https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...f7aff6-081b-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html Energy Saudi Arabia Reveals Oil Output Is Near Its Ceiling Analysis by Javier Blas | Bloomberg July 21, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EDT During US President Joseph Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia, the world was so focused on how Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would respond to his plea to pump more oil immediately that it missed a bombshell: the level at which Saudi oil production will peak. It’s a lot lower than many anticipated. It’s lower than the Saudis have ever intimated. And with the world still hungry for fossil fuels, it spells long-term trouble for the global economy. For years, Saudi oil ministers and royals have sidestepped one of the most important questions the energy market faces: What is the long-term upper limit of the kingdom’s oilfields? The guesstimate was that they could always pump more, and for longer; if the Saudis knew the answer, they kept it secret. And then, almost casually on Saturday, Prince Mohammed broke the news, revealing that the ultimate maximum capacity is 13 million barrels a day. Prince Mohammed framed his answer emphasizing that the world — and not just countries like Saudi Arabia — needs to invest in fossil-fuels production over the next two decades to meet growing global demand and avoid energy shortages. “The kingdom will do its part in this regard, as it announced an increase in its production capacity to 13 million barrels per day, after which the kingdom will not have any additional capacity to increase production,” he said in a wide-ranging speech. It bears repeating: Saudi Arabia, the holder of the world’s largest oil reserves, is telling the world that in the not-so-distant future it “will not have any additional capacity to increase production.” Let that sink in. The first part of his announcement was well known. In 2020, Riyadh instructed its state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco to embark on a multiyear, multibillion-dollar program to boost its maximum production capacity to 13 million barrels by 2027, up from 12 million. The project is ongoing, with the first small additions coming online in 2024 followed by larger ones in the following three years. But the second part was completely new, setting a hard ceiling at a much lower level than the Saudis have themselves discussed in the past. Back in 2004 and 2005, during Riyadh’s last big expansion, the kingdom made plans to expand its pumping capacity to 15 million if needed. And there was no suggestion that even that elevated level was an upper limit.For example, Aramco executives told the CSIS think tank in Washington in 2004 that the company could sustain output levels of 10, 12 and 15 million barrels a day for 50 years if needed. At the time, Riyadh was fighting the views of the late Matt Simmons, author of the much-discussed book “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.” The book argued that peak Saudi oil production was just around the corner. One reason why Saudi Arabia is now setting a lower production ceiling may be related to climate change. Unsure about future oil demand growth, Riyadh may calculate that it’s foolish to spend billions of dollars in new capacity that may not be needed. In his speech, Prince Mohammed stressed the “importance of assuring investors” that policies do “not pose a threat to their investments,” with the aim of avoiding “their reluctance to invest.” I don’t think Prince Mohammed was talking about Wall Street money and hedge funds when he said “investors.” It’s a term that also covers Saudi Arabia’s interests. Oil demand forecasting is as much art as science — and the kingdom is conservative by nature. A decade ago, then Saudi energy minister Ali Al-Naimi said Saudi Arabia would be “lucky” to be pumping more than 9 million by the early 2020s. “Realistically, based on all projections that I have seen, including ours, there is no call on us to go past 11 million by 2030 or 2040.” The reality has turned far more positive than he anticipated: next month, Aramco will lift daily production to just above 11 million barrels. If demand proves stronger in the coming years than the Saudis currently anticipate, the kingdom may simply revise its investment plans, and announce it’s able to boost output further. But Prince Mohammed sounded rather definitive in setting that 13 million upper boundary. If money isn’t the constraint, then it must be geology. For years, Saudi Arabia has brought new oil fields online to offset the natural decline of its aging reservoirs, and allowed Ghawar, the world’s biggest oil field, to run at lower rates. As it seeks to boost production capacity and not just offset natural declines, Aramco is increasingly turning to more expensive offshore reservoirs. Perhaps Riyadh is less confident in its ability to add new oilfields. Ghawar itself is pumping far less than the market assumed. For years, the conventional wisdom was that the field was able to produce about 5 million barrels, but in 2019 Aramco disclosed that Ghawar’s maximum capacity was 3.8 million. If the obstacle to boosting production is geology, rather than pessimism about future oil demand, the world faces a rocky period if consumption turns to be stronger than currently expected. For now, Saudi peak production is a relatively distant matter, at least five years away. More urgent is whether Riyadh would be able to sustain its current output of 11 million — something it has achieved only twice in its history, and then only briefly — let alone increase it further. But that ceiling will matter towards the end of the decade, and perhaps even earlier. Despite widespread talk about peak oil demand, the truth is that, for now at least, consumption keeps growing. The world relies heavily on three nations for crude: the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia. Together, they account for nearly 45% of global total oil supply. With US investors unwilling to finance a return to the days of “drill, baby, drill” at home, American output growth is now slower than it was in the 2010s. Russia faces an even darker outlook as the impact of Western sanctions not only curb current supply, but also hinder its ability to expand in the future. In an era of climate change, Saudi oil production will be, ironically, even more important. And Riyadh has now, publicly, set a hard limit on how much it can pump. This time, oil demand will have to peak — because there won’t be additional supply. Ultimately, there are only two routes to that outcome: Voluntarily, by shifting to low-carbon sources of energy such as nuclear power or wind; or by compulsion, via much higher oil prices, faster inflation and slower economic growth. If we don’t take the first path, we’ll be forced to follow the second.
The Mediterranean sea no longer acts as a carbon sink and releases CO2 into the atmosphere. Thursday October 06, 2022 · 6:32 AM MDT The gorgeous blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean are dotted with ancient sea coast villages and cities. The fertile crescent is where agriculture began, and at that moment, the biosphere would never be the same again. Both have "sustained humans for millennia." It took us thousands of years to reach the point where the earth has become overpopulated; the bounty of nature is now unsustainable as we consume more resources than can be replaced by nature. The oceans and land are poisoned with toxic chemicals, plastics, and the extraordinary destruction of our habitat by burning fossil fuels to power our civilization. Humans have never experienced the temperatures that we see today, we did not evolve in this climate, and neither has the majority of the food chain that nurtures us. We are on borrowed time. In the past few hundred centuries, the industrial revolution burned carbon-based fuels has gradually warmed the climate. However, the Great Acceleration after World War Two brought us to the point of the sixth mass event we face today. Our Epoch is now referred to as the Anthropocene. Since 1950 sapiens' population has exploded, and medical breakthroughs along with burning fossil fuels for industrialization and powering indoor heating and cooling have thrived. We live in luxury that our ancestors never experienced and never dreamed was possible. Scientists have nicknamed this period the Great Acceleration. The oceans have protected us from harm as they absorb most of the CO2 that we funnel into the atmosphere second after second. The oceans sequester the carbon and store it in the depths. But depressingly, the Mediterranean Sea can no longer perform this function. Instead, the eastern half of the Mediterranean sea has become a source of deadly greenhouse gas; this finding might be the first discovery of carbon release in a saltwater basin. Wired Magazine writes on the science of the phenomenon in plain Engish. It is a compelling read, and I encourage all to read it. The scientific study is here. Think of this part of the Mediterranean as a cake made of liquid, essentially. Fierce sunlight heats the top layer of water that sits on cooler, deeper layers below. Out in the open ocean, where water temperatures are lower, CO2 dissolves in saltwater—which is what allows Earth’s seas to collectively absorb a quarter of the carbon emissions that humans pump into the atmosphere. But as the eastern Mediterranean Sea heats up in the summer, it can no longer absorb that gas and instead starts releasing it. It’s the same thing that happens in a bottle of soda that is carbonated with carbon dioxide. “You usually keep it cold, so the dissolved gasses will stay dissolved,” says Or Bialik, a geoscientist at the University of Münster in Germany. “If you leave it in your car for a while and try to open it, all the gasses are going to pop out at once, because when it warms, the capacity of the fluid to hold CO2 goes down.” Boom, fizz, you’ve got a mess on your hands. In the Eastern Mediterranean, this dynamic is rather more consequential for the climate than a sticky car interior, as the sea begins burping up great quantities of CO2 that the water can no longer hold. And Bialik and his colleagues have discovered that these warming, stratifying waters teem with a second carbon problem: The team recently caught aragonite crystals in sediment traps. Aragonite is a form of calcium carbonate, which oceanic creatures like snails use to build their shells. Except in the increasingly hot Eastern Mediterranean, the aragonite is forming abiotically. That’s another sign that the water is getting so warm that it’s releasing its carbon load. In these hot, shallow, stable waters, the fluid on top doesn’t mix much with the underlying colder layers, in contrast to deeper parts of the ocean, where upwelling brings up cooler H2O. “The conditions are so extreme that we can definitely generate calcium carbonate chemically from these waters, which was kind of a shock for us,” says Bialik, who coauthored a recent paper describing the discovery in the journal Scientific Reports. (He did the research while at the University of Malta and University of Haifa.) “It's basically like a beaker that sits there for a very long time, and it's long enough to get these reactions going and start generating these crystals.” snip It’s also worth noting that the Mediterranean Sea is one of the most microplastic-polluted water bodies in the world: In 2020, scientists reported finding 2 million particles in a single square meter of sediment that was only 5 centimeters thick. Whether aragonite crystals are forming around microplastics floating in the water column, Bialik doesn’t know. “They could probably form around any nucleation center,” says Bialik. “I suspect that microplastics may also be a possible one. But as scientists love to say, more research is needed.” Interesting Engineering weighs in. The acidity of the sea decreases as it warms and loses CO2, both from the water belching it up and from the proliferating crystals. This is the inverse of the process causing widespread ocean acidification: As humans emit more CO2 into the atmosphere, the oceans absorb more of it, causing a chemical reaction that increases acidity. However, as the Mediterranean warms and releases the carbon it has absorbed back into the atmosphere, it becomes more basic, reversing the acidification. It's unclear whether aragonite crystals are growing in number globally. The waters near the Bahamas and in the Persian Gulf take on a milky color due to calcium carbonate precipitating in far more There is no do-over on climate. Undoubtedly, we should be bracing ourselves for disruption in every part of our lives. Those who don’t give a fuck are killing themselves, me, and you. Voting for the party that recognizes reality is the most important thing we can do. QmFECACs.png https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2022...s-CO2-into-the-atmosphere?utm_campaign=recent
This article is declared completely biased and BS because of the bolded underlined line above. Consider it the Godwin's Law of stupid.
Just one of the other nine planetary boundaries we must not cross, crossed. Over 57,000 US Sites Likely Contaminated With “Forever Chemicals” News Published: October 12, 2022 | Sarah Whelan Credit: Patrick Hendry on Unsplash Read time: 4 minutes A new study has mapped over 57,000 sites in the US that are likely contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – also known as “forever chemicals”. The study is published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. PFAS are a risk to human health PFAS are a group of over 12,000 chemicals first produced in the late 1930s. Referred to as “forever chemicals” due to their durability, they are useful in non-stick cookware coatings, waterproof clothing and firefighting foams. However, these qualities also make them almost impossible to destroy meaning that PFAS can accumulate in the environment, contaminating water, air and even our blood. Research in recent decades has revealed numerous health implications of PFAS such as increased risk of cancer, decreased fertility, low birth weight and high cholesterol levels. Despite this, there is a notable lack of data regarding the extent and severity of PFAS contamination in the US. Federal efforts to test for PFAS in the US have focused on large drinking water systems, excluding private wells and having high reporting thresholds – meaning that the scale of known PFAS contamination is likely an underestimate of actual contamination. Dr. Alissa Cordner, co-director of the PFAS Project Lab and senior author of the study, explained the importance of monitoring for PFAS contamination: “Testing for PFAS is essential in order to understand the scope of PFAS contamination across the globe, and it also is necessary to protect public health in specific communities. There can be disincentives for PFAS testing – for example, testing is expensive, there are currently no federal regulatory levels for PFAS in drinking water and so it's not always clear what action should be taken when PFAS are detected, and remediation can be extremely costly. However, we also know that PFAS appear to be toxic at extremely low levels of exposure, so it is essential that more testing is done to identify where PFAS contamination poses a risk to the public.” The researchers in the current study set out to build a map of presumed PFAS contamination sites in the US, based on likely sources of PFAS in the absence of costly large-scale testing. Cordner says these findings “will let decision-makers prioritize locations for future testing and regulatory action.” Mapping presumed contamination The researchers combined high-quality geocoded information (i.e., with precise geographical coordinates) on sites that are likely contaminated with PFAS to build the presumptive contamination map. “We used already published scientific studies and government research programs that have identified specific types of locations that were sources of PFAS contamination – for example, extensive testing at Department of Defense sites suggests that military bases are presumptive sites of PFAS contamination because of the use of fluorinated firefighting foams,” explained Cordner. “We then gathered all of the publicly available, high-quality, nationwide data we could on the different types of presumptive PFAS contamination sites, and we kept in only the data that was specific enough in terms of its geolocation data that we could use it to create a nationwide map.” In total 57,412 sites were identified – this included 49,145 industrial facilities, 4,255 wastewater treatment plants, 3,493 military sites and 519 major airports. This reflects the applications and implications of PFAS as they are used in industrial manufacturing, in extinguishing fuel-based fires and are released in contaminated effluent after wastewater treatment. An interactive web version of the map can be found here. These findings were validated by cross-referencing them with a list of 503 sites that are known to be contaminated with PFAS. 35% of these sites were observed by the map, and a further 37% were “expected” sites, but could not be mapped due to the limitations of the data – meaning the total accuracy was 72%. Is this still an underestimation? Nevertheless, the authors state that this map of presumptive PFAS-contaminated sites remains a vast underestimate. For example, around 23% of the identified industrial facilities had to be excluded as they lacked geographical information. There is also a lack of publicly available information on other locations where PFAS are commonly used such as firefighting training sites, fuel storage facilities and locations of railroad or airplane crashes. “[Our] modelis designed to be conservative, so there are many types of industrial facilities that are possible sources of PFAS contamination, but we didn't feel confident that every single one of those facilities was a probable source of contamination – for example, dry cleaners, ski shops, septage businesses, etc. As more testing is done related to these industrial facilities, we may expand the types of industrial facilities included in our model,” Cordner elaborates. The researchers hope that this map of presumptive PFAS-contaminated sites can fill in the gaps left by the laborious nature of PFAS testing and identify hotspots to drive future monitoring and regulation of contamination. In the future, Cordner and colleagues hope that similar maps of presumptive PFAS exposure or PFAS-mediated illness could also be produced. Dr. Alissa Cordner was speaking to Sarah Whelan, Science Writer for Technology Networks. Reference: Salvatore D, Mok K, Garrett KK, et al. Presumptive contamination: a new approach to PFAS contamination based on likely sources. Environ Sci Technol Lett. doi: 10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00502 https://www.technologynetworks.com/...ntaminated-with-pfas-forever-chemicals-366501
The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record Our climate models could be missing something big. By Peter Brannen March 2021 Issue Photo Illustrations by Brendan Pattengale | Maps by La Tigre Images above: Glaciers from the Vatnajökull ice cap, in Iceland Brendan Pattengale is a photographer who explores how color can convey emotions in an image. In his photo illustrations throughout this article, the colors of the original photos have been adjusted, but the images are otherwise unaltered. This article was published online on February 3, 2021. Updated at 1:53 p.m. ET on February 11, 2021. We live on a wild planet, a wobbly, erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void. Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earth’s surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything. Our planet is fickle. When the unseen tug of celestial bodies points Earth toward a new North Star, for instance, the shift in sunlight can dry up the Sahara, or fill it with hippopotamuses. Of more immediate interest today, a variation in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere of as little as 0.1 percent has meant the difference between sweltering Arctic rainforests and a half mile of ice atop Boston. That negligible wisp of the air is carbon dioxide. Since about the time of the American Civil War, CO2’s crucial role in warming the planet has been well understood. And not just based on mathematical models: The planet has run many experiments with different levels of atmospheric CO2. At some points in the Earth’s history, lots of CO2 has vented from the crust and leaped from the seas, and the planet has gotten warm. At others, lots of CO2 has been hidden away in the rocks and in the ocean’s depths, and the planet has gotten cold. The sea level, meanwhile, has tried to keep up—rising and falling over the ages, with coastlines racing out across the continental shelf, only to be drawn back in again. During the entire half-billion-year Phanerozoic eon of animal life, CO2 has been the primary driver of the Earth’s climate. And sometimes, when the planet has issued a truly titanic slug of CO2 into the atmosphere, things have gone horribly wrong. Today, atmospheric CO2 sits at 410 parts per million, a higher level than at any point in more than 3 million years. And humans are injecting more CO2 into the atmosphere at one of the fastest rates ever. When hucksters tell you that the climate is always changing, they’re right, but that’s not the good news they think it is. [emphasis mine] “The climate system is an angry beast,” the late Columbia climate scientist Wally Broecker was fond of saying, “and we are poking it with sticks.” The beast has only just begun to snarl. All of recorded human history—at only a few thousand years, a mere eyeblink in geologic time—has played out in perhaps the most stable climate window of the past 650,000 years. We have been shielded from the climate’s violence by our short civilizational memory, and our remarkably good fortune. But humanity’s ongoing chemistry experiment on our planet could push the climate well beyond those slim historical parameters, into a state it hasn’t seen in tens of millions of years, a world for which Homo sapiens did not evolve. When there’s been as much carbon dioxide in the air as there already is today—not to mention how much there’s likely to be in 50 or 100 years—the world has been much, much warmer, with seas 70 feet higher than they are today. Why? More...