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Dutch IGCC pioneers chalk up pain and gain Emergency response is behind schedule in the European public sector A new refining industry in Europe's Asian Corridor Commission proposes milestone energy proposal Replace fuel oil with distillate? Cancelled projects will sustain margins “Marine distillate not fuel oil from 2010” Branson's biofuels megastore You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway Buncefield 2: Investigation critical Where now for Swedish Class 1 diesel My slow awakening to climate change The luckiest motorist alive Safety row goes on over Europe's largest LNG terminal New WHO guidelines on city air quality put focus on diesel Would LNG really 'evaporate harmlessly' in an accident? Another lesson in the thermobaric bomb Spare a thought for the oil-rich But will the good times keep on rolling? Carbon storage and the zero emissions refinery Everything just changed E85 and high octane gasolines The problem of small-minded young engineers New Permit Regulations Biodiesel newbuilds and a new green superfuel Spilled wine and our split industry Drilling down into the prospects for IGCC The beginning of the start of the end of oil | My slow awakening to climate change Over the last three weeks I’ve attended two conferences and as a result I feel I’ve crossed a threshold of understanding – as people did in 1938 or early 1939. After a decade of warnings, they realised the horror that was upon them. They woke up to World War Two. I woke up to climate change. Like many people, I’ve been vaguely anxious about global warming for ten years. I’ve nevertheless managed to file my concern away, as if for a rainy day when I might take out my gathered good causes and do something about them. But at the Barcelona conference organised by the Institution of Chemical Engineers a decade’s anxiety reached new depths. Then in London I got an update on climate science and realised that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) has, through the necessarily conservative process of consensus-building, been pulling its punches. Things are far worse than they’re institutionally able to say. But in London I also saw evidence that countries working together have successfully tackled global problems in the past. As the speaker said: “Climate change is an old-fashioned air pollution problem”. I think it’s that fleeting fighting chance that made all the difference. I came away with my hope rebuilt and with a new determination to be part of the solution. At IChemE’s European Gasification Conference in Barcelona there was excitement that a somewhat overlooked technology is finally coming to the fore. Combined with geo-sequestration of carbon dioxide it seems to hold great promise. And of course, Asia’s demanding energy like never before. The keynotes were bullish. The conference room was packed. Several speakers spoke of European projects stealing a march on other regions. But the after-dinner speech was extremely sobering. Lord Ron Oxburgh is a very accomplished speaker as you’d expect from a graduate of Oxford and Princeton who in his time has been head of the Earth Sciences at Cambridge, a visiting professor at Stanford, California Institute of Technology and Cornell, Chief Scientist to the UK Ministry of Defence and Non-Executive Chairman of Shell Transport and Trading. After he took over from Phil Watts at Shell he said he didn’t hold much hope for the world without CO2 sequestration. But in Barcelona he told us that time is running out even for that. “There is a very serious danger that if things move at their current pace, by the time the technologies come into their own the need may have gone,” he said. He said Europe’s long summer – the 10,000 year temperate period that has made current agriculture and modern civilisation possible – is coming to an end. “We’ve had a very stable period stretching for thousands of years. I think it’s very clear that we are moving out of that,” he said. Every power station built from 2020 onwards must capture and store its CO2, he said, cautioning that if not the “extreme consequences of global warming” are just a matter of time. Beyond 2020, the challenge will be retrofitting the existing power infrastructure for CO2 capture, he said. Vostok ice core The following week in London I attended the excellent Be The Change conference on my own account and, on its final day, heard author and Professor Tim Flannery of the University of Adelaide talk about his new book The Weather Makers. It’s highly recommended and I’ve drawn much of what is salient here from it. He described his visit to the University of Copenhagen’s ice store where there are tens of kilometres of ice core samples. By drilling more than three kilometres into the Antarctic ice cap 500km from the Russian Vostok base, scientists obtained an archive of air –trapped bubbles in snow dating back almost one million years. Analysis of that period shows that during cold periods CO2 concentrations have dipped to 160ppm. Until 1800, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, they had not exceeded 280ppm. This is when CO2 concentrations, followed later by temperature, began their hockey-stick rise. Today, the average temperature is 0.8 deg higher than it was then. Such is the long-lived nature of CO2 in the atmosphere, that today’s level of 380ppm includes more than half of the CO2 ever liberated by humans burning fossil fuels. Lord Oxburgh spoke of the dramatic steps society must take to stabilise CO2 concentrations at even 450ppm by 2050. If successful, average temperatures in 2100 will be at least 1.1 deg C higher than at present, with some regions 5 deg C warmer. CO2 doubling A more likely scenario would lead to a doubling of CO2 concentrations. In Early 2005 a team led from Oxford University undertook the largest ever climate change study using downtime on 90,000 personal computers to run simulations. It focused on the temperature implications of such a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. The average result of the many runs indicated that this would lead to 3.4 deg C of warming, from a range between 1.9 and 11.2 deg C. Small rises in CO2 and the corollary increases in temperature have dramatic effects. When CO2 concentrations rose at the end of the last ice age by 100ppm, the effects of a 5 deg C rise in temperatures included a rise in sea level of 100m. “While the scale of the change is less than that seen at the end of the last glacial maximum,” says Prof Flannery, “the fastest warming recorded back then was a mere 1 deg C per thousand years. Today we face a rate of change thirty times faster – and because living things need time to adjust, speed is every bit as important as scale when it comes to climate change.” Earlier this year, Time magazine carried a special report on Global Warming under the heading “Be worried. Be very worried”. Its cover showed a polar bear. Prof Flannery, a mamologist as well as paleontologist, expects the extinction of the bear in its natural habitat this century as summer ice in the Arctic disappears along with the ecosystem it literally supports. In what climatologists called ‘magic gates’, the climate is making a jerky progress towards temperatures that threaten hundreds of thousands of species and billions of humans. From 1975 onwards for example, the city of Perth in Western Australia has received only half of the yearly 338 gigalitres of water that until then flowed into the city’s dams. In 1998 another jerk occurred resulting in a shift of the jet stream, significant ocean warming, and the death of 18 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef. The massive forest fires of that year were an effect of a 0.3 degree heat spike. Reef scientist, Dr Terry Done, predicts that a 2 deg C further rise in global temperatures will result in the bleaching of 97 per cent of the world’s coral reef – a habitat in which one in four ocean inhabitants spends at least part of its life cycle. A solution with a precedent There is a precedent for the world facing a massive problem and taking decisive action to address it. Prof Flannery described in his paper in London the slow journey that began with the apparently anomalous indications of the disappearance of ozone over the Antarctic in the early 1970s. From as early as 1974, three scientists, Paul Crutzen, F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina were arguing that the depletion was real and that the cause was manmade chemicals. He says the manufacturers launched a massive PR campaign to discredit the link between chlorofluorocarbons(CFCs) and the ozone hole. For their part, the scientists were unable to marshal proof positive of their thesis – a Nobel prize in Chemistry was still decades away. Yet public opinion forced politicians to act and in 1985 twenty progressive countries signed the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. “It was described by critics as ‘toothless’,” says Prof Flannery, “but by two years later it led to the Montreal Protocol, in which the world’s governments pledged to phase out the chemicals”. By 2001 the Protocol had limited real damage from ozone depletion to a tenth of that otherwise predicted for 2050 and, although not conclusive in itself, in 2004 the ozone hole over the Antarctic reduced by 20 per cent. That CFCs were phased out at a net saving to many of the companies will surprise few who have watched air pollution issues in the hydrocarbon industry. Several times we’ve seen changes that were forecast to bankrupt parts of our industry – or parts of our site – be achieved through engineering ingenuity at a fraction of the forecast cost. It’s been the story of clean transport fuels in the last decade in Europe. Prof Tim Flannery has won world-wide acclaim for his message… I’d venture for his optimism. Start at home, he says. If 70 per cent reductions are what’s needed then, he says, trading in a four wheel drive car for a hybrid can save a city commuter that amount on their transport emissions overnight. “We’re good at air pollution problems,” says Prof Flannery. And there’s plenty of evidence of that. He’s less optimistic about what he calls ‘engineering solutions’ to climate change. And Lord Oxburgh’s concern that technology is being brought to bear on this problem far too slowly is a serious warning. In this respect, our industry needs to complete the transformation some companies have boldly begun. Radical it will be, but more and more companies are arguing that it can be done. Indeed, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is one of those leaders heralding immense business opportunities in sustainable growth and moving to a low carbon economy. To some extent, his claim is backed up by the fact that between 1990 and 2002 the UK economy grew by 36 per cent while greenhouse gas emissions fell by 15 per cent. I considered quoting Churchill for the close of this month’s column. His 1940 statement to Parliament nine months into the second world war, with France defeated and Britain facing an air war it was wholly unprepared for, is one Englishmen call on when the chips are down and a massive effort is required. He said the bloody episode of suffering facing Britain would be known as “their finest hour”. Prof Flannery also evoked the war, telling how post-war children in Australia would ask: “What did you do in the war, daddy?” A deeper look into the potential consequences of climate change revealed to me we too have not to contemplate a massive defeat. But more important is that we’re for now facing the possibility of success. Instead of Churchill, here’s the current incumbent, Tony Blair, from a speech given in September, 2004. “The emission of greenhouse gases… is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming and is simply unsustainable in the long term. And by the long term I do not mean centuries ahead. I mean within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own. And by unsustainable, I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment. I mean a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence… There is no doubt that the time to act is now.” | |||||||
Download Energy Industry Resumé with work samples Profile: Tim Lloyd Wright MA Here you'll find a brief profile of my work with international energy, transport and associated environmental issues. Energy trends articles You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway From the archive... Over-processed fuel leaves oil tankers adrift | ||||||||
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