Reposting Results from Fall's GHG Inventory Seminar

Greetings, GHG-Inventory-Minded Students-

Here at the start of Winter 2008 quarter - I'd like to repost the Wiki webpage where the data from the Fall ES692 Seminar Course "OU's Greenhouse Gas Inventory" are archived:

http://ohioghgseminar.pbwiki.com/

At this site you will find the results of teams of students in the following categories:

OUBuildings_OU_GHGInventory

Transportation_OU_GHGInventory

SolidWaste_OU_GHGInventory

Fertilizer_OU_GHGInventory

Population Data_ohioghgseminar

Solutions_OU_GHGInventory

-- Dr. Kim Brown

Info from other schools...

http://green.msn.com/galleries/photos/photos.aspx?gid=134&GT1=10628

Green office

Here's a good article I just found on energy efficiency in the office. It has lots of stuff on Energy Star and how to reduce your computer's carbon footprint.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9045738&pageNumber=1

Air Travel Findings

After going through the flights for 1998 I was able to average the number of miles flown per flight (2478 mi). Using this number I estimated the number of miles flown for the remaining years based on the number of flights. Here were my findings:

Year .........No. Flights................Miles Flown

1998 1999	593 1992			1,469,454 4,936,202
2000	2773			6,871,530
2001	3937			9,755,937
2002	3775			9,354,499
2003	4356			10,794,224
2004	4783			11,852,336
2005	4938			12,236,428
2006	4975			12,328,114

The University of New Hampshire (UNH) did not have access to the information that we did, and when they did their final report they did not include specific air travel numbers but came up with an estimation using a hypothetical scenario: If every faculty and staff member flew to Los Angeles, round trip, once a year.

I think that it is important that we take advantage of the data that we do have, albeit strenuous and stressful, to come up with more accurate estimates.

Data quality

I'm never sure how much estimating to do. This morning Ed Newman gave me tons of landfill trash projected from refuse contracts going back to 1973. The data points are for years the contracts were started, and do not include minor re-negotiations in the intervening years. For the Calculator I will place any missing years as the average of the years on either side. Landfill tonnage numbers since 2003 have been going up a lot, and Ed tells me that "around then" they started weighing the trash rather than estimating from volume.

There are dozens of different things that Campus Recycling collects and keeps out of the landfill (fluorescent bulbs, CFC gas, construction and development scrap, motor oil, toner cartridges, campus envelopes, etc) and they add more categories to that list each year. But what notes there are on quantities are in different units for each item (boxes of envelopes, crates of styrofoam, pickup trucks of reuseables) that I don't know how to convert to tons or cubic yards for comparison to trash. Ed showed me a conversion chart for items I'm willing to estimate. Still, data collection on that has been a lower priority than ITEM collection, and I'm missing data most years for everything not picked up by Athens Recycling. For the report I'll highlight a subset of years with relatively complete data and explain that there are probably similar numbers for other years. Doesn't change the Calculator tallies any, just how good we look.

Looking further into the calculator I found a column for Compost in the Offsets category! Compost just got much higher on my priority list, and will be a bigger part of my presentation.

Calculations on out of state commuting, and international student air miles

Matt - That is amazing. Good job!

RE: out of state students:
For states adjacent to Ohio, I think it is fair to assume these student will be driving back and forth. I would pick a major/central city in each state and estimate drive miles * the number of students from that state. Then apply the same assumption (4 trips home/year)

eg INDIANA = RT Indianapolis miles to Athens* 4*# of students from IN
PENN = RT Pittsburgh miles to Athens* 4* # students from PA
KY = RT Lexington miles to Athens* 4* # students from KY

RE: Foreign students.
My gut feeling here is that these international student numbers should be given to Samantha Williams from our class (sw223407@ohiou.edu). I am cc-ing her here.

We have a lot of students from Africa, East Asia, India [in addition to a lot of other places]. For many of these students - they come here and *might* be able to visit home once or twice during the course of their studies.

What I would recommend is to estimate that each international student will fly the equivalent of a RT to Paris every year. That will over estimate for some, and wildly underestimate for others (China, Japan, African continent, etc). It's a start.

Using this URL = http://www.webflyer.com/travel/milemarker/
. . . ROUND TRIP Air Miles . . .
CMH - JFK = 962 miles (1548 km)
JFK = CDG (Paris) = 8060 miles (12980 km)

So these data would be plugged into the student air travel part of the Carbon Campus Calculator (via Samantha's section).

Just to be consistent I am going to paste this email into the blog, so that we can have a record of this collaboration.

--KJB

Quoting ma236805@ohio.edu:

> Hi Dr. Brown,
>
> I got the In-state stuff typed into a spreadsheet and calculated the
> distance that everyone(from Ohio) travels to get here based on 4 trips back
> and forth each year. I used GIS to estimate distance from the center of each
> county. The total came out to be over 16,000,000 miles!And that doesn't even
> count the 3,000 out-of-state and foreign students. Any ideas on how / if I should do
> those? The 1056 foreign students will be especially difficult because they're
> home countries are not given in this info.
>
> Thanks again for your help getting this info. It isn't what I had in
> mind when I volunteered to do the commuter mileage, but you were right, it is
> better than nothing.
>
> -Matt

Kim J. Brown, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
[ecophysiology & ecosystem function]
Dept. of Environmental and Plant Biology
Ohio University, Athens OH 45701

Lab = http://ecophys.plantbio.ohiou.edu/index.html
Dept = http://www.plantbio.ohiou.edu

Dr. Brown's work this week on Commuter data

This week I was doing some work to assist Matt Alden in his project - estimating how many miles commuted by faculty/students/staff.

Matt's first (and most direct attempt) was to obtain records from Transportation services as to who has parking hang tags - this seemed to be the most direct way of learning who is driving to campus. Those data are only available as hardcopy data - about 18,000 pieces of paper - that no one has time to type in manually.

The next step was Matt talking to someone in Institutional Research to track down zip codes associated with each faculty/staff person. The idea was that Matt would use zip code data to estimate driving distance. They told Matt they don't have zip code data.

Wed 31 Oct I visited the Institutional Research office and they provided data from the OU factbook that has a distribution of #s of students from each county of Ohio. In addition there is a list of # of students from the other 49 states, as well as a tally of international students.

Fri 2 Nov I visited Carlotta Hensler (hensler@ohio.edu) in the Human Resources office to ask for fac/staff zip code data by year. She agreed that it would be a simple request and that these data would be provided by the HR analyst Steve Madden (maddens@ohio.edu).
These data should be emailed on Monday 5 Nov. --KJB

Update of the University Fleet

Marty Paulins at Parking Services sent 2 files, one with odometer readings and license plates, the other with make, model, year the vehicle was purchased by OU, cost, etc and license plate information. My idea was to cross reference the license plate information, calculate the average MPG of the vehicles, divide by vehicles and get a number for the calculator. I'm not sure why I thought it would be this easy, but regardless I was wrong. When I cross referenced the plate numbers, some cars from both sides are missing. I asked Marty about this and here is his response:

They were sold - as they age or departments decide to get rid of them -
they are transferred over to moving & storage services and sold at public
auction.

On the other email - LTD = Life to Date

On the other question - a department could purchase a vehicle in 1999 on
their own - the only thing we would do is do the yearly insurance and tag
requirments - Transportation Services would not see that vehicle again
because we are not a centralized fleet - the departments do not have to
bring their vehicles to our garage for maintenance (once again because we
are not a centralized fleet) - what probably happened in 2004 is they did
bring it to our garage for some reason, and then it would go into our
maintenance software - at that time the miles, etc would be entered into
our maintenance software.

I think the last one was term years - that should only pertain to leased
vehicles - number of years the vehicle was under lease.

Let me know if you need anything else - thanks - marty

In a nut shell, this means I have no way of knowing when cars were bought or sold without going through massive amounts of paper data. It also means that i have no way of even knowing if the information Marty gave me will provide accurate numbers. I am going to go through the data again to see if I can make any logical conclusions about miles traveled by the University Fleet per year.

See you all on Monday,
Sarah

Ping Energy

I was wondering if anybody could provide me with the kWh per month or year that Ping Center uses?

a plague on paper filing

I called Athens Hocking Recycling center a few days back and asked for garbage data. The lady who keeps those records is early morning shift, so I had to call back before 3:30pm. She explained that the data I wanted was somewhere in a waist-high stack of paper with the rest of their paper receipts, and that there were no computer records to access. She could maybe find some answers for me in 6 months or so.

Happliy most of what I needed was in another file Ed Newman sent me. It took some deciphering from pages of jumbled notes, but it was a Word document and therefor searchable. Nearly good to go now.

Natural Gas Vehicles

While looking for MPG for various university vehicles, I came across some numbers comparing MPG for Natural Gas Vehicles to Unleaded Vehicles (something like 34 MPG for N.G. vs 9 for Unleaded.

Does anyone know how / where to refuel Natural Gas vehicles?

The end result will (hopefully) be a comparison of CO2 and $ saved by switching a small number of cars on the fleet to N.G.

Thanks,
Sarah

Wiki notes

I was poking at the Wiki page today and I found a few features.

If you DON'T want to get notifications every time I change the font on my page:
Log in and go to the Settings link at the top.
Find the link on the left that says Notifications.
Take your name off the list.

There is a Files option with 10MB of storage. We could put the Carbon Calculator here where we can all access it, using 3-4MB of that storage. Any images or graphs we use on our pages are also going to come out of that 10MB, so we may need to keep an eye on the size of our files. Should we post the Calculator for just a day or two next week so we can all add our data to a common file? Maybe after the presentations so we can incorporate any suggestions? Or is it possible to post just the input sheet so we can past things into our own files? Thoughts?

Hey guys,

So I looked at Ron's email and Gabe was right, that was the price to switch solely to coal (not what we want!). I emailed him again and it would be more that 5 million dollars to switch to all natural gas. So I will look at other rations to decrease GHG while still using some coal--ouch!

Here is what the email said:

The $101,400 refers to replacing the natural gas we actually used with coal. To reverse this - e.g. switching from coal and natural gas to all gas would be a lot more expensive. To replace the 25,863 tons of coal would require 542,592 MCF of natural gas at current unit price of $10.98 per MCF or $5,957,660!Our actual energy cost for steam was $1,937,974 (coal $1,468,492, natural gas $469,482). To produce it all with coal would be $1,569,892 (coal $1,468,492 + equivalent coal for gas $101,400). To produce it all with natural gas it would be $6,427,142 (natural gas $469,482 + equivalent gas for coal $5,957,660)

As you can see, the total cost is about 3.3 times the original cost and why such a radical shift in the fuel used for steam production is such a huge economic decision!

New method to display the cost of electricity use

Hi everybody,

Just wanted to let you know that our team devised another method to display the cost of electricity use in campus buildings. This is intended to help those who don't grasp the true meaning of MMBTU consumption understand the relationship between OU's electrcity consumption and each building's efficiency/consumption habits.

Assuming OU's current electrical rate is $.04/kWh (as provided by Ron Chapman), I multiplied the kWh totals for each building (on South Green at least) by $.04 to get the total amount spent in the FY(06-07).

Next, to show how each building's electrical efficiency and use habits affect the cost, I divided the total amount of money spent for each building by its GROSS square footage to illustrate $$ spent/SQFT in the 06-07 fiscal year. This seemed to correspond wonderfully with the MMBTU's / SQFT I wrote about the other day.

If you have any suggestions on how this method could be improved or modified, please let me know.

Thanks.
Drew

Air Travel Changes

THIS WAS A MISTAKE:
In a previous blog I mentioned analyzing the travel data by looking at the first and last fiscal years.
I thought that I had detailed notes (who, where, why) for 2006 (making it the last fiscal year) however the last full fiscal year that has detailed notes is 2002.

WE DO HAVE DETAILED NOTES FOR ALL THE YEARS (not all the flights)
THE NOTES ARE BROKEN UP INTO TWO SPREADSHEETS ON THE DISC PROVIDED BY RON

Also even with the notes, there are still a number of flights that do not provide locations, or are not listed on the "Notes" spreadsheet that was given to me.

The deeper I go into these spreadsheets the more problems seem to come up.

Final word on the landfill

I called them back, figuring that whoever picked up the phone would know the answer. I was right - there is no methane recovery. Not at all surprising, but nice to have it confirmed. Handily all the data is already in short tons, so all I have to do is enter it to the calculator and get numbers for the missing years.

Thoughts for the Future

While brainstorming with Sarah and Matt A. about what we are doing and what the next steps should be of our efforts, I thought of an idea. If the University wants to take this commitment seriously and continue to inventory our green house gas emissions (which it should) then standards need to be in place in the departments where we are gathering the data. The GHG Inventory needs to be one of "T's" crossed and "I's" dotted for each department. So that when whoever is put in charge of that years inventory, the information will be there. I think that this would be key in maintaining our efforts for the future.

Solutions update

Just an update on the solutions progress: we have approximately 200 responses on the surveys and will keep collecting data until the end of this week. This will make for a good pilot study and I definitely think we should refine the questions and I can send it out again to faculty, staff, and students next quarter.

I heard back from Third Sun (solar and wind energy) as to what they could possibly implement at OU and how much it costs. This is a PDF though so I can bring it too class.

Additionally, I heard more from Ron regarding some specific questions we had about the univeristy's current system. Here are the relevant questions and his responses:

1. Do you have dollar figures as to how much the residence challenge saved the college, how much it cost to implement and how much it reduced energy consumption?

The Residence Challenge saved us $5256.96 in water, $4183.77 in electric and 106.6 tons of CO2. No figures were kept on actual costs. Actual KGAL water was 685,000 gallons and 96,917 kWh of electric.

2. Is the university set up for natural gas heating? If so, do you know how much more it would cost to switch from natural gas to coal?

Question is a little ambiguous. We heat primarily with steam produced by Coal and Natural gas in a 88% coal and 12% natural gas ratio at the heating plant. Coal is $53.00 per ton and natural gas is presently $10.98 per MCF. Cost per MMBTU is 4.63:1 (gas to coal). We used 25,863 tons of coal and 376,652 CCF of natural gas at the heating plant. The coal cost was $1,468,492 and the natural gas cost us $469,482 Replacing the natural gas MMBTU with coal is only 21.6% the cost! the natural gas could be replaced with coal costing about $101,400.

3. Are our buildings set up with thermostats that we potentially could lower a degree or two in the winter and raise in the summer?

Some are, a lot are centrally controlled and we exercise control over the temperatures remotely. A lot of the buildings, primarily the residence halls have no thermostats for heating and are zone controlled. We have much difficulty regulating the temps in these buildings. Also, individual controls on window A/C's are difficult for us to dictate control!

4. Are there any buildings that would function with passive solar heating and/or could we potentially have solar water heating?

Anything is possible. Solar heating in our region of the US dictates a redundant back up so it results in a higher first cost. To my knowledge, no life-cycle costing has been done on solar heating. It was initially considered for the natatorium I'm told but was discounted due to high need for heat in the winter with low sun hours and a concern as to how to reject all the heat in the summer time when the heat was not needed as much. It is something that bears additional investigation.

See you in class

Further progress on building data

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let you know that I added another column to our "Building Energy Use" spreadsheet.

The additional column is "MMBTU's / square foot" for electricity only.

Given what we all discussed, additional columns can be added for water, natural gas and steam once the meters are installed.

I figured it would be good to calculate the energy use (for electricity) per square foot using the GROSS sq. footage numbers, considering that would account for all the additional energy that's inadvertently used because of the gaps in the walls etc., although I'm also open to using the NET sq. footage numbers too.

(For those of you not familiar with the difference between GROSS and NET square feet, GROSS indicates the total square footage of the building footprint, whereas NET stands for all the usable space (excluding interior walls, gaps, voids etc.).

What do you think?

comming together

i met with gabe last friday and she was able to give me some information concerning the actuall area of each of the fields. i have finally heard a reply from david hamill, but i still have to wait for his answere. this is so frustrating, i just want to know how much fertilizer we have used. is that such a big deal?

anyway...i should have all of it together soon, im excited. ill se everybody tomorrow in class.
josh