One US Oil Field a Key Culprit In Global Ethane Gas Increase 84
An anonymous reader writes: According to scientists, a single U.S. shale oil field is responsible for much of the past decade's increase in global atmospheric levels of ethane, a gas that can damage air quality and impact climate. The Bakken Formation, an oil and gas field in North Dakota and Montana is spewing nearly 2% of the globe's ethane. That translates to about 250,000 tons each year. "Two percent might not sound like a lot, but the emissions we observed in this single region are 10 to 100 times larger than reported in inventories. They directly impact air quality across North America. And they're sufficient to explain much of the global shift in ethane concentrations," said Eric Kort, U-M assistant professor of climate and space sciences and engineering.The Washington Post has more details (paywalled; alternatively you can read this Gizmodo report)
Global Warming season (Score:2, Funny)
Happens every year between March until August.
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Climate didn't even come to mind my thought was why would they let 250,000 tons of ethane waste how much is it going for? even at $0.10 a gallon that's around $18 million.
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Quite simply because due to the nature of fracking it is impossible to stop. They knew that from the start, which is exactly why laws were drawn up to protect the polluting frackers from justice, whilst of course the general public are not protected from the frackers, profits first, people last.
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> profits first, people last.
Which is just the way it should be!
Do I *really* need the /s in there or is that not obvious? Sadly, there are people who think that it is so binary. Of course, there are people who are just as binary and at the opposing end of the spectrum. They both look good on paper, to some folks, but neither is really very good in reality.
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Re:Global Warming season (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile the Earth continues to warm, as predicted. Ice continues to melt, as predicted. Sea level continues to rise, as predicted. The oceans continue to acidify, as predicted.
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... and this entire thread went to shit, as predicted.
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Don't worry, if the Sun goes into a period similar to the Maunder Minimum at most it delays the warming by a decade or so. There is no mini ice age or real ice age in the offing.
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You guys just never give up, do you? Nothing is happening as "predicted" - the trends are almost all out of the 3-sigma band of error and headed rapidly towards 6 sigma. Fail.
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Temperatures are well within the 2 sigma range of temperatures projected by climate models. If ice melt is out of the 2 sigma range it's because there has been more melt than predicted, not less. Sea level rise is also above predictions.
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Which models should be the next question. Which model, singular, predicted those?
It's a bit disingenuous to point and say, "The models predicted it!" There have been quite a few models with varied degrees of accuracy. So, seeing as nobody asked... I will!
What model predicted those, made when, and to that degree of accuracy in all of those values? What percentages of the models made those same predictions? When did they make those predictions?
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When I talk about models I'm mostly talking about the Couple Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) [llnl.gov]. Different models have different strengths and weaknesses and I'm not sure it's possible to pick any one model that is the best.
One thing that is possible is to cherry pick individual model runs from an ensemble of runs that happen by coincidence to match real world natural variability (especially of ENSO). when you do that the model output matches the observations quite well.
Here is an interesting article "C [climate-lab-book.ac.uk]
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Whatever happened to 4 sigma and 5 sigma in your story and why not go beyond 6 sigma?
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Only in the northern hemisphere. From March until August the southern hemisphere experiences something nobody is talking about called global cooling.
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Enough of the evil North-South dichotomy. Three billion people live in the tropics, where summer and winter do not exist.
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Hemispherist!
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Blame the regulators (Score:2, Interesting)
who make it 10,000% harder to lay the pipelines required to collect and harvest the gas. This resulted in the producers taking the option to flare the gas off. It's a valuable product, but harvest made uneconomical by stupid lawmakers.
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Enlighten us and tell us what laws are they.
No other agenda? (Score:3)
I''m sure it's coincidence that this is about the single largest expansion of oil reserves in what the last 50+ years, and is the USs trump card in energy independence from the Middle East?
Yeah, complete coincidence.
So, 3 parts per billion of ozone is a crisis... (Score:4, Interesting)
...but 100 parts per billion is pretty much business as usual in the big Californian cities.
And 50 ppb is what the best-ranked ones produce.
Before you complain about the chemical being ethane, note that ethane + air + sunlight = ozone.
ethane + air + sunlight = ozone (Score:2)
Really? Source please.
Re:ethane + air + sunlight = ozone (Score:5, Informative)
The source is the article linked above. As in, the article you should have read before commenting.
"Ethane reacts with sunlight and other molecules in the atmosphere to form ozone, which at the surface can cause respiratory problems, eye irritation and other ailments and damage crops."
It's a fair cop (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks for the slap!
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The source is the article linked above. As in, the article you should have read before commenting.
Oh come on! Nobody ever does that here!
Re:So, 3 parts per billion of ozone is a crisis... (Score:5, Informative)
Ozone in the stratosphere = good
It blocks UV radiation from the Sun and without it there wouldn't be life as we know it on the dry land of Earth.
Ozone in the lower troposphere and at the surface = not so good
It can have serious health effects [wikipedia.org] mainly respiratory in high enough concentrations.
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That might work if we could stop the wind from blowing.
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Actually, what you claim isn't really true. They try to make it seem scary in the article, but there's a helluva lot of handwaving to get from "the ethane releases are causing big ozone issues."
The normal ozone concentration at ground level - worldwide - is about 50 parts per billion.
They make a big deal (the red color in the scale in the article) of THREE parts per billion from the Bakken area.
Do the math.
Excellent, thank you. (Score:2)
Ozone from this source is clearly not something to worry about. There may be other reasons for worrying about ethane release, but this certainly isn't it.
http://www.ozoneapplications.c... [ozoneapplications.com]
offers some information about the use of Ozone as a pesticide for crops!
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"note that ethane + air + sunlight = ozone."
So where did the Carbon and Hydrogen go?
Ozone is useful , it blocks UV rays
Re:Jealousy... (Score:4, Insightful)
The nice thing about the "Church of Climatology" as opposed to those others is that they have actual physical evidence to back up their scriptures.
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You mean like the Holy Hockeystick?
ALL PRAISE the DIVINE CONSENSUS
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That's the Holy Hockeysticks, thank you very much. There are over a dozen different ones now and they all show pretty much the same thing.
Consensus is not something that scientists pay attention to to any great degree. Rather it is something useful for the layman in understanding where the science is in the field. For scientists consensus amounts to something they pretty much agree on and don't argue about any more.
Re:Jealousy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like the Church of Climatology is jealous of the levels of esteem & high regard held for the Church of Scientology and the Westboro Baptist Church, and are exerting maximum effort towards correcting that discrepancy.
Can't fault the CoC for lack of effort in that regard.
The Church of Climatology: The US Progressive/Liberal version of the bastard-child of the Westboro Baptist Church and the Church of Scientology if they bred. Even the tactics they use against their critics are nearly indistinguishable.
Fascinating, I've apparently missed all of the climate scientists going around picketing funerals while sending out private investigators to stalk and blackmail their opponents.
Re:Jealousy... (Score:4, Interesting)
Fascinating, I've apparently missed all of the climate scientists going around picketing funerals
They didn't do that. Why would they?
They wouldn't. I was pointing out that it was a stupid comparison.
sending out private investigators to stalk and blackmail their opponents.
Yes, you did miss it. Maybe because it wasn't actual climate scientists, but the church's parishioners that claim to speak for them.
Probably not a road you want to go down considering the continuous witch hunts and slanderous accusations thrown at climate scientists.
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Probably not a road you want to go down considering the continuous witch hunts and slanderous accusations thrown at climate scientists.
Yeah, it's not like climate alarmists have seriously proposed rounding up and prosecuting "climate change denialists".
Oh wait...
Strat
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Don't worry, we're not after run-of-the-mill climate change denialists like you, just the ones who continued to spread disinformation, even though they knew better, to dupe people like you.
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... disinformation...
Who decides what is or is not "disinformation"?
If the evidence is so overwhelming would it not be a much more sane and rational route to simply publicly prove them wrong instead of limiting free speech?
Why must you jump immediately to abridging the free speech rights of an otherwise law abiding person or group of like-minded people? What other rights do you think this fully-politicized agenda trumps?
To me it more closely resembles the old Catholic Church of the 1600s and Heliocentrism versus the Church's o
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Who decides what is or is not "disinformation"?
If it's disinformation about science then science gets to decide. If you can use science to show that it's not disinformation then more power to you.
If the evidence is so overwhelming would it not be a much more sane and rational route to simply publicly prove them wrong instead of limiting free speech?
Pretty much everything the climate science deniers have brought up has been proven wrong and on the rare occasions when they had something right or a valid point it has quickly been incorporated into the science.
The only one I know of that's being investigated for supporting disinformation is Exxon-Mobile. Their own internal scientists told them back in the 1
BHLL (Score:1)
Bleep happens. Live and Learn to avoid it again.
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so we are agreed then, all fracking should be halted because that's the only realistic way to avoid this happening again.
Lose 250,000 tons a year with this weird old trick (Score:2)
What about the Methane???? (Score:3)
If there is some kind of huge ethane leak from the Bakken, you can be sure there is a huge methane leak as well.
Ethane makes up 10% mole percent of LNG at most, the other 90% is mostly methane.
Methane is a very significant global warming gas, more so than CO2, although its half-life in the atmosphere is much shorter than CO2.
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After further research, if there is a lot of ethane emissions but not methane emissions, the source could be in storage or transfer of natural gas liquids (NGLs) which are often processed from raw natural gas, and include ethane, propane, and butane.
What paywall? (Score:2)
Washington Post is completely readable for me. Maybe only paywalled in the US?
A Sngle Oil field? GASP! (Score:3)
Hardly a field. It covers two Northern US States. That is why it's named the Bakken Formation.
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You're going to be in for a shock when you learn about there being people working in the construction field all over the world. ;-)