Conservation society mollycoddles fracked LNG part 1/2
During the March 3 Midday Café interview with Leonard Linklater, Anne Middler, the senior energy analyst for the Yukon Conservation Society (YCS), glossed over troublesome liquified natural gas (LNG) facts and accommodated misleading statements made by the Calgary frack gas promoter, Ferus Inc.
The interview followed up on Yukon Energy Corporation's latest Frack & Pony show, this time a closed door event featuring Ferus on the morning of March 1 in the Old Firehall.
The main theme in the Old Firehall was to use LNG plans of the Casino mine proposal as vehicle for an introduction of deep natural gas infrastructures across Yukon.
A team of presenters decked out in company uniform dresses and seamless Prozac happiness had rolled out a tightly controlled message and multi media track. Benefit of such by invite-only sessions, there was some plain text such as carbon pricing subsidizes fracking (accurately referenced in the Alberta Climate Plan).
Claims of supposedly clean fracked LNG, long debunked, she accommodated as "dubious".
In response to facts that are too solid and obvious to be simply overturned introducing such false doubt to scientific proof (not hypothesis, not theory) is a classic feature of toxic cigarette and fossil industries discourse.
During the Oct. 2013 Yukoners Concerned PPT presentation to the YG frack committee I had elaborated on my link in the PPT, showing a University of Colorado study of total mass measurements of methane emissions in a Utah frack gas field.
Since then, from journals like Scientific American to the academic literature, we have seen building an avalanche of high-calibre evidence that fracked natural gas has the dirtiest GHG output of all fossil fuels, including coal and fracking-derived diesel.
With no evidence to the contrary long lists of peer reviewed papers published by Sourcewatch: goo.gl/PNrTJR, and Cornell University : goo.gl/N2Wrjn, are summed up well by fracture engineer and fracking pioneer Dr. Tony Ingraffea: "Shale Gas is not the cleanest, not the least worst of all the fossil fuels, it is the dirtiest, it is the worst."
Of course, LNG is dirtier yet as it means a double-whammy of pollution in comparison to above referenced, increasingly fracked natural gas in general, because of the massive additional emissions involved in liquifying natural gas into LNG.
Anne Middler further ceded supposed economic benefits of establishing an ever broader frack LNG infrastructure in Yukon.
She suggested, for example, in the case of a truly massive LNG fuelled electrical generation for the Casino Mine proposal, a measly renewable energy quota along with fracked LNG should be required.
The YCS continue to overlook that Yukon is not an economic island and that it is unethical and economically destabilizing for Yukon to saddle B.C. or Alberta with incentives for even more public debt, private sector investment fraud and structural unemployment.
It is irresponsible for experts like her, perceived to be impartial and objective, to give feed back that contributes to sooner or later leaving public and industrial energy needs high and dry, and leaving planning unaware of supply unreliability and price volatility of short sighted frack gas perspectives.
Frack gas speculators like Ferus focus on pumping up the next quarterly balance sheet while a big mining project is planned for decades to come, very incompatible.
Once infrastructure dependencies reach a critical mass many expect natural gas prices to go up ferociously, roughly to Pacific Rim levels.
It is noteworthy that after years of $100-plus plus per barrel crude prices (until 2014) no Canadian jurisdiction has relevant savings.
In the case of the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, it is in the 0% - 1% range of Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, at best.
Norway, with savings of about $1.5 trillion, extracts crude from once-profitable conventional reservoirs and reinvests almost exclusively into renewables.
Whereas somewhere around half of current Canadian oil and gas extraction and practically all of its new fossil energy projects unfold as unconventional tar and frack expansion, with no useful net energy output while bleeding financial losses and proliferating economic failure.
And with depletion of 'low hanging fruit' resources those efficiency losses of fracking are getting ever-bigger.
Super-intense efforts of breaking the back of the Earth in unconventional operations seamlessly across vast sacrifice regions require expenditure of financial and energy resources that is economically very different to a once profitable conventional extraction, with typically localized spot impacts.
The YCS consistently ignored, or by now shall I say has hidden as in the interview, the massive economic and ecological outcome differences when expanding into unconventionally vs. once conventionally derived fossil fuels.
When the chips were down YCS had endorsed (sneak) fracking, the dishonest NDP and Liberal way of going about it paired with no-frack lip service.
Strikingly, before the unanimous passing of the Dec. 2015 Yukon Oil and Gas Act (YOGA), the YCS responded "Agreed” to eight out of 11 frack enabling proposals in YG's related online consultation.
Tony Ingraffea, a well-known Cornell University professor, in the fall of 2016 provided a reality check to Yukoners by pointing out the YOGA never even mentions “shale” or “fracturing”, “conventional” or “unconventional”, not in any form.
He explicitly responded to the author in agreement on the deceptive character of the YOGA, which, in Ingraffea’s review, could only be matched on the negative scale by Texas regulatory fracking implementations.
Ecological, industrial and social challenges before us are immense, but without ethical core there is no hope.
One could start by transitioning from technocratically shackled, spineless slithering to re-learning upright walking.
The Yukon Conservation Society has a bad habit of regurgitating oil industry talking points, and generally does not recognize independently and broadly accepted energy basics such as these:
As indispensable but vanishing backbone of the entire fossil energy outlook, global conventional O & G extraction is declining since around 2005; North American reserves and production are in worse shape.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers estimates a final decline of natural gas resources from 2025 onward.
The only significant LNG exporter, Qatar, ships almost half of the world's exports.
Even the only two other relevant conventional natural gas producers, Russia and Iran, have reserves too far from tidewater to afford the wasteful LNG option.
The freezing down to 162 degree Celsius (260 Fahrenheit) is so energy intensive that nearly half of the natural gas is used up right then and there.
It also means the frack gas extraction from short-lived wells in overrated reserves with no useful net energy or revenue output from Alberta and B.C. interior shale geology is an LNG pipe dream of pipe dreams.
LNG is typically understood as non-viable oddball fossil fuel that historically evolved in highly unusual trade scenarios such as the Qatar export - Japan import connection, not at all suitable for most energy logistics and architectures.
Seasoned oil and gas industrialists like Art Berman and analysts like Deborah Rogers or petroleum geologists like David Hughes, state clearly that fracking and LNG are investment fraud based on wildly inflated reserve statements and energy wasting, more than realistic resource production.
Matthias Bichsel, then project and technology director at Shell, summed it up this way, cited by the Financial Post on Oct. 18, 2013: “The United States oil and gas industry has “overfracked and overdrilled’.” The reader can fill in "Canadian tar and frack bubble will be short lived".
Part 2 of this two-part commentary will be published Monday.
It will show how the YCS following its Oct. 5, 2012 backroom deal with the oil industry, misreads energy economics and presents misleading renewable energy as well as oil cartel-coined climate advice.
Yukon Conservation Society Mollycoddles Fracked LNG part 2/2
P.E.I. with about one-third penetration of wind energy on the power grid, produces the wind component at 5 cents/kWh.
If critical mass was moved beyond Yukon Energy Corp.'s (YEC's) renewable Mickey Mouse approach, and thereby pushing down Northern overhead costs such as construction crane use, Yukon might expect closer to Dawson Creek's 8 cents/kWh wind energy production cost.
On top of that, a first Yukon wind park such as the Ferry Hill 10 - 20 MW proposal, is mostly base load power because of so far unused storage potential at the Aishihik power dam and therefore decades overdue, also with regard to loads for electric vehicle charging.
Crucially in winter months that have lots of wind, with wind farm operations, water can be held back at Aishihik.
Then, when there is little wind, it can be reliably used instead of the current fossil fuel generators.
This cost competitive edge of wind energy is agreed on, but hidden under a "mountain of disjointed, incoherent facts" (out of Tarkovsky's movie Solaris) by YEC.
Battery electric transit busses have been successful in many places.
Winnipeg Transit is now considering going all electric with 618 busses; electric busses for over half a century had been successful in Winnipeg.
As one example, the BYD K9 model purchase cost and maintenance cost are competitive to the latest diesel bus orders by Whitehorse city council and of course fuels up for 20 percent of diesel fuel's cost.
In five years since the previous order of new city busses, which already should have been electric, significant diesel expenses and GHG emissions have frivolously occurred.
City council's lack of perspective or fossil default mentality aligns with the scandalous Feb. 2016 EV study YEC had commissioned with the ICF oil and gas consultancy in California.
The study discourages any vehicle charge infrastructure initiative.
As a planning goal into the future, it advises that electrical vehicle traffic in the Yukon should be referred to and limited to block heater outlets, a total no-no in EV infrastructure development 101.
This frozen situation is not ecology- or economics-based, but ideological, and even less likely to change as time goes on with the irrational fossil eggheads digging in and advancing further their already adversarial stance.
Michael Brandt, YEC's Vice-President and face of frack gas continuity through and beyond Dave Morrison's days, is a seasoned expert in irrational frackonomics, which he proved once again during the LNG promotional event in the Old Firehall March 1, 2017.
Unchallenged by the Yukon Conservation Society (YCS), he made the disingenuous, circular statement that Yukon's electric infrastructure is not robust enough to power or partially power large mining projects.
In reality, every step of the way in years, Brandt had opposed any sensible, incremental options to cost-competitively, robustly, resiliently and adaptively electrify Yukon's energy, industrial and transportation capacities.
He is still the enemy of a Ferry Hill wind farm. Hydro dams once were considered renewable but are not any longer in forward planning, which the fossilized Brandt has not learned.
Renewable energy is competitive; always-wasteful conversion of fossil resources into energy is not.
Oil, coal and gas are politically and militarily influential, which is an entirely different piece, or beast.
A big problem with YCS is they are trying to pull the wool over our eyes by selling us one for the other with Exxon Mobile-sponsored carbon price indoctrination.
The climate crisis is unravelling livable conditions on our planet. It is time now to stop or wake up the climate deniers, be it flat-earthers or carbon-pricers with their own attack on atmospheric science and energy economics.
Carbon taxes and carbon off set trade speculation only validate and navigate current GHG emission levels.
Conversely, unequivocally climate science as well as climate/north-south justice (Kyoto Principle) understand accumulated emissions, not current emission levels, as core data point.
But it is the dishonest indoctrination by carbon-pricers that enable and multiply the flat-earth and Trump followers who understand very well being lied to, just are confused what exactly about.
It is the carbon-pricing narrative of YCS and others to confuse the morbid end-game of fossil cartel subsidies with the capitalist or simply industrial cycle of private/public infant industry investment.
It is a crucial failure to overlook or forget the mechanics for crossing critical mass thresholds for network technologies, like rail, air travel, phone service, communication and energy sectors.
As with other technology standard changes, fossils do not transition to renewables but are disrupted by change.
Illegal fossil actions, such as violations of the Competition Act section 15.1 with the fraudulent carbon-price claim of lowering emissions, when in fact it it increases emissions, need to be stopped.
Like the VW emission lowering claims for petroleum sphere products that blocked renewable paths for an actual reduction of emissions, the emission increasing carbon pricing fraud of the petro-political complex will be prosecuted under competition legislations by an initiative of the author.
Remember muckraking journalist Ida Tarbel and Republican US president Theodore Roosevelt, who broke up the criminal cartel operations of Standard Oil?
In today's anti-democratic corporatism, they could be considered far left of the neoliberal phonies from Blair-Mulcair New Labour.
Fully interchangeable, Yukon wise, fill in Premier Sandy Silver or Yukon NDP Leader Liz Hanson.
The Silver government is getting their ducks in a row for fracking in Northern and South-East Yukon, which is plain text for already initiated Oil and Gas development of shale resources, such as in the Kandik Basin.
There is danger at the door; neoliberal carbon pricers outfrack and outpipeline neoconservatives everywhere.
It is a bandwagon That Peter Turner, the president of the Yukon Chamber of Commerce was quick to jump on with the now-familiar emphasis on frack subsidies through carbon-pricing.
Yukon has zero proven conventional Oil or Gas reservoirs according to comprehensive literature of Yukon O & G geology available through the Yukon Geological Survey. Sandy Silver and Peter Turner can't seem to get it into their heads.
For such a surreal scene of endlessly and brainlessly parroted frack promos, in the coming out year 2012 for Yukon Frack and Pony shows, on Oct. 5, the YCS framed the picture.
YCS set the tone for a fossil default standard of frack double talk by signing a backroom deal with the oil industry.
The document borrows language from similar agreements that are often facilitated by the fossil-controlled and funded group Synergy Alberta.
The psychologically clever term "polarized spectrum" has a track record for degrading fact- and science-based research as supposedly extreme.
The mental image of "polarized" pushes frack critical views to beyond an acceptable, allowable scope.
Under the contract, packaged as a joined letter of YCS and Northern Cross, YCS is to seek "common ground" with the frackers.
"There is a need for the public to be engaged in an open and informed discussion about the oil & gas industry, including the benefits and risks of various oil and gas industry activities such as hydraulic fracture stimulation (fracking), and how Yukon's regulations govern these activities."
In the sophisticated legalese of the frack lobby culture the YCS has entered – need for an informed discussion – implies that frack objections in the community forum are supposedly –uninformed –, and frack lobbyists like YCS/Northern Cross by petitioning government assume expert authority, and importantly gain false legitimacy in sidelining the citizens by covering the consultation requirement in such elitist style.
The deceptive frack beautification of the "benefits and risks" language frame later set the Gov's select committee on course.
Long shadows continue to be thrown on Wealth and Health for Yukon with powerful language in YCS's oil backroom deal.
Anne Middler's signature is on it – goo.gl/DPYYg5 .
