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Sunday, October 12, 2008
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After fanning the flames of the oil shale fire last year in a report the RAND Corporation has ignored oil shale in their current report on unconventional fuel sources -- because of the uncertainty around the technology for producing the kerogen -- according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. From the article:
Questions surrounding oil shale led to its omission from a new study analyzing the economic and the environmental trade-offs of unconventional fossil fuels. The RAND Corp., a nonprofit research group, issued the study last week. It ended up focusing on oil sands and coal liquefaction, also known as coal-to-liquids. "Although oil shale is also an important potential unconventional fossil resource, we do not address it in this report because fundamental uncertainty remains about the technology that could ultimately be used for large-scale extraction, as well as about its cost and environmental implications," RAND said in the report summary. RAND representatives could not be reached for comment late last week...
Environmentalists and some local and state elected officials, among them Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, have said the federal government has been moving forward too quickly in pushing oil shale development when uncertainty remains over what technology holds the most promise for extracting the resource. Without knowing that, it's impossible to evaluate requirements for water, electricity and workers, and impacts on communities and the environment, they say. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has moved ahead with setting aside 1.9 million acres in the West, including about 360,000 acres in Colorado, for possible commercial oil shale development. By the year's end, the agency is expected to release final rules pertaining to commercial oil shale leasing on public lands. Shell, which is researching oil shale development technology in Rio Blanco County, supports the issuing of those rules. Shell says even though it may be 10 or more years away from commercial oil shale development, having rules in place for things such as the royalties it would have to pay would provide it with some certainty in moving forward with its plans.
The National Resource Defense Council also has criticized a provision in the recent financial industry bailout bill that provides a tax credit of 50 percent for a company's first year of capital investment in oil shale and oil sands refineries. McEnaney fears those credits could extend to efforts by companies such as Shell to recover shale underground through methods such as heating it. The credits could further encourage oil shale development to occur too quickly and without adequate analysis of impacts, he believes. However, the credit would expire after 10 years, which Shell spokesman Tracy Boyd said would be too soon for the company to be able take advantage of it. He said he doesn't think it would apply to Shell's project because by definition a refinery processes fuel above ground -- after it has been produced.
Meanwhile, here's an article from EV World about the nexus between water and energy production, which includes video of a lecture from Sandia National Laboratories' Dr. John A. Merson. Out here in the arid west energy production has a huge impact on water supplies both in requirements for energy production -- such as electrical generation -- and in impacts to groundwater. Energy production for natural gas can deplete groundwater (coal be methane production) and pollution of groundwater (benzene in springs around Parachute, Colorado).
Be sure to click through and view the whole lecture.
More Coyote Gulch coverage here.
Category: Climate Change News
7:27:47 AM 
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From the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel: "A group representing Colorado River Basin interests in water discussions within the state has come out in opposition to Amendment 52. The Colorado Basin Roundtable voted unanimously to oppose the measure, which would divert severance tax funds from the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and water supply projects to transportation projects. "The roundtable believes the state of Colorado faces too many critical water supply issues to straitjacket funding by the policies of this ballot question," the group said in a news release last week. The group also opposes putting into the Colorado Constitution a fiscal policy now under the state Legislature's purview."
More Coyote Gulch coverage here.
Category: Colorado Water
7:03:03 AM
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Speakers at last week's "Governor's Conference on Managing Drought and Climate Risk tried to look into the future and predict how Colorado will look in the future, according to the Pueblo Chieftain. From the article:
Historian Patricia Limerick of the Center for the American West at CU pointed out that early day explorers to Colorado like Zebulon Pike and Steven Long believed the plains and mountains of the state to be uninhabitable and looked upon them as the natural bounds to civilization on the continent. Human ingenuity has proved them wrong 200 years later, she said. Engineers deserve more credit than they are usually given by historians for taming the waters of the state and developing solutions demanded by policymakers. That's what the policy makers - Gov. Bill Ritter and his top water advisers - were asking for at the drought summit. All of the state speakers emphasized the meeting was a time to share ideas about what answers could look like if dire climate predictions come true.
Some of the predictions, taken from the CU-CWCB report, included:
A warming trend of 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2025, and 4 degrees by 2050.
Higher winter temperatures on the Eastern Plains, and creeping up into higher elevations in the mountains.
A greater dependence on rainfall, rather than snowfall, for water supply. There may be little change in overall precipitation, which is already highly variable.
An earlier spring runoff, which already is coming two weeks earlier than it historically occurred.
Declining runoff in the Colorado River basin. Runoff changes for the South Platte, Rio Grande and Arkansas basins have not been fully studied.
A drop in overall water supply by 2050, predicted by the National Academies of Science, as Colorado's population is expected to almost double in the same time frame.
Here's an article about the economic folly of drying up agriculture to water population growth, from the Pueblo Chieftain:
Mortgaging Colorado's future on agricultural water is a mistake, advocates for agricultural users said last week. "We have a very diverse agricultural economy in Colorado, and it's highly dependent on water," Colorado Commissioner of Agriculture John Stulp told a conference looking at drought and climate change.
Cattle is the leading product in Colorado's $16 billion farm economy. Farm receipts in the state total $5.6 billion, with another $1.6 billion spent to equip them. Processing industries - everything from beef and beer to tea and milk - account for another $9 billion...
From a worldwide perspective, however, it makes little sense to raid agriculture, Stulp said. There are 6.6 billion people in the world today, and 9 billion are projected by 2050. As diets improve there will be need for more food. Even so, food stockpiles have been dwindling for several years. While the United States is losing farm ground, acreage is increasing worldwide. In Colorado, however, wells have been shut down or restricted. Water taken for energy development and growth likely would be taken from agriculture. Crops grown for use as fuel take land away from the food supply. Agriculture is trying to find more drought-resistant crops, look for efficiencies and reduce consumptive use, but it's an uphill battle, Stulp said. "Ag is doing all it can to make use of its water, but there are certain limitations," Stulp said...
Planning for drought is more difficult yet, said Reagan Waskom of the Colorado Water Institute, a state research center. "The state's 30,000 farms and ranches are family-owned. How does drought planning occur? One operation at a time," Waskom said. A farmer makes his decisions on what to plant or raise in January or February, when conditions during the growing season are largely unknown, Waskom said. Farmers need reliable forecasts, risk-management tools and ways to firm their own water supplies, he said...
Pat O'Toole, president of the Family Farm Alliance, said many of the Western dams built to irrigate farmland are a century old. Even more storage for cities could ease the pressure on ag water, he said. "I don't necessarily think we need storage just for agriculture, but for municipalities so they can live on somebody else's water and not ours," O'Toole said. O'Toole said cities need to stop looking at agriculture as a reservoir for times of trouble and develop more equitable transfer policies. "A bit of rain perks you up and makes you think everything's going to go better. In the last 10 years there's been little of that," O'Toole said. "We're the canaries in the coal mine, and there's a train wreck coming."
Here's a look at Colorado water providers and their efforts at conservation, from the Pueblo Chieftain. They write:
[University of Colorado researcher Douglas Kenney] assessed the performance of cities during the 2002 drought and said the procedures put in place by cities then were appropriate and effective. Not only did they cut immediate water use, but they provided the public with an education about the semi-arid land in which they live. The focus during the drought was managing the demand for water rather than trying to build a bigger supply, impossible at the time since there was no water to be had. Kenney said demand management is easier, can be done in increments, saves energy and relieves pressure on other systems. "The most important reason is, it works," Kenney said. Between March and August 2002, nearly every city on the Front Range adopted restrictions aimed at lawn watering, while encouraging customers to water trees...
Other speakers at the conference had differing views. One urged longer term restrictions to acclimate water users to doing with less over time, while another pointed out that lawns provide a cushion for drought. Kenney said there was nothing wrong with slamming on the brakes. "Demand restrictions are quick," Kenney said. "It only took two or three days to get results." Demand dropped immediately by 20 percent to 56 percent in Front Range cities. Most of the cities spent little on actually enforcing restrictions, relying on education and peer pressure to get the point across. While some places like Castle Rock had restrictions going into the drought, others like Aurora kept them in place afterward. Consumption of water remained lower after the drought in most places, including Pueblo, as public attitudes remain shifted. One person wondered aloud how new arrivals to the state would get the same message...
Denver also is working with other Front Range providers - Aurora, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins and the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District - to develop a drought vulnerability assessment. "We need a mechanism that will bridge the gap for climate projections and turn it into something useful," said Laura Kaatz, a climate scientist for Denver Water. Boulder has a four-level drought alert system, said water consultant Lee Rozaklis. It looks at weather indicators - snowfall, streamflow and water in storage - early in the year and mandates specific action when projected levels start to fall. Mark Pifher, director of Aurora water, said cities also have to be cognizant of water quality issues if supplies dwindle in the future. This is particularly important for Aurora, which will see more "demand hardening" as it physically reuses its available return flows through the Prairie Waters Project.
Meanwhile, here's a look at Colorado's National Forests and their role in the water picture statewide, from the Pueblo Chieftain:
Colorado's forests, already under siege from pine beetles, fire and mismanagement, could fare worse with climate change. Federal stewards don't want to see that happen. "Forests serve as a natural sponge that absorbs, stores and slowly releases water to the rivers," said Tony Dixon, regional deputy forester with the U.S. Forest Service. "If you have no forests, you have no rivers. They are like water towers and they are under siege."[...]
Today, about 22 percent of Colorado land is in national forests, providing 68 percent of the water that flows within and out of the state. Pine beetle damage to the forests is becoming more obvious each year, as hillsides turn red, then gray. Nights in the mountains are no longer cold enough to kill the bugs. Fires have increased, with four times as many fires burning six times as many acres. The fire season is 78 days longer than it once was. The average time to control a fire has increased to 37 days from eight days. And because we hate to see the forests burn, small trees once controlled by smaller periodic fires have been allowed to grow, becoming ladder fuel for the larger fires, Dixon said...
Sage and grasslands also are threatened, said Steve Torbit, regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation. Wildlife industries - hunting, fishing or just watching - are a $33.6 billion business for the American West, but habitat is shrinking. "Predictions of more habitat loss (from climate change) don't leave a lot of tools in my tool box," Torbit said. "Sagebrush and grassland areas are crucial to maintain these landscapes for wildlife."
In the water itself, Trout Unlimited is assessing what the worst impacts of climate change could be, said Greg Espegren, aquatics specialist. The group uses a conservation success index to measure the viability of species. It is particularly concerned with the cutthroat trout in the Colorado River basin. The risks include wildfires that degrade streams through erosion and sedimentation, increased water temperatures and winter floods.
The state's ski industry is bracing for impacts as well, trying to begin management practices that will help it avoid some of the perils resorts in other countries have faced, said Luke Cartin, environmental manager for Vail resorts. As glaciers are melting and snow lines rising, ski areas are losing terrain. In Europe and Australia, more impacted by global warming trends so far, some traditional ski areas have closed. Higher elevations in Colorado are projected to retain at least some snowpack because the earlier melting is occurring mainly below 8,000 feet, but there have already been years when snows failed to show up. Ski areas are increasingly reliant on snow-making equipment.
More Coyote Gulch coverage here.
Category: Colorado Water
6:55:47 AM
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© Copyright
2008
John Orr.
Last update:
11/1/08; 7:59:31 PM.
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