Tag: Gazprom
Putting the Carbon back in Carbonated
by John Muir on Apr.11, 2009, under Natural Gas, News
NPR’s Anthony Kuhn reports on a story that could have passed for the annual April Fool’s day joke. His story “China Puts Fizz In Bid To Reduce Carbon Emissions” outlines a Chinese company’s efforts to sequester carbon from a power plant for soda production. The story is real, but the efforts sound a bit more like “pop” culture than a true break through in battling climate change.
Also, a follow on to my Gazprom post from January.
I found a great article by Rudolf ten Hoedt that appeared last spring in the European Energy Review. Hoedt brings more depth to the political chess game going on with Nigeria’s oil and Western Europe’s suppliers. Oil was on the rise when this was written, I’ll be interested to see how the dramatic drop in oil prices affects this developing story in coming months and years.
http://www.hcss.nl/en/download/610/file/EER3-Gazprom%20-Africa.pdf
Russia’s Gazprom in Africa
by John Muir on Jan.14, 2009, under News, Radio
NPR’s Planet Money discusses Russia’s state-run oil giant Gazprom on their January 7th podcast. The show gives some perspective on the current natural gas crisis in Europe which has been in the headlines recently, but they also talk about Gazprom’s recent purchase of mineral rights in Algeria.
Guest reporter, Geoff Porter, reports on a possible larger strategy at work, where Russia is interested in using Algeria as a transit country for the bountiful supply of natrual gas in Nigeria.
There is one particularly frightening statistic that Porter mentions in his report: Nigeria, which does not have the infrastructure to export their natural gas is currently flaring about 20 billion cubic meters of gas a year. This is equal to about 1/3 of Algeria’s annual exports. I did a quick calculation on this assuming:
1.0 cubic meter natural gas (methane) = 0.49 kg carbon (http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html)
This comes out to 10.8 million tons of CO2 that is emitted and completely wasted. Most estimates I’ve seen for a sustainable level of carbon emissions for an individual range from 2-2.3 tons per person per year. With this in mind Nigeria is flaring the equivalent carbon allowance of about 4.7-5.4 million people or which is roughly 0.08-0.09% of the world’s population.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/01/hear_russia_russia_everywhere_1.html
