Water injection induced quake, says study

With all the environment concerns around fracking, a new study may just be sounding another alarm. It says that wastewater injection was the major trigger for the Prague earthquake of 2011.

Wastewater injection is the removal of water from fossil-fuel energy production into the ground — whether for hydrofracking, which uses the pressure of the water to crack open rocks to release natural gasses, or using the water to force petroleum out of conventional oil wells. In both cases the water has to be disposed of somewhere away from drinkable and habitable water supplies, so it is often pumped underground somewhere.

Geologically sedate areas of Arkansas, Texas, Ohio, and Colorado have recently become relatively earthquake-prone, with quakes in the middle of the US jumping 11-fold over the past four years when compared to the previous three decades. The risk is such that the National Academy of Sciences in a report last year called for further research to “understand, limit and respond” to induced seismic events.

The present study looked at the evidence for the Prague quake November 6, 2011, when a 5.7 magnitude and found that as wastewater refilled now-empty oil wells the pressure to continue filling the holes with water had to be increased which caused the Wilzetta fault to jump. The amount of wastewater injected into the well was relatively small, yet it triggered a cascading series of tremors that led to the main shock, said study

The study’s authors believe that water injection should be kept away from known fault locations, and that companies involved in wastewater injection should be compelled to provide accurate measurements of the amount of water that is being pumped into the ground and at what pressure. They also recommend that sub-surface monitoring of fluid pressure for earthquake warning signs.

One-up on plants?

What if we can take carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like fuels and chemicals without having to go through the process of growing plants and extracting sugars from biomass? That’s exactly what scientists seem to be on way to achieving!

Excess carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere created by the widespread burning of fossil fuels is the major driving force of global climate change, and researchers the world over are looking for new ways to generate power that leaves a smaller carbon footprint. Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found a way to transform the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere into useful industrial products.

This discovery may soon lead to the creation of biofuels made directly from the carbon dioxide in the air. During the process of photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugars that the plants use for energy. These sugars can be fermented into fuels like ethanol, but it has proven extraordinarily difficult to efficiently extract the sugars, which are locked away inside the plant's complex cell walls.

Now, the process is made possible by a unique microorganism called Pyrococcus furiosus, or "rushing fireball," which thrives by feeding on carbohydrates in the super-heated ocean waters near geothermal vents. By manipulating the organism's genetic material, the team created a kind of P. furiosus that is capable of feeding at much lower temperatures on carbon dioxide. The research team then used hydrogen gas to create a chemical reaction in the microorganism that incorporates carbon dioxide into 3-hydroxypropionic acid, a common industrial chemical used to make acrylics and many other products.

With other genetic manipulations of this new strain of P. furiosus, they could create a version that generates a host of other useful industrial products, including fuel, from carbon dioxide.

Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University researchers meanwhile have developed efficient solar cells using natural substrates derived from plants such as trees. By fabricating them on cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) substrates, the solar cells can be quickly recycled in water at the end of their lifecycle. The technology is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The researchers report that the organic solar cells reach a power conversion efficiency of 2.7 percent, an unprecedented figure for cells on substrates derived from renewable raw materials.

The CNC substrates on which the solar cells are fabricated are optically transparent, enabling light to pass through them before being absorbed by a very thin layer of an organic semiconductor. During the recycling process, the solar cells are simply immersed in water at room temperature. Within only minutes, the CNC substrate dissolves and the solar cell can be separated easily into its major components. To date, organic solar cells have been typically fabricated on glass or plastic. Neither is easily recyclable, and petroleum-based substrates are not very eco-friendly.

More food for the hungry

As we posted recently, the spotlight is turning from shale to methane hydrates. Especially after news from Japan about massive deposits offshore. Methane hydrate deposits could hold up to 15 times the amount of gas as the world’s shale deposits. At the same time, they represent more carbon than all of the world’s fossil fuels combined. Hence, the response has been mixed.
Methane hydrates (a.k.a. methane clathrates or fire ice) are solid compounds where methane is literally trapped in water. The substance looks like ice and can be found deep on the ocean floor, locked under layers of sediments. What are the implications of the world turning to tap this resource which is believed to be generously spread across the globe?

Developing methane hydrates would be “game over for the climate,” believe some. Depending on how cost-effective production of gas hydrates proves, this vast new fossil energy resource could lower energy prices worldwide. These lower prices almost certainly will lead to an increase in fossil-fuel consumption on an energy basis.
The other concern is that methane hydrates contain more carbon than all the world’s other fossil resources combined. Hydrate drillers would also have to be wary of letting methane leak out of hydrate deposits and into the atmosphere. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, and even modest leakage rates could nix any potential climate benefit of burning gas from hydrates instead of coal. But, clean-burning natural gas from hydrates could also help displace coal consumption in places like China and India, just as cheap shale gas is now driving coal out of U.S. electricity markets. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Every drop counts

A tap that drips once every second wastes a thousand litres of water in a month. How many of us will react to that? How many will sit up? How many will start making the calculations for a year or more? And then get swept by the daily routine, of which wasting water is a part!

It was different for distinguished Indian painter and author, Aabid Surti who was moved deeply about water scarcity on the planet. He read an interview of the former UN chief Boutros Boutros Ghali who said that by 2025 more than 40 countries are expected to experience water crisis. It made him hark back to childhood days in a ghetto, fighting for each bucket of water. He realized that shortage of water is the end of civilized life.

Sadly, he found that most people dismissed leaky taps casually as it was too expensive and inconvenient to call a plumber! A chance award for his contribution to Hindi literature saw him get some funds and the project was on -- to address leaking taps in Mumbai! The one-man NGO was called Drop Dead! He picked the apartment blocks, got permission from the housing societies, and got to work. That was in 2007. By the end of the first year, he and his two assistants had visited 1533 homes and fixed around 400 taps. In 2010, Aabid Surti was nominated for the CNN-IBN CJ ‘Be The Change’ Award. His work continues.

As Surti observed, anyone can launch a water conservation project in his or her area. But how aware are we of the crisis awaiting us? On World Water Day, can we promise ourselves to be a water campaigner at home?

Asian wind blows gaily

Wind energy is expected to do better in India with the generation-based incentive (GBI) reinstated in February. The government will also offer low-interest loans for wind projects through the National Clean Energy Fund. India's current installed wind capacity is 26.9 GW, and the nation plans to install 30 GW by 2017. Analysts agree that India is on track to achieve this target - but there is doubt about the target for 2012-2013. Between April and December 2012 India added only 982.5 MW of wind power capacity, less than half the previous year's numbers. Analysts say the required capacity is unlikely to be added before the end of the fiscal year.

Wind is seen as more scalable than solar, given wind's faster project development times, ease of financing and the maturity of the Indian wind sector. But there are also big challenges. Most discoms haven't raised their tariffs for 7-10 years due to political complications and are unable to pay for the power they buy. Another red flag for investors has been that revenue from carbon credits isn't particularly high. Governments in several states have begun issuing notices asking discoms to explain how they are meeting their renewable energy purchase obligations. But the state governments haven't yet begun enforcing penalties, so certificate revenue hasn't yet kicked in, and the bulk of the purchase obligation falls on the discoms.
The wind is also blowing in favour of India’s neighbor. According to new statistics from the China Electricity Council, China’s wind power production actually increased more than coal power production for the first time ever in 2012. Thermal power use, which is predominantly coal, grew by only about 0.3 percent in China during 2012, an addition of roughly 12 terawatt hours (TWh) more electricity. In contrast, wind power production expanded by about 26 TWh. This rapid expansion brings the total amount of wind power production in China to 100 TWh, surpassing China’s 98 TWh of nuclear power. The air quality targets the government set for 2016 will require cutting coal pollution. Already last year the government set new strict standards for coal power emissions, requiring costly investments in filters. This year the government set new water use targets for provinces, which do not give much room for increased use of water for coal use in key provinces.

Good show by clean energy

According to RenewableEnergyWorld’s Clean Energy Trends 2013 report, the fundamental global market drivers for clean technology remain largely intact. The report found that lower prices for many clean-tech goods and services, combined with a renewed focus on scalable projects, resulted once again in record annual solar, wind, and biofuels deployment. Against this continued expansion, however, combined global revenue for solar PV, wind power, and biofuels expanded just one percent, from $246.1 billion in 2011 to $248.7 billion in 2012. This marginal growth was one of the many consequences of rapidly declining solar PV prices.

 
Some of the report’s key findings include: 

• Global wind capacity additions totaled 44.7 GW (gigawatts) in 2012, a record year led by more than 13 GW added in both China and the U.S., and an additional 12.4 GW of new capacity in Europe.
• Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) decreased from a record $91.6 billion in 2011 to $79.7 billion in 2012 as continued growth in annual capacity additions was not enough to offset falling PV prices.
• Together, these three sectors are projected to continue to grow over the next decade, nearly doubling from $248.7 billion in 2012 to $426.1 billion in 2022. 

·     In 2012, newly installed solar PV accounted for 37 percent of all added capacity, followed by wind with a 26.5 percent share, and gas at 23 percent.

·     Generating capacity is, of course, not the same as actual generation. But even in this regard, clean energy sources have moved past their days as rounding errors and are playing a significant role in meeting electricity demand in a number of global markets. Wind energy in Denmark blew past a 30 percent share of national electricity use in 2012, and an official target is in place to generate half of the nation’s power from wind by 2020. In Germany, clean energy already accounts for 25 percent of energy production — led by wind (9.2 percent), biomass (5.7 percent), and solar (5.3 percent) — and the country is aiming for 35 percent from renewables by 2020.

Rdeox flow batteries show the way

As more power gets generated from intermittent sources of power, such as solar and wind energy, the need for energy storage devices that level out corresponding irregularities in the power supply becomes crucial. Fraunhofer scientists have recently made an important breakthrough with their development of a redox flow battery that reaches stack power up to 25 kW, with a cell size of 0.5 square meters. This is eight times larger than the previous A4-sized systems.

The German Federal Government has set itself the objective of generating total electricity the country needs from sun, wind, biomass, by 2050. For this, increasing amounts of solar and wind energy have to be stored for use during the night, or for times when there is less wind. Electric batteries are an option. Redox flow batteries offer an effective way to balance out fluctuations in the supply of renewable energy and thus guarantee its constant availability.

The batteries store electrical energy in chemical compounds, the liquid electrolytes. The electrolytes are charged and discharged in small reaction chambers. Several of these cells are lined up in stacks. However, the batteries that are currently available on the market, which are roughly the size of A4 paper (1/16 square meters), can only generate 2.3 kilowatts (kW) of power.

Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT in Oberhausen, Germany, have succeeded in significantly increasing the size of the stack and, with it, its capacity. A new design has allowed them to produce stacks up to 0.5 square meters in size. This is eight times larger than the cells in previous systems, and results in power up to 25 kW. Successfully redesigning the battery stacks was an important step in developing redox flow batteries that could, for example, supply 2000 households with electricity. Redox flow batteries offer several advantages; they are cost-effective, robust, durable, and can be individually customized.

Ignore at our own risk

Environmental threats may seem imperceptible causing nations to often ignore them. But a recent UN report warns: “Environmental threats are among the gravest impediments to lifting human development, and their consequences for poverty are likely to be high. The longer action is delayed, the higher the cost will be.”
Recent human ‘progress’ may be reversed throughout much of the developing world as a result of climate change, according to the UN’s recently released 2013 Human Development Report. The report notes that while climate change will affect the whole world, the more equatorially located developing world will experience the worst of it, within the near future anyways.

The report predicts that recent improvements in the HDI (Human Development Index) of these regions will be halted or reversed. South Asia and Subsaharan Africa are singled out by the report as likely to see the most significant drops in living standards. Among the most notable of its predictions, the report says that the number of people living in extreme poverty in the world could increase by up to 3 billion by 2050. And the regular environmental disasters occurring by then would then effectively stop these people from working their way out of poverty.

Ignoring environmental concerns will only add to economic costs in the long run.

Either... or...

Are oil and gas developers at eternal odds with the environmentalists? As Forbes reports, public policy is often reactive, necessitating immediate action after the fact. If things get desperate, more oil drilling would occur to meet demand and to curb prices both in California and elsewhere.

At issue now is the Monterey Shale in California, a formation holding more shale oil than anywhere else in the country. It could be a potential gold mine if developers could find a way to extract it and if regulators could appease the environmental community there. Governor Jerry Brown says that California needs that oil wealth and that the state’s regulators could ensure that the drilling techniques meet strict standards. “We want to get the greenhouse gas emissions down, but we also want to keep our economy going.” The universal dilemma stated there!

The region holds 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil, says the U.S. Energy Information Administration. According to a study done by the University of Southern California, tapping the Monterey Shale would bring in 2.8 million new jobs while raising an additional $25 billion in new revenues by the end of the decade.

Monterey geological formation is uncommon, and at present, hydraulic fracturing cannot work there. Fracking is the controversial method by which producers extract tight oil and gas — a process that uses a concoction of water, sand and chemicals to break those deposits free from the rocks where they rest a mile beneath the ground.

Throughout the country, new areas are opening up to shale development, with restrictions. While industry is complaining that such oversight is burdensome, environmentalists are dismayed that pristine regions are even accessible. How does one promote economic development while limiting emissions and degradation – that is the billion dollar question, clearly for nations across the globe.

Alternatives losing the battle?

The frequently asked question in the US these days is whether energy alternatives will falter in the face of a new abundance of fossil fuels. The alternative energy landscape is in tumult, judging by the recent fourth annual summit of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA–E. A glut of cheap natural gas threatens to sweep all other energy sources before it. Funding for alternative energy has dried up, says a report by Scientific American.

To cite an example, the ‘artificial leaf’ promised to revolutionize the world by bringing reliable modern energy to those mired in poverty. But the company founded to commercialize the research found that it needs to concentrate its efforts on something likely to make money in the nearer term, for instance flow batteries that might provide large amounts of energy storage on the electric grid.

ARPA–E efforts range from power-flow controllers for electricity transmission lines to modified microbe that builds liquid fuels from hydrogen and carbon dioxide. But even ARPA-E has begun to shift its limited funding into projects to enhance the use of natural gas, such as the Methane Opportunities for Vehicular Energy, or the MOVE program.
While shale is the new hot source, there are other gas discoveries too.The Nikkei news service reports the gJapanese overnment research team drilled 330m into the seafloor at an ocean depth of about 1000m, then decompressed and gasified deposits of methane hydrate trapped in the sediment. Methane hydrate deposits off Aichi and Mie are said to be equal to 10 years' worth of domestic natural gas consumption. There are massive deposits of methane hydrate in other parts of the world too. It seems an easier option to continue doing what we are familar with rather than start anew!
The Breakthrough Institute estimates that US energy firms reinvest less than one percent of total revenues into research, development and demonstration (RD&D) projects, compared to 15-20% in the IT, semiconductor, and pharmaceutical industries. Is this the reason for ‘disadvantage alternatives’, or simply a refusal to see long-term? Eternal optimism that when one source dries up, the planet will throw up another may be a feel-good factor but are we fooling ourselves that from coal to natural gas to shale and on and on is a natural jump? Are we simply pressing on for luck? What do you think?

Building storage costly, says study

A key problem to wind energy development in the US is that the electrical grid has virtually no storage capacity, so grid operators can't stockpile surplus clean energy and deliver it at night, or when the wind isn't blowing. To provide more flexibility in managing the grid, researchers have begun developing new batteries and other large-scale storage devices. But the fossil fuel required to build these technologies could negate some of the environmental benefits of installing new solar and wind farms, according to Stanford University scientists.

"We calculated how much energy it will cost society to build storage on future power grids that are heavily supplied by renewable resources," said Charles Barnhart, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) and lead author of the study. "It turns out that that grid storage is energetically expensive, and some technologies, like lead-acid batteries, will require more energy to build and maintain than others."

The results are published in a recent online edition of the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Most of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. Only about 3 percent is generated from wind, solar, hydroelectric and other renewable sources. The Stanford study considers a future U.S. grid where up to 80 percent of the electricity comes from renewables.

Wind and solar power show great potential as low-carbon sources of electricity, but they depend on the weather, said co-author Sally Benson, a research professor of energy resource engineering at Stanford and the director of GCEP.

The total storage capacity of the U.S. grid is less than 1 percent, according to Barnhart. What little capacity there is comes from pumped hydroelectric storage, a clean, renewable technology. Here's how it works: When demand is low, surplus electricity is used to pump water to a reservoir behind a dam. When demand is high, the water is released through turbines that generate electricity.

For the Stanford study, Barnhart and Benson compared the amount of energy required to build a pumped hydro facility with the energetic cost of producing five promising battery technologies: lead-acid, lithium-ion, sodium-sulfur, vanadium-redox and zinc-bromine. The data revealed that all five batteries have high embodied-energy costs compared with pumped hydroelectric storage.

After determining the embodied energy required to build each storage technology, the next step was to calculate the energetic cost of maintaining the technology over a 30-year timescale. To quantify the long-term energetic costs, the team came up with a new mathematical formula they dubbed ESOI, or energy stored on investment. The higher the ESOI value, the better the storage technology is energetically.

A pumped hydro facility has an ESOI value of 210. It can store 210 times more energy over its lifetime than the amount of energy that was required to build it. The five battery technologies fared much worse. Lithium-ion batteries were the best performers, with an ESOI value of 10. Lead-acid batteries had an ESOI value of 2, the lowest in the study.

To reduce a battery's long-term energetic costs, one way is to improve its cycle life -- that is, increase the number of times the battery can charge and discharge energy over its lifetime. None of the conventional battery technologies featured in the study has reached that level. Lithium-ion is the best at 6,000 cycles, while lead-acid technology is at the bottom, achieving a mere 700 cycles.

They also calculated the material costs of building these grid-scale storage technologies. And found that the material constraints aren't as limiting as the energetic constraints. It appears that there are plenty of materials in the Earth to build energy storage. There are exceptions, such as cobalt, which is used in some lithium-ion technologies, and vanadium, the key component of vanadium-redox flow batteries.

Cold facts about coal

Let us now look at another side of the coal story. Up to 120,000 premature deaths every year result from India’s failure to properly control emissions from a growing number of coal plants throughout the country, according to a Greenpeace report. Unless significant changes occur, the problem could worsen as officials race to meet a burgeoning demand by building a slew of new coal plants throughout the country.

Greenpeace studied 111 coal plants in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, and other regions, and found that virtually no regulation exists to manage emissions from these facilities. “Hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved, and millions of asthma attacks, heart attacks, hospitalisations, lost workdays and associated costs to society could be avoided, with the use of cleaner fuels, [and] stricter emission standards and the installation and use of the technologies required to achieve substantial reductions in these pollutants,” said the report.

Greenpeace also found that in places where some standards have been theoretically imposed, there is virtually no enforcement of the regulations. Currently India produces roughly 210 GW of electricity each year, most of which is from coal generation, and plans to produce a further 160GW to cover the thousands of Indians who lack access to power. Such a move would make the country the highest coal user, pushing past China. Failure to instill standards now could easily put Delhi, Kolkata and other regions en par with Beijing, where record levels of pollution have been recorded.

Drastic changes?

In the UK’s Daily Mail, Christopher Booker dissects Britain's energy policy by looking at the changes planned at giant Drax power station in Yorkshire. Every day, Drax burns 36,000 tons of coal, brought to its vast site by 140 coal trains every week — and it supplies seven per cent of all the electricity used in Britain. Because it burns so much coal, Drax is the biggest single emitter in Britain of carbon dioxide (CO2), ‘the gas supposedly responsible for global warming’ says Booker.
There is, he writes, ‘no better symbol of madness than turning one of the biggest and most efficiently run coal-fired power stations into a world of eco-lunacy as it embarks on a £700 million switch away from burning coal in its six colossal boilers to devour millions of tons a year of wood chips instead’.

Most of these chips will come from trees felled in forests covering a staggering 4,600 square miles in the USA, from where they will be shipped 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to Britain. Campaigning groups, such as Friends of the Earth, scorn the idea that wood chips are  ‘carbon neutral’ or that felling millions of acres of American forests, to turn trees into chips and then transporting those chips thousands of miles to Yorkshire, will end up making any significant net reduction in ‘carbon’ emissions. Even then, before being pulverised into powder ready for use, the wood chips must be stored in giant purpose-built domes, where they need to be humidified in order to prevent spontaneous combustion — to which wood is 1,000 times more prone than coal. This has already given rise to disastrous fires in other power plants.

Unlike coal, biomass is considered ‘sustainable’, because it supposedly only returns back to the atmosphere the amount of CO2 it drew out of the air while the original tree it came from was growing.

The writer makes his case for coal here, citing that coal is still by far the cheapest means of creating electricity. But the Government is keen to meeting its own and the EU's targets for reducing Britain's "carbon emissions" and hence the change at Drax.

First, the UK Government wants to use a carbon tax to make burning fossil fuels such as coal so expensive that it will become prohibitive for power companies to use them. Second, the Government is determined to boost all those "carbon neutral" — ‘but currently much more expensive’ — means of making electricity, such as wind farms, nuclear power and burning biomass. “The result of this dog’s dinner of an energy policy is that, on the one hand we can look forward to ever-soaring energy bills, while on the other hand we will have crippling power cuts.”

He notes how Germany, which already has five times as many wind turbines as Britain, is now desperately building 20 new coal-fired stations in the hope of keeping its lights on. China, already the world’s largest CO2 emitter, is planning to build 363 more coal-fired power stations. India is ready to build 455 new coal-fired power stations…

Clearly, the world is getting polarised into two factions; one that looks at the cheap way of doing things, and the other at the long-term effects. True, expenses are getting out of control for everyone, from governments to the common man. But do you think expense should be the deciding factor?

Sun shining bright!

Here is the third report in the recent weeks anticipating a bright future for the global solar market. Thanks to significant cost reductions and rising retail tariffs, households and commercial users are set to install solar systems to reduce electricity bills – without any subsidies, says Deutsche Bank in a newly released analysis. It concludes that the global solar market will become sustainable on its own terms by the end of 2014, no longer needing subsidies to continue performing.Looking at India, Deutsche Bank predicts that due to state and RPO programs, demand is likely to be strong, at between 1 to 2 GW. Meanwhile, it says, "grid parity has been reached in India even despite the high cost of capital of ~10-12%." Rooftop solar is looking especially robust, and sees strong demand in solar markets in India, China, Britain, Germany, India, and the United States. As a result, Deutsche Bank actually increased its forecast for solar demand in 2013 to 30 gigawatts — a 20 percent increase over 2012.
It points to India, where despite delays in the national solar program, huge demand for state based schemes has produced very competitive tenders, in the [12 cents per kilowatt hour] range. Given the country’s high solar radiation profile and high electricity prices paid by industrial customers, it says several conglomerates are considering large scale implementation of solar for self consumption.“Grid parity has been reached in India even despite the high cost of capital of around 10-12 percent,” Deutsche Bank notes, and also despite a slight rise in module prices of [3 to 5 cents per kilowatt] in recent months (good for manufacturers).Deutsche bank says demand expected in subsidised markets such as Japan and the UK, including Northern Ireland, is expected to be strong, the US is likely to introduce favourable legislation, including giving solar installations the same status as real estate investment trusts, strong pipelines in Africa and the Middle east, and unexpectedly strong demand in countries such as Mexico and Caribbean nations means that its forecasts for the year are likely to rise.

US lags in efficiency??!

The fact that the U.S. is the least energy efficient country in the world may be unbelievable, but it is a fact.  Every industry (manufacturing, transportation, residential, commercial, etc.) has aided in the wastefulness of this country, some more than others.  According to the U.S. Energy Administration, estimates show that the industrial sector consumes more energy every year than any other U.S. entity.  It has also established that energy use by the residential, transportation, and commercial sectors has drastically increased each year for the past 60 years, and it continues to rise.

Despite the growth of renewable energy sources, the bulk of power in the US is still produced using coal, petroleum, and natural gas, which tend to lead to inefficiency.  The New York Times published a study in 2008 that calculated the main causes of energy waste.  It estimated that 71 percent of energy generated for transportation is wasted, 66 percent is wasted in electricity, 20 percent is wasted in commercial and residential buildings, and 20 percent is wasted in industry or manufacturing.

A major culprit across all industries is heat waste, the byproduct of inefficient technology.

LA turns into a climate lab!

Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and elsewhere are turning the entire Los Angeles metro region into a state-of-the-art climate laboratory. From the ridgeline, they deploy a mechanical lung that senses airborne chemicals and a unique sunbeam analyzer that scans the skies over the Los Angeles Basin. At a sister site at the California Institute of Technology, researchers slice the clouds with a shimmering green laser, trap air samples in glass flasks, and stare at the sun with a massive mirrored contraption that looks like God’s own microscope.

These folks are the foot soldiers in an ambitious interagency initiative called the Megacities Carbon Project. They’ve been probing L.A.’s airspace for more than a year, with the help of big-name sponsors like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and the California Air Resources Board. If all goes well, by 2015 the Megacities crew and colleagues working on smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Boston will have pinned down a slippery piece of climate science: an empirical measurement of a city’s carbon footprint.

The idea is to prepare a set of climate archetypes that can be applied to different megacities. The L.A. area is on the ocean, ringed by mountains, and often holds emissions in place like a lidded bowl. Perhaps what the Megacities team learns about emissions here will also apply in Mumbai, India, which has a similar geography.

Historically, researchers have tried to understand anthropogenic global warming by looking at it from the big picture — first across the planet, then by regions and countries. But two things happened in the past few years that turned their frame of reference. First, they realized that the emissions of a large landmass are extremely difficult to measure. Second, they encountered a climate gridlock in the United States government.  It became clear to environmental stakeholders that if any policy was going to happen on cutting emissions, it was going to be at the scale of states and cities.

They now suspect that cities are some of the worst offenders when it comes to generating greenhouse gases, especially so-called megacities with more than 10 million residents, like Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, and Mumbai. Urban areas and their enabling power plants are thought to pump out about 70 percent of humankind’s total fossil-fuel emissions. With the world’s urban population expected to nearly double by 2050, the boom in development could release a flood of greenhouse gas, as more city dwellers torch colossal quantities of coal and oil to power their cars, feed their stoves, and crank their air conditioners.

A major issue is that governments estimate the volume of emissions with indirect measurements, such as tracking the carbon output of power plants or surveying the number of people riding mass transit or buying gasoline. Nobody is really testing greenhouse gases above cities on a focused, long-term basis, which is crucial in verifying whether the measurements urban governments use to make policy decisions are accurate.

Only one spacecraft in orbit right now is monitoring greenhouse gases, Japan’s Gosat (Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite), and its resolution isn’t good enough to give an accurate picture of a city’s emissions. But in the next few years, NASA plans to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite and install a new instrument (OCO-3) on the International Space Station. Both devices will periodically take snapshots of the “chemical weather” over population centers.

Hopefully the climate footprint of cities will emerge sharp and clear, giving indications of how to proceed.

Volcanoes cooling planet

A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for clues about why Earth did not warm as much as scientists expected between 2000 and 2010 now thinks the culprits are dozens of volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide. While small and moderate volcanoes mask some of the human-caused warming of the planet, larger volcanoes can have a much bigger effect. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, it emitted millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that cooled Earth slightly for the next several years.

Observations suggest that increases in stratospheric aerosols since 2000 have counterbalanced as much as 25 percent of the warming scientists blame on human greenhouse gas emissions. The new project was undertaken in part to resolve conflicting results of two recent studies on the origins of the sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, including a 2009 study led by the late David Hoffman of NOAA indicating aerosol increases in the stratosphere may have come from rising emissions of sulfur dioxide from India and China. In contrast, a 2011 study led by Vernier -- who also provided essential observation data for the new GRL study -- showed moderate volcanic eruptions play a role in increasing particulates in the stratosphere. The new GRL study also builds on a 2011 study led by Solomon showing stratospheric aerosols offset about a quarter of the greenhouse effect warming on Earth during the past decade.

The study results essentially exonerate Asia, including India and China, which are estimated to have increased their industrial sulfur dioxide emissions by about 60 percent from 2000 to 2010 through coal burning. Small amounts of sulfur dioxide emissions from Earth's surface eventually rise 12 to 20 miles into the stratospheric aerosol layer of the atmosphere, where chemical reactions create sulfuric acid and water particles that reflect sunlight back to space, cooling the planet.

The new study relies on long-term measurements of changes in the stratospheric aerosol layer's "optical depth," which is a measure of transparency. Since 2000, the optical depth in the stratospheric aerosol layer has increased by about 4 to 7 percent, meaning it is slightly more opaque now than in previous years.

However, one can't sit back and expect volcanoes to counter the effect of warming, as overall these eruptions are not going to counter the greenhouse effect. Emissions of volcanic gases go up and down, helping to cool or heat the planet, while greenhouse gas emissions from human activity just continue to go up. The scientists said 10-year climate data sets like the one gathered for the new study are not long enough to determine climate change trends.