It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, February 10, 2020
New ‘Solar Panels’ Harness The Energy Of Deep Space
Solar power is cheaper than ever, it’s ultra-abundant, and it emits zero greenhouse gases. But it’s far from perfect--for now. One of the biggest limitations of solar energy (which applies to wind power as well) is that it is variable and is not dispatchable. Variability refers to the fact that solar power is dependent on a completely unreliable factor: the weather. Solar panels don’t generate energy if the sun isn’t shining, meaning that they don’t function for an entire half of every day and function far under capacity during overcast daylight hours. They also can’t be turned on and off according to the grid’s needs, known as dispatchability. Instead of being able to respond to the energy needs of the grid, the grid has to work around the productivity of the solar panels.
Researchers have been hard at work for years to address these two shortcomings with all different kinds of approaches. The most predominant strategy, and the one that is furthest along in development and implementation, is energy storage. When solar panels create excess energy, that is, more than the grid can absorb, the energy will be stored for later use when the sun isn’t shining. Energy storage is extremely promising, but currently is simply too expensive to be applied across the industry at a scale large enough to compete with fossil fuels. In order to reach 100 percent renewable energy in the United States, energy storage needs to be cheaper--a lot cheaper. “The answer is $20 per kilowatt hour in energy capacity costs. That’s how cheap storage would have to get for renewables to get to 100 percent,” reported Vox late last year based on findings from an MIT study. “That’s around a 90 percent drop from today’s costs. While that is entirely within the realm of the possible, there is wide disagreement over when it might happen; few expect it by 2030.”
In the meantime, there are a few teams of scientists taking a very different approach: developing a solar panel that can derive energy from the night sky. Oilprice reported on one of these projects last year. While the article proclaimed that “this ‘Anti-Solar Panel’ Could Generate Power From Darkness,” however, calling it a solar panel is a bit of a misnomer. The process does not use photovoltaic cells but operates entirely based on changes in temperature. The study from Stanford, poetically called “Generating Light from Darkness” explains: “We use a passive cooling mechanism known as radiative sky cooling to maintain the cold side of a thermoelectric generator several degrees below ambient. The surrounding air heats the warm side of the thermoelectric generator, with the ensuing temperature difference converted into usable electricity. We highlight pathways to improving performance from a demonstrated 25 mW/m2 to 0.5 W/m2. Finally, we demonstrate that even with the low-cost implementation demonstration here, enough power is produced to light a LED: generating light from darkness.”
Now, there is another new study that touts its own anti-solar panel technology. Not too far from the team in Palo Alto, another team of researchers from the University of California, Davis have published their own, even more poetically titled paper: “Nighttime Photovoltaic Cells: Electrical Power Generation by Optically Coupling with Deep Space.” A report from Popular Mechanics explains the study in layman’s terms. “To turn even low-level heat into energy, scientists have to use a thermal cell instead of a photo cell. The materials must be able to absorb the lowest wavelengths of energy.”
The report continues, “In a thermal radiation cell, we reset the parameters so Earth is the new sun, and its even minimal accumulated heat dwarfs the cold, midnight black of outer space. Letting heat seep out of thermal cells at night, drawn out by the cold night sky, could let scientists capture the energy as it goes out the same way we capture the sun’s energy as it comes in.” This is known as a heat sink.
While these studies are promising and innovative solutions to making renewable energy competitive and reliable on a large scale, they’re still in their initial stages, and commercialization can’t come fast enough. With catastrophic climate change right around the corner and the UN begging for investment in renewables, it’s a race against the clock, and right now it’s not certain if we will win.
Humans have been harnessing power from the sun as long as we have existed. By eating our photosynthesis-fueled friends in the animal kingdom and other organisms that eat plants, we are, ultimately gaining all of our energy from the sun. It stands to reason that we tried to extract energy from the sun for industrial purposes as well at the outset of industry. During the Industrial Revolution, way back in 1839, French scientist Alexandre Edmond Becquerellar made history when he discovered that a man-made solar cell could be used to convert sunlight into electricity thanks to the photovoltaic effect in 1839.
What’s more, sunlight is abundant, free, and clean. “Every five days, the sun provides the Earth with as much energy as all proven supplies of oil, coal, and natural gas,” reported Singularity Hub last year. “If humanity could capture just one 6,000th of Earth’s available solar energy, we’d be able to meet 100 percent of our energy needs.”
So if solar energy is more than capable of meeting all of our energy needs while producing zero greenhouse gas emissions, and the United Nations is all but pleading with the private sector to fund more renewable energy research before it’s too late to avoid the onset of catastrophic climate change, why isn’t the world simply blanketed with solar panels?
There have been some attempts to do just that: massive-scale solar plants that cover huge swaths of land. These projects have not, however, solved our clean energy needs. Far from it. The $1 billion Crescent Dunes solar plant developed by SolarReserve in Nevada was going to be the biggest solar plant in the world in its investment phase back in 2011, but by the time the project complete, it was already obsolete. “SolarReserve may have done its part, but today the company doesn’t rank among the winners. Instead, it’s mired in litigation and accusations of mismanagement at Crescent Dunes, where taxpayers remain on the hook for $737 million in loan guarantees,” Bloomberg reported last month. “Late last year, Crescent Dunes lost its only customer, NV Energy Inc., which cited the plant’s lack of reliability.”Related: Could This Be The Decade Of Green Hydrogen?
Ironically, the Crescent Dunes project was not a victim of the failure of the solar industry, but of its sweeping, whirlwind success. Solar tech has improved rapidly in past years, and a mammoth project like Crescent Dunes just couldn’t keep up. “The steam generators at Crescent Dunes require custom parts and a staff of dozens to keep things humming and to conduct regular maintenance,” the Bloomberg article goes on to say. “By the time the plant opened in 2015, the increased efficiency of cheap solar panels had already surpassed its technology, and today it’s obsolete—the latest panels can pump out power at a fraction of the cost for decades with just an occasional hosing-down.”
Despite this cautionary tale, the United States military currently has about $38 billion invested in projects very similar in style to crescent dunes. (This is not an anomaly--the U.S. Department of Defense has invested heavily in all kinds of alternatives to fossil fuels as climate change becomes an ever more pressing issue and peak oil looms around the corner.) As Popular Mechanics reports, “the Department of Defense has more of the government’s high-profile “moon shot”-type investments with DARPA, the Spruce Goose, and other famous weirdies—but in the short term, the government invests in cutting-edge science, too.”
But these investments may very well be just as ill-fated as Crescent Dunes. “As in any form of investment, there's risk involved.” the Popular mechanics article continues. “And public money has another layer of trouble. Because of the way public contracts are bid for, won, and fulfilled, the companies chosen to complete projects are often the best at the application process, and not necessarily the best at the work the project really involves.”
While it may still hold true that solar holds the greatest promise for the future of clean energy, bloated, government-contract projects mired in litigation, bureaucracy, and limited reflexivity to changing technology and trends are most certainly not the answer.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
The Race For Arctic Oil Is Heating Up By Tsvetana Paraskova - Feb 05, 2020 Despite climate concerns and environmentalist backlash against exploration for oil and gas in pristine sensitive regions of the Arctic, companies continue to explore for hydrocarbon resources in the Arctic Circle, in Russia and Norway in particular.
The largest Russian energy companies are looking to explore more Arctic oil and gas resources on and offshore Russia, while Norwegian and other Western oil firms are digging exploration wells in Norway’s Barents Sea.
Those companies lead the development efforts to tap more Arctic oil and gas resources as legacy oil and gas fields both offshore Norway and onshore Russia mature.
Russia’s biggest energy firms Gazprom, Rosneft, Novatek, and Lukoil, and Norway’s oil and gas giant Equinor, as well as Aker BP and ConocoPhillips, are the top oil and gas producers in the Artic region, data and analytics company GlobalData said in a new report. Gazprom is the undisputed leader in Arctic oil and gas production, followed, at a long distance, by two other Russian firms, Rosneft and Novatek, GlobalData’s estimates show.
Russian firms are ramping up exploration in Russia’s Arctic, while Equinor and other Western companies drill exploration wells in Norway’s Barents Sea, hoping for a significant discovery that could add to the Johan Castberg oilfield—a massive discovery which was made in 2011, but which hasn’t been replicated in the Barents Sea so far.
Yet, both Russia and Norway face specific challenges in getting the most out of their respective Arctic oil and gas resources.
In Russia, the government has made Arctic oil and gas development a key priority and offers tax breaks for firms exploring in the area.
Energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft dominate the exploration and development efforts in Russia’s Arctic. Offshore, Gazprom’s Prirazlomnoye field is currently the only producing Russian oil and gas project on the Arctic Shelf.
But even with tax breaks, Russia may find it hard to develop its offshore Arctic resources, due to the U.S. sanctions banning collaboration on Russian deepwater, Arctic offshore, or shale projects with Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftegas, and Rosneft. These are the largest energy firms in Russia and they don’t have access to capital at western banks to develop such projects. In the wake of the sanctions, many Western oil firms withdrew from joint ventures with Russian companies, which are now left without partnerships in technology needed to explore, drill, and potentially produce and process hard-to-extract oil and gas resources.
Although Russian firms downplay the effects of the U.S. sanctions on their development plans, and although domestic companies are focused on developing in-house technology solutions to replace foreign-sourced tech, analysts believe that 100-percent local content technology in challenging projects would likely take years to implement.
Financing for large onshore projects in the Arctic is not easy either. Rosneft, which wants to develop the Vostok Oil project, to “implement a complex development program for a new oil and gas province in the north of the Krasnoyarsk Territory,” is looking east to gather funding for the US$157 billion project—to Japan, India, and China.
Russia’s largest private natural gas producer, Novatek, is one of the success stories of Arctic resource development. Novatek—which already exports liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Yamal LNG plant—gave last year the go-ahead to its second LNG project, Arctic LNG 2 on the Gydan Peninsula. Novatek’s partners in the ventures are France’s Total with a minority stake as well as Chinese and Japanese companies.
Last year, Russian officials said that the Arctic area could become the key driver of Russia’s natural gas production in less than two decades, as it has the potential to produce 90 percent of all the gas produced in Russia by 2035.
Norway’s Arctic areas open to exploration are parts of the Barents Sea, where companies are struggling to finally make a large-size discovery after Johan Castberg. Norwegian authorities say that the Barents Sea holds 64 percent of the yet to be discovered resources on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, while the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea each are estimated to hold 18 percent of the undiscovered resources.
Last year, just five wells were drilled in the Barents Sea, fewer than in 2018. In 2019, a total of 17 new discoveries were made offshore Norway, of which only one was in the Barents Sea.
Norway’s Equinor says that it continues to explore in the Barents Sea because more oil will be needed in the world just to maintain supplies.
“Discoveries in the Barents Sea can lead to significant economic development, nationally and locally. Based on our understanding of the geology, we hope to find high quality light oil that’s in demand—and better for the climate. The wells we drill in the Barents Sea are cheaper than many others, thanks to the geology and shallower waters,” says the Norwegian giant.
In 2020, Equinor will focus on exploration in the western part of the Barents Sea, Tim Dodson, Executive Vice President, Exploration at Equinor, told Reuters in November.
Norway and Russia are leading Arctic oil and gas development, but they both face challenges in making the Arctic the next oil hotspot.
Goldman Sachs downgraded ExxonMobil’s shares to Sell from Neutral, following another disappointing quarter.
Exxon reported a drop in profits on Friday for the fourth quarter, weighed down by a deterioration in nearly every segment. Oil prices were weak, natural gas prices fell sharply, while profit margins for refining and petrochemicals also deteriorated. “There's no doubt that 2019 was a challenging year for a number of our businesses,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods admitted to shareholders and analysts on an earnings call on January 31. “Near or at 10-year lows on price and margins for gas refining and chemicals. Fourth quarter was particularly challenging for our chemical business.”
It isn’t just 10-year lows for prices. Exxon’s share price is also at its lowest point in a decade. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil is not slowing down, spending at aggressive levels as it drills in the Permian and tries to ramp up its oil discoveries in Guyana.
As a result, the financial picture has darkened. Goldman slashed its price target for Exxon’s shares to $59, down from $72 previously. The bank’s analysts see “downside to long-term consensus estimates,” and a “lack of free cash flow limiting capital returns.” Ultimately, there is a “risk to long-term return on capital employed targets,” Goldman analysts warned. Exxon’s return on capital employed could end up being about half of what Exxon is aiming for by 2025.
Often, there are mixed reactions from industry analysts. But the rather gloomy take on Exxon from so many different corners of the financial world was notable. “Shareholder returns are poor, and debt is rising in a way that suggests that attractive dividends yields are unsustainable,” Paul Sankey of Mizuho Securities USA LLC said in a note to clients. “What is so concerning about these mega-oil results is that they come in a quarter that featured an average $62/bbl Brent price.”
“Lower cash flow combined with heavy capital investment led to negative free cash flow and a rise in debt that exceeded our expectations for the year,” Moody’s Investors Service Inc. analyst Pete Speer said in a note. “These trends continue to pressure the company’s credit metrics as captured in our negative outlook.”
Exxon hiked its dividend again in order to satisfy shareholders, but its share price fell anyways. Exxon has not been able to finance its dividend and share buybacks with cash generated from its operations for a very long time. Over the past ten years, Exxon dished out $202 billion to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends, but only generated enough money to cover about two-thirds of that payout, according to a recent report from IEEFA. Exxon financed the remaining 30 percent of those distributions from asset sales and debt.
Those numbers worsened substantially last year. “In fact, the company’s deteriorating financial condition required it to cover 64% of the dividends in 2019 with funds from asset sales and borrowing, a sharp increase from its 10-year average of 30%,” IEEFA analysts Tom Sanzillo, Kathy Hipple and Clark Williams-Derry wrote in a commentary.
“It is a dividend that requires crutches,” the analysts said. “The company continues to bring new reserves to market at the wrong time and wrong price.”
ExxonMobil would need oil prices to trade at about $100 per barrel in order for the company to pay for all of its spending and also cover shareholder payouts, according to Citigroup. Needless to say, that is far higher than the prevailing oil price today, and few, if any, oil market analysts see triple-digit oil prices anytime soon.
“We can expect ExxonMobil to stay around but as a far smaller financial and production player,” IEEFA analysts wrote.
When asked about the quarterly numbers on Friday, CNBC’s Jim Cramer was even less charitable. “I’m done with fossil fuels,” he said. “They’re done. They’re just done.”
By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com
HEY BC LNG GOES BUST
“Gasmaggedon” Sweeps Over Global Gas Market By Nick Cunningham - Feb 05, 2020
China’s state-owned gas importers are considering declaring force majeure on LNG imports, which would amplify the turmoil in global gas markets.
LNG prices have already plunged to their lowest levels in a decade in Asia as the ramp up of supply in 2019 came at a time when demand has slowed. That was true before the outbreak of the coronavirus. But the quarantine of around 50 million people and the shutdown of huge swathes of the Chinese economy has sent shockwaves through commodity markets.
Shipments of oil and gas are backing up at Chinese ports, which is creating ripple effects across the world. Now, Chinese state-owned CNOOC is considering declaring force majeure on its LNG import commitments, according to the FT. Sinopec and CNPC are also apparently considering the move.
Prices were already in the dumps. JKM prices recently fell to 10-year lows. But they have continued to decline, approaching $3/MMBtu for the first time in history. Just a few weeks ago, JKM prices were trading at around $5/MMBtu, itself an incredibly low price for this time of year.
LNG exports from the U.S. are uneconomical at these price levels. Many exporters have contracts at fixed, higher prices. But shipments can be cancelled for a fee. And any spot trade would be hit hard. The question now is whether shipments will come to halt. “Forward prices for summer are now at levels where U.S. LNG shut-ins begin to seem viable,” Edmund Siau, a Singapore-based analyst with energy consultant FGE, told Bloomberg. “There is usually a lead time before a cargo can be canceled, and we expect actual supply curtailments to start happening in summer.”
But if buyers start cancelling their purchases, LNG exporters have to ramp down production. That could then ripple back to the shale gas fields in the U.S., where prices are already below $2/MMBtu and drillers can’t make any money. The CEO of Marcellus shale gas giant EQT said in December that “a lot of this development doesn’t work as well at $2.50 gas.” Henry Hub prices are now below $1.85/MMBtu.
There is little relief in sight. “Even with our projected increase in power sector natural gas demand due to the current low price environment, we estimate natural gas stocks to end this summer with 3.85 tcf in the ground,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a recent note. “Such inventory level would be more than 100 bcf higher YoY, and does not leave much room for bearish errors from mild weather, high renewable generation, or reduced LNG exports.”
Europe too is sitting on abnormally high inventories. “LNG exporters desperately need cold weather in Europe to draw down inventories and provide more breathing room this summer,” Bank of America warned.
But that is not happening. Europe just saw its warmest January on record, depressing gas demand. Fossil fuels are driving climate change, so it’s rather ironic that higher temperatures are now battering gas markets.
It’s all combining to create a “gasmaggedon,” according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
“We are now more than halfway through the winter, and thus far Mother Nature has not been kind to natural gas prices,” analysts at the bank wrote.
The investment bank calls the U.S. Midwest power sector is the “true market of last resort,” which means that U.S. gas prices have to fall to such low depths that coal-fired power plants are forced offline in their last redoubt – the Midwest.
“We believe the US cannot sustain reduced LNG exports this summer,” Bank of America warned. “Therefore, US natural gas prices might have to go low enough to stimulate sufficient Midwest power sector natural gas demand to balance the entire global gas market.”
When Rolls Royce in December unveiled its new electric plane, it said it would be the fastest electric aircraft, capable of achieving a top speed of 300 mph. It also said the plane will be able to fly from London to Paris on a single charge.
The battery pack of ACCEL, as the aircraft is called, standing for Accelerating the Electrification of Aircraft, is the most energy dense pack ever made for a plane, its developers say. It is also among the lightest--lighter than many EV battery packs.
The ACCEL aircraft has three battery packs that power its three electric motors. Each pack weighs 450 kg and has a capacity of 72 kWh. To compare, the battery pack of a Tesla Model X has a capacity of 75 kWh and weighs over 500 kg. Smaller EVs do have much lighter battery packs, but they do have much lower range. The challenge with the ACCEL seems to be striking a rather fine balance between weight and capacity.
And according to the tram behind the project, they succeeded.
In an article devoted to ACCEL, IEEE Spectrum’s Prachi Patel writes that among the challenges the team was facing in the area of batteries, what form of battery cell to choose and how to arrange them for maximum density and minimum weight were the toughest.
According to the project manager, Matheu Parr, the best battery cell shape for the aircraft battery pack turned out to be the cylinder. These, Parr told Patel, could hold a lot of energy and could release it quickly at high power. The secret to the weight was the packaging materials: using as little as possible of those and only the lightest-weight.
Inspiration came from Formula E – the all-electric cousin of Formula 1 that now also has an aircraft version. Formula E cars and planes need to be as light as possible in order to be faster, and this lightness comes from the battery packaging. According to Parr, Formula E planes have a packaging-to-battery cell weight ratio that is half as much as the packaging-to-battery cell weight ratio of electric cars.
So, can the Rolls Royce racing plane take on a commercial jet? Not yet. The specific energy of the ACCEL aircraft batteries is just 165 Wh/kg, a standard measure used for the energy density of batteries, and it needs to rise to 500 Wh/kg for the plane to compete with jet propulsion-powered aircraft. But it is certainly an important step in the electrification of planes even if for the time being only small planes can be electrified.
The thing is that batteries are heavy. Even with lightweight packaging and the most efficient arrangement of battery cells inside the pack, they are heavier than jet fuel. They are also less efficient for the time being, as CNBC’s Andrew Evers and Katie Schoolov wrote in a December 2019 article.
Yet there are some 200 companies working on electric aircraft technology. The promise is big: electric motors require a lot less maintenance than jet fuel engines, which means they are cheaper over their lifetime; they are also, of course, a lot more environmentally friendly.
This latter factor is a concern of growing importance for airlines. Flight shaming has yet to affect passenger numbers in any noticeable way, but it is there and is a source of pressure for the industry even though it only accounts for 2.5 percent of global CO2 emissions. Road transport, in comparison, accounts for 28 percent of emissions in the United States alone.
Rolls Royce has the ambition to be a pioneer in the transition to what some call the third age of aviation, the first two being the propeller age and the jet age. It is not setting itself unrealistic goals. The company believes all-electric aircraft will continue to be small for quite a long while yet, with hybrid systems for larger planes. But small planes could be useful, too.
“We’re learning an awful lot that we want to see packed into a future aircraft. Innovations in the battery and system integration, packaging and management will all help us shape any future electric product, be it all-electric or hybrid,” Parr said.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
The Tide Is Turning For Canada’s Mining Industry
The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) released its annual Facts & Figures report on Tuesday, saying it is time is for the industry to fulfill its potential as a dominant mining nati
The resource-rich country ranks among the top five countries in the global production of 15 minerals and metals. The industry was valued at $105 billion in 2018, and mineral exports accounted for 19 percent of Canada’s total domestic exports, the report found.
Facts & Figures reports that in 2018, Canada’s mining industry contributed C$97 billion ($73 billion) or 5 percent to Canada’s total nominal GDP. The industry’s direct and indirect employment exceeds 620,000 jobs, accounting for one in every 30 jobs in Canada. Proportionally, the mining industry is the largest private-sector employer of indigenous peoples and provided over 16,600 jobs to community members in 2018, MAC found.
MAC said that with this data comes the need to focus on where the industry still has room to improve and that while Canadian mining’s year-over-year competitiveness metrics have improved, they remain depressed in some areas. But as its oil industry continues to struggle, Canada is looking to revitalize its mining sector.
Capital investment increased modestly by 5 percent to C$12.9 billion year-over-year, following five consecutive previous years of decline.
Canada’s global share of non-ferrous exploration investment was 15 percent in 2018 — up 1.3 percent from 13.7 percent — but well below the peak of 20.8 percent in 2008, MAC reported. While showing growth of 5 percent (or C$8 billion) year-over-year, NRCan’s 10-year projected value of mining projects planned and under construction remains 50 percent below 2014 levels, from $160 billion to $80 billion.
Only five new mining projects were submitted for federal environmental assessment review in 2019, well below average levels seen from 2012-2014.
“We feel energized by a number of recent commitments pertaining to mining, including in Prime Minister Trudeau’s most recent mandate letters to his Cabinet, the Canadian Minerals and Metals Plan and the new Canada-US Joint Action Plan on Critical Minerals Collaboration, all of which bode well for our industry,” said Pierre Gratton, MAC’s president and CEO.
By Mining.com
POLITICS Canada wants to phase out fossil fuels. First, it needs to learn from phasing out coal
Wendy Berry says people will drive a couple of hours from Red Deer, Alta., for the made-from-scratch pizza that she serves up at her restaurant in the hamlet of Tomahawk, but that’s not enough to keep her going these days.
She is worried sick about paying the mortgage and having enough left over to feed her family now that the shuttering of Canada’s coal industry put an end to the catering side of her business.
It was supposed to be a “just transition” — that buzzy phrase that was on the tips of everyone’s tongues at the global climate talks in Madrid this winter, and that made it into the federal Liberal election platform as a commitment to help fossil-fuel workers who are regulated out of a job as the government pushes us towards a low-carbon economy.
But when Berry hears that expression, she fires back with some tough questions that have no satisfactory answers.
“What exactly is a just transition?” she asks. “Do we have something else in place for when we shut down our fossil fuels?”
Berry and the rest of her community are a lesson in real time for the federal government as it contemplates how to push Canada to become a low-carbon economy. Coal mining and coal-fired electricity in Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are being phased out or radically altered to meet the country’s climate-change goals. The thousands of workers employed at these facilities and living in 50 nearby communities are on the front lines of decarbonization, the first to feel the profound effects of a massive shift away from fossil fuels.
They are a real-life test case, exposing what works and what doesn’t in our attempt to move humanely, with compassion, away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy.
With an eye to the acute disruption that decarbonization implies, the federal Liberals promised during the last election campaign to legislate a “just transition act” that would require governments to give workers help with training, support and new opportunities.
Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan’s office says work has begun on getting that legislation together, and they point to their work with coal workers as the way forward.
Berry and many local politicians and coal workers in the area are quick to say they know coal mining and coal-powered electricity hurts the environment, raises greenhouse gas emissions, and can’t continue as is. And they acknowledge the help provincial and federal governments have offered to help local communities figure out their next steps.
“I get it,” says Berry, 55.
But there have been some stumbling blocks in government support along the way — unintended consequences, lack of foresight, and arbitrary limitations that leave some people, like Berry, out on a limb.
Her small business was dependent on the coal industry. A third of her revenue came from providing hot lunch to the workers at the mine nearby. But as coal production is cut back and power producers switch to using natural gas, the numbers of well-paid coal workers buying employees buying Berry’s lunch have dwindled dramatically.
Some of them have moved away permanently. Others are in desperate straits, taking on new jobs with low pay. Berry talks about a woman she knows who took the retraining help offered to her but ended up landing a job at Walmart, where she is competing against employees 25 years younger than her for shifts at a much lower pay grade than what she was used to.
Berry’s former staff of 15 is now just an occasional shift for family members. As a restaurant owner, Berry doesn’t have access to the retraining and redevelopment funding, since she’s not directly employed in the coal industry. Instead, she finds herself paying an extra few hundred dollars a month to cover the rising tax on her utilities. She figures she needs to sell an extra 30 to 40 hamburgers a month. “I didn’t even get a free light bulb. Come on!”
Governments are actually lining up to play a part in the just transition for coal — provincial, federal and municipal alike. Unions are heavily involved, the companies are engaged, and common conversation in affected towns frequently turns to brainstorming about how to move forward.
Tens of millions of dollars are on the table to ease the way.
In Alberta, the provincial government under Rachel Notley put $40 million into programs to bridge older workers to retirement, help other workers find new jobs and subsidize moving costs. They followed up with another $5 million for communities to diversify their economies. Saskatchewan just offered up $10 million.
At the federal level, Ottawa has budgeted $185 million so far, for transition away from coal. Of that, $35 million is earmarked for skills and training, and $150 million is for infrastructure and economic development. All signs point to more in upcoming budgets.
There have been task forces and reports and community meetings and endless discussions about how to make sure the money meets the needs of workers.
But what the governments didn’t fully anticipate was the speed of the transition itself.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper gave Canada until 2030 to move away from coal, a timeline adopted by the Trudeau government in 2016. But in Alberta, the Notley government added a massive $1.4 billion incentive, using carbon-tax revenues, for companies to pick up the pace — and they responded faster than many had predicted. They are already in the midst of switching to natural gas in some places — saving money and employing many fewer people — or simply shutting down earlier than planned.
“It caught everyone off guard, completely,” says Matt Wayland, who represented the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers on the federal government’s task force for a just transition for coal workers.
In theory, the key to the “just” part of the transition was to allow enough lead time for companies to change their production, workers to train up and find new jobs if necessary, and for communities to tilt their economic base toward clean energy. Those changes can take years.
Instead, despite the millions in government programming, the mayor of Parkland County is suddenly worried about firefighters.
Parkland County is the epicentre of coal transition in Canada, the area near Edmonton that hosts about half the province’s coal-fired generating units. Mayor Rod Shaigec says about a quarter of his municipal tax base was directly related to coal, but that’s now shrinking rapidly.
The municipal government has been setting aside $2 million a year to deal with the anticipated loss of tax revenue, but it’s not enough, and the volunteer firefighting ranks speak to why.
When coal was flourishing, half the county’s volunteer firefighters were employed by TransAlta, and the company actively encouraged them to participate. But now, the force of 120 firefighters has dropped to 100 to cover an enormous area. The municipal government has had to dig into its budget to hire three full-time professional firefighters. And they’re still short. Get more politics in your inbox Make sense of what's happening across the country and around the world with the Star's This Week in Politics email newsletter.Sign Up Now
Shaigec knows he needs to push hard to diversify the local economy, enhance the agricultural base and lure in more investment. He is eyeing the government funding, and has plenty of transition planning in the works, from infrastructure to attracting new business. But it’s not happening fast enough to deal with the shift away from coal and its unintended consequences.
“There’s tremendous opportunity,” he says. “But it’s challenging.”
What does “just transition” mean in reality for his constituents? “Some would say we’re just waiting, we’re just waiting, we’re just waiting. And nothing’s happening.”
Over in Estevan, Sask., where about 1,300 workers are employed in the surrounding area’s coal mines and coal-powered plants, anxiety is running high — but not despair.
Denise Ludwig is a 61-year-old retired nurse with too many ties to the coal industry to count. Her husband, Roy, who is also the mayor of Estevan, has worked in coal mining for 40 years. Their closest friends, her father — they all spent years if not their entire careers in the sector. Coal mining has been the backbone of the community since the 1800s.
“I’ve been around it a lot,” she says. “My whole life.”
When they get together to talk about the future of the community, the chatter inevitably turns to brainstorming about what could be done to stave off hard times — through embracing new forms of green energy production, or finding better ways to use coal.
“I see our community pulling together a lot and trying to figure out ways to keep our community thriving.”
And it’s that sentiment that is at the heart of the recommendations from the federal task force that travelled to coal communities across the country in 2018 to learn what works and what doesn’t. Governments, the task force said, need to plan well in advance, listen carefully to affected people from the get-go, and tailor their solutions for each community.
“Coal workers, their families, and communities fear that without careful and inclusive planning, they may face devastating impacts from the coal phase-out,” their report states.
“Workers and community members expressed their dissatisfaction with how the government decided and announced the phase-out in the first place, pointing to limited or no consultation about the impacts for both provincial power grids and for the coal mine and electricity-generation workforces.”
In Tomahawk at the Kountry Kitchen, they’re tossing around ideas about how to move away from coal, and onto something more compatible with climate change, something that brings with it the high-paying steady jobs that the coal industry provided for so long. In Estevan, they’re having daily conversations about the viability of carbon capture and storage, or other ways to make coal so clean that Canada can get closer to its emissions-reduction targets.
“We do understand that we need to move to a greener society. We have to move to a greener world,” says Mayor Ludwig. But clean coal should be part of that future, he adds. “Just because it’s black doesn’t mean it’s dirty. We do have a future. We do have a role to play … Let’s perfect it.”
Another key lesson from the coal experience so far is that some workers need a lot more government help than access to extra financial support and a jobs board at a local transition centre. Some need a generous bridge to retirement. Some need more flexible rules so they don’t get penalized for taking a job quickly. Some need to have their hands held as they navigate a complex job market.
Even as other countries are watching Canada to see how it handles transition, Gil McGowan, the president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, is looking to Germany, where anyone who loses a job to the coal phase-out is assured another position.
“There’s still more work to be done and kinks to be worked out,” says McGowan, who was on the federal task force. “We didn’t get it completely right.”
And for people like Wendy Berry, the restaurant owner, strategic help from governments and investors alike in economic development and diversification toward new lines of business and clean energy are crucial. Phasing out of fossil fuels doesn’t automatically lead to a booming business in clean energy.
“It’s easy for people sitting in comfortable offices in downtown Toronto to say everything will be fine,” says McGowan. “But for the workers whose jobs are being lost, this is about their livelihood, and about their families, and about their dignity.”
That’s an attitude shared by those on the front lines of transition, no matter where they place themselves on the political spectrum.
Conservative MP Dane Lloyd from Sturgeon River-Parkland puts it this way: “We just want to work.”
Heather Scoffield is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and an economics columnist. Follow her on Twitter: @hscoffield
Seeking beauty can be potentially deadly on central Alberta’s Abraham Lake One of the quirky methane bubbles that’s frozen in the ice of Abraham Lake. They are created by the break-down of organic matter under the water. (Contributed photo/Carl Hahn).
As tourists flock to the man-made gem, they are being warned about unstable ice Feb. 8, 2020
Hordes of sightseers are being drawn to a central Alberta lake that’s uniquely beautiful — and potentially deadly.
With an increasing number of vehicles and tour buses heading out to visit Abraham Lake’s intriguing ice-bubble formations, Rocky Mountain House Search and Rescue is warning the public to be careful when stepping onto the frozen surface of the water body west of Nordegg.
Abraham Lake is a man-made reservoir, which makes it “a very dangerous lake. Always be aware of your surrounding and stay safe,” the group posted on its Facebook page.
A photo of broken ice is also shown, revealing a gaping air hole beneath the lake’s frozen surface.
As Abraham Lake’s water level is controlled by a dam, it can rise and fall after ice forms on top. Rocky Mountain House Search and Rescue workers are cautioning that if the water levels drop, the unsupported ice can break under the weight of a vehicle, or even a person.
Individuals who fall into the lake wouldn’t be able to pull themselves out, because the air gap between the dropping water and ice surface is greater than their reach.
The group’s president, Edward Van Heeren, said, “The lake’s become a very popular tourist spot, with people coming from all over” to see lava-lamp-like bubbles in the ice.
The strange formations are caused when methane gas is released by decaying tree limbs and other underwater organic matter. The frozen bubbles can be as large as a foot in size and are visible through the glass-like surface of the ice.
Van Heeren is starting to notice foreign tour buses after the HuffPost, The Daily Beast, Canadian Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution published articles about the lake. He feels the urgency of spreading awareness about the lake’s inherent dangers.
Even when walking down the slope to the lake, Van Heeren recommends wearing ice cleats to avoid slipping.
Bruce Schollie, a Red Deer outdoors enthusiast, was surprised to see at least 10 cars parked at Preacher’s Point, one of several parking lots along the lakeshore, during a recent hike in the area.
“They were all bubble watchers,” said Schollie.
He observed both vehicles and people on the frozen lake surface. As a trained scout leader, he recommends carrying a rope, which could help reach someone who falls through the ice, but he admitted no one would last long in the frigid water.
Danielle Fortin, who runs Pursuit Adventures in Red Deer with her husband JP Fortin, believes some spots on the lake are safer than others.
The couple regularly takes tour groups out to Hoodoo Creek, or to Preacher’s Point at the furthest side of the lake from Nordegg. Fortin said the ground beneath the water slopes off more gently there.
She feels the most dangerous points are between Windy Point and the dam, as ice in this area is more unstable and the bank beneath slopes steeply.
Fortin understands the lake’s appeal: “When you are standing on the ice, it’s so clear, you can see straight down to the rocks at the bottom…. It feels like you are walking on bubbles. It’s a unique and magical experience.”
But it’s also concerning for amateur photographer Carl Hahn, of Red Deer, who makes a point of watching for running water beneath the ice whenever he walks out on the lake to take pictures.
Flowing water is a sign that the lake level below has receded and he should avoid the spot.
“Since the ice is clear, you can tell where it might have pockets of air,” said Hahn, who has also noticed a colour change where there’s only air beneath the ice.
Hahn noted it’s possible to not step onto the lake and still see some bubbles, since broken pieces of ice have been heaved up onto the shore.
Fat-tire biker Barry Shellian, of Rocky Mountain House, has noticed a lot of rental car licence plates around the lake as news spreads of its ice bubbles. He hopes tourists are aware of the lake’s potential dangers, as well as its beauty.
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
Rocky Mountain House Search and Rescue posted this photo on its website to show how ice can break on Abraham Lake when it has no water underneath to support it. The lake is actually a reservoir with a dam that can raise or lower water levels. (Contributed photo/Amy Rodtka).
Apparent meteor passes over Alberta skies Saturday afternoon
JASON HERRING February 8, 2020
Tim Wiebe's doorbell camera captured what appears to be a meteor streaking across the sky over Calgary on Saturday, February 8, 2020. COURTESY TIM WIEB
Calgarians with their eyes on the sky may have noticed what appeared to be a meteor pass overhead on Saturday afternoon.
The fireball lit up daytime Calgary skies around 5:08 p.m. on Saturday.
Janzel Nicanor was driving east on 32nd Avenue near 36th Street in northeast Calgary when he captured the apparent meteor on his dashboard camera. The video shows an orange streak of light appearing in the sky for about two seconds before fading away.
Tim Wiebe also shared video that he captured — this time, from a doorbell camera.
Footage from videos of the possible meteor could help scientists determine its probable trajectory and landing area.
People from across the province also reported having seen the fireball, with Albertans tweeting about it from Calgary, Edmonton and Red Deer.
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/politics/2020/02/08/canada-wants-to-phase-out-fossil-fuels-first-it-needs-to-learn-from-phasing-out-coal/coal_transport.jpg){kind=spacer}
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/politics/2020/02/08/canada-wants-to-phase-out-fossil-fuels-first-it-needs-to-learn-from-phasing-out-coal/wendy_berry.jpg)
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/politics/2020/02/08/canada-wants-to-phase-out-fossil-fuels-first-it-needs-to-learn-from-phasing-out-coal/ludwigs.jpg)
