Posted by wastedenergy on May 20, 2010
What spews forth from hundreds of coal-fired power plants never regulated under the Clean Air Act, makes oil from hundreds of wells in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere too sour to produce even low-grade diesel, creates noxious and foul-smelling gases capable of suffocating animals and corroding pipelines, and pours from the sky as enough acid to destroy thousands of acres of temperate and boreal foliage every day? If you guessed “sulfur,” you’re right on the money.
Posted in Air | Tagged: acid rain, coal, dumps, smog, sulfur | Leave a Comment »
Posted by wastedenergy on May 12, 2010
Let’s talk tar. Not tar balls washing up onto beaches this time; much has already been said, and surely there will be more to say on that matter. Today we’re talking about that real sticky icky icky, our friend to the north.
Now that we have seen the end of new offshore drilling permits for the foreseeable future and hence a favorite chimera of the “oil supply can continue growing forever” crowd, i.e. deepwater “resources,” obliterated, we have started to see the growth religionists come out of the woodwork in support of something else. “We are blessed with oil sands!” declared a recent op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen, a right-wing rag. You might be wondering: tar sand? What is it? And why bother with it if we still have plenty of regular old oil left for which to drill? Well, we don’t, and that is why tar sand started to become relevant over the past decade or so as oil prices have, in spite of their volatility, remained above levels that would give just about any economist in the 1990′s a heart attack. (Sidebar: we have short memories, don’t we?) So today Canada produces around a million or two barrels of “oil,” or “syncrude,” from the stuff each day, so that we can burn it up driving around (or just sitting in traffic) in our sport utility vehicles and pickups. Freedom!
It is worth pointing out a couple of items about tar sand to begin this discussion. Firstly, the biggest tar sand refining operations are owned by the oil industry’s best and brightest: British Petroleum, known for their high standards for protection of the environment, not to mention human health and safety in their operations. And secondly, the preferred moniker that peak oil denialists like to give it, “oil sands,” is not accurate: tar sand contains no oil, i.e. liquid hydrocarbons that flow into a well. In fact, not only does it not flow to the surface due to a pressure differential, the way regular light crude does, but it also cannot be pumped. Here’s why: it’s actually asphalt.
If you want your world to look like this, then tar sand mining is pretty much fine.
Posted in Air, Climate Change, Water and Soil | Tagged: follow the money trail, lies, miscarriages, peak oil, pools of toxic sludge everywhere, sticky icky icky, suicidal insanity, tar sand | Leave a Comment »
Posted by wastedenergy on May 9, 2010
By all accounts, it went off without any warning. It was not just the blowout preventer itself that failed, but also the alarms in place to warn the 200-person crew of the Deepwater Horizon, easily among the most technologically advanced and complex structures ever created by humanity. So when a valve broke, or didn’t quite close properly, or didn’t close in time (nobody knows exactly what went wrong, and we may never know), and a pocket of high-pressure gas surged up through a well miles below the ocean to explode at the surface, the eleven members of that crew who were working in the drilling control room were instantly vaporized. We will never hear their stories of what happened. All we have to go on are the accounts of those who survived. And if you have ever tossed something highly flammable into a campfire, perhaps an old piece of plastic furniture, and watched the flames rocket skyward, then you know the heating power of the 18,000 BTU’s per pound of the light sweet crude oil that began rushing up to the drilling platform along with that gas. The only thing a living creature can do in the face of such heat is to turn tail and run like hell. Nothing burns like oil; there is no analogue in the millions of years of human experience to standing by an oil fire, and so it is like nothing to which the human body or spirit is capable of adapting.
This fire burned not just hot, but hotter than Hell itself. And to the credit of humanity, we surprised even the devil himself with our resourcefulness: when he first produced the stuff in a bout of diarrhea, even he could never conceive of the profane uses we would one day find for it. After all, the oil seeping out of an uncontrollable leak today into the Gulf of Mexico that will quite possibly wash into the Carribbean and up the Atlantic coast in those vaunted Gulf Stream waters, coating everything in its path in a deliciously toxic sheen and annihilating marine life at scales we can scarcely comprehend today, is of course the same “resource” whose sudden absence propelled Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor, which not only motivated but also powered not one but two American wars in the cradle of civilization, which was a feedstock for both bombs and defoliants dropped on Vietnam, not to mention for countless chemicals sprayed recklessly on farms as “replacements” for the very fertility they were actively burning out, and yes, which even fueled the righteous indignation of pickup truck and sport utility vehicle drivers threatening violence against those who would dare take away their “rights” to these luxuries for such frivolous reasons as “it’s turning both our lives and the world around us into a living Hell.”
Half-apologies won’t make the trail of slime go away.
Posted in Air, Climate Change | Tagged: containment dome failure, Deepwater Horizon, end of oil, global overheating, Gulf of Mexico, human beings, methane hydrates, oil spill, peak oil, survivor stories | 4 Comments »
Posted by wastedenergy on May 7, 2010
Meanwhile, back in the Boonedocks, companies like Cabot Energy (decidedly NOT the cheese people) and Chesapeake Energy (decidedly NOT from anywhere near the Chesapeake) went about drilling for North America’s touted Hundred Year Supply of Natural Gas. And what a gas it was! The money kept rolling in: ten, twenty, forty dollars per thousand cubic feet. Even as conventional gas production in North America peaked and then began its inevitable decline, it didn’t matter, said energy “experts” and economists: rising gas prices will make unconventional gas production viable. We have hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of supply in shale gas and other unconventional supplies, they told us. It is fine, they said, to make plans to run everything and its mother on methane, from a new generation of electrical generating plants to the hot water heaters and stove cooktops in our homes: we’ll never run out! It will be clean and efficient, they said. And we all lived happily ever after. Isn’t that how the narrative goes?
Let’s back up for a moment. Natural gas is supposed to be America’s ace in the hole, our Transition Fuel, our Bridge to a Clean Energy Future. But as it turns out, we have to drill quite a few holes to get to that ace. And it seems there are a few holes in that ace as well. So once again, let’s dig deeper and get a sense of the bigger picture when it comes to this resource that the American Clean Skies Foundation and other industry groups have called “abundant, clean, and American-made.” Are they giving us the full picture?
Welcome to North America! Don’t drink the water…
Posted in Air, Energy Production, Water and Soil | Tagged: energy sink, frack ponds, fracking, natural gas | 1 Comment »
Posted by wastedenergy on April 29, 2010
So, with all that’s been floating around the news lately, I bet you thought my next entry would be about either the offshore oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico or the brighter side of things offshore, the likely soon-to-be-successful Cape Wind offshore wind energy project. Right?
Wrong! This entry will be about waste-to-energy. In particular, this entry will consist of me repeating points I have already endlessly repeated to many, many people, making myself feel not only like a broken record, but also like it is worth it to be a broken record if it means I occasionally, actually get through to someone. So what are we waiting for? Touch the fire!
Posted in Air, Energy Production, Solid Waste, Urban Planning | Tagged: waste-to-energy | 2 Comments »
Posted by wastedenergy on April 21, 2010
What’s up with oil supplies these days? The first place to go to find out is usually the International Energy Agency (IEA), the multinational body charged with overseeing global prevention, mitigation, and management of oil shocks. IEA publishes an annual “World Energy Outlook” (WEO) as a guideline for the energy sector, governments, and the public to help determine likely future petroleum supplies and determine effective policies to help offset the impacts of future shortages. Until very recently, IEA has been unabashedly bullish on the possibility of future growth in both oil demand and production. As recently as 2002, the WEO predicted that growth in total liquid fuel production, including conventional light crude oil as well as alternative sources such as natural gas liquids (condensates), tar sand, heavy oils, biofuels, and technically difficult deepwater resources, would keep up with a projected demand of 130 million barrels per day (mbd) by 2030, up from today’s total production of roughly 85 mbd. But such predictions beg the big questions: where is all that oil going to come from? Will we be able to, and should we, ramp up production of unconventional oil fast enough to offset the natural declines in production and energy return from conventional light crude oil development? More recent IEA projections have in fact cast doubt on the veracity of the information published previously: over the course of the past decade, 2030 production forecasts were revised down to 116 mbd, many producing countries and oil companies have slashed their proven reserves estimates, and since 2008, the agency has shifted into damage control mode, predicting an imminent supply crunch and recommending quick action to keep the oil flowing. Even Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, was recently caught red-handed lying about the number of wells drilled in Ghawar, the largest oilfield in the world, which suggests that even major producers are facing imminent production declines and will be unable to maintain even current, let alone growing, supply levels. Are IEA’s recent revisions a classic case of locking the barn door after the horse has already escaped?
Keep in mind I am not talking about what replacements or supplements for oil might theoretically be possible to produce absent technical and economic constraints. Sure, if infrastructure were in place and enough energy and materials were readily available to invest in production of alternative liquid fuels from say, kerogen shale, then it might be technically possible to produce large enough quantities of synthetic crude to close any projected supply gap. But assuming such infrastructure gets us nowhere, and the existence or absence of acceptable replacements in theory says little about the real-world prospects for future liquid fuel production; what matters far more is actual online, planned and projected production capacity, in the form of specific projects. Oil does us no good if it is sitting in shale and needs to be cooked out, yet extraction and refining capacity has not materialized and insufficient energy supplies are available to do the cooking. Such a resource cannot be considered a “reserve,” since little to no hard evidence exists to suggest the resource will be developed and produced for economic uses in the foreseeable future. What we need to begin to effectively manage the peak oil transition is transparent, publicly available data on the amount of remaining oil likely to be recovered and the rate at which it will be recovered; in other words, we need a database of the oilfield development projects that are either already online or likely to come online in the next few years, in time to help prevent a supply crunch given the decline rates of current oilfields.
The MegaProjects database has embarked upon a mission to collect and publicize exactly this data, and a current listing of oilfield projects and their expected output rates and “ultimately recoverable reserves” (URR) is available on Wikipedia. This database of nearly 300 projects planned to come online in the next ten years or so includes all but the tiniest of projects, which have very little impact on overall supply, and it reflects the long lead time for construction and startup of oilfield projects. It is, therefore, a very reliable assessment of the probability of different oil supply scenarios. IEA, on the other hand, has historically relied on estimates from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which assesses not current and planned online development, but rather potential fossil resources. Unlike MegaProjects, which draws its data from the available facts on the ground regarding projects actually likely to be developed in the foreseeable future, USGS data and hence IEA projections do not take into account the effects of current or planned investment, permitting and construction delays, or project cancellations, and therefore represent only one possible scenario for output at some point in the indefinite future.
So what is really going on here? Why do the IEA and USGS, agencies charged with ensuring accurate accounting of oil reserves, continually publish overly optimistic assessments of petroleum supply? Do these forecasts represent the best available data, or are they merely reflections of the political imperative to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil when it comes to the possibility of permanent shortages in fuel supplies? Is the possibility that liquid fuel production will begin to irreversibly decline in the near future so damaging to the influence and credibility of the powers that be that any evidence of such a decline must be continually suppressed, dismissed, and denied, even relying on phantom reserve data to do so if necessary? To answer these questions, we dig a little bit deeper again and look at where our oil production is coming from today, as well as some of the oil substitutes that have been proposed and/or are in limited production currently.
Posted in Air, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Water and Soil | Tagged: biofuels, offshore drilling, peak oil, shale oil, tar sand | 2 Comments »
Posted by wastedenergy on April 7, 2010
If you work in the coal industry, especially on the public relations side of things, I don’t envy you this week. OK, I envy your paycheck, but not much else about your job. I do have to admit I admire the determination it takes to keep at a job as thankless in the public’s eye as serving as Big Coal’s apologist. Recently, the industry has had quite a few items added to its list of apologies to hand out, not least of which are major mine collapses in both the United States and China, which are of course the world’s two largest consumers of coal for electricity. You certainly have your work cut out for you when your job is to make a product look good that has historically been associated with filling workers’ lungs and the stockings of naughty children around the holiday season. But then, I suppose if you have those skills (most likely acquired as captain of your high school debate squad), you might as well use them to pay the bills.
We saw a lot of high-profile news about coal mines this week, mostly involving photos of emergency medical workers wheeling injured mine workers on stretchers and industry executives issuing sheepish, waffly half-apologies, “explanations,” and empty promises to improve safety practices in the future. What we didn’t see, of course, was any sign of plans to slow down the aggressive, even reckless, worldwide expansion of coal power, to narrow the rather wide path of destruction brought to all the land, water, and air the coal industry touches (if there is an opposite of the Midas touch, they have it), to halt aggressive and strident lobbying efforts to guarantee rights to continue polluting without paying for the consequences. To be fair, we also didn’t see any evidence of either American or Chinese citizens having second thoughts about their continually expanding electricity consumption, which suggests that coal tomorrow will be just as profitable as it is today, and coal mining and utility executives will have little incentive to make meaningful strides toward cleaning up their act. But for how many tomorrows that will continue to be the case remains to be seen. It is not impossible that in the coming years and decades, coal mines won’t be the only part of this industry to collapse.
Meanwhile, all the power plants kept humming right along…
Posted in Air, Energy Production | Tagged: base load, clean coal, coal, electricity | 1 Comment »
Posted by wastedenergy on March 23, 2010
If you’ve been following this blog from its humble beginnings (either around not quite a month ago, or the beginning of time, depending on how you measure it), then you have a good sense by now of some of the things Americans like to both import and export. So it should be no surprise, whether you are reading it here for the first time or the thousandth, that America’s number one export good today is something we have become really really good at stacking: paper! Bales upon boxes upon stacks upon more bales of it, more and more every day! And as usual, whether it is our stacks of bills or our stacks of paper waste, the Chinese have readily relegated themselves to the dirty task of sorting through it all.
Remember, we’re going to need covers on ALL those TPS reports from now on…
Anyone else up for a smoke break?
Posted in Air, Energy Consumption, Solid Waste | Tagged: paper, recycling | 1 Comment »
Posted by wastedenergy on March 20, 2010
Should you be one of those who feels any degree of harm to nature is acceptable lest it provide at least some marginal benefit to humans, the following images might serve as a warning of what happens when that idea is taken to its logical conclusion. Below the fold are some of what you might call “graphic images.” In other words, they convey the depth of madness of a civilization enthralled of its own power and unchained from the hinges of ancient wisdom. Each photograph is labeled with the activity and location to the best information available.
Posted in Air, Solid Waste, Water and Soil | Tagged: pollution | 13 Comments »
Posted by wastedenergy on March 18, 2010
Chugachugachuga…CHOOOOCHOOOO!!! The Little Engine That Could! Although in this case, I think we can probably replace the engine with an electrified track. Zap zap…I’m charging my lazer……
High-speed cross-continental (or even trans-continental?) travel has long been a dream of humanity, achieved for the first time in the twentieth century and hopefully to be perfected in the twenty-first. Here in the states, we’re a big fan of doing it way up in the air, which, for some of the distances we cover, happens to be “just plane crazy.” Flight from Washington to Boston? Washington to Atlanta? WHY, LORD, WHY!?!?!? Oh wait, probably because my best option is the following, and that is only in the BEST of cases:
The Acela: They call it our “Bullet Train,” but really it’s not much more than an “iron horse.”
Posted in Air, Energy Consumption, Urban Planning | Tagged: bullet trains | Leave a Comment »
