Global Warming, Alternative Energy? It's Not Working In Nome, Alaska

Some say Arctic sea ice is melting and will soon disappear completely.  Sea level will rise, polar bears will drown.  Some say we can replace fossil fuels like gasoline and diesel with alternatives like solar, wind, and geothermal energy.  We've all heard the bogus stories and unrealistic claims.  Well, we're now seeing how this la-la land dreaming is playing out this winter in Nome, Alaska.
 
All the Billions spent on climate modeling, the United Nations cajoling and bullying of lawmakers and taxpayers, and the predictions of catastrophic warming seem like a cruel joke. I bet the people of Nome wish Al Gore could be there with them to warm things up a bit and share the fun.
See the following article from the hypocritical New York Times, long a perpetuator of the myth of man-caused global warming, for the story.
Peter

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 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/us/icebreaker-slowly-carves-path-for-tanker-to-bring-emergency-fuel-to-alaska.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23


January 9, 2012

A New Race of Mercy to Nome, This Time Without Sled Dogs
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

NOME, Alaska — In the winter of 1925, long after this Gold Rush boomtown on the Bering Sea had gone bust, diphtheria swept through its population of 1,400. Medicine ran dangerously low, and there was no easy way to get more. No roads led here, flight was ruled out and Norton Sound was frozen solid.



Parents still read books to their children about what happened next: Balto, Togo, Fritz and dozens more sled dogs sprinted through subzero temperatures across 674 miles of sea ice and tundra in what became known as the Great Race of Mercy. The medicine made it, Nome was saved and the Siberian huskies became American heroes.



Eighty-seven years later, Nome is again locked in a dark and frigid winter — a record cold spell has pushed temperatures to minus 40 degrees, cracked hotel pipes and even reduced turnout at the Mighty Musk Oxen’s pickup hockey games. And now another historic rescue effort is under way across the frozen sea.



Yet while the dogs needed only five and a half days, Renda the Russian tanker has been en route for nearly a month — and it is unclear whether she will ever arrive. The tanker is slogging through sea ice behind a Coast Guard icebreaker, trying to bring not medicine but another commodity increasingly precious in remote parts of Alaska: fuel, 1.3 million gallons of emergency gasoline and diesel to heat snow-cloaked homes and power the growing number of trucks, sport utility vehicles and snow machines that have long since replaced dogsleds.



For the moment, this latest tale appears less likely to produce a warm children’s book than an embarrassing memo, and maybe a few lawsuits, about how it all could have been avoided.



“People need to get fired over this,” said David Tunley, one of the few Musk Oxen at the outdoor rink on an evening when the temperature was minus 23. “The litigation of whose fault it is will probably go on forever.”



How Nome ended up short on fuel this winter is a complicated issue unto itself, but trying to get the Renda here to help has become a sub-Arctic odyssey — and perhaps a clunky practice run for a future in which climate change and commercial interests make shipping through Arctic routes more common.



“There is a lot of good knowledge that is coming out of this,” said Rear Adm. Thomas P. Ostebo, the officer in charge of the Coast Guard in Alaska.



The learning curve has been steep. Since leaving Vladivostok, Russia, on Dec. 17, the 370-foot Renda has encountered a fuel mix-up in South Korea and storms that prevented it from going to Japan; it has received a waiver of the Jones Act in the United States (to allow the foreign vessel to finally pick up gasoline in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, before transporting it to Nome) and broad support for its mission from Alaska’s Congressional delegation; it has been joined by the Coast Guard’s only operative icebreaker built for the Arctic, the Healy. It has had to alter its route to avoid the world’s most substantial population of a federally protected sea duck called the spectacled eider.



As of Monday, the Renda and the Healy were about 140 miles south of Nome, having made little progress from the night before. Wind, current and the brutal cold are causing complications with breaking what is known as first-year ice — the kind that forms each winter and melts in the summer as opposed to lasting year-round. As soon as the Healy breaks open a channel, ice closes in behind it, squeezing the Renda.



The Coast Guard has been among the most vocal government agencies in asking for more money and better equipment to deal with increased commercial activity in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Admiral Ostebo said the Healy, a medium-duty icebreaker, was fully capable of making the trip to Nome but that using a heavy-duty polar icebreaker — the Coast Guard owns two: one is retired, the other under repair until at least 2014 — might have made a difference.



He said the Coast Guard had thought that having the Healy lead the Renda would have been easier, “but it turns out that the pressure that ice is under quite frankly makes it hard to move through for the Renda.” He said these were “conditions I think we’re going to see a lot in the future.”



If the Renda reaches Nome, it would be making the first maritime fuel delivery through sea ice in Alaska history. The effort comes as many interested parties are anticipating business that could develop as Shell plans to conduct new exploratory offshore oil drilling just north of here as early as this summer.



“These are not cowboys out here trying to do crazy things,” said Mark Smith, the chief executive of Vitus Marine, the Alaska company that proposed using the Renda to representatives for Nome. “All of the stakeholders involved in this mission look at it as a learning experience as they consider further development.”



Nome usually receives its winter supply of fuel in early fall, before ice hardens over the Bering. But last fall, multiple shipping delays and then a major storm prevented the fall shipment from arriving. Many people here blame Bonanza Fuel, one of two local companies that barge in fuel and the one that failed to ensure its fall delivery made it. But the fuel company’s owner blamed the barge company for delaying shipments.



“Certainly we’ll evaluate how this situation came together,” said Jason Evans, the chairman of the Sitnasuak Native Corporation, which owns Bonanza, “so that we’re not put in this situation and the community of Nome’s not put in this situation again.”



Officials say Nome could run out of heating oil by March. A normal fuel barge cannot make the trip until ice melts in June or July.



Dogs still pull sleds to Nome, in the annual Iditarod race each March, but there are still no roads here from outside. There are, however, more modern means of transportation. Mr. Evans said Nome could resort to flying in fuel through hundreds of small shipments but that shipping costs alone would be more than $3 per gallon. Fuel here already approaches $6. Conservation can only go so far.



“You have to heat your home when it’s 36 below,” he said.



The effort has prompted observers far and wide to comment on what it all means as the United States tries to figure out how to navigate the increasingly important Arctic. One question not to ask here: Regardless of how it came to this, is tiny Nome worth all the effort?



“Why should we be treated any differently than the Lower 48?” said Mayor Denise L. Michels, noting that the Coast Guard also escorts commercial shipments through ice and difficult conditions in the Great Lakes and off the East Coast. “We keep saying that we are an Arctic nation.”

Gas Hydrates: A Major New Source Of Natural Gas?

Is this Al Gore's worst nightmare? A huge new source of carbon dioxide - producing energy? This could make Sarah Palin look like Joan of Arc with her pipeline to transport natural gas from Alaska's North Slope to the lower 48 United States. I can already hear the howling and whining from environmentalists. Maybe if we really want to pull America out of this economic depression we should put tens of thousands of people to work producing this gas and building this pipeline immediately. Mr. Obama, are you listening?

Peter

Study Points to Major Source of Natural Gas in Alaska
By Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, November 12, 2008; A06

Federal scientists have concluded that Alaska's North Slope holds one of the nation's largest deposits of recoverable natural gas in the form of gas hydrates, a finding that could open a major new front in domestic energy exploration.

Researchers have speculated for years that gas hydrates -- a combination of gas and water locked in an icelike solid that forms under high pressure and low temperatures -- could provide an important source of natural gas in the United States and worldwide.

Today the U.S. Geological Survey will release a study estimating that 85.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas can be extracted from Alaska's gas hydrates, an amount that could heat more than 100 million average homes for more than a decade.

Brenda Pierce, manager of the agency's energy resources program, called the find "groundbreaking" and said, "I don't want people to think our problems are solved, but this has real potential."

Part of the reserve's significance, federal officials said, is that gas companies will be able to tap into it with existing technology. A coalition of American and international experts conducted three tests on gas hydrates over the past five years in the United States and Canada and demonstrated that the gas can be extracted by reducing the pressure that binds them together. Gas hydrates have also been found in the Wyoming basin, Texas's western Gulf basin, and the San Juan basin in New Mexico and Colorado, as well as in several offshore areas.
"The assessment points to a truly significant potential for natural gas hydrates to contribute to the energy mix of the United States and the world," Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said in a statement. "This study also brings us closer to realizing the potential of this clean-burning natural gas resource."

The prospect of extracting methane from gas hydrates, some of which lie below the permafrost of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, worries some environmentalists.
Athan Manuel, who directs the lands program for the Sierra Club advocacy group, said that the refuge should remain "inviolate" and that tapping into gas hydrates can harm less-pristine areas as well.

"The process is still pretty damaging to ecosystems," Manuel said, noting that companies must inject water into the reservoirs in the same way they extract methane from coal beds in the West. "Bottom line, this is a very destructive way to extract natural gas."
Pierce said the government will examine the potential environmental effects of tapping gas hydrates as "the next step" in its analysis. "Like every resource, it's going to have impacts," she said.

USGS Director Mark Myers said the process is likely to be less damaging than coal bed methane extraction because water is more plentiful on the North Slope and it will not take nearly as many wells to extract the gas. "The water disposal is not nearly so environmentally challenging," he said.

As conventional sources of domestic natural gas continue to decline, energy companies are eager to exploit what Myers called "innovative supplies." In August, ConocoPhillips received $11.6 million in funding from the Energy Department to test its gas hydrate production technology on the North Slope, and company spokesman Charlie Rowton said yesterday that "both globally and for the domestic market, methane hydrates represent a potentially huge new source of natural gas."

Even if industry manages to extract natural gas from these reserves -- long-term tests on hydrates will take place between 2009 and 2011 -- it will be years before companies will be able to send this gas to the lower 48 states. Such shipments probably would take place via the natural gas pipeline that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has championed, which will not be complete for at least a decade.

The Alpine Field, North Slope, Alaska

A ConocoPhillips drilling rig near the Alpine field, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle on Alaska's North Slope.
By Barney Gimbel; photographs by Thomas Dworzak/Magnum

"We're looking to see if we left anything behind," says Jim Darnall, a geophysicist for Conoco.

The orange cable looks like the extension cord you might keep in your garage, but every 100 feet or so, three small blue geophones, which are used to detect seismic waves, are planted into the ground. The idea is to "shoot seismic," an oil driller's term for a laborious surveying process that maps the earth's subsurface.

Gas flares at Conoco's Alpine field in Alaska, the nation's fourth largest. The 100-acre facility is effectively a small town, with its own fire department, sewage treatment plant, medical clinic, and airstrip.

The 400 workers at Alpine field work 12-hour shifts, and sleep in small dorm rooms like this one. Most rotate in and out every two weeks.

Workers maintaining wellheads at Alpine.

A technician in the (heated) control room at Alpine.

A worker at Alpine. Pickups idle all the time up here; once you turn an engine off for any length of time, you may never get it started again.

The 800-mile Trans Alaska pipeline near its northern terminal at Prudhoe Bay.

The Alpine Field is something I have an intimate knowledge of and probably played a significant role in finding. See the following photos.

Peter

Hunting for oil beneath the ice

source
There's a new rush for petroleum from Alaska to the North Pole. Can ConocoPhillips and other energy giants find another Saudi Arabia under the ice?
By Barney Gimbel, writer
(Fortune) -- It's 25 below outside, and the heat in the van is busted. Randy Boyer, a burly ConocoPhillips contractor in thermal coveralls, navigates the slick ice road. "This is nothing," he says, keeping his eye on the thin red line running down the center of the road. "The other week we had a whiteout, and I was stuck in my truck for 36 hours." Right now we're some 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and it's so white outside that the distant horizon appears to blend seamlessly into the blustery sky.

Boyer pulls over into a small mobile base camp to switch trucks. We're deep in the tundra of Alaska's North Slope, and you need a vehicle with tanklike treads or special tires to venture off-road. After a bone-rattling 15-minute ride - the tundra only looks flat - we catch up with a red truck creeping across the frozen landscape. A worker bundled in a blue coat of Michelin-man dimensions trudges behind it, uncoiling orange cable that looks like the extension cord you might keep in your garage. Every 100 feet or so, he plants three small blue geophones into the ground.
He's setting up to "shoot seismic," an oil driller's term for a laborious surveying process that maps the earth's subsurface. It will take a team of 100 workers more than a week to lay a precise grid of 21,000 geophones, which act as motion detectors, along 145 miles of wire. After that a truck known as a "vibrator" will make stops along the grid, lowering a large plate onto the ground. The apparatus creates seismic waves - tiny earthquakes - that are recorded by the geophones. Geologists in Anchorage will then spend six months transforming that data into a picture of the underground formations. Some of them, they hope, will contain oil.

The folks at Conoco surveyed this slice of barren land about a decade ago. But times are a bit desperate up here in North America's largest oil region, and they've come back. "We're looking to see if we left anything behind," says Jim Darnall, an acquisition geophysicist for ConocoPhillips, as he brushes ice off his bushy gray beard. "We're trying to milk this field anyway we can."

Is this what America's late-20th-century oil paradise has been reduced to - the petroleum equivalent of rooting for loose change in the cushions of a sofa? U.S. crude production is at its lowest since 1949, and nowhere has that decline been steeper than in Alaska, where oil output is less than half what it was a decade ago. The fields that since the late 1970s have provided more than 20% of America's oil are slowly running dry. It's a phenomenon that is hardly limited to Alaska. The world's five largest oil companies are replacing only 82% of the oil they pump each year, as once-prodigious fields fade and state entities in such countries as Venezuela and Russia consolidate ever more control over their oil and gas.

The combination of falling reserves and $100-plus oil is sparking a frenzy of oil and gas activity in Alaska the likes of which hasn't been seen since the state's initial oil boom more than three decades ago. ConocoPhillips (COP, Fortune 500), Alaska's biggest producer and America's third-largest oil company, is spending huge sums to re-explore old stomping grounds like the North Slope. The company is also investing in heavy-oil technology and early preparation for a proposed $30 billion natural gas pipeline. "We think the Arctic is the new frontier," says Conoco CEO Jim Mulva, "and it's not just in Alaska. The potential exploration opportunities go all the way around the Arctic Circle."

The excitement extends even farther north, where the shrinking ice cap is helping spur a new race for territorial supremacy. In August, Russia planted a flag 2 1/2 miles below sea level at the actual North Pole, laying claim to what it says are vast quantities of oil and gas. Some experts estimate that a quarter of the planet's undiscovered energy resources are buried at the top of the planet. But that figure is highly speculative - much of the Arctic is unexplored - and even if you find something, how do you transport it through a sea of ice?

A Lot Of Money Being Spent On Arctic Oil Exploration

Oil companies just spent a record $2.7 BILLION dollars for the "right" to drill exploratory wells in the Chuckchi Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska. This is a huge amount of money, in fact, the most ever spent in Alaska, onshore or offshore. This tells me, as a geologist who is familiar with the area and its history of oil exploration and development, that the oil companies are very confident there is a lot of recoverable oil in rocks beneath the Chuckchi Sea. It also means they think they can find it, produce it, and move it to market. This is by no means a simple task, in what certainly must be the world's harshest environment.

Another aspect of this lease sale by the United States Federal Government, and one that is often overlooked, or ignored, is that all of the money from the winning bids goes into the governments coffers. Look at the amount of money the government has collected from lease sales in Alaska in the past (see the list below). The amount is mind-boggling. So much for the idea that "big oil" is bad. The government must love the oil and gas industry for all of the revenue it provides.

There is yet another aspect to this sale that I'm sure a lot of people overlook. Where does the oil industry get all the money to spend on these lease sales? Well, they get it from you and I, and anyone and everyone who uses petroleum products. The cost gets passed on to the consumer, of course. When you think about it, this is another form of taxation; in this case the money goes from your pocket to the oil companies, who then pay a large portion to the government. This does not even include the royalties companies pay when they actually produce oil and gas.

To make things even more depressing, think of the taxes you pay when you buy the gasoline made from this oil. We're being taxed, and taxed, and taxed again. Think about this the next time you fill your car with gas and complain that you're being "ripped off" by "big oil".
Peter


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Record bids for oil, gas leases in Chukchi Sea
$2.7 BILLION: Alaska won't get a penny from federal sale of remote Chukchi Sea tracts.
By WESLEY LOY

wloy@adn.com wloy@adn.com
Published: February 7th, 2008 12:11 AMLast Modified: February 7th, 2008 03:23 PM

Oil companies flush with cash and hungry for new discoveries bid nearly $2.7 billion Wednesday in a blockbuster competition for drilling rights in the forbidding Chukchi Sea.
The sum of winning bids is the most ever generated in an Alaska oil and gas lease sale, whether on land or offshore. The tally tops the $2.1 billion raised in a 1982 sale in the neighboring Beaufort Sea, and the $900 million in a 1969 land sale at Prudhoe Bay that launched giddy Alaskans into a new era of fabulous oil wealth.
All proceeds from Wednesday's sale go to the U.S. government, and none to the state, as the offshore acreage is under federal jurisdiction.

Oil men, journalists and others packed a Loussac Library auditorium in Anchorage and listened with anxiety and awe as officials announced hundreds of often jaw-dropping bids on tracts totaling 2.8 million acres in the Chukchi, a shallow and icy polar sea between Alaska and Russia.
The competition was pitched as two global powers -- Shell and Conoco Phillips -- offered fortunes on some of the same tracts. Onlookers sometimes sounded like a football crowd, going "ohh!" or "aww!" when one company barely beat out the other.

The day's highest bid for a single tract came from the Dutch company Shell at $105,304,581.
"It's fabulous," Jason Brune, head of the Resource Development Council for Alaska, said during a break in the three-hour bid reading. "The big boys came -- flexed their muscles."
Not everyone was happy.

A handful of environmental activists and Native leaders from the coastal villages of Point Hope and Barrow stood in subzero cold outside the library to protest the sale. They fear industrial activity and spills could drive away or kill whales villagers hunt for food.
"Our ocean is our garden," said a shivering Earl Kingik, a Point Hope whaler.
He and other protesters said they don't believe oil companies can clean up offshore spills, and they said the companies demonstrated with their huge bids they have the power to steamroll village concerns.
Point Hope and a coalition of environmental groups have filed suit challenging Wednesday's lease sale.

Oil company executives and officials with the U.S. Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore industry, said whales, polar bears and other wildlife will enjoy many protections from explorers. For example, all the leased acreage is at least 50 miles out to sea. And companies would be encouraged to use pipelines, not tankers, to carry oil to market.
Randall Luthi, director of the Minerals Management Service, said world energy demand is rising and the Chukchi Sea offers a chance to reduce U.S. dependence on oil and gas imports.
The government estimates the Chukchi could hold 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Those numbers compare to reserves in the Prudhoe Bay area.
"It's a great sale, a great commitment," Luthi said. He noted the $2.7 billion in winning bids far surpassed his agency's prediction a couple of years ago that the Chukchi sale would generate $67 million.

The last Chukchi sale, in 1991, generated $7.1 million.
Much has changed since then. The price of oil has rocketed to nearly $100 a barrel, and Shell and Conoco ran seismic surveys to test the geology beneath the Chukchi in the last couple of years, sometimes sharing the cost and the data, said Erec Isaacson, Conoco Alaska's exploration and land vice president.

Of the seven companies bidding, Shell was tops with $2.1 billion in winning bids, followed by Conoco with more than $506 million. Other bidders included the Spanish firm Repsol, the Italian firm Eni, Statoil Hydro of Norway, and two others.

The biggest bids centered on abandoned well sites in the Chukchi. Between 1989 and 1991, Shell drilled four exploratory wells with names like Popcorn and Burger, finding signs of oil and gas, and Chevron drilled one.

Because the Chukchi is so remote and devoid of roads, pipelines and ports, it'll take a major strike to justify the enormous cost of commercial development, oil company executives said.
But with other oil provinces around the globe either closed or played out, and with oil prices soaring, the Chukchi looks like a good gamble, they said.

"The time's right to come back to Alaska," said Annell Bay, a Shell exploration vice president.
Shell, which re-entered the Alaska picture in 2005, plans to drill in the Beaufort Sea this summer assuming it can overcome a court challenge.

Biggest Alaska oil lease sales
Year Sponsor Location High bids
2008 Federal Chukchi Sea$ 2.66 billion
1982 Federal Beaufort Sea $2.06 billion
1969 State North Slope $900 million
1984 Federal Beaufort Sea$ 867 million
1979 State Beaufort Sea $567 million
1976 Federal Gulf of Alaska $560 million
1984 Federal Navarin Basin $516 million
1979 Federal Beaufort Sea $489 million
1988 Federal Chukchi Sea $478 million
1983 Federal St. George $426 million
Sources: U.S. Minerals Management Service; Alaska Division of Oil & Gas

The Arctic Barbecues

The Arctic Barbecues

Local resident Lars Larsen explains how global warming is transforming summer life in Barrow, Alaska during a recent outdoor barbecue

(From Barrow, Alaska)

Each summer, Americans enjoy traditional activities such as swimming, camping, and going to the beach. While some of these events are limited to areas with the warmest temperatures, global warming is increasingly allowing summer fun-seekers even in the far north to enjoy them as well. In Barrow, Alaska, the summers are usually dismal, cold, and above all, short. Ice perpetually coats the Arctic Ocean, placing this coastal town at the edge of a endless blanket of white. But as summertime temperatures continue to soar in response to global warming (which is now known by all reputable scientists to be man-made) more summer activities are being enjoyed by the locals.

At a recent summer solstice party, residents of this traditionally frigid town were seen enjoying an outdoor barbecue. Many were able to go without gloves, which years ago would have been an open invitation to frostbite. "I love it", said local Lars Larsen, wiping frost from his full beard. "This is the warmest summer I can ever remember…even the polar bears are looking for a shady spot to escape the heat."

As party goers traded stories about the warm weather, children were seen frolicking in the melting snow. Parents dutifully applied sunscreen to their children's faces, which would normally be covered by insulated masks. One resident was overheard telling the others around him that he had actually turned off the heat in his house for several hours on a recent warm day. Others accused him of exaggerating. "That's Wild Bill for ya", noted one woman. "He always has a wild story to tell."

There has been endless speculation about how long the warming will last. Some in Barrow believe that one day their children or grandchildren will be able to walk to school without a coat. Others were seen passing around pictures that showed what the ocean looks like when it isn't covered by ice. "Sure is pretty", one man observed. "Kind of a blue color." Still, the inevitable return of winter brings them back to reality. "We'll soon be back inside, hiding from the cold, heating our car engines so they will start the next morning, and treating frostbite in our children when they have stayed too long outside after school". "But next summer," Wild Bill exclaimed loudly, "I'm gonna go outside with just a sweater on!" The others just laughed, "That's Wild Bill for ya…"

(stolen from:)