Posted on 02/11/2022 11:33:48 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
BOSTON (Reuters) - New England’s electric grid delivered a massive blast of greenhouse gas into the region’s air during a recent stretch of cold weather, as power stations switched from natural gas to dirtier but cheaper fuel oil, according to data from the grid's operator.
During the six weeks ended Feb. 7, the region's fleet of power stations burned 1.7 million barrels of fuel oil, accounting for more than 10% of the grid’s electric capacity, according to ISO New England. Fuel oil typically accounts for less than 1% of the region’s power production.
Burning that fuel oil produced about 3.55 billion pounds of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in January alone, up 4,800% from emissions from fuel oil in January 2021.
Natural gas is the region's dominant fuel source, but many generators switch to other fuels if gas becomes too expensive or supplies are not available.
The price of natural gas has spiked globally in recent months in part because of heightened demand for liquefied natural gas (LNG) in Europe.
New England's natural gas pipeline capacity is also limited, making it difficult to ramp up deliveries into the region when needed. A series of proposals to expand that capacity to bring in more supply have been rejected in recent years due to public opposition to new pipeline infrastructure.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
I burned more wood pellets. Life is good.
Well, the lights stayed on so what’s the big deal.
Bad idea. The utilities should have not switched. If the gas runs out then you shut down the power plant until the cleaner gas is available. That way no blast of greenhouse gas occurs.
True, a lot of folks may well freeze to death from lack of electricity but such is life. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Also, remember that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. (/liberal)
I burned charcoal yesterday.
So the Northeast heated up the planet. Cool, that explains why the temperatures warmed up a bunch in Texas this week... Much nicer here this week!
That just means that somewhere a lot of carbon eating plants will be exceedingly happy and well fed.
Oh no…build more windmills and solar…lower your lifestyle standards by 75%…
At any point in time there are 50 erupting volcanos around the earth pouring co2, so2, co, hs, and other noxious gases into the atmosphere by the 1000s of tons…c’mon man…
...and this is bad because?
Well on the bright side, a few more years of burning this carbon-heavy stuff will warm them up enough to where the winter isn’t so cold and they won’t need it any more! Right?
While there are volcanoes all over the planet that do contribute to global CO2 they are dwarfed by the shear scale of man’s emissions. Belive in warming or not what is not up for debate is that global CO2 levels in the atmosphere arw.rising currently just over 400 ppm up from 180ppm at the start of the industrial revolution as confirmed by hundreds of scientific observations from trapped gas bubbles in Antarctica ,Greenland and various mountain glaciers around the world. Further confirmed by direct atmospheric measurements going on over a hundred years of those. The C12 to C13 ratios of the direct measured increasing CO2 confirms the carbon atoms were once in the biosphere as organics not CO2 from metamorphic or igneous rocks released by heat and depressureization such as a volcano or subsea hydrothermal venting. Humans are burning geologically stored carbon at a rate over a million times faster than it accumulated over the geological past. We will burn through over a hundred million years of carbon accumulation in liquid hydrocarbons in just over 100 years we already have burned half of the recoverable liquid hydrocarbons in just over a century that also took well over a hundred million years to produce. The Permian basin in west Texas is named after the geological time period of its deposition the Permian deposition was 299 to 252 million years ago and humans will suck it dry in under a hundred years even if you dont believe in AGW clearly the consumption rate vs available resource is unsustainable thats a mathematical fact. Oil is arguably to precious to burn to the sky we should be saving it for future generations to use as plastocs,fertilizer,medications and lubricants. What took hundreds of millions of years for our planet to produce hunans will waste in under two centuries. Abiotic oil is a myth I personality have done well over a thousand geochem analysts on oils from nearly every basin on earth over a two decades plus career as a petroleum geologist, geochem engineer, and hydrogeologist never once have seen an oil with out one of three characteristic biological markers for having been created from former living organics. Not one nor gave any of my colleagues with equal or longer experiences. In oils the C12/13 ratio is a fourth and dead give away of biological processes and every single oil has the signature of organics every single one every where. The Russians claimed once to find an abiotic oil in granite but it was debunked under peer review. Whats in the ground took millions of times longer to form than we are using it thats just a fact of life humans have to accept.
Sooner rather than later humans must find another source of primary energy. Nuclear with breed fast spectrum reactors and solar are the only two that can power a world of 8+ bilion soon to be 10+ billion with anything close to a western stabdard of living. Oil will be uses up in under 40 years if the Chinese and Indian middle classes keep growing soon that that. We as a species absolutely must transition to solar,nuclear and storage technologies in the next few decades or the wars for the last drops of liquid hydrocarbons will be global in scale and probably nuclear or biological. Coal is so dirty it should stay in the ground its levels of heavy metals, Mercury, particulates, and sulfur means there will never be a way to burn it clean you can lower the toxins but never get to zero Mercury particularly even with the best scrubbers worth hundreds of millions of dollars you still only get to 99% one percent still ends up in the air abd water if you tried to fuel the whole human race in coal that one percent will lead to environmental disaster saying nothing of the sulfer acid rains, lung damages from billions of tons of particulates that the scrubbers still let 5% past. Coal is best left in the dust bin of history. There is one way to get at coal while not spewing metals,particulates,acid rain and radioactive waste coal ash is radioactive it has so much uranium and thorium its considered ore grade for modern recovery processes. The only way to get at coal and not have environmental disaster is gassifiy it underground then clean up the syngas using deep cleaning with nanomembranes then burn that syngas in turbines with scrubbers at the back end that gets you to the 99.98% removal of Mercury,lead,particulates,sulfur and with SCR cats virtually zero NOx all of which are actually pollution the CO2 is irrelevant on a human time scale. We should be concerning ourselves with real pollution and a very real end of not only cheap but available liquid hydrocarbons its sooner rather than later we need to find better energy sources.
Not all that more years, under 50 at 2016 consumption levels and the Chinese and Indians are adding another few hundred million to the middle class this decade.
This includes heavy oils in Canada and Venezuela which the latter is not going to be accessible unless VZ gets a new regime. So the countdown is even sooner. There is a reason the resources plateau out ita not lack of looking th oil industry is good at finding oil the seismic imaging technology is fully mature now has been for a decade thats why the plateau all the massive oil fields have been found there simply is no where else to look. Opening the Arctic assuming the ice melts and lets ships scan won’t add trillions of bbls the sedimentary environment in the Arctic over geological past is pretty well understood that.means the estimates of accumulated organics in the basins is also understood so the amount of oil expected to be found assuming the traps formed and the sediments went through the oil window is accurate then the maximum resource is not in the trillions of bbls even if it was 1.4 trillion only lasts 40 years at 2016 not 2036 levels with triple the middle class numbers from 2016. China added 500 million to the middle class since 1990 thats nearly the population of North America one only needs to look at the mega cities of Shanghai or Beijing to see it first hand. Wu han is another example 15 years ago it was a backwater town now its 13 million plus and larger than NYC just one city in the middle of nowhere they have dozens larger than NYC built and populated in under two decades. Humans will be out of liquid hydrocarbons sooner than later and its not the fuel that matters its the plastics ,fertilizer and lubricants that are critical to humans
https://www.worldometers.info/oil/
The botannical world in New England sends its thanks for the food!
A lot of folks have spent a lot of time speculating and making predictions about these issues, and they all have one thing in common.
They are always wrong.
The more interesting question is—why are they always wrong?
There are several reasons, but one issue is technology that makes the “impossible” suddenly become possible and even economical.
Truly new technologies defy predictions and calculations—and homo sapien brains are just not wired to deal with non-linear functions.
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