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False Alarm

Posted by wastedenergy on August 29, 2010

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about communicative strategies recently.  If you have read many of my other writings here at WastedEnergy, you know that I believe we face an imminent, even ongoing crisis due to the rising costs of obtaining energy and resources.

I am quite aware of the many commentators who accuse those advancing ecological principles of “alarmism” or of promoting a particular political agenda.  But what if a careful examination of the facts reveals that some alarms should be sounded, lest a window of opportunity pass us by?  On the other hand, is the very idea of sustainable development truly a contradiction in terms as some observers have suggested, and would we be better off preparing to revert to a pre- or proto-industrial society and abandoning the ideas of mass production and technological progress wholesale, rather than attempting, presumably in vain, some transformation of the existing economy based on new, sustainable industries?  The role of technology and degree of faith in technological progress to deliver solutions appear to be central to determining one’s approach to this question.  As a result, discussions of sustainability tend to degenerate into Luddites arguing against hedonists, ultimately irreconcilable viewpoints leaving little room for nuance.  I think both ways of framing the issue are incorrect, and each obscures the path forward in its own way.

There is a more complicated view that says renewable energy and other clean industry, as components of sustainable living systems, are not really about maintaining business-as-usual at all, and it would be far too late for that already if they were.  What this matter is really about is building a necessary component of resilience networks, creating a safety net in the likely event that fossil fuel depletion continues apace and creates otherwise unmanageable problems in tearing apart the fabric of society as we have built it.  In other words, if you would like to get around your city and possibly even visit other cities at some point, it might be a good idea to build some trains, and some batteries to store the energy needed to make them move around, rather than assuming we can or should keep the fantasy of endless compulsive personalized motoring alive forever.  In the absence of this level of planning, what is most likely to emerge in the wake of an energy crisis is not a resilient society, but fragmented and insular communities distrustful of outsiders and unable to manage new problems that emerge in ways that require movement of people and goods.  The rhetoric in political discussions on this issue, when they do take place, does not often reflect the urgency of the matter, instead framing the debate over fossil fuels as being about saving polar bears versus keeping the economy humming.  This rhetorical approach accepts and repeats the conceit of cheap fossil fuels versus expensive alternatives, as if that were really the choice we face.

The reasoning behind this approach is not difficult to understand: our political institutions give no quarter to those who point to resource constraints as practical limitations on growth.  It is as if the notion damaged the central thesis of modernity, that advances in technology and our understanding of the world will make it possible to achieve ever more complex and advanced structures both physical and social, and to make the benefits of progress, expressed through higher material living standards, available an ever-growing share of the world’s population (which is itself ever-growing).  Such a view has long been enshrined in classical economic models and deeply ingrained in the minds of those living in developed countries, exemplified by the idea of the American Dream.  Increasingly, however, the sciences of the earth and its ecosystems have revealed such abstracted thinking about progress and faith in technology to be at odds with the physical reality of the human body and the space it occupies. 

So in choosing which points to emphasize and which alarms to sound, it becomes clear that one need not and should not make an all-or-nothing choice between supporting business-as-usual and returning to pre-industrial modes of living.  One need not dispense with the idea of progress in its entirety to deal with the matter of limits; it requires, rather, that we take a sober and realistic look at the options available.  It does not strain the ideal of progress to accept that some ventures are simply too costly or unrealistic to maintain. Part of the idea of progress is to shed the superfluous trappings of the material world that bring us needless burdens and suffering, like our nation’s present crises of debt and obesity driven by overconsumption as expected and continually reinforced by popular myths in our culture and media.  It is possible to agree that we are capable of making great strides in perceiving and understanding the world around us while still accepting that our perception and understanding are imperfect, and that we are capable of making great strides backwards as well.

We are likely on the verge of such a backslide if we fail to take appropriate corrective measures quickly.  The point to emphasize in discussions of energy and resource consumption is that altruism and “green” conscience hardly even enter into the picture.  What is really at stake, and hardly a foregone conclusion at this point, is our own survival and well-being.  Energy transitions take generations to accomplish and require generations of planning in advance.  Our great technological progress has instilled in us a certain way of thinking about problems, so that we expect the market to provide solutions quickly and avert any possible crisis just in time.  This approach will not work with a crisis in energy systems, which underlie such progress in all other areas and make possible the style of just-in-time delivery of new technologies to which we have become accustomed in communications, health care, and information technology.  We cannot afford to sputter between complacency and panic modes on energy as we have become accustomed to doing.  If we wait to act until the gas pumps begin to run dry, it will be far too late already.  Most Americans in particular have a strange and largely unwarranted faith in this deus ex technologica approach to energy, even though, as the late Matt Simmons was fond of saying, America has no Plan B.  We have done less than almost anyone else to prepare for the end of cheap energy, even though we are never more than a few days away from a total society-wide breakdown at all times given the possibility of a sudden disruption in our networked systems of infrastructure.

In any case, two central themes seem to have emerged from my reading of the existing communication strategies on energy, natural resources, and other questions ecological.  First, extreme proclamations from either Cassandra or Pangloss are unlikely to get us very far when the truth is far more complicated than either position allows; second, some positions associated heretofore with ideological extremism, like the “limits to growth” hypothesis, may turn out not to be so extreme after all, and we would do well to adapt our language on such matters so our voices are not so easily dismissed or drowned out.  The only way meaningful ideas about sustainability are likely to achieve any traction is if ecological insights become mainstream thinking and associated with self-interested rather than merely altruistic motivation to action.  All signs point to vast and rapid changes in the terrain ahead of us.  Will we continue to rely on a system that keeps these matters out of sight, out of mind, and off the table, all the while promising us that nothing could possibly go wrong?  Will we give up hope for modernity altogether and refuse to build bridges to the future on the grounds that such bridges are manifestations of the technological demon that brought about crisis in the first place?  Or will we choose locally-based, adaptable, organic and democratic approaches to changing economic cultures, to prioritize the advancement of technologies needed to avert a total collapse and to make the resources we consume real to us again?

The way we read the signs makes all the difference in how we choose to respond.

“Full speed ahead!”

Posted in Energy Consumption, Energy Production | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Breaking Down Clean Coal

Posted by wastedenergy on August 18, 2010

This piece is a revised version of an article originally posted in April 2010.

Breaking Down “Clean Coal” 

Jeremy Abramowitz, April 2010 (Revised August 2010)

Coal, the fuel that helped spark the Industrial Revolution, remains the primary fuel for electricity generation worldwide as well as in the United States today. However, in recent years, the problem of global climate change has attained political salience, potentially limiting the role that this fuel can play under a future scenario of greenhouse gas regulations.  Meanwhile, the polluting effects of coal mining and combustion on the air, water and soil remain as significant a challenge today, with coal providing such a large fraction of global primary energy, as they did during the early ages of coal use. With both U.S. and worldwide supplies of coal in relative abundance compared to oil and gas, a number of concepts have been proposed to continue taking advantage of this inexpensive and comparatively widespread resource while minimizing the environmental impacts associated with its use. Rather than a single technology, the idea of “clean coal” may be better understood as a collection of different technologies, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. 

In this article, I explore a number of technological concepts that fall under the umbrella of “clean coal,” including co-firing with renewable biomass, installation of air pollution control equipment, and more innovative ideas such as carbon capture and gasification of coal for use in combined cycle plants similar in design to today’s natural gas-fired power plants.  I also examine the viability of producing synthetic liquid fuels from coal as a wedge against petroleum depletion.  In each case, I examine the potential economic and environmental benefits of each option, as well as the disadvantages and obstacles to their implementation.  While some of these concepts are fully proven from a technical standpoint, the available evidence suggests that no single technology or combination of technologies is capable of addressing all of the environmental or economic challenges likely to arise from continued dependence on coal as a major source of energy in the coming decades, underscoring the importance of building viable alternatives to address these challenges over the long run.

Biomass Co-Firing

One of the most effective ways of reducing pollution associated with burning coal for electricity is to directly replace it with a renewable fuel of similar quality, usually wood.  Out of all the fossil fuels, coal contains the highest ash (inorganic) content and produces the most climate-altering greenhouse gases, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, heavy metal emissions, and waste to be disposed.  It also produces more of these pollutants than wood, a relatively similar solid fuel whose physical and chemical properties make it a decent replacement for coal in generating base load power, at least up to a point.[1]  While wood is less energy dense than higher quality coals, it is also renewable, produces lower quantities of most air emissions, avoids waste and damage to the landscape associated with mining coal, and is carbon neutral assuming the sources of biomass are sustainably managed.[2]  Since wood is physically similar to coal and is comparable to lower-quality coals such as lignite in energy density, the two fuels can burn in the same furnaces at the same time so long as certain constraints are met.

While direct co-firing of biomass with coal can be effective as a way of reducing harmful emissions, there are limitations to this practice as well.  The lower energy content of wood compared to most coal used in electricity generation today renders long-distance transport inconvenient.  To maintain positive net energy and avoid exorbitant costs, wood-fired plants, including plants where it is co-fired with coal, must be located within a certain radius of sources of harvestable wood, determined by the fuel’s growth rate and energy content.  This limitation places a practical size limit on direct-fired biomass power plants, typically 50-150 megawatts of electric power.[3] This size is much smaller than the gigawatt-plus size typical of coal-fired power stations.  There is also a limit to how much wood can be practically burned in a coal furnace due to the fuels’ differing requirements for emissions control; for instance, wood produces fewer total particulates, but they tend to be of a larger size than coal particulate emissions, resulting in a greater overall mass of particulate emissions.[4] Wood also has different ash handling requirements, since it primarily generates bottom ash that remains in the furnace, while coal ash is lighter, higher in metal content, and is more likely to be entrained in flue gases exiting the furnace.  While wood can make a useful substitute for some of the coal used in power generation, the physical properties of the fuel prevent it from being a fully acceptable replacement for all uses.

While wood and other biomass can substitute for some quantity of coal-fired generation, physical differences in the two fuels as well as insufficient total energy resources in sustainably managed biomass make it an insufficient replacement to match the raw power and infrastructure in place for coal-fired utility generation.

“Conventional” Clean Coal: Air Pollution Control and Clean Combustion

Out of all the approaches to “clean coal” being developed today, the most “conventional” and least revolutionary in its concept is also one that, perhaps not coincidentally, can also achieve some of the most significant and measurable benefits in terms of energy efficiency and air quality.  Rather than designing entirely new plant concepts from scratch, this concept instead works to optimize standard coal combustion plants to maximize efficiency and energy recovery and minimize the production and release of pollutants.  The idea is to take “the devil we know” of combustion of coal to generate power, something we already know is technically feasible, and make it work in a way that is more environmentally benign.  In this case, improvements have been realized and progress continues to be made in three main areas: clean combustion, flue gas purification, and increased efficiency.

Clean combustion refers to optimizing the process of burning coal, or other fuels, to release more useful heat and generate fewer harmful pollutants from the outset, prior to the effects of any pollution control exhaust post-treatment.  While the combustion process itself has little effect on the release of certain pollutants intrinsic to the physical material of coal on a per-unit-combusted basis, such as mercury, arsenic, lead or antimony present in coal ash, it can have a significant impact on the formation of pollutants that form due to combustion itself, such as smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) as well as carbon monoxide (CO) and other incomplete combustion byproducts such as volatile organic compounds (VOC’s) and black carbon (soot).  One of the challenges of designing an optimized combustion system is that soot, VOC and CO emissions tend to form due to insufficient oxygen supply or insufficient mixing of fuel and air in the combustion chamber and are primarily eliminated through a more “complete” combustion, whereas NOx tends to form due to an overabundance of oxygen and forms preferentially at higher temperatures typically associated with more complete combustion.[5]  Combustion system improvements must therefore balance NOx control with formation of pollutants resulting from incomplete burning like CO or, in the case of waste combustors, dioxins and furans.  The preferred method today is to promote more complete combustion to avoid the formation of a wide range of organic pollutants, then to reduce NOx through a combination of effective control over combustion temperature and exhaust post-treatment with ammonia or other chemicals to dissociate NOx particles into benign atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen.

Flue gas purification, or air pollution control (APC), refers to technologies used to condition a power plant’s emissions after the combustion of fuel but before the release of gaseous and suspended particulate combustion byproducts into the atmosphere.  Each device or system corresponds to a given pollutant or category of pollutants to be removed from the flue gas stream.  Reducing chemicals such as ammonia or urea, along with catalysts in the case of selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems, are used to treat the exhaust to remove NOx.  Slaked or slurried lime is used to neutralize acid gases such as sulfur dioxide.  Packed beds or spray injection of activated carbon, with its high surface area to volume ratio, are used to adsorb heavy metals and other particulate fly ash. Electrostatic precipitators and fabric filters remove adsorbed and residual particulates entrained in the flue gases as well as reagents from other APC processes.  Most APC devices are applied on the “cold side” of the heat exchangers once the heat used to do work has been transferred to the boiler fluid.  The main exception is in NOx control, wherein the reducing agents ammonia and its precursor urea are typically added on the hot side to eliminate NOx in order to meet the temperature range requirements for the reduction reaction.

Efficiency improvements of conventional solid coal combustion plants can take a number of forms, and each reduces the environmental footprint of a power plant’s output work by using rather than wasting more of the energy contained in coal’s chemical bonds and released when it is burned.  Technical improvements that fall into this category include improved furnace and boiler design to keep heat inside the power generation cycle rather than releasing it through ash quenching and condensing of steam, reductions in parasitic load demand from pumps, induced draft fans, and other plant components, and improved efficiency of the steam turbines used to transform heat energy into electricity.  The advancements that have been achieved in conventional coal plant performance demonstrate significant promise and room for further improvements; however, they also demonstrate the limitations of existing technology, as coal combustion and turbine design have been continually improving for many years, yet power generation from this source still generates considerable pollution.  Potential areas of further improvement are being exhausted.  “Conventional clean coal” offers promise for the future, perhaps more so than any other form of coal power, but it is still far from unproblematic.  Analogous and in some cases greater improvements are likely to occur in alternative energy sources as well, as has certainly been the case with wind power and other renewable energy sources over the past decade, and coal may not remain the winner in pure economic terms that it is today with many of the changes listed above as fuel prices and capital costs of new plants and retrofits continue to increase.

Carbon Capture and Sequestration

Carbon Capture and Sequestration, also known as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), is the “clean coal” concept being promoted the most heavily by utilities today.  If successful, the concept would offer a way to continue burning coal for electricity while avoiding major costs expected under greenhouse gas emission regulations.  Such regulations appear likely over the long run, whether they take the form of energy and climate legislation passed by Congress or command-and-control style regulations promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is authorized to regulate the emissions under its Clean Air Act authority based on the Massachusetts vs. EPA Supreme Court decision should Congress fail to provide a legislative framework for curbing emissions.  The concept in any plant with CCS is to pump the carbon dioxide emissions that are the chief byproduct of coal combustion underground or into some other permanent or semi-permanent reservoir rather than directly into the atmosphere.

Two main technical approaches have been proposed for development under the umbrella of CCS: underground storage and enhanced oil recovery (EOR).  Underground storage involves diverting CO2 emissions into underground caverns or other storage areas either directly or using pipelines, where the gases remain indefinitely.  This method has proven reasonably effective for plants that happen to be located adjacent to such caverns; however, the majority of plants do not fall into this category, and constructing new plants with CCS in geologically suitable locations is likely to dramatically increase costs of transmission, as well as potentially increasing other balance-of-plant costs, for new generation.  It is possible that enough economically, environmentally, and geologically acceptable sites for these plants simply do not exist.  EOR involves scaling up proven technology to pump CO2 into depleting oil fields where injection of gas reduces the viscosity and improves the pumping qualities of heavier, more difficult-to-recover oils.

The largest advantage of the EOR approach is that it makes use of a proven method in the oil industry to create a potentially viable market for what would otherwise be a source of pollution and could help reduce imports of oil, albeit by a small amount.[6]  The disadvantages are the small overall volume of CO2 that can be repurposed in this manner compared to the total emissions of coal plants due to the requirement to transport exhaust gases over the long distance between power generation facilities and oilfields that would benefit from EOR, as well as the tradeoff in greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the production of additional fossil fuels.  In the cases of both underground storage and EOR, a great deal of uncertainty remains regarding the permanence of CO2 storage in reservoirs and scaling issues, and no long-term testing has yet been conducted to confirm the long-term viability of carbon storage, particularly as the technology moves from experimental to commercial scales.  A few alternative approaches have been proposed, such as capturing flue gases through photosynthesis using tanks of algae known as “photobioreactors,” but none of these approaches have a strong enough theoretical or experimental basis to be considered viable at this time.

CCS concepts have some problem areas that have seen relatively little improvement over the years as CCS has begun to move beyond conceptual infancy and into the testing stages.  First, removing a significant quantity of CO2 emissions from the flue gas stream requires a significant parasitic expenditure of energy itself, with as much as a quarter or more of the plant’s gross electric output being dedicated solely to pumping the flue gases underground or through pipelines.[7]  Such parasitic loading could exacerbate future supply problems as more regions of the world begin to deplete their indigenous coal reserves and the price of coal increases.  Second, in spite of several decades of research and development and heavy promotion of CCS technology by the coal industry, no commercial-scale power plant utilizing CCS has ever been built, and investors and banks will be unlikely to provide the extensive capital needed to scale up the technology until they see a proven track record of success.  Finally, the sheer scale required to make a dent in coal’s contribution to climate warming pollution is daunting enough that CCS is unlikely to provide a readily available near-term wedge against climate change and may exacerbate other environmental problems associated with coal use due to the energy inefficiency of the process and therefore greater quantity of coal required.

Integrated Gasification-Combined Cycle

Integrated Gasification-Combined Cycle (IGCC) is another approach to reducing the environmental footprint of coal power.  IGCC is distinct from CCS, although it could potentially be combined with CCS technologies should they become commercially proven in the future in order to achieve greater environmental benefits than either method alone, albeit at great expense.  Gasification, or incomplete combustion in an oxygen-poor environment, produces an intermediate gaseous fuel known as synthesis gas, or syngas for short, composed mainly of the combustible gases hydrogen (H2) and carbon monoxide (CO).  Coal gasification was used to produce the gas burned to light the streets of Paris and a number of other cities beginning in the late 1800′s, as well as in the first step of the Fischer-Tropsch process used to produce substitute liquid fuels in Nazi Germany when the war effort strained that country’s energy supplies to the breaking point.  The usual combustion byproducts of water and CO2 ultimately form when syngas is burned as well.

The theoretical advantage an IGCC plant has over a conventional coal plant is in the higher system efficiency of the “combined cycle,” a concept originally developed for natural gas-fired plants and used in many such plants used to meet intermediate and peak loads today.  Combined cycle power generation, as the name suggests, uses a multi-stage process to generate electricity.  The first stage involves the recovery of energy released by a gas as it burns and expands inside a combustion turbine using the Brayton cycle; the second stage involves the transfer of heat from flue gases to a working fluid, typically water in a boiler, used to turn a steam turbine as in a conventional power plant using the Rankine cycle.  Because the first cycle takes place at extremely high temperatures needed to rapidly expand gas to do work in the combustion turbine, the flue gas still contains enough heat at the end of the cycle to make additional energy recovery feasible using heat exchangers.  The net power output from the two power generating cycles is combined and fed into the grid.  The most obvious disadvantage of generating power this way is the far higher capital cost of constructing an IGCC plant compared to conventional generation facilities.

While the overall combined cycle is more efficient than conventional pulverized coal plants, energy losses do occur in the transformation of coal into a gaseous fuel, mostly due to the heat input needed for gasification.  As a result of the added gasification process needed for combined cycle systems using coal, the IGCC process is less efficient than the same combined power generation cycle run on a fuel that does not require pre-treatment such as natural gas or fuel oils.  As a result, most estimates place the efficiency of full-size IGCC plants at around 45% of the total energy released from burning coal converted into usable electric power, an improvement over the 30-40% efficiencies achievable in conventional plants but still considerably lower than the 60% electric efficiency achievable in today’s most advanced combined cycle plants. 

Additionally, the use of a gasification process generates additional environmental problems distinct from those of conventional coal-fired generation.  One of the challenges of designing IGCC plants is management of slag, the semi-liquid byproduct that forms from trace elements in coal that do not gasify such as silicon, aluminum, and other metals.  Slag, like combustion ash, contains a high proportion of heavy metals and other contaminants, but in the more potentially hazardous form of wastewater rather than relatively inert solids, and the limited field experience with IGCC such as in Indiana’s Wabash River plant has demonstrated significant potential for creating water quality problems.[8]  When taking into account the added challenges of managing these unique byproducts from the gasification reaction, as well as the dramatically increased capital costs of IGCC plants relative to conventional coal plants, the theoretical environmental benefits that could be gained by achieving a higher plant efficiency and thereby conserving a still relatively inexpensive fuel appear less attractive.

Liquefaction

While the use of coal as a feedstock to produce liquids to replace petroleum-derived fuels does not technically fall under the same “clean coal” umbrella as CCS or IGCC, it is similar enough to these concepts as an alternative use of coal and ties into related concerns of oil and gas supply problems enough that the possibility of doing so merits some discussion here.  A number of processes have been proposed to produce liquid fuels from coal, most of which are claimed to become cost-competitive at sustained oil prices over $35 per barrel, and almost all of which are very similar to the gasification stage of IGCC plants described above (when the product of incomplete combustion is a liquid rather than a gas, the process is called “pyrolysis” rather than “gasification,” but the mechanisms are very similar).[9]  South Africa has built commercial-scale coal liquefaction plants, but no successful projects exist today in North America, at least in part because the process generates significant quantities of air and water pollution as well as greenhouse gas emissions, giving the technology rather dim prospects under air and water quality protections.  Costs of coal-to-liquid technologies also increase as lower-quality coals from more remote mines are exploited in the later stages of a coal-based economy, as is occurring in South Africa today.[10]

As production of oil and gas, more versatile and energy-dense resources than coal, peaks and then declines, increased dependence on relatively more abundant but lower-quality solid fuels appears likely in the absence of greenhouse gas emission constraints.  While coal, oil and gas are all viable fuels for electricity generation, many other energy-using technologies such as internal combustion engines require higher quality liquid or gaseous fuels and cannot run on coal in its native form. Since it is a solid fuel and has a lower energy content than oil or gas, coal cannot serve as a direct replacement for the myriad uses of liquid fuel today without first being converted into a liquid itself, and it is difficult to envision a scenario in which such large-scale substitution could take place without creating a major source of pollution and wasting large quantities of energy, exacerbating regional and possibly even global coal shortages in the future.

Conclusions

While a number of concepts exist today to continue using coal, the cheapest and most abundant fossil fuel, in more environmentally benign ways, only a few of these methods have demonstrated commercial viability and cost-competitiveness.  Unfortunately, the most significant environmental problem associated with the use of coal for energy also appears to be the most intractable: the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide from coal combustion and associated changes to the Earth’s climate system due to the enhanced greenhouse effect.  The most promising “clean coal” technology today in terms of cost-benefit ratio is simply adding more scrubbers and other air pollution control equipment to existing plants or constructing new conventional plants with these devices in place, which does not address the issue of climate change.  Other technologies geared toward reducing coal’s climate impacts or alleviating supply problems with liquid fuels suffer from a host of technical and economic feasibility problems that range from scale-up issues to the major up-front capital costs of technologies not yet proven for commercial electricity generation.  In some cases, such as in the production of higher-grade liquid and gaseous fuels for use in internal combustion engines and combined-cycle plants, the processes involved in conversion can create additional sources of air and water pollution, and in the case of liquefaction may worsen climate change effects as well due to the lower energy efficiency and higher greenhouse gas emissions of the process compared to both conventional pulverized coal-fired power plants and production of conventional oil and gas.  No single technology or combination of technologies is capable of managing all of these problems at once, suggesting that the age of coal as a reliable and abundant fuel for industrial societies may be nearing its twilight.

[1] U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), “Direct Fired Biomass”, 1997, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/ba/pba/pdfs/direct_fire_bio.pdf, pp. 3-4

[2] U.S. DOE, “Biomass Co-Firing,” 2002, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/pdfs/fta_biomass_cofiring.pdf, p. 1

[3] U.S. DOE 1997, p.10

[4] U.S. DOE 2002, p. 12

[5] Srivastava, Ravi et al., “Nitrogen Oxides Emission Control Options for Coal-Fired Electric Utility Boilers,” http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/ewr/pubs/NOx%20control%20Lani%20AWMA%200905.pdf, September 2005

[6] Mannes, Robert, “CO2 Reductions Through Technology: Enhanced Oil Recovery and CCS,” presentation to Prairie Climate Stewardship Conference, 2008, http://www.prairiestewardship.org/Resources/Robert%20Mannes.pdf

[7] “CO2 Capture and Storage: The Energy Costs,” http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2733, 2007

[8] U.S. DOE, “Wabash River Coal Gasification Repowering Project: DOE Assessment,” 2002, http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/cctc/resources/pdfs/wabsh/netl1164.pdf, p. 8

[9] Cobal Alternative Fuels USA, “Coal to Liquid,” 2008, http://www.cobal-usa.com/coal_to_liquid.html

[10] Heinberg, Richard, Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis, 2008, pp. 93-98.

Posted in Air, Climate Change, Energy Production | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Window of Opportunity

Posted by wastedenergy on August 17, 2010

If you listen carefully, you can hear something rising above the noise of the traffic.  Beyond the day-to-day ups and downs of the stock market, the oil market, and the job market, something bigger is happening.  I like to call this phenomenon “the winds of change.”

I’ll give you an example of what I mean: a few days ago, the New York Times published an article that, taken to its logical conclusion, ought to make the promoters of the endless growth myth tremble in their boots.  It told the story of a woman who took a daring leap of faith to escape from what she called “the work-spend treadmill,” challenging the widely held, or at least widely followed, belief that a strong relationship exists between the money we earn and spend and the fulfillment we ultimately find in life.  In addition to the anecdotal evidence, the article cited a number of recent scientific studies confirming that, in fact, not only can you not take it with you, a lot of it isn’t even all that helpful here in the first place.  Among the conclusions:

“While the current round of stinginess may simply be a response to the economic downturn, some analysts say consumers may also be permanently adjusting their spending based on what they’ve discovered about what truly makes them happy or fulfilled.”

If that doesn’t cut directly to the heart of the Western sell-the-world mentality that seeks to prop up its primacy through backwards thinking on questions of consumption and resources, I don’t know what would.  And that wasn’t the only gem from the Times’ recent portfolio of work.  It turns out scientists have begun to study not just the problem of “can money buy happiness?” (hint: no) but also the question of “is it good to get outside and clear your head a little bit sometimes instead of spending all your time in a little box worrying about the next stage in the tiny hyper-specialized corner of the universe known as ‘your career?’”  As it turns out, yes, it is in fact good for your mental (not to mention physical) state to take in a little natural splendor from time to time and get away from the daily grind.

Not only that, but the paper is finally getting around to talking about the changes we have seen in our climate on the front page. 

About time.

A Mighty Wind

Here is another item that graced the headlines recently, not to be lost in a cascade of sour news about the economy and the damage we have done to the Earth’s climate system.  In case you missed it, we just broke ground on the largest wind farm – ever, by nearly a factor of three and perhaps even more once additional phases of the project are completed.

Who cares if wind power growth stalled from its five-year epic entrance into the big time just a little bit in the first half of 2010?  In case you forgot, just about everything else slowed down too.  The long term outlook for wind power is that it is going to keep growing for a long time to come, and we still have a long way to go.  Of course, the longer we delay and adopt backwards policies that ignore the externalized costs of fossil fuels as well as both the environmental and economic benefits of renewable energy, the more difficult and painful the transition will be.  Is it any wonder that Portugal, Germany and Spain, which is even leading the way in snatching up the market for renewable energy customers over on this side of the pond, are light-years ahead of the United States already in adoption of clean energy technology, from solar to wind to household trash combustion?  They have had the correct policies in place for decades, policies that tax pollution and waste and reward conservation and investment in technologies that deliver over the long run.  Europe even has its own internal cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions.  How are we doing over on this continent?

We seem to have so many skeptics here who think we’ll never be able to get away from fossil fuels (or can only get there by reopening the can of nuclear squirms).  Do these people really think we couldn’t do a whole heck of a lot more to take advantage of the world’s best wind resource, both on- and offshore?  Boy, do they have a lot to learn!

These are not final solutions, unlike what proponents of “clean coal” believe it is and what it still might become if we fail to use this potentially transformational moment wisely.  But the small changes we are seeing today could be the beginning of a systemic shift in our ways of thinking about consumption of energy and resources, ways of thinking about living.  And you’d better believe we need to change our ways and start consuming a lot less, and fast; if you thought living in a $147-a-barrel world was tough cookies, just wait until we arrive in $500-a-barrel country (and don’t think it won’t happen, or something much, much worse).

There may be no hope for business-as-usual, and perhaps there shouldn’t be.  But there is hope for humanity.  From culture to technology, from sea to shining sea, the seeds of change have been planted, and if you look closely, you can even see the first few sprouts coming up.

Amidst the chaotic storm, a glimmer of hope in the sunlight?

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, The Ether, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Bridge to Nowhere

Posted by wastedenergy on August 15, 2010

Drill, baby, drill?  It’s been said that U.S. energy policy exists in two modes, complacency and panic.  And the speed with which we move from one to the other, and back again, is truly astonishing.  If the Deepwater Horizon incident was supposed to be our wake-up call, our politicians seem all too ready to hit the snooze button.  And if our energy policy today doesn’t make you question whose interests our government truly serves, well, it probably means you haven’t really been paying attention.  In fact, the phrase “energy policy” itself is probably far too generous.  A more accurate phrase might be “policy of returning to business-as-usual as expeditiously as possible, and damn the consequences.”  What our leaders all too conveniently ignore, and at everyone’s peril, is that business-as-usual is already over, and the only thing propping it up for the time being is politics-as-usual.

Costs a lot, but gets you nowhere in the end.

Drill Here, Drill Now.  It’s a siren call we’ve all heard, and its appeal is not terribly difficult to understand, particularly when spoken by political sirens to the masses who see little beyond today’s costs at the pump.  After all, for a nation almost wholly dependent on imports for its primary source of primary energy, an aggressive new program of domestic drilling might seem to make sense.  But it won’t make dollars, nor will it make much of a dent in our imports as we fritter away ever larger and larger amounts of our earnings to compete in the international arena for ever smaller and smaller amounts of oil, whether that means relying on imports from the Middle East or imports from vast multinational corporations with little interest in the long-term well-being of our communities.   We ignore fundamental geological and ecological constraints at our peril.  We forget that when you’ve already dug yourself into a deep hole, drilling further down won’t get you out of it; your only real option is to climb out of it.

The chances that another big oilfield the size of Ghawar or Cantarell, or even the size of Alaska’s North Slope fields, remains to be found just around the corner are slim to none, and slim just left the building.  We can drill all the way to China if we want, and it won’t make a bit of difference; anyway, they’re busily extracting their last remaining drops of oil as well. When you’re falling off a net energy cliff, opening a parachute is a lot more helpful than tying yourself to a piece of drilling equipment the size of an aircraft carrier, and unless we somehow manage to disconnect ourselves from it, that parachute won’t do us much good either.  No amount of drilling will bring us back to an age of happy motoring nor do anything but delay an inevitable transition to less energy-intensive systems of living based on renewable resources, while the inertia of our built infrastructure and already-invested capital represents just one more chip in the pile we have already wagered away in a losing bet against the forces of nature in pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein

There is another matter we seem to be ignoring at our peril as well, and that is the ominous cloud now hanging over our future thanks to decades of relentlessly pursuing shortsighted energy goals without giving proper attention to longer-term needs.  We can say with some certainty what the future holds for oil production, and it’s not a pretty picture.  What is far more uncertain is whether we will be able to live in the world to come at all.  Climate change represents the largest unpaid externality and embedded cost of present systems of production, and we and the rest of the world are already paying the price, yet we persist in the cultural myth that fossil energy is somehow cheaper than its alternatives in spite of the mountain of evidence telling us no course of action could be more expensive to our planetary economic and ecological health.

One more point made by proponents of the energy status quo must be addressed.  “Drilling creates jobs,” we are told, and we can’t afford to make the kinds of sacrifices demanded by policies like placing a moratorium on new drilling at least until we can figure out how to make our rigs stop exploding.  But we are already sacrificing, as the embedded costs of extracting and consuming fossil energy to the economy and to living systems becomes greater and greater.  The jobs that matter, the jobs that are needed, are those that ensure we will be resilient and find the energy we need in a world of scarcity; digging in deeper by creating more jobs in the unsustainability industry makes the jobs we truly need harder to create and harder in turn to find for those who actually wish to help in building alternatives.  Creating new jobs drilling for oil is no different from creating new jobs building a bridge to nowhere; they won’t last long, and nobody benefits in the end. 

And a policy of pursuing short-term goals and avoiding dealing with long-term consequences is sure to get us nowhere indeed.  The only way new drilling can be considered remotely acceptable is if it is enacted consciously as a component of a comprehensive, system-wide transformative policy to remedy our dependence on unsustainable sources of energy, a policy that includes paying the full costs of our dependence today.  Are our politicians’ calls to resume drilling embedded in such a long view of the energy needs of our nation and the world?  Or have we trapped ourselves by building a business culture incapable of looking beyond quarterly balance sheets and a political culture incapable of looking beyond the campaign contributions needed to protect the status quo through one more election cycle?

“I see no changes.” – Tupac Shakur

If you honestly believe today’s political and business leaders have taken the long view we need, you would give them far more credit than I do, and I would argue that such a position ignores the facts on the ground, like the abject failure to tackle or even acknowledge the matter of catastrophic climate change looming just over the horizon.  If we want to believe our leaders have truly considered our best long-term interests, then we, like the good people of Missouri, must demand that they show us that is the case before we throw our support behind them.  We must demand that they adopt an ecological mindset and a language that reflects it, and that they acknowledge that an economy based upon unsustainable sources of energy, by definition, cannot be sustained.  Any new extraction of unsustainable energy resources must be taken in the context of building a sustainable energy future, and based on the actions of our leaders, it appears they do not even begin to understand this context, let alone understand what it would mean to act on it.

It’s long past time we got beyond the short-term outlook and started building the bridges to the future we really need.

We once had the technology.  Can we rebuild it?

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Production | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Man Behind The Curtain

Posted by wastedenergy on August 14, 2010

The first law of thermodynamics tells us that no energy can be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed.  The practical upshot of this law for the world in which we live is that everything, all matter and all energy, must come from something.  Our culture of instantaneous interactions, high-speed travel and just-in-time delivery obscures the physical economy of primary production that underlies it all, all the mineral resources that are necessary to create the products out of which the human world is built. The result is that most of us don’t know where anything we use comes from anymore.  We certainly couldn’t make most of these things ourselves even if we really wanted or tried to do so.  We have forgotten the true power of matter and energy by cheapening it all to the point where a culture of neglectful waste is not only normal, it is expected.  And so, taking the long view, the modern world of easy growth and abstracted transactions we call “the economy” is something of an aberration. There’s a simple explanation, of course: everything we take for granted draws its power from a vast underworld kept out of sight from the common people.  We have built a world, which most of us seem to believe will last forever as it is the only one we have ever known, wherein hyper-specialization rules and forgetting of origins is the rule.  But that world is crumbling.

It’s about a lot more than plastic bottles.

Now, don’t take this point the wrong way: I won’t claim, as some have, that we were better off in the pre-industrial world, although I certainly find that there are areas where we have vastly overshot our capacity for complexity in a way that creates net harms rather than benefits.  Certainly we might have a few regrets about the way that pursuing a hyperconnected world built on the principle of instant gratification causes us to forget our cultural origins and the skills we used to get ourselves to here in the first place.  And the modern man could certainly use a lesson or two in humility, we worshippers of the false idol of our own mastery of the universe.  But the point I am really trying to make here is a different one: that if we want to continue living according to the standards to which we have become accustomed, if we wish to avoid throwing the baby out with the bath water, we need to start working for it.  We’re past the point of keeping the primary economy out of sight and out of mind; what remains to be seen is whether we have passed the point of no return.

Perhaps the most obvious way in which the world we once knew has begun to fall apart is the disappearance of the easy once-and-done resources that underlie all aspects of the secondary economy of production and consumption of goods and services.  Oh, but you might say, we have plenty of these non-renewable energy resources left in the ground, and we haven’t arrived at a true emergency yet.  But to say so misses a key distinction: sure, there is plenty of fossil fuel remaining, but the cheap and easy stuff is gone.  It has been for decades, and it took the reasonably stable and predictable climate we once knew with it.  Now we are living in the age of hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal, and fighting wars for the oil that remains.  All the while, the business interests pulling the strings of this shadow economy work day and night to obscure knowledge of the true costs.  These wars are fought to preserve freedom, not as a last-ditch effort to preserve a culture of happy motoring, we are told; we must continue to mine for coal and drill for oil and gas because they bring jobs, say the powers that be.  And indeed, what patriot in his right mind would resist such a clarion call to inertia?

It all sounds fine and good, until you stop ignoring the details, the all-too-obvious signs that we have led ourselves down the path of a system-wide decline in primary production that contributes to our present economic woes.  Meanwhile, those who profit from our present systems of production stand all too ready to keep the true costs of our transactions hidden for as long as possible, until in the end we may find it is too late after all…

Time to pull back the curtain and reveal the man pulling the strings.

Posted in Energy Production | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Brownout

Posted by wastedenergy on August 13, 2010

Who wants to tell me what I’m looking at this time?

My eyes and my head are both starting to hurt. In any event, maybe THIS is the oil spill we should be more concerned about?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

A Series of Tubes

Posted by wastedenergy on August 12, 2010

In honor of the late Ted Stevens, I’d like to take a brief moment to discuss something the man truly loved.  No, not the Internet, but actual tubes: the ones that carry Alaska’s contribution to our modern world, and also the kind that can keep society moving once those become obsolete. 

While St. Peter may have dropped his charges against Stevens after prosecutorial misconduct, another type of charges, the explosive kind, might have been dropped by Environmentalists in order to invent a problem with another series of tubes in Michigan, at least if you believe Rush Limbaugh’s likely take on events.  In any case, thanks to production declines from its fields and yet another aging pipeline, it looks like Alaska is getting a run for its money as a prime oil supplier from another place you can see from your house if you live there: Canada.  The conventional wisdom tells us that Canada, as a friendly neighbor to the north that doesn’t want us to, as Jim Kunstler so eloquently put it, “eat shit and die” like most of the other places that sell us oil, will be more than happy to hand over all the tar we could possibly want, that is once they get done toasting the remainder of their natural gas supply and more than a few gallons of water in order to separate it from all that sand and get it into a less amorphous-solid-like form that can actually be pumped through tubes.

Look at all the beautiful land still left to wreck.

That is, of course, all assuming that everything goes swimmingly, unlike in Lake Pontchartrain.  It’s looking more and more like the Keystone XL pipeline, an expansion of an existing pipeline system from the tar sands that would extend all the way to Texas and Louisiana and a segment of tube with the potential to monumentally increase America’s use of the dirtiest and most inefficient mode of transportation in existence, won’t ever swim at all.  Even if it does get built, this time around there actually are a whole lot of environmentalists already angry enough about the project that they just might sabotage the pipeline for real this time.  After the Michigan pipeline tear last month dumped a million gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River watershed in what is believed to be the Midwest’s largest-ever oil spill (it’s been a good year for biggest-ever spills, hasn’t it?), the public’s opinion turned just a little sour on the risks of adding yet more pipelines to the vast network that spans the nation already.  And for those who missed it, crude was already not exactly the sweetest thing on the public’s mind these days.

Even assuming the pipeline is completed, that doesn’t mean our tubular troubles are over.  Before the synthetic crude from tar sands, or any other crude, can be burned up taking the kids to soccer practice, it must first be refined, then pumped through another series of smaller tubes to get it to your local Circle K.  OK, our pipelines may be crumbling, but our refineries are still doing OK, right?  No strange things afoot there?

Turns out there was yet another headline that graced Page 22 of your newspaper this week showing that the Deepwater Horizon and the Trans-Alaska pipeline aren’t the only leaky liabilities and ticking time bombs in BP’s portfolio: on April 7, a compressor at BP’s Texas City refinery (yes, that one again) caught fire, resulting of the illegal release of 17,000 pounds of benzene and over 500,000 pounds of undisclosed “other pollutants” into the neighborhood over the next two months.  An investigation by the Texas Attorney General’s office revealed a lack of maintenance as the likely cause of the fire.  You’d think after such an event, BP would have the wisdom to shut down the refining units running off the faulty equipment, right?  Well, it turns out they actually knew about the problem and chose to keep those units running so as to avoid any loss in productivity. I know, truly shocking for a company with such an outstanding reputation for safety and excellent performance.  Call it yet another notch in the company’s belt and add it to the fifteen from the 2005 explosion at the refinery and the shift supervisor who died in another accident at the plant three years later, along with the eleven from the Deepwater Horizon.  Hey, if we can reduce Afghan and Iraqi casualties to mere numbers, why not oil workers as well?  It’s not like they amount to a hill of beans to the company for which they once worked and which treated their lives as just another cost of doing business.

By the way, if you’re not such a big fan of wind turbines or trash-to-energy plants, I’m curious: how might you feel about having one of these monstrosities in your backyard?

Trouble in Texas City: The Intertubular Processing and Storage Node

But suppose the oil makes it through all the tubes without a hitch, all the way to the pumps and ultimately into your vehicle.  Happy motoring, right?

Bill McKibben and a few others have continually pointed out that the disasters that make headlines and business-as-usual habits are, in the end, more or less equally disastrous for the health of our environment and our economy.  A headline from today’s issue of The Onion, in the tradition of the media outlet known for its role as one of the few able to comment seriously on matters of importance, told it like it is: “Millions of Barrels of Oil Safely Reach Port in Major Environmental Catastrophe.”  It is telling that the only psychological method we have to seriously confront our oil crisis is humor: such is the mark of truly intractable problems, like the jokes that emerged from the Jewish ghettos of Europe through centuries of segregation and persecution.  So what are we going to do once, or hopefully before, this party ends, as it surely will (and more likely sooner rather than later)?

The terminal: in the end, the Internet and everything else will all go down the tubes if we don’t figure out something, and fast. 

By jove, I think I might just have the answer!  Unfortunately, it takes a bit of foresight, some dollars, and, if you want it to be sustainable, a simultaneous commitment to renewable energy, all resources that seem to be in short supply right now at all levels of government here in these United States.

Maybe soon we can start talking about trillion-dollar-scale electrified rail projects instead of just a few billion dollars in occasional stimulus money even as ten times as much goes to keep the auto industry on life support. It takes more than just a little seed money to build an industry capable of making a dent in levels of oil consumption that remain mammoth even during periods of chilled demand, like today.  It also takes comprehensive, top-level planning for the long term from visionaries at the highest levels of government.  And that, in turn, requires our political leaders to square their positions with scientific principles and the goal of moving the country forward rather than merely the principle of profitable petroleum for what proportionally is just pennies of campaign funds.  Can anyone doubt that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R – CLIMATE ENEMY NUMBER ONE) will do as much as she can to continue Alaska’s legacy as the fossil state holding back the rest of the country from finally making serious attempts to get beyond oil, and how sad is it that she is willing to sell herself for so little?

We urgently need mass transit and other forms of low-impact transportation not to supplement our driving habits, but to actually replace them at levels that matter.  We should be generating as much as possible of the funds needed to build a transportation network we won’t be embarassed to call our own in the future through taxation of gasoline and other fossil motor fuels, including fair and non-zero valuation of their externalities such as congestion, smog, and climate pollution.  Public transportation infrastructure in this country is crumbling at the same time that we face other key turning points in the history of human energy use: the first stages of a permanent worldwide decline in crude oil supplies and changes in the planetary climate system too obvious for even the most vigorously stubborn Conservapedia readers to deny any longer.  If we don’t do something about fixing our fixation on oil-centric transport, we face serious problems not even just over the horizon but already, as America’s families and its ecosystems come under ever more strain from the rising costs of energy and transportation.

If we do manage to somehow break through the inertia of politics and get it right, our tubes will serve us in the coming world for a long time.  There may even be something already happening in Washington, DC that can give us hope…

.

Tubes done right: if we fix our transportation system, there may be a place in the world for the Internet after all, and all the other wonderful things we call “civilization.”

Posted in Energy Consumption, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Dead in the Water

Posted by wastedenergy on August 11, 2010

Because sometimes, you just gotta tell it like it is.

Posted in Water and Soil | Leave a Comment »

Food for Thought

Posted by wastedenergy on August 10, 2010

With the Gulf of Mexico still reeling, should the United States overturn its moratorium on drilling new oil wells offshore?  Do we really need comprehensive energy and climate legislation, or are half-measures enough?  Well, the addiction metaphor is played out, so let’s try something Americans can really relate to for a change: obesity.

Suppose you just went to the doctor for your first physical examination in years, and the doctor unfortunately has some bad news for you.  “You’re morbidly obese,” you are told, and beyond that, “your arteries are hardening, your blood sugar is off the charts, and you’ve probably only got another five years to live unless you change your ways, and fast.”

So what is the appropriate response?  Do we say “screw it, I’m gonna die anyway, so I might as well live it up in the meantime,” and immediately double down on your wager against the Grim Reaper by proceeding directly to the nearest KFC?  Or is it better to say “my goodness, I really should start eating healthier and getting some exercise?”  More importantly, should you not just say it, but actually follow through on this statement?  After all, it doesn’t really matter to the doctor: she’s just telling you what you needed to hear, for your own sake.  It’s up to you to decide whether your own life is worth enough to you to act on her advice.

 

“You know, you really need to cut the grease out of your diet.”

The Deepwater Horizon accident that caused the largest-ever release of oil into the marine environment was supposed to be the catalyst for change in U.S. energy policy.  It was supposed to get people to realize the true consequences of relying on dirty and ever-scarcer fossil fuels and underscore the urgency of getting serious about alternatives.  For decades, we’ve known the health of our environment and our economy would suffer if we kept continually consuming more – so why has our approach to energy been roughly the equivalent of scarfing down as many Deep Fried Snickers bars as we can get our hands on?  Yeah, it might taste good, and the sugar high might give you a quick burst of energy, but what about the crash after the fact?  And even more importantly, shouldn’t we give at least some thought to the long term consequences?  Junk food might give you a nice caloric bang for your buck, but it behooves us to remember that the price of potato chips at the cash register doesn’t include the expensive triple-bypass surgery you’ll need just a few short years, or at most a decade or two, down the road.

Isn’t it time for us to finally grow up and for our tastes to mature, if only just a little bit?

Posted in Energy Production | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Sunrise Over the Ocean

Posted by wastedenergy on August 9, 2010

Today the world bid farewell to a true visionary: Matthew Simmons, energy investment banker and peak oil theorist who introduced a generation to the dangers of continuing to rely on a finite, scarce and depleting resource, founder and chairman emeritus of Simmons & Company International, and founder of the Ocean Energy Institute.  In his waning years, Simmons put his money where his mouth was with concrete plans to develop massive offshore wind farms, synthetic ammonia fuel production from offshore wind and other ocean energy systems, and other forms of alternative energy to wean the United States and the world from oil-guzzling habits and build a new world powered by the endless renewable energy of the sun, wind and waves.

The call for redoubled efforts to build a viable and sustainable energy future could not be more urgent today.  Our nation has just come out of what could be the hottest month ever, and firestorms in Russia and floods in Asia continue to rage on unabetted, underscoring the necessity of reversing the abject failure of our government and the international community to take meaningful measures against catastrophic climate change.  And lest we forget, we just suffered through the worst spill in the history of the modern oil industry, with major effects already wrought and sure to continue through the coming years and decades, devastating marine and coastal ecosystems and a Gulf Coast community still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Katrina.  Simmons spoke out against the dangers of relying on deep ocean oil and unconventional gas from hydraulic fracturing, and his candor put him at odds with many of his contemporaries, including the investment bank he founded in the 1970′s to develop viable solutions to the oil and energy crises the nation faced during those times. 

Simmons’ powerful 2005 book Twilight in the Desert, which went beyond the shroud of government secrecy and dug deep through studies of technical papers and site visits to uncover the truth about Saudi Arabia’s dwindling oil reserves, remains a must-read text for all students of energy issues.  He became a regular speaker at the conferences of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, and his position as an industry insider brought not only much-needed credibility and gravitas to the issue of peak oil, but also a realistic perspective on paths toward a sustainable future among a community where the loudest voices all too often belonged to shrill doomsayers and hand-wringers keen to talk about problems while offering little in the way of concrete solutions.  Few more clearly saw not only the nature and magnitude of the problem, but also ways of bringing it into the public sphere and political discussions.  With his passing, my hope is that the leaders of the world will finally begin to take seriously what this man, who made his reputation as a straight shooter and a level-headed analyst of the facts, had to say.

Matthew Simmons, the world salutes you.  Rest in peace, and may the next generation carry on your work with renewed vigor and passion.

Posted in The Ether | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

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