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THE Global Dimming Thread (merged)

Re: China smog in California

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 02 Apr 2015, 22:27:43

"Because the CO2 (from burning coal) expended in collecting and compressing CO2 would more than equal to the CO2 'sequestered' in the process." You seem to be oblivious of the fact that the GHG created to produce the energy needed to drive the GHG recovery and piping to the injection wells will be a portion of the GHG that will be sequestered. You do understand that it is the power plant itself that will be driving the process, don't you? This isn't a case of one facility producing the energy to sequester GHG produced at another facility. Hint: think closed loop system.

Look at that original post again: it's not just the LARGEST CCS project on the planet but it will sequester GHG from the SECOND LARGEST source in the entire USA. You do understand why sequestration of coal sourced GHG in Texas is a critical issue, don't you? Texas burns almost twice as much coal as the #2 coal consuming state and as much as 23 other states COMBINED. And hell will freeze over before Texas ever reduces coal consumption. Our GHG is either going into the ground or into the atmosphere. Those are the only two choices: pick one. LOL.
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Re: China smog in California

Unread postby frankthetank » Fri 03 Apr 2015, 11:33:55

Rockman=

Why would a state like Texas with unlimited natural gas supplies need coal? Even if Texas ran out (never) of cheap natural gas supplies, they could tap into other unlimited natural gas supplies in the GOM, North Dakota, and other unlimited, infinite reserves? Every coal burner should be shut down and replaced with cheap, green, clean, pure, unable to run out or become expensive again natural gas....
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Re: China smog in California

Unread postby Poordogabone » Fri 03 Apr 2015, 12:51:13

Another incentive to stop buying cheap china coal produced consumer goods from Walmart.
Anyone else sees the cause and effect here?
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Re: China smog in California

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Fri 03 Apr 2015, 22:53:44

Frank - It's really just simple economics and about the size of the resource base. First, we have a much greater reserve base of lignite than NG. Many, many decades more. Second there's no market for it outside of Texas. Thus decades long purchase contracts which keeps the price stable and, more important, predictable. Low NG prices today...but for how long? Do you understand that we don't have an abundant supply of NG: the US is a net NG importer. Yes: we consume more NG then we produce. Not by very much but we're still a tad short. We also import more LNG then we export. Remember it wasn't that long ago NG was selling for 5X the current price.

The Texas govt is focused on the long game. It knows it needs to protect it's lignite resources that are worth many tens of $BILLIONS. Protect it from sanctions by the federal govt. Which is why it's working to mitigate GHG emissions with that first big CCS project. And with the projected growth of the state's economy they anticipate a 30% increase in electricity in a couple of decades.

I wasn't teasing: in general Texans don't give a crap about AGW. Our leadership in wind power wasn't motivated by "saving the plant". It's strictly good business. The same for the $1+ BILLION CCS project. So if increasing amounts of GHG from lignite consumption is sequestered do you have a problem? Trust me: the lignite is going to be burned whether the emissions are sequestered or not. Stopping that consumption would be as difficult as banning guns in the state. IOW it ain't going to happen. The feds will get our guns and coal-fired plants when they pry them from our dead hands. LOL.

You and every other US citizen outside of Texas might oppose our lignite consumption. And that would not change the future of coal consumption here IMHO.
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Re: China smog in California

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Fri 03 Apr 2015, 23:03:12

ROCKMAN wrote:Outcast - "Is this the same kind of argument you make in your incessant AGW denial". Are you off you f*cking meds again? LOL. Or have you ever read a single word in any of my dozens of posts where I readily acknowledge AGW? Son, it might be time for you to seek some professional help.

Maybe it's your f*cked up neural pathways that make you see dots between the "L" and the "a". Either that or as the great Texas comedian Ron White has said: "You can't fix stupid." LOL.

I made a mistake. I admit it.

I would have expected L.A. to blame someone, anyone, for their pollution problems (other than themselves), and since the left coast and their ilk HATES Texas, I connected dots that weren't there.

Too bad that calling other people stupid doesn't fix AGW. I won't lower myself to your level -- your arguments on AGW do the work for me.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: China smog in California

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Fri 03 Apr 2015, 23:11:50

Frank - And where will more of our "abundant" NG in Texas be going in the future? Mexico. Imagine how much NG they'll have to ship south to get an acceptable rate of return for a $900 million pipeline investment. But that pales in comparison to the $2.5 BILLION Pemex is kicking in:

Reuters - BlackRock and First Reserve have taken a joint stake worth around $900 million in the second phase of the Mexican NG pipeline project Los Ramones. Pemex will spend $2.5 billion on the second phase of the pipeline, which will eventually run from the U.S.-Mexico border to central Mexico to help satisfy growing demand.
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Re: THE Global Dimming Thread (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Thu 12 Nov 2015, 13:31:27

There is a fairly high probability that if China really does go into a major economic decline and shuts down many of there coal SOx particulate spewing power plants that are of the older generation the dimming over the Pacific and west coast of the USA will decline.

We know from post September 11, 2001 studies of contrail effects on global dimming can be as much as 1.5 to 2.2 C in impact virtually overnight.
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Re: THE Global Dimming Thread (merged)

Unread postby Keith_McClary » Thu 12 Nov 2015, 14:15:11

Tanada wrote:There is a fairly high probability that if China really does go into a major economic decline and shuts down many of there coal SOx particulate spewing power plants that are of the older generation the dimming over the Pacific and west coast of the USA will decline.

We know from post September 11, 2001 studies of contrail effects on global dimming can be as much as 1.5 to 2.2 C in impact virtually overnight.
Maybe the recent pollution spikes will spur some enforcement.
Much of China's fleet of coal plants are modern units fitted with scrubbers, units designed to remove sulphur dioxide, one of the gases blamed for causing acid rain and respiratory illness.

More than 70 percent of the approximately 700 gigawatts of coal-fired power in China have these units, but they cost money to use, adding around 10 percent to operating costs for power generators.

This means that the scrubbers are often not used, and attempts by the authorities to force utilities to turn them on are ignored.

The Washington Post reported in May last year that Huadian, one of China's largest power producers, turned off scrubbers at its plants near Beijing.

Fines levied on offending coal plants are likely to be lower than the cost of operating scrubbers, meaning power companies have little incentive to follow the laws.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/1 ... QB20140312
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Re: THE Contrails &

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Thu 12 Nov 2015, 15:34:20

Tanada wrote:Best solution, require short distance flights to remain below 25,000 feet and require long distance flights to fly at or above 40,000 feet. Contrails almost disappear, no more contrail pollution or global dimming caused.

Interesting. Any idea of the general fuel/economic impact of doing this? If the extra fuel required is minor (percentage wise) then this sounds like a good idea, if you can get the international community to agree on this.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: THE Contrails &

Unread postby Subjectivist » Thu 12 Nov 2015, 21:05:51

Outcast_Searcher wrote:
Tanada wrote:Best solution, require short distance flights to remain below 25,000 feet and require long distance flights to fly at or above 40,000 feet. Contrails almost disappear, no more contrail pollution or global dimming caused.

Interesting. Any idea of the general fuel/economic impact of doing this? If the extra fuel required is minor (percentage wise) then this sounds like a good idea, if you can get the international community to agree on this.


Hopefully AirlinePilot will chime in on this. From what I have read you can design engines that are highly efficient at a certain altitude and speed. I think that means you could design aircraft with lower altitude engines for the short range routes and other aircraft with high altitude efficient engines for the long range routes. I know that a lot of the short range aircraft around here are turboprops flying from Toledo to Detroit, Chicago or Cleveland, and those don't fly very high because the propellers are less efficient the higher above 20,000 feet you go.
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Re: THE Contrails &

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 13 Nov 2015, 01:40:22

Outcast_Searcher wrote:
Tanada wrote:Best solution, require short distance flights to remain below 25,000 feet and require long distance flights to fly at or above 40,000 feet. Contrails almost disappear, no more contrail pollution or global dimming caused.

Interesting. Any idea of the general fuel/economic impact of doing this? If the extra fuel required is minor (percentage wise) then this sounds like a good idea, if you can get the international community to agree on this.


http://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/contrail-edu/faq.php

Q: In which layer of the atmosphere do we normally see contrails?
A: Contrails usually form in the upper portion of the troposphere and in the lower stratosphere where jet aircraft normally fly, generally between about 8 and 12 km altitude (~26,000 to 39,000 feet). They can also form closer to the ground when the air is very cold and has enough moisture.


For most modern gas turbine powered aircraft you have a balanced set of competing properties to get the perceived best fuel efficiency. I say perceived because for a traditional jet engine passenger aircraft you have a low to mid range bypass ratio ranging from 2:1 to about 5:1, the early generation turbofan engines. The latest and best ultra high bypass ratio turbofans like the ones on the Boeing 777 are rated at 9:1 while the Airbus A380 has a bypass ratio of 8.7:1 and the 2015 version of the Airbus A320 has a super efficient 12.5:1 bypass ratio. In contrast a turboprop engine driving a free spinning unducted propeller has a nominal bypass ratio of 50:1 because very little of the engine thrust comes from the jet exhaust, almost all thrust is from the spinning propeller. The difference is propellers are most efficient below 450 knots air speed and 25,000 feet altitude while the low bypass ratio turbofans are more efficient at higher altitude in thinner air. Contrary to what most people think the high bypass ratio turbofans are an attempt to get the most thrust possible at lower altitude with the lowest noise output possible to let very heavy aircraft take off safely.

Passenger aircraft in particular do not normally climb to high altitude immediately after taking off. Instead they preform a series of step altitude increases especially on long distance flights. They will fly at say 27,000 feet for the first hour or more, then as they burn off fuel weight they will ask permission to ascend to a higher altitude of say 33,000 feet where they will cruise for another hour or two while burning off more fuel weight. Finally when they are light enough they will climb again to their flight plan cruise altitude of 37, 000-39,000 for the remainder of their travel time to the destination where they will descend and enter the holding pattern at much lower altitude before finally landing.

Because much of the thrust on even a high bypass turbofan actually comes directly from the jet exhaust a high altitude cruise is more fuel efficient at typical speeds of 550-650 mph, however no long distance passenger jet climbs directly to that altitude because for long distance flights they are very heavily loaded with fuel and they basically can't until they burn off a lot of weight. To follow the no contrail plan these long distance jets would skip the middle steps in the climb, they would fly at or around 25,000 feet until they burned off enough fuel to climb to their long distance cruise altitude when they had burned off enough weight. While this would be somewhat less fuel efficient than the step climb system used today it would greatly reduce the contrail formation by only spending a limited period in the 26,000-39,000 foot altitude band where most contrails form.

Ideally for short distance flying you should not use engines designed for very high altitude, it is a mismatch between engine capability and fuel efficiency. Climbing to a high altitude takes a lot of energy IOW fuel consumption, and for a short flight it doesn't pay off. For long and very long flights flying high once you have a low enough weight saves fuel because once you climb you stay at the high altitude for 3 or more hours. If you fly from Boston to Seattle you are in the air 6 hours or more so high altitude saves fuel. If on the other hand you are going from Boston to Detroit the whole trip is a little over two hours. For such a short flight the only way to make climbing to high altitude economical is to put a light fuel load on the aircraft so it can climb directly to high altitude without the cruise phase. Meanwhile you could put the same passengers in turboprop engine aircraft flying at 23,000 feet and get there in 2 hours 45 minutes instead of 2 hours 15 minutes and save a lot of fuel in the process. IOW if we only flew aircraft that were most suited depending on the route we could nearly eliminate contrails which are just a side effect of long cruises at optimum contrail altitudes.
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Re: THE Global Dimming Thread (merged)

Unread postby Subjectivist » Fri 13 Nov 2015, 16:16:34

Okay you made me look. The newest large passenger turboprop is from ATR, the 72-600 that came out this year will seat 78. It doesn't fly super fast, just a little over 300 mph, and it flies at or below 25,000 feet so contrails are rare.

http://www.atraircraft.com/products_app ... riesBD.pdf

To fly from Toledo to Boston is 650 miles, so just a little over two hours flight time.
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Re: THE Contrails &

Unread postby careinke » Fri 13 Nov 2015, 17:49:31

Outcast_Searcher wrote:
Tanada wrote:Best solution, require short distance flights to remain below 25,000 feet and require long distance flights to fly at or above 40,000 feet. Contrails almost disappear, no more contrail pollution or global dimming caused.

Interesting. Any idea of the general fuel/economic impact of doing this? If the extra fuel required is minor (percentage wise) then this sounds like a good idea, if you can get the international community to agree on this.


Even easier, just have the Air Route Traffic Controllers direct the traffic under or over the contrail level. The controllers can easily get the contrail level, and avoid them. Even if you have to quickly transition through one it would have minimal impact.

Of course you can create the opposite effect by directing the planes to fly in the cons.
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Re: THE Contrails &

Unread postby Keith_McClary » Fri 13 Nov 2015, 19:50:17

Tanada wrote:Best solution, require short distance flights to remain below 25,000 feet and require long distance flights to fly at or above 40,000 feet. Contrails almost disappear, no more contrail pollution or global dimming caused.
Aren't the planes still emitting the same stuff? You just won't see the H2O contrails.
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Re: THE Contrails &

Unread postby careinke » Fri 13 Nov 2015, 20:19:33

Keith_McClary wrote:
Tanada wrote:Best solution, require short distance flights to remain below 25,000 feet and require long distance flights to fly at or above 40,000 feet. Contrails almost disappear, no more contrail pollution or global dimming caused.
Aren't the planes still emitting the same stuff? You just won't see the H2O contrails.


It is really not about emitting stuff, the planes movement through the air at the right altitude, humidity level and temperature causes the water vapor to condense and basically make a cloud. This cloud, (contrail), shades the earth (global dimming) making it cooler.
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Re: THE Contrails &

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 13 Nov 2015, 23:11:49

Keith_McClary wrote:
Tanada wrote:Best solution, require short distance flights to remain below 25,000 feet and require long distance flights to fly at or above 40,000 feet. Contrails almost disappear, no more contrail pollution or global dimming caused.
Aren't the planes still emitting the same stuff? You just won't see the H2O contrails.


When all the jets were grounded for three days in 2001 they discovered that Contrails act as heat reflectors at night making the night time temperatures over 1 C warmer on days with contrails than on days without. Their dimming effect in the day is real, but not as large as their warming effect over night.
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Re: THE Contrails &

Unread postby Keith_McClary » Sat 14 Nov 2015, 02:55:46

Tanada wrote:
Keith_McClary wrote:
Tanada wrote:Best solution, require short distance flights to remain below 25,000 feet and require long distance flights to fly at or above 40,000 feet. Contrails almost disappear, no more contrail pollution or global dimming caused.
Aren't the planes still emitting the same stuff? You just won't see the H2O contrails.


When all the jets were grounded for three days in 2001 they discovered that Contrails act as heat reflectors at night making the night time temperatures over 1 C warmer on days with contrails than on days without. Their dimming effect in the day is real, but not as large as their warming effect over night.
These folks make it seem more complicated:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/ ... 068.html#/
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Re: THE Contrails &

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 14 Nov 2015, 10:52:26

Keith_McClary wrote:
Tanada wrote:
Keith_McClary wrote:
Tanada wrote:Best solution, require short distance flights to remain below 25,000 feet and require long distance flights to fly at or above 40,000 feet. Contrails almost disappear, no more contrail pollution or global dimming caused.
Aren't the planes still emitting the same stuff? You just won't see the H2O contrails.


When all the jets were grounded for three days in 2001 they discovered that Contrails act as heat reflectors at night making the night time temperatures over 1 C warmer on days with contrails than on days without. Their dimming effect in the day is real, but not as large as their warming effect over night.
These folks make it seem more complicated:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/ ... 068.html#/


Of course it is more complicated, but the gist of it is the net effect of contrails is a warming, not cooling effect. At least everything I have read on the topic indicates that is the core of the contrail issue.

This is what your own link has to say on the topic,
Contrail cirrus are composed of ice crystals that—similarly to natural cirrus—reflect solar short-wave radiation and trap outgoing long-wave radiation. For fixed ambient conditions, their radiative effect is mainly determined by their coverage and optical depth. Contrail cirrus form and persist in air that is ice-saturated, whereas natural cirrus often require high ice supersaturation to form. This implies that in a substantial fraction of the upper troposphere, contrail cirrus can persist in supersaturated air that is cloud-free, thus increasing high cloud coverage. Remote-sensing studies have estimated line-shaped-contrail coverages as large as a few per cent in regions in which the levels of air traffic are high. The coverage due to contrail cirrus is as yet unknown because they are difficult to distinguish from natural cirrus in satellite observations.

Globally, the long-wave radiative forcing due to contrail cirrus (after correcting the scattering component of the long-wave forcing from the model30) amounts to 47.1 mW m−2 and short-wave radiative forcing to −9.6 mW m−2, resulting in a net radiative forcing of 37.5 mW m−2. This includes the effect of line-shaped contrails. Globally averaged contrail-cirrus optical depth is 0.05. Net radiative forcing of contrail cirrus (Fig. 3a) reaches values larger than 300 mW m−2 over the eastern US and central Europe. Over most of the US, Europe, over the North Atlantic flight corridor and also over parts of southeast Asia, net radiative forcing exceeds 100 mW m−2. Over much of the northern mid-latitudes contrail-cirrus radiative forcing exceeds 30 mW m−2. Maxima in radiative forcing are found in areas of maxima in contrail-cirrus coverage, but radiative forcing is enhanced in areas with large contrail-cirrus optical depth (Fig. 3b). This means that for a fixed contrail-cirrus coverage, radiative forcing is larger over southeast Asia than in the northern mid-latitudes and slightly larger over the eastern US than over central Europe or the North Atlantic flight corridor.
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Re: THE Global Dimming Thread (merged)

Unread postby careinke » Sat 14 Nov 2015, 19:51:59

Tanada,

I was under the impression the over all difference from the US grounding of planes after 911, was a gain of about 2 degrees F.

Another study that took advantage of the grounding gave striking evidence of what contrails can do. David Travis of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and two colleagues measured the difference, over those three contrail-free days, between the highest daytime temperature and the lowest nighttime temperature across the continental U.S. They compared those data with the average range in day-night temperatures for the period 1971-2000, again across the contiguous 48 states. Travis's team discovered that from roughly midday September 11 to midday September 14, the days had become warmer and the nights cooler, with the overall range greater by about two degrees Fahrenheit.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/contrail-effect.html

The article above say the science is still unclear on how much effect contrails actually have. Hansen thinks the CO2 emission is much worse than the contrail effect.

I can certainly see the argument that contrails may be a "net warmer" though.
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