agriculture and community use.
Using public records, the report examines more than 200 water rights held by six energy companies, including Shell and ExxonMobil, which, it is estimated, are collectively entitled to divert at least 6.5 billion gallons of water from rivers in western Colorado, as well as almost 2 million acre-feet of water from the state’s reservoirs, which is enough to supply the Denver metro area for six years. Shale oil production is a water-intensive process: up to five barrels of water are consumed for every barrel of oil produced. This means that projects producing 1.55 million barrels of oil per day would require 378,000 acre-feet of water each year, compared to the Denver metro area’s consumption, which is less than 300,000 acre feet. Should oil shale production hit full stride in the next 15 to 20 years — something the White House under President George W. Bush tried to accelerate by opening up 2 million acres controlled by the Bureau of Land Management to leasing and approving royalty rates and leasing rules — there will be a major political battle over water rights [Colorado Independent].
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Last year, President Mohamed Nasheed announced that his country would look to buy land for Maldivians to resettle on when sea levels rose and caused the low-lying islands to be uninhabitable. That plan proved too expensive, but Nasheed has now announced a $1.1 billion plan that will shift the Maldives entirely to renewable energy over the next ten years, making it the world’s first carbon-neutral nation.
The archipelago Indian Ocean nation consists of almost of 1,200 islands, of which only about 250 are inhabited. None of the coral islands measures more than 1.8 metres (six feet) above sea level, making the country vulnerable to a rise in sea levels associated with global warming [BBC]. Scientists at a meeting in Copenhagen last week predicted that glaciers and ice sheets melting as a result of global warming could boost the level of the world’s oceans by as much as a metre by the end of the century [CBC].
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The Arctic’s ice may be melting, but a vote by a federal fishing council makes it likely that fishing trawlers won’t be moving in to look for rich harvests in the newly accessible Arctic waters. In a preemptive move, the council voted to ban commercial fishing in almost 200,000 square nautical miles of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas along Alaska’s northern coast. These areas are not currently fished, but sea ice melt and the northward migration of certain fish species, such as salmon, raises the possibility that they would be in the not too distant future [Scientific American]. If the U.S. commerce secretary approves the proposal, the ban will remain in place until scientific studies can determine whether fishing can be conducted sustainably in the Arctic.
Says Jim Ayers, of the conservation group Oceana: “Global climate change is making everyone think differently up here and making them understand that precautionary approaches are best.” … The unanimous vote was unusual in that it was largely supported by industry and conservation groups alike and because it was the first time the United States had acted to close a fishery as a result of climate change instead of in reaction to overfishing [The New York Times].
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Every winter, a thick cloud of brown smog settles over South Asia, stretching from southern China, across India and Pakistan, to the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean. For everyone who lives with the so-called “Asian brown cloud,” this air pollution is just a fact of life. Pilot John Horwood says the worse part about flying into Hong Kong is the suffocating, two-mile-thick blanket of pollution that hovers between 15 and 18,000 feet. “The whole cockpit fills with an acrid smell,” says Horwood, who started noticing the cloud in 1997. “Each year it just gets worse and worse” [Time]. But scientists have long puzzled over the cloud’s source: Is it produced by burning biomass, or by the combustion of fossil fuels?
Now researchers have analyzed the cloud’s composition, and found that two-thirds of the haze is produced by burning biomass, primarily the wood and dung burned to heat houses and cook food throughout the region. This research is the first step to doing something about the brown haze, which is linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths — mainly from lung and heart disease — each year in the region, they said. “Doing something about this brown cloud has been difficult because the sources are poorly understood,” said Orjan Gustafsson [Reuters], the study’s lead author.
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It may be a platitude that fresh, clean air is good for you, but now researchers have quantified how much cleaning up air pollution has improved the public health: It has boosted the lifespan of the average American city-dweller by five months.
Coauthor Majid Ezzatin explains that when his team examined three decades of health data from 51 U.S. cities, researchers found that people are living about three years longer than they did before. Controlling for changes in income, education, demographics and smoking, about five months of that can be chalked up to air improvements…. “Rather than just saying pollution is bad for health,” he said, “we can say that regulations are good for health” [Wired News].
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Researchers have long known how to create surfaces that repel water (they just had to look at a duck’s back for an example), but how to repel oily liquids was a mystery until last year, when a team of MIT chemists created a material antisocial enough to repel liquids of both kinds. They have gone one better than nature, which is not known to have made materials with such properties. [Researchers] even had to coin a new word to describe their creation - “omniphobic” - literally meaning it hates everything [New Scientist].
Now, the same researchers have pushed the technology another step forward, by developing a set of general design rules for omniphobic materials and by altering existing items–like, for example, duck feathers–to make them repel both oil and water.
One of the biggest differences between water and an oily liquid such as octane, a component of petroleum, is surface tension. A droplet of a fluid with high surface tension — such as water — tends to pull itself into a sphere, whereas one with low surface tension, such as oil, tends to spread across a surface more readily [Science News]. Researchers first created a surface covered in 300-nanometer-tall “toadstools,” which allowed even oily liquids with low surface tension to remain in tight spherical droplets, essentially sitting on the toadstools’ caps.
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American voters may have enthusiastically chosen to send Barack Obama to the White House as the next president of the United States, but the Bush Administration still has 76 days in office and seems to be making the most of that time by passing a host of so-called “midnight regulations.” Many of these last-minute rule changes relax environmental regulations, and watchdog groups say these controversial changes may be difficult for the incoming president to undo.
Some of the rule changes would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms. Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining [Washington Post]. If the rules take effect before inauguration day, the incoming Obama Administration would have to begin a long and complicated regulatory process to reverse them.
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As the turmoil continues in the world’s financial systems and countries brace for an economic downturn, many environmentalists and green tech entrepreneurs are posing the question: How will this crisis impact the young renewable energy sector?
Some worry that ambitious projects won’t be able to get the financing they need from troubled banks wary of lending money, while others note that oil prices have dropped fast based on predictions of lower demand. Advocates are concerned that if the prices for oil and gas keep falling, the incentive for utilities and consumers to buy expensive renewable energy will shrink. That is what happened in the 1980s when a decade of advances for alternative energy collapsed amid falling prices for conventional fuels [The New York Times].
In Europe, environmental ministers are meeting to finalize the European Union’s goals for cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, but new discord has broken out. Nations like Italy and Poland have begun to argue that emission cuts must be scaled back to avoid further hardship for industry during the hard economic times. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said: “Our businesses are in absolutely no position at the moment to absorb the costs of the regulations that have been proposed” [BBC News].
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A “sustainable chemical” company called Genomatica has developed a way to use sugar and genetically engineered bacteria to produce a common industrial chemical that’s usually produced using petroleum, and which is found in everything from Spandex to car bumpers. By using sugar from sugar cane as a feedstock, industrial chemical companies can get a cheaper alternative to petroleum-derived chemicals, while investing in processes that are less polluting and nontoxic, said Genomatica CEO Chris Gann [CNET].
Genomatica produces the chemical, 1,4-butanediol (BDO), by feeding pure glucose derived from sugarcane to E. coli bacteria, which has been engineered to produce BDO. “We have engineered the organism such that it has to secrete that product in order for it to grow,” says [company president] Christophe Schilling…. “The interests of the organism are aligned with our interests: It grows faster when it produces more” [Scientific American].
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The House of Representatives passed an energy bill including a provision that will allow for more oil and gas drilling off U.S. coastlines, but the compromise measure doesn’t go far enough to please Republicans, and doesn’t include enough protections to mollify environmentalists. The bill would allow drilling as close as 50 miles from the coastline if adjacent states agree and 100 miles out no matter a state’s position [The New York Times].
The bill faces significant hurdles to becoming law: The Senate must vote on its own version of the energy bill, which is expected to place much more conservative limits on offshore drilling, then the two bills must be reconciled, and finally the finished product must be sent to the unwelcoming White House. President Bush, who has called for ending the offshore drilling bans, signaled he would veto the legislation if it reached his desk, arguing that it would stifle offshore oil development instead of increasing it [AP]. Lawmakers also have a strict time limit, as Congress is scheduled to adjourn on September 26.
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President Bush has proposed protecting vast swaths of marine territory in the South Pacific from commercial fishing and offshore drilling, in a move that some environmentalists have said could earn him a legacy as the “Teddy Roosevelt of the seas.” This week, Bush is expected to ask his Cabinet for comments on conservation proposals for marine ecosystems around the Northern Mariana islands, the Line Islands, and American Samoa.
While the Bush administration’s environmental record has generally received harsh criticism from environmentalists, these proposals are being seen as a cause for celebration. “We have every expectation that the president will move forward on protecting these places sometime in the fall,” said Diane Regas, ocean program director at Environmental Defense Fund. “Today, we put the champagne on ice, and we will pop it open.” Two years ago, the president made a huge swath of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, barring fishing, oil and gas extraction and tourism from its waters and coral reefs. The area is the single largest conservation area on the planet [AP].
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