Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy. As usual, emphasis is added.

More Complicated, Huh? Who Knew?

Fascinating how global warming hysteria never quite pans out, isn’t it?

Does a warmer climate mean more dry land? For years, researchers projected that drylands—including deserts, savannas and shrublands—will expand as the planet warms, but new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) challenges those prevailing views.

Previous studies used atmospheric information, including rainfall and temperature, to make projections about future land conditions. The real picture is more complicated than that, said Kaighin McColl, Assistant Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and senior author of the paper.

An all too typical headline from a Weather Channel enthralled with global warming hysteria, before anyone knew the science

“Historically, we have relatively good records of rainfall and temperature but really poor records of the land surface, things like soil moisture and vegetation,” said McColl. “As a result, previous definitions of drylands are based only on how the atmosphere is behaving, as an approximation of the land surface. But models can now simulate both atmospheric and land conditions. By just looking directly at the land surface in climate models, we find that the models aren’t showing a clear increase of drylands over time and that there is huge uncertainty about the global average state of drylands in the future.”

Hubris on the part of supposed “experts” may be the biggest problem our world faces today.

Hat Tip: J. N.

PennEast Pipeline Hopes to Be in the Ground Next Year!

The folks at PennEast Pipeline are optimistic they’ll have pipe in the ground and in service in Pennsylvania next year:

PennEast Pipeline Co said on Thursday it still expects to put the first phase of its $1.2 billion natural gas pipeline project in Pennsylvania in service in 2022 and complete the second phase from Pennsylvania to New Jersey in 2024.

PennEast is involved in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court with New Jersey over whether the company can seize state-owned or controlled land under federal eminent domain rules.

Earlier this week, the Biden administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court that agreed with a filing by the Trump administration urging the court to overturn a 2019 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. That ruling blocked PennEast from using federal eminent domain to seize state land.

“PennEast appreciates the continued support of the United States, which underscores this case presents an issue that cuts across party lines,” the company said in a statement.

The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved PennEast’s request to build the pipeline in January 2018. The company had hoped to complete the project in 2019…

PennEast needs the New Jersey land to build its 120-mile (193 km) pipeline, which is designed to deliver 1.1 billion cubic feet per day of gas from the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania to customers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

One billion cubic feet is enough gas to supply about 5 million U.S. homes for one day.

The PennEast strategy of phasing the project by state is a very smart one as it will increase the pressure on all parties to not stand in the way of the New Jersey phase.

Hat Tip: J. W.

If We Decarbonize Natural Gas Why Would We Transition Away from It?

The WuFlu lockdown debacle has revealed the true nature of most ideologues; nothing will ever to change their minds. We have scores of politicians and “experts” such as the phony Fauci telling us we must continue to live in lockdown even after getting a vaccine, which poses the obvious question of why in the devil we’d ever bother to get vaccinated if that were to be the case. We see the same dynamic in this story:

Dr. Brian Anderson, director, National Energy Technology Laboratory, said the Department of Energy has been tasked with a critical role– to serve the Biden Administration’s bold climate agenda. It has been asked to develop innovative, cutting-edge carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies from the bench scale at the laboratory into commercially deployable solutions.

Anderson said decarbonized fossil-based solutions are necessary as a bridge to carbon-free technologies.

He said a further stage may focus on “blue hydrogen,” derived from fossil fuels in a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative manner, enroute to the eventual goal of using renewables-powered electrolysis to get hydrogen from water…

the world’s biggest battery for storing solar energy.

Hat Tip: R.B.

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