Re: Danny "didn't need to read the that part "
Posted by Dale on Mar 13, 2002 at 10:25
(204.212.222.27)Re: Lost among the clutter (DA Morgan)
Bobba: In order to achieve the “no net cost”, it will "entail the use of carbon credits." Did you read that part Dan?
Danny: Didn't need to read the that part ...What’s with the sudden surge of honesty? :) BTW, Kyoto doesn’t allow credits.
“It was clear that the issue was global, potentially affecting everyone. And it was equally clear that the only practical solutions would be ones which recognized the human desire for improved living standards.
To ask people to sacrifice the future would be unrealistic. To deny the basic aspirations of hundreds of millions of people to escape from poverty would be immoral.”Is Kyoto going to achieve the required reductions without denying “the basic aspirations of hundreds of millions of people to escape from poverty”? Well it tries by making sure that it applies almost exclusively to the US I guess. The poor people of China and India who produce most of the global CO2 can continue to do as they please so I guess that meets these requirements for the majority.
“That means our emissions of carbon dioxide have fallen to almost 80 million tonnes, 10 million tonnes below the level in 1990 and 14 million tonnes below the level they had reached in 1998.”
“And we've met it at no net economic cost - because the savings from reduced energy inputs and increased efficiency have outweighed all the expenditure involved.”
So how much is this? Do refineries really produce that much CO2 in the first place? The 1998 CO2 global CO2 production by man was 6608 million metric tons. So BP, the largest energy producer in the world has reduced the global total by 0.21%. Not a very big contribution for the worlds largest oil company. But very understandable because refineries are in the business of producing oil, not burning it.
Next we need to understand the economics and physics of cracking petroleum. First I digress to a study that was requested 20 years ago when I was working for an electric utility. A General Electric salesman had come into one of our power plants and sold management on the need to replace all the fluorescent and mercury vapor lighting with sodium vapor with the claim that the new lights would pay for themselves in just a few years. The plant management designed all new lighting and sent in budgetary item for authorization. The problem was that they treated a power plant like any large other electric customer. Electric power plants don’t pay retail – they pay wholesale! “Normal” customers pay for transmitting the electricity plus profit, etc. etc. etc. An power plant takes electricity right off the generator. The unit cost of electricity in a power plant is minimal.
So back to BP. When BP wants to make gasoline they heat crude oil in the presence of catalysts. The heat comes from waste oil. It is almost free. When the crackers that were operating in 1990 (and 1998) were built there was NO incentive to save energy. As long as there was waste oil you either burned it or found a way to bury it. So you burned it. Then they get an envirowacko CEO why is out to save the world. Sure they can cut their CO2 emissions. Simply by improving the efficiency of heaters I am surprised that the improvement wasn’t twice as high. Maybe they are just waiting for some time to elapse and then they can make a 50% improvement and get another big political green benefit.
And they stopped flaring natural gas and started selling it. Seems like a reasonable change considering the change in natural gas prices now that natural gas is now burnable again (Carter prohibited new natural gas usage) and the price has risen because the demand has risen because gas is replacing coal because of environmental regulation.
But you can’t do the same thing with an SUV and still have an SUV. An SUV is already pretty efficient. An SUV doesn’t have fuel to waste that can be shut off with no change in productivity. And SUVs are a much larger source of CO2 than the 1.2% BP contributes. Yes, we can make drastic reductions in global CO2 if we replace wood as the major fuel of India and China. But Kyoto specifically doesn’t do that.
“…for example, 1 kilowatt hour of electricity generated from natural gas emits about half the volume of CO2 generated from coal.”
DING! DING! DING!!! ALARM BELLS!!! BS ALERT!!! BS ALERT!!! Danny, Danny, Danny. Didn’t you read that far down? You’re supposed to have some kind of chemistry education. What is the chemical composition of coal and what is natural gas and, when you burn both, what are the energy releases from each chemical reaction? Coal and natural gas both get the majority of their energy release from making CO2. The hydrogen reactions contribute but the differences between coal and natural gas are minimal. Yes, there is a difference but one isn’t twice the other. So now we know that a press release from an oil company attempting to tout their green stance can occasionally stoop to misinformation.