A 2011 magnitude 5.7 quake in OK, linked to wastewater injection, buckled US Highway 62. (Credit: John Leeman)

After pulling massive amounts of fossil fuels out of the Earth’s crust so we can burn it up into our atmosphere, we have a good sense of where the stuff goes. Our oceans. A global greenhouse. Our lungs. But what happens to the ground formerly occupied by those fossil fuels?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that oil and gas extraction processes are actually weakening the structural integrity of the Earth’s crust just enough to cause more frequent earthquakes, in places not used to them.

Oklahoma, for instance, is not known for earthquakes. Yet the central U.S. has seen an elevenfold jump in recent years, including the Sooner State’s largest earthquake on record. This 5.7-magnitude quake occurred on November 6, 2011 near Prague, Oklahoma. And research published yesterday in Geology from the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University, and the U.S. Geological Survey has made a direct connection to the disposal of wastewater from conventional oil production:

A new study in the journal Geology is the latest to tie a string of unusual earthquakes, in this case, in central Oklahoma, to the injection of wastewater deep underground. Researchers now say that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake near Prague, Okla., on Nov. 6, 2011, may also be the largest ever linked to wastewater injection. Felt as far away as Milwaukee, more than 800 miles away, the quake — the biggest ever recorded in Oklahoma — destroyed 14 homes, buckled a federal highway and left two people injured. Small earthquakes continue to be recorded in the area.

The recent boom in U.S. energy production has produced massive amounts of wastewater. The water is used both in hydrofracking, which cracks open rocks to release natural gas, and in coaxing petroleum out of conventional oil wells. In both cases, the brine and chemical-laced water has to be disposed of, often by injecting it back underground elsewhere, where it has the potential to trigger earthquakes. The water linked to the Prague quakes was a byproduct of oil extraction at one set of oil wells, and was pumped into another set of depleted oil wells targeted for waste storage.

As Climate Progress has written before, this practice of disposing chemical-laced water generated during the extraction of oil and gas has far-reaching effects. Drillers have been doing this for more than a decade, and the researchers note that the Oklahoma quake did not actually require very much wastewater. In fact, because we have been doing this for so long, the built-up pressure in the Earth’s crust changes the criteria of how quakes happen. The study’s abstract notes:

Significantly, this case indicates that decades-long lags between the commencement of fluid injection and the onset of induced earthquakes are possible, and modifies our common criteria for fluid-induced events.

So we could be paying for more than a decade of wastewater injection and fracking for quite some time with earthquakes. There’s not much more room 9,000 feet down. Wellhead records indicate that pressure in these areas underground increased by a factor of ten from 2001 to 2006.

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Climate Progress recently reported on a study that found both economic and environmental benefits if homes in the northeastern United States upgraded older heating systems by moving from heating oil to switchgrass. However, one point to emphasize was the findings were specific to those circumstances — the region, the homes, and that particular use.

Switchgrass was not nearly as good an idea for electricity generation or transportation fuel. Further confirming the need for a diversity of renewable solutions to our energy needs, a recent study determined that electricity generated by solar beats out biofuels for powering cars under myriad scenarios.

The report, put together by a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and published in Enviornmental Science and Technology, compared five different approaches to see what was the most efficient way to power a compact passenger vehicle for every 100 kilometers driven:

1. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) run on electricity from solar power.
2. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from switchgrass.
3. Internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) run on switchgrass biofuel.
4. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from corn.
5. Internal combustion vehicles run on corn-based biofuel.

The analysis considered land-use, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel use, and took into account the production and use life cycles of both the fuels themselves and the vehicles they power.

In terms of land-use, solar significantly out-performed all other options. It performed modestly better than switchgrass in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and significantly better than corn-based biofuel. Solar was actually equal or slightly worse than switchgrass when it came to fossil fuel requirements over the totality of the life cycle, but it still out-performed corn-based internal combustion. (And, of course, gasoline.)

So all things considered, a pretty clear win for solar-powered electric battery vehicles:

A write up over at Green Car Congress has more details on the assumptions and variables in the study’s modeling.

“PV is orders of magnitude more efficient than biofuels pathways in terms of land use — 30, 50, even 200 times more efficient — depending on the specific crop and local conditions,” Roland Geyer, a UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management Professor, told Science Daily. “You get the same amount of energy using much less land, and PV doesn’t require farm land.” The central bottleneck, as the report notes, is the low efficiency of photosynthesis:

Biofuels for ICVs and bioelectricity for BEVs use photosynthesis to convert solar radiation into transportation services, that is, they are sun-to-wheels transportation pathways. While photosynthesis has a theoretical maximum energy conversion efficiency of 33 percent, the overall conversion efficiency of sunlight into terrestrial biomass is typically below 1 percent, regardless of crop type and growing conditions.

“Today’s thin-film PV is at least 10-percent efficient at converting sunlight to electricity,” Geyer explained — hence solar’s superior performance. In fact, the WWF’s Solar PV Atlas found that as far as land-use goes, solar is so efficient that less than 1 percent of global land areas would be needed to supply all the world’s electricity needs in 2050.

Traditional corn-based biofuels are problematic on all sorts of levels: Carbon emissions from agricultural production over their full life cycle largely wipe out any carbon benefits at the point of actual vehicle use. They compete with human food supplies and food cropland, driving up global prices and contributing to global poverty and instability. And new cropland sequesters less carbon from the atmosphere than the grassland or forest it typically displaces.

Switchgrass and other cellulosic biofuels, while they avoid disrupting food supplies, are not immune to these other flaws either. On top of that, their commercial viability at any time in the near future is far from certain.

For the clean car fleet of the future, electrical and hybrid vehicles relying on a grid powered by solar — and presumably wind, hydroelectric, and such — still appears to be the way to go.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

by Julius Fischer

Germany is moving forward to replace fossil fuels with renewables faster than most countries. But there is always pushback, most recently in the form of much media discourse about rising electricity prices spearheaded by the Federal Minister of Environment Peter Altmaier. Like many politicians, he is already preparing for national elections in September, so let’s take an honest look at this discourse surrounding electricity prices and how they affect Germany’s move toward renewables.

Ever since the Fukushima catastrophe two years ago, Germans have redoubled their efforts to phase out of nuclear energy and fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy — called the “Energiewende” (energy transition) that began in 2000. Minister Altmaier, CDU (Christian Democratic Party — center-right) believes that the recent rise in electricity prices for households poses the biggest threat to the success of the Energiewende, because rising household electricity bills endanger public support for renewables. He thus proposed a plan to prevent an “explosion of electricity prices.”

First of all: why care about what happens in Germany? For one thing, German policy-makers played a dominant role in the evolution of feed-in tariffs (FITs) for renewables (the term is actually an Anglicization of the German “Stromeinspeisungsgesetz”). FITs are the most elegant and effective policy instrument to incentivize renewable energy deployment in a cost-effective manner. Germany remains on the forefront of optimizing FITs to account for the differences in renewable technologies and decreasing market prices over time. Germany also has an impressive record of success in deploying renewable energy (especially solar), and set uniquely high targets of efficiency improvement and renewables deployment. Once we realize that the Energiewende is not a big government program by naïve tree-huggers, we can use the German example to help show that renewable energy can and does create jobs and lower costs.

The discourse surrounding the Energiewende has ranged from whether the grid expansion can keep up with renewable energy deployment, to whether the grid liability can be maintained (yes it can), and whether shutting down nuclear power in Germany will just result in imports of nuclear power from France or the Czech Republic (it hasn’t). The current discourse raises the questions of whether household electricity consumers should pay less, whether industry should pay more, and whether the Energiewende can be done cheaper.

Should households pay less?

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People who spend a lot of their time outdoors are more likely to see the obvious — the climate is changing and invasive species like the bark beetle are ravaging the West.  That’s a key reason hunters and anglers rallied for the climate bill back in 2009.

Last year Todd Tanner, the founder of Conservation Hawks, an organization of sportsmen dedicated to fighting climate change, said he would give up his gun, a Beretta Silver Pigeon 12 gauge (see picture), if someone can convince him that climate change is not real.

Videographer Peter Sinclair has a new video on “Hunters, Anglers, and Climate Change” for his Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media series, which is well worth a look:

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The effects of massive government budget cuts that took effect on March 1 are being felt across the country already, from the closure of air traffic control towers to cancellation of White House tours to hundreds of thousands of furloughs. Another agency that is beginning to make cuts — just as the spring and summer tourism seasons kick off — is the National Park Service.

The park service faces an approximately 6 percent cut under sequestration and a recently-passed funding bill which means major impacts on how the parks function and the visitor experiences at them. A memo from park service Director Jon Jarvis on March 8 warned that permanent positions will not be filled, and he wrote:

… we will hire over 1,000 less seasonal employees this year. Seasonal employees are our utility infielders, the “bench” we turn to when fires break out, search and rescue operations are underway, and every other collateral duty. Many of these folks return year after year — they are the repositories of amazing institutional knowledge.

In total, 3,000 jobs at the agency may be affected. Here are some of the national park superintendents who are being forced to make hard choices about their parks and staffs:

• Dan Wenk is Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, which faced a $1.8 million sequestration cut. After considering all of his options, Wenk decided to open most entrances to the park two weeks late this year, losing 50,000 visitors. He also will hire fewer seasonal employees and bring them on later (saving $450,000), and freeze all permanent hires (saving $1 million).  As the Washington Post reported, opening two weeks late has a “ripple effect on jobs and tourism [that] could means millions of dollars in lost income.”  Luckily, a local coalition has provided the funding to open the roads on time this year.
• Phil Francis is the Superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the most visited national park unit in America. To meet the $784,000 cut required by sequestration, Francis has closed a number of facilities and also looked to his workforce. As he put it, “The hiring freeze has saved us some money on permanent staff and we just cut seasonal hiring by more than thirty jobs. With fewer people to be hired, we squeezed money out of diminished support costs….”  Additionally, visitors centers, picnic areas, and more than 400 campsites will be closed.
• Eric Brunnemann, Superintendent at Badlands National Park, will cut seasonal hires by 24 percent. These positions “support interpretive talks and walks, school programs, custodial services, road, fence and building repair and maintenance, science and research activities, natural resource monitoring, and search and rescue operations,” according to National Parks Traveler.

As these examples show, sequestration is having major impacts on the lives of government employees like park rangers and superintendents. And, as the summer begins, visitors will also start noticing the impacts like fewer park rangers, poorly-maintained restrooms and campgrounds, and longer lines to get into parks.

Credit: Navigant Research

The U.S. is now the largest wind power market, and a U.S. company is the world’s number 1 supplier, according to a new industry report by Navigant Research.

This is a big shakeup in the global wind market. Danish wind manufacturer Vestas had been the world leader from 2000 to 2011 but in 2012, GE Wind grabbed 15.5 percent of the market share. Vestas dropped to 14 percent.

The U.S. also snuck ahead of China as the the biggest wind power market last year.

The United States recaptured its title as the worldʹs largest market with 13,124 MW of new wind power installed in 2012. China came a close second with 12,960 MW, followed by Germany, India, and the U.K.

The same is true regionally:

Europe lost its position as the world region installing the most wind power, recording 28.5% of all new installation in 2012, a 4% increase on 2011, but 12.5% less than five years ago. Driven by the US, Canada, and Brazil, wind installations in the Americas grew by 12.3% compared with 2011. The American continent represented 35.2% of the global wind market in 2012.

Globally there is 285.7 gigawatts in wind power capacity, and 44.9 of those were installed in 2012 — an 18.6 percent increase. Concretely, this means nearly 23,350 new wind turbines were erected in 60 countries. Navigant’s numbers are different than those reported by the Global Wind Energy Council, which came out last month.

More fun facts from Navigant:

• According to the forecast, the total value of the wind market will grow from $74.2 billion in 2012 to $109.8 billion in 2017.
• We can expect wind power to generate more than 2.62 percent of the world’s electricity in 2013, and 4.9 percent in 2017.
• The average turbine installed in 2012 was 1,847 kW. Offshore turbines installed last year got even larger too: 3,793 kW.
• Direct drive turbines — which transfer energy from the rotor to the generator without a gearbox — are becoming more popular, which make offshore wind more feasible because they are cheaper and more scalable.
• Wind companies are diversifying their product lines, with specialized options for low wind speed areas, for operation in high altitudes or in cold climates.

While it may be true that U.S. production and installation numbers spiked last year as the wind industry stutter-stepped in anticipation of the expiring wind production tax credit, the industry has been growing stronger. With another year on the clock for the wind PTC, the industry shouldn’t contract, but it may slow a bit.

The global wind forecast for the next five years dropped 10 percent, with 241,620 megawatts expected to be installed through 2017. This is mainly due to expected slower growth in the next two years — after 2015 the market should grow strongly again. It’s possible that the market is even reacting to the right sorts of stimuli, per Navigant:

Concerns about security of electricity supply and manmade climate change continue to be the main drivers for increased use of wind energy.  This reportʹs market prediction for the 2018‐2022 period indicates an improved average growth rate of 8.9%.

Success stories like this are a welcome but too-infrequent sight. If the U.S. wants to see them happen more often, it should make the wind production tax credit permanent, which would provide this roaring new industry the same sort of regulatory stability that the oil and gas industry has relied on for decades.

Most of the Arctic sea ice that forms each year melts in the spring and summer, which affects global weather patterns and U.S. military planning. [NBC News]

“There are tremendous two-way and multiple interactions between the Arctic and the rest of the world,” retired Rear Adm. David Titley said during the teleconference organized by Climate Nexus, a group trying to raise awareness about climate change.

Experts tied the melting ice in the Arctic to the recent spate of stormy winter weather in parts of the U.S. and Europe. They also noted that the prospect of ice-free summers in the Arctic as soon as 2030 is already impacting international trade and U.S. Navy plans to protect Arctic resources.

The briefing was held the day after the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) announced that the Arctic sea ice reached its maximum reach for the year on March 15, covering 5.84 million square miles. This is the sixth lowest maximum sea ice coverage in the 35-year satellite record.

Melting season starts: Arctic sea ice hit its maximum for the year, and it’s the 6th lowest on record. [Climate Central]

Yesterday the Obama Administration announced a plan to help wildlife adapt to the threats posed by climate change. [LA Times]

Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (ret.) is in Texas to explain how national security is threatened by climate change, and how naval bases are already being rebuilt due to sea level rise. [NPR Texas]

The governors of Oregon and Washington are imploring the White House to consider climate change when it looks at environmental impacts of coal export terminals. [The Hill]

New York State may be the first to tell bondholders that climate change is a risk to their investments. [Bloomberg]

The city of Melbourne, Australia, is now carbon-neutral by virtue of emissions reductions and offsets. [Climate Group]

A new study finds that if you add lignin (a worthless byproduct of corn/ethanol) to concrete, the concrete gets 32% stronger — allowing you to use less carbon-intensive cement. [EarthTechling]

Coral reefs in southern Florida have declined by 50 percent over the last twenty years. [Climate Adaptation]

Community solar will allow electricity-hungry Orlando residents to buy solar power for 13 cents a kw/h, guaranteed for 25 years. And the solar installation is over a parking lot! [EarthTechling]

They call it the “oil & gas industry” for a reason: the next CEO of the American Natural Gas Alliance comes from the American Petroleum Institute. [The Hill]

An aluminum-air battery, used as an emergency one-time backup for an electric car, could carry you 1,000 miles at once. [CleanTechnica]

Climate change is rewriting the world’s wine list, causing vinyards to consider importing grapes from warmer latitudes, and messing with the finesse of Languedoc. [Discovery]