Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

[Guest]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

While idiots in the state government were doing this, the temperature at SF Airport for May 2008 was exactly normal: 58.7F. If the world is getting warmer, why isn't the temperature going up at SF? And why isn't the sea flooding into downtown SF because downtown SF is just a foot or two above mean sea level?

Maybe San Francisco is "special"? :confused:

[Verrocchio]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Extracting oil from Colorado shale makes about as much economic sense as extracting the gold out of a cubic metre of seawater. That is why Shell Oil pulled-out of the project: it costs more energy to extract the oil in shale than the oil in the shale yields in energy...... Dahhhhhhh.

The available reports on Shell's Colorado shale oil project contradict both of your points, Steve.

First, if Shell's in situ shale oil extraction process is successful, it will make eminent economic sense. Rising oil prices will make this even more so. More important than economic return is the EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested). They have projected this to be about 3.5:1.

Second, Shell Oil has not pulled out of the project. Instead, Shell has, and this was the point of the initial post in this thread, merely failed to achieve the successful test of their freeze-wall, a key element of their extraction technology.

[Master Shake]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

And what comes out the other end besides energy?

Isn't burning plastic how dioxins get made?

Dioxins are produced by incomplete combustion. I make some when I burn leaves every fall.

[Verrocchio]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Maybe it will happen yet.

Then again, maybe not...

The argument advanced by the global warming climate change proponents regards sunspots is that "correlation is not causation". That is certainly true, but I think it does work the other way also. What we think we know about our world is highly uncertain...and perhaps more subject to chance than the human species is willing or comfortable acknowledging?

The Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is “Dead”—What Does it Mean for Earth?
Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.

Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today's sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why.

"It continues to be dead," said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission, noting that it is at least a little bit worrisome for scientists.

Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening.

"It's a dead face," Tsuneta said of the sun's appearance.

Tsuneta said solar physicists aren't weather forecasters and they can't predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots.

That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.

Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by
about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Dr Chapman noted in The Australian recently.

If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning.

Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder.

Could something like this happen again? There’s no way to tell, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.

The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state. The unexplained phenomenon has been the topic of much intense scientific debate, as well as other millennial scale events.

Now this 11-year low in Sunspot activity has raised fears among a small but growing number of scientists that rather than getting warmer, the Earth could possibly be about to return to another cooling period. The idea is especially intriguing considering that most of the world is in preparation for global warming.

Canadian scientist Kenneth Tapping of the National Research Council has also noted that solar activity has entered into an unusually inactive phase, but what that means—if anything—is still anyone’s guess.

Another solar scientist, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, however, is certain that it’s an indication of a coming cooling period.

Sorokhtin believes that a lack of sunspots does indicate a coming cooling period based on certain past trends and early records. In fact, he calls manmade climate change "a drop in the bucket" compared to the fierce and abrupt cold that can potentially be brought on.

Well said, GRG55. It takes a modicum of humility to acknowledge the uncertainty of our knowledge about the world -- and the cosmos beyond. We have lately become aware that we have radically altered the atmosphere and risk raising the mean temperature of the earth by an estimated three degrees Centigrade. However, our projections for global warming are based on the assumption that the solar radiation is a constant. We may be in for a shivering surprise, if we learn that it's a variable!

For more on the ominous absence of sunspot activity, also referred to as the Maunder Minimum, see my February thread: Global Warming or Global Cooling?

[Verrocchio]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Maybe San Francisco is "special"? :confused:

There are other places that are "special" this year. Coastal areas are readily influenced by the ocean's temperature. Possible causes mentioned are La Nina and Pacific decadal oscillation. These can be considered local conditions that run counter-trend to the global warming trend -- or they could be effects of an approaching Maunder Minimum.


Chill out -- it's just a normal cool summer

Sunny days of '04 and '05 spoiled us, experts say
Published: July 15th, 2008 12:01 AM
Last Modified: July 15th, 2008 05:47 PM
People are exchanging their flip-flops and shorts for close-toed shoes and fleece more than usual this summer.


....


WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?
Judging by the pattern of June weather over nearly two decades, this should've been a warm summer, meteorologist David Vonderheide said.
"Every four to five years we would get a cool June, and then bang -- something has happened to interrupt this little cycle," Vonderheide said.
He thinks the strong forces of La Nina are the culprit. La Nina, a phenomenon that causes ocean temperatures to dip below average, kicked in this year and resulted in a drop in land temperatures, Albanese said.
Another cause could be Pacific decadal oscillation, a cyclical period of lower ocean temperatures that comes every 20 to 25 years.
There's a warm phase and a cold phase of the climate pattern, Vonderheide said.
"We were in a warm phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation in the '80s and '90s," he said. "(Some forecasters) believe we may have entered into the cold phase."
As in any coastal area, the ocean's temperature has great influence on the weather in Anchorage, forecasters say.


--Finish Article