Anatomy of an earthquake series

by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

An international team led by scientists at GFZ Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, in collaboration with colleagues by Spanish, Italian and US institutions, is publishing a new scientific work on induced seismicity in Europe in the Journal Nature Communications.

The study focuses on the 2013 seismic sequence at the Castor platform of a former oil field, about 20 km offshore the coast of Valencia, Spain. During the initial phase of the development of a gas storage facility in the former oil field, thousands of earthquakes with magnitudes below 4.1 took place after the injection of gas into the depleted layers of the reservoir. While similar gas storage operations worldwide are typically not stimulating substantial seismicity, the Castor sequence remains to date the most significant case of seismicity related to this  type of industrial operations in Europe.

The new study employs a combination of advanced seismological techniques applied to an enhanced waveform dataset to better understand the seismogenic process and the geometry of activated fault, which remained to date debated.

The new analysis identifies about 3,500 earthquakes, which took place at shallow depth between September and early October in the vicinity of the Castor injection platform. The study reveals for the first time three phases of the crisis. The first phase, accompanying gas injection from early to mid-September, was characterized by weak seismicity, progressively growing in magnitude. The injection stop marks the beginning of a second phase, which will last until end of September, where seismicity slowly migrated towards SW, driven by pore-pressure diffusion. The third phase, lasting until early October, saw a fast, backward migration, with the occurrence of all largest earthquakes as the failure of loaded asperities. Seismicity mostly affected a secondary fault, located close below the reservoir, and dipping opposite from the reservoir bounding fault.

The study demonstrates that a detailed view of the dynamics of  seismic sequences can be resolved even in the lack of a dense local monitoring network, offering a benchmark for similar future studies elsewhere.

The insights are important also in the light that the Castor project has been abandoned after the occurrence of the earthquakes and the question of predictability of the risks and responsibility for such types of events are under public debate.Earthquakes continued after COVID-19-related oil and gas recovery shutdown

More information: Simone Cesca et al, Seismicity at the Castor gas reservoir driven by pore pressure diffusion and asperities loading, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24949-1

Journal information: Nature Communications 

Provided by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres 

Yellowstone sees 1,000+ earthquakes in July. Super-eruption to come?

Nathan Howes
Digital Reporter

Tuesday, August 10th 2021- The University of Utah seismograph stations recorded 1,008 earthquakes at Yellowstone Nationl Park in July, with the strongest tremor registering a 3.6 magnitude, says the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

July was fairly active seismically for Yellowstone National Park, which recorded a figure not seen since June 2017, according to a recent report from the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

The University of Utah seismograph stations recorded 1,008 tremors, but all of them registered as minor magnitudes. The strongest earthquake had a 3.6 magnitude, occurring at a depth of 17.7 km beneath Yellowstone Lake.

SEE ALSO: Yellowstone's Old Faithful geyser might stop erupting, here's why

"This number is preliminary and will likely increase, since dozens more small earthquakes from July 16 require further analysis. This is the most earthquakes in a month since June 2017, when [more than] 1,100 earthquakes were located," the USGS said.

 

(Videoblocks)

A swarm of 764 earthquakes occurred beneath Yellowstone Lake, beginning on July 16. The pack consisted of four earthquakes in the magnitude 3 range and 85 in the magnitude 2 range.

IS AN ERUPTION FORTHCOMING?

Yellowstone is adored for its picturesque scenery and known for its distinctive geothermal features, such as Old Faithful and its caldera complex. The latter is referred to by many as a supervolcano.

With the high number of earthquakes last month, does the tally indicate an imminent eruption at Yellowstone? Rest assured, the answer is no. The USGS says this level of seismicity is not unprecedented and it doesn’t reflect magmatic activity, as no other indicators were found.

"Earthquakes at Yellowstone are dominantly caused by motion on pre-existing faults and can be stimulated by increases in pore pressure due to groundwater recharge from snow melt. If magmatic activity were the cause of the quakes, we would expect to see other indicators, like changes in deformation style or thermal/gas emissions, but no such variations were detected," USGS said in the report.

The Yellowstone area experiences anywhere from 700 to 3,000 earthquakes every year, according to the National Park Service.

Although most are too small to be felt, the quakes are an indication of the state of the Yellowstone region -- one of the most seismically active areas in the United States. Each year, multiple tremors registering with magnitudes 3 or 4 are felt by people within the park.

THE CHANCES OF ANOTHER MASSIVE ERUPTION

Yellowstone has produced three extremely large volcanic eruptions (caldera-forming eruptions) in the past 2.1 million years, according to the USGS. In each cataclysmic event, large volumes of magma exploded at the surface and were sent into the atmosphere as mixtures of red-hot pumice, volcanic ash, and gas that disperse as pyroclastic flows in all directions.

Data from the agency suggests that the Yellowstone caldera system erupts approximately every 730,000 years, with the most recent explosion occurring 640,000 years ago.

The last eruption created a 56-kilometre-wide, 80-kilometre-long Yellowstone caldera. Pyroclastic flows from the discharge left thick volcanic deposits known as the Lava Creek Tuff, which comprises the north wall of the caldera. Vast volumes of volcanic ash skyrocketed into the atmosphere, and some of it can still be found in places as far from Yellowstone as Iowa, Louisiana and California.

 

Map of the known ash-fall boundaries for major eruptions from Long Valley Caldera, Mount St. Helens and Yellowstone. (USGS)

If another catastrophic eruption from Yellowstone were to happen, the effects would be worldwide, the USGS says. Thick ash deposits would bury extensive areas of the United States, and huge volumes of volcanic gases would be shot into the atmosphere. It would likely affect the global climate and have "enormous effects on human activity, especially agricultural production, for many years."

"Fortunately, the Yellowstone volcanic system shows no signs that it is headed toward such an eruption. The probability of a large caldera-forming eruption within the next few thousand years is exceedingly low," the USGS said.

It added that a more likely scenario to occur is the eruption of a lava flow, which would be "far less" devastating than a large explosive, caldera-forming blast.

VIDEO: SUPERVOLCANO COULD ERUPT CAUSING ASH TO FALL OVER THE ENTIRE GLOBE


Thumbnail courtesy of Videoblocks.

With files from Isabella O'Malley.

Follow Nathan Howes on Twitter.

More than 1,000 earthquakes swarmed Yellowstone Park last month. Is 'the big one' nearing?

The answer is: Probably not.

By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 

Norris Geyser Basin at sunset (Image credit: Shutterstock)

The Earth is rumbling beneath Yellowstone National Park again, with swarms of more than 1,000 earthquakes recorded in the region in July 2021, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report. This is the most seismic activity the park has seen in a single month since June 2017, when a swarm of more than 1,100 rattled the area, the report said.

Fortunately, these earthquakes were minor ones, with only four temblors measuring in the magnitude-3 range (strong enough to be felt, but unlikely to cause any damage) — and none of the quakes signal that the supervolcano underneath the park is likely to blow, park seismologists said.

"While above average, this level of seismicity is not unprecedented, and it does not reflect magmatic activity," according to the USGS report. "If magmatic activity were the cause of the quakes, we would expect to see other indicators, like changes in deformation style or thermal/gas emissions, but no such variations were detected."


Related: Rainbow Basin: Photos of Yellowstone's colorful grand prismatic hot spring

Throughout July 2021, the University of Utah Seismograph Stations, which are responsible for monitoring and analyzing quakes in the Yellowstone park region, recorded a total of 1,008 earthquakes in the area. These quakes came in a series of seven swarms, with the most energetic event occurring on July 16. According to the USGS, at least 764 quakes rattled the ground deep below Yellowstone Lake that day, including a magnitude-3.6 earthquake — the single largest of the month.

The month's remaining six swarms were all smaller, including between 12 and 40 earthquakes apiece, all measuring below magnitude 3, the report said.

These quakes are nothing to worry about, the USGS added, noting that the earth-shaking is likely the result of motion on preexisting faults below the park. Fault movements can be stimulated by melting snow, which increases the amount of groundwater seeping under the park and increases pressure levels underground, the researchers said.

Yellowstone is one of the most seismically active regions in the U.S.; the area is typically hit by anywhere from 700 to 3,000 earthquakes a year, most of which are imperceptible to visitors, according to the National Park Service. The biggest quake on record in Yellowstone was the magnitude-7.3 Hebgen Lake quake, in 1959.

Why so shaky? The park sits atop a network of fault lines associated with an enormous volcano buried deep beneath the ground (this volcano last erupted about 70,000 years ago, according to the USGS). Earthquakes occur as the region's fault lines stretch apart, and as magma, water and gas move beneath the surface. These features also feed the park's reliable geysers and steamy hot springs.

The Yellowstone volcano has erupted several times in the past, with gargantuan eruptions occurring every 725,000 years or so. If this schedule is accurate, the park is due for another big eruption in about 100,000 years. Such an eruption would devastate the entire United States, clogging rivers with ash across the continent and causing widespread drought and famine, Live Science previously reported.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Wildfire smoke may lead to less rain in the western US

by American Geophysical Union

Cumulus clouds mingle with smoke from the August 2018 Cougar Creek fire in Washington state’s Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. Credit: Emily V. Fischer

As wildfires and heatwaves stress the western United States, concern over drought is rising: Dry landscapes burn more readily, and rain can help quell fires already raging. But wildfire smoke may keep that essential rain from falling.

A new study finds tiny particles in wildfire smoke affect the way droplets form in clouds, potentially resulting in less rain and exacerbating dry conditions that fuel fires.

When wildfires send smoke up into the atmosphere, tiny particles fly up with it. Water droplets can condense on the particles in clouds.

The study's authors expected an increase in the number of water droplets forming in clouds as a result of wildfires, because more particles create more droplets. But the difference between smoky and clean clouds was bigger than expected, with smoky clouds hosting about five times the number of droplets than their clean counterparts. Smoky droplets were also half the size of pristine droplets.

That size difference is what could stop the drops from falling. Because small droplets are less likely to grow and eventually fall out as rain, wildfires in the western U.S. could mean less rain during wildfire season, according to the new study published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

"We were surprised at how effective these primarily organic particles were at forming cloud droplets and what large impacts they had on the microphysics of the clouds," said lead author Cynthia Twohy, an atmospheric scientist at NorthWest Research Associates and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "I started thinking, 'What are the long-term effects of this? We have drought, and we have a lot of wildfires, and they're increasing over time. How do clouds play into this picture?'"

Twohy and a team of atmospheric chemists spent the summer of 2018 in a C-130 Hercules research plane, sampling mid-altitude altocumulus clouds while fires burned across the western U.S. Instruments on board the plane measured gases and particles emitted by wildfires and sampled droplets, whose chemistry Twohy analyzed back in the lab.

The work provides direct new insight into the microphysics and chemistry of wildfire-linked clouds that can help scientists understand potential causes and effects of atmospheric changes during wildfires.

A thin layer of cumulus clouds caps dense smoke from the Kiawah-Rabbit Foot fires in

 eastern Idaho during August 2018, as viewed from a C-130 research plane. 

Credit: Emily V. Fischer

Smoky cloud complexities

In clouds that reach high into the atmosphere, adding more particles can invigorate the clouds and cause rain, but the opposite is true for lower-altitude cumulus clouds like those Twohy studied. Previous work, unrelated to the present study, found similar changes in droplet size and concentration related to smoke in the Amazon, supporting the new findings.

"What really excited me about this paper were the connections to the hydrological cycle," said Ann Marie Carlton, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California-Irvine who was not involved in the new study. "They observe differences in cloud droplet size and precipitation, and cloud formation definitely impacts the hydrologic cycle. To have cloud-related findings so robust is sort of unusual, in my experience."

Cloud microphysics are complex, and Twohy notes that there are factors other than droplet size to consider for the overall impact smoky clouds have on regional climate. The new study focused on small cumulus clouds, which blanket about a quarter of the western U.S. in the summer, but other types of clouds, like higher-altitude thunderstorms, could behave differently. In shallower clouds, the more numerous, smaller droplets also can be more reflective, which could have a slight cooling effect at the surface.

With summer rain in the region decreasing, Twohy thinks the drying effects are winning out over factors that could increase rain, like cloud invigoration.

"Over the past couple decades, summer precipitation is down and temperatures are up. The cloud effects are likely an important part of all this. I'm hoping these results will spur detailed regional modeling studies that will help us understand the net impact of smoke on clouds and climate in the region," said Twohy.

If wildfire smoke is making rain less likely, feedback between smoke, dry spells and more wildfires could be more common in the future. Cloud microphysics are complex, so it may be a matter of time before these relationships are clear. Regardless, in connecting wildfire smoke to cloud changes and tentatively, precipitation, Twohy's new research pushes atmospheric physics and chemistry to catch up with climate change.

"As humans have perturbed the composition of the atmosphere, there are all these feedbacks and interactions that we don't even know about," said Carlton. "This experiment we're doing on planet Earth is altering clouds and the hydrologic cycle, at least regionally. I think this paper is scratching the surface of what we don't know."

Seeding ice clouds with wildfire emissions

More information: Cynthia H. Twohy et al, Biomass Burning Smoke and Its Influence on Clouds Over the Western U. S., Geophysical Research Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1029/2021GL094224

Journal information: Geophysical Research Letters 

Provided by American Geophysical Union 

Global warming begets more warming, new paleoclimate study finds

by Abby Abazorius, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

It is increasingly clear that the prolonged drought conditions, record-breaking heat, sustained wildfires, and frequent, more extreme storms experienced in recent years are a direct result of rising global temperatures brought on by humans' addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And a new MIT study on extreme climate events in Earth's ancient history suggests that today's planet may become more volatile as it continues to warm.

The study, appearing today in Science Advances, examines the paleoclimate record of the last 66 million years, during the Cenozoic era, which began shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The scientists found that during this period, fluctuations in the Earth's climate experienced a surprising "warming bias." In other words, there were far more warming events—periods of prolonged global warming, lasting thousands to tens of thousands of years—than cooling events. What's more, warming events tended to be more extreme, with greater shifts in temperature, than cooling events.

The researchers say a possible explanation for this warming bias may lie in a "multiplier effect," whereby a modest degree of warming—for instance from volcanoes releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—naturally speeds up certain biological and chemical processes that enhance these fluctuations, leading, on average, to still more warming.

Interestingly, the team observed that this warming bias disappeared about 5 million years ago, around the time when ice sheets started forming in the Northern Hemisphere. It's unclear what effect the ice has had on the Earth's response to climate shifts. But as today's Arctic ice recedes, the new study suggests that a multiplier effect may kick back in, and the result may be a further amplification of human-induced global warming.

"The Northern Hemisphere's ice sheets are shrinking, and could potentially disappear as a long-term consequence of human actions" says the study's lead author Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. "Our research suggests that this may make the Earth's climate fundamentally more susceptible to extreme, long-term global warming events such as those seen in the geologic past."

Arnscheidt's study co-author is Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics at MIT, and co-founder and co-director of MIT's Lorenz Center.

A volatile push.

For their analysis, the team consulted large databases of sediments containing deep-sea benthic foraminifera—single-celled organisms that have been around for hundreds of millions of years and whose hard shells are preserved in sediments. The composition of these shells is affected by the ocean temperatures as organisms are growing; the shells are therefore considered a reliable proxy for the Earth's ancient temperatures.

For decades, scientists have analyzed the composition of these shells, collected from all over the world and dated to various time periods, to track how the Earth's temperature has fluctuated over millions of years.

"When using these data to study extreme climate events, most studies have focused on individual large spikes in temperature, typically of a few degrees Celsius warming," Arnscheidt says. "Instead, we tried to look at the overall statistics and consider all the fluctuations involved, rather than picking out the big ones."

The team first carried out a statistical analysis of the data and observed that, over the last 66 million years, the distribution of global temperature fluctuations didn't resemble a standard bell curve, with symmetric tails representing an equal probability of extreme warm and extreme cool fluctuations. Instead, the curve was noticeably lopsided, skewed toward more warm than cool events. The curve also exhibited a noticeably longer tail, representing warm events that were more extreme, or of higher temperature, than the most extreme cold events.

"This indicates there's some sort of amplification relative to what you would otherwise have expected," Arnscheidt says. "Everything's pointing to something fundamental that's causing this push, or bias toward warming events."

"It's fair to say that the Earth system becomes more volatile, in a warming sense," Rothman adds.

A warming multiplier

The team wondered whether this warming bias might have been a result of "multiplicative noise" in the climate-carbon cycle. Scientists have long understood that higher temperatures, up to a point, tend to speed up biological and chemical processes. Because the carbon cycle, which is a key driver of long-term climate fluctuations, is itself composed of such processes, increases in temperature may lead to larger fluctuations, biasing the system towards extreme warming events.

In mathematics, there exists a set of equations that describes such general amplifying, or multiplicative effects. The researchers applied this multiplicative theory to their analysis to see whether the equations could predict the asymmetrical distribution, including the degree of its skew and the length of its tails.

In the end, they found that the data, and the observed bias toward warming, could be explained by the multiplicative theory. In other words, it's very likely that, over the last 66 million years, periods of modest warming were on average further enhanced by multiplier effects, such as the response of biological and chemical processes that further warmed the planet.

As part of the study, the researchers also looked at the correlation between past warming events and changes in Earth's orbit. Over hundreds of thousands of years, Earth's orbit around the sun regularly becomes more or less elliptical. But scientists have wondered why many past warming events appeared to coincide with these changes, and why these events feature outsized warming compared with what the change in Earth's orbit could have wrought on its own.

So, Arnscheidt and Rothman incorporated the Earth's orbital changes into the multiplicative model and their analysis of Earth's temperature changes, and found that multiplier effects could predictably amplify, on average, the modest temperature rises due to changes in Earth's orbit.

"Climate warms and cools in synchrony with orbital changes, but the orbital cycles themselves would predict only modest changes in climate," Rothman says. "But if we consider a multiplicative model, then modest warming, paired with this multiplier effect, can result in extreme events that tend to occur at the same time as these orbital changes."

"Humans are forcing the system in a new way," Arnscheidt adds. "And this study is showing that, when we increase temperature, we're likely going to interact with these natural, amplifying effects."Global warming will result in stronger and more frequent heatwaves in Southeast Asia

More information: Asymmetry of extreme Cenozoic climate-carbon cycle events, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg6864

Journal information: Science Advances 

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Study of Earth's Deep Past Reveals Terrifying Global Warming Warning

Even modest temperature increases can self-amplify into extreme warming events, a finding that has implications for the current climate crisis.

By Becky Ferreira
11.8.21


PEOPLE RUN FROM THE FOREST FIRE THAT BROKE OUT IN MANAVGAT DISTRICT CONTINUE IN ANTALYA, TURKEY ON AUGUST 01, 2021. IMAGE: ANADOLU AGENCY/ CONTRIBUTOR VIA GETTY IMAGES

The urgent need to address the climate crisis was thrown into sharp relief yet again this week by a mountain of research that established an “unequivocal” link between human activity and warming global temperatures, according to a major new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Now, a pair of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reveal that modest warming events in Earth’s deep past often spiral into volatile climate extremes, a finding that has been written into the fossils of marine organisms over the Cenozoic period, which dates back 66 million years to the present.

This long view of our planet’s climate swings suggests that “as anthropogenic warming continues, Earth’s climate may become more susceptible to extreme warming events on time scales of tens of thousands of years,” according to a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances.

“Abrupt global warming events of the geologic past are of interest because they reveal fundamental aspects of how the Earth system works, and because they provide an observational window into the long-term consequences of anthropogenic climate change,” said Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences who led the study, in an email.

“In past studies the focus has been on specific large warming events,” he added. “Here, we wanted to understand the more general behavior throughout the Cenozoic (the past 66 million years), and so for the first time we considered all of the fluctuations involved rather than picking out the big ones.”

To accomplish this aim, Arnscheidt and co-author Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics at MIT and co-director of its Lorenz Center, relied on single-celled organisms called benthic foraminifera, which have been living and dying in Earth’s oceans for hundreds of millions of years.

These simple lifeforms grow hard shells that preserve information about temperatures and conditions at the time their bodies were deposited in sediments. As a result, their fossils offer an extremely useful window into the deep past, and are often used as a climate proxy in reconstructions of Earth’s paleoclimate.

Arnscheidt and Rothman assessed foraminifera records from around the world that date back to the cataclysmic asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs and many other species some 66 million years ago. In contrast to other studies, the team applied a statistical analysis of this entire Cenozoic period as opposed to focusing on major climate disruptions, such as the dramatic Eocene warming event that occurred about 55 million years ago.

This approach exposed “an intrinsic asymmetry that favors ‘hyperthermal-like’ extreme events of abrupt global warming,” according to the study. In other words, Earth’s Cenozoic climate has shown a clear bias toward warming events (hyperthermals) relative to cooling events, meaning that warming events were both more frequent and more extreme than cooling events.

“The fact that specific intervals in Earth history, such as the Eocene epoch, exhibit this bias is not surprising: this has been implicitly understood for a long time,” Arnscheidt said. “However, when we quantified the evolution of this asymmetry throughout the past 66 million years, we found that it displayed remarkable consistency over most of this period.”

“One simple way to explain the observed warming bias is to hypothesize that temperature fluctuations (on timescales of thousands to tens of thousands of years) themselves increase with temperature: this is called ‘multiplicative noise,’” he added. “The statistics of the observed fluctuations turn out to be mathematically consistent with the multiplicative noise hypothesis.”

‘Nobody Is Safe,’ Warns Latest IPCC Climate Report

Even modest global temperature increases during the Cenozoic seemed to lead to more stochastic and self-amplifying climate fluctuations than cooling events of similar magnitude. No doubt there are many complex mechanisms underlying these processes, but Arnscheidt and Rothman identified a few likely culprits, including biological and chemical processes that speed up at higher temperatures, as well as Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

“Many past global warming/hyperthermal events appear to coincide with changes in the eccentricity of Earth's orbit, but the mechanisms remain debated,” explained Arnscheidt. “The multiplicative theory provides a natural reason this could occur. If temperature fluctuations (on timescales of thousands to tens of thousands of years) indeed increase as it gets warmer, small changes in Earth's surface temperature due to orbital changes can, on average, generate abrupt warming events consistent with geologic observations.”

Interestingly, the team found that the Cenozoic’s long-term bias toward warming events disappeared about five million years ago, around the same time that ice cover crept down from the Arctic across much of the Northern Hemisphere. It’s possible that this recent period of glaciation helped to stabilize the global climate and reduce the incidence of extreme temperature fluctuations.

But Arnscheidt and Rothman warn that human-driven climate change may now be injecting all of that multiplicative noise and volatility back into the climate system. In light of the new IPCC report, which concludes that we are essentially locked into a global temperature spike of at least 1.5°C above pre-industrial averages, it’s more important than ever to heed the lessons etched into the paleoclimatological record of our planet.

“I think these results emphasize that Earth's long-term evolution is governed by complex, potentially amplifying mechanisms that we do not yet fully understand,” Arnscheidt said. “As humans continue to increase Earth's surface temperature, we will likely interact with these mechanisms, potentially at the peril of current and future generations.”

CCS IS A MYTH, NATIONALIZE BIG OIL
Cenovus chief urges Trudeau to pay for greening of Canada's oilsands

Canada's oil could be the 'cleanest in the world' but it will take $75 billion to get there

Financial Times
Derek Brower in Calgary
Publishing date: Aug 09, 2021 • 

Cenovus Energy has joined the four other largest producers in Canada's oil and gas sector to propose a vast carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) project they said was "the only realistic proposal" to curb pollution. PHOTO BY REUTERS/TODD KOROL/FILE PHOTO

Canada’s government should pay for up to 70 per cent of a proposed $75 billion project to decarbonize the country’s controversial oilsands and protect a critical engine of the country’s economy, one of the proposal’s backers said.

“If we’re able to solve the puzzle of making Canadian oil significantly lower carbon intensive,” the oil would be the “cleanest in the world,” Alex Pourbaix, chief executive of Cenovus Energy, the country’s second-largest oil producer, told the Financial Times.

But Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, which last year committed Canada to slashing emissions by 40-45 per cent below its 2005 levels by 2030, must pay up to make it happen, he argued.

“It’s going to take tens of billions of dollars over 30 years to decarbonize [our oil] industry,” said Pourbaix. “But at the same time that will protect something in the range of $3 trillion of GDP.”

Pourbaix and industry group the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (Capp) also urged the federal government to extend tax credits to oil companies that would use captured carbon to produce more oil.

“If we’re able to solve the puzzle of making Canadian oil significantly lower carbon intensive,” the oil would be the “cleanest in the world,” said Alex Pourbaix, chief executive of Cenovus Energy. PHOTO BY AZIN GHAFFARI/POSTMEDIA

The calls for federal funding will complicate matters for Trudeau amid criticism that Canada is not moving quickly enough to meet its climate targets while his government defends its high-emissions oil industry, the biggest petroleum exporter to the U.S.

Despite imposing an aggressive carbon tax regime, the federal government lobbied for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to Texas — which was cancelled by U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this year — and is funding another export pipeline development from the oilsands to Canada’s west coast.

“Our prosperity and our economy are still highly dependent on” the oil sector, Seamus O’Regan, the country’s Liberal federal resources minister said in a recent interview with the FT. “It is what we do.”

Last month Cenovus joined the four other largest producers in Canada’s oil and gas sector, the biggest single contributor to the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, to propose a vast carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) project they said was “the only realistic proposal” to curb pollution.

Critics of CCUS say the technology, mentioned for years as a solution to emissions, remains too expensive to achieve the scale needed.

Pourbaix said it showed operators were now “attuned to where the world is moving.”

The proposal includes installation of a trunk line capturing carbon from oilsands projects and other industries near Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta, and storing it further south near Cold Lake.

The proposal came as the Canadian government mooted an investment tax credit designed to accelerate development of a domestic CCUS industry. The credits are due to begin next year.

Pourbaix urged the federal government to reverse a decision to exclude enhanced oil recovery — a method of reinjecting the captured CO2 to help produce more oil — from the tax incentive scheme, saying the EOR could make the CCUS projects economic “right out of the chute.”

Tim McMillan, Capp’s chief executive, welcomed the federal government’s focus on CCUS to help meet its emissions goal, but said “excluding EOR from the federal programme will create substantial challenges to the government in reaching this goal.”


A spokesperson for O’Regan’s office said CCUS was “one of many technologies that will get us to net zero by 2050,” but did not say if the federal government would help pay for the oilsands companies’ proposed project. The government has set aside $319 million for research into CCUS and is working on a new strategy to promote it.

The oilsands sector is recovering from last year’s crash. But operators continue to face opposition from climate activists and environment-focused investors because of the higher emissions associated with producing the heavy, bituminous oil found in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan.

International oil supermajors, including Shell, TotalEnergies and Equinor, have pulled investment from the region, home to the world’s third-biggest oil deposit.

Alberta’s provincial government has fought aggressively to protect the sector, including a recent failed legal challenge to stop the federal carbon tax.

Pourbaix said he supported the new carbon pricing scheme and his company has a “long-term ambition” to achieve net zero emissions from its operations. But like other oil sands operators, Cenovus would not commit to a net zero target for its so-called scope 3 emissions — the pollution caused by the burning of the products its sells.

“Scope 3 is largely the responsibility of consumers,” said Pourbaix. “And kind of absolving the consumer of accountability for this doesn’t make sense.”

© 2021 The Financial Times Ltd

Oil companies’ renewables 

push squeezing profitability

from green projects

By WILLIAM MATHIS on 8/10/2021

(Bloomberg) --The world’s largest oil companies are bidding up prices for renewable energy projects, squeezing profits from wind and solar farms just as climate planning focuses more on green energy sources.

Companies from BP Plc to TotalEnergies SE are paying top dollar for clean energy assets as they transition away from fossil fuels, boosting competition and compressing margins for developers. Wind giants Orsted A/S and Vestas Wind Systems A/S reported lower returns in the first quarter, while turbine maker Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA lost money as materials rallied.

Shrinking profits are a worrying sign for an industry that needs to invest at least $92 trillion by 2050 to cut emissions fast enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. They also come at a time governments are tackling record gas and electricity prices, a headache for world leaders trying to iron out an ambitious climate deal when they meet in Scotland in November.

“Sometimes you end up with very low remuneration of capital, below normal,” said Bruno Bensasson, chief executive officer of the renewables arm of Electricite de France SA. “That’s not healthy, that’s not sustainable.”

Green energy is now the cheapest source of electricity in most of the world, drawing a growing number of companies into the space. BP last year set a target to boost its renewable energy capacity to 50 gigawatts up from less than 3 gigawatts. TotalEnergies plans to have 100 gigawatts of capacity by 2030, while Royal Dutch Shell Plc is also growing quickly in the space.

Rising competition is being met by a limited pipeline of projects. Auctions for offshore wind sites in the U.K. saw record prices earlier this year as oil companies led by BP battled for the right to develop projects in the Irish Sea.

Renewable Returns

“We see the European oil companies positioning themselves strongly into renewables now,” said Christian Rynning-Tonnesen, CEO of Norwegian utility Statkraft AS. “It will take down returns, of course, but oil companies also have return requirements of a similar size to us, so the whole industry is dependent on finding an economic balance here.”

Orsted, the top developer of offshore wind farms, said returns on capital employed fell to 7.5% in the first quarter, down from 11% in the same period a year earlier. Vestas, another wind developer, saw returns fall to 12.2% from 17.4% in the first quarter of 2020. Investors will keep an eye on any signs of diminishing returns when the two Danish firms report this week.

Siemens Gamesa lost 314 million euros ($369 million) in the three months ended in June. The Spanish developer was wrong-footed this year by the surging price of steel, which accounts for most of a turbine’s weight.

Even Equinor ASA, an oil and gas company that has become a major developer of wind farms, has had to tame investor expectations, projecting returns from its renewable projects at 4% to 8%, down from the 6% to 10% forecast last year.

Solar Modules

“If you look at renewables -- just renewables, nothing else attached to it -- you reach a stage where the returns are going to plateau and probably go down a little bit in the next years because of increased competition,” Francesco Starace, CEO of Italian utility Enel SpA, said on Bloomberg TV. “Our view is that the strategy of an integrated utility is a much safer position.”

Solar module prices are up over 16% in 2021, while the cost of key commodities like steel and copper have surged this year. That’s forced wind turbine makers to raise prices for their customers. The cost of shipping, which skyrocketed as the world emerges from the global pandemic, has also added to the long list of challenges facing renewable energy companies.

Producers of green power tend to strike deals to sell the electricity they produce before construction begins. While that strategy helps them obtain financing, it may also leave them exposed to swings in the cost of materials.

“Our industry is vulnerable,” said Michel Letellier, CEO of Innergex Renewable Energy Inc., which builds renewable power projects in Canada and the U.S. “Unfortunately you get caught because your costs to build are so high and you can’t go back to your customer and increase the price.”

Renewables Investment

To be sure, there are still no signs that the squeeze in profits is reducing investment. A record $174 billion was spent on solar, offshore wind and other green technologies and companies in the first half of the year, according to BloombergNEF. That’s 1.8% more than in the same period a year earlier.

Still, there’s concern some projects may get scrapped or be delayed, making it harder to achieve climate goals. Limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels will require wind and solar capacity to grow at a rate five times higher between 2020 and 2050 than the average from the last three years, according to the International Energy Agency.

“There’s been a restart of the industry,” said Xavier Barbaro, CEO of French renewable energy firm Neoen. “It may sometimes destroy some value of some of our projects, but that didn’t lead us to abandon any project. I think some people that had very little buffer are now abandoning some projects, or postponing them as much as they can.”

 Nfld. & Labrador

Climate change report shows need for 'downward shift' in N.L. oil industry, prof says

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'We need to make sure we're reading it,' says Angela Carter

CBC News · Posted: Aug 10, 2021

A university professor with a focus on oil and the climate crisis says Newfoundland and Labrador's offshore industry needs to transition. (Paul Daly/Canadian Press)

A United Nations report released on Monday sounded the alarm on what it's calling "irreversible" climate impacts and a "code red for humanity," and a Newfoundland professor researching oil and the climate crisis says people need to pay attention. 

University of Waterloo professor Angela Carter, originally from Conception Bay South, told CBC Radio's St. John's Morning Show on Tuesday the the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is the best independent knowledge on climate science in the world. 

"We need to make sure we're reading it, paying attention to it and adapting it in terms of how policy makers are responding to this," Carter said. 

Carter said the latest report is a summary of more than 14,000 scientific publications that's peer-reviewed work vetted by hundreds of scientists. 

The report blames human activity for being the cause of heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, extreme storms and sea-level rise.

Carter said what surprised her in the report is the urgency coming from the science community for immediate solutions.

"This is happening. We created it as humans by the greenhouse gases that we have been producing. This report is underscoring that we have altered our climate and we have altered it in every corner of the world," she said. 

"The impacts of the change that we have created are now unfolding with terrible consequences."

N.L. oil and gas

As a province, Newfoundland and Labrador relies heavily on revenue generated from its offshore oil and gas industry to keep its lights on. A report released earlier this year by the premier's economic recovery team recommended the province stop depending on oil with further recommendations on transitioning to a green economy. 

Carter said no one is suggesting there can be an immediate end to using fossil fuels, but pointed to IPCC vice-chair Ko Barrett on Monday saying "unprecedented transformational change is needed."

"Those are strong words," said Carter. "No one is saying we need to stop using or producing oil, or gas or coal tomorrow, but what is very clear is that there must be a downward shift of the production and the use of those fossil fuels."

Carter said the most pressing question now facing the government of Newfoundland and Labrador is what it will do about winding down a sector that has been financially beneficial for decades. 

University of Waterloo professor Angela Carter says Monday's report from the United Nations needs to be considered by policy makers responding to the climate crisis. (CBC)

She said Newfoundland and Labrador's oil sector is part of the global climate problem, ranking among the highest large final emitters in Canada in 2017, and the province needs to take responsibility. Carter said the province cannot explore oil fields further for new reserves and subsidies given to that sector need to be redirected to developing sectors that are climate-safe. 

"We can't hide behind oil companies' wishful thinking that our oil is somehow clean. However we might extract it, it's being extracted to be burned somewhere with a terrible climate cost that the IPCC is referencing for us today," said Carter.

"What we have on the books right now is the commitment to increase production of oil off our coast. In fact that's been a key talking point for our provincial government now for several governments."

National economy

Federal Natural Resources Minister Seamus O'Regan told CBC News the IPCC report reminds people they're on "red alert."

With Canada the fourth-largest oil-producing nation in the world, O'Regan said, the country is facing a big challenge. 

"It's the biggest part of our national economy," he said. He noted Canada has set a target of reducing emissions by 30 to 40 per cent by 2030.

"But the same people, the same infrastructure, the same expertise that made us the fourth-biggest producers of oil and gas in the world are also the same people, and the same infrastructure that can turn this around and lower our emissions.… But we got to get at it urgently."

• UN sounds alarm on 'irreversible' climate impacts, but offers hope

• $392M shortfall for N.L., as oil-related revenue drops

Newfoundland and Labrador Environment Minister Bernard Davis told CBC Radio's On The Go he's happy the province is working on its environment and climate change action plan. 

Davis said small changes from the general public can have an impact on supporting the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. 

When asked about backing future oil exploration in Newfoundland and Labrador's offshore industry, Davis said the industry is still going to exist "for a little while" but the transition away from it is "important for us."

"We're going to put practices in place to … even more reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That's our goal, that's what we're working with [the] industry on," he said. 

"At the end of the day I understand that tomorrow would be great to switch from all of those things, but the economy has to survive and one of the things we're working in is balancing that approach."

Tom Mulcair: Climate looms large on list of Trudeau's broken promises

With the likelihood of a federal election, the prime minister's failure has been noted by voters whose generation will have to try to deal with the dire consequences of climate change.

Author of the article: Tom Mulcair • Special to Montreal Gazette
Publishing date: Aug 10, 2021 • 1 day ago • 

Just over a month after being elected prime minister in 2015, Justin Trudeau went to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris and proclaimed: “Canada is back.” PHOTO BY ALAIN JOCARD /AFP/Getty Images files
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Canadians are getting ready to go to the polls for the second time in less than two years, and the result will have a determining effect on the economy, the environment and social programs.

Justin Trudeau has followed the pattern of previous Liberal governments: governing by polling and focus groups, and achieving very little in the process.


Scenes from the historic climate march in Montreal on Sept. 27, 2019

Jean Chrétien will be remembered more for something he didn’t do (get us embroiled in the U.S. war in Iraq) than any signal accomplishment that has lasting historical significance.

During an election campaign, you learn a lot about the other side.

In my run as leader of the NDP in 2015, we heard that the Liberals were doing a new focus group every day. It showed as they veered from one policy announcement to the other with very little ideological consistency. The only common thread was the desire to tell people what they wanted to hear. It works. They won.

Trudeau stole a page from our playbook and announced (hundreds of times) that 2015 would be the last election under the unfair “first past the post” system. Once the election was over and they’d formed government, a lengthy set of hearings concluded that a fairer system would include some form of proportional representation. Trudeau tore up the report because it wouldn’t be good for the Liberals to change the system. He was proven right in 2019 when the Conservatives under Andrew Scheer actually got more votes than Trudeau, but the Liberals still won based on that unfair system he’d promised to change.

Whether it was smaller local issues like restoring door-to-door mail delivery to communities where it had been cut by Stephen Harper’s government (Trudeau broke that one right away) or big promises like ending boil-water advisories on reserves during their first five years (cheques are now being sent out to try to compensate for that failure), the Liberals have a history of promising big to win, then breaking those promises once they’re in office.

Right after being elected, Trudeau went to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris and proclaimed: “Canada is back.” Then he came back to Canada and announced that he was sticking with Harper’s targets and timeline.

This week’s UN report lays out in stark terms the extreme danger that human-caused climate change is creating for life on our planet. Trudeau’s failure has been duly noted by those voters whose generation will have to try to deal with the consequences.

Indeed, polls are showing that younger, more progressive voters are increasingly turning away from Trudeau. In the past, the Liberals have often been able to use the threat of a Conservative victory to convince hesitant progressives not to “split the vote.” With the very low polling numbers of Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives, that threat won’t work this time.

Trudeau’s history of broken promises and the self-destruction of the Greens have provided an interesting opening for Jagmeet Singh’s NDP. The increasingly strange rule of Jason Kenney in Alberta has given Singh hope that he can surf on the resurgent popularity of Rachel Notley’s provincial NDP. In the seat-rich Greater Toronto Area, Singh has built a solid following that extends beyond the NDP’s traditional base, bringing in many voters from ethnocultural communities who often feel taken for granted by the Liberals.

But it’s Singh’s own province of B.C. that may decide whether Trudeau gets his much-coveted majority.

Against a backdrop of heat domes and forest fires fuelled by global warming, climate activist Avi Lewis will be running as part of Singh’s team. He is emblematic of a refusal to compromise on this vital issue.

Lewis’s views may cause some grief to NDP organizers elsewhere, but in B.C. he’ll be seen as part of a bulwark against more climate failures, if Trudeau can be denied a majority.

Tom Mulcair, a former leader of the federal NDP, served as minister of the environment in the Quebec Liberal government of Jean Charest.