El Niño, La Niña and Regional US temperatures

Changes in the temperatures in the Pacific that are described as El Niño and La Niña events.(NOAA)

One of the increasingly obvious drivers for the weather we’re likely to see over the next year comes from the relative state of the temperatures of the Pacific Ocean. This is generally known as the El Niño effect when the waters are warmer, and La Niña when they are cooler than normal, as shown above. Collectively it is the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI). The effect, over the past 60 years, can be compared with the regional temperatures over that period, derived in an earlier post. Remember that the regional plots were artificially adjusted to move vertically and allow the changes in shape.

A comparison of average station temperatures in the Pacific states (red), mountain states, (dark green), Midwest (light green) and the Atlantic States (purple) with the plots separated by block change in the temperature values for each region, and compared to the Pacific Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) the lower blue filled in line.

The relative importance of the ONI to temperatures in different parts of the world, and particularly Texas, and the derivation of the plot follows.

Considering the volumes of water that are involved, the relative changes in temperatures are quite significant. Consider the current situation, where as we head into a La Niña winter, the temperatures across the Pacific are as much as 1 deg C below normal.

Temperature variations from the average across the Pacific (Australia is in the lower left, the USA on the upper right). (NOAA )

There is a growing recognition that the impact of these changes controls the monsoons in India, going back to the paper published in Science back in 2006 by Kumar et al. This paper explained why monsoon failure always happened with El Niño events, but not all El Niño events led to monsoons. There are thus “flavors” to the events and their results depending on whether they happen in the winter or the summer. The typical impacts, globally, are shown with these illustrations, showing how the timing has influence:

First El Niño:

The changing influence of an El Niño event, depending on timing (after Kumar et al)

India only becomes dry in the second of the two cases, with the monsoon months occurring between June and the end of August, i.e. the lower condition. (And there is also an Arizona Monsoon which might be one of the few areas of the US to be immediately impacted in that case).

With La Niña, the conditions change, and with the event occurring in the summer India gets the needed rain.

The impacts of a La Niña event, depending on timing (after Kumar et al )

The condition that we are moving into at the present is the upper of these latter two pictures, which is not good news for the folk in Texas who have been hoping for rain. NOAA is now predicting that the drought will last into the summer and high temperatures will continue through 2012.

Temperature projections for the next year (NOAA

Precipitation projections for the next year (NOAA )

The impact of these events can, therefore be quite severe. However there is a continual swing from one condition to the other, hence the more broad description of the event that has come into vogue, that of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, or more generally the Oceanic Nino Index (ONI) And the United States sees different impacts in different regions of the country. For example consider the contrast between conditions for the East Coast:

Change in snowfall on the East Coast as a result of ENSO (NOAA)

Change in snowfall in the West as a result of ENSO (NOAA )

There has been some debate in the blogosphere as to what effect this has all had on the US temperatures. Well there are a couple of different points that have to be considered in that discussion, that seem to have got lost in some of the “religious” aspects of the extreme ends of the debate. It has been partially blamed for the high global temperatures in 1998. However, if we take just the last 60 years of data, we can look at how those data fit with the plots that I have previously posted to the site on regional temperatures.

The ONI plot from 1950 (GGWeather )

Now how does this look relative to the temperature changes that have occurred in the US. There are a couple of things to bear in mind on this, that seem lost to the folk at Real Climate. The first is this graphic, which seems to have got lost from the view of most of those who looked at the recent release of pre-papers from the BEST study.

Map of stations in and near the United States with at least 70 years of measurements; red stations are those with positive trends and blue stations are those with negative trends. (The BEST Project).

The second point is the change in temperature profiles (which BEST does not look at, rather concentrating on individual results) for the different regions of the US.

Average variation in time for four regions of the country, with the results adjusted as shown to separate the curves, and show them in order (bottom to top) from West to East.

Using the section of the above plot the regional temperatures were separated, by adding and subtracting from the actual temperatures (as shown in the legend to the above) to get a separation, the section after 1950 can be used to make the comparison.

The ONI plot can now be superimposed below this, with the amplitudes of roughly the same size (since one is in Centigrade and the other in Fahrenheit). The result shows that the ONI (lowered filled blue plot) has some influence on the Western Coast temperature (the lowest red curve), but as one moves through the Mountain states (dark green(, and less on the Midwest (lighter green), with the effects smoothed out by the time they reach the Atlantic Coast (upper purple). The fall in temperature along the Atlantic Coast is emphasized with this plot, and clearly nothing to do with what is happening in the Pacific.

A comparison of average station temperatures in the Pacific states (red), mountain states, (dark green), Midwest (light green) and the Atlantic States (purple) with the plots separated by block change in the temperature values for each region, and compared to the Pacific Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) the lower blue filled in line.

Now rumor has it that something similar happens in the Atlantic?

Drought, renewable energy, Texas, London and Florida

The Governor of Texas has asked the denizens of the state to pray for rain. The state has not had serious rain for months, and the drought conditions have turned severe.

The current drought conditions in Texas.

Conditions are not anticipated to get any better in the next few months. The recent predictions are that the conditions will persist in the area through July.

Predictions of the weather changes through July (NOAA )

Droughts around the world are one of the unfortunate consequences of changing weather, in much the same way as we have seen high snowfalls in other parts of the country this past winter. There will likely be cries about the underlying causes (with folks forgetting that droughts have occurred throughout history), but this post was started because of a potential event-changing occurrence.

This week Thames Water, which supplies 687 million gallons of water a day to the inhabitants of London and the immediate vicinity, was running its first water desalination plant. The region has faced droughts in the recent past as have other regions of the United Kingdom. Earlier solutions included building large water reservoirs, that at Kielder is the largest man-made reservoir in Europe. There is, however, only a certain limited amount of land that can be made available for this use, and so desalination proves an alternate way of supplying the increasing global demand for water.

In the United States droughts have threatened the viability of nuclear power stations, since the shortage of cooling water (as we recently learned again in Japan) is essential to safe plant operation. And therein lies one of the rubs to the situation. As the spokesman for Thames Water noted, the intent is not just to run the plant when there is a drought, since that is going to be too late. Rather at times of lower rainfall the plant (which can produce up to 150 million gallons a day) will pump clean water into the reservoirs, maintaining their integrity, and building up a reserve that will reduce the drought impact if it occurs. The plant was apparently completed last June at which time it was expected that it would just be used in times of drought. Within the last year that thinking has changed, and the plant is now running intermittently, partly to train operational staff, partly potentially also to help meet demand.

According to the Environment Agency, average water use is 148L per person per day in the UK and in the south-east of England it’s as high as 170L (far higher than the government target of 130L). Despite the popular perception of London as an overcast, rain-soaked city, its rainfall rate is, in fact, on a par with Rome, Dallas and Istanbul.

Schematic of the flow path through the desalination plant.

One question that I had relates to the amount of power that will be needed at Beckton. A calculation assuming that it takes 4 kWh to produce a cubic meter of fresh water, suggests that it will need a 21 MW plant. In 2009 the company CEO noted

The (20 MW) plant will be the first in the world to generate all its energy on-site, from renewable sources, including recycled cooking oil.

However the plant has been controversial, not least because although planning to use rapeseed oil, it could also burn palm oil, which is apparently cheaper. That is much more controversial. Planning permission for a second plant nearby at Southall, was refused in June 2010.

Biofuel powered stations in the UK, which includes that in the Tees Valley, where a plant burning 300,000 tons of recycled wood and specially grown wood from plantations, have had a somewhat mixed reception.

But to get back to the original idea of desalination, the largest plant in the United States is in Tampa with a maximum projected size of 35 million gallons/day, though it currently only produces some 25 million, sufficient for 10% of the region’s water needs. It went on line in 2008.

The plant uses about 44 million gallons per day (mgd) of seawater from a nearby power plant’s cooling system, which is pretreated with sand filters and a diatomaceous earth filtration system to remove particles. Reverse osmosis filters then separate 25 mgd of freshwater from the seawater. The unused concentrated seawater is diluted with up to 1.4 billion gallons of cooling water before it is discharged to the bay and that dilution is why environmental studies show no measurable salinity change in Tampa Bay related to plant production.

Which brings us back to Texas. In the latest report on desalination in the state, two possible developments are cited. There is a plan to install a 2.5 million gallon a day plant at Brownsville and a 1 million gallon a day facility on South Padre Island. Unfortunately the South Padre Island initiative failed in a bond election last year, and its future is considered doubtful. Meanwhile the Brownsville Public Utilities Board is considering combining a renewable energy source (shades of the UK) into the plant, in order to leverage funding, and possibly qualify for DOE funds.

But in the meantime, as the discussion continues, the drought gets worse. The discussions started with an initiative in 2002. As those in Texas may find out the hard way, waiting until the crisis is upon them makes it too late to construct the solution that might have helped. It appears that those in the UK and Florida were just a little more prescient. It might be noted that the initial planning for the Florida plant started in 1996.

Can we take a clean page and start over?

I have worked in a branch of science/engineering where we talk almost all the time to each other about what we do, and share information with folk that ask for it. We also have argued about points, and have the luxury, if we doubt someone’s conclusions that we can try and repeat their experiment to see what else we can glean from the results. This is much harder to do in the disciplines that feed into the climate change debate, since there are many different facets to the overall situation, and there are very few folk that publish over more than small parts of the whole. Yet without some trust and honesty in the process of developing those small parts, the integrity of the whole is challenged. Increasingly it seems as though that trust has been misplaced.

The Big Meeting in Copenhagen is over, and with some final negotiation at the end, there is just enough “progress” from the various talks, that the issue of climate change will continue to dominate the policies of governments around the world over the next few years. Whether this meeting really did that much is still in question. However, while heat waves etc are just about always claimed as signs of climate change, the current cold spell in Europe is just localized bad weather, so we are told. Five trains broke down in the Channel Tunnel starting Friday and trapped 2,000 passengers for up to 16 hours in an “unprecedented” cold spell in Northern France.

"What was unprecedented was the weather conditions particularly in northern France with heavy snowfall and very, very cold temperatures outside of the tunnel."

The situation has not improved and trains have now been cancelled through Monday. The trains that shuttle cars through the tunnels were not apparently affected. And to think I always thought that trains were more reliable than planes or cars in that sort of bad weather! (Incidentally Washington D.C. just set a new record for snowfall in December. )

Those who have led the world’s opinion into the knowledge of Global Warming, are now increasingly on the defensive, as the questions arising from Climategate become more pointed. Newspapers who had not previously spent much time on it, now run headlines. Thus Michael Mann was given op-ed space in the Washington Post in which he sought to deflect questions about the seriousness of that case. Sadly he seemed to do this by misdirection and some mis-statements of fact. For example he says that there were no deletions of e-mails regarding the topic, yet in one of the e-mails that remains, Phil Jones comments about deleting “loads of e-mails.” One would hope that the two inquiries that are now proceeding in the UK and the US become thorough investigations and not whitewashes of those involved. (But I am not hopeful. There are too many who have too much invested in this and who control too many of the leverages of power and publication that will work against the truth ever coming out).

In that regard the story (via Climate Audit) of the control that some climate distorters have over the pages of Wikipedia, reported in the National Post should also start to cause legislators to worry. When the articles that cover a topic (and so far there are apparently some 5,428 of them relating to climate change) are manipulated by one individual, William Connolley in this case, to reflect his opinions, rather than scientific fact, and that this is not known by the general public, then there is something seriously wrong. Apparently the manipulation is most focused on the Medieval Warming Period, and the Little Ice Age. The site comments

Thus current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period" appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries... [Viewed] hemispherically, the "Little Ice Age" can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C relative to late 20th century levels.

Bear in mind that it was just this past week that the EPA did recognize the existence of the MWP, although still disinclined to read the evidence of the temperatures that then existed.

Evidence from the e-mails contained in the Climategate folders show that, in fact there was some agreement among them that the MWP existed, and was warmer than today, and I have commented a number of times on the hundreds of scientific papers that attest to the global extent of the Little Ice Age. But where there is one person with the power to deny that, as these articles do, and further to have the full support of the Wikipedia management in manipulating this information, then the integrity of the whole program is shown to be rotten, and the goals of the whole endeavor a masquerade hiding an attempt at manipulation.

It is tragic that this whole debate has long passed beyond seeking answers to the fundamental questions of what is truly going on with the climate. Politicians in under developed countries are now using the issue to demand recompense from the developed world and for payment to protect them from the fallouts of the global warming. Yet the results from the rising populations in those countries, and their need for rural electrification, is being hidden in the clamor to be given supportive dollars. Forget that the most effective power source in many of these countries comes from coal. There is a potential for Western money to be fed, perhaps via the UN, into the coffers of those countries – and sadly in many cases, I suspect, into the pockets of those clamoring loudest in the debate.

Droughts may threaten the water supply of places such as Las Vegas but as much of the problem is caused by creating a city in a desert, and having it steadily grow, as might be caused by a changes in the rainfall pattern. Although, if one goes back to the MWP these areas have a history of severe droughts, that should not have been unexpected. But there was no-one to blame (and pay) back in the MWP.

P62. Pick Points

Well after being told that we had to “Drill, Baby, Drill,” a Federal appeals court has" Just Said No!” It ruled that permits for off-shore drilling, whether in Alaska or the Gulf, must give greater consideration to environmental impacts of such oil exploration.

The lawsuit was brought by three environmental groups that want to protect the ecosystem and the Native Village of Point Hope, Alaska, a tribe that lives off the wildlife on the Chukchi Sea coast.

It is of particular concern down in Louisiana where it might have significant impact out into the Gulf.

Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, was dismayed by the court's ruling. "We have so much science to prove that in the Gulf of Mexico, the environment is protected. Wildlife actually flourishes around offshore production facilities," Briggs said. "I believe that this is just politics."

The appeals court ordered the Interior Department, now run by President Barack Obama's appointee Ken Salazar, to analyze the areas to determine environmental risks and potential damage before moving ahead with the program.

However the story is a little different up in Alaska, and in this particular case, since among other things it impacts the subsistence living of the local tribes.

Eskimos living along the coastline worry that drilling noise may disturb migrating bowhead whales, walruses and seals, which they depend on for food. They've also questioned whether Shell is prepared for a potential oil spill in the Beaufort Sea, where moving ice can make a cleanup difficult.

"Americans are looking for a clean energy future, and trading animals and their habitat for massive oil company profits is the way of the past," said Charles Clusen, director of the Alaska project for the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement.

The Manifa oilfield in Saudi Arabia has gone through a number of “on again, off again” cycles. While it has the potential to produce over a million barrels of oil a day, the chemical content of the oil is such that it cannot be economically refined by existing facilities. Thus Aramco have planned to build a couple of refineries in Saudi Arabia to allow them to usefully bring the field into production. Well it now looks as though work is going to start again on building some of the on-shore crude handling facilities. (The oilfield is just offshore). Last year plans were announced for a new refinery at Jubail that would process the oil, with initial production scheduled for 2011, and the refinery was supposed to be up and running in 2012. Well it has now slipped to 2013, and will only process 400,000 bd, of the Manifa production, but the work is going forward, though the economic downturn is anticipated to have lowered the overall cost. The other refinery planned to take the remainder of the Manifa oil has been planned to go into Yanbu. The partnership this time is between Aramco and ConocoPhilips, and current plans are for initial bids to be solicited this summer, with contracts awarded before the end of the year. Production is again anticipated for 2013.

Gazprom has just successfully raised $2.25 billion in bonds, and Gazprom Neft (the oil branch) is going to go ahead this week to raise some 10 billion roubles ($299 million) in a domestic sale this week. They may need some of the money to recompense Turkmenistan, who is still claiming that the blast in the gas pipeline the other week, was Gazprom’s fault. Given that Gazprom was hoping to get more gas from Turkmenistan, this is not good for them, since it continues to delay pipeline expansion.

The third summer of drought in California is causing additional tensions in that state as water restrictions are reimposed, at the same time that water supplies to farms are being cut.

"Up to 19 million southern Californians this summer will feel the impact of a new water reality that has been in the making for years, if not decades," said MWD board chairman Timothy Brick in a statement.
In the Central Valley, meanwhile, tens of thousands of farmers, farm workers, and local officials protested federal and state water cuts during a series of marches this march.

Between 70,000 and 80,000 farm workers are out of work this year as a result of water shortages, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. California ordinarily supplies America with half of its fruits and vegetables.

Some 100,000 acres of agricultural land will not be planted.

At the same time the state is praising the success of the re-flooding of Owens Lake as a way of both stopping regional dust storms from the lake bed, and coincidentally providing a wetlands for migrating birds. The only problem?

As it stands, each year the project uses about 60,000 acre-feet of water worth about $54 million -- enough to supply 60,000 families.

There are no easy choices, although, as is noted:

"We're beginning to get to the real cost of water," says Colin Sabol, vice president of marketing for ITT Corporation, the world's largest provider of pumps and water equipment. He notes that US consumers pay on average only one-third of what Germany pays for its water.

Germany "charges a price that allows them to reinvest in their infrastructure," Mr. Sabol says.

Some $250 million in stimulus funds are going to be directed at helping with the problem. Perhaps they could learn from the “grey water” controversy out there. Back in the early 1990’s the State carried out an experiment that allowed homeowners to use grey water (that from showers and dishwashers) for irrigation. The project at the time was a success, with great things predicted. Unfortunately bureaucracy stepped in and made the regulations so complex that the benefits never officially happened and there are only 200 legal systems in the State – maybe this could be changed, since it is estimated that up to 16% of the state consumption could be saved and reused.

Hydropower in California

Yesterday I began by commenting on the NYT article on the need for coal-fired power plants, which led me to the discovery that California still gets over 32% of its power from coal with the next largest supply source being natural gas at 31% (it has dropped between 2005 and 2007 from 33%, just as coal has dropped from 38%). Eligible renewables had grown in that period from 5% to 12%, and hydro had stayed the same at 24%. The largest growth had been the increase in small hydroelectric power from 1 – 6%. (Wind is at 2% and solar <1%) With hydro now adding up to 30% of California power, and with Dr Chu commenting a couple of weeks ago about California water shortages:

Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation's leading agricultural producer.

In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

It seemed time to see where all the hydro stations are that supply California, and see if they are in similar trouble to agriculture.


The first thing I discovered is that the numbers in the first paragraph are, if not wrong, somewhat misleading. At least according to the California Energy Commission. They show that Natural gas provides 45.2% of the electric power, nuclear 14.8%; Large hydro 11.7%; coal 16.6% and renewables 11.8%. And of the renewables small hydro provides 2.8%, for a total input to the state of 14.6% for hydro. What is further interesting is that of the coal power that produces 16.6% of the state’s energy only 2% is produced in state, and the rest is imported. Solar however still only produces 0.2% of state need, and wind 2.3%, most of that internal to the state.

The state itself produces around 69.5% of the electricity that it uses. I’ll leave it for another day to discover where the earlier numbers come from. What I would like to focus on is the hydro-electric part.

In 2007, hydro-produced electricity used by California totaled nearly 43,625 gigawatt-hours (GWh) or 14.5 percent of the state's total system power. In-state production accounted for 69.5% of all hydroelectricity, while imports from other states totaled 30.5%.A total of 343 hydroelectric facilities are in California with an installed capacity of 13,057 megawatts (MW). Hydro facilities are broken down into two categories: larger than 30 MW capacity are called "large hydro"; smaller than 30 MW capacity is considered "small hydro" and are totalled into the renewable energy portfolio standards. The amount of hydroelectricity produced varies each year. It is largely dependent on rainfall.

Power plants in California (note the blue hydro ones)

In a good year (such as 1983) the state can get up to 59,350 GWh of power from hydro. But in a bad year the amount can fall significantly.
(Source CA Energy Commission)
Note there is a difference between the CA production 27,000 GWh, and the overall hydro total of 43,000 GWh.

The water outlook for the state is not good,

As of February 1, 2009, statewide hydrologic conditions were as follows: precipitation, 65 percent of average to date; runoff, 35 percent of average to date; and reservoir storage, 65 percent of average for the date. . . . . For California statewide, January 2009 was the eighth driest January on record, with precipitation at about 30 percent of average for the month. In general, temperatures were significantly above average. On February 1, 2009, the Northern Sierra 8-station Precipitation Index had accumulated a seasonal total of 17.7 inches, which is 66% of the seasonal average to date and 35% of an average Water Year (50.0 inches). During January 2009, the 8-Station Index received only 3.1 inches, about 34% of average. Last year at this time, the 8-Station Index had 25.1 inches for the seasonal total.

The historic snowpack can be put in context with the drought scenario above:
(Source CA Water )

The current prediction for drought in the region from NOAA is that the drought will persist through at least April. And from the drought monitor:

Moderate to heavy precipitation (over 1 inch) was widespread across the southern Cascades, the Sierra Nevada, the coastal regions of California, and the southwestern California mountains, with amounts of 3 to 6 inches fairly common in southwestern California. However, since this was the first substantial precipitation across the state in several weeks, and because reservoir levels remain low and higher-elevation snowpack is still considerably below normal, drought classification improvements were limited. Specifically, moderate drought was re-classified as abnormal dryness through most of the climatologically arid areas in southeastern California and in southern Nevada while D0 conditions retracted westward out of west-central and southwestern Arizona. For the state of California as a whole, combined reservoir storage has dropped to levels typically observed only once every 10 to 20 years in February, and some areas reliant on relatively small-scale water supply systems are bracing for mandatory water usage cutbacks for the coming spring and summer.

In short hydropower may be a little short this summer, and the question will then be where they turn to get the additional supply. It will be interesting to see.


And since there is a virtually real-time counter and graph available, we will be able to do that. As I noted yesterday, however, you shouldn't start to get concerned until the projected numbers start getting over 50,000 Megawatts.

P31 Pick Points

Half-a-dozen or so stories of interest:

Sweden has just lifted its ban on nuclear power growth, with the intent of increasing from their current 10 nuclear reactors. Last October the NEA published its first Nuclear Energy Outlook with predictions up to 2050, and with the renewed interest and this global switch to a more favorable atmosphere concerns about supplies of uranium are rising. India has just signed agreements with Kazakhstan to assure its supply. With as many as 300 new reactors planned around the world, assuring supplies is becoming more necessary. India alone will bring four new reactors on stream this year. And just this week Areva has agreed to supply $6.3 billion worth of uranium to France. It will likely come from Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger. In regard to the weapons side of uranium purchases Iran is apparently finding it more difficult to find supplies. There is however a prediction that supplies of uranium (once mined) may well last 200 years though that carries the usual caveat of “at current levels of consumption.” With the growing number of reactors, that prediction becomes increasingly meaningless.

China is also pressing ahead with its nuclear power program, doubling its nuclear power target for the next decade. The country currently has 11 reactors generating about 1% (9 Gigawatts) of the countries needs. By 2020 the new target is 70 Gigawatts. Construction planned for this year will add over 8 Gigawatts alone. It may need the power since hydroelectric sources will be hurt as the country sees a lack of rainfall since October that has caused China to declare a state of emergency in eight provinces. 40,000 sq miles of wheat and red seed, about half the crop, are at risk.

It has been suggested that the creation of the Zipingpu dam triggered the Wenchuan major earthquake in China last year, this is a concern, since China is still building hydroelectric dams. This dam was set to generate 760 megawatts of electricity. That report is not stopping China Hydroelectric from raising $200 million to help with hydroelectric projects. China is also investing heavily in wind energy aiming for an installed capacity of 122 Gigawatts (the size of five Three Gorges Dam outputs) by 2020

The Xinjiang region of China found more gas in the last year than in the previous 50, and now considers that with 11 trillion cu m it has a quarter of the Chinese reserve. China used 76 billion cu m in 2008, up 12.3% over 2007. Note that this was down from the 23% growth rate of 2007, when it used 67.3 billion cu. M. China is expecting that its economy will lead the world out of recession. One way of doing this is to subsidize the purchase of appliances, particularly in rural communities.

Along those lines President Obama is raising the standards for energy efficiency in appliances, bringing the regulations into line with Congressional will. “We will save in the next 30 years, the energy produced over a 2-year period by all the coal-fired power plants in the United States.” (Incandescent bulbs are to be phased out by 2014). It is a message that more companies are hearing, and increasing renewable energy power, even though it is more expensive. A move to capture carbon dioxide in rock, however, may need to burn 40% more coal to power it (reducing reserves from 200 years to 100).

Iran is making some noises about being a possible source of gas for the Nabucco pipeline. And speaking of pipelines there is talk of providing load guarantees for an ethanol-only pipeline in the United States.

Interestingly just as Pakistan is seeing serious problems with shortages of natural gas , the onset of more LNG trains and the slowing economies of he world may be leading to a world gas glut, at least according to Platts.

For more stories see The Energy Bulletin and Drumbeat at The Oil Drum

P27. Pick Points

Half-a-dozen or so stories of interest:

Somewhere in Washington they are looking for incentives for us to buy a new car. The Germans have seen it work by providing 2,500 euros to everyone who replaces a car at least nine years old with a new one. The need for this can be seen by the continued decline in sales, even as industry incentives have risen to an average $2,902. Well maybe we should hold-off on a replacement until they decide ?

Having set some of the standards for automobiles that will likely soon impact the rest of the country, it is now California’s turn to go after energy inefficient appliances, such as TV’s, which can account for 10% of a home electricity bill. The Department of Energy is running a campaign to improve residential water heaters. Yet the amount set aside in the stimulus package is relatively quite small. Though that has not stopped some entrepreneurs. There are the standard steps that one can take to save energy but if the economy is to rebound, then the scale of increase that California has achieved needs to be applied, even perhaps in Italy.

One of the features of the Medieval Warming Period was the extensive and long-lasting droughts that hit Southern California. Trees grew where now lakes and rivers run, it was so dry. Now California is again facing severe drought. There are already campaigns to reduce water usage . With the snow pack only 61% of normal this could be the third year in a row where water runs short, and this is beginning to have serious consequences for agriculture . While the snow situation is a little better in Nevada, it too is facing problems. On the other hand Utah’s nine-year drought came to an end last June, and Arizona is seeing a moderate drought in Navajo County.

Following the Russia:Ukraine dispute over natural gas the relatively small volumes that could be sent around Ukraine through the North and South Stream pipelines is getting another look. In the South Gazprom is considering increasing capacity by 50% to 47 bcm. Coming the day after the meeting on the Nabucco pipeline, its major competitor, the response is quite quick. Germany points out that one can support both. But it may be Prime Minister Putin who makes the next move.

MidWestern Senators are urging a reconsideration of the FutureGen project. This plan to build a demonstration coal-fired power plant that would capture and sequester carbon dioxide was “restructured” by the last DOE Administration, and thus killed. This could not, perhaps have had anything to do with it being proposed for Illinois, where the junior Senator at the time had announced his support.

In order to help provide more electricity to Nepal, the price is to be raised and in this way load shedding can drop to 12 hours a day “soon” and to 6 hours a day by the end of February. There is s Singaporean there blogging about the problems.

For more stories see The Energy Bulletin or Drumbeat at The Oil Drum