Climate Clippings: Heavy crude, crowdsourcing, and being a low-carbon rock star

New and noteworthy for 8 December 2010

The heavy footprint of unconventional crude

Carbon dioxide emissions from the petroleum industry, already one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the United States, could skyrocket as the industry shifts toward lower-quality sources of oil such as Canada's oil sands, according to a new study. 

Oil refinery emissions could double or even triple as the industry comes to rely upon lower-quality heavy oil and tar sands products, said Communities for a Better Environment, the Oakland, Calif.-based non-profit that sponsored the study. Its findings were published last week in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

As conventional petroleum reserves decline, the industry is increasingly forced to tap low-grade oils to meet demand for gasoline and diesel fuel.  That substitution requires more energy than refining conventional petroleum and emits more carbon dioxide, the group found. 

The study analyzed facilities in the United States' four largest refining regions from 1999 through 2008 to gauge the impact of switching to heavier oils. It found that the San Francisco Bay Area used the lowest-quality oil  and ranked highest in emissions, followed by the West Coast overall.

A global switch to heavy oil and tar sands could have big implications for global climate policy, concluded CBE senior scientist Greg Karras, the study's author.

"This raises the possibility that a switch to these oils might impede...the total reduction in emissions from all sources that is needed to avoid severe climate disruption," Karras wrote in the report. 

The study also points out that refining these types of oil using old, inefficient  equipment could increase the pollutants released into nearby communities. 

Photo courtesy Suncor 

Crowdsourcing the climate conundrum

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a suggestion for moving the United Nation's climate talks forward: Let members of the public have a go at drafting an international climate change agreement. 

Last week, the Climate CoLab at MIT's Sloan School of Management awarded prizes to three projects that proposed unconventional methods for addressing climate change. 

Proposals came from around the world, but the top prize went to two MIT graduate students. In their plan, Christophe Chung and Shoko Takemoto suggested emission reduction targets based not on national or global targets, but on regional groupings that would team up wealthy and poorer countries from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres to encourage greater collaboration.

Dennis B. Peterson, a North Carolina software engineer, claimed the second-place prize with his plan to remove carbon from the air, ground and oceans rather than cut carbon emissions at the source. 

The first-place winners shared another prize, The Judge's Choice Award, with a group of MIT students who proposed more modest worldwide targets for CO2 emission reductions in the hopes of achieving global agreement more quickly while continuing to work toward more ambitious cuts.

"The contest has furthered our goal of 'crowdsourcing' to help discover new ideas and possible solutions from people around the world, including those who otherwise would not be part of the discussion," MIT Center for Collective Intelligence director Thomas Malone said in a statement.

The winning proposals will be presented to Congress and the United Nations, according to MIT. 

Graphic courtesy Climate Colab

I wanna be a (low-carbon) rock star

Let's say you're Beyonce, or maybe Jay-Z, and you've got a hot tune in need of a video but are, alas, concerned about your carbon footprint. Worry not.

Broadway Stages, one of New York City's biggest film, television and music video production houses, recently installed the largest privately-owned solar rooftop array in the state.

The new installation, topping 500 kilowatts, saves the equivalent of 75,000 gallons of gasoline and keeps 1.5 tons of sulfur dioxide from the air annually, according to the company. 

The installations cover seven different studios in Brooklyn, with a 200 kilowatt expansion slated for 2011. The company has also offered up one of their studio roofs for the city's CoolRoofs program. And it has converted the roof of a 50,000-square-foot-plus studio in Brooklyn into the city's first-ever year-round, fully operational organic rooftop garden.

Broadway Stages handles just about every conceivable size, style and type of production, from film to television series and pilots to music videos and commercials. 

Spiderman 3, Michael Clayton, Duplicity were all at least partly filmed in Broadway Stages studios. CBS' The Good Wife is being filmed under solar panels, and Beyonce, Busta Rhymes, Kanye West and 50 Cent have filmed videos there, according to the company.

Photo courtesy BeyonceOnline.com

'Climate Clippings' is a regular feature of DailyClimate.org, an online news service that covers climate change. 

Compiled by Autumn Spanne and Douglas Fischer. 

To contact Daily Climate editor Douglas Fischer, e-mail dfischer [ at ] DailyClimate.org

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