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Paul Merrell

Porter Ranch Methane Leak Spreads Across LA's San Fernando Valley - 0 views

ecowatch.com/...ter-ranch-methane-leak-spreads

environment disasters Porter-Ranch methane-leak

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • It now looks like the catastrophic Porter Ranch gas leak, which has spewed more than 83,000 metric tons of noxious methane for nearly three months, has spread across Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. On Wednesday, Los Angeles City Councilman Mitchell Englander called on the Southern California Gas Co. to extend residential relocation assistance to residents in Granada Hills, Chatsworth and Northridge who live near the Aliso Canyon gas leak above Porter Ranch. These residents reported symptoms related to the exposure of natural gas such as nausea, vomiting, headaches and respiratory problems.
  • This latest development compounds with a new analysis from Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET). The Cambridge-based nonprofit sent Boston University Professor Nathan Phillips and Bob Ackley of Gas Safety to take methane measurements around the San Fernando Valley for several days and their findings were disturbing. As the Los Angeles Daily News wrote, “the researchers recorded elevated levels of the main ingredient in natural gas—10 miles away from the nation’s largest gas leak.” “It’s not just in Porter Ranch, it’s going all the way across the [San Fernando] Valley,” Ackley told Inside Climate News. According to HEET, the researchers drove a high precision GIS-enabled natural gas analyzer down the roads around the gas leak to create a comprehensive map of the leak around San Fernando Valley. The red on the map indicates where they drove and the levels of methane they found is shown by the height of the peaks. Their monitors showed methane levels at 3.4 parts per billion, about twice the level of natural clean air, the Los Angeles Daily News reported. Another measurement showed 127 ppm, or an astounding 67 times above normal. “Whatever else may be in the gas—benzene, toluene, xylene—that is what people may be breathing,” Phillips told Inside Climate News. “Even though we’re not measuring things other than methane, there is a legitimate concern that there is that other nasty stuff in there.”
Joseph Skues

Arctic Ice in Death Spiral - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...world3694891285019437

arctic ice permafrost warming global methane hydrates

shared by Joseph Skues on 24 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • dangerously upsetting the energy balance of the entire planet,
  • the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It's not going to recover," he said.
  • ecause
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • aid Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and a world expert on permafrost.
  • takes much longer to re-freeze
  • emits huge volumes of additional heat energy into the atmosphere
  • srupting the weather patterns of the northern hemisp
  • Paradoxically, a warmer Arctic means "future cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception
  • Overland told IPS.
  • average temperatures are now three to five degrees C warmer than they were 30 years ago
  • nderway is a rapid warming of the coastal regions of the Arcti
  • f the global average temperature increases from the present 0.8 C to two degrees C, as seems likely
  • possibly eight degrees due to a series of processes and feedbacks called Arctic amplification.
  • half of the world's permafrost will likely thaw,
  • depth of a few metres,
  • eleasing most of the carbon and methane accumulated ther
  • emendous amounts of extra heat are added every summer to the region as more than 2.5 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean have been opened up to the heat of the 24-hour summer sun
  • 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2).
  • Methane is
  • catastrophic for human civilisatio
  • spans 13 million square kilometres of the land in Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of Europe
  • Present pledges by governments to reduce emissions will still result in a global average temperature increase of 3.5 to 3.9 C by 2100,
  • hree times more carbon than all of the worlds' forests contain.
  • consistently across the entire region since the 1980s,
  • southernmost permafrost limit had retreated 130 kilometres over the past 50 years in Quebec’s James Bay region.
  • r by the undersea permafrost that acts as a cap over unknown quantities of methane hydrates (a type of frozen methane) along the Arctic Ocean shelf, he said.
  • eight million tonnes of methane emissions are bubbling to the surface from the shallow East Siberian Arctic shelf every year
  • If just one percent of the Arctic undersea methane reaches the atmosphere, it could quadruple the amount of methane currently in the atmosphere.
  • releasing huge amounts of global warming gases.
  • ould rapidly accelerate in a few decad
  • we could lose much of the permafros
  • because of rapid feedbacks.
  • contains at least twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere –
  • Arctic that's 10 to 16 degrees C warme
  • asing most of the permafrost carbon and methane and unknown quantities of methane hydrates.
  • climate scientists are calling for a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels
  • still a 50-percent probability of exceeding two degrees C
  • decline three per cent per year
  • the emissions peak is delayed until 2025
  • rctic will be eight to 10 degrees warmer and the world will lose most its permafrost.
  • emperatures will rise three degrees
  • has the potential to eliminate burning coal and oil to generate electric
  • governments have the political will to fully embrace green technologies.
Gary Edwards

Conventional fuels from concentrated sunlight | Discover | University of Minnesota - 0 views

discover.umn.edu/...al-fuels-concentrated-sunlight

syngas energy Clean-Energy

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Feb 14
     
    "Simulated sun, authentic opportunity" At the University's Solar Energy Laboratory, the process begins with an indoor solar simulator in the form of seven mirrored, 6,500-watt lamps that concentrate the light on a 10-centimeter spot with an irradiance of 3,000 suns. (One "sun" equals 1,000 watts of solar energy falling per square meter of surface.) With this concentrated radiant energy, one can generate temperatures of more than 3,600 F in a chemical reactor. There, carbon dioxide and water are split to form carbon monoxide and hydrogen, the two components of syngas. Davidson, along with mechanical engineering professor Tom Chase and their students, have developed two prototype reactors to split water and CO2. Deploying these technologies in the Earth's sunbelt could yield enough renewable energy to significantly exceed the world's current needs, the researchers say. "More sun falls on Earth in one hour than is consumed globally in a year," Davidson notes. "Harvesting the sun to meet our energy needs is a challenge with a huge payoff." Of course, it's a little more complicated than focusing concentrated sunlight into a reactor filled with carbon dioxide and water. The key to the technology rests with using metal oxides in a reduction/oxidation cycle to reduce the temperature required to split water and carbon dioxide. "Metal oxides allow you to split water and carbon dioxide at temperatures achievable with modern solar concentrating devices," Davidson explains. In the reactor, the metal oxides go through cycles in which they strip oxygen alternately from carbon dioxide or water-forming carbon monoxide or hydrogen, respectively-then release the oxygen as a byproduct. The syngas formed from the carbon monoxide and hydrogen can be converted into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, methane (natural gas), or other products. Davidson and her colleagues have produced syngas this way in their laboratory. They have moved from bench top experiments to demonstration in proto
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