Global Warming - Climate change in image

Here's some nice pics about global warming or climate change:

If you want the sources, do a reverse lookup of the image here.

Click on image for full size

CO2 sous roche - Est-ce un bon choix ?

http://lecodechastenay.telequebec.tv/occurrence.aspx?id=687&ep=169

En 2014, la quantité de carbone dans l’atmosphère atteint des concentrations record de 400 ppm. L’idéal serait bien sûr de réduire nos émissions. Mais à défaut d’y arriver, les experts prônent le développement des techniques de captage et de stockage du CO2. Michel Malo, spécialiste de géologie structurale à l’INRS, étudie le sous-sol québécois pour identifier les meilleurs sites de stockage. Ceux-ci doivent contenir des roches poreuses permettant d’absorber le gaz, mais couvertes en plus de roches imperméables pour l’empêcher de remonter à la surface. Le site doit de plus être à proximité des industries polluantes. Le géologue crée des modèles informatiques pour prédire comment le gaz se comportera en ces lieux et évaluer les risques de fuite. Selon ses prédictions, la vallée du Saint-Laurent permettrait de séquestrer 3,5 milliards de tonnes de CO2, soit toutes les émissions du Québec pendant 75 ans.

Vidéo

Après avoir écouté le segment sur le CO2, je me suis pausé la question suivante... combien de °C de réchauffement climatique seraient "sauvés" si le Québec capturait tout son CO2 pendant 75 ans?

Les chiffres:

1) 2.13 gt de CO2 = 1ppm (Trenberth, 1981 JGR 86:5238-46)

2)  3.5 gt de CO2 pour le Québec pour 75 ans

 - Ceci nous donne donc 1.64 ppm sauvée

                                                         

3) Selon le GIEC AR5, doublement de CO2 depuis 280ppmv = 1.5°C

 - Ceci nous donne 1.64 ppmv * 1.5°C / 280 ppmv (doublement)

 = 0,0088 °C sur 75 ans.

Combien couterait en $$$ cette aventure pour "sauver" 0,0088°C sur 75 ans...

Serions-nous capables de le mesurer ?

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Je suis l'heureux proprio d'une Nissan Leaf "full" électrique... je me suis pausé la même question... combien de Leaf doit t’ont mettre sur la route pour sauvée 1ppmv de CO2 ?

http://simonfiliatrault.blogspot.ca/2014/10/how-much-global-warming-will-i-save.html

C'est beau sur papier tout ces projets, mais quand on fait le calcul cout/bénéfice... ça ne tient pas la route!

Certains diront... mais il faut faire quelque chose!  OK, mais pas ça!

How much global warming will I save with my Electic Nissan Leaf ?

A few months ago, I bought a Nissan Leaf, full electric car.  Very nice car, fun to drive, fun not to go to gas station.  Faster acceleration than my Jetta TDI.  Nice equipment, GPS, Carwings, remote control and others.

So, I was interested to see how much "global warming" I would save with my Nissan Leaf.

I knew from intuition that it would be a very small number of °C.  So I did the calculation to see how many cars would be needed to "remove" 1 ppmv of CO2 from the atmosphere.

And from this 1 ppmv, I could calculate the number of °C I would save by using the "climate sensitivity" of a doubling of CO2.

So... here's the basic information I needed.

1. How much kg of CO2 is "saved" with my Leaf.

This is approximated with the Carwings Nissan application.  So after 4179 km, I saved 761 kg.  Extrapolating this to 24,000 km per year (lease contract), I can calculate I will save 4370 kg

2. Now I need to know how much kg of CO2 is equal to 1 ppmv of atmosphere. 
For this, I used this information:

Using 5.137 x 1018 kg as the mass of the atmosphere (Trenberth, 1981 JGR 86:5238-46), 1 ppmv of CO2= 2.13 Gt of carbon.

So from there, I calculated that 1.93E12 kg of CO2 = 1ppmv

3. How much CO2 is really saved compared to gas cars ?
It's not because you can save x amount of kg with an electric car that you saved it compared to a gas car.  For starters, it is more complex to build a Leaf compared to a simple gas car.... there's a good discussion of this topic here:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/06/lowcvp-20110608.html

To make a long story short... we save around 20% of CO2 compared to a gas car...
So the above figure of 4370 kg for 24,000 km (1 year) comes down to : 874 kg.

4. How many Leaf is needed to "reduce" the CO2 content of the atmosphere by 1 ppmv ?
Ok now we can simply take the number from 2: 1.93E12 kg of CO2 = 1ppmv and divide by 3: 874 kg
=== > we would need 2,210,735,217 Nissan Leaf on the road per year to cut 1 ppmv of CO2!

Wow, that's a lot of electric cars!  Not sure if we have enough resources, like Lithium, to build all that!

5. How many °C did we save with all those Leaf on the road ?
To calculate this, we need to know the "climate sensitivity"... this is the number of °C increase for a doubling of CO2.  Here's one source of many for informations on this...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ipcc-revises-climate-sensitivity/

Number from latest IPCC AR5 report is 1.5°C.  Ranges are from 1.5 to 4.5... So I will take the latest number from IPCC AR5... 1.5 °C.  This is for a doubling of CO2 from pre industrial level of 280 ppmv.... so... we have a double of 280 ppmv... will give 1.5 °C.  So this is:
1.5 °C / 280 ppmv = 0.005 °C per ppmv of CO2.

CONCLUSION:
We would need 2.2 billions Nissan Leaf to cut 1 ppmv that would reduce global warming by 0.005 °C .... This is for 1 year of all Leaf doing 24,000 km compared to gas cars.

If we where able to build those 2.2 billions cars NOW and use them for 8 years... we would save 8x0.005 or 0.04 °C total global warming.

So my Leaf, leased for 4 years, by itself, would save:
0.000000000009 °C of global warming!

That's why I bought it, not to save the environment, but other reasons... but that would be for another time!

Comments ?

 
 

Coors Light Saint Sauveur Challenge 2014 - Sam Beauchesne & Vince Prévost

Crazy things my kid do! Please share!

Plastic or reusable bag?

February 28th 2014, I posted this on Twitter...

You want to be #GREEN, use #plastic bags... forget about those "green" bags that use resources: http://t.co/Mt7A9d3Xlh
— Simon Filiatrault (@SimonFili) February 28, 2014

And got this response

@SimonFili I'm so confused... next you'll be telling me ethanol is not Green fuel but #nuclear is. #paradigmshifts
— Atomik Rabbit (@Atomikrabbit) March 1, 2014

This warrants a bit more explanation than just 140 chars twitter feeds contains.

The news I linked to is this:

Plastic bags can be recycled into diesel fuel

Here's some excerpt from this new:

• Given that each year an estimated 100 billion shopping bags are thrown away in the US alone, this is great news indeed.
• we can recover almost 80 percent fuel from it through distillation.”
• The process works by heating the plastic bags in an oxygen-free chamber to obtain the oil.
• through pyrolysis into different petroleum products, and have achieved their goal of producing a fuel that meets the standards for ultra-low-sulfur diesel and biodiesel fuels.

So this is indeed great news, we can now recycle those plastic bags and renew them.

One may ask...
Does this become a renewable resource?

This is a complex question... like Atomik Rabbit commented... on Ethanol and Nuclear.

The important concept here to understand is about physical economy. Physical economy has nothing to do with money or maybe a little bit, since money is a mean to exchange work. But let's not get into this now.

Humans consume resources, that we understand.  What is less understood is that for each resources we use and "consume", we need energy to transform it.  I put consume in quote here because we don't really consume resources in the sense that the resources is gone (apart from energy), we only transformed it.

Take for example your toast in the morning.  You used energy to grow, extract, transform wheat in the form of bread, need energy again to cook it.  Then you consume the toast.  Did we loose that resource, the original wheat? No, we simply transformed it.  We did loose part of the energy in the process, because we probably used a mix of energy from fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro to do the transformation.  Part of the energy used was also transformed, like burning fossil, you create CO2 which is used by plants through photo-synthesis to grow.  The more they have the happier they are.

Other source of energy like hydro, you simply moved water around in a endless cycle.  For nuclear, you use the energy stored in unstable atoms by a fission process and created new elements, this is another type of transformation, but the energy used in the process, is lost in a sense, you cannot simply re-used once the work is done.  You may have added energy in form of heat to the system, but in the end, this will be lost in space.

So the question is, what type of energy make sense to use and which process/type is better for the whole physical economy of the planet ?   This seems a complex question, but in the end, you can boil it down to a simple "black box"!  Energy in - Energy out.

Here we see that for any energy system, you will have:

• An input of energy
• To create the system: Metal, concrete and other basic elements
• To feed the system: Wind, Solar, Nuclear, Fossil sources
• And output of energy
• In the form of resources (heat and elements) and electrical energy

The system that make more sense from a physical economy point of view is where the ratio of Out/In is the largest. This equate to energy density. The more dense the energy source, the more OUT you will get for the IN you put in.  This transform in cost, normally cents/kWh.

You also need to take into account the following:

• Availability of the resource to feed the system
• Impact on other system (humans, nature, , etc)

From a physical point of view, Nuclear fission used today in over 450 nuclear power stations, is the most dense form of energy.  Wind and Solar is the less dense. There's a factor of 6 million between Solar and Fission.

So from a physical economy point of view, the more dense you are the better.  This graph tells it all. I needed an exponential Y axis to compare all sources since the difference is so great!

So to get back to the original question, is it good that we can recycle plastic.. I would say, sure it's good, but at what cost.  We have for now plenty of Fossil resources, but for how long?  So from a storage perspective, it's probably better to recycle plastic if the cost is not prohibitive, but it would not make sense to use energy from fossil fuels (low density) to recycle plastic... If we could use the high density electricity from Nuclear to recycle all the world plastic cheaply to use in transportation where we don't have a good solution yet on the electric side... that would make sense. 

There's also the pyrolysis process that can recycle about anything... A plant is in operation in Ottawa, Canada from the company Plasco Energy.

For the question about ethanol... For sure, this has been proven many time that using corn (that uses large amount of fossil) to produce ethanol does not make sense in any way... it's been called a crime against humanity by the UN food program.

You will find on this blog many article about energy, nuclear and other types... Again, we need to have the best ratio of IN/OUT in any human endeavor.  Having a ratio close to 1 for solar/wind, does not make sense.  The ratio is greater for coal and gas, but why would you want to burn a limited resource where you can use a higher density one like nuclear.  Unfortunately, the anti nuclear and all the regulations have push the price point of nuclear over that of cheap shale gas... but this cheap shale gas will not stay cheap and available for ever.  So like any greedy wall street banker can tell you... there's money to be made now on the shale gas, but from a physical economy point of view, we should keep this resources for all other usage outside electricity generation.

About the reusable bag thing...  Here's an interesting information from wikipedia:

One reusable bag requires the same amount of energy as an estimated 28 traditional plastic shopping bags or eight paper bags. "If used once per week, four or five reusable bags will replace 520 plastic bags a year" according to Nick Sterling, research director at Natural Capitalism Solutions. ^[1] A study commissioned by the United Kingdom Environment Agency in 2005 but never published found that the average cotton bag is used only 51 times before being thrown away.^[2]

So you need to use your reusable bag, 28x.  And people use it only 51 times!  So if you recycle those plastic bags and recover 80% of the energy to be re-used in diesels transport, than not sure you save a lot with re-usable bags.... Again, the whole IN/OUT black-box need to be calculated to see what makes more sense... But for sure, I like better the re-usable bags... Can put more stuff in them and better handles!


So here's my quick answer to a simple 140 char comment!

Comments are welcome.

Simon