Tag Archives: Natural gas

Natural gas, Oil Industry, Solar energy

Oil and gas industry the next major market for solar power

Repost from The San Francisco Chronicle
[Editor:  How’s this for conflicted?  Go figure ….  – RS]

Fremont firm to build huge solar plant at Oman oil field

By David R. Baker, July 8, 2015 4:57pm
GlassPoint Solar's pilot plant in Oman. The company uses solar power to generate steam, which is then pumped into oil fields to squeeze out more petroleum. Photo: GlassPoint Solar Photo: GlassPoint Solar
GlassPoint Solar’s pilot plant in Oman. The company uses solar power to generate steam, which is then pumped into oil fields to squeeze out more petroleum. Photo: GlassPoint Solar Photo: GlassPoint Solar

Solar power and fossil fuels tend to be viewed as natural enemies.

But on Wednesday, a Fremont company signed a deal to build a massive solar power plant in the Omani desert, creating steam to squeeze petroleum out of an aging oil field.

GlassPoint Solar’s new plant — named Miraah, or “mirror” in Arabic — will be by far the largest facility of its kind in the world, generating 1,021 megawatts of thermal energy. For comparison, a single reactor at California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant generates about 3,400 thermal megawatts.

The plant will help Petroleum Development Oman, the country’s largest oil producer, wrest thick and viscous crude from the Amal oil field. Pumping steam underground lowers the viscosity of the oil, making it easier to extract.

The practice, which is common in California, typically requires burning large amounts of natural gas to generate the steam. Oman, however, doesn’t have big gas reserves of its own. GlassPoint’s solar plant, covering more than a square mile, will save 5.6 trillion British thermal units of gas each year. Used in a power plant, the same amount of gas could produce enough electricity for 209,000 people in Oman.

“The use of solar for oil recovery is a long-term strategic solution to develop (the Oman oil company’s) viscous oil portfolio and reduce consumption of valuable natural gas, which is needed elsewhere to diversify Oman’s economy and create economic growth,” said Raoul Restucci, the oil company’s managing director.

Neither company disclosed the project’s cost Wednesday.

Founded in 2008, GlassPoint uses a variation on the same solar thermal technology that has been generating electricity at power plants in Southern California for decades.

Instead of solar panels, the company employs curved troughs of mirrors to focus sunlight on a tube filled with water. The superheated water generates steam.

The troughs are light enough that a strong breeze could knock them out of focus. So GlassPoint plants the troughs inside a greenhouse made of glass. Automated washing machines on the roof clear off grime — a key feature in a country, such as Oman, that’s prone to dust storms.

GlassPoint already built a small plant in Oman to demonstrate the idea. But the Miraah project will be more than 100 times larger, consisting of 36 greenhouse modules.

“The oil and gas industry is the next major market for solar energy,” said GlassPoint CEO Rod MacGregor. Indeed, one of the company’s early investors was Royal Dutch Shell.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Fossil fuels, Lac-Mégantic, Natural gas, Oil Industry, Rail industry

Roundup of Actions Against Fossil Fuel Infrastructure in Vermont and NY (PHOTOS)

Repost from EarthFirst! Newswire

Roundup of Actions Against Fossil Fuel Infrastructure in Vermont and NY (PHOTOS)

July 7th, 2015

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from Rising Tide Vermont

* 150+ w/dozens occupying the tracks in Ticonderoga to ‪#‎StopOilTrains‬.
* Four arrested blockading VT fracked gas pipeline construction.
* TWAC still locked down to CNG truck on way to IP mill.

Disrupting Vermont Gas Systems

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from Burlington Free Press

About 30 protesters disrupted work at a Vermont Gas Systems construction site in Williston on Tuesday morning.

Four protesters were arrested on suspicion that they unlawfully trespassed to stop work at the construction site, said Williston police Chief Todd Shepard. Williston police had given protesters until 7 a.m. to move.

Vermont State Police, Essex police and South Burlington police were also on scene. Shepard said about 14 law enforcement representatives had arrived by the end of the protest.

Thomas Buckley, 34, of Westford and Martha Waterman, 25, of Charlotte chained themselves together across a ditch digging machine. Avery Pittman, 25, of Burlington was later also chained to Waterman.

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Buckley, Waterman and Pittman were taken into custody before 9 a.m. Grayson Flory, 28, of Los Angeles was also arrested after refusing to leave the site at 310 Hurricane Lane.

All protesters arrested were carried from the site by law enforcement, but they did not actively resist arrest otherwise, Shepard said.

Each protester has been released from police custody and issued a citation to appear on Thursday in Vermont Superior Court in Burlington, Shepard said.

Occupation of the Tracks

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Flotilla

from Rising Tide Vermont: More than a hundred people converged in Ticonderoga, NY today for a flotilla and symbolic blockade to ‪#StopOilTrains.

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Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the Lac-Megantic oil train disaster, in which a train carrying fracked oil exploded and leveled the small Quebec town, killing 47 people.

In the so-called Champlain valley, tens of millions of gallons of fracked oil are transported annually along the lake, and industry is making plans to start bringing tar sands through.

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TWAC Throws Down

from Rising Tide Vermont: “Our friends at the Trans and/or Women’s Action Camp (TWAC) also stopped a truck on its way to deliver compressed fracked natural gas to International Paper. One person has locked their body to the back of the truck preventing it from making a delivery. Fracked gas by truck is just as dirty and dangerous as fracked gas in a pipeline!”

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(TWAC is a group of activists who identify as Trans*, Transgender, Genderqueer, and Gender non-conforming as well as anyone who identifies as a woman regardless of whether they were assigned female at birth)

Released from Jail!!!

The four people who were arrested this morning blocking the construction of the fracked gas pipeline have all been released. Please share and donate to our legal fund to support this fierce escalation of resistance against extreme energy! Donate to our legal fund at: http://bit.ly/J7legal

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Alberta Canada, Canadian regulation, Electoral politics, Natural gas, Oil Industry, Oil prices, Pipeline transport, Tar sands crude

Alberta’s possible pivot to the left alarms Canadian oil sector

Repost from Reuters

Alberta’s possible pivot to the left alarms Canadian oil sector

By Scott Haggett and Nia Williams, May 4, 2015 7:07am EDT
Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley meets with Mayor Naheed Nenshi in his office in Calgary, Alberta, April 30, 2015. REUTERS/Todd Korol

(Reuters: CALGARY, Alberta) – Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta is on the cusp of electing a left-wing government that can make life harder for the energy industry with its plans to raise taxes, end support for key pipeline projects and seek a bigger cut of oil revenues.

Polls suggest Tuesday’s election is set to end the Conservative’s 44-year reign in the province that boasts the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves and now faces recession because of the slide in crude prices.

Surveys have proven wrong in Canadian provincial elections before and voters may end up merely downgrading the Conservatives’ grip on power to a minority government.

Yet the meteoric rise of the New Democratic Party and the way it already challenges the status-quo of close ties between the industry and the ruling establishment has alarmed oil executives. The proposed review of royalties oil and gas companies pay the government for using natural resources and which could lead to higher levies, is a matter of particular concern.

“Now is not the time for a review of oil and natural gas royalties,” Tim McMillan, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the country’s top oil lobby, said in a statement.

A 2007 increase in the levy was rolled back when the global financial crisis struck and oil executives say today the time is equally bad to try it again.

Yet the left’s leader Rachel Notley, a former union activist and law school graduate, has shot up in popularity ratings in the past months advocating policies that have been anathema for many conservative administrations.

She says she would not lobby on behalf of TransCanada Corp’s controversial Keystone XL pipeline or support building of Enbridge Inc’s Northern Gateway pipeline to link the province’s oil sands with a Pacific port in British Columbia. Citing heavy resistance from aboriginal groups to the Enbridge line, Notley says Alberta should back those that are more realistic such as TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline to the Atlantic ocean.

PACKING UP?

Notley also advocates a 2 percentage point rise in Alberta’s corporate tax rate to 12 percent to shore up its budget that is expected to swing from a surplus to a C$5 billion deficit in 2015/2016 as energy-related royalty payments and tax revenues shrink.

Even with the proposed corporate tax hike Alberta’s overall taxes would remain the lowest nationally. Oil executives warn, however, that any new burdens at a time when the industry is in a downturn, shedding jobs and cutting spending, could prompt firms to move corporate head offices out of the province.

“Business is mobile,” said Adam Legge, president of the Chamber of Commerce in Calgary where most of Canada’s oil industry is based. “Capital, people and companies move.”

Ironically, the challenge the oil industry and the Conservatives face is in part a by-product of Alberta’s rapid growth fueled by the oil-sands boom.

The influx of immigrants from other parts of Canada and overseas has changed the once overwhelmingly white and rural province. Today Alberta is one of the youngest provinces and polls show younger and more diverse population is more likely to support left-wing causes such as environment and education and more critical of big business. The New Democratic Party still only got 10 percent of the votes in the 2012 vote, but an election of a Muslim politician as a mayor of Calgary in 2010 served as an early sign of the changing political landscape.

The Conservatives themselves and their gaffe-prone leader Premier Jim Prentice also share the blame for the reversal of fortunes with one poll showing them trailing the left by 21 percent to 44 percent.

Prentice angered voters when he told Albertans to “look in the mirror” to find reasons for the province’s fiscal woes and then passed a budget in March that raised individual taxes and fees for government services but spared corporations.

Scandals – Prentice’ s predecessor left last year because of a controversy over lavish spending – and blunders added to the party’s woes.

The NDP vaulted to the top of the polls after Notley’s strong performance in an April 23 televised debate, when Prentice, former investment banker, drew fire for suggesting his rival struggled with math.

Then there is voter fatigue with a party seen as too comfortable and scandal-prone after decades in power.

“It’s still the same gang, the same policy, same procedures, the same concept of entitlement,” said one executive at a large oil and gas producer who declined to be named because he is not authorized to talk to the media. “I know some extremely neo-conservative guys who have said enough is enough.”

(Additional reporting by Julie Gordon in Vancouver and Mike De Souza in Ottawa; Editing by Amran Abocar and Tomasz Janowski)
Big Oil, Fossil fuel divestment, Natural gas, Sensitive wildlife habitats

North America’s Oil And Gas Industry Has Taken Over 7 Million Acres Of Land Since 2000

Repost from Think Progress’s Climate Progress

North America’s Oil And Gas Industry Has Taken Over 7 Million Acres Of Land Since 2000

By Katie Valentine, April 24, 2015 at 12:28 pm

Millions of acres of land across the U.S. and Canada has been taken over by oil and gas development in the last 12 years, according to a new study.

The study, published Friday in Science, tallied up the amount of land that’s been developed to house drilling well pads, roads, and other oil and gas infrastructure in 11 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces. It found that between 2000 and 2012, about 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) have been turned over to oil and gas development, a stretch of land that, combined, is equal to three Yellowstone National Parks.

This land takeover can have ecological consequences, according to the report.

“Although small in comparison with the total land area of the continent, this important land use is not accounted for and creates additional pressures for conserving rangelands and their ecosystem functions,” the report states. “The distribution of this land area has negative impacts: increasing fragmentation that can sever migratory pathways, alter wildlife behavior and mortality, and increase susceptibility to ecologically disruptive invasive species.”

Most of the land converted into drilling operations was cropland and rangeland — a term that encompasses prairies, grassland, shrubland, and other ecosystem types — and roughly 10 percent was woodland. Wetlands, according to the report, were mostly spared by oil and gas developers, though a very small amount have been converted into oil and gas sites.

CREDIT: Science/AAAS

Land takeover due to oil and gas development can have a number of negative consequences, the report states. It removes vegetation that’s important for food, habitat, and carbon storage, and it also fragments ecosystems in such a way that can disrupt the natural behavior of wildlife.

According to the report, oil and gas development reduced the study area’s net primary production (NPP) — the rate at which an ecosystem produces plant biomass, which the report calls “a fundamental measure of a region’s ability to provide ecosystem services” — by 4.5 teragrams (9,920,801,798 pounds). The amount of vegetation lost from rangelands amounts to about five million animal unit months (the amount of vegetable forage required to feed an animal for one month), which “is more than half of annual available grazing on public lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.”

“The loss of NPP is likely long-lasting and potentially permanent, as recovery or reclamation of previously drilled land has not kept pace with accelerated drilling,” the report states.

Steve Running, co-author of the study and ecology professor at the University of Montana, told Midwest Energy News that the upward trend of oil and gas development is concerning in terms of land use, especially if serious efforts to reclaim land aren’t taken.

“The point we’re trying to make with this paper is not so much that some huge fraction of current land area has been de-vegetated, as much as the trajectory of drilling, (consuming) a half-million acres per year,” he said. “If we continue that to 2050, you get to some seriously big amounts of land.”

CREDIT: Science/AAAS

Right now, there’s not much known about to what extent oil and gas areas in the U.S. are being reclaimed after they’ve been developed, said Samuel D. Fuhlendorf, another co-author of the report from Oklahoma State University. And, he said, there isn’t much work at the federal or state level to regulate or enforce this reclamation. Some states — including Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Dakota, and West Virginia — do require oil and gas companies to submit plans for reclaiming land after they’re done drilling. But others, like Colorado, don’t require these plans.

“You’d expect there would be both state- and federal-level policy,” Running told Midwest Energy News. “But we’re not aware of a clear policy on this. We don’t see any active discussion or regulatory planning of how that’s going to be done, who will do it and when it will be done. Beyond policy, is there actual enforcement. We are not aware that any state or federal policies are actively following this.”