Big Oil’s Foray Into Renewables Has Completely Changed The Market

By Irina Slav - Aug 19, 2021

That the oil and gas industry is problematic is perhaps too mild a way to put it. Fossil fuel producers have recently become the singular target of accusations and lawsuits from parties arguing that they are the only industry responsible for the effects of a changing climate. And now those same fossil fuel producers are coming after renewables. Big Oil is trying to green itself up, so it is bidding for wind farm construction tenders and buying other renewables assets. And in doing this, it is undermining the profit margins of renewable energy companies, Bloomberg’s Will Mathis recently wrote in an article.

There is a certain irony in the situation. Thanks to a surprisingly strong rebound in oil demand, Big Oil can afford to be generous with its wind and solar purchases and bids. On the other hand, devastating supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic have prompted price increases in a lot of commodities, including raw materials for solar panels, making the panels costlier as well.

Neither of these trends is Big Oil’s fault, and yet it is the industry benefiting from them. According to Mathis, however, it is Big Oil’s fault that Ørsted, for instance, reported lower financial results for the first half of the year.

According to the Danish turbine maker itself, however, the lower results were related to a 4-percent decline in electricity output, which was the result of lower average wind speeds in the period.

“Earnings from our offshore and onshore wind farms in operation were DKK 0.3 billion lower compared to the same period last year,” Ørsted said in its first-half report, released earlier this month. “The increased generation capacity from new wind farms in operation was more than offset by significantly lower wind speeds across our portfolio.”

Mathis also cited the other big Danish name in wind turbines, Vestas, as suffering from Big Oil’s foray into its turf. Vestas, however, blamed the effects of Covid-19 on its lower first-quarter results and then reported stronger results for the second quarter as demand for wind generation capacity continued strong.

Another company mentioned in the article that laments the entry of Big Oil into renewables is Siemens Gamesa. The company itself attributed its weaker performance earlier this year to “The sharp increase of raw material prices” as well as to “Increased estimates of ramp-up costs for the Siemens Gamesa 5.X platform, especially in Brazil.”

Related: JP Morgan: Don’t Expect A ‘Shock’ Transition In Energy Markets

Now, there seems to be nothing easier than dumping the blame for everything that goes wrong in renewable energy onto Big Oil. When oil—and gas—is cheap, it is to blame for the lower uptake of EV and an overall feeling of discouragement in the adoption of wind and solar. When oil is expensive, it is expensive because of demand, and fills Big Oil’s coffers with cash that they can then use to encroach on renewable’s territory.

One would imagine that this is a reason for celebration—after all, with all that cash, Big Oil could do a lot to help the fast expansion of wind and solar generation capacity that the world is believed to need in order to avoid the worst of the climate change fallout. Yet, as Bloomberg’s Mathis notes, this intensifies competition in the space.

Competition should be the natural order of things, and rather than a reason for worry, it should be welcomed as a motivational push. This should be all the truer if the assertion Mathis makes—that “Green energy is now the cheapest source of electricity in most of the world”—reflects reality. Consumers are attracted to cheap things and willing to pay for a lot of them. This should be good for margins all around, even with Big Oil in the game.

Unfortunately, the “cheapest source of electricity” adage does not reflect reality to the extent that the authors who use it would like. It is a fact that the costs of wind and solar farms have declined dramatically over the last decade or so as technology improved and raw material costs fell due to abundant supply.

However, it is worth noting that both technologies are strongly reliant on government subsidies. China didn’t cancel wind and solar subsidies because it felt like it a couple of years ago. It canceled them because it could no longer afford to support those projects.

Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies, on the other hand, can afford to pay millions upon millions to beat competitors for new renewable energy projects. They are highly motivated, with shareholders, governments, and environmentalists looking over their shoulders at how they are tackling their carbon footprints. And however blasphemous it may sound to the ideologically inclined, they are partnering with renewables companies.

The thing about business is that it is not driven by ideology. Business is driven by the need to turn in a profit. Orsed, Vestas, and Siemens Gamesa know this, as do BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies. The influx of competitors in the wind and solar space is bound to sooner or later result in partnerships of mutual benefit. This would help Big Oil morph into Big Energy. Like it or not, it would be the natural way.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

Geologists dig into Grand Canyon's mysterious gap in time

by University of Colorado at Boulder

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder reveals the complex history behind one of the Grand Canyon's most well-known geologic features: A mysterious and missing gap of time in the canyon's rock record that covers hundreds of millions of years.

The research comes closer to solving a puzzle, called the "Great Unconformity," that has perplexed geologists since it was first described nearly 150 years ago.

Think of the red bluffs and cliffs of the Grand Canyon as Earth's history textbook, explained Barra Peak, lead author of the new study and a graduate student in geological sciences at CU Boulder. If you scale down the canyon's rock faces, you can jump back almost 2 billion years into the planet's past. But that textbook is also missing pages: In some areas, more than 1 billion years' worth of rocks have disappeared from the Grand Canyon without a trace.

Geologists want to know why.

"The Great Unconformity is one of the first well-documented geologic features in North America," Peak said. "But until recently, we didn't have a lot of constraints on when or how it occurred."

Now, she and her colleagues think they may be narrowing in on an answer in a paper published this month in the journal Geology. The team reports that a series of small yet violent faulting events may have rocked the region during the breakup of an ancient supercontinent called Rodinia. The resulting havoc likely tore up the earth around the canyon, causing rocks and sediment to wash away and into the ocean.

The team's findings could help scientists fill in missing pieces of what happened during this critical period for the Grand Canyon—today one of North America's foremost natural wonders.

"We have new analytical methods in our lab that allow us to decipher the history in the missing window of time across the Great Unconformity," said Rebecca Flowers, coauthor of the new study and a professor of geological sciences. "We are doing this in the Grand Canyon and at other Great Unconformity localities across North America."

Beautiful lines

It's a mystery that goes back a long way. John Wesley Powell, the namesake of today's Lake Powell, first saw the Great Unconformity during his famed 1869 expedition by boat down the rapids of the Colorado River.

Peak, who completed a similar research rafting trip through the Grand Canyon in spring 2021, said that the feature is stark enough that you can see it from the river.

"There are beautiful lines," Peak said. "At the bottom, you can see very clearly that there are rocks that have been pushed together. Their layers are vertical. Then there there's a cutoff, and above that you have these beautiful horizontal layers that form the buttes and peaks that you associate with the Grand Canyon."

The difference between those two types of rocks is significant. In the western part of the canyon toward Lake Mead, the basement stone is 1.4 to 1.8 billion years old. The rocks sitting on top, however, are just 520 million years old. Since Powell's voyage, scientists have seen evidence of similar periods of lost time at sites around North America.

"There's more than a billion years that's gone," Peak said. "It's also a billion years during an interesting part of Earth's history where the planet is transitioning from an older setting to the modern Earth we know today."

A continent splits

To explore the transition, Peak and her colleagues employed a method called "thermochronology," which tracks the history of heat in stone. Peak explained that, when geologic formations are buried deep underground, the pressure building on top of them can cause them to get toasty. That heat, in turn, leaves a trace in the chemistry of minerals in those formations.

Using this approach, the researchers conducted a survey of samples of rock collected from throughout the Grand Canyon. They discovered that the history of this feature may be more convoluted than scientists have assumed. In particular, the western half of the canyon and its eastern portion (the part that tourists are most familiar with) may have undergone different geologic contortions throughout time.

"It's not a single block with the same temperature history," Peak said.

Roughly 700 million years ago, basement rock in the west seems to have risen to the surface. In the eastern half, however, that same stone was under kilometers of sediment.

The difference likely came down to the breakup of Rodinia, a gigantic land mass that began to pull apart at about the same time, Peak said. The researchers results suggest that this major upheaval may have torn at the eastern and western halves of the Grand Canyon in different ways and at slightly different times—producing the Great Unconformity in the process.

Peak and her colleagues are now looking at other sites of the Great Unconformity in North America to see how general this picture might be. For now, she's excited to watch geologic history play out in one of the country's most picturesque landscapes.

"There are just so many things there that aren't present anywhere else," she said. "It's a really amazing natural lab."

Researchers dig into case of geologic amnesia

More information: B.A. Peak et al, Zircon (U-Th)/He thermochronology reveals pre-Great Unconformity paleotopography in the Grand Canyon region, USA, Geology (2021). DOI: 10.1130/G49116.1

Journal information: Geology 

Provided by University of Colorado at Boulder 

Judge throws out Trump-era approvals for Alaska oil project

Mark Thiessen and Becky Bohrer
The Associated PressStaff
Thursday, August 19, 2021 

Drilling operations at the Doyon Rig 19 at the Conoco-Phillips Carbon location in the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska. (Judy Patrick / AP)

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA -- A federal judge on Wednesday threw out Trump administration approvals for a large planned oil project on Alaska's North Slope, saying the federal review was flawed and didn't include mitigation measures for polar bears.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason in Anchorage vacated permits for ConocoPhillips' Willow Project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska in a 110-page ruling.

The Trump administration approved the project in late 2020, and the Biden administration defended the project in court.

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Rebecca Boys, a ConocoPhillips' spokesperson, said the company would review Gleason's decision "and evaluate the options available regarding this project."

Spokespersons for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the Interior Department said their agencies had no comment. The Bureau of Land Management conducted the environmental review of the project that Gleason found flawed.

Conservation groups and Sovereign Inupiat for a Living Arctic, described as a grassroots organization, had challenged the adequacy of the review process.

Karlin Itchoak, Alaska director for The Wilderness Society, in a statement called the ruling "a step toward protecting public lands and the people who would be most negatively impacted by the BLM's haphazard greenlighting of the Willow project."

In October 2020, then-U.S. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt signed the government's record of decision that called for allowing ConocoPhillips to establish up to three drill sites, associated processing facilities and gravel roads and pipelines on the North Slope.

Two more drill sites and additional roads and pipelines proposed by ConocoPhillips could be considered later, the Interior Department said at the time.

Bernhardt had said the decision would make a "significant contribution to keeping oil flowing" through the trans-Alaska pipeline system "decades into the future" and provide revenues. The Bureau of Land Management said the project could produce up to 160,000 barrels of oil a day with about 590 million barrels over 30 years.

More than 1,000 jobs were expected during peak construction and more than 400 jobs during operations, the agency's then-state director said.

Gleason said the land management agency's exclusion of foreign greenhouse gas emissions in its environment review was "arbitrary and capricious."

She also ruled the agency acted contrary to law to the extent it developed its "alternatives analysis based on the view that ConocoPhillips has the right to extract all possible oil and gas on its leases."

Gleason voided a report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for lacking specifics around mitigation measures for polar bears. The agency had concluded that the project "was not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of polar bears and not likely to result in the adverse modification of polar bear critical habitat," according to the ruling.

The Bureau of Land Management's reliance on that report was also flawed, Gleason said in sending the case back to the appropriate agencies for further action.

Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska program director for the Defenders of Wildlife, called the decision "a win for our climate, for imperiled species like polar bears, and for the local residents whose concerns have been ignored." She urged the Biden administration to examine alternatives to the project.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, in a statement, said the ruling "from a federal judge trying to shelve a major oil project on American soil does one thing: outsources production to dictatorships & terrorist organizations."

He called the decision "horrible."

New Scans of Tyrannosaur Skulls Reveal Echoes of Dino Brains

Paleontologists examined the braincases of two daspletosaurs and were surprised to find significant differences between them.

By
Isaac Schultz
Today 2:30PM

A mounted daspletosaur at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

Photo: Tetsuto Miyashita © Canadian Museum of Nature

Not much is known about Daspletosaurus, a late Cretaceous theropod that thrived in the forests of North America 75 million years ago. Now, paleontologists have shined a literal light on one of the animal’s mysteries, by taking CT scans of two of dinosaur braincases to digitally reconstruct the brains and adjacent structures.

Daspletosaurus was a meat-eating dinosaur first described in 1970; it is a tyrannosaur, meaning it’s part of the family Tyrannosauridae, the group that includes Tarbosaurus, Albertosaurus, and of course Tyrannosaurus rex, among other similarly terrifying predators. The research team looked at two Daspletosaurus skulls—one found near Alberta, Canada’s Red Deer river in 1921 and another dug up near the province’s Milk River at the turn of the millennium.

The two specimens are about 2 million years apart, a blink of the eye in terms of dinosaur evolution. At over 70 million years old, they’re far too ancient for any soft tissue to remain intact. But CT scans aren’t just great for peering non-invasively into complex structures like the brain—they can even be useful when the brain is long gone. In this case, the research team was able to map out some otherwise hidden structures in the two skulls that offer glimpses at how the dinosaurs made sense of their environment. Their work, published today in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, found differences between the animals’ braincases, suggesting that tyrannosaur skulls may have had more variation than previously thought.

Compared to other anatomical structures influenced by natural selection, “the brain is a very conservative organ … the bones surrounding it are also considered to change little,” said Tetsuto Miyashita, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature and the study’s lead author, in an email.

“This was thought true to dinosaurs, but because we used to have access to so few braincases, we are only finding out recently in tyrannosaurs that the braincase actually varies a lot from species to species, or even within a species,” Miyashita expalined.

That’s a big takeaway from the recent study: that, based on the shapes of the two skulls and their respective ear structures, braincases, and dimensions, the animals may represent two distinct species, which would be a first for daspletosaurs. (The braincase is the specific part of the skull that holds the brain; it therefore offers unique insights on how dinosaurs’ nerves and senses worked.)

A diagram of some internal structures in one daspletosaur’s braincase.

Graphic: Tetsuto Miyasita © Canadian Museum of Nature.

In the paper, the researchers describe Daspletosaurus (specifically Daspletosaurus torosus) as a bit of a fallback classification for tyrannosaurs from western North America that aren’t clearly an animal like Albertosaurus or T. rex. As a result, daspletosaurs crop up over an “unusually broad” swath of the continent, the researchers wrote in the paper, though more recent work has begun to sift through these mislabeled creatures.

The new work follows up on studies clarifying the species of Daspletosaurus; Miyashita and his colleagues spent hundreds of hours scanning the internal spaces within the two fossils, which belonged to animals that lived in the late Cretaceous. With a unique view into their heads, the team found canals that hosted nerve bundles connected to the dinosaurs’ eyes. They also spotted air sacs—a common feature in theropods and modern birds—in many of the braincase bones.

“Cavities within the bones not only make the huge skull lighter but also are related to the middle region of the ear. The cavities probably helped to amplify sound and assist the system that communicates to the left and right ears, allowing the brain to determine where a sound is coming from,” said Ariana Paulina Carabajal, a paleontologist specializing in dinosaur braincases at the National University of Comahue in Argentina and a co-author of the paper, in a press release.


Though both fossils had these features, they varied, with one of the specimens having unique-looking sinuses and some internal characteristics more evocative of other tyrannosaur species, like Gorgosaurus and Bistahieversor. Miyashita said the work was just the first step in teasing apart the specimens long thought to be a single species, Daspletosaurus torosus. Next, the team will check out the rest of the body of the more recently discovered Daspletosaurus. We could have a new meat-eating dinosaur on our hands quite soon.

More: Utah Mass Death Site Bolsters Theory That Tyrannosaurs Hunted in Packs

Study of tyrannosaur braincases shows more variation than previously thought

by Canadian Museum of Nature

The mounted skeleton of Daspletosaurus torosus on view at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Canada. The skull is a cast for display. The original skull, including the braincase, is preserved for study in the museum's collections. Credit: Tetsuto Miyashita Canadian Museum of Nature.

Among the fierce carnivores that lived during the late Cretaceous was a predator named Daspletosaurus. The massive tyrannosaur, about nine meters long, lived in the coastal forest of what is now Alberta around 75 million years ago—-preceding the more famous T. rex by about 10 million years.

For the first time, scientists in Canada and Argentina have used CT scans to digitally reconstruct the brain, inner ear, and surrounding bones (known as the braincase) of two well-preserved Daspletosaurus specimens.

Their results, published online today in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, counter a prevailing view that dinosaur brains and the bones enclosing and protecting them varied little within species, or among closely related species, especially when compared with changes observed in other parts of the skeleton. "Our study with the two Daspletosaurus specimens suggests otherwise," explains Dr. Tetsuto Miyashita, paleontologist with the Canadian Museum of Nature and senior author of the study.

"We know that tyrannosaurs had relatively good-sized brains for a dinosaur, and this study shows that this pattern holds for Daspletosaurus. Furthermore, based on the shapes of the brain, ear structure, and braincase, we suggest that these two specimens represent distinct species of daspletosaurs."

Access to a braincase, the internal part of the skull that surrounds and protects the brain, helps unlock one of the most complex parts of dinosaur anatomy. This requires advanced medical technology such as a CT scanner to image the internal spaces hidden underneath thick bones, with the resulting hundreds of hours of work to reconstruct the brain and other fleshy parts slice by slice. Therefore, most studies on dinosaur brains have each focused on one specimen from a representative species of the group. As an exception, Tyrannosaurus rex has several such reconstructions of their brains. Now, this new study investigates two remarkably well-preserved skulls of Daspletosaurus, a much rarer tyrannosaur than T. rex.

The braincase of Daspletosaurus torosus in the Canadian Museum of Nature's collections. This was part of one of two rare Daspletosaurus specimens studied by the researchers. Credit: Tetsuto Miyasita, Canadian Museum of Nature.

One belongs to the original specimen of Daspletosaurus, which is prominently displayed at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Unearthed in 1921 along the banks of Alberta's Red Deer River, its description in 1970 as Daspletosaurus torosus ("muscular frightful lizard)" by Dr. Dale Russell ushered in the modern era of research on tyrannosaurids. The second specimen, uncovered in 2001, is with the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta. Miyashita is continuing to study it with Dr. Philip Currie of the University of Alberta, another author of the study.

Study of the braincase structure and its endocranial cavity provides insights on the brain itself, as well as characteristics such as the layout of cranial nerves, and some aspects of the sensory biology such as auditory and visual anatomy that drove the life of the dinosaur.

View of the Daspletosaurus torosus braincase, showing the reconstructed brain, inner ear, and air sacs as determined by CT scanning. Credit: Tetsuto Miyasita, Canadian Museum of Nature.

Dr. Ariana Paulina Carabajal, a dinosaur braincase expert in Argentina and study co-author at the Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente (CONICET-Universidad Nacional del Comahue), provided the detailed models of the brain and inner ear anatomy and related structures. Among the findings were the presence of large bony canals that would have transmitted thick nerve bundles that moved the eyeballs. The researchers also describe large air sacs that filled up most of the braincase bones, which is in line with the limited studies known of other tyrannosaurs.

"These cavities within the bones not only make the huge skull lighter, but also are related to the middle region of the ear," explains Paulina Carabajal. "The cavities probably helped to amplify sound and assist the system that communicates to the left and right ears, allowing the brain to determine where a sound is coming from."

A cast of the skull of Daspletosaurus torosus in the Canadian Museum of Nature's collections. The original skull, including the braincase, is available for study. Credit: Tetsuto Miyasita, Canadian Museum of Nature.

Yet, even within the two braincases of Daspletosaurus, there were differences. "It was surprising to see so many variations in the braincases even though the skeletons are similar," says Miyashita, who offers that their study provides a good reason to look at more braincases within similar groups of dinosaurs, or even within species.

"Researchers have looked inside so few braincases in dinosaurs, typically one each for whatever species they studied, that this reinforced the assumption that these structures don't change much within and among species. We just haven't looked inside enough skulls to document variation."

New evidence for combat and cannibalism in tyrannosaurs

More information: Ariana Paulina Carabajal et al, Two braincases of Daspletosaurus (Theropoda: Tyrannosauridae): anatomy and comparison, Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1139/cjes-2020-0185

Journal information: Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 

Provided by Canadian Museum of Nature

Mega-clouds of traveling 

smoke are harming people's 

health thousands of miles 

away from wildfires

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

Thu, August 19, 2021

A resident watches from his porch as the Cameron Peak Fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado's history, burns outside Estes Park, Colorado, October 16, 2020. Jim Urquhart/Reuters

• Wildfire smoke is traveling thousands of miles, polluting air on distant coasts and even in the North Pole.

• The smoke can damage lungs and exacerbate disease even a continent away from a fire.

• World-traveling clouds of wildfire smoke may be annual events now.

• See more stories on Insider's business page.

For the second year in a row, enormous wildfires are creating clouds of smoke big enough to generate their own weather, blanket entire continents, and turn faraway skies orange or grey.

Smoke is billowing from blazes in the western US, Canada, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Algeria, and Siberia - so much, in fact, that astronauts on the space station can see it. The wildfires in California and Oregon have darkened skies and led to air-quality warnings in New York City and Boston, as they did last summer. The Siberian fires, meanwhile, have sent clouds of smoke and ash to the North Pole, nearly 2,000 miles away, then down to Canada and Greenland.

The Dixie fire's thick smoke plume, as seen from the International Space Station on August 4, 2021. NASA/JSC

Each time a big fire burns, its smoke can rise high in the atmosphere, where winds can catch it and carry it for thousands of miles until it hits a weather system that pushes it back towards the ground. That's when it poses a health risk. Many people see wildfires as a local problem - a danger to people in Greece or California, say, but not for them personally. That's incorrect, according to environmental epidemiologist Jesse Berman.

"Every one of these wildfire events is an opportunity for that smoke to travel long distances and affect not only the people nearby, but also those very far away," Berman told Insider. "People who live in areas that have relatively good air quality are going to be all of a sudden subjected to levels of pollution that are many times higher than what's normally seen, and at levels that are very harmful to health."

These mega-clouds of world-traveling smoke may become a regular, annual occurrence, according to Berman - "if not multiple times every single year," he said.

Climate change is expected to lead to more frequent, larger, more intense wildfires in the coming decades. A new report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that "fire weather" will probably increase through 2050 in North America, Central America, parts of South America, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, north Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. That means more days where conditions are warm, dry, and windy enough to trigger and sustain wildfires.

Wildfire smoke shrouds the Statue of Liberty, as seen from Brooklyn, New York, July 21, 2021. Brendan McDermid/Reuters

The amount of fuel available to burn in those places - dry vegetation - is also likely to increase as rising temperatures cause the air to absorb more moisture and bring about more droughts.

"When these events cover hundreds or thousands of miles, everybody is at risk," Berman said. "It doesn't matter where you're living. You can be affected by these events the same as anyone else."

Particles in wildfire smoke can strain your lungs, heart, and immune system

Smoke from the Bootleg Fire rises behind the town of Bonanza, Oregon, July 15, 2021. Bootleg Fire Incident Command via AP

Wherever it goes, wildfire smoke fills the air with microscopic particles from the material that has burned and the resulting chemical reactions.

Known as PM2.5, these particles measure no more than 2.5 micrometers across (that's about 30 times smaller than a human hair), allowing them to penetrate deep into your lungs and enter your bloodstream. When you inhale these particles - as millions of people have in the last year - they can damage the lining of your lungs and cause inflammation.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that smoke can "make you more prone to lung infections" including COVID-19, since any breach in the lungs' lining offers more opportunities for a virus to infiltrate.

Satellite imagery shows smoke spreading over the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in eastern Russia on August 8, 2021. NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens

Indeed, a recent study linked about 19,000 cases of COVID-19 on the West Coast to wildfire smoke last summer. The paper, published last week, found a correlation between high levels of PM2.5 pollution and spikes in coronavirus cases in counties across California, Oregon, and Washington.

Experts suspected as much. Previous research had already shown that wildfire smoke leaves people more vulnerable to disease. In the short term, smoke can irritate the eyes and lungs and cause wheezing, coughs, or difficulty breathing, even in healthy people. Longer-term studies have connected PM2.5 pollution to an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, heart failure, and premature death. PM2.5 particles can also impair the immune system, possibly by disabling immune cells in the lungs.

Wildfire smoke can have the most severe effects on people who are already highly vulnerable to COVID-19: the elderly, children (many of whom are unvaccinated against the coronavirus), and people with asthma or chronic lung disease.

   

These electric submarines map the seafloor to make way for wind power

PUBLISHED THU, AUG 19 2021
Lora Kolodny@LORAKOLODNY

KEY POINTS

A start-up called Bedrock has developed electric, autonomous submarines and software that map the seafloor to help identify sites that are suited for offshore wind farms.

The U.S. has been a global laggard in offshore wind power, with just one active facility that started commercial operations in 2016.

However, the Biden administration is pushing for a massive increase in U.S. offshore wind capacity by 2030.


Bedrock cofounders (L-R) CTO Charlie Chiau and CEO Anthony DiMare
Courtesy: Bedrock

In March, the departments of Energy, Interior and Commerce said they were aiming for U.S. offshore wind capacity to hit 30 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, a hugely optimistic goal that would require thousands of new wind turbines to be installed off the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts.

With federal support locked in, now it’s up to developers and operators to figure out where it’s safe to install offshore wind farms and pursue permits.

Bedrock, a Richmond, California, start-up, wants to help them map the seafloor using electric autonomous underwater vehicles (e-AUV) that can launch right from the shore.

Traditionally, marine surveys would require a large, crewed ship and heavy sonar equipment that would generate terabytes of data stored on hard drives that had to be mailed somewhere for processing and analysis.

Marine surveys like that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take up to a full year, says Bedrock co-founder and CEO Anthony DiMare.

By contrast his company’s electric mini sub gathers data using lighter-weight sonar and other sensors, then transmits it to Bedrock’s cloud-based service. The company’s Mosaic software makes it usable almost right away from a work PC.

Bedrock’s electric submarines run on a lithium-ion battery that can be swapped out for a freshly charged one when needed. They run for 12- or 24-hour missions, typically at a speed of 2 to 3 knots (or less than 5 mph) to conduct surveys up to 300 meters in depth.


Bedrock was co-founded in 2019 by DiMare, a repeat entrepreneur and mechanical engineer, along with CTO Charlie Chiau, a former SpaceX systems integration engineer.

They told CNBC the company is focused on the needs of the domestic offshore wind industry right now, further motivated by the urgency of the IPCC report earlier this month.

However, Bedrock’s seafloor mapping technology can be put to use in many other industries. For example, it can find aging oil and gas infrastructure that may need to be decommissioned. It can also be used for data center planning underwater.

Bedrock developed an electric, autonomous underwater vehicle and software to map the seafloor.
Courtesy: Bedrock


To test the AUVs before they’re taken to the open water, Chiau says Bedrock has installed a 20-foot long, 5-foot deep circular tank in its Richmond office. This functions like an underwater treadmill, mimicking currents and conditions an electric submarine would likely encounter in an ocean or perhaps the Great Lakes.

The company has just one electric submarine operating commercially at this time, but the founders intend to build and send fleets of them into the water.

In March, Bedrock closed an $8 million seed round of funding, which it plans to use for hiring, refinements and production of more of its electric submarines, as well as cloud services and software development.

DiMare said the first 50 gigabytes of seafloor data will always be free for any user of the company’s Mosaic software to store and access. It was important to the co-founders that they give independent researchers and smaller teams access to the same kind of tools large renewable energy developers might have.

Bedrock’s Mosaic software shows a rendering of the seafloor.
Courtesy: Bedrock

Near term, Bedrock expects to make money by selling seafloor mapping and software as a service. It will send electric AUVs to scan a specific “polygon” -- essentially a plot of land on the seafloor -- collect data, clean it up and hand it over to customers via Mosaic.

To ensure that employees at Bedrock have a personal connection to the ocean, and a strong commitment to protecting marine ecosystems, the start-up gives new hires what DiMare and Chiau call an “ocean allowance.” This perk can go toward any activity, like scuba diving lessons, surfboard rentals or a guided kayaking tour.

The company is aiming to double its head count from around 25 employees today to 50 in the next year, and to help the U.S. catch up to European nations, and eventually China, when it comes to offshore wind capacity.

The U.S. has been a global laggard with just one active offshore wind facility that started commercial operations in 2016 -- the 30 MW Block Island Wind Farm.

Bedrock modernizes seafloor mapping with autonomous sub and cloud-based data

Devin Coldewey@techcrunch •August 19, 2021

Image Credits: Bedrock


The push for renewable energy has brought offshore wind power to the forefront of many an energy company’s agenda, and that means taking a very close look at the ocean floor where the installations are to go. Fortunately Bedrock is here to drag that mapping process into the 21st century with its autonomous underwater vehicle and modern cloud-based data service.

The company aims to replace the standard “big ship with a big sonar” approach with a faster, smarter, more modern service, letting companies spin up regular super-accurate seafloor imagery as easily as they might spin up a few servers to host their website.

“We believe we’re the first cloud-native platform for seafloor data,” said Anthony DiMare, CEO and co-founder (with CTO Charlie Chiau) of Bedrock. “This is a big data problem — how would you design the systems to support that solution? We make it a modern data service, instead of like a huge marine operation — you’re not tied to this massive piece of infrastructure floating in the water. Everything from the way we move sonars around the ocean to the way we deliver the data to engineers has been rethought.”

The product Bedrock provides customers is high-resolution maps of the seafloor, made available via Mosaic, a familiar web service that does all the analysis and hosting for you — a big step forward for an industry where “data migration” still means “shipping a box of hard drives.”

Normally, DiMare explained, this data was collected, processed and stored on the ships themselves. Since they were designed to do everything from harbor inspections to deep sea surveys, they couldn’t count on having a decent internet connection, and the data is useless in its raw form. Like any other bulky data, it needs to be visualized and put in context.



Image Credits: Bedrock

“These data sets are extremely large, tens of terabytes in size,” said DiMare. “Typical cloud systems aren’t the best way to manage 20,000 sonar files.”

The current market is more focused on detailed, near-shore data than the deep sea, since there’s a crush to take part in the growing wind energy market. This means that data is collected much closer to ordinary internet infrastructure and can be handed off for cloud-based processing and storage more easily than before. That in turn means the data can be processed and provided faster, just in time for demand to take off.

As DiMare explained, while there may have been a seafloor survey done in the last couple decades of a potential installation site, that’s only the first step. An initial mapping pass might have to be made to confirm the years-old maps and add detail, then another for permitting, for environmental assessments, engineering, construction and regular inspections. If this could be done with a turnkey automated process that produced even better results than crewed ships for less money, it’s a huge win for customers relying on old methods. And if the industry grows as expected to require more active monitoring of the seafloor along every U.S. coast, it’s a win for Bedrock as well, naturally.




Image Credits: Bedrock


To make this all happen, of course, you need a craft that can collect the data in the first place. “The AUV is a piece of technology we built solely to enable a data product,” said DiMare, but noted that, originally, “we didn’t want to do this.”

“We started to spec out what it looked like to use an off the shelf system,” he explained. “But if you want to build a hyper-scalable, very efficient system to get the best cost per square meter, you need a very specific set of features, certain sonars, the compute stack… by the time we listed all those we basically had a self-designed system. It’s faster, it’s more operationally flexible, you get better data quality, and you can do it more reliably.”

And amazingly, it doesn’t even need a boat — you can grab it from the back of a van and launch it from a pier or beach.

“From the very beginning one of the restrictions we put on ourselves was ‘no boats.’ And we need to be able to fly with this thing. That totally changed our approach,” said DiMare.




Image Credits: Bedrock

The AUV packs a lot into a small package, and while the sensor loadout is variable depending on the job, one aspect that defines the craft is its high-frequency sonar.

Sonars operate in a wide range of frequencies, from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands of hertz. Unfortunately that means that ocean-dwelling creatures, many of which can hear in that range, are inundated with background noise, sometimes to the point where it’s harmful or deters them from entering an area. Sonar operating about 200 kHz is safe for animals, but the high frequency means the signal attenuates more quickly, reducing the range to 50-75 meters.

That’s obviously worthless for a ship floating on the surface — much of what it needs to map is more than 75 meters deep. But if you could make a craft that always stayed within 50 meters of the seabed, it’s full of benefits. And that’s exactly what Bedrock’s AUV is designed to do.

The increased frequency of the sonar also means increased detail, so the picture its instruments paint is better than what you’d get with a larger wave. And because it’s safe to use around animals, you can skip the (very necessary but time-consuming) red tape at wildlife authorities. Better, faster, cheaper and safer is a hell of a pitch.

Today marks the official launch of Mosaic, and to promote adoption Bedrock is offering 50 gigs of free storage — of any kind of compatible map data, since the platform is format-agnostic.

There’s a ton of data out there that’s technically “public” but is nevertheless very difficult to find and use. It may be a low-detail survey from two decades ago, or a hyper-specific scan of an area investigated by a research group, but if it were all in one place it would probably be a lot more useful, DiMare said.

“Ultimately we want to get where we can do the whole ocean on a yearly basis,” he concluded. “So we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

 

  

Super Clean Water from Cooling Towers and Grid-Scale Battery Storage Doubles as Frequency Control

Aug 19, 2021

engineeringdotcom

Electrostatics have long been a high-efficiency technology for removing pollutants from the air, from residential air cleaners to the electrostatic precipitators in coal-fired power plants. A new use for this technology has been developed by an MIT spinoff that promises to capture water vapour emitted by industrial and commercial cooling towers. Captured water is pure enough to be practical for human consumption or as boiler feed water for generating plants.

Battery storage of electrical power is an essential part of intermittent clean energy systems like photovoltaic panels and wind turbines. But batteries can have a secondary and equally important purpose: grid forming. Frequency control of large AC grids can be difficult with multiple generating sources and varying loads across a system. With advanced computer control of inverters, battery storage systems can act as a frequency regulator in large grid systems, forming an electrical equivalent of the large rotating inertial mass of a mechanical generator. Technology makes battery storage for grid purposes both more useful and cost-effective. 

SPACE WARS BEZOS VS MUSK
NASA agrees to pause SpaceX lunar contract until November after Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin files suit


BY TODD BISHOP on August 19, 2021

An artist’s rendering shows SpaceX’s Starship rocket ship on the moon. (SpaceX Illustration)

NASA paused its contract with SpaceX to take astronauts back to the moon pending the initial outcome of a lawsuit filed by Blue Origin.

The voluntary stay will expire on Nov. 1, two weeks after oral arguments are set to take place in the case, according to a timeline laid out Thursday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ commercial space venture, filed the complaint against the U.S. government over NASA’s decision to award a $2.9 billion contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build what would be the first lunar lander to carry astronauts to the moon since the Apollo era.

The decision was previously the subject of a Blue Origin protest, which was denied by the Government Accountability Office on July 30.

Blue Origin filed its lawsuit under seal, but the company’s previous bid protest disputed NASA’s decision to award a single contract.

NASA originally had hoped to fund two of the three teams to continue work on their human landing systems, which would have provided a backup option. Agency officials cited congressional budget limits as one reason for making only one award.

Todd Bishop is GeekWire's co-founder, a longtime business and technology journalist who covers topics including Amazon, Microsoft, startups, AI, the cloud and health tech, and hosts GeekWire's weekly podcast. Follow him @toddbishop. Email todd@geekwire.com.

Blue Origin leaving humans behind as next mission will carry scientific and research payloads

BY KURT SCHLOSSER on August 18, 2021

(Blue Origin Photo)

Jeff Bezos and his crewmates won’t be hopping aboard for a suborbital redo on the next New Shepard mission. The Amazon founder’s space venture announced Wednesday that the 17th flight of the reusable rocket ship will carry scientific and research payloads.

Blue Origin scheduled the launch for 6:35 a.m. PT on Aug. 25 from its West Texas facility. It’s the fourth flight for the program in 2021 and the eighth for this particular vehicle.

The NS-17 mission will carry NASA lunar landing technologies being tested to help reduce risk and increase confidence for successful missions to the moon. The payload, which flew in a previous experiment on Oct. 13, 2020, is mounted to the exterior of the rocket booster. According to Blue Origin, information from the first flight informed improvements to technology that determines a spacecraft’s location and speed as it approaches the surface of the moon.

Blue Origin’s continued interest and work on future moon missions comes in the wake of the company’s recent legal action against the U.S. government. Blue Origin is suing NASA over its decision to award a $2.9 billion contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build what would be the first lunar lander to carry astronauts to the moon since the Apollo era.

NS-17 will also carry 18 commercial payloads inside the crew capsule, 11 of which are NASA supported.

The rocket will also have another unique payload on the exterior — an art installation called “Suborbital Tryptych,” a series of three portraits by Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo painted on the top of the crew capsule on the main chute covers. “The portraits capture the artist, his mother, and a friend’s mother … and is part of Uplift Aerospace’s Uplift Art Program, whose purpose is to inspire new ideas and generate dialog by making space accessible and connected to the human experience,” Blue Origin said.

Bezos and three crewmates took a 10-minute ride as the first humans aboard a New Shepard ship on July 20.

Writer and editor Kurt Schlosser covers the Geek Life beat for GeekWire. A longtime journalist, photographer and designer, he has worked previously for NBC News, msnbc.com and the Seattle P-I. Follow Kurt on Twitter or reach him at kurt@geekwire.com.