Secretary Chu in Newsweek

My dependence on good internet service has been underlined by a week where it has not been available. Unfortunately the motel we were staying at in Maine had a problem with its server, and we returned home to find a problem with our own internet connection. Thus a couple of the posts that I was completing will be a little delayed, until I have that indispensable tool, a good connection. This has been prepared largely without, and similarly posted with access just to find a couple of references.

And in that meantime I have been perusing this week’s NEWSWEEK, on my Kindle, and noted that the Secretary of Energy had a new interview. The first thing that he said in it was in response to a request to define President Obama’s energy policy. Here is what he said:

We look at all the factors and we say, how can we get to the lowest possible level of carbon as quickly as possible and not only at the lowest cost but with the greatest possible economic opportunity for the U.S.?

That’s it!

The rest of the interview was not that much more constructive (one of the benefits of the Kindle is that it counts words, in this case the article – including questions – ran to 782 words - the attempted length of this piece). There was no mention of peak oil, or energy security or prices in the article. In response to the criticism that the Stimulus package did not make enough investment in energy, the Secretary said that they would fund projects for up to three years maximum, and encouraged innovators to “swing for the fences.” Whatever that means (in context)! I will admit to having helped put a couple or more proposals into the DOE hopper, though most came back rather quickly and negatively (one was successful). What struck me about the process, and the attitude redolent in the Secretary’s remarks was the focus on short term benefits and application. Most of the work is also oriented to larger group efforts, with a lot less focus on the smaller innovator to stimulate new ideas. If you can’t claim a home run within the remaining life of this Administration, don’t bother applying.

He appears to hope for a start to a Smarter Electric Grid, to double renewable energy contributions by 2012, and to get the nuclear power plant construction industry restarted in this term. But he also recognizes that carbon capture and sequestration is at least 10-years away from deployment. His “blue sky” hopes are for cheap (below $2) per watt photo-voltaic systems, (current costs he quoted as being over $4) and he still looks to the generation of fuels such as gasoline directly from biomass. This is not the ethanol production that the industry and government are still heavily involved in, but rather focuses back on the work he was supporting while at LBNL looking at using natural fauna to do the digestion and fuel generation.

But he returned to the need to put a price on carbon, and for a cap-and-trade bill to make sure that the point on where his focus was, would not be missed.

Sigh! He sounds as though the “scientist in a tower” description still fits him like a glove. There are considerable issues in regard to the changing energy supply of the planet that should be giving him pause in his charge against carbon. Increasing numbers of people are pointing to a coming crisis in oil supply. The British government, at the urging of folk such as the head of Virgin Airways, has decided that perhaps it is about time that it took its head out of the sand, and took a hard look at the situation. Of course it is also taking a look at the reality of climate change predictions, though with the coming of a general election, it is not clear whether either effort will amount to much.

I am increasingly struck by the perception that many of the folk that write about both climate change and energy supply do so with a very complacent attitude toward the continuing situation. The potential impact from a major impact on climate from a severe eruption of the Laki suite of volcanoes in Iceland seems to be being totally ignored. (A quick skim through some of the scientific papers suggests that the major eruption follows within a couple of years of the current eruption of the smaller volcano). The problem is that should there be a problem, running around in a panic for a couple of days is going to do nothing constructive in stopping folk from being killed.

Well we will have to see, in the relatively short term, whether that complacency is warranted. Being a Cassandra is unlikely to get more recognition this time around.

Using heat to refine kerogen from oil shale

One of the problems with the oil (kerogen) in oil shale is that it is not mature enough (i.e. close enough to being an oil) that it will easily flow through the rock. In earlier parts of this particular theme I have written about mining the rock and then heating it in retorts as a way of transforming the kerogen and recovering it for use. I have also, somewhat tongue in cheek, discussed using nuclear weapons to heat the rock so that the transformation can take place without moving the rock, while breaking the rock at the same time, and the unlikely potential for burning some of the oil within the deposit to power the transformation of the rest. While it might work in a heavy oil sand, is not likely to be realistically practical for the finer grained shales. But there are ways of adding somewhat less heat to the rock than using a nuclear bomb, and that will be the topic for today.

This is a continuation of the technical posts that I usually write on Sundays, but I am trying to catch up after the eye problem, and so will try and get the last one or two posts on the immediate topic of oil shale up within the next week, before moving on to a new set of subjects..

While I am largely going to bypass the use of nuclear power (apart from that of providing electrical power) in this piece, the potential use of nuclear power to heat penetrators that allow rapid drilling of weak rock has been partially demonstrated. As I have mentioned previously , Los Alamos National Lab, in looking at different methods for drilling, had come up with the idea of using a small nuclear reactor to provide sufficient heat to a ceramic probe that it would melt its way into the ground, pushing the molten rock to one side, and providing a glass lining to the resulting tunnel.

By the way, this has not been used to create the network of tunnels under this country in an idea beloved of some, it has been demonstrated. Not with a nuclear source, but with more conventional heating, Los Alamos drilled drainage holes at the Tyuoni pueblo plaza for drainage in 1973. A total of eight drainage holes were drilled at this archeological site in the Bandelier National Monument.

The first significant step in the Subterrene technology transfer program occurred when eight water drainage holes were melted with a field demonstration unit at the Rainbow House and Tyuonyi archaeological ruins at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico in cooperation with the National Park Service,, By utilizing a consolidation penetrator, the required glass-lined drainage holes were made without creating debris or endangering the ruins from mechanical vibrations.

At around the same time Dr George Clark, at what was then the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri University of Science and Technology) had used ceramic electrical heaters in rock to raise rock temperatures enough to fracture and break out blocks of granite.

Field tests have therefore been able to take rock up to temperatures that are high enough to melt rock, using electrical heaters placed in holes in the rock. Which is a good introduction to the Mahogany Project in which Shell have been using electrical heaters to heat oil shale in place, to high enough temperatures that the kerogen transforms into a light oil. The investigation has been going on for some 25 years starting in the laboratory, and has progressed through an initial field trial.

Small holes are drilled down through the rock to house the electric heating coils, which slowly raise the temperature of the rock to between 600 and 750 deg F, at which temperature the kerogen will convert, depending on what is there, to a mixture of light oil and natural gas. These fuels can be recovered by drilling conventional wells into the rock, with typical depths at the test site being in the 1,000 to 2,000 ft depths.

The Shell Mahogany Technology

The field trial placed heaters in a grid over a 30 ft by 40 ft test area and found that a third of the volume produced was natural gas was produced from the lower grade layers of the shale above the layers with the highest concentrations of kerogen (the Mahogany layer) which produced the light oil.

Array of heaters at a Shell test site

A total of 1,700 barrels of the light oil was recovered during the test period.

Production from the Shell test wells in oil shale

While the Bureau of Land Management has approved further sites for tests, the program is waiting to see what happens to the price of oil to determine whether or not the program will be sufficiently economically viable to move forward. At present this decision is anticipated to be in the middle of this decade, by which time it may be a little clearer whether the Cornucopians or some of the rest of us have been more accurate in our predictions on the future availability of sufficient oil to meet global demands at an affordable price. But it is the level of that affordable price that will decide whether the oil shale program is viable.

The costs of the project will not just have to cover the heating of the rock. One of the problems with the site is that there is some migration of water through the rock, and this can create two problems. The first is that it pulls heat away from the transformation process and the second is that it can interfere in the overall process itself. To stop the water flow (and concurrently the risk of transformed oil and gas migrating away from the collector wells) Shell has been looking into building an ice wall around the site to hold the water back.

Ground freezing is growing more popular as a tool for dealing with water underground. It has been used, for example, to stabilize the ground while the Boston Big Dig (the Central Artery/Tunnel project) was built and in stabilizing the ground for some of the underground stations in the London Tube network (including the collapse of one of the excavations). It has been used to hold back the water while uranium ore was mined at MacArthur River. Simply described, a dual pipe system is placed in vertical holes, and a freezing solution (usually a brine) is circulated through them, lowering the temperature of the rock to the point that the water freezes. Since the lowered temperature is distributed around the holes, there is no need to intersect any of the fractures, or voids, and the frozen water also helps to strengthen the rock where needed.

For the Mahogany Project test, which began in 2007, the freezing liquid was ammonia, and the test used a pattern of 157 holes drilled eight-feet apart, to a depth of 1,800 ft. The test removed the groundwater from within the well, but did not heat the rock to produce the oil and gas.

It will be interesting to see how this project turns out. It has been suggested that the technology would need a dedicated power source of some 1.2 gigawatts, in order to yield a production of 100,000 bd. Shell estimates it will yield 3-4 energy units for every unit consumed.

Layout of freezing pipes for the Shell Mahogany tests.

As usual with these technical posts, they can only briefly outline a process, if something is not clear please ask in comments, or if there is more information available, we all gain from reading of it.

Temperatures in Nevada, and Death Valley

Well trying to find the temperatures for the different states and compare the USHCN data with the GISS data is proving to be more interesting than I had thought. And it is taking a fair bit more time. So when I got to Nevada, as I moved West from Missouri, I thought that today’s state would be a faster run through. Turns out that, along the way there were a couple of other issues, and so even for a smaller sized population there are some problems. (I started writing this just after inputting the USHCN initial data into the table). Nevada has Death Valley, which although it has some of the higher temperatures in the Union did not make either the GISS or USHNC lists, since it has only been providing data since 1910.


Finding the temperature relationships started out easily. Checking with the USHCN stations first, there are only 13 stations listed, and so a quick modification to the generic file, and renaming it, made it easy to get and put up the basic temperature data. There was no data appearing until 1901 for Boulder City and there were seven years missing for Searchlight. So as I described earlier, I filled in estimates for each of these values by seeing that Boulder City (for e.g.) was, at 67.13 deg, 16.49 deg warmer than the state average of 50.64 deg, and that 1895 was 3.54 deg colder than that overall average. This suggests that the Boulder City temp was 63.59 deg that year. And so I filled that number in the space, and repeated the procedure to find an estimate of the rest of the missing numbers. And then, as I started to get the GISS data I started to run into trouble.


I looked at the Chiefio site to find the sites that GISS uses in Nevada. Not being sure which station was in each state, I went through the list and checked (by using the co-ordinates and Google Earth) to make sure which state each station was in. And in the process discovered that there were actually four GISS stations in Kansas and not just the three that I listed. So I will have to go back and redo that state, adding in the info from the GISS station in Goodland, KS. (But I will put that off for this evening).

The next problem that I ran into is that Chiefio cites two stations in Nevada as being GISS stations. These are in Las Vegas, and Ely. But when I open the Las Vegas data table the data only goes back to 1937. Odd, I thought that one of the criteria for selection was that there had to be a continuous record going back to 1895. So can I do the same correction to find the earlier data. Actually given that I am looking for a difference between the two sets of data, and that there are only two stations in the GISS record, I don’t think that I can do this. Wonder what the difference is? Well let me enter the data and then take a look. (Which is not the purely scientific way of doing this, but I am doing all this out of personal curiosity so press on . . . .) And it gets a bit more strange, since when I go to the Ely data there is only data since 1947. Now in Nevada there are some 35 stations listed by GISS (though I think the odd one or two are in other states), and a number of these have data going back to 1895 or earlier (see the USHCN list), so why pick two stations that only have partial data sets?

Have to think a bit about that one, but in the meantime how am I to handle the lack of complete sets of data to compare? Well, in the circumstances it is a little difficult to do a significant comparison, since Las Vegas is the station with the lowest elevation in the set I am looking at, and thus has the highest temperature, so it will have a significant influence, when it is brought into the averages. In fact the difference between the GISS data and the USHCN data consistently increases over the years that there is GISS data.


And the average difference over the time period where there are values for both GISS stations is 4.37 degrees. The impact of the added GISS stations on the overall average can be seen over the period from 1895, with the red showing the addition of the GISS data after 1945.


Looking at the influences on those temperatures, as previously, there is a strong correlation with latitude:


This is now becoming quite consistent over the states, as is the correlation with elevation:


But here in Nevada there is no significant correlation with longitude, nor is there much of a correlation with population, probably because there are not a lot of folk living near most of the stations. And there is not a significant trend looking at overall standard deviation of the data.

I am going to try normalizing the data to the center of the state, by just using latitude, (I believe that GISS uses distance but since the correlation shown above is relatively consistent with latitude, I will use that). The center of the state is given (by GISS) at 38.9N 116.4 W. So if I adjust for that using the equation on the latitude plot, then I get a figure of:


One can use the derived equation to determine the temperature profile for a station that was at the center of the state, and at the mean elevation for the state, which turns out to be 1,676 m. And that gives a plot:


Note that I have not used the GISS data in this series, because, had I done so, since the GISS data is hotter than the average, only including it in the latter parts of the curve would give a relatively cooler initial period and hotter latter half. So I left the GISS stations out of this plot.

And when we look at standard deviation, having adjusted to the center of the state and to the state mean elevation, then the plot shows a definite decrease in scatter as the years have worn on.


Which is interesting, but remember that this is a relatively small sample. And so on to correcting Kansas, and then to see what California adds to the picture. This is the state that Chiefio first got my attention by writing about, and it also brings us down to the ocean, which, until now we have been far from.

Today there were more questions about the data than about the hypotheses, hopefully we can get on to other things next time.

The volcano in Iceland

The current volcanic eruption in Iceland raises a question of the Precautionary Principle but one calling for an opposing action to that most commonly sought in ameliorating damaging climate change. If I can summarize the situation in a somewhat condensed version, the current eruption in Iceland at the Eyjafjallajokull site has now been going on for a couple of days (video) and is throwing a plume of ash up to 5 miles into the overlying air.

View of the plume from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption (scienceblogs). More photos here

What should be a concern, it appears, however, is that this particular volcano, although in itself not that large, is often a precursor to the eruption of the Katla volcano, which is nearby but further north- east. While the current eruption started away from a glacier, the Katla lies under the Myrdalsjoekull glacier, and the precedents are not good.

"Eyjafjallajokull has blown three times in the past thousand years," Dr McGarvie told The Times, "in 920AD, in 1612 and between 1821 and 1823. Each time it set off Katla." The likelihood of Katla blowing could become clear "in a few weeks or a few months", he said.

The second Katla eruption has, historically, had much greater impacts since it has had the power to inject large volumes of particles and gases into the atmosphere that create a sufficiently dense cloud that sunlight is reduced, harvests are affected and famines result. For example when the nearby Laki fissures erupted in 1783 the results that were reported included:

Iceland's Laki volcano erupted in 1783, freeing gases that turned into smog. The smog floated across the Jet Stream, changing weather patterns. Many died from gas poisoning in the British Isles. Crop production fell in western Europe. Famine spread. Some even linked the eruption, which helped fuel famine, to the French Revolution. Painters in the 18th century illustrated fiery sunsets in their works.

The winter of 1784 was also one of the longest and coldest on record in North America. New England reported a record stretch of below-zero temperatures and New Jersey reported record snow accumulation. The Mississippi River also reportedly froze in New Orleans.

The last eruption of Katla was not that severe, although there was severe flooding. But it can be violent, throwing large volumes of material into the air. The consequence of the Laki eruption of 1783-4 (it lasted for eight months and ejected over 9 cubic miles of basaltic lava and a quarter of the population of Iceland died from starvation, the effect on winter temperatures in the US was evident.

(Sigurdsson 1982)

But it is not the fine particles that apparently cause the most climate impact, rather the large volumes of gases that also are ejected and turn into acid aerosols that contribute to the disastrous consequences. It has been projected that there were some 8 million tons of fluorine and 120 million tons of sulphur dioxide released. To put this in context, during the Mount Pinatubo eruption (which also had a short term cooling on global climate) the volcano is projected to have emitted some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and that this lowered the global temperature by perhaps 0.8 deg C in 1992. (The aerosols reflecting back more solar energy into space.)

Mount Pinatubo erupting (USGS photo)

The fissures themselves, from which the Laki lava flowed, stretch some 16- miles though not as a continuous crack, but rather the lava flowed from about 130 craters.

Laki craters (climate4you)

The general locations of the Katla to the earlier Laki and Eldgja eruptive flows is shown here:

Location of the Laki, Katla and Eldgja fissures, the current eruption is further south and west, on the hidden side of the Mydalsjokull glacier.

The severity of the impacts of these eruptions on the global climate and the resulting devastation on the harvests is a matter of record. We know that there are more coming, and, from past history the damage will be great.

That record suggests that there will soon be another serious eruption that, on past performance, will also eject large quantities of sulfur dioxide gases into the atmosphere and induce another period of cooling.

Since the previous evidence has shown that this cooling has not been good for the global health, perhaps it might be about time that folks started working on what can be done to stop, or collect these large volumes of gases before they become too predatory. Certainly the problem of neutralizing the gas or otherwise collecting it or storing it is significant (but then so is that for carbon dioxide). However we know where it is going to come from, and some of the mechanics of how it will migrate upwards. There are large unknowns in terms of how we might capture, control, or neutralize a lot of the acid-forming gasses, but the size of the problem has never stopped us before.

And if the problem were to be addressed by the nations of the world, perhaps we could, in time, assuage some of the known negative effects from the global cooling that we can now expect as the Icelandic eruption continues. This cooling may well already be more certain than near term global warming, and more immediately likely to occur, so under the same Precautionary Principles that are driving the huge investments in climate change already, ought we not be spending our time right now trying to find ways to stop the impact of these massive eruptions on the health of the globe.

Silly thought – but one that suggests that the problems don’t always only have one side, and that we might find out by visual observation the down-sides of too much cooling and its effect on people and agriculture, perhaps sooner than we would like.

A tear in the retina

Just over a week ago, on Thursday morning, I got into the car to make the three mile drive to the University. Shortly after leaving the house I noticed what appeared to be something like a # sign in my upper right eye. This turned into a black line that, as I continued along the road reached all the way down the right side of my vision. And it was followed by waves of small spots that swept across my view, from the right, gradually first blurring and then cutting back on what I could see as i pulled into the parking lot.

A quick call to my optometrist and I had an appointment for that afternoon. But as the morning wore on I gradually reached the point where I could not see out of my right eye. When I was examined the diffused blood within the eye made it impossible for the optometrist to see anything within the eye itself, and I was given an appointment the following morning at the Barnes Retina Institute in St Louis.


At the Institute the eye was still too blocked for even what seemed the very brightest of lights to penetrate well enough to show the problem. But with an ultrasonic probe it was possible to see that there was at least one tear in the back of my retina which had caused the bleeding that was the evident result of the problem. I was, accordingly, given an appointment for surgery this past Monday morning. The Actress was kind enough and diligent in repeatedly taking me into (and from) St. Louis, even though she herself was engaged in rehearsals for performances which have been going on in the latter evenings of this week.

The surgery took about an hour, there were apparently two sites that needed to be tied back to the retinal wall, using a laser to do the “welding.” And the majority of the debris in the eye was drained out, and an air bubble injected to hold the area that had been worked on in place, until it could re-establish. (While it was done under a local anesthetic, I was given a general one to allow that to happen, and my memory of the whole event is extremely clouded).

After a check on the Tuesday to ensure that there was no infection, I was able to come home (we had spent the previous night in St Louis as a precaution). By Wednesday I could see out of the top of the right eye (looking down through the air bubble gave a clear but offset view when I looked down), and over the week as the air bubble has shrunk (with my head six inches from the table it now covers the area of my palm when placed on the table). When I look at the laptop screen, the bubble now only covers part of the keyboard as I type. I can almost read these words as I write them (the definition comes from my left eye) since there is still some small debris in the eye, and that will only be absorbed through time.

I am left very impressed with the strides of modern medicine, the benefits of Medicare (I retired at the end of last Month) and the skills of the team that so rapidly brought me back to functionality. And as my eye strengthens I will be returning to more regular posting. I gather that the air bubble, which is steadily shrinking, should be gone by the beginning of the week.

Thanks again for the good wishes.

A slight problem

Because of the need for an unexpected minor operation I will not be able to post for a couple of days or more and posts may be limited in the near term. I regret the necessity, and will be back as soon as feasible.

While waiting you might want to keep up with the Iditarod, which seems to be heading for an exciting finish.

Utah Temperatures and Colorado UHI

This is now the fourth in an originally unplanned series looking at the differences between GISS and USHCN average temperatures and some trends in the data that are not necessarily obvious when one only looks at global data. Tracking Westward from Colorado, Utah has the next set of temperature data that I will look at, and I will also comment on Anthony Watts note on Colorado UHI , which he posted since my post on that state.

Utah has a different topography in that while in Colorado as we head West the land rises, in Utah that is no longer the case. So for the hypothesis of the week I will assume that while there will be a correlation with elevation, that there will be none with longitude. Let’s see if I’m correct. And while there was little correlation with latitude in Colorado, because of the strong effect of elevation and the wide range it covered, I am going to hypothesize that we will see a significant effect of latitude again, even though the elevation is considerably higher.

As usual I am writing this as I carry out the tabulation, and so I begin, following the initial procedure, by going to the USHCN web site and, yikes, there are 40 weather stations listed for Utah. OK, there will be a slight pause while I enter all these into the data table . . . . 40 stations, mutter, mutter).


Hmm! And we have the same problem of missing data that showed up in Colorado, but with more stations. For some stations there is no data in specific years before 1900. Well I am going to apply the same procedure as I did for Colorado and calculate an assumed temperature for those sites. First is Blanding, for which there is no temperature for 1896. Blanding is, on average at 51.15 deg, 2.8 deg warmer than the rest of the state. If that year the average temp was 47.5 deg, then Blanding should be at 50.3 degrees. If the average temperature for 1896 was, at 47.5 degrees, 0.8 degrees below the average annual temp, and the annual temp for Blanding is 51.15 deg, then the temp in 1896 would be 50.35 deg. Taking the average of these gives 50.33 deg, which is what I insert.

I follow the same procedure to calculate the temperatures for Bluff in 1895, 1896, 1896, and 1898; Farmington in 1895; Morgan Power in 1895; Snake Creek in 1895; (if you get the table these values are marked in red.)

Again checking on Chiefio’s list of the GISS stations. I find only one station out of the stations in Utah, that has survived the cut is the one in Salt Lake City. So I go to get the GISS data for that station.

Adjusting the tabulation to calculate averages for the different numbers of USHCN and GISS stations reveals that the GISS station reads 4 degrees higher than the state average from the USHCN stations.

Looking for the populations of the different cities and towns, Deseret is now apparently preferably called Delta. Modena, UT is also not on the city-data file, and so I got the population of 35 from Century 21. The population for Snake River Powerhouse also requires a little detective work, and two communities have merged to form Midway, and so I will use that number. And for Zion National Park I used Springdale.

And so all the data is in the table and what do we find? First of all, looking at the primary hypothesis of the day:


There is realistically no correlation here, so the first hypothesis is apparently valid.


As with the Colorado data, this again suggests that the trend that we saw with the Kansas data in regard to longitude was really a reflection of the increasing height above sea level. And at the high elevations, looking at latitude, there is a trend:


Not as strong as elevation, given the widely carrying heights of the stations around the state, but it is still there.

In regard to the population distribution, Utah is a state with a large number of small communities , which also have weather stations, so I shrunk the scale of the plot shown to below 10,000 population:


And the log correlation still shows.

In terms of the standard deviation plot that I have calculated for all the states so far:


There has been a slight increase in scatter over the years, (which would validate Anthony Watts observation on station quality) though it is not at a significant level (which I have set at an r-squared of 0.05).
However Utah is a state that has seen a warming over the years:


But the growth of the small communities, relative to the single GISS station in Utah, and the sensitivity of temperature more to the growth of small communities, means that the difference between the GISS and USHCN averages has declined over the years, due to the makeup of the USHCN average.


Which brings me back to Anthony Watts recent post on Colorado data. What he and Stephen Goddard have done is to look at the relative population growths of Boulder, and Ft Collins in Colorado.

Growth in relative populations of Boulder and Ft Collins in Colorado

Now, taking the data that I had discussed last Saturday, it was fairly easy to pull out the data for Ft Collins and Boulder and find the difference, and plot it against time:



I have taken it back a little further than WUMT, since I had the data, but the two curves are otherwise the same. And it does show the effect of the Urban Heat Island, from the point of view that the most significant change between the two towns has been their relative growth.

And so it continues, perhaps next week we will look at Nevada?