Kate Galbraith reports in The New York Times on the Dash for  Gas Raises Environmental Worries.  American politicians often extol natural gas as abundant, cleaner-burning than other fossil fuels, and domestically produced, unlike Middle Eastern oil.  But the process of extracting it is raising concerns among people with wells in their backyards.

Anger and fear were on display last week at a public meeting convened by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Fort Worth, a gas-drilling hub. Dozens of local residents took turns at the microphone to voice concerns about potential contamination of drinking water.

A film called “Gasland,” released last month on the cable channel HBO, showed people in drilling areas lighting their tap water on fire, as gas found its way into their water supply.

“I am frustrated and angry,” said State Representative Lon Burnam, Democrat of Fort Worth, who spoke at the meeting and decried the “inadequacies” of state regulators.

At issue is a procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which has been adopted widely in the United States over the past 10 years to extract gas trapped in shale formations. It is just starting to spread to other parts of the world, including Europe, China and Australia.

Fracking involves shooting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals deep underground, to break up rock and release the gas. The technique has vastly expanded access to shale-gas reserves in the United States, including deposits in Pennsylvania, New York, Texas and Louisiana.

More than 20,000 wells of this nature have been drilled in the past 10 years, according to a study of natural gas released last month by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Natural gas accounts for 23% of US electricity generation, and a number of politicians are calling for increased use of the fuel in vehicles.)

Please leave your suggestions here on what can be done to stop the disastrous leak in the Gulf  of Mexico from the BP drilling.

How will expanded use of solar power, wave power, wind turbines, nuclear power lessen the chance for future disasters?  Please leave your comments here.

Best States for Greener Driving

How on target were the green movement leaders over the last 4 decades?

“1. It’s the climate, stupid. The orators at the first Earth Day didn’t deliver speeches on global warming.  That was partly because there weren’t yet good climate models predicting warming in the 21st century and partly because the orators weren’t sure civilization would survive that long anyway.

They figured that the “overpopulated” world was about to be decimated by famine, the exhaustion of fossil fuels, global shortages of vital minerals, pollution, pesticides, cancer epidemics, nuclear-reactor meltdowns, and assorted technological disasters. Who had time to worry about a distant danger from a natural substance like carbon dioxide?

Well, the expected apocalypses never occurred.

2. You can never not do just one thing. Environmentalists of the 1970s liked to justify their resistance to new technologies by warning that you could never do just one thing. It was a nice mantra and also quite accurate. New technologies do indeed come with unexpected side effects.

But resisting new technology produces its own unpleasant surprises. The “No Nukes” movement effectively led to more reliance on electricity generated by coal plants spewing carbon. The opposition to “industrial agriculture” led to the lower-yield farms that require more acreage, leaving less woodland to protect wildlife and absorb carbon.

3. “Let them eat organic” is not a global option. For affluent humans in industrialized countries, organic food is pretty much a harmless luxury. Although there’s no convincing evidence that the food is any healthier or more nutritious than other food, if that label makes you feel healthier and more virtuous, then you can justify the extra cost.

But most people in the world are not affluent, and their food budgets are limited. If they’re convinced by green marketers that they need to choose higher-priced organic produce, they and their children are liable to end up eating fewer fruits and vegetables — and sometimes nothing at all, as occurred when Zambia rejected emergency food for starving citizens because the grain had been genetically engineered.

“Total reliance on organic farming would force African countries to devote twice as much land per crop as we do in the United States,” he writes. “An organic universe sounds delightful, but it could consign millions of people in Africa and throughout much of Asia to malnutrition and death.”

4. Frankenfood, like Frankenstein, is fiction. The imagined horrors of “frankenfoods” have kept genetically engineered foods out of Europe and poor countries whose farmers want to export food to Europe. Americans, meanwhile, have been fearlessly growing and eating them for more than a decade — and the scare stories seem more unreal than ever.

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences reported that genetically engineered foods had helped consumers, farmers and the environment by lowering costs, reducing the use of pesticide and herbicide, and encouraging tillage techniques that reduce soil erosion and water pollution.

5. “Green” energy hasn’t done much for greenery — or anything else. Since the first Earth Day, wind and solar energy have been fashionable by a variety of names: alternative, appropriate, renewable, sustainable. But today, despite decades of subsidies and mandates, it provides less than 1 percent of the electrical power in the world, and people still shun it once they discover how much it costs and how much land it requires.

6. “New Nukes” is the new “No Nukes.” In the 1980s, Gwyneth Cravens joined the greens who successfully prevented the Shoreham nuclear reactor from opening on Long Island. Then, after learning about global warming, she discovered that the reactor would have prevented the annual emission of three million tons of carbon dioxide. She wrote a book on the nuclear industry titled, “Power to Save the World.”

7. We are as gods and have to get good at it. “

Read the whole article in The New York Times.

But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas.  It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.

The project’s advantages are obvious: electricity generated from the sun will allow FPL to cut natural gas use and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.  It will provide extra power when it is most needed: when the summer sun is shining, Floridians are cranking up their air-conditioning and electricity demand is at its highest.  The plant also serves as a real-life test on how to reduce the cost of solar power, which remains much more expensive than most other forms of electrical generation. FPL Group, the parent company of Florida Power and Light, expects to cut costs by about 20% compared with a stand-alone solar facility, since it does not have to build a new steam turbine or new high-power transmission lines.

“We’d love to tell you that solar power is as economic as fossil fuels, but the reality is that it is not,” Lewis Hay III, FPL’s chairman and chief executive, said on a recent tour of the plant. “We have got to figure out ways to get costs down.  As we saw with wind power, a lot has to do with scale.”

For solar power, scale is still a relative term.  At its peak, the solar plant will be able to generate 75 megawatts of power, enough for about 11,000 homes.  But that is dwarfed by the adjacent gas plant, which can produce about 3,800 megawatts of power. (A megawatt is enough to power a Wal-Mart store.)”

For those challenged by arithmetic, that means that the gas plant is capable of producing over 50 times the power of the world’s second largest solar installation.  That means for the solar array to have the same output as the gas system it is next to would require 9,500,000 mirrors!  Can FPL even build the 190,000 mirrors to withstand the hurricanes that pass over the Florida peninsula some summers?

Read the full article in The New York Times and then leave your comments here.

The SGT5-8000H gas turbine developed by Siemens for the power plant in Irsching was completed in Berlin in late April 2007.  With an output of 375 megawatts (MW), it is the largest and most powerful gas turbine in the world.

“The award proves that innovations for climate protection and sustainability are the right approach,” said Barbara Kux, member of Siemens’ Managing Board and the company’s Chief Sustainability Officer. “Technological leadership is helping us continue our success in these difficult economic times. Our Environmental Portfolio grew 11 percent in 2009 and is, thus, a key stabilizing factor in our business. At some €23 billion, the Portfolio accounts for nearly a third of our total revenue, making Siemens the world’s largest supplier of green products and solutions.”

“Our new gas turbine shows that climate protection and fossil power generation are not mutually exclusive,” said Michael Süß, CEO of the Fossil Power Generation Division of Siemens’ Energy Sector. “This innovation will make it possible to continue supplying electrical energy at an affordable price in the future.” The gas turbine is the centerpiece of a combined-cycle power plant (CCCP) operated by E.ON in Irsching, near Ingolstadt, Germany. The turbine of superlatives is more than 13 meters long, five meters high and, at 444 tons, weighs more than the world’s largest passenger airplane. On its own, the gas turbine generates 375 megawatts of electricity. Once it is connected with a steam turbine, output will rise to roughly 570 megawatts, an amount sufficient to meet the electricity needs of some 3.4 million people – roughly the entire population of Berlin. The plant will achieve a world record efficiency level of more than 60 percent, which will benefit both the environment and the climate: annual CO₂ emissions from each new plant of this type will be about 700,000 tons below the average emission level for power generation worldwide – a reduction equal to the total emissions of 350,000 cars driven 15,000 kilometers a year.

The speedMatic dishwasher proves that consumers, too, can contribute to climate protection. “In the last 20 years, we’ve cut our dishwashers’ energy consumption in half. The new zeolite technology provides an enormous increase in efficiency, using a further 20 percent less electricity than the most economical dishwashers on the market today,” said Kurt-Ludwig Gutberlet, head of BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte. “In 2008, we were designated the most sustainable company in Germany. This is just the next step.” The dishwasher’s unique technology utilizes zeolites – aluminum silicate minerals with a very large surface area and hollow pores – which can absorb water and become hot in the process. As a result, the drying cycle is considerably faster and more efficient. Even the puddles of residual water that accumulate in the indentations of cups and plastic containers that are otherwise always covered with water are dried up in seconds by the warm air released from the zeolite pellets. In the next washing cycle, the minerals are regenerated when moisture is removed from them as the dishwasher heats up. Plans now call for using the technology not only in top-of-the-range dishwashers but also in medium-priced models.

Pictures are available at: http://www.siemens.com/photonews/pn201002e