Mixing Oil and Water, Oil Companies Buying Water Rights to Guarantee Supply

March 19, 2009 Dave Ohara

WSJ has a page 3 article on oil companies buying water rights in Colorado. Keep in mind west of the Mississippi, water rights are much like mineral rights, and are not necessarily part of land purchase. This is called Prior appropriation water rights.

The legal details vary from state to state; however, the general principle is that water rights are unconnected to land ownership, and can be sold or mortgaged like other property. The first person to use a quantity of water from a water source for a beneficial use has the right to continue to use that quantity of water for that purpose. Subsequent users can use the remaining water for their own beneficial purposes provided that they do not impinge on the rights of previous users.

Beneficial use is commonly defined as agricultural, industrial or household use. Ecological purposes, such as maintaining a natural body of water and the wildlife that depends on it, were not initially deemed as beneficial uses in some Western states but have been accepted in some jurisdictions. The extent to which private parties may own such rights varies among the states.^[1]

Each water right has a yearly quantity and an appropriation date. Each year, the user with the earliest appropriation date (known as the "senior appropriator") may use up to their full allocation (provided the water source can supply it). Then the user with the next earliest appropriation date may use their full allocation and so on. In times of drought, users with junior appropriation dates might not receive their full allocation or even any water at all.

When a water right is sold, it retains its original appropriation date. Only the amount of water historically consumed can be transferred if a water right is sold. For example, if alfalfa is grown, using flood irrigation, the amount of the return flow may not be transferred, only the amount that would be necessary to irrigate the amount of alfalfa historically grown. If a water right is not used for a beneficial purpose for a period of time it may lapse under the doctrine of abandonment. Abandonment of a water right is rare, but occurred in Colorado in a case involving the South Fork of San Isabel Creek in Saguache County, Colorado.

Now the WSJ article.

Oil, Water Are Volatile Mix in West

Energy Firms Buying River Rights Add to Competition for Scarce Resource

By STEPHANIE SIMON

DENVER -- Oil companies have gained control over billions of gallons of water from Western rivers in preparation for future efforts to extract oil from shale deposits under the Rocky Mountains, according to a new report by an environmental group that opposes such projects.

The group, Western Resource Advocates, used public records to conclude that energy companies are collectively entitled to divert more than 6.5 billion gallons of water a day during peak river flows. The companies also hold rights to store, in dozens of reservoirs, 1.7 million acre feet of water, enough to supply metro Denver for six years.

Industry representatives said they have substantial holdings of water rights for future use in producing oil from shale, though they could not confirm the precise numbers in the report.

Before any move into full-scale oil shale production, the energy industry plans a close study of water issues, including the impact its operations would have on ranchers, farmers and communities that all rely on the same limited sources of water, said Richard Ranger, a senior policy adviser for the American Petroleum Institute. "It's among the most important questions to be examined," he said.

Why is water important to oil companies?

But if the price of oil rebounds, the potential payoff is big: the federal government estimates 800 billion barrels of oil, triple the known reserves of Saudi Arabia, lie under the Rocky Mountain West.

For now, the energy companies are not using most of the water they've claimed; they're leasing some of it to other users, most often farmers. But they are stocking up on water rights to be sure they won't be caught short.

Associated Press

Colorado River water supports 30 million people and dozens of uses, including power generation, above, at the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona.

We're picking up properties as they become available or look strategic," said Tracy Boyd, a spokesman for Royal Dutch Shell PLC. Shell does not expect to need large quantities of water for at least 15 years, he said, and by then it may have developed less water-intensive ways to extract oil, perhaps using wind power.

Exxon Mobil Corp., too, said new technologies might reduce future water needs. "We continue to be a careful steward of this precious resource and a considerate neighbor in dry years," said Patrick McGinn, a spokesman.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer e-mail: Investing in Environmental Sustainability

March 18, 2009 Dave Ohara

ArsTechnica has post on Microsoft’s aim to reduce carbon emissions by 30%.

Microsoft aims to reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent

90,000 Microsoft employees in over 100 countries around the world have been asked to help reduce Microsoft's environmental footprint by at least 30 percent.

By Emil Protalinski | Last updated March 16, 2009 12:40 PM CT

In a post last week on the Microsoft's Environment Sustainability Blog, Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist, explained Microsoft's goals for the environment: "Today, I want to focus on our carbon footprint goal. We understand that environmental action must begin at home. Today, Steve announced to all employees that Microsoft has set a goal to reduce its carbon emissions per unit of revenue by at least 30% compared with 2007 levels by 2012. We'll achieve this goal by improving energy use in our buildings and operations, reducing air travel, and increasing our use of renewable energy." I recommend checking out the full letter as it's a good read; TechFlash also has Ballmer's memo in full.

Microsoft’s Rob Bernard mentions Steve Ballmer’s email.

Reducing Microsoft’s carbon footprint

Today, our CEO Steve Ballmer sent an e-mail to all Microsoft employees about Microsoft’s long-term commitment to increase our focus around environmental sustainability. As Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist, I’m humbled and excited that Steve has asked our more than 90,000 Microsoft employees in over 100 countries around the world to help reduce Microsoft's environmental footprint; accelerate the development of software solutions and advance scientific research to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, -- energy and climate change.

But let’s straight to the email. Here is Steve Ballmer’s e-mail in full from Tech Flash.

From: Steve Ballmer

Date: March 11, 2009

To: Microsoft - All Employees

Subject: Investing in Environmental Sustainability

Microsoft has a long tradition of tackling tough challenges at a global scale. It started with our original vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. It continues with our current mission, which is to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential. Today, society faces concerns about energy use and about dangerous changes to our climate and environment. Microsoft is committed to helping address these challenges.

Even in this difficult economic environment, working on the issues of energy use and environmental change provides an opportunity to make a difference in the world. It’s the right thing to do. And it’s also an opportunity to grow, as the world transitions to new ways of using energy and managing natural resources. Serious efforts to address climate change will require that software plays an even greater role in our economy and our everyday lives. In the near future, applications will help individuals and enterprises track and improve their carbon footprint, while scientific computing will enable fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of complex ecosystems.

Microsoft offers solutions today like virtualization, power management, and collaboration tools that can help customers reduce their energy usage, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and cut costs.

Now we are taking the next step in our efforts to help address global environmental challenges by focusing on three core areas where Microsoft can achieve the greatest impact for our customers, for society, and for the company.
Using Information Technology to Improve Energy Efficiency Today society has the opportunity to use software to help eliminate more greenhouse gas emissions annually than are currently released by all sources combined in the United States. At Microsoft, we are working to accelerate technology breakthroughs that enable the transition to a cleaner, more energy-efficient economy. Our investments will focus on:

Reducing the energy use of information technology: With energy efficiency gains, the IT industry can dramatically increase computing productivity without increasing the amount of energy consumed by computers.

Enabling an ecosystem that uses IT to improve energy efficiency: Microsoft will work with other leading companies to use software to drive significant energy efficiency gains in everything from buildings and transportation to manufacturing and energy grids.

Building applications and services to track carbon emissions: To effectively reduce greenhouse gasses we need the ability to measure them accurately. Microsoft is developing solutions that will help businesses and governments track carbon emissions.
Accelerating Research Breakthroughs

Scientific research into the impact that humankind has on complex environmental and biological systems will help provide the insights needed for effective policy change in government and increased environmental awareness in people. It will also provide the foundation for technological advancements in energy usage, resource management, and environmental planning. Microsoft Research is working with leading scientists to expand the boundaries of our knowledge of the planet. We’re also working to create the tools, technologies, and models to help accelerate scientific understanding on a global scale. Our efforts include:
Enabling fundamental advances in science: Microsoft is working with the scientific community to monitor environmental conditions and develop computational methods and tools to help scientists correlate and analyze data across research efforts.

Modeling the impact of climate change: Microsoft is helping to create advanced modeling technologies that will improve our understanding of global and local climate changes and the environmental consequences of human activity on species and ecosystems.

Providing access to computing power for the scientific community: Microsoft will work with leading scientists around the world to provide access to our facilities, research, collaboration tools, and computing power to help them advance scientific research.

Responsible Environmental Leadership

Microsoft will cut the rate of our carbon emissions and continue to invest in efforts to significantly reduce our use of natural resources. The steps we’re taking include:
Reducing Microsoft’s carbon footprint: Our goal is to reduce our carbon emissions per unit of revenue by at least 30 percent compared with 2007 levels by 2012. Steps we’ll take to achieve this include improving energy efficiency in our buildings and operations, reducing air travel, and increasing our use of renewable energy.

Optimizing our supply chain: We’ll focus on reducing the environmental impact of our supply chain—from how we deliver software to customers, to environmental practices in factories building our devices, to the food we serve.

Reducing our impact on the environment: We’ll continue to invest in programs and search for opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of our operations, including our waste stream, our water use, and our use of materials.
Together, these efforts represent an important long-term initiative for the company. We have a tremendous opportunity to help change not only the way we run our own operations, but also, through the power of software, to help our customers significantly reduce their impact on the planet.
For more information on these efforts, I encourage you to watch the Environmental Sustainability Webcast with Craig Mundie, Kevin Turner, and Rob Bernard, and to visit www.microsoft.com/environment.
Steve

Memory Virtualization (Getting Servers to Breath Better) vs. the Uber Virtualized Data Center

March 18, 2009 Dave Ohara

There is a lot of news and products on Virtualizing the Data Center.

Cisco announced their Unified Computing System.

Cisco Unleashes the Power of Virtualization with Industry's First Unified Computing System

Innovative Architecture Integrates Compute, Networking and Virtualization in a Single Platform; New Services and Partnerships Focused on Next Generation Data Centers

SAN JOSE Calif. - March 16, 2009 - Cisco today unveiled an evolutionary new data center architecture, innovative services and an open ecosystem of best in class partners to help customers develop next-generation data centers that unleash the full power of virtualization. With today's announcement, Cisco is delivering on the promise of virtualization through Unified Computing - an architecture that bridges the silos in the data center into one unified architecture using industry standard technologies. Key to Cisco's approach is the Cisco Unified Computing System which unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single energy efficient system that can reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity, help extend capital assets and improve business agility well into the future.

VMware has their Virtual Data Center OS.

The Virtual Datacenter Operating System Defined

VMware's flagship product, VMware Infrastructure, coupled with VMware's comprehensive roadmap of groundbreaking new products provide a virtual datacenter OS for IT environments of all sizes. The virtual datacenter OS addresses customers’ needs for flexibility, speed, resiliency and efficiency by transforming the datacenter into an “internal cloud” – an elastic, shared, self- managing and self-healing utility that can federate with external clouds of computing capacity freeing IT from the constraints of static hardware-mapped applications. The virtual datacenter OS guarantees appropriate levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of hardware and location.

But, what I find interesting in all these solutions is how neither of these solutions focus on memory.

Why memory? The focus is on compute, storage, and network.

I think memory is like air for automotive engine (CPU). You need good intake of air (memory input), and exhaust with minimal backpressure.

So why not virtualize memory across multiple servers?

While in Portland I was able to visit with RNAnetworks and discuss their latest announcement.

RNA networks Brings Memory Virtualization Into the Enterprise Data Center

RNA Memory Virtualization Transforms Memory into a Shared, Networked Resource

Portland, Ore. – February 2, 2009 – RNA networks, a leader in memory virtualization software that transforms server memory into a shared network resource, today announced the launch of its Memory Virtualization Platform (MVP) and first product, RNAmessenger, based on the MVP. Memory Virtualization unleashes high-performance computing from existing commodity hardware by decoupling memory from the processor and server. Uniquely, the RNA Memory Virtualization Platform is transparent to existing applications and operating systems allowing enterprises to leverage their existing IT assets with no changes.
“Reliance on fragmented local server memory has been a key roadblock to optimizing performance in data center clusters, but memory virtualization eliminates size limits and slashes access times by providing distributed shared memory for all CPUs in a cluster,” said Eyal Waldman, Chairman, President and CEO, Mellanox Technologies. “By combining RNA Networks' Memory Virtualization with Mellanox Technologies' unrivaled connectivity performance, data center architects can achieve new levels of performance with high efficiency and lower costs.”

The concept is simple.

RNA’s innovative Memory Virtualization Platform works by pooling or aggregating available memory across nodes, and making the memory pool available as a shared network resource available to all servers in the data center. Servers can access the pool, contribute to it or both.

Where is the money savings? This is another problem I see with Cisco and VMware’s uber virtual data center solutions. Where is the money savings?

I asked RNAnetworks CEO Clive Cook how much could be saved with memory Virtualization, and he said in grid computing type of scenarios where there is a high throughput requirement across multiple machines they have numbers below.

Bottom Line Economic Advantages

Performance Improvement
10-30X

Cost Savings

Fewer Load Balancers
$44,500

Less Aggregate Memory
$64,500

Storage Savings
$163,000

Power Savings
$39,500

Additional Benefits

Efficiency

Simplicity

Reliability

Resource Sharing

Low TCO

Consolidation

Missed My Chance to Have a Green Discussion with Harrison Ford

March 18, 2009 Dave Ohara

I was in Portland yesterday working on Green Data Center Modeling, and stayed at the Nines hotel for a $99 special rate.

It turns out the Nines hotel is the location for The Living Future conf, May 6 – 9, 2009.

The Unconference for Deep Green Professionals

The 3rd annual Living Future will convene the continent's deepest-green building professionals for two days of kinetic dialogue and unbridled imagination to catalyze revolutionary change.

And, they have a session on Living Building Mindmapping.

This session intends to share our learning experiences and the inspiration of working with Living Tools to make Living Buildings.

Also the hotel is nice enough that Harrison Ford was two tables over having a breakfast meeting. Sitting about where these tables are.

I knew Harrison Ford was into green efforts, but I didn’t know how much until I went to another website.

Hundreds came out Orange County’s Laguna Beach for The Sea Change Summer Party to raise money for environmental group Oceana, and to honor Harrison Ford’s consistent work for the environment. Ford sits on many boards for different environmental groups, he’s donated acreage in Wyoming for conservation, and his recent chest waxing to bring attention to deforestation is one of the most creative acts of advocacy I’ve scence in a long time. A perfect choice for someone to honor…he deserves it!

If I had known all this, I would have approached Harrison for a green discussion. Which is a better plan than getting his autograph for my son who was excited to hear I saw “Indiana Jones” in the restaurant.

Greenwashing Hits Microwind Turbines, Perform 1/3 of Performance Expectations

March 18, 2009 Dave Ohara

News.com has a post on Massachusetts microwind turbine project.

Study: Microwind turbines a tough sell in Mass.

by Martin LaMonica

BOSTON--Despite the growing enthusiasm for home wind turbines, an analysis of microwind turbines in Massachusetts found that they fell short of performance expectations.

The Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust commissioned a study last year to review electricity output from 21 small wind turbines in the state and the results were surprising: the data showed that the estimated production was about three times higher than the turbines' actual production.

Oops, the estimated production was three times higher? And as the article states few ever go back and measure the performance in the field.

The analysis is not the final word on small wind generators, but is significant because few states have done similar reviews, say the study's authors.

The Swift wind turbine from Cascade Engineering, one of many new small wind turbines now available or being developed.

(Credit: Cascade Engineering)

The Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust was "taken aback" at the discrepancy in expected versus actual performance and made changes to its "small wind" rebate program earlier this month to address the issue, said James Christo, a program director from the quasi-public state agency. Christo spoke on a panel on small wind--defined as less than 10-kilowatt capacity machines--at the Northeast Sustainable Energy Building Energy Conference here last week.

What are some of the issues.

Data problem
The Massachusetts state analysis tried to pinpoint the reason for the underperforming turbines and found that installers often worked without sufficiently good information.

Area wind maps for the region tended to overestimate on average by 10 percent how good the wind was for certain locations, according to Shawn Shaw, an analyst at the Cadmus Group who worked on the study.

Another problem is the rated capacity--how much electricity a turbine can produce--that manufacturers publish aren't always reliable for extrapolating expected performance, Shaw found. Industry associations are trying to come up with standard ways of reporting capacity which will help, he added.

"You want to be internally honest about your (wind resource) assessments," Shaw said. "The economics are going to probably be the best driver in Massachusetts."

A state like Massachusetts has a good wind resource near the coast, but its hilly and woody terrain means that finding a good site requires some investigation.

Installers and customers should be aware, for example, that nearby obstructions can have a significant impact. A 100-foot wind tower placed next to a 50-foot tree is effectively the same as a putting turbine on top of a 50-foot tower, which means it will get a lot less wind, Shaw said.

The results from the Massachusetts study echoes a similar survey done in the U.K. over the past two years, called the Warwick Trials.

That study focused specifically on urban microwind turbines, some of which were roof-mounted. Overall, it found that the performance of these systems fell below expectations as well and that a number suffered technical glitches.

"The truth of the matter is that (urban wind) hasn't been studied very much, at least in the U.S.," said Shaw. "There's a tremendous amount of uncertainty."

And, now they are going to do what should have been done in the beginning. Set up a performance lab to evaluate devices.

To test urban wind turbines, Christo said the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust is sponsoring a "science experiment" to put up five turbines from different manufacturers at the Museum of Science, a project expected to go up this spring.