Entries Tagged 'Climate change' ↓

Ski resorts in Colorado and across the West showed marked improvement in environmental ratings for the third year in a row, according to an annual report released today by the Ski Area Citizens Coalition.

While the scores for protecting habitat and watershed protection are weaker in Colorado than other states, Colorado scored the strongest of the 11 Western states evaluated in the report in the “environmental policy and practices” category.

With regard to addressing climate change, the report found that ski resorts are backing away from things like biodiesel and renewable energy credits in favor of other new energy saving ideas. Additionally, the report found that ski resorts continue to implement a piecemeal approach to improving their carbon footprint, rather than a comprehensive strategy.

“Some resorts that scored points for buying renewable energy credits last year lost those points this year because they discontinued the program,” said Colorado Wild intern Megan Marshall in a statement. “In some cases, it sounded like it was a cost-cutting measure, but in other instances resorts seemed to be simply searching for something new to market to their customers.”

Even with scores improving across the board, more than half of the resorts still receive a failing grade in at least one of the four areas evaluated — habitat protection, watershed protection, addressing climate change, and environmental policies and practices, according to Paul Joyce, report card research director with Colorado Wild.

“Resorts in Colorado are leading the way in addressing environmental policies and practices, but still lagging behind when it comes to on-the-ground conservation,” Patricia Hickson, land use campaign associate for the Sierra Nevada Alliance, said in a statement.

The Ski Area Citizens Coalition has been publishing the “Ski Area Environmental Scorecard” for the past decade. The report card evaluates the environmental policies and practices of ski areas based on a system of 35 criteria, including preservation of sensitive lands within the ski resort areas, actions related to water conservation and quality, and “green” programs such as recycling and alternative energy use. This year, for the first time, the coalition grouped the suite of criteria by which the ski resorts were evaluated into four categories.

Scorecard data is obtained from an annual survey, public records from government agencies and from the resorts themselves.

Methane gas has about 23 times the heat-trapping capacity as carbon dioxide, making it a concern when it comes to climate change, and experts at the U.S. Coal Mine Methane Conference in Boulder last week said gas and coal mine companies should team up so that the 158 billion cubic feet that coal mines vent into the atmosphere annually could be used as an energy source, the Casper Star-Tribune reports.

The Energy Department has awarded $3.8 million in Recovery Act funds for a research project that will investigate the suitability of geologic formations deep under northwestern Colorado for long-term sequestration of carbon dioxide, Gov. Bill Ritter (D) announced yesterday.

The research project, “Characterization of Most Promising Sequestration Formations in the Rocky Mountain Region,” was submitted by a public-private consortium headed by the Colorado Geological Survey and the University of Utah. Other partners include the Utah Geological Survey, Shell Exploration and Production, Tri-State Generation and Transmission and Schlumberger Carbon Services.

The project partners will provide $1 million in matching funds, bringing the total project cost to $4.8 million.

“Finding cleaner ways of producing and consuming traditional fuels is key to meeting our climate initiative targets and a vital part of Colorado’s new energy economy,” Ritter said in a statement. “This project will enable us to expand our research into the viability of climate protection technologies such as carbon sequestration in northwest Colorado and throughout the Rockies.”

Colorado has a number of potential opportunities for carbon storage, including storage in oil and gas reservoirs, coalbed reservoirs, deep rock aquifers containing salt water and through advanced mineralization engineering. This project will examine the storage potential of deep saline aquifers.

The goal of the project is to evaluate whether three formations located about 8,000 feet underground can be used to capture and store carbon dioxide, or CO2. The project site is located on a Colorado State Land Board tract south of the Craig Power Station.

“This is exciting stuff,” Vince Matthews, director of the Colorado Geological Survey, said in a statement. “Since these formations are found throughout the Rockies , the results of this research should be very useful to carbon sequestration work in a number of states.”

Matthews also noted that the project will expand on the Colorado Geological Survey’s previous work on carbon sequestration. In 2005, the Geological Survey published “CO2 Sequestration Potential of Colorado,” a detailed characterization of carbon emissions and carbon storage potential in Colorado .

Matthews will serve as a co-principal investigator along with Brian McPherson from the University of Utah, which will administer project funding.

A CGS field team will map the surface geology with helicopter support and analyze available seismic and borehole data in the vicinity of the large structure. CGS will also obtain and analyze rock cores from three formations at a depth of about 8,000 feet.

CGS senior petroleum geologist Genevieve Young will integrate all of the geologic data and coordinate with the University of Utah on a computer modeling analysis regarding the potential for CO2 sequestration in these formations.

The northwestern Colorado project is one of 11 projects nationwide awarded nearly $50 million by the DOE to study carbon dioxide storage and sequestration.

Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) will visit Rocky Mountain National Park next week as part of a Senate field hearing to discuss the impacts of climate change on Colorado’s parks.

The senators are expected to discuss what climate change means for Colorado’s parks and how they are adapting to and mitigating the impacts. Rocky Mountain National Park has already seen changes due in part to rising temperatures, including bark beetle infestations and changes to wildlife habitat.

A start-up company co-founded by a Colorado State University professor is making biofuel by nourishing algae with carbon dioxide emissions from a natural gas processing plant on the Southern Ute Indian reservation in southwest Colorado, the New York Times reports.

Researchers at Colorado University, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Reclamation have released a study that projects all the reservoirs along the Colorado River could be dry by 2057 because of climate change and overuse, the Denver Post reports. But Denver Water officials disputed the study’s findings, saying that other studies have indicated that parts of the Upper Colorado River Basin are likely to become wetter as a result of climate change.