Shouldn’t we have the right to know? (apparently not) Is this corporate fear of allowing _object_ively truthworthy observation of Earth, why we still do not have Selene L1? Is Big Energy and their faith-_base_d cabal pulling all the strings? Look at their extended dysfunctional family of owing multiple headquarters, multiple mansions, multiple yachts and fancy jets plus fleets of other transportation and accommodations with special benefits before you answer that question.  ~ Brad Guth Brad_Guth Brad.Guth BradGuth BG / “Guth Usenet”

Were there good enough reasons to sabotage OCO, and/or was Big Energy simply capable of putting their usual voodoo hex on such a mission? Emissions of sweet gas flares in Alberta, Canada. Coal has certainly been much worse than any typical oil extraction process for that of our environment and personal health, but you wouldn’t want your family, pets or any food source within 10 downwind miles of a typical oil extraction field or major refinery.  In some instances 100 miles might be considered a safe distance. “The observation that gas flaring in the Niger Delta is causing acid rain is also backed by the U.S government's Energy Information Administration”  http://www.climatelaw.org/cases/country/nigeria/cases/case-documents/... “The human health effects of exposure to pollutant emissions from gas flares will be localized to the vicinity of such flares. Therefore, it is important to estimate how much gas each flow station in the Delta flares. Recent data show that the Kolo Creek and Obama flow stations in Bayelsa State flare, on average, approximately 800,000 m3/day of gas” (most of which they’d like nothing better than to simply burn off in order to prevent catastrophic local fireballs that could otherwise incinerate most everything in sight).  “Hence, _base_d on the Canadian data, an 800,000 m3/day sweet gas flare would elevate ambient air levels of particulate matter by 21 ug/m3 at a distance of 1,325 meters from such flare, and would elevate ambient levels of benzene by 2.3 ug/m3.” Some nations have enforcement of flare gas standards to go by.  “Burning of gas in fields that produce 150,000 m3 or less per month, or in fields with a gas-petroleum ratio of less than 20 m3/m3” In other words, they don’t want to see more flare gas (of primarily methane) combustion greater than 20 m3 per m3 of extracted oil.  They even attempt to restrict this incineration gauntlet down to the dull roar of  “60,000 m3 per month for the pilots of flares on installations at sea”.   Most oil fields and especially offshore directly utilize <33% of their vented methane in order to produce a source of local energy, of which does nothing except pass-through whatever’s helium.  Therefore, per m3 of extracted oil can contribute its 1% of <30 m3 of associated methane as raw helium, or 0.3 m3 helium per m3 of crude oil.  That’s <30% helium per volume of crude oil.  In trying to remain conservative, we might suggest 20% per volume of crude as helium. Of course, most all of this artificially created CO2 via oil flare gas combustion and of our coal industry ventilation of releasing gas and toxins, including its raw methane, helium and even freed hydrogen would not have gone unnoticed by those new and greatly improved science instruments of our spendy and badly needed OCO mission, that which rather conveniently failed to get deployed.  What we have got here is a serious Big Energy butt load of damage-control motives, more than sufficient opportunities and certainly the wherewithal means by which to foil or eliminate any such public funded science that might give the rest of us an honest clue as to what we’re doing to our environment. “The Canadian Public Health Association has noted over 250 identified toxins.” In addition to the mostly artificial release of helium, there’s also a fair amount of hydrogen set free, that isn’t otherwise properly stored or consumed, and always good old SO2, CO2 plus NOx for good measure, and much of everything else you wouldn’t dare put into your body, plus a few elements heavy enough (such as radon) that’ll sink to the surface and/or combine with other perfectly acceptable elements so as to dilute or cloak there existence (acidic rain being one of the most common, although others such as benz[a]pyrene and dioxin are certainly worth noting), many of which would have been OCO remote spectrometer detected and even rather nicely quantified per better than 3 km2 resolution.  In other words, a large enough cache of Porta-Potties might have been easily detected and their gas output quantified by those three bore-sighted high-resolution spectrometers.  In the near future, instead of extrapolating data from spectrophotometry, with better instruments _base_d upon the x-ray or gamma spectrometer format could narrow this resolution detail down to a few m2, thus eliminating all possible doubt as to where each and every m3 of such gas contributed elements are coming from.  In other words, a Big Energy executive couldn’t fart without being detected. If you don’t want to know about the extensive CO2 contributions, then by all means don’t go to this next _link_. CARBON DIOXIDE EQUIVALENTS PER BARREL OF CRUDE  https://www.edockets.state.mn.us/EFiling/ShowFile.do?DocNumber=5589092  336<472 kg of CO2 per barrel of extracted crude (excluding methane combustion) seems a tidbit high, but what hell, it’s only our frail environment and quality of life we’re trashing.  All we have to do is adjust ourselves to a future of 1000 ppm(0.1%) CO2 and stop our incessant whining about acid rain, global warming, or the accelerated erosion of our precious topsoils, plus the inflationary cost of most everything that’s becoming spendy as hell. Paint me silly, but I smell rotten eggs.  Too bad as of 4 decades ago we didn’t establish our robust platform or gateway/outpost of sufficient robotic/remote science within the ideal orbital location of Selene L1, offering the best ever whole Earth observations including the contents of and solar wind interactions with our badly failing magnetosphere.  Instead we keep wasting time, resources and our hard earned loot on LEO limited observations that seldom if ever agree with one another.  ~ Brad Guth Brad_Guth Brad.Guth BradGuth BG / “Guth Usenet”

Shouldn’t we have the right to know about our own planet? (apparently not) By the observationology science of looking at Mars, we know that <21,000 tonnes of methane is seasonally vented and most likely lost to space within a given amount of time.  By way of using the same observationology science can also quantify exactly how much of Earth’s methane is made available, as well as observing our build up of CO2 and any number of many other elements, including helium and hydrogen that do not stick with Earth. If the general public knew what our government agencies of DARPA, NASA, DoE and their Big Energy puppet masters have been obfuscating and otherwise doing to us and our frail environment, we’d likely terminate the whole lot as though they were nothing but worse than another Muslim sleeper cell hiding WMD.  In other words, we’d act first and ask questions later, especially since the cloud of evidence by way of their actions isn’t all that hidden from modern observation methods of easily detecting and quantifying such atmospheric elements. (in other words, perhaps our recently failed OCO mission wasn’t such an unavoidable anomaly after all) As of 4 decades ago, the Selene L1 (Earth-moon L1) platform of global observation and other science instruments could have been accomplished for 10% the cost of one Apollo mission, and as such it could have been station keeping and telling us the whole body of naked truths about Earth, instead of our being limited by the published mainstream and obfuscated infomercial alternative that’s telling us only what limited parts of our public funded science they see fit to share, so that we can’t be informed as to how much and from which sources are contributing the most into our environment. Not so unexpected, it seems Big Energy and those invested have needed something to refocus or divert our public media attention away from the ugly truths, whereas the AGW fiasco as having fingered freons and then CO2 as being the primary culprit has certainly been their best ticket to ride thus far.  Oddly, it seems Earth has been unexpectedly warming as of 11,711 years ago (long before artificial freon and CO2 were invented), and only as of lately losing a great deal of its mass at the same rime, partially via natural causes including by holding onto our Selene/moon, and otherwise extensively due to all of the human released gasses of mostly methane, hydrogen and helium.  The volumes and subsequent megatonnage/year of terrestrial methane for the most part recombines and doesn’t leave our environment, however eventually the megatonnage/year of its helium and hydrogen does manage to leave. We’ve been told and/or informed by those in charge that our planet is always gaining mass.  However, in spite of the local and cosmic influx of 1<5 kg/sec, seems Earth has actually been losing a great deal of its mass, mostly by way of its insufficient tidal radius grip on our helium and hydrogen.  Directly related to where some of that hydrogen and helium comes from, and far away from the supposed mainstream promoted and heavily infomercial hyped truth, whereas it seems there’s actually nothing all that clean or environmentally friendly about our extracting and using coal, not to mention the obvious atmospheric pollution of toxic elements you wouldn’t dare breath yourself, plus surface and aquifer loads of mostly fresh water consumptions and subsequent contamination of the surrounding terrain and ground water that’s downright mind boggling. On the lighter side of such released elements, Earth’s atmosphere sustains an average 5.2 ppm of helium (5.2e-6 parts per volume or 0.00052%) that continually migrates towards space along with freed hydrogen leading the way, plus certain freons and perhaps even pulling some of our methane along for the ride, that’s all helping to expand those O3 ozone holes along the way.  In other words, within any given minute or hour there’s a volume of 26.5e8 m3 of helium being made available from the interior and surface of Earth, as otherwise our atmosphere simply wouldn’t sustain those background readings of 5.2 ppm, and at 1 bar this kind of saturation is worth a global volumetric 472e3 tonnes of helium per vertical cubic meter of added mass, that’s continually made available on any given minute, hour or day after day (try to remember that’s per vertical meter, whereas a km gives us 472e6 tonnes to work with). Methane w/helium: Our global 2009 wellhead natural gas extraction = 3.5e12 m3, He<9% (avg 0.5<1.5%) of this natural gas volume is always contributing that element of helium.  Using 1% as the helium content average = 3.5e10 * . 178 = 6.23e9 kg or 6.23 million tonnes of He/year. Basically, other than our trusty DoE, there’s no one all-inclusive or specialized agency of oversight or global accounting on behalf of released hydrogen and helium from oil wells, oily sands, coal or multiple other moning, so instead we have any number of mostly industry funded and a few private research reports to pick from, none of which agree with most any other report.  Therefore, tossing out the high and the low,  we get to use our loose cannon swag of deductive interpretation in order to obtain rough estimates as _base_d upon average of everything else.  Being highly conservative, I have used 1% of the methane volume and 0.1% of the extracted coal volume as a rough basis for estimating the extent of helium released.  However, as it turns out I’ve only been off by a factor of 10<30 fold at having underestimated the methane and subsequent helium per tonne, or especially per m3 of coal, because I had no idea how much methane comes along with the process of uncovering or extracting each tonne or m3 of coal and oil. Judging by the following US Coal reports on methane absorption and subsequent emissions, if used for further interpreting on behalf of speculating global methane released from abandoned mines, is likely in excess of contributing 1e10 m3/year in methane, and therefore at the very least  we’re looking at 1e8 m3 of helium, or 0.178e8 kg = 17.8e3 tonnes He/year from just those abandoned sites, and because of so much having been exposed from deep within Earth, that estimate could easily be conservative by a factor of 10. http://www.coalinfo.net.cn/coalbed/meeting/2203/papers/coal-mining/CM... This next example of an active coal mining operation of extracting <4e6 t/year of coal is worth 30<35 m3 of methane/tonne, directly venting <72 m3/minute of methane, or 37.8e6 m3/yr, and otherwise less than a third of the 30<35 m3/tonne of extracted coal is captured, and for the most part utilized on site.  http://www.methanetomarkets.org/Data/Coal_MX_Mimosa_poster.pdf  Total volume of ventilation from mine: 150 m3/sec = 9000 m3/minute  Volume of pure methane in ventilation air: 72 m3/min  Average methane concentration in ventilation air: 0.5%  Fluctuation of methane concentration: 0.5% -0.8%  Total volume of gas drained: 22.5 m3/minute  Volume of pure methane drained: 18 m3/minute  Average methane concentration in drained gas: 75%  Fluctuation of methane concentration in drained gas: 50 –75%  Coal permeability: 30 – 4 milidarcy  Coal in situ gas content: 10 m3/tonne  Relative emissions: 30 m3/tonne of coal mined “From the present coal production the emissions from the mines are 30-35 m3 of methane per tonne of coal mined. Only 30% of the average gas emitted is captured from underground mining operations of each mine. The remaining 70% is exhausted in the atmosphere as ventilation air methane (VAM).” In other words, the vast bulk of their coal related methane (VAM) is 130e6 m3/yr, plus whatever portion that’s helium is simply vented.  At the distributed energy equivalent value of 33<36e3 btu/m3 or 10.5 kwh/ m3 @100% eff. (typical power generation efficiency at 39% = 4.1 kwhr/ m3, and top quality home/office/commercial heating can extract <96% eff), means these coal and methane energy supplying wizards never heard of “waste not, want not”.  Perhaps BHO needs to create a national methane piping grid with 99% helium removal, just as badly as we have needed to upgrade and expand our national electrical grid, because we’re clearly wasting as much or more energy than we actually need to use, and otherwise needlessly venting helium. Richard Heinberg's MuseLetter: Coal in China  http://globalpublicmedia.com/museletter_coal_in_china  http://www.itc.nl/personal/coalfire/index.html  When underground coal uncontrollably burns (thousands of such fires exist, and many of those were artificially caused and/or of spontaneous fires having been allowed to burn), besides all the toxic CO2 and multiple other sooty and gaseous pollutants released (China’s underground fires alone providing 360 million tonnes/year of CO2), whereas the geologically stored element of helium is never consumed, but instead the release of coal and methane sequestered helium is greatly accelerated.  With perhaps 250 million tonnes of global underground coal fires plus associated methane per year going up in smoke, so to speak, there’s a minimum of a million of tonnes worth of helium getting released per year by this process alone.  This natural plus artificial release of helium, much like that continually released via natural gas, simply doesn’t recombine or otherwise stick with the mass of Earth. Perhaps our not putting out or terminating those underground coal fires has been a bad idea, and simply not a viable future option unless 1000 ppm of CO2 isn’t a bother.  Much worse if you’re situated near or down wind of a natural pocket, underwater volume or geothermal vent of CO2, that from time to time gets released and kills off most of everything it surrounds. Frankly, I’ve had no idea as to how utterly dynamitic and extensive the natural outflux plus that of our artificial release of helium was, and that so little of the bulk methane per tonne of excavated coal
... więcej »

Were there good enough reasons to sabotage OCO, and/or was Big Energy simply capable of putting their usual voodoo hex on such a mission? Emissions of sweet gas flares in Alberta, Canada. Coal has certainly been much worse than any typical oil extraction process for that of our environment and personal health, but you wouldn’t want your family, pets or any food source within 10 downwind miles of a typical oil extraction field or major refinery.  In some instances 100 miles might be considered a safe distance. “The observation that gas flaring in the Niger Delta is causing acid rain is also backed by the U.S government's Energy Information Administration”  http://www.climatelaw.org/cases/country/nigeria/cases/case-documents/... “The human health effects of exposure to pollutant emissions from gas flares will be localized to the vicinity of such flares. Therefore, it is important to estimate how much gas each flow station in the Delta flares. Recent data show that the Kolo Creek and Obama flow stations in Bayelsa State flare, on average, approximately 800,000 m3/day of gas” (most of which they’d like nothing better than to simply burn off in order to prevent catastrophic local fireballs that could otherwise incinerate most everything in sight).  “Hence, _base_d on the Canadian data, an 800,000 m3/day sweet gas flare would elevate ambient air levels of particulate matter by 21 ug/m3 at a distance of 1,325 meters from such flare, and would elevate ambient levels of benzene by 2.3 ug/m3.” Some nations have enforcement of flare gas standards to go by.  “Burning of gas in fields that produce 150,000 m3 or less per month, or in fields with a gas-petroleum ratio of less than 20 m3/m3” In other words, they don’t want to see more flare gas (of primarily methane) combustion greater than 20 m3 per m3 of extracted oil.  They even attempt to restrict this incineration gauntlet down to the dull roar of  “60,000 m3 per month for the pilots of flares on installations at sea”.   Most oil fields and especially offshore directly utilize <33% of their vented methane in order to produce a source of local energy, of which does nothing except pass-through whatever’s helium.  Therefore, per m3 of extracted oil can contribute its 1% of <30 m3 of associated methane as raw helium, or 0.3 m3 helium per m3 of crude oil.  That’s <30% helium per volume of crude oil.  In trying to remain conservative, we might suggest 20% per volume of crude as helium. Of course, most all of this artificially created CO2 via oil flare gas combustion and of our coal industry ventilation of releasing gas and toxins, including its raw methane, helium and even freed hydrogen would not have gone unnoticed by those new and greatly improved science instruments of our spendy and badly needed OCO mission, that which rather conveniently failed to get deployed.  What we have got here is a serious Big Energy butt load of damage-control motives, more than sufficient opportunities and certainly the wherewithal means by which to foil or eliminate any such public funded science that might give the rest of us an honest clue as to what we’re doing to our environment. “The Canadian Public Health Association has noted over 250 identified toxins.” In addition to the mostly artificial release of helium, there’s also a fair amount of hydrogen set free, that isn’t otherwise properly stored or consumed, and always good old SO2, CO2 plus NOx for good measure, and much of everything else you wouldn’t dare put into your body, plus a few elements heavy enough (such as radon) that’ll sink to the surface and/or combine with other perfectly acceptable elements so as to dilute or cloak there existence (acidic rain being one of the most common, although others such as benz[a]pyrene and dioxin are certainly worth noting), many of which would have been OCO remote spectrometer detected and even rather nicely quantified per better than 3 km2 resolution.  In other words, a large enough cache of Porta-Potties might have been easily detected and their gas output quantified by those three bore-sighted high-resolution spectrometers.  In the near future, instead of extrapolating data from spectrophotometry, with better instruments _base_d upon the x-ray or gamma spectrometer format could narrow this resolution detail down to a few m2, thus eliminating all possible doubt as to where each and every m3 of such gas contributed elements are coming from.  In other words, a Big Energy executive couldn’t fart without being detected. If you don’t want to know about the extensive CO2 contributions, then by all means don’t go to this next _link_. CARBON DIOXIDE EQUIVALENTS PER BARREL OF CRUDE  https://www.edockets.state.mn.us/EFiling/ShowFile.do?DocNumber=5589092  336<472 kg of CO2 per barrel of extracted crude (excluding methane combustion) seems a tidbit high, but what hell, it’s only our frail environment and quality of life we’re trashing.  All we have to do is adjust ourselves to a future of 1000 ppm(0.1%) CO2 and stop our incessant whining about acid rain, global warming, or the accelerated erosion of our precious topsoils, plus the inflationary cost of most everything that’s becoming spendy as hell. Paint me silly, but I smell rotten eggs.  Too bad as of 4 decades ago we didn’t establish our robust platform or gateway/outpost of sufficient robotic/remote science within the ideal orbital location of Selene L1, offering the best ever whole Earth observations including the unaccounted contents of and solar wind interactions with our badly failing magnetosphere.  Instead we keep wasting our valuable time, resources and our hard earned loot on LEO limited observations that seldom if ever agree with one another, in part because they simply can not get the big picture from LEO, although a number of spendy GSOs might have done the trick (except we’ve kind of run out of GSO parking spaces), even though GSO isn’t exactly a science friendly environment for the OCO kinds of instruments unless highly shielded.  ~ Brad Guth Brad_Guth Brad.Guth BradGuth BG / “Guth Usenet”

simply capable of putting their usual voodoo hex on such a mission? Emissions of sweet gas flares in Alberta, Canada. Coal has certainly been much worse than any typical oil extraction process for that of our environment and personal health, but you wouldn’t want your family, pets or any food source within 10 downwind miles of a typical oil extraction field or major refinery.  In some instances 100 miles might be considered a safe distance. “The observation that gas flaring in the Niger Delta is causing acid rain is also backed by the U.S government's Energy Information Administration”  http://www.climatelaw.org/cases/country/nigeria/cases/case-documents/... “The human health effects of exposure to pollutant emissions from gas flares will be localized to the vicinity of such flares. Therefore, it is important to estimate how much gas each flow station in the Delta flares. Recent data show that the Kolo Creek and Obama flow stations in Bayelsa State flare, on average, approximately 800,000 m3/day of gas” (most of which they’d like nothing better than to simply burn off in order to prevent catastrophic local fireballs that could otherwise incinerate most everything in sight).  “Hence, _base_d on the Canadian data, an 800,000 m3/day sweet gas flare would elevate ambient air levels of particulate matter by 21 ug/m3 at a distance of 1,325 meters from such flare, and would elevate ambient levels of benzene by 2.3 ug/m3.” Some nations have enforcement of flare gas standards to go by.  “Burning of gas in fields that produce 150,000 m3 or less per month, or in fields with a gas-petroleum ratio of less than 20 m3/m3” In other words, they don’t want to see more flare gas (of primarily methane) combustion greater than 20 m3 per m3 of extracted oil.  They even attempt to restrict this incineration gauntlet down to the dull roar of  “60,000 m3 per month for the pilots of flares on installations at sea”.   Most oil fields and especially offshore directly utilize <33% of their vented methane in order to produce a source of local energy, of which does nothing except pass-through whatever’s helium.  Therefore, per m3 of extracted oil can contribute its 1% of <30 m3 of associated methane as raw helium, or 0.3 m3 helium per m3 of crude oil.  That’s <30% helium per volume of crude oil.  In trying to remain conservative, we might suggest 20% per volume of crude as helium. Of course, most all of this artificially created CO2 via oil flare gas combustion and of our coal industry ventilation of releasing gas and toxins, including its raw methane, helium and even freed hydrogen would not have gone unnoticed by those new and greatly improved science instruments of our spendy and badly needed OCO mission, that which rather conveniently failed to get deployed.  What we have got here is a serious Big Energy butt load of damage-control motives, more than sufficient opportunities and certainly the wherewithal means by which to foil or eliminate any such public funded science that might give the rest of us an honest clue as to what we’re doing to our environment. “The Canadian Public Health Association has noted over 250 identified toxins.” In addition to the mostly artificial release of helium, there’s also a fair amount of hydrogen set free, that isn’t otherwise properly stored or consumed, and always good old SO2, CO2 plus NOx for good measure, and much of everything else you wouldn’t dare put into your body, plus a few elements heavy enough (such as radon) that’ll sink to the surface and/or combine with other perfectly acceptable elements so as to dilute or cloak there existence (acidic rain being one of the most common, although others such as benz[a]pyrene and dioxin are certainly worth noting), many of which would have been OCO remote spectrometer detected and even rather nicely quantified per better than 3 km2 resolution.  In other words, a large enough cache of Porta-Potties might have been easily detected and their gas output quantified by those three bore-sighted high-resolution spectrometers.  In the near future, instead of extrapolating data from spectrophotometry, with better instruments _base_d upon the x-ray or gamma spectrometer format could narrow this resolution detail down to a few m2, thus eliminating all possible doubt as to where each and every m3 of such gas contributed elements are coming from.  In other words, a Big Energy executive couldn’t fart without being detected. If you don’t want to know about the extensive CO2 contributions, then by all means don’t go to this next _link_. CARBON DIOXIDE EQUIVALENTS PER BARREL OF CRUDE  https://www.edockets.state.mn.us/EFiling/ShowFile.do?DocNumber=5589092  336<472 kg of CO2 per barrel of extracted crude (excluding methane combustion) seems a tidbit high, but what hell, it’s only our frail environment and quality of life we’re trashing.  All we have to do is adjust ourselves to a future of 1000 ppm(0.1%) CO2 and stop our incessant whining about acid rain, global warming, or the accelerated erosion of our precious topsoils, plus the inflationary cost of most everything that’s becoming spendy as hell. Paint me silly, but I smell rotten eggs.  Too bad as of 4 decades ago we didn’t establish our robust platform or gateway/outpost of sufficient robotic/remote science within the ideal orbital location of Selene L1, offering the best ever whole Earth observations including the unaccounted contents of and solar wind interactions with our badly failing magnetosphere.  Instead we keep wasting our valuable time, resources and our hard earned loot on LEO limited observations that seldom if ever agree with one another, in part because they simply can not get the big picture from LEO, although a number of spendy GSOs might have done the trick (except we’ve kind of run out of GSO parking spaces), even though GSO isn’t exactly a science friendly environment for the OCO kinds of instruments unless highly shielded.  ~ Brad Guth Brad_Guth Brad.Guth BradGuth BG / “Guth Usenet” From Selene L1, besides having the best ever in Earth and Selene/moon remote science vantage point, plus all sorts of better astronomy and TRACE-II along with the much easier discovery and tracking of potential Earth threats, such as DD45 / K09D45D that should have been accomplished, there's any number of other uses for this Selene L1 depot or Oasis/Gateway, not to mention my LSE-CM/ISS or at least Clarke Station...  ~ BG

NASA, DoE and their Big Energy puppet masters have been hiding and otherwise doing to us and our frail environment, we’d likely terminate the whole lot as though they were nothing but another Muslim sleeper cell hiding WMD.  As of 4 decades ago, the Selene L1 (Earth-moon L1) platform of observation and other science instruments could have been accomplished for 10% the cost of one Apollo mission, and as such it could have been telling us the whole body of naked truths about Earth, instead of our being limited by the published mainstream obfuscated infomercial alternative that’s telling us only what parts of our public funded science they see fit to share. Not so unexpected, they have needed something to refocus or divert public attention away from the ugly truths, and the AGW fiasco as having fingered freons and then CO2 as being the primary culprit has certainly been their best ticket to ride. In spite of the local and cosmic influx of 1<5 kg/sec, seems Earth is losing a great deal of mass, mostly by way of losing its helium and hydrogen.  Directly related to where some of that hydrogen and helium comes from, and far away from the supposed mainstream promoted and their heavily hyped truth, whereas it seems there’s nothing all that clean or environmentally friendly about our extracting and using coal, not to mention the surface and aquifer loads of mostly fresh water consumptions and subsequent contamination of the surrounding terrain and ground water that’s downright mind boggling. Earth’s atmosphere sustains an average 5.2 ppm of helium (5.2e-6 parts per volume or 0.00052%) that continually migrates towards space along with hydrogen leading the way, plus certain freons and perhaps even pulling some of our methane tag along for the ride, that’s all helping to expand those O3 ozone holes along the way.  In other words, on any given second, minute or hour there’s 26.5e8 m3 of helium made available from the interior and surface of Earth, as otherwise our atmosphere simply wouldn’t sustain those background readings of 5.2 ppm, and at 1 bar this saturation is worth a global volumetric 472e3 tonnes of helium per vertical cubic meter of added volume, that’s continually made available on any given minute, hour or day after day. Our global 2009 wellhead natural gas extraction = 3.5e12 m3, He<9% (avg 0.5<1.5%) of this natural gas volume is always contributing the element of helium.  Using 1% as the helium content average = 3.5e10 * . 178 = 6.23e9 kg or 6.23 million tonnes of He/year. Basically, other than our trusty DoE, there’s no one all-inclusive or specialized agency of oversight or global accounting on behalf of released hydrogen and helium from coal mining, so instead we have any number of mostly industry funded research reports to pick from, none of which agree with most any other report.  Therefore, we get to use our loose cannon swag of deductive interpretation in order to obtain rough estimates.  Being highly conservative, I have used 1% of the methane and 0.1% of the extracted coal volume as a rough basis for estimating the extent of helium released.  However, as it turns out I’ve only been off by a factor of 10<20 fold at having underestimated the methane and subsequent helium per tonne or even per m3 of coal. Judging by the following US Coal reports on methane absorption and subsequent emissions, if used for further interpreting on behalf of the speculating global methane released from abandoned mines is likely in excess of contributing 1e10 m3/year in methane, and therefore at the very least  we’re looking at 1e8 m3 of helium, or 0.178e8 kg = 17.8e3 tonnes He/year from abandoned sites, and that estimate could easily be conservative by a factor of 10.http://www.coalinfo.net.cn/coalbed/meeting/2203/papers/coal-mining/CM... This next active coal mining operation of extracting <4e6 t/year is worth 30<35 m3 of methane/tonne, plus directly venting <72 m3/minute of methane, or 37.8e6 m3/yr, and otherwise less than a third of the 30<35 m3/tonne of extracted coal is captured.  http://www.methanetomarkets.org/Data/Coal_MX_Mimosa_poster.pdf  Total volume of ventilation from mine: 150 m3/sec = 9000 m3/minute  Volume of pure methane in ventilation air: 72 m3/min  Average methane concentration in ventilation air: 0.5%  Fluctuation of methane concentration: 0.5% -0.8%  Total volume of gas drained: 22.5 m3/minute  Volume of pure methane drained: 18 m3/minute  Average methane concentration in drained gas: 75%  Fluctuation of methane concentration in drained gas: 50 –75%  Coal permeability: 30 – 4 milidarcy  Coal in situ gas content: 10 m3/tonne  Relative emissions: 30 m3/tonne of coal mined “From the present coal production the emissions from the mines are 30-35 m3 of methane per tonne of coal mined. Only 30% of the average gas emitted is captured from underground mining operations of each mine. The remaining 70% is exhausted in the atmosphere as ventilation air methane (VAM).” In other words, the vast bulk of their coal related methane (130e6 m3/ yr) plus whatever helium is simply vented.  At an energy equivalent value of 10 kwh/m3, guess these energy producing folks never heard of “waste not, want not”, and perhaps it sounds like BHO needs to create a national methane piping grid with 99% helium removal, just as badly as we need to upgrade and expand our national electrical grid, because we’re clearly wasting more energy than we use. Richard Heinberg's MuseLetter: Coal in China  http://globalpublicmedia.com/museletter_coal_in_china  http://www.itc.nl/personal/coalfire/index.html  When underground coal uncontrollably burns (thousands of such fires exist, and many of those were artificially caused and/or of spontaneous fires having been allowed to burn), besides all the toxic CO2 and multiple other sooty and gaseous pollutants released (China’s underground fires alone providing 360 million tonnes/year of CO2), whereas the stored element of helium is never consumed, but instead the release of coal sequestered helium is greatly accelerated.  With perhaps 250 million tonnes of global coal plus associated methane per year going up in smoke, so to speak, there’s also a good million tonnes or more worth of helium getting released per year.  This helium, like that released via natural gas, simply doesn’t recombine or otherwise stick with the mass of Earth. Perhaps our not putting out those underground coal fires has been a bad idea, and simply not a viable future option. Frankly, I’ve had no idea as to how dynamitic and extensive the natural flux plus that of our artificial release of helium was, and that so little of the bulk methane per tonne of excavated coal was captured.  I’m only now understanding how limited or rather systematically obfuscated our public knowledge is about the vast extent of this ongoing factor of released methane and subsequent helium via coal mining.  Another important consideration, is that it takes 3 to 9 tonnes worth of coal per tonne of synfuel, so that option of solid to liquid fuel conversion isn’t exactly a viable solution unless the ultimate goal is to toxic gas and mineral saturate our frail environment while quadrupling the release of coal sequestered helium in order to supplement our consumption of crude oil. Apparently 130e6 m3 of methane released per year from a given coal mining operation is not all that uncommon. Whereas 1% of this gaseous volume is likely helium, thus 1.3e6 m3 of helium is released per year from a typical coal mining operation.  Gee, I wonder why BP, GE and ExxonMobil are not bragging about who has contributed the most helium.  Is there a race with China to see who can release the most helium? If I were the kind of brown-nosed NASA or DARPA puppet and/or public funded minion of such a faith-_base_d government, run by the likes of those Rothschilds and Big Energy, I sure as hell would not want to see any such Selene L1 platform of science instruments looking at Earth, and much less allowing general media access to any of such publicly funded research that would easily quantify how much of Earth is getting consumed by natural and artificial fire, and otherwise polluting the upper most atmosphere with helium and hydrogen that’s going away at a fairly alarming rate. Wonder how those smart ETs on Venus manage to get by without their fair share of internal or open combustion? (just kidding, because there’s all sorts of ways that’s put anything we have to shame, and then some)  ~ BG Apparently, any view or subsequent science as could be easily obtained from Selene/moon L1 or even via OCO, as to our having essential knowledge about Earth is not a good thing, but on the other hand we can never have too much knowledge about Mars or other godforsaken planets and moons.  Such as knowing our thermal imbalance, extent of pollution and the ongoing loss in mass isn’t worth the trouble if there’s any price or consequences to pay. Some if not the greater portion of our global warming is unavoidable by way of volcanism and geothermal ventings, the vast majority of which has been taking place underwater.  Ever since the last ice age it seems our terrestrial thermal activity has been increasing, as though the reactive core of Earth hasn’t seen its last spurt of growth. In addition to an extremely slight rise per century in solar influx of perhaps <0.1 w/m2 that amounts to merely 25.5e9 kw,  whereas in order to raise the ocean temperature by an average of 1°C per century would
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