Why Scientists Should Shape Environmental Policy

The case of fracking in Pennsylvania shows that if experts and fossil fuel industry leaders can cooperate, innovation is possible.

Signs opposing fracking are posted in the front of the yard of an Evans City, Pennsylvania, home on Feb. 23, 2012. KEITH SRAKOCIC/AP

Solar power, wind energy, smart grids, and energy storage often command the current discourse on energy innovation. Yet none of these technologies has transformed the U.S. energy landscape to the degree of high-volume hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking,” which is unlocking previously inaccessible crude oil and natural gas from underground reservoirs. Thanks to fracking, the 40-­year decline in U.S. domestic crude oil production has reversed, and the United States has recently become a net exporter of natural gas for the first time.

For many, this record-setting pace of oil and gas production is no cause for celebration, because it reflects a continued reliance on fossil fuels. Nevertheless, fracking has made oil and gas plentiful and cheap, making these energy resources hard to resist. Like it or not, we may depend on oil and gas—and the technologies that produce them—for the foreseeable future.

Fracking begins after a gas or oil well is drilled and involves injecting a mixture of water, sand, and chemical additives into rock. The high pressure causes the rock to fracture, providing conduits for the oil and gas to flow into the nearby wellbore. Public perceptions of fracking are shaped by controversies between an industry that has downplayed the risks of fracking and the citizens alleging that it has polluted air, contaminated drinking water, and scarred landscapes.

People within communities hosting fracking were scared, looking to experts to make sense of this issue. While experts were easy to find, definitive answers were in short supply. The deployment of fracking had raced ahead of the science needed to illuminate its potential impacts. As fracking activities evolve, uncertainties remain. MORE

Canada’s chief executives call for companies to disclose climate risks

Toronto financial district buildings in 2017. Wikimedia Commons Photo: Arild Vågen

Corporations in Canada have an “obligation” to disclose how the climate crisis will disrupt their long-term plans, according to a body formed by big-business leaders.

The Business Council of Canada, a lobby group representing chief executives of Canada’s largest corporations, released a report Oct. 30 that contains this recommendation and others designed to juice the economy.

The report, called “A better future for Canadians,” says the country needs to develop a “national resource and climate strategy,” in part to meet intensifying demands for cleaner energy, and Canadian companies “have an obligation to demonstrate how they are incorporating the risks of a changing climate into their long-term business strategy.”

“There’s increasing demands from shareholders, from regulatory authorities and so on,” John Dillon, senior vice-president for policy and corporate counsel at the Business Council of Canada, said in an interview with National Observer on the sidelines of the report’s unveiling in Ottawa.

“(Firms) have traditional risks in terms of securities, to disclose any material risks to their business,” he said. “At the same time, (climate-related risk) is a growing field of endeavor and study, without necessarily having clear guidelines on how exactly one assesses the risks that a changing climate may create to a business.”

A task force formed by the chief executives’ group wrote the report, which also recommends that the government “prioritize” infrastructure projects like oil and gas pipelines. “All Canadians have paid the price for inadequate pipeline infrastructure, which seriously constrains energy exports,” the report says. MORE

 

What Norway’s Big Divestment Decision Means for Fracking, Tar Sands and Global Oil Exploration

Main image: Bergen, Norway. Credit: Juan Antonio Segal, CC BY 2.0

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund — a state-owned investment fund worth approximately a trillion dollars — recently announced it was divesting from oil and gas exploration companies around the world. Not surprisingly, many oil and gas stocks declined following the announcement.

While this is good news for the climate, this was simply a smart business decision. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, known as the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), primarily exists due to Norwegian oil production. And the fund will continue to be a major investor in companies like Exxon.

It appears it’s just cutting its losses on money-losing endeavors like fracking in America, tar sands oil production in Canada, and frontier exploration by UK companies in Africa and South-East Asia.  MORE

The Coming EV Revolution

 

“Disruption” is a term that tends to be used casually when attempting to describe an industry or technological change on the horizon. Although the term may be overused in many contexts, it is hard to formulate a better word to describe the looming disruption that is certain to emanate from the increased adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).

Because EVs have far fewer moving parts than an ICE engine (roughly 20 moving parts in an EV as opposed to over 2,000 in an ICE), the lifetime maintenance costs are cheaper for an EV as compared to an ICE vehicle.  Because of this phenomenon alone, fleet-based companies are beginning to transition their fleet vehicles from ICE to EV-based technologies. For example, last year, IKEA announced that they will transition 100% of their home delivery fleet to EVs by 2030.

As transformative as this coming transition will be on the automotive industry, its impact across the energy industry will be hard to overstate. Most directly, the decrease in demand for refined gasoline will have ripple effects across the traditional oil and gas business. Also, even though the “energy trade” of a gallon of gasoline for a kilowatt hour of electricity is not 1 to 1, there will certainly be a much higher demand for electricity (as a fuel source) and for power infrastructure (as a distribution network). Add on the expectation for fully autonomous driving (which is already being beta tested in many jurisdictions), and the disruptive impacts become even larger.

Ironically, many doomsayers predicted the looming death of the traditional electric utility due to the rapid increase of renewable energy, reasoning that the uptick in grid integration of wind and solar generation resources would damage utilities. Now, the automotive industry could end up being the knight in shining armor to save the electric utility business, which will have to build (and charge customers for) increased infrastructure and power generation capacity to meet increased EV demand. Since EVs will be dispersed throughout the grid ecosystem, it is expected that more demand for generation (namely, solar generation by day, and wind generation by night) will be needed as the most cost-effective marginal unit of electric generation. So although rooftop solar and wind generation was once viewed as a potential death knell to the traditional utility, the coming EV revolution could end up making utilities the largest renewable energy developers and proponents due to the same factor that will drive the trend towards EV adoption: money. MORE

Why Canada’s boreal forest is gaining international attention

The green ribbon that makes up 75 per cent of Canada’s forests is among the largest intact wildernesses on the planet. Environmentalists call it ‘one of the last great conservation opportunities.’ What do we need to do to save the boreal?

As the world’s ecological crisis becomes better understood, the boreal forest is becoming somewhat of a celebrity because of one jaw-dropping stat: the Canadian boreal represents 25 per cent of the planet’s remaining intact forest, leading the world alongside the Amazon.

What’s more, around 80 per cent of Canada’s boreal is still relatively intact — a rare thing in today’s world.

But the boreal is facing threats from logging, mining, fires, pests and the many ways those factors interact with climate change.

“We have to recognize that this is one of the last great conservation opportunities in human evolution on Earth,” says Jeff Wells, science and policy director for the Boreal Songbird Initiative.

The boreal is one of our best hopes for mitigating the effects of climate change and keeping the Earth habitable. Yet it also houses huge deposits of oil and gas and minerals. The decisions being made to protect or exploit it could have repercussions for generations. MORE

Horgan bullish on Site C, LNG

Premier John Horgan speaks with an attendee at the Northern Resource Forum on Wednesday.- BRENT BRAATEN, PHOTOGRAPHER

Horgan also noted that some of the things done by the current government might seem surprising to an industrialist/business crowd.

He was bullish on developing liquefied natural gas. After careful review, he supported Site C Dam construction which he described as a “very controversial but fundamental project.”

He also stressed that two sub-topics of government were actually keystone enablers of natural resource development.

He said all the investment a government could make in the burgeoning tech sector was tantamount to investment in mining, forestry, oil and gas, agriculture and so forth because contrary to mental image, the tech sector did not mean making better video games, but rather making better tools for the natural resource sectors to use.

That might mean software, but it also might mean the 18-storey all-wood skyscraper now standing on the campus of UBC in Vancouver. SOURCE

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