Category: News

Having a Blast in Bozeman

I don’t often get to read about my adopted hometown in the national papers; it’s usually pretty obscure. When FAA analysts look for a small-time airport to poke fun at, we’re first on the list. However, today the NYT has covered the gas explosion that destroyed half a block of downtown, including some wonderful historic brick buildings. The blast was so powerful that we heard it from our house, 6 miles away with an intervening ridge. Sadly there’s no recovery for one person, but I hope the rest of downtown bounces back quickly.

FutureGen killing a mistake?

Via ClimateArk,

US government slammed over coal project

Basic accounting error led government department to miscalculate ongoing project costs

The document, which examines the restructuring of the FutureGen project in January 2008, found that a basic accounting error led the department to miscalculate ongoing project costs. This led it to drastically alter the nature of the project, delaying its operation by three years.

FutureGen, which was meant to begin operation in 2012, combined integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

The initiative was designed to be an experimental one for emerging clean coal research, but construction prices had been escalating as material and labour costs increased. The DoE decided to withdraw support for the industry alliance that was partially funding the programme in January last year.

“Contrary to best practices, DoE did not base its decision to restructure FutureGen on a comprehensive analysis of factors, such as the associated costs, benefits, and risks,” says the report.

“DoE made its decision based, in large part, on its conclusion that construction and material costs for the original programme would continue escalating substantially in the definite future and that lifecycle costs were likely to double.”

However, the DoE’s own Energy Information Administration has pointed out that significant cost escalation for building power plants does not continue in the long run.

The department also made a fundamental mistake in assessing ongoing project costs. It said that costs had doubled from original estimates, using that as the key justification for withdrawing funds from the alliance.

But when it compared its original 2004 estimate of the project’s cost with the alliance’s 2006 estimate to reach that conclusion, it did not take into account that the first estimate was in constant 2004 dollars, whereas the latter was in inflated dollars. Had it acknowledged this difference, the project cost would only have increased by 39 per cent ($370m), according to the GAO.

…

Another good reason to make sure your units balance. I find this explanation of the cancellation barely credible. There must be more to this than meets the eye.

OMG Did I say that out loud?

Steve Chu says the t word in an NYT interview:

He said that while President Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders had endorsed a so-called cap-and-trade system to control global warming pollutants, there were alternatives that could emerge, including a tax on carbon emissions or a modified version of cap-and-trade.

Glad the option isn’t totally dead.

I'm Shovel Ready

Lots of carping on the ‘net about the likely slow pace of stimulus spending. Nevermind the pace, I want to know what’s in it. You actually have to dig quite a bit to get the details of the package (especially with the CBO web site down today). Fortunately, I always keep my shovel handy. Here’s what I see:

9702bc96-e756-11dd-adce-000255111976 Blog_this_caption(Click through to the live version to see the labels)

A few observations:

  • There’s $90 billion in unstated spending.
  • Infrastructure grabs the headlines, but education and health actually get the lion’s share.
  • The “green” portion of the stimulus looks rather small in context. It also seems out of balance – more $ for energy supply than energy efficiency. I’m not convinced that energy supply subsidies are very green.
  • The distribution of half the tax credits is unstated. How do you know the magnitude without knowing the components? Could it be that business tax credits constitute the majority? If so, that would be highly regressive.

Where’s the consulting sector in all this?

Some Links I Won't Have Time to Blog About

Paul Krugman’s letter to Obama

Reasoning-from-conclusions-to-assumptions? (a perspective on modeling)

Sell-off drops EUAs to $11.60/TonCO2

Via Nature, a google search doesn’t really produce 7 grams of carbon, and you can’t build carbon infrastructure to get to a low-carbon future.

Four new CCSP reports from the last days of the Bush administration:
Final Report of Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.1 (Coastal Sensitivity to Sea-Level Rise: A Focus on the Mid-Atlantic Region)
Final Report of Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.2 (Thresholds of Climate Change in Ecosystems)
Final Report of Synthesis and Assessment Product 2.3 (Aerosol properties and their impacts on climate)
Final Report of Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2 (Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes)
Plus last month’s USGS report on abrupt climate change, buried over the holidays.

Three climate negotiators walk into a bar …

Analogies can be dangerous when you don’t know their limitations, but they can be a good way of distilling a lot of technical details into a central point. A flurry of emails last week resulted in this story at Climate Interactive, about some inebriated decision makers who can’t predict the consequences of their actions. It reminds me of another favorite, cited in Cloudy Skies:

The article gives a fascinating insight into the way international politics struggles with complex technical issues. I was inspired to set up an experiment to test some of the ideas, and hit upon the analogy of using my bath instead of the Earth and taking the water as carbon dioxide. I jammed the plug firmly, and turned one tap to full. I observed that the bath was filling with water. I turned the flow down to 80% – a massive 20% reduction – only to discover that it was still filling but slightly more slowly. At this point I was joined by my neighbour, an American. He pointed out that reducing the flow by 20% was out of the question; we haggled for a bit before agreeing on a reduction to 94.8%. We thought the 5.2% reduction had a nice ring to it. Oddly, the bath was still filling up with water at almost the same rate that it had been initially. My friend then gave me a five pound note to turn the tap down by another 20%. I did so. He then turned on the other tap to exactly counter the 20% saving. I complained, only to be told that he had bought my credits, whatever that means. He then rushed out, returning with a bucket which he put under the second tap. I was so impressed that I did not notice for a moment that the bath was still filling up and that the bucket would soon overflow. We decided we had experimented enough for one day and went off to the pub. We were on our third pint when we remembered that the experiment was still running.

Letter to The Chemical Engineer from A. Lodge (1999)

Unfortunately, even in simple systems, intuition often deserts us. The fact that mental models fail to capture the essence of climate dynamics is but one symptom of this. This Thursday, Drew Jones and I will present a simple model designed to close the gap at the Tällberg Forum’s Washington Conversation, “the climate deal we need.”