Daily Archives: April 17, 2015

Big Oil’s business model is broken

April 17, 2015Energy and Climate Change, Oil, OpinionTrevor Larkum

Many reasons have been provided for the dramatic plunge in the price of oil to about $60 per barrel (nearly half of what it was a year ago): slowing demand due to global economic stagnation; overproduction at shale fields in the United States; the decision of the Saudis and other Middle Eastern OPEC producers to maintain output at current levels (presumably to punish higher-cost producers in the U.S. and elsewhere); and the increased value of the dollar relative to other currencies. There is, however, one reason that’s not being discussed, and yet it could be the most important of all: the complete collapse of Big Oil’s production-maximizing business model.

Until last fall, when the price decline gathered momentum, the oil giants were operating at full throttle, pumping out more petroleum every day. They did so, of course, in part to profit from the high prices. For most of the previous six years, Brent crude, the international benchmark for crude oil, had been selling at $100 or higher. But Big Oil was also operating according to a business model that assumed an ever-increasing demand for its products, however costly they might be to produce and refine. This meant that no fossil fuel reserves, no potential source of supply — no matter how remote or hard to reach, how far offshore or deeply buried, how encased in rock — was deemed untouchable in the mad scramble to increase output and profits.

In recent years, this output-maximizing strategy had, in turn, generated historic wealth for the giant oil companies. Exxon, the largest U.S.-based oil firm, earned an eye-popping $32.6 billion in 2013 alone, more than any other American company except for Apple. Chevron, the second biggest oil firm, posted earnings of $21.4 billion that same year. State-owned companies like Saudi Aramco and Russia’s Rosneft also reaped mammoth profits.

How things have changed in a matter of mere months. With demand stagnant and excess production the story of the moment, the very strategy that had generated record-breaking profits has suddenly become hopelessly dysfunctional.

To fully appreciate the nature of the energy industry’s predicament, it’s necessary to go back a decade, to 2005, when the production-maximizing strategy was first adopted. At that time, Big Oil faced a critical juncture. On the one hand, many existing oil fields were being depleted at a torrid pace, leading experts to predict an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline. On the other, rapid economic growth in China, India, and other developing nations was pushing demand for fossil fuels into the stratosphere. In those same years, concern over climate change was also beginning to gather momentum, threatening the future of Big Oil and generating pressures to invest in alternative forms of energy.

A “Brave New World” of tough oil

No one better captured that moment than David O’Reilly, the chair and CEO of Chevron. “Our industry is at a strategic inflection point, a unique place in our history,” he told a gathering of oil executives that February. “The most visible element of this new equation,” he explained in what some observers dubbed his “Brave New World” address, “is that relative to demand, oil is no longer in plentiful supply.” Even though China was sucking up oil, coal, and natural gas supplies at a staggering rate, he had a message for that country and the world: “The era of easy access to energy is over.”

To prosper in such an environment, O’Reilly explained, the oil industry would have to adopt a new strategy. It would have to look beyond the easy-to-reach sources that had powered it in the past and make massive investments in the extraction of what the industry calls “unconventional oil” and what I labeled at the time “tough oil”: resources located far offshore, in the threatening environments of the far north, in politically dangerous places like Iraq, or in unyielding rock formations like shale. “Increasingly,” O’Reilly insisted, “future supplies will have to be found in ultradeep water and other remote areas, development projects that will ultimately require new technology and trillions of dollars of investment in new infrastructure.”

For top industry officials like O’Reilly, it seemed evident that Big Oil had no choice in the matter. It would have to invest those needed trillions in tough-oil projects or lose ground to other sources of energy, drying up its stream of profits. True, the cost of extracting unconventional oil would be much greater than from easier-to-reach conventional reserves (not to mention more environmentally hazardous), but that would be the world’s problem, not theirs. “Collectively, we are stepping up to this challenge,” O’Reilly declared. “The industry is making significant investments to build additional capacity for future production.”

On this basis, Chevron, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and other major firms indeed invested enormous amounts of money and resources in a growing unconventional oil and gas race, an extraordinary saga I described in my book The Race for What’s Left. Some, including Chevron and Shell, started drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; others, including Exxon, commenced operations in the Arctic and eastern Siberia. Virtually every one of them began exploiting U.S. shale reserves via hydro-fracking.

Only one top executive questioned this drill-baby-drill approach: John Browne, then the chief executive of BP. Claiming that the science of climate change had become too convincing to deny, Browne argued that Big Energy would have to look “beyond petroleum” and put major resources into alternative sources of supply. “Climate change is an issue which raises fundamental questions about the relationship between companies and society as a whole, and between one generation and the next,” he had declared as early as 2002. For BP, he indicated, that meant developing wind power, solar power, and biofuels.

Browne, however, was eased out of BP in 2007 just as Big Oil’s output-maximizing business model was taking off, and his successor, Tony Hayward, quickly abandoned the “beyond petroleum” approach. “Some may question whether so much of the [world’s energy] growth needs to come from fossil fuels,” he said in 2009. “But here it is vital that we face up to the harsh reality [of energy availability].” Despite the growing emphasis on renewables, “we still foresee 80 percent of energy coming from fossil fuels in 2030.”

Under Hayward’s leadership, BP largely discontinued its research into alternative forms of energy and reaffirmed its commitment to the production of oil and gas, the tougher the better. Following in the footsteps of other giant firms, BP hustled into the Arctic, the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, and Canadian tar sands, a particularly carbon-dirty and messy-to-produce form of energy. In its drive to become the leading producer in the Gulf, BP rushed the exploration of a deep offshore field it called Macondo, triggering the Deepwater Horizon blow-out of April 2010 and the devastating oil spill of monumental proportions that followed.

Over the cliff

By the end of the first decade of this century, Big Oil was united in its embrace of its new production-maximizing, drill-baby-drill approach. It made the necessary investments, perfected new technology for extracting tough oil, and did indeed triumph over the decline of existing, “easy oil” deposits. In those years, it managed to ramp up production in remarkable ways, bringing ever more hard-to-reach oil reservoirs online.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production rose from 85.1 million barrels per day in 2005 to 92.9 million in 2014, despite the continuing decline of many legacy fields in North America and the Middle East. Claiming that industry investments in new drilling technologies had vanquished the specter of oil scarcity, BP’s latest CEO, Bob Dudley, assured the world only a year ago that Big Oil was going places and the only thing that had “peaked” was “the theory of peak oil.”

That, of course, was just before oil prices took their leap off the cliff, bringing instantly into question the wisdom of continuing to pump out record levels of petroleum. The production-maximizing strategy crafted by O’Reilly and his fellow CEOs rested on three fundamental assumptions that, year after year, demand would keep climbing; that such rising demand would ensure prices high enough to justify costly investments in unconventional oil; and that concern over climate change would in no significant way alter the equation. Today, none of these assumptions holds true.

Demand will continue to rise — that’s undeniable, given expected growth in world income and population — but not at the pace to which Big Oil has become accustomed. Consider this: In 2005, when many of the major investments in unconventional oil were getting under way, the EIA projected that global oil demand would reach 103.2 million barrels per day in 2015; now, it’s lowered that figure for this year to only 93.1 million barrels. Those 10 million “lost” barrels per day in expected consumption may not seem like a lot, given the total figure, but keep in mind that Big Oil’s multibillion-dollar investments in tough energy were predicated on all that added demand materializing, thereby generating the kind of high prices needed to offset the increasing costs of extraction. With so much anticipated demand vanishing, however, prices were bound to collapse.

Current indications suggest that consumption will continue to fall short of expectations in the years to come. In an assessment of future trends released last month, the EIA reported that, thanks to deteriorating global economic conditions, many countries will experience either a slower rate of growth or an actual reduction in consumption. While still inching up, Chinese consumption, for instance, is expected to grow by only 0.3 million barrels per day this year and next — a far cry from the 0.5 million barrel increase it posted in 2011 and 2012 and its 1 million barrel increase in 2010. In Europe and Japan, meanwhile, consumption is actually expected to fall over the next two years.

And this slowdown in demand is likely to persist well beyond 2016, suggests the International Energy Agency (IEA), an arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the club of rich industrialized nations). While lower gasoline prices may spur increased consumption in the United States and a few other nations, it predicted, most countries will experience no such lift and so “the recent price decline is expected to have only a marginal impact on global demand growth for the remainder of the decade.”

This being the case, the IEA believes that oil prices will only average about $55 per barrel in 2015 and not reach $73 again until 2020. Such figures fall far below what would be needed to justify continued investment in and exploitation of tough-oil options like Canadian tar sands, Arctic oil, and many shale projects. Indeed, the financial press is now full of reports on stalled or cancelled mega-energy projects. Shell, for example, announced in January that it had abandoned plans for a $6.5 billion petrochemical plant in Qatar, citing “the current economic climate prevailing in the energy industry.” At the same time, Chevron shelved its plan to drill in the Arctic waters of the Beaufort Sea, while Norway’s Statoil turned its back on drilling in Greenland.

There is, as well, another factor that threatens the well-being of Big Oil: Climate change can no longer be discounted in any future energy business model. The pressures to deal with a phenomenon that could quite literally destroy human civilization are growing. Although Big Oil has spent massive amounts of money over the years in a campaign to raise doubts about the science of climate change, more and more people globally are starting to worry about its effects — extreme weather patterns, extreme storms, extreme drought, rising sea levels, and the like — and demanding that governments take action to reduce the magnitude of the threat.

Europe has already adopted plans to lower carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and to achieve even greater reductions in the following decades. China, while still increasing its reliance on fossil fuels, has at least finally pledged to cap the growth of its carbon emissions by 2030 and to increase renewable energy sources to 20 percent of total energy use by then. In the United States, increasingly stringent automobile fuel-efficiency standards will require that cars sold in 2025 achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon, reducing U.S. oil demand by 2.2 million barrels per day. (Of course, the Republican-controlled Congress — heavily subsidized by Big Oil — will do everything it can to eradicate curbs on fossil fuel consumption.)

Still, however inadequate the response to the dangers of climate change thus far, the issue is on the energy map and its influence on policy globally can only increase. Whether Big Oil is ready to admit it or not, alternative energy is now on the planetary agenda and there’s no turning back from that. “It is a different world than it was the last time we saw an oil-price plunge,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven in February, referring to the 2008 economic meltdown. “Emerging economies, notably China, have entered less oil-intensive stages of development … On top of this, concerns about climate change are influencing energy policies [and so] renewables are increasingly pervasive.”

The oil industry is, of course, hoping that the current price plunge will soon reverse itself and that its now-crumbling maximizing-output model will make a comeback along with $100-per-barrel price levels. But these hopes for the return of “normality” are likely energy pipe dreams. As van der Hoeven suggests, the world has changed in significant ways, in the process obliterating the very foundations on which Big Oil’s production-maximizing strategy rested. The oil giants will either have to adapt to new circumstances, while scaling back their operations, or face takeover challenges from more nimble and aggressive firms.

Source: Tom’s Dispatch via Grist

OLEV plug-in car and charging grant revisions April 2015

April 17, 2015Charging, Electric Cars, News, Reviews and CommentTrevor Larkum

The government has pledged to continue its support of plug-in vehicles and their integration into the mainstream. This means that grant schemes in place such as the plug-in car grant and the EV Homecharge scheme will continue to run.

Importantly, the guidelines for these grants are being revised by the government, so there are some differences.

Plug-in car and van grant

From 1st April 2015, buyers of eligible electric cars will be able to claim 35% of the vehicle’s OTR price as opposed to the 25% currently offered. The grant cap of £5,000 remains, however.

To take account of rapidly developing technology, and the growing range of ULEVs on the market, the criteria for the Plug-in Car Grant is also being updated.

From April 2015, eligible ULEVs must meet criteria in one of the following categories depending on emission levels and zero-emission-capable mileage:

Category 1: CO2 emissions of <50g/km and a zero emission range of at least 70 miles;
Category 2: CO2 emissions of <50g/km and a zero emission range between 10 and 69 miles;
Category 3: CO2 emissions of 50-75g/km and a zero emission range of at least 20 miles.

EV Homecharge Scheme

The cap on the Homecharge scheme will be reduced on 13th April to £700. Eligible applicants will be able to get a grant to cover 75% (capped at £700) of the installation costs for a domestic charging point.

So far, the UK government has attributed almost £1 billion of funding to plug-in vehicles up to 2020, cementing their support for the uptake of electric vehicles into the mainstream.

Source: Zap Map

Rate Of Climate Change To Soar By 2020s, With Arctic Warming 1°F Per Decade

April 17, 2015Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and CommentTrevor Larkum

New research from a major national lab projects that the rate of climate change, which has risen sharply in recent decades, will soar by the 2020s. This worrisome projection — which has implications for extreme weather, sea level rise, and permafrost melt — is consistent with several recent studies.

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) study, “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change,” finds that by 2020, human-caused warming will move the Earth’s climate system “into a regime in terms of multi-decadal rates of change that are unprecedented for at least the past 1,000 years.”

In the best-case scenario PNNL modeled, with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations stabilizing at about 525 parts per million (the RCP4.5 scenario), the four-decade warming trend hits 0.45°F (0.25°C) per decade. That means over a 4-decade period, the Earth would warm 1.8°F (4 x 0.45) or 1°C (4 x 0.25). This is a faster multi-decadal rate than the Earth has seen in at least a millennium.

Because of Arctic amplification, the most northern latitudes warm two times faster (or more) than the globe as a whole does. As this figure from the study shows, the rate of warming for the Arctic is projected to quickly exceed 1.0°F (0.55°C) per decade.
DecadalWarming

The decadal rate of temperature change for 40-year periods over various regions — if humanity takes moderate climate action. Rates of change are averages over land plus ocean in each region. Via PNNL.

Such rapid Arctic warming would be ominous for several reasons. First, it would likely speed up the already staggering rate of loss of Arctic sea ice. Second, if, as considerable recent research suggests, Arctic amplification has already contributed to the recent jump in extreme weather, then the next few decades are going to be utterly off the charts.

Third, such rapid Arctic warming implies that the rapidly-melting Greenland ice sheet — already made unstable by human-caused warming — is likely to start disintegrating even faster, which in turn will push sea level rise higher than previously estimated, upwards of six feet this century.

Fourth, such rapid warming would serve to accelerate the release of vast amounts of carbon from defrosting permafrost — the dangerous amplifying carbon cycle which has already been projected to add up to 1.5°F to total global warming by 2100.

There is, of course, “internally generated variability” in the Earth’s climate system — which has been linked to variability in the Pacific Ocean — that can cause the rate of warming to slow down or speed up for a decade (and occasionally longer). That was the point of a February study on what has mistakenly been called the “hiatus” in global warming.

That hiatus was in fact merely an apparent slowdown in the rate of warming, primarily found in the U.K. Met Office’s dataset. But the Met Office uses the Hadley temperature record, which excludes the Arctic (!) — the very place on the planet that has been warming the fastest. When scientists incorporated Arctic warming into the Met/Hadley record using other data sources (such as the satellites), the slowdown all but vanished.

12 cities shortlisted for ULEV funding

April 17, 2015Electric Cars, Milton Keynes, News, Reviews and CommentTrevor Larkum

Today, government announced details of 12 UK cities shortlisted to share £35 million of funding to promote ultra-low emission vehicles (ULEVs).

Bidding to be the UK’s first ‘Go Ultra Low Cities’, the shortlisted authorities have until 31 August 2015 to finalise their submissions, with the winning cities announced in the autumn.

Set up by The Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) and the Department for Transport (DfT), the £35 million Go Ultra Low City Scheme will deliver a step-change in the uptake of ultra-low emission vehicles. The programme will reward cities that demonstrate most potential to achieve ‘exemplar status’ – becoming internationally outstanding examples for the adoption of ULEVs in a local area.

The 12 cities and authorities shortlisted for official Go Ultra Low status and a share of the £35 million funding are: City of York Council; Department for Regional Development of Northern Ireland; Dundee City Council; Greater London Authority; Leicester City Council; Milton Keynes Council; North East Combined Authority; Nottingham City Council; Oxford City Council Sheffield City Council; West of England; West Yorkshire Combined Authority.

Minister of State for Transport Baroness Kramer said,

“This funding is an unequivocal signal from government that we are committed to making ultra-low emission vehicles a practical and viable choice for more people.

“Today’s shortlist of 12 Go Ultra Low Cities from across the country is an important part of our effort to improve air quality and establish the UK as a global leader in the uptake of low and ultra-low emissions vehicles. This can help to transform people’s quality of life in their cities and is an important step towards our 2050 vision when almost every car, bus and van in the UK will be an ultra-low emission vehicle.”

The scheme rewards cities that show how their plans could be rolled out across the UK, and how their initiatives complement other schemes in their city, such as wider transport policies like the Low Emission Bus and Taxi Schemes.

Those cities that address local air quality issues, particularly in relation to NO2 and other particulate matter, will also be considered favourably.

The Go Ultra Low campaign is the first of its kind, bringing together the Department for Transport (DfT), the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV), the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) and a consortium of seven car manufacturers – Audi, BMW, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Renault, Toyota and Volkswagen.

Source: Next Green Car, 11 March 2015

2015 BMW i8 Video Road Test

The BMW i8 is sleek and stunning, but it’s no V-8-powered supercar. Is it the car that will give plug-in hybrids sex appeal?

First, you need to know what makes the i8 go. This is no straightforward supercar: The i8 gets power in a complex way–it can be front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive, or all-wheel drive, depending on the situation.

Here’s how: Between the front wheels there’s a 96-kilowatt electric motor–the equivalent of 131 horsepower. It sends power to the front wheels through a two-speed transmission.

That electric motor taps into a 5.1-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery mounted in the tunnel between the seats. It can run the car’s front wheels in its electric-only “Max e-Mode” up to 75 mph.

In the back, there’s a turbocharged 1.5-liter three-cylinder gasoline engine producing 231-horsepower. That power goes to the rear wheels through a six-speed automatic transmission.

Combine them, and you have 362 horsepower, and a 0-62 mph time of 4.4 seconds when using both powertrains together.

Put the BMW i8 into Comfort mode, and the i8 behaves like a hybrid, blending gas and electric power as needed. Go faster than 40 mph, and it sends power to every wheel, for all-wheel drive.

Flip into Sport mode, and the gauges glow red, a tachometer replaces the power meter, and the powertrains go into beast mode.

Can the i8 really be an eco-friendly sports car? The EPA says it can run in pure electric mode for 15 miles; in hybrid mode, the i8 earns ratings of 28 mpg combined and 76 MPGe.

Drive it like a sports car, and you might only see 50 mpg on average. But when you do, you’ll get attention. A lot of it.

Let’s be clear: The i8 really isn’t a track car. It strikes a nice balance between sporty performance and high efficiency. It has really neutral handling, and precise electric power steering with decent simulated feedback.

It also has what we call “engineered” noise: BMW pipes in simulated power noises to make the i8 sound more sporty. Those noises get louder in Sport mode…but the i8 never is really, truly, blindingly fast. It’s just quick.

The drivetrain is exotic, but the i8’s shape is truly outrageous. Sure, there’s a BMW grille and something like a 6-Series shape, but it’s all swept up in huge futuristic swoops and scoops and wings–which all help smooth out its aero profile.

It’s something of a chore to get into the i8, but once you’re in, the usual iDrive controller and infotainment screens will be familiar.

The climate control and stereo both feature actual knobs, which is nice, and the gauge cluster is an LCD screen, which reconfigures itself based on the driving mode you’ve chosen.

These front seats are very comfortable, with heavy contouring. You sit low in the car, but visibility is just fine. BMW may say the i8 is a 2+2, but don’t expect to put average-sized humans back there if an actual adult sits up front.

The BMW i8 hasn’t been crash-tested yet, and frankly we want to see it happen–its bodyshell is made of carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic on an aluminum rolling chassis, and little crash-test data exists for cars made that way.

The i8 gets the standard suite of safety tech, from six airbags to the usual electronic safety systems, plus such active safety systems as a forward-collision warning system and surround-view cameras.

Priced from about $135,000, the i8 comes well-equipped, with iDrive and a 10.2-inch screen, navigation, BMW’s i Remote App, six-way power front seats, heated seats, LED headlights, and satellite radio. There are few options other than color.

So what’s the bottom line with the BMW i8? It’s a ground-breaking sports coupe with an advanced hybrid powertrain that has super economy and style, if not quite supercar performance.

Source: Green Car Reports

Electric Cars Would Lower UK Oil Imports By 40%, But Only With Much Wider Adoption

April 17, 2015Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, OilTrevor Larkum

Outside of Norway and the Netherlands, electric vehicle market share remains under 1 percent, even in environmentally progressive countries such as Iceland and Sweden. While the benefits of wider electric-car adoption — including reduced urban air pollution and a lower long-run cost of vehicle ownership — are well known, researchers in Britain have put some numbers behind the economic effects of battery-powered transport.

Assuming a much broader acceptance of electric cars than exists today in Britain, researchers concluded that the country’s dependence on oil imports could drop by 40 percent, saving drivers 600 British pounds ($905) a year in fuel costs, which would eventually offset the higher upfront price of electric cars. At the same time, the overall economic impact of a broad shift toward electric cars would yield a modest national economic benefit. The implications in the report go beyond Britain, suggesting that countries that depend on oil imports and use more renewable energy have the most to gain economically from investing in electric-car infrastructure.

“Based on the current body of evidence, we conclude that a transition to low carbon cars and vans would yield benefits for U.K. consumers and for the environment (both in terms of reduced greenhouse gas emissions and reductions in local air pollution), and have a neutral to positive impact on the wider economy,”

said Cambridge Econometrics, an independent consultancy, in the study that was released Monday. But in order to get there, governments and the private sector will have to greatly increase infrastructure investment — and soon.

In order to greatly reduce the harmful pollutants emitted by internal-combustion engines by mid-century, the report estimates Britain would have to grow electric-car use from less than 20,000 vehicles today (out of about 35 million vehicles last year) to more than six million by 2030 and 23 million by 2050. This wouldn’t be an easy task.

To get tens of millions of electric cars on Britain’s roads over the next 15 years, the government and private sector would have to build out the charging-station infrastructure to allay consumer concern about running out of power before finding a place to plug in, a phenomenon known as “range anxiety.” According to a report last week from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, an organization based in California, range anxiety lessens over time among electric-car owners. However, it’s commonly understood in the industry that electric-car skeptics aren’t going to get over their concerns until they see a combination of longer electric-car ranges (most electric cars travel less than 100 miles per charge), faster charging times (it can take 20 minutes to “fill up” an electric car to 80 percent at a fast-charging outlet) and more charging stations.

“There will be a transition in the next five to 10 years but you won’t see a sudden shift to electric vehicles until consumers have got over their ‘range anxiety’ concerns — and that will only happen with infrastructure spending,”

Philip Summerton, one of the report’s authors, told the Guardian in a report published Tuesday.

In January 2013, the European Commission proposed a $10.7 billion program to build out electric-car charging stations across the European Union. In Britain the plan would have boosted the number of these outlets from 703 in 2012 to 1.22 million by 2020. Other European Union states would have seen similar increases, but by the end of 2013, EU member states, including Britain, successfully delayed the measure, citing the high costs.

Source: IB Times

Video Review: The BMW i3 Offers a Glimpse of the Future

April 17, 2015BMW, Electric Cars, i3, News, Reviews and CommentTrevor Larkum

Generally, there have been two approaches to creating electric automobiles: Stuff batteries and an electric motor into existing gas-power cars, or start from scratch and create a new design. Not satisfied with either of those methods, BMW in a sense used a time machine.

Its new i3 is a deep dive into what the car of the future should be: efficient and sustainable. It’s transportation to be sure, but the i3 is also just as much an environmental think tank on wheels.

Its passenger cell is made from lightweight carbon fiber and reinforced plastic manufactured in a hydroelectric-power factory in Washington State. Interior panels use renewable Asian kenaf plants. It’s all assembled in a German plant amped up by wind power. It would be no surprise to find that the i3 is organic. And edible.

The motor provides 170 horsepower and 184 pound-feet of instant torque. While the i3 can be purely electric, drivers seeking more range will insist on the model with the 2-cylinder gasoline-power generator for $3,850 more. At 1.9 gallons, the gas tank adds about 60 miles of range. At speeds over 25 miles an hour, road noise masks the engine drone. Pedestrians may think you’re mowing the lawn. With the generator, i3 weighs just 2,900 pounds.

BMW claims 80 to 100 miles on battery power alone. My average was 65 using the midlevel efficiency mode Eco Pro. My range was confirmed by a couple in a grocery store parking lot who have owned their i3 for a few months.

Rear-wheel drive, 50-50 weight distribution and a spunky 0-to-60 time of 7.5 seconds seem a God-given right for BMW (it’s slower in Eco modes and in range-extender operation). But a stiff ride and lack of any road feel should prevent the Bavarians from using the Ultimate Driving Machine tagline here. Tires not much wider than my foot don’t help much.

The brake pedal is seldom needed in urban driving. Power regeneration is so aggressive that lifting off the throttle slows things strikingly. One-pedal driving activates the brake lights. At higher speeds, the i3 coasts with less resistance.

Inside, the car makes me wary of the future. The power button location is awkward, and the unusual drive selector takes practice. Creative and renewable materials used on the base Mega World model — one of three, along with Giga World and Tera World — give off an office cubicle vibe. Nearly all my passengers viewed the kenaf fiber panels as trunk liner material. That couple at the grocery store bought the Giga World model with leather and eucalyptus wood trim. It’s highly preferable to the Mega’s budget plastic look (and sometimes feel) and adds a larger data screen. It’s a bargain at $1,500 more.

At $47,050 as tested (without tax incentives), navigation is standard; heated seats add $550. Note: A huge medical-grade electric heating pad can be found on Amazon for under $50. I’ll once again gripe that BMW’s rearview camera is part of a $1,000 grouping. Who knew that the future, and safety, was about option packages?

Getting to the two rear seats requires using cumbersome rear-hinge coach doors. Average adults will fit fine, and the i3’s floor is delightfully flat, though feet in back will be cramped.

Looking like the avant-garde offspring of BMW’s classic Isetta and 2002, people instantly know if they love or hate the i3’s design. Comparably equipped, the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt are easily $11,000 less than the i3. All of them will get you to work; the i3 takes owners into the future.

Source: NY Times

A Major Surge in Atmospheric Warming Is Probably Coming in the Next Five Years

April 17, 2015Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and CommentTrevor Larkum

Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming—new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles—hence the skeptics’ droning on about “pauses”—global warming, as a whole, has not stopped. Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding on average around 125 trillion Joules of heat energy to the oceans per second.

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second. But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year—this, along with the ocean’s over-absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005. The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

“In other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas. For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the “pause” doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades,” Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out,” NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed. “Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but… net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe: “Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere. That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines—and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now.

In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost,” ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming,” suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85 percent chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Roberts and his team found that a “slow down” period is usually (60 percent of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer. And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere. Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

Source: Vice