Alaska governor eyes a future in carbon storage

The state itself has no overarching climate plan or emissions reduction goals


Becky Bohrer/Associated Press People rally in support of renewable energy policies, such as strengthening a renewable energy fund, across from the Alaska Capitol on Friday, Feb. 3, 2023, in Juneau, Alaska. Some environmentalists are skeptical of legislation proposed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy that aims to capitalize on carbon storage and carbon markets. (AP Photo/Becky Bohrer)

PUBLISHED: February 15, 2023 
By Becky Bohrer | Associated Press

JUNEAU, Alaska — Oil-dependent Alaska has long sought ways to fatten its coffers and move away from the fiscal whiplash of oil’s boom-and-bust cycles.

The newest idea, promoted by Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy, would have the state capitalize on its oil and gas expertise to tap into a developing industry — carbon storage — as a way to generate new revenues without curtailing the extraction industries that underpin Alaska’s economy. It’s also being pitched as a potential way for petroleum and mining companies to head off legal challenges over greenhouse gas impacts.

Hearings with state lawmakers are underway on legislation that would charge companies rent and fees for carbon dioxide storage deep underground in places like the Cook Inlet oil and gas basin. Hearings are coming on another bill that would enable Alaska to set up programs so companies could buy credits to offset their emissions. While details are few, such so-called “carbon offset” proposals sometimes include letting trees stand that otherwise might have been logged with the idea that the carbon stays stored in the trees so a company can pollute elsewhere.

Dunleavy said the state could ultimately earn billions annually without raising taxes on industry or Alaska residents. Alaskans currently receive yearly checks from the state’s oil-wealth fund and pay no statewide sales or personal income taxes.

“The reason we landed on this is it doesn’t gore any ox, and more importantly, it’s in line with what Alaska does, and that’s resources,” Dunleavy said, underscoring the idea that the plan, as laid out, wouldn’t harm existing interests.

But some environmentalists say the state, which has a front-row seat to the ravages of climate change, should be focused more on investing in renewables and green projects. Many of the oil companies operating in Alaska have emissions reductions targets, but the state itself has no overarching climate plan or emissions reduction goals.

The governor “will be the first person to tell you it doesn’t have anything to do with climate change, and it doesn’t have anything to do with solving Alaska’s energy needs,” said Matt Jackson, climate program manager with the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

It’s unclear exactly how much money Alaska could reap from the proposals, and there are still many questions around ideas such as the potential for other states or countries to ship in carbon dioxide for underground storage. Alaska officials for now have emphasized they want to prepare a regulatory framework for future carbon storage.

Shipping carbon dioxide is being analyzed in parts of the world. A project in Norway aims to ship carbon dioxide captured at European industrial sites and pump it into the seabed in Norway, according to the International Energy Agency. Japan is working on shipping technology.

Lawmakers in Alaska want to find experts who can help them analyze Dunleavy’s proposals, said state Rep. Ben Carpenter, who chairs the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee. Carpenter said finding people with the experience necessary has been a challenge. It’s not clear if Dunleavy’s proposals will gain traction during the current legislative session.

Alaska is rich in traditional resources — oil, gas, minerals and timber — and is home to a largely intact forest the size of West Virginia that is estimated to hold more carbon than any other U.S. national forest. But Alaska is also feeling the impacts of climate change: coastal erosion threatening Indigenous villages, unusual wildfires, thinning sea ice and permafrost that threatens to release carbon as it melts.

Dunleavy’s plan would give the Department of Natural Resources, which manages state lands for development including oil leasing, authority to implement carbon offset programs and would set up protocols for underground injection and mass storage of carbon dioxide.

Alaska’s concept echoes efforts in other fossil fuel-dependent states to capitalize on carbon offsets and sequestration or other emissions-reducing technologies while continuing to support the traditional industries they’ve long relied on, such as oil, gas or coal.

The proposal for underground storage would also offer a way for companies to mitigate emissions that might otherwise tie a project up in court, said Aaron O’Quinn with the state Division of Oil and Gas.

Cook Inlet, the state’s oldest-producing oil and gas basin near Anchorage, could serve as an underground storage site for carbon dioxide pollution from other states or even countries, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. The agency also said federal tax credits aimed at spurring carbon storage could provide a boost for a long-hoped-for liquefied natural gas project.

As part of its plan, Alaska wants to get authority from federal regulators for oversight of carbon injection wells, something North Dakota and Wyoming have already secured and that other states, like Louisiana, are pursuing or interested in.

An Iowa-based company working with Midwest ethanol plants is pursuing a $4.5 billion carbon dioxide pipeline project that would store the gas underground in North Dakota. The idea has gotten pushback from some landowners. In Wyoming, a state law requires utilities to evaluate getting at least some of their electricity from power plants fitted with carbon capture equipment, but utility reports suggest such retrofitting could cost hundreds of millions of dollars per plant with the expense showing up in higher electricity bills. Wyoming’s governor, Republican Mark Gordon, has vowed to make the coal state carbon negative, in part by trapping the carbon dioxide emitted by the state’s coal-fired power plants and pumping it underground.

ConocoPhillips Alaska, Alaska’s largest oil producer, is among the companies that have expressed interest in Dunleavy’s carbon plan but said it is too early to make any commitments.

The company is pursuing an oil project on Alaska’s far-northern edge that it says could produce up to 180,000 barrels (29 million liters) of oil a day. Environmentalists call the Willow oil project a ” carbon bomb ” that could lead to more development in the region if approved by the federal government. A decision could come by early March.

Alaska officials see perhaps the most immediate carbon opportunities on forest lands. Several Alaska Native corporations have made money through the sale of credits to let trees go unlogged, and the University of Alaska system is proposing a carbon credits program on some lands it manages as a revenue generator.

A report commissioned by the Department of Natural Resources identified three “high potential” carbon offset pilot projects on state forest lands, pegging the revenue potential for all three around $80 million over 10 years. The department said the report was limited in scope.

Associated Press reporter Mead Gruver contributed from Cheyenne, Wyo.

Waters off New England Had 2nd Warmest Year on Record in ’22

The average sea surface temperature was 53.66 degrees, more than 3.7 degrees above the 40-year average, the scientists said.

By The Associated Press

Published on 2/15/2023 at 5:51 PM

Lobster fishermen work at sunrise, Thursday, September 8, 2022, off Kennebunkport, Maine. Photo Credit: AP Photo

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The waters off New England, which are home to rare whales and most of the American lobster fishing industry, logged the second-warmest year on record last year.

The Gulf of Maine, a body of water about the size of Indiana that touches Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Canada, is warming faster than the vast majority of the world's oceans. Last year fell short of setting a new high mark for hottest year by less than half a degree Fahrenheit, said scientists with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, a science center in Portland.

The average sea surface temperature was 53.66 degrees (12 degrees Celsius), more than 3.7 degrees above the 40-year average, the scientists said. The accelerated warming is changing an ecosystem that's host to numerous important commercial fishing industries, especially for lobsters, they said.

One implication is that the warming is driving species more associated with southern waters into the Gulf of Maine and altering its food chain, said Janet Duffy-Anderson, chief scientific officer with the institute. That includes species such as black sea bass, which prey on lobsters.

“Who will be the emergent species and who will be the species that decline is, in large part, a function of those interactions,” said Duffy-Anderson. “At the moment, we’re not in a period of stability.”

The gulf is the nerve center of the lobster fishing business, which has recorded heavy catches over the past 10 years. However, lobster fisheries in more southern waters have collapsed, and scientists have placed the blame on warming temperatures.

The Gulf of Maine is also a key area for marine mammals such as the North Atlantic right whale, which numbers only about 340, and sea birds such as Atlantic puffins. Those species and many others are threatened by disruptions in their food supply due to warming waters

The environmental factors accompanying high temperatures in the Gulf of Maine include persistent, intense heatwaves, according to a report released by Gulf of Maine Research Institute on Wednesday.

The warming is also coming at a time when the world’s oceans are heating up. Last year was the third-warmest year for global sea surface temperature, the report said.

“What is being observed in the Gulf of Maine (and elsewhere around the world), however, is a loss of that balance: larger fractions of recent years are experiencing above average temperatures and cold spells are becoming vanishingly rare,” the report said.

The hottest year in the Gulf of Maine was 2021, according to records that go back to 1982, the institute said. That year, the average annual sea surface temperature was slightly more than 54 degrees (12.2 degrees Celsius). Last year was a fraction of a percent warmer than the third warmest year, which was 2012.

Those three years are the only ones in recorded history in which the gulf's average temperature exceeded 53 degrees (11.7 degrees Celsius).

The report states that other data also paint a picture of the Gulf of Maine as the site of prolonged warming. In nine of the year's 12 months, the average monthly sea surface temperature was within the top three warmest among all years on record, the report said. November and December both set new records for highest monthly average sea surface temperature in the gulf, it said.

____

BY PATRICK WHITTLE, The Associated Press

Warming seas are carving into glacier that could trigger sea level rise

New research provides a startling look at how warmer 

oceans, driven by climate change, are gouging the 

West Antarctic’s Thwaites Glacier

By Chris Mooney

Updated February 15, 2023

A robot called the Icefin operates under the sea ice near McMurdo Station, an Antarctic research station. (Schmidt-Lawrence/NASA PSTAR RISE UP)

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Rapidly warming oceans are cutting into the underside of the Earth’s widest glacier, startling new data and images show, leaving the ice more prone to fracturing and ultimately heightening the risk for major sea level rise.

Using an underwater robot at Thwaites Glacier, researchers have determined that warm water is getting channeled into crevasses in what the researchers called “terraces” — essentially, upside-down trenches — and carving out gaps under the ice. As the ice then flows toward the sea, these channels enlarge and become spots where the floating ice shelf can break apart and produce huge icebergs. If the remaining shelf is further undermined, Thwaites Glacier will flow into the ocean faster and boost global sea levels on a large scale.

A team deploys the Icefin at Thwaites Glacier in January 2020. (Andrew Mullen/International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration)

Warm water carves underwater crevasses into glacier

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Underwater video taken of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica in January 2020 shows carvings of potential break points beneath the glacier. (Video: International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration)

The results from overlapping teams of more than two dozen scientists, published Wednesday in two papers in the journal Nature, reveal the extent to which human-caused warming could destabilize glaciers in West Antarctica that could ultimately raise global sea level by 10 feet if they disintegrate over the coming centuries.

Scientists with the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a historic scientific collaboration organized by the United States and the United Kingdom, arrived at one of the safest spots to land on the West Antarctic behemoth in 2019 and 2020, and used hot water to drill through nearly 2,000 feet of ice to the ocean below.

Here, in a region known as the eastern ice shelf, they deployed an ocean sensor at the base of the floating ice shelf and sent down an 11-foot-long pen-shaped robot called Icefin. The vessel collected data and images in an environment in which warm ocean water, in some places more than 2 degrees Celsius above the local freezing point, is weakening the glacier.

The biggest revelation was that the ice melt is very uneven, with relatively slow loss in flat areas on the underside of the glacier. But the warm water entering Thwaites Glacier’s crevasses poses a serious threat, according to Britney Schmidt, a Cornell University scientist who is the lead researcher behind Icefin and deployed it with a group of 12 other researchers who encamped on the ice.

“The warm water is getting into the weak spots of the glacier, and kind of making everything worse,” Schmidt said.

“It shouldn’t be like that,” Schmidt continued. “That’s not what the system would look like if it wasn’t being forced by climate change.”

The new observations emerge from what is the very definition of an extreme environment. In this part of Thwaites Glacier — perhaps its most stable region — 1,900-foot-thick ice lifts upward from the seafloor and spreads over the ocean. Where the ice first departs from the seafloor is called the “grounding line” — the three-dimensional intersection of ice, ocean and bedrock. Outward from there, the floating ice creates a dark cavity that warm seawater and some fish can enter — but that humans cannot.

Underwater robot deployed beneath Antarctic glacier

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The Icefin underwater robot was deployed beneath the Thwaites Glacier in Antartica in January 2020 to measure ice melt beneath the surface of the glacier. (Video: International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration)

That’s why the observations from Icefin — which scientists pulled back up the borehole after the experiments and can be deployed again — are so unprecedented and revealing. “That’s the first time we’ve had data from that kind of environment, for Thwaites or any other glacier,” Schmidt said.

They give breathtaking details of what it looks like beneath the glacier.

Near the grounding line, video from the robot shows an underside of the ice that is dark and grainy because seafloor mud and sediment is frozen into it. Further downstream, the robot observed sand and pebbles falling out of the ice as it melted.

Within the crevasses and terraces, the robot captured video of scalloped side walls that resemble a round coffered ceiling.

“The technical achievement of getting this amazing range of data in a very difficult environment, and getting out safely, is just wonderful,” said Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State who was not directly involved in the research.

The unique data and images come from what is arguably the most important ocean-facing glacier of them all — at least so far as humans are concerned.

The Icefin at Kamb Ice Stream after being pulled from the water. (Schmidt-Lawrence/NASA PSTAR RISE UP)

Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier in 2019. (Jeremy Harbeck/OIB/NASA)

Thwaites is some 80 miles across and is the exit point for an area of ice larger than Florida. It is, essentially, the heart of West Antarctica, so large that if lost, it could be replaced only by a new Thwaites Sea.

Thwaites has been losing ice at an accelerating pace, based on data provided by Eric Rignot, one of the studies’ co-authors, at the University of California at Irvine.

The rate of loss overall since 1979 has been a little less than 20 billion tons per year, but that has increased to more than 40 billion tons since 2010, according to the data Rignot provided.

“This robot is getting to the hard places where we need to go to understand the future of the continent,” Rignot said. “We cannot understand what we cannot observe and measure.”

The terraced and scalloped features are generally not included in the simulations, or models, which attempt to forecast what the all-important Thwaites Glacier system will do in the future, the new research noted.

That’s critical because as the ice flows outward over the ocean — that is why this part of the glacier is called an ice shelf — crevasses that begin at the grounding line grow and develop over the course of this motion.

“This melting that starts right at the grounding line in crevasses is really important for what happens downstream,” Schmidt said. “Downstream, where it’s falling apart, these crevasses become these giant features.”

In the main trunk of Thwaites — where the seafloor is deeper and the glacier’s movement much faster, and which is difficult to safely reach — the floating ice shelf has largely collapsed. In the calmer eastern region, where the research took place, it is still intact but features large cracks.

In both regions, the grounding line of the glacier is retreating toward the center of Antarctica. And in both regions the glacier is out of balance, meaning it is getting thinner, and losing more ice to the ocean than is being replaced by flow from the inland parts of Antarctica.

A borehole drilling site on the Thwaites Glacier is seen in 2022. (Peter Davis/British Antarctic Survey)

When it comes to the Icefin robot, “my hope is that we will have a chance to take it to [the] main trunk of Thwaites, which is harder to get to, but also more important (deeper, warmer, moving faster, etc.),” Rignot said in an email. “These studies show it can be done and that we learn enormously from it.”

There was some good news in the research: In areas measured beneath Thwaites that were not characterized by crevasses and terraces, the melt rates were fairly slow. That’s because cold fresh meltwater created a protective layer that insulated the ice from the warmer water below — which could mix up into the crevasses but was thwarted in the more linear environment. Thus, nearly a third of melting occurred in the crevasses, the scientists calculated.

And the slower melt rate outside of them is not much consolation, considering that this slow rate may not be characteristic of the faster-changing part of Thwaites, and at any rate does not change the fact that the glacier is losing ice and retreating.

“What the results show is that you don’t need a large increase in melting to drive rapid retreat,” said Peter Davis, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey who led a second paper published with Schmidt’s by a largely overlapping team of scientists. “You just need to shift it out of equilibrium.”

Scientists consulted by The Washington Post had different readings of what the new research means for our overall understanding of what Thwaites Glacier will do to coastlines in our coming lifetimes.

For Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, the results from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration dampen somewhat the fear of catastrophic collapse of the glacier any time soon. It is retreating and that may not be stoppable, Scambos said, but the pace will still be manageable in coming decades.

“While we might see only a moderate add-on to sea level rise in the next 50 years, the processes are real, and the triggers for accelerating the collapse are bound to occur,” he said. “But we have also seen how to apply the brakes, what parts of the climate and ocean system are the main drivers, and what makes them drive. … We have some time to get this under control. Otherwise, the century of our grandchildren’s children will be very, very difficult.”

Alley, the glaciologist at Penn State, had a somewhat different overall outlook — that at least we are finally learning how these gigantic glaciers work.

“Overall, these papers don’t really change my level of worry about Thwaites collapse or not,” Alley said. “But the papers increase my optimism that we can make sense of this incredibly difficult and important system, and improve our ability to project what it may do in the future.”

EPA draft: US greenhouse gas emissions saw record single-year spike in 2021

BY ZACK BUDRYK - 02/15/23 

A flare burns off methane and other hydrocarbons as oil pumpjacks operate in the Permian Basin in Midland, Texas, Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions rose 5.5 percent in 2021 from the previous year, an all-time year-over-year spike, but were still below 2019 levels, according to a draft Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report.

In the draft of its annual inventory, the agency found total emissions of 6,347.7 million metric tons in 2021, driven largely by increased auto emissions as driving rebounded in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fossil fuel combustion-related emissions increased 7 percent relative to the year before, while emissions from coal consumption rose 14.6 percent.  

Emissions in 2021 mark a 2 percent decline from 1990, when the EPA began tracking them, and nearly 18 percent down from 2007, when they reached their recorded peak.

The EPA found that 2020 saw a record drop in emissions as economic activity largely halted during the initial wave of pandemic restrictions that began in the spring of that year, with emissions falling 8.9 percent.

Fossil fuel combustion comprised the vast majority of carbon dioxide emissions in 2021, at around 92.1 percent. Electric power demand also increased 2.1 percent from 2020 to 2021, for an overall emissions increase of 7.1 percent.

Despite the sharp increase compared to 2020, 2021 emissions from fossil fuel consumption were down 1.3 percent from 2019, part of a longer decline, while emissions from electric power were down 4 percent from 2019 to 2021, according to the EPA.

The EPA inventory also found that methane emissions comprised 11.5 percent of emissions in 2021. While methane emissions are less common than carbon dioxide and have a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than other greenhouse gases, they trap more heat in the atmosphere.

Methane emissions, like those from carbon dioxide, have seen a longer-term decline, with emissions down 16.3 percent between 1990 and 2021, according to the EPA inventory.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel will testify before Senate next month on Covid vaccine price hike

PUBLISHED WED, FEB 15 20232:
Spencer Kimball@SPENCEKIMBALL

KEY POINTS

Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate health committee, confirmed in a statement that Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel will testify on the company’s plans to increase the price of its Covid vaccine.

Sanders, in a letter to Bancel last month, slammed the proposed price hike for the vaccine as “outrageous” given that the vaccine was developed in cooperation with the National Institutes of Health using taxpayer money.

Moderna said Wednesday that it will offer the vaccine to the uninsured at no cost through a patient assistance program


Moderna CEO, Stephane Bancel attends 2019 Forbes Healthcare Summit at the Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 05, 2019 in New York City.
Steven Ferdman | Getty Images

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel will testify before the Senate health committee in March over the company’s price for its Covid-19 vaccine when the shots are sold on the private market.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the health panel, confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that Bancel would appear at a hearing titled: “Taxpayers Paid Billions For It: So Why Would Moderna Consider Quadrupling the Price of the COVID Vaccine?”

Bancel will testify at 10 a.m. ET on March 22.

The Moderna CEO stirred controversy last month when he said the company could increase the price of the shots to $110 to $130 a dose, significantly higher than the $26 the U.S. government pays for the omicron boosters. Sanders sent a letter to the CEO calling the proposed price hike “outrageous.”

Moderna, in a statement Wednesday, said it will provide the vaccines to the uninsured at no cost through a patient assistance program.

“For uninsured or underinsured people, Moderna’s patient assistance program will provide COVID-19 vaccines at no cost,” the company said.

Sanders, in a letter to Bancel last month, slammed the proposed price hike as “outrageous” because the vaccine was developed in cooperation with the National Institutes of Health using taxpayer money.

“I find your decision particularly offensive given the fact that the vaccine was jointly developed in partnership with scientists from the National Institutes of Health, a U.S. government agency that is funded by U.S. taxpayers,” Sanders wrote to Bancel.

Sanders said raising the vaccine price would have a negative effect on the budgets of Medicare and Medicaid and will increase private health insurance premiums, but he said the uninsured would feel the greatest impact.

“Perhaps most significantly, the quadrupling of prices will make the vaccine unavailable for millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans who will not be able to afford it,” Sanders said. “How many of these Americans will die from Covid-19 as a result of limited access to these lifesaving vaccines?”

Bancel sold more than $400 million in company stock from the start of the pandemic through March 2022. The Covid vaccine is currently Moderna’s only commercially available product.

The federal government has guaranteed free Covid vaccines for everyone in the country regardless of insurance status since the shots rolled out in December 2020. The vaccines will remain free for people who have Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance under the Affordable Care Act even after the federal Covid immunization program ends.

The U.S. still has 120 million omicron boosters that haven’t been used. The uninsured will continue to have access to these shots for free, but it’s unclear how long the supply will last.

When the federal supply runs out, uninsured adults may have to pay the full price for the shots. The White House has said it is developing plans to help.

There is a free federal vaccine program for children whose families or caretakers can’t afford the shots.