Between the Poles

Do natural gas-fired power plants contribute less greenhouse warming than coal ?

Emissions Associated with Electric Power Production

Methane represents 9.9 % of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and is at least 20 more times more potent in warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

It has been asserted that natural gas power plants, which are responsible for 21% of power generation in the US, produce 50% less emissions than coal-fired plants. However, in the past the amount of methane gas that is lost (vented or leaked) during production, distribution and in plants has not been included in the calculation. Now a new study suggests that methane emissions from power plants and refineries may be much larger than current estimates.

A recent EPA analysis doubled its previous estimates for the amount of methane gas that leaks from pipes and is vented from gas wells, which significantly changes the emissions picture.  Methane (CH₄) levels from hydraulic fracturing of shale gas were found to be 9,000 times higher than previously reported.  Based on the new numbers, the median gas-powered plant in the United States is estimated to be 40 % cleaner than coal-fired plants, according to calculations ProPublica has made. In addition about half of the 1,600 gas-fired power plants in the US operate relatively inefficiently. In the past these plants were estimated to be 32 % cleaner than coal, but with the revised EPA estimates, these ~800 inefficient plants are estimated to produce 25 percent less emissions than coal.

But there is another issue.  Methane is one of the more potent greenhouse gases for global warming, but it is not clear just how much more potent methane is than CO₂.  The EPA has estimated a factor of  21 times compared to carbon dioxide. But Robert Howarth, an environmental biology professor at Cornell University, has suggested that it is actually 72 times as powerful as carbon dioxide in terms of its warming potential.  This is critical, because if the climate effect of methane from natural gas is 72 rather than 21 times that of carbon dioxide from burning coal, natural gas may even turn out to be worse than coal in terms of global warming.  Howarth has suggested that the type of shale gas drilling taking place in Texas, New York and Pennsylvania generates particularly high emissions of methane and could be as dirty as coal.

New estimates of methane emissions from power plants

Now a new study reports on overflights of power plants and refineries and finds that methane emissions are much larger than current estimates.  Power plants and oil refineries are large consumers of natural gas. The EPA has collected data contributed by operators and estimated the methane (CH4) emissions from these plants, but there is high uncertainty in these estimated. In this study an airborne chemistry lab was used to estimate the methane emissions from three gas-fired power plants and three oil refineries. The average methane emission rates were larger than than the operator-reported estimates by 21 to 120 times for the power plants and by 11 to 90 times for the refineries. By looking at the pattern of methane emissions compared to carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour, the researchers were able to determine that the methane emissions were primarily from non-combustion processes suggesting leaks and venting as the sources. Scaling these result to the national level suggests that methane emissions from these types of facilities are 4.4 to 42 times larger than current estimates. The results indicate that gas-fired power plants and oil refineries could contribute significantly to U.S. methane emissions. The estimated contribution of 0.61 teragrams of methane annually (Tg CH4/yr) is significant, representing about 2% of total U.S. annual emissions of methane of about 30 Tg CH4/yr.

A recently published study has assessed the spatial distribution of anthropogenic methane sources in the United States by combining comprehensive atmospheric methane observations, extensive spatial datasets, and a high-resolution atmospheric transport model. Based on the results of this analysis the authors conclude that the EPA underestimates methane emissions nationally by a factor of about 1.5.  Generally the study found that methane emissions due to the animal husbandry and fossil fuel industries have larger greenhouse gas impacts than indicated by existing inventories.

One of the motivations from switching from coal to natural gas for these types of facilities is that natural gas delivers the same amount of energy but with significantly reduced emissions. But that does not take into account leaks and other processes releasing methane during production, distribution and within plants.  These latest results further reduce the advantage of gas-fired over coal-fired power production.

A study by Robert W. Howarth, Renee Santoro, and Anthony Ingraffea has concluded that the emissions of methane from shale gas wells are between 30% and 100% more than methane emissions from conventional natural gas wells.  The study estimates that between 3.6% to 7.9% of the methane from shale-gas production escapes to the atmosphere in venting and leaks over the lifetime of a well.

As a result the study found that the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint for shale gas is greater than that for conventional gas or oil. When compared to coal, which is responsible for nearly 50% of electric power generation in the US,  the GHG footprint of shale gas is estimated to be 20% to 100% greater than coal over a 20 year period.  Over a 100 years, the study concludes that the GHG impact of shale gas is comparable to coal.

Open 3D map of Antarctica includes ice height and shelf thickness

Around 250 million measurements taken by CryoSat between 2010 and 2016 were used to create the most comprehensive 3D picture of Antarctic ice currently available. The satellite’s orbit takes it to latitudes within 200 km of the north and south poles – closer than other Earth observation satellites - which allows CryoSat’s radar altimeter to detect tiny variations in the height of the ice across the entire continent, including on the steeper continental margins where the vast majority of ice losses occur. The mission is also used to map changes in the thickness of ice floating in the polar oceans, which is particularly important for the Arctic.

The satellite measurements allow scientists to distinguish between changes in topography and ice motion when working with other satellite measurements, such as those used to calculate the balance between how much the ice sheet is gaining by accumulating snow and losing through melting and creating icebergs. The model will soon be freely available via the CPOM portal, which already provides information on sea-ice volume and thickness, ice velocity and, shortly, ice sheets. In the meantime, the model can be downloaded.

Third year of decoupling emissions from global economic growth

According to the IEA, even thought the world's economy grew in 2016, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions remained constant.  This is the third year in a row of "decoupled emissions", economic growth that did not generate more emissions.  The IEA ascribes the flattening of emissions to growing renewable power generation, switches from coal to natural gas, improvements in energy efficiency, and economic factors.  The IEA estimated that energy-related emissions in 2016 amounted to 32.1 gigatonnes, the same as the previous two years.  In 2016 the global economy grew 3.1%. Carbon dioxide emissions declined in the United States and China and were stable in Europe, offsetting increases in most of the rest of the world.  According to the IEA in the United States, carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 3% while the economy grew by 1.6%.

U.S. congressional bill to restrict access to open geospatial information

A bill has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that specifically targets open access to geospatial information.  It intends to do this by nullifying a regulation under the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that provides open access to data that enabled the public to identify and monitor housing discrimination, patterns of of integration and segregation in housing.

The Civil Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon Baines Johnson in April 1968,  contains a provision (Title VIII commonly referred to as the Fair Housing Act of 1968) that prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin and sex.  Among other things the Act required the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to affirmatively further the goals of fair housing. In 2015 HUD published the "final rule" to provide clear guidelines on what fair housing and equal opportunity meant in practice.  It also committed to providing the data necessary to measure compliance with the final rule.  Specifically, to aid communities in assessing fair housing, HUD committed to providing "open data to grantees and the public on patterns of integration and segregation, racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty, disproportionate housing needs, and disparities in access to opportunity."

On January 12 of this year a bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, HR 482, that is intended to nullify the final rule on affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH).  If enacted, the bill would require that "no Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing."  Some see this not only as a first step in reducing the regulatory efficacy of the Civil Rights Act, but in restricting access to what has been open information, specifically, open geospatial information or maps of certain types.

Trump advisory council proposal to speed up infrastructure project permitting

At the CG/LA Global Infrastructure Leadership Forum Dan Slane, the director responsible for infrastructure in the Trump Transition Team, described his report which he completed and delivered January 20 this year.  In his view the only way to get the U.S. economy going again, by improving productivity and delivering 4 million high quality jobs (paying $60-80 000 for high school graduates), is infrastructure investment.  Slane said that the the biggest impediment to infrastructure development is permitting.  In the U.S. on average it requires 9.5 years to get the necessary permits in place for an infrastructure project.  It involves many federal and state agencies and can take up to 15 years.  The U.S. presidential term is 4 to 8 years, which means that presidents are not able to show significant results during their term in office from focussing in infrastructure.  Their successor reaps the benefits politically.

When asked by President Trump to propose an infrastructure strategy, he decided to take a business approach  and assess projects based on five criteria.  The investment had to generate high quality jobs for high school graduates in disadvantaged geographical areas.

1) Fix the worst of the worst - fix the bridges like the one in Minnesota before they collapse.

2) Fix productivity of America - find those infrastructure bottlenecks that inhibit economic progess.  He gave an exmaple of a lock on the Mississippi River that takes ships two days to get through.

3) Defensive projects - these are projects that are designed to prevent storms from seriously impacting the oil and gas facilities on the Louisiana Coast or New York transportation hubs.

4) National defence - projects like cyber security that are designed to prevent disruption of the U.S. energy grid by enabling redundancy

5) Next gen - projects that contribute to the development of the infrastructure of the future

He, Norman Anderson, President & CEO the CG/LA, and others winnowed 240 major projects down to 100 initially and then later down  to 52 projects.  They asked the Boston Consulting Group to verify the cost benefit analyses for these projects.  It was estimated that the total cost of the 52 projects was $2.5 trillion and the investment would generate 500 000 direct high quality jobs.  It could not be done without private investment funding. 

The biggest hurdle to getting these 52 projects underway is permitting. To speed the permitting process up Dan Slane proposed that the president issue an executive order mandating the 13 federal agencies who needed to be involved in the permitting of the 52 projects had to complete the permitting within four months.  The objective was to force agencies to collaborate and work in parallel and not sequentially. That proposal may not have been perceived as practical.

More recently an advisory council advising U.S. President Donald Trump on infrastructure and led by Richard LeFrak and Steve Roth has proposed an arbitration-style pilot program to significantly reduce the 9.5 years it takes on average to complete permitting.  The idea is not to get around environmental and other regulations but to speed up the process using an arbitration approach.  According to Reuters the advisory council made the suggestion to Trump and others in the White House last week.

Guide to selecting Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Applications

The development, integration, and distribution of the information and spatial data infrastructure necessary to support the vision and goals of a digital Earth will occur in a distributed fashion, in very diverse technological, institutional, socio-cultural, and economic contexts around the world. Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Applications (FOSS4G) offers mature, capable and reliable software to contribute to the creation of this infrastructure. A recent paper presents a selected set of some of the most mature and reliable FOSS4G solutions that can be used to develop the functionality for a digital earth.  It includes examples of large-scale, sophisticated, mission-critical applications of each software to illustrate their potential in support of a digital Earth. Information and resources are offered to help users select the best FOSS4G solutions for their particular contexts and system development needs.

2017 ASCE Infrastructure Scorecard reveals slight improvement

The 2017 ASCE Infrastructure Scorecard has been released this morning.  Grades for seven categories of infrastructure – Hazardous Waste, Inland Waterways, Levees, Ports, Rail, Schools, and Wastewater – improved slightly. The grades for three categories – Parks, Solid Waste, and Transit – declined this year.  The overall cumulative GPA remained constant at D+.

2013 and 2017
Water and the environment

    Dams                    D  D
    Drinking Water      D  D
    Hazardous Waste D  D+
    Levees                  D- D
    Solid Waste          B- C+
    Wastewater          D  D+

Transportation

    Aviation                 D  D
    Bridges                 C+ C+
    Inland Waterways D- D
    Ports                     C  C+
    Rail                       C+ B
    Roads                   D  D
    Transit                   D  D-

Public Facilities

    Public Parks & Recreation C- D+
    Schools                 D  D+

Energy

    Energy                  D+ D+

Digitization could boost construction productivity

The CG/LA Infrastructure Leadership Forum in Montreal has provided a fascinating glimpse into what is happening around the world in infrastructure from a technology, financing, and business model perspective. From 50,000 feet the big item is that the construction industry may be at the tipping point with respect to digitization.  Just about every speaker referred to the lack of progress on productivity in the construction industry. 

But Wipro, Booz Allen Hamilton, Aconex,  Jacobs, and other vendors believe that the construction industry is poised for the digitization revolution.  Vendors are investing heavily in technology including artificial intelligence, digital modeling such as BIM and full lifecycle BIM or BIM++ as one speaker referred to it, machine learning, drones, neural networks, virtual reality, big data, analytics, automation and hyperautomation.

$10 trillion is spent on construction goods and services every year.  But whereas the average worker adds $37 of value for every hour worked, a construction worker adds only $25 per hour worked.  Construction productivity has stagnated over the past decades in many of the world's advanced economies.

McKinsey Global Institute’s Industry Digitization Index combines 27 indicators to measure the digital assets, digital usage, and digital workers in each sector.  Construction is among the least digitized sectors in the world.  According to this index construction comes second to last in the United States and last in Europe.  Globally, labour-productivity growth in construction has averaged only 1 percent a year over the past two decades, compared with growth of 2.8 percent for the total world economy.  In the Unites States labour productivity in construction has actually declined. 

Construction productivity needs to be improved if we are going to attract the private sources of funding that are required to address the world's infrastructure gap.  McKinsey estimates that if construction-sector productivity were to catch up with that of the total economy this would increase the sector’s value add by about $1.6 trillion which would add 2 percent to the global economy.

Globally the sector is extensively regulated, highly dependent on public-sector demand and highly fragmented.  It ranks among the lowest industries with respect to investment in R&D.  The sector splits broadly in two:

• large-scale players engaged in heavy construction such as civil and industrial work and large-scale housing, and
• mom and pop firms engaged in fragmented specialized trades such as mechanical, electrical, and plumbing work that act as subcontractors or work on smaller projects like refurbishing single-family housing.

According to McKinsey the first group tends to have 20 to 40 percent higher productivity than the second.

Digitization by itself is not going to solve the productivity gap in construction but it could at least play an important role or it could even be disruptive as it has been in other industries. Innovative firms have increased productivity by 50 to 60 percent by infusing digital technology, new materials, and advanced automation, reskilling the workforce, changing business practices and pushing government to change regulations.

Digital America: A tale of the haves and have-mores, McKinsey Global Institute, December 2015

Reinventing construction through a productivity revolution, McKinsey Global Institute February 2017

Kids use Humanitarian OpenStreetMap to help eliminate malaria

Nearly half of the world’s population is at risk of malaria. In 2015, there were roughly 212 million malaria cases and an estimated 429 000 malaria deaths. 

On Thursday, March 3rd 2016, a world-record humanitarian mapathon took place at Politecnico di Milano in northern Italy.  Two-hundred and twelve 10-year old children from nine classes at six elementary schools in Milan province had the unique opportunity of meeting with researchers from GEOlab (Geomatics and Earth Observation laboratory) and HOClab (Hypermedia Open Center laboratory) of Politecnico di Milano, who introduced them to humanitarian mapping.  In cooperation with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and Missing Maps, the team led by Prof. Maria Antonia Brovelli, Dr. Marco Minghini, Dr. Monia Molinari and Dr. Aldo Torrebruno showed children how to map buildings in the northernmost part of Swaziland in a project for malaria elimination.  The results of the mapathon have been incredible: more than 40,000 edits to the map and more than 5,000 buildings mapped in only a few hours of work. Knowing that their maps will be used to help local people in Swaziland, children were simply fantastic in performing the mapping task in a unique, passionate, and enthusiastic way. Some of the young mappers did not want to return to class because they had remaining buildings to map in their task areas.

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is calling all mappers to help HOT and our partners eliminate malaria with its biggest project to date. HOT is working on two projects, mapping over 500,000 square kilometers in 7 countries. This project collective is part of the Missing Maps initiative in conjunction with DigitalGlobe, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Gates Foundation, PATH and MapBox.

Help HOT map against malaria!

Construction industry poised for rapid digitization

The CG/LA Infrastructure Leadership Forum in Montreal has provided a fascinating glimpse into what is happening around the world in infrastructure from a technology, financing, and business model perspective. . From 50,000 feet the big item is that the construction industry may be at the tipping point with respect to digitization.

PPP

Probably the highlight of the event is the success of PPP projects, especially in Canada.  About one quarter of major infrastructure projects in Canada are PPP.  In the U.S. the PPP model works well in some jurisdictions, for example, the Port Authority of New New York and New Jersey.  In some states PPP is illegal and even at the federal taxation level until recently there were tax regulations that hindered the adoption of the PPP model.  The presentations made clear that there are multiple PPP models.   Several projects in Latin America were looking at PPP alternatives that were better suited to their jurisdictions.  A conference attendee from Nigeria was clearly very interested in which of the PPP models were appropriate in his country.

Investment in infrastructure

Big numbers were on virtually every speaker's lips.  The Canadian Federal government intends to invest $180 billion over ten years in infrastructure, the Quebec government $87 billion, President Trump threw out $1 trillion over five years in a state of the union speech a few days ago, Boston Consulting Group has estimated that there is a spending gap of $1 trillion annually, and the ASCE estmates that US infrastructure requires an investment of $4 million just to make up for the lack of maintenance over the past decades. Some speakers made a convincing case that these estimates are overblown. Whatever the numbers there was a consensus that there is a very large need for investment in infrastructure. 

But infrastructure, while among the top ten priorities for Americans, is not up there with jobs and the economy.  The Boston Consulting Group estimates that there are 15.4 million jobs in the infrastructure industry.  On average these are better paying than the average blue collar job.  The BCG modeling suggests that $ 1 trillion invested in infrastructure could get this up to 19 to 20 million jobs.  To get attention infrastructure has to be about jobs.

The good news is that there was a consensus that there is a lot of money looking for infrastructure projects. One speaker estimated ten times as much money as projects to invest in.  The holdups appear to be:
1) Permitting - Few are willing to commit money to projects that don't have the requisite permitting in place.  In the U.S. that process requires on average 9.5 years, but can take up to 15 years.
2) Social licence - These days it is not enough to simply get the state, federal, presidential, US Army Corps of Engineers and other regulatory permits.  It is necessary to get a social licence which means actively seeking buyin from the community.  For example, the Plains and Eastern Tennessee transmission line project has been supported by the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations as well as local landowners and other stakeholders.  Sometimes opposition comes from unexpected sources.  Clean Line's several big transmission projects have sometimes been filed against by the local utilities companies whose service territory the line crosses.
3) Business case - Investors are looking for a low risk investment with a good return.  That means that benefits to various stakeholders have to be identified and stakeholders brought into the project to spread the risk and reduce it for any one participant.

A lot of this money is private from domestic and international sources.  Japan and Saudi Arabia were both mentioned as sources of money for infrastructure investment.  Canadian pension funds are active in investing in infrastructure internationally.  To attract private funding infrastructure projects will have to generate returns, and that will drive investment in technology to improve productivity.

U.S. infrastructure market

Another highlight of the conference was Dan Rule's presentation on the Trump Transition Team's recommendation for infrastructure development in the next four years, which I blogged about previously.

Interestingly what Trump decides to do with respect to infrastructure may not be all that important. In the U.S. the federal government is not by any measure the biggest player in the infrastructure market - it only represents about 10% of the market. The big player is local governments. Local government has enormous power to choose projects, raise money and borrow money. This local autonomy is baked into the Constitution. Local governments decide on infrastructure projects and then float (tax deductible) bond issues to finance them.  The muni bond market is $3.2 trillion and is the second largest debt market.  There is good news here as well. The majority of the bond issues at the local level to fund infrastructure projects are successful in raising the necessary money through rates.State governments are also big players in the infrastructure market.  One speaker recommended to vendors and consultants looking for opportunities in the U.S. to look for municipalities who had recently successfully floated bond issues or states that had increased the gas tax or counties that has implemented a sales tax. In some states the state government and local governments are collaborating to fix all bridges in need of rehabilitation rather than inefficient one-offs by individual municipalities and counties. 

Large infrastructure projects

There are some very innovative large infrastructure projects around the world that were profiled at the conference.  I was very impressed that the long-haul transmission business appears to be coming to life in the U.S.  This business is not being driven by the incumbent power utilities, but by new players like Clean Line.  Geospatial technology underpins transmission line siting, transportation, and increasingly horizontal construction as drones, scanners, 3D visualization and other digital technology transforms the construction industry.

Technology

From a technology perspective just about every speaker referred to the lack of progress on productivity in the construction industry. Engineering and construction are second from the bottom on the IT adoption chart. But Wipro, Booz Allen Hamilton, Aconex,  Jacobs, and other vendors and analyst McKinsey believe that the construction industry is poised for the digitization revolution.  Vendors are investing heavily in technology including artificial intelligence, digital modeling such as BIM and full lifecycle BIM or BIM++ as one speaker referred to it, machine learning, drones, neural networks, virtual reality, big data, analytics, automation and hyperautomation.

GIS has been widely used by utilities for years for automated mapping/facilities management, back office records management, asset management, transmission line siting, and more recently for design and construction, energy conservation, vegetation management, mobile workforce management (MWFM), and outage management (OMS). Now, utilities are integrating GIS with automated meter infrastructure (AMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Intelligent design has crossed over from the office to the field in utilities, also enabled by the capabilities of GIS. Geospatial-related analytics (spatial analytics) is seen as one of the key aspects of success for electric utility operations in the smart grid era. Looking for patterns and correlations between different land, weather, terrain, assets, and other types of geodata will be increasingly important for utilities. Power-related analytics with geospatial components include network fault tracing, load flow analysis, Volt/VAR analysis, real-time disaster situational awareness, condition-based maintenance, and vegetation management.

As an example, PrecisionHawk is not only selling drone services but the geoanalytics to extract useful, actionable information. One of their targets is the construction industry and they intend to fit their solutions into existing workflows.  For example, a drone can collect aerial imagery of a stockpile, and the software provided by PrecisionHawk enables the volume of the stockpile to be calculated from the imagery without the user having to know much about drones, imagery, meshes or algorithms for calculating stockpile volumes.  PrecisionHawk also have an FAA permit for beyond-line-of-sight (BVLOS) drone flights. (I already blogged about the pilot flights that Xcel Energy also has an FAA permit for.) This suggests the next step will be drone data collection and geospatial analytical applications based on this data for linear construction projects.