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Freedom Is Free

Posted by wastedenergy on January 20, 2011

You’ve probably been taught that the “invisible hand” of a “free market” is the most “efficient” way of generating the largest amount of wealth for the largest number of people, and that those who don’t participate in the system are “lazy welfare queens.”  It would be best if you disabused yourself of these notions.

I’ll repeat here a thought experiment I’ve mentioned to a number of people over the last day or two: imagine a world in which all labor is automated (and note that you don’t have to get all the way there for the conclusions of the experiment to hold true).  The requirement for less intensive human labor should, in theory, ease the burden on everyone.  But under a system of dog-eat-dog capitalism, where all wealth must be considered “earned” through engagement in the labor market, and where virtually all jobs are eliminated by ever-increasing automation, the only ones who stand to gain are the oligarchs who own the machines, pulling the strings at the top. The entire economy would reorient itself to serve only the needs of those elites.  Do you suppose we might be headed in this general direction?  And if so, should we continue full speed ahead?  Or should we at the very least pause and consider what the purpose of employment really is, whether it is an end in itself or simply a means to an actual end, that of improved general welfare at the median of society?

Consider this one: if you want economic stimulus through job creation, the most effective way to do so might be something like this:

WASHINGTON—In an effort to boost the economy and promote job growth, representatives from the newly revived Works Progress Administration announced Thursday their plan to dismantle, piece by piece, the 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete forming the Hoover Dam, and then immediately rebuild it. “This is a vital initiative,” said WPA director Ted Doogan, who was appointed last week. “Systematically tearing down such a massive edifice will create at least 25,000 jobs over the next five years. And then reassembling it, using all the same pieces in the exact same configuration, will employ another 25,000 workers. America is back.” Other public works projects currently underway include the bulldozing of libraries, the burning of national forests, and the defacing of public murals, which will be followed by a massive plan to rebuild libraries, revive national forests, and repaint public murals.

Efficiency at its finest, no?

If you happen to be among the lucky ones whose work hasn’t yet been outsourced, automated, or otherwise eliminated, if you are among those who would object to the idea of providing a guaranteed minimum livable income to all citizens, you might ask yourself a few questions: could a robot do your job?  How about someone in Bangladesh? Does your work really require any “skills” outside of formatting Excel spreadsheets and keeping an Outlook inbox neat and tidy?  Do you have to work with your hands? When was the last time you had to use any aspect of your “higher” education?  Is there any creativity or artistry involved on a day-to-day basis?  How many times per week, or even per day, do you find yourself unable to engage in the activities from which you truly derive some pleasure or passion because you must instead act in a way that serves a corporate interest that does not concern you directly?  And finally, does your work create any real, lasting wealth, or are you one of the multitudes involved in transforming fossil fuels into garbage?

Now, let’s step back for just a moment.  I don’t mean to suggest that all jobs are worthless, or that the idea that anyone who does one deserves no more wealth than someone who does literally nothing except sit on the couch watching reruns of Family Guy.  I do mean to suggest, however, that such a person in many cases creates the same aggregate value as someone who works day in and day out, and in some cases more value (considering the number of business models predicated on the creation of negative value and the outsourcing of unpaid externalities). And considering any of the above criteria, can you really honestly say to yourself that someone not engaged in this activity does not have the right to a decent standard of living?  What about those who are entirely able and willing to contribute to the creation of value for society in some way, but whose entreaties to do so are rejected by the ruthless inefficiencies of the corporate economy?  Do they deserve hot meals?  Is it really a better economic model to force someone to “earn” her keep serving poison to the masses at Burger King than to simply pay her to stay at home doing nothing?

Oh, whoops, this one is proprietary!  Another great example of how large corporations create positive wealth for society at large, no?  Ah, well, at least you can still watch it on YouTube…

Let’s return briefly to the idea of negative externalities, and how much of our economic system is oriented around encouraging people to take jobs that promote them, at the expense of the public’s general welfare.  Externalities are a lot more important than most economists assume.  In many cases, they are the very heart of the matter, the basic reason why one choice is better or worse than another (and remember, kids: economics is about making good choices, not just about maximizing profit for the corporation).  Most economic analysis either ignores externalities entirely or at the very most treats them as some kind of side consideration, perhaps shifting around some prices but too difficult to bother including in any economic model.  But consider the following claim, some variation of which we’ve seen from a number of related vested interests:

“Continuing to burn coal creates more jobs than solar or wind power because it maintains the need for coal miners.”

And why is it that the dirtiest fuel creates this particular economic “benefit”?  Precisely because it requires continual depletion of a non-renewable resource!  Now, you try and tell me there is any real value in maintaining these jobs for their own sake.  So we don’t even need to consider how our present economic system treats any of the other externalities of coal burning, and there are many, all of which “add” value to the economy in the form of jobs (in the health care and environmental remediation sectors) and an increase in the GDP through their management, to the extent that they are managed.  Just the very nature of the activity is, in itself, a negative externality to society as a whole: it permanently destroys a resource for all time, making the next round of coal that much harder to find and burn.  And there are still those out there who believe the game we’re playing isn’t rigged to make bad choices?

Now how about this one: Michael Vick.  The man gets paid bajillions.  What value has he created?  He has tortured dogs, but even setting aside that negative value, let’s consider just what it is that he does that enables him to “earn” his keep: he’s good at tossing around a dead pig.  What value does that create?  Well, for one thing, it inspires many television viewers to get piss-drunk and gorge themselves on nachos while living vicariously through a machismo colloseum spectacle.  What a great example for the children!  And another type of value he creates: by getting more people to tune in through his display of athletic prowess, he creates lots of revenue for advertisers.  You know, those corporate parasites who make their living by turning the very premise of free-market capitalism on its head: convincing people to buy products that won’t benefit them through misrepresentation and manipulation in lieu of the “information” that is supposed to be the greatest asset to the perfectly rational economic human consumer.

The list goes on.  Ke$ha.  Charles Koch.  Lloyd Blankfein.  T. Boone Pickens.  R.J. Reynolds.  Coca-Cola.  The entire prison industry.  All of them, making fortunes by taking advantage of unpaid externalities that vastly outweigh any positive benefit to society.  For every instance you can find of a millionaire or billionaire who has transformed civilization for the better, I can come up with ten examples of those who make their fortunes by turning fossil fuels into garbage.  At some point, we have to ask ourselves: where does it all end?

Real Wealth?  It’s Gone Daddy Gone…

I’ll go ahead and end this one on a positive note: you only live once, so stop worrying about it and go do something you really enjoy!  I myself am going to go make some art, and create something of real value.

Posted in Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Auto-Matic Earth

Posted by wastedenergy on January 18, 2011

I must admit, I’m a bit confused.  How do automobile enthusiasts square their love of four-wheeled travel, possible only thanks to the largest public works project in history, and arising from a desire to maintain rapid cross-continental military dominance, with the professed libertarian ethic supposedly underlying their arguments, that the government ought not to interfere on behalf of matters of the public good?  Certainly, the social isolation of the solo commute makes sense given the harrowed place of the individual in their ideal society.  But let’s face it: it takes a lot of work to make it all happen.  There are no accidents here, other than the thousands that litter the freeways every day; the default option, given a withdrawal of government support, is not cars and roads, but rather nothing at all. Yet somehow, many true believers still seem drawn to the purported neutrality of the automobile option, as if believing that the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System arose naturally based upon its merits in a free market.

Sometimes I have to wonder if those who advocate taking humanity along such a regression curve have ever really bothered to expose their own arguments to any scrutiny.  Here I am talking both about conservatives who espouse status quo apologism as if current living patterns and disparities in wealth arose from some presumptive natural system of ethics rather than massive government intervention, and also leftist do-nothing “doomers” who put the cart before the horse in arguing that the best way to protect the living planet is a massive die-off or worldwide degeneration of living standards to abject poverty for living humans. Strangely, these two groups, of such divergent political philosophies, seem to have found some common ground of late: they both seem to think it would be best if we stopped trying to make life better for people and instead let everything just come crashing down.  This validation of the “horseshoe theory” of politics helps us make sense of the current popularity of deflationary, minimal-interventionist, “Austrian”-style economics.  After all, it is a system that offers no way out, and both sides are essentially arguing that we ought to get used to wading through smog and feces instead of trying to build a future life that is livable by getting interested in technologies like solar panels and high-speed rail.  High speed in general is the antithesis of an ethic that believes most in grinding progress to an absolute halt.

High Speed Nothings

While the selection of transportation systems is far less than automatic, and their deterioration absent continual reinvestment and replacement far more so, perhaps most automatic of all seems to be our acceptance of the idea that “Americans have a love affair with the automobile.”  Providing transportation for the public, rather than merely publicly funded systems that serve the private motorist, strikes us as morally wrong; why, the idea itself is downright socialist!  Or as Chris Christie and his ideological kin might say, “You can have my Lexus, when you pry my cold, dead body out of the pool of twisted metal it will become should it be struck by a semi truck!”  Are we really that sworn over to asphalt and rubber instead of sidewalks and cold steel rails for any practical reason, or is it just something we find important in order to feed a fantasy?  After all, in the nation enamored of a Tea Party aesthetic (as in, get your grubby government paws out of my pocket, except for the highways, the military-industrial complex, and my Medicare-subsidized scooter), communal mobility strikes us as an insult; it offends the sensibilities that favor some macho notion of the lone cowboy or the lone gunman, the individual stalwart against some kind of creeping communitarianism.

Or, to put it more bluntly, without big cars, big suburban roadways, and lots of big open spaces in between, it’s a lot harder to get away from minorities who live in cities and therefore to insulate and protect ourselves from the idea that we might actually owe some debt to society at large for our affluence.

Were things always so black and white?

So, what exactly is the point of refusing solutions to problems upon which most all (reasonable) people can agree, such as the ever-increasing scarcity and cost of petroleum-based fuels, the social and environmental pollution of automobile culture, or the isolation and ghettoization of urban spaces?  The simplest explanation is often that those who stand for the status quo have their own dogs in the fight.  I’m not much for conspiracies myself, but they certainly aren’t unprecedented.  Take, for instance, the great highway robberies of the 1940′s and 50′s: it’s been well established that the transformation of American cities from transit- to car-based spaces, from mixed-use developments to suburbia unsurvivable sans automobile, was no accident, but bore the particular mark of interests invested in particular forms of mobility.  Unless, of course, you work for the Cato Institute, but therein lies another dog: it exists only thanks to funding from, and in order to replicate and justify the ideology of, the oil billionaire Koch brothers.  And given the continuing prominence of the auto and oil lobbies in public policymaking and electioneering, it should be no surprise that their beneficiaries in the halls of government choose the long and difficult road of collapsitarianism, rather than the easier path of choosing to adequately build out technologies of tomorrow to serve broader public interests and more sustainable, less isolated styles of development.

It would, of course, be too easy to just sit back and complain.  Is it really enough, after all, to just identify the source of the problem?  To do so would simply replicate the behavior described above.  The problem isn’t really the immense staying power of lobbies, as every major industry has them.  The problem is really that we give their arguments so much credence, and that as a result, the level of discussion of policies as a means to solve problems remains superficial.  Mull this one, for instance: the “debate” over use of Canada’s tar sands is not really one at all, but merely ships passing in the night.  Are ”Oil creates jobs!” (all industries do, though, so it’s really a non-point) or “Hundreds of millions of Americans depend on cars!” (a bit of a scarecrow, that, as it’s not the only way to get you there) really responses to “Mining tar sands devastates the local environment and First Nation communities, and exacerbates anthropogenic climate change”?  Neither side really does much to deny the validity of the other’s point.  But from a bird’s-eye view, it is possible to see that there really are some answers out there, and that there is no ideologically neutral choice in the menu of options supposedly handed to us by The Powers That Be.  Rather than accept ideologically loaded points at their face value, then, and in turn act as if economic development and protection of basic environmental and health standards were inherently at odds with each other, we might instead ask ourselves not merely “what is the best way to continue doing what we do today?” but instead, ”what are the systems that might serve both of these perceived needs?” In such a manner we might go about finding real answers.

But first, we must find the actual will to do so.

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Heavy Metal

Posted by wastedenergy on January 5, 2011

It’s not just rare earths that are getting noticeably rarer these days.  The coppers and silvers seem to be in scarce supply, too, but it’s not because we traded in all our chips to “go green.” 

Before we get deeper into that, though, a new year always calls for predictions.  After all, here in the tubes, we’re always on the lookout for the trend spotters, those who know about the “next big thing” before it happens - and where would we be if we had no basis for determing whose end-of-the-world forecast turns out to be most accurate?  Just as importantly, we need to provide ammunition to the cornucopian crowd, so that they can point out just how off base our predictions were (like they did with Limits to Growth, remember?) and thereby prove that business-as-usual can (and should!) continue indefinitely.

I predict, therefore, that in 2011, the U.S. federal government will continue to exempt hydraulic fracturing from its environmental protections, passing the buck back down to cash-strapped and understaffed state enforcement agencies to contend with the outsized interests of the fossil fuel business, even as evidence will continue to mount that improper management of flowback fluids from fracturing operations constitute a hazard to residents in major drilling areas.  In 2011, regional fuel shortages of the type we saw in 2010, like the UK’s periodic Gas Balancing Alerts and the regional diesel outages we saw in China, will become more pronounced and longer-lasting as aging infrastructure is strained and producers struggle to keep up output in old giant oil and gas fields (I won’t bother making a prediction about prices because that’s like trying to predict the behavior of hamsters on crystal meth).  And in 2011, you’ll hear even more than you did last year about how shortages of rare earth metals, and maybe a few other things too, are of “mounting concern” to the political and media classes, especially as such shortages pertain to the “clean energy economy.”  The implicit message will be that the included technologies are “unreliable” and therefore we needn’t worry about transitioning off our transition fuel because did I mention natural gas is cheap and super abundant?  This message brought to you by ExxonMobil.

I can pretty much guarantee your Congresspersons won’t get too worked up about rare earths, though.  After all, they have it a lot better than a good chunk of their constituents: they have jobs, and very likely other engagements to which they can return if they lose their seats.  So they probably aren’t going to get too worried about a hike in the price of a flat-screen TV, and especially not the price of thin-film solar panels that probably didn’t interest them in the first place.  They might be more concerned about the effects on gasoline prices if material shortages crimped the catalytic cracking capacity of our oil refineries, assuming they understand there would be any effect at all.  But what really gets their goat is the thought of paying a few more pennies to China for materials used in military technology, never mind that they were asleep at the helm for fifteen years while the U.S. already came to depend on China for these materials.  It’s worth mentioning that if current trends continue in the zinc market, we might also be paying China a few more pennies for pennies too – in fact, some analysts believe we are just a few years off the from the peak of global zinc production.  Not bad for a base metal, huh?

In any case, what seems to be causing a lot more angst than the steady disappearance of the world’s high-grade mineral deposits is the steady growth of negative digits in our imaginary beanpile.  Now, I don’t mean to diminish it (the beanpile) by means of some claim that all wealth is imaginary or even a stale critique of a “fiat currency” system.  From where I stand, it doesn’t matter much in the long run what exchange medium is used, or whether growth in nominal terms (GDP) continues or whether the supply of money increases or decreases, other than effects on the distribution (not the total quantity) of real wealth.   Gold sitting in a vault won’t be anymore helpful than cash in a mattress if things get bad enough that our real wealth (things like cities, vehicles, farms, oilfields and power plants) reach some entropic state wherein they are no longer useful, right?  Unless I’m missing something – but it seems to me that gold itself has no utility other than as decoration (probably the not the first thing on your mind in that situation) or possibly roofing (although thatching will probably be easier).  If you ever want to witness an amusing display of mental gymnastics, get a gold standard true believer to explain her view of economics to you – just make sure you have an escape route planned beforehand, as they tend to be on the longwinded side.

Not a very nutritious diet for growing an economy…perhaps next time we should try real beans instead?

Most economists and politicians making decisions on such matters in this country, like most members of the general public, do not have a clear grasp of the relationship between natural capital and real wealth beyond simple monetary value.  Instead, the physical economy is subsumed by a larger myth that lies somewhere between Manifest Destiny and the American Dream.  When white settlers first began to occupy the New World, an abundance of natural wealth seemed to lie in all directions.  Armed with the confidence of Divine Providence, they set about their sacred task of bringing light into the wilderness: thus were the Eastern forests cleared, the coalfields of Pennsylvania and hematite ores of Minnesota depleted, the oilfields of Texas squeezed dry, the sands of New Mexico stripped of radioactive isotopes, the wild stocks of North Atlantic cod and Pacific Northwest salmon trawled up, the fossil lakes of the Midwest poured into the oceans, the mangroves of Florida cleared for exurbs, the waters permafracked in the name of “energy independence.”  Wait, what was that last part?  Independence – from what?  From whom?   Can it be true that the ”magic of the market” is unable make resources simply appear out of thin air after all – at least not where we can get to them?  Might our destiny not be so manifest in the end?  Best to distract ourselves from the possibility of having our myths shattered; instead, let us split hairs over the inability to precisely pin down dates and definitions of “peak oil” and the like, as if, nits safely picked, we have proved the theory that “ingenuity” can indeed substitute for finite resources.  Also, it would be reassuring if we could go back and see what’s been said over the past few years to find some horribly off-base predictions, since if a critic is wrong once, it means we must be right.  That’ll show those “peakists!”

Of course the depletion of our natural wealth cannot be unrelated to the mess of debt we’re in, even if the “peak stuff” story is complicated by external political and economic factors from time to time.  Do you feel as if you’ve been asked to do more for less lately?  The story is the same in the workplace as in our extractive industries: the easy work is over, and the low-hanging fruit is gone.  The size of the rock from which we must mine the same amount of money – excuse me, the same amount of wealth, as these concepts should not be confused – has increased.  You’re going to have to work harder for your zinc from now on.

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

The EV Fallacy

Posted by wastedenergy on December 14, 2010

Does a Nissan Leaf or a GM Volt really use considerably less energy than a comparable conventional compact or midsize sedan?  Could the same reasoning given for seductive ”100+ mpg” and “Zero Emissions” stickers be used for more insidious purposes? With the first shipment of 2011 model electric passenger vehicles ready to hit the streets and plug-in hype at an all-time high, it’s worth considering the implications of the EV methodology from the EPA (no, not the Electric Plug-in Association) and all its faults for another measure used to compare energy options: the energy return on investment (EROI) of primary fuels.  In fact, the same rationale used to justify head-scratching mileage ratings is used in a misleading context to make sources of renewable energy, such as the sun, appear less attractive in terms of energy return than conventional dirty coal and oil.

The biggest problem with 100+ mpg ratings for vehicles of the plug-in type is that primary fuels, or slightly refined derivatives thereof, are compared directly to units of electricity.   It should be noted that electricity does not simply come out of the ground as do coal or oil; it is a highly refined and nearly universal energy carrier whose versatility gives it far greater utility to society than raw fuel with its limited direct uses.  But according to the methodology of EPA, “a BTU is a BTU,” and units of electrical energy can be compared directly to the energy content of primary fuels such as gasoline and diesel fuel.  This is rather like comparing oranges to orange juice.  The high apparent efficiency of electric vehicles derives from the actual inefficiency in converting thermal energy to usable electric or motive energy (and in fact the conversion between these two forms is also close to 100% efficient).  If you want to know how many “gasoline gallon equivalents” any vehicle is actually using, simply multiply the given mileage using the EPA method by the conversion efficiency of the power plant used to generate its motive power.  In the case of a conventional vehicle, the power plant sits under the hood.  In the case of the typical U.S. grid mix, the power plant sits on somebody else’s backyard and is usually around 33% efficient.  So your 120 “mpg” EV actually gets, all told, around 40 miles per “gallon-equivalent” of its primary fuel, assuming you charge it from the grid.  Not too shabby, but 40 is not the same as 120.

Similarly, when considering the EROI of primary energy sources used to generate electricity as a secondary carrier, one often encounters analyses that limit the study of coal, for instance, to the EROI at the mine-mouth.  But an EROI of 80:1 for simply getting rocks out of the ground does not give us much useful information to compare to potential alternatives.  Even if all electric power were generated directly at the mine-mouth (and we know that is not the case), we would still need to know the energy losses associated with conversion to electricity.  Converting thermal energy from a coal fire in turn to steam, to the mechanical energy of a rotating turbine, and finally to the energy carried by electrical currents induced in a power plant’s connection to the grid, introduces losses, mostly in the form of waste heat, at each step.  So if the EROI for the thermal energy content of mine-mouth coal is 80, then the EROI for mine-mouth-coal-generated electricity is roughly a third of that figure, or around 27:1, based on the conversion efficiency of typical power plants. 

Comparable figures to primary fuel EROI for most renewable energy sources makes little sense – the primary energy converted into electricity, e.g. sunlight or wind, is free, in both monetary and energy terms.  Instead, the ultimate EROI of wind- or PV-generated electricity is used as the basis for comparison, usually yielding relatively lower figures such as 8:1 for photovoltaics or 19:1 for wind power.  While we may also charge certain support infrastructure, such as long-distance transmission or energy storage, as additional energy costs unique to renewable energy in determining EROI, these considerations are no different from assessing the energy costs of networks of pipelines and railroads needed to support fossil fuel consumption, and such costs are (in the case of renewables) of far lower magnitude than the 60-70% losses of primary energy associated with thermal power plants.  And while 8:1 or 19:1 may still be lower than 27:1 (which should be an upper bound for the EROI of coal-fired electricity, given that any transportation beyond the mine-mouth will lower the ultimate EROI), these numbers are also a far cry from the 80:1 figures that make renewable technologies appear ridiculous by comparison.

Hopefully it is clear that my goal here is not to disparage the EV but to promote a clearer understanding of how to compare apples to apples.  And heck, the EV is better than nothing – we’ve known petroleum was unsustainable for about as long as we’ve been using it to carry around ourselves and our stuff, and what could be better evidence than the daily transfer of over $1 billion in wealth every day from Americans to petroleum exporting nations thanks to our gas-guzzling habits?  It is undoubtedly a good thing that automakers have had the foresight to put into production advanced models that can convert different forms of energy into propulsion power and conserve energy that would otherwise be wasted in transit.  But we cannot act as if the EV, should it prove a viable replacement for a major share of transportation, gives us a blank check to continue our happily motoring culture and all its trappings of luxury without considering the physical limitations of the biosphere and humanity’s existence within the larger ecosystems on which it depends.  

Case in point: what we call primary fuels are, in fact, secondary products of the bounty of sunlight harvested over eons by the Earth’s organisms.  Solar energy remains the only primary energy source directly driving the vast majority of life processes, and as a consequence the replenishment of fuels on which we depend is fixed at a certain rate given the biophysical conditions under which minable fossil fuels deposits can form.  Fossil fuels may have given us the temporary illusion of freedom from Earth’s primary productivity, but the overall energy balance equation hasn’t changed much over billions of years.  When one considers ancient photosynthetic and geologic conditions as input requirements, and the impossibility of recreating those conditions on timescales meaningful to humans, the long-term EROI of fossil fuels really doesn’t look so good.

“No it doesn’t!”

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

A Bright Future

Posted by wastedenergy on December 9, 2010

Watch out for snakes!  These guys and their kin are all over the press these days, including one of Shell, Exxon, and BP’s preferred dumping grounds.
 

We could start with the statement that the U.S. has “more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil,” which is clearly meaningless.  They love throwing these kinds of numbers around because most Americans don’t know the first thing about what is really the same and different about the king of supergiant oilfields in the heart of the Arabian oil province and a hyper-dispersed, hyper-expensive, unconventional and intrinsically lower-quality resource here in North America.  The gas guys don’t like to talk about it much, but if you ask them directly, they’ll tell you nobody is exactly champing at the bit to go drill all those shale gas acres they keep talking up to their shareholders and anyone else who will listen.  That is, not unless they can do it with Other People’s Money.

You might not have noticed, being distracted by the return of $90 oil and all, but the price of natural gas is also creeping upward these days, toward $5 per thousand cubic feet.  Weren’t we talking about $3 gas just a few months ago?  But the current price rise looks like a tiny blip compared to the wild price swings of the past decade, when $13 and $14, roughly equal to the price of oil today on a per BTU basis, could be reached from prices at half that level or even less in a matter of just months.  Why did the price go down so suddenly?  The conventional wisdom, which as usual turns out to be not so wise, is that the shale gas drilling boom has brought a flood of low-cost gas onto the market and depressed prices.  That’s half true: there was a lot of drilling, but a lot of it was subsidized at a loss by the shareholders of the various members of America’s Natural Gas Alliance.  The gas companies were making money, but it was because they weren’t paying anywhere close to the full costs of drilling and fracking all those wells.  As long as some new suckers could always be convinced to pave the way, they went right along their business of driving their big old trucks (did I remember to mention that the natural gas industry relies heavily on oil?) up to those wells and fracking away at gas they could then sell to another batch of suckers at hedged prices.  Through a combination of creative financing, sleight of hand, and a devilishly convincing PR game, they were able to convince most of us, including those whose votes of confidence count the most, that expensive gas, gas that cost more and more to produce with each new field being developed, was actually cheap.

Well, as it turns out, the latest suckers just got swept into office and now sit in state houses from sea to shining sea.  Since the federal government still hasn’t regulated hydraulic fracturing, that leaves state governments, already in a deep financial hole, now in a regulatory black hole at the same time.  (Sidebar: what was it Tom Friedman said about what you should do when you’re in multiple holes at the same time?  That’s right: BRING SHOVELS!)  The reason New York is forced to outright ban fracturing is the same reason Pennsylvania has forsaken any meaningful attempt to regulate it or to improve its own dire financial straits by taxing a practice with the potential to cause – excuse me, which already has caused –  widespread contamination of critical water resources throughout the state, not to mention the industry’s own taxing of state infrastructure.  It will be interesting to compare the two states going forward, each sitting atop monstrous swaths of potential gas fields, and see whether the people of Pennsylvania in fact come to feel that their decision to allow unconventional gas drilling to go forward unregulated was the correct one.  Either way, the causes of both divergent policies are the same: the outsize political clout of the oil and natural gas industry and its ability to create special exemptions and loopholes for itself and even to get its CEO’s installed as vice presidents by an eager-beaver conservative Supreme Court.  This industry doesn’t just want to convince the public of its benefits; it will also shove itself down anyone’s throat who disagrees, courtesy of their tap water.

One of the most popular lines used to sell natural gas is that it will make us less dependent on oil.  Of course, gas is not a substitute for oil: the vast majority of natural gas is used for industrial, commercial and residential heating alongside electricity generation.  Very little petroleum is used for these purposes except in a handful of mostly remote locales; around 3% of total electricity generation in the U.S. comes from petroleum, compared to around a quarter from natural gas.  But the promoters continue to use the line anyway, suggesting that the alternative to natural gas development is to send more energy dollars overseas to oil producers, instead of supporting domestic production of renewable energy.  To be fair, many supporters of renewable electricity proposals such as wind and solar power also suggest that their chosen technology is in itself an alternative to oil.  And while there may be some utility for natural gas as a transportation fuel – say, for fleet vehicles that can be reliably refilled at the same location each night, such as buses or taxi cabs – it is totally impractical as a fuel for a primary family vehicle or for long-distance trucking, as even the biggest proponents of natural gas vehicles acknowledge.  At most perhaps a quarter of the U.S. vehicle fleet could be converted to run on natural gas – at great expense, and doing nothing to obviate the need for alternatives to oil that can properly serve the other 75% of Americans’ transportation needs. 

What natural gas could do, assuming there were actually enough of it to go around for any purpose for which one cared to use it, is replace a significant share of the nearly half of U.S. electricity production currently generated in coal-fired power plants.  Of course, renewable energy technologies backed by effective support infrastructure could effectively accomplish the same goal, and they could do so on a far more permanent basis and even (over the long run) at significantly lower costs than using natural gas.  But those in the oil and gas business seem to prefer the line that gas will get you off oil.  I guess that makes it easier to sell than calling attention to the polluting effects of coal, potentially undermining the industry’s position by risking broader public scrutiny of sustainability (and pollution) effects of energy choices in general.  They don’t want people to understand that sooner or later, we’ll all be freed from our addiction to fossil fuels whether we like it or not, that the only real question is what price will be paid for continually delaying the day of reckoning, and that ultimately conservation and renewable energy are the only viable options to avoid an inevitable fossil energy crash and all its attendant consequences for the resilience of the ecosystems we must continue to rely upon after the fact.  Sooner or later, Mustang Sally must slow that Mustang down, you won’t be able to get a Cadillac for no money down anymore, and there will be no more fun once Daddy takes away that T-bird.

I’m sure there are a few people out there who will read this entry and immediately accuse me of “alarmism,” as if the preferable option were to keep the alarms silent and the public in the dark, shielded from the harsh truth of our unsustainable energy trajectory and its consequences for the human species and planet Earth.  “Millions of wells have been fracked without incident,” they will say.  Fine, then: let the oil and gas drillers simply play by the same rules as everyone else.  Revoke the exemptions to the Safe Drinking Water Act and force companies to fully disclose any chemicals used in drilling fluids that may be associated with health and environmental hazards.  To use a line the conservatives who deliver political favors to these oilmen love: if they have nothing to hide, they should have nothing to fear.

That the fossil fuel interests shroud themselves in such secrecy and demand special protection from the laws everyone else must follow in itself tells us enough to know that something must be amiss.

In conclusion: “Natural gas,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at a recent press conference, “has a bright future.”  Let’s hope he doesn’t mean it will brighten our skies with flames from a vaporized LNG cloud explosion or some similar WMD-scale disaster related to our fossil fuel extravagance.  Gas, alongside its cousin oil, will surely play a major role in the course of human events over the coming age as humanity brushes up close against its geophysical limits.  But it just might not be quite the gas America’s Natural Gas Alliance wanted you to have in mind.

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Highway to Hell

Posted by wastedenergy on October 31, 2010

Welcome to Fort Chipwyan, Alberta.  If you’re looking to cash in on Canada’s “oil” boom, here is where you want to be. 

Whether we’re talking about building, grading, and widening highways to accommodate McMansion-sized trucks and whole factories being hauled to the site, or the tar sand itself being transported and processed by those vehicles and equpiment, shoveling asphalt is the only game in town.  You don’t have to drive a tar sand truck or work in an upgrading plant, but whether you work laying down airstrips or milling steel for new pipelines, there’s many a bucktoothed buck to be made in selling your soul to Syncrude.  99% of the universe here is composed of dark energy. 

It’s a pretty good deal for everyone involved, unless of course you happen to be one of the few remaining quaint folk who prefer to live off the fruits of the land rather than profiting off fuel shipped in from the underworld.  Thin strips of land separate the tar sands operations and the vast pits of waste sludge they produce from the Athabasca river and its headwaters, the essence of life for countless generations of farming and fishing communities.  Crops, livestock, fish, and people now die bearing mysterious markings and tumors never before seen by the First Nation elders of these communities.  Government officials and university professors living off the oil dole from boomtowns named after the original people to inhabit this countryside dismiss their concerns over the water’s toxicity as just so much “folklore” and hogwash.  Perhaps a healthy environment is something citizens of Earth should be prepared to give up in the name of progress, as the lands once known for their bounty are covered over in pavement and plastic.

We now travel a few hundred miles west, where something strange is afoot in a remote corner of British Columbia.  The zombie invasion, we shall soon see, is no longer limited to Alberta and the Gulf of Mexico, and the infestation has begun to feed on anything it can find that hasn’t already been chewed up by mountain pine beetles:

Look a little bit closer, and some familiar patterns begin to take shape:

What we are looking at in these photos is, of course, the signature “circuit board” pattern of fracking, the process now used to unlock much of the energy used to keep spinning the wheels of the oil machines over in Alberta.  North American natural gas, the primary fuel used to boil tar out of the ground and upgrade it to synthetic crude oil throughout an ever-increasing share of Canada’s middle provinces, has already peaked and has been in decline for the past decade.  And the tar sands are always hungry for more gas.  Look a little bit closer, and the thoroughness of the change that is happening becomes clear.  Some of the last remaining wild lakes and rivers in the whole continent now sit adjacent to massive industrial operations, where a single careless spill or feckless operator has the potential to poison vast and formerly unspoiled ecosystems for generations to come.  These remote waters are now being tapped.

You’re probably saying to yourself: wait a second.  Isn’t natural gas supposed to be abundant in North America?  It’s touted as an “alternative” fuel, even though it already makes up a quarter of the continent’s energy mix.  But supposedly we’re sitting on a veritable bonanza of cheap methane, much of it in the form of shale gas, tight gas sandstone, coalbed methane, and such “unconventional” gas sources, right?  And all of it is going to cost $3.50 per thousand cubic feet to develop and bring to market, so cheap we can afford to put off living sustainably for as long as anyone alive today cares…no?

The media echo chamber continues to recite the conventional wisdom that technological breakthroughs are responsible for the oversupply of gas that has depressed prices this season.  Meanwhile, the gas producers themselves have begun to sing a different tune and are now liquidating their assets to those able to bail out the industry, as revenues at such low prices are unable to keep up with the costs of production.  The trend over the past several months has been increasing consolidation of smaller, independent gas-drillers into large multinational corporations with diverse portfolios and a wider range of hedging options.  The likes of Exxon-Mobil and the China National Offshore Oil Company are the kind of names you see coming up in the news about shale gas today, but it’s not because they think the gas is going to come for cheap.  It’s because these are the companies that have the cash flows and deep pockets to hold onto undeveloped land and poor-performing wells while the price of natural gas recovers from years of continuous new drilling subsidized by swindled shareholders and high costs hidden by arcane accounting procedures. In the meantime, the executives of these companies continue to talk up their gas plays in an effort to convince the public and the market to continue to support gas development off which they have no intention of making a profit anytime soon, at least not until the gas markets witness another one of the price surges we have started to see over the past decade.

Meanwhile, as more and more fracks per well are used, the energy and water intensity of the process expands: the amount of energy consumed by trucks hauling fluid and equipment to and from drilling and disposal sites, and the energy needed to process and transport the produced fluids and gas skyrockets along with the water consumed to drill each new well.  As gas from wells fracked dozens of times in British Columbia flows eastward to the Alberta tar sands, more oil is needed to produce more of this “natural” gas, which in turn is needed to produce more oil.

 

As the circle formed by such a tail-chasing operation continually expands and a surplus of energy production disappears, less energy, and hence less wealth, becomes available to the rest of society, until finally the profit of fossil energy completely disappears and energy production itself becomes impossible to sustain.  By the time we catch on to what is happening, will there be anything left to keep us cruising down our own highways?

What we are talking about is not new technology, of course – just look at how the industry likes to bring up the “50,000 wells that have been successfully fracked without incident over the last fifty years.”  What we really mean is the application of old technology, formerly used to squeeze the last bits of juice out of dying wells, as the now-mainstream means of acquiring onshore oil and gas in the United States and Canada.  The process mimics what is happening in the tar sands, as the toxic byproducts of an energy- and water-intensive process claim a growing share of ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.  What we have now begun to do is multiple-frack the countryside in all corners of the continent to free up the last few little pockets of energy, in a vain attempt to stave off the ever-dwindling gap between what the rest of the world can afford to export and what we can afford to consume.  In other words, it is the classic story of peak oil and gas: newer, more expensive technology and methods used to access and process ever-smaller and more remote resources of continually lower quality.  If it can’t go on indefinitely, it won’t.

Whatever the noise of the market says from day to day, the signal only points in one direction.

Creepy…Happy Halloween

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

ASPO-USA World Oil Conference: Day 1 Report

Posted by wastedenergy on October 8, 2010

Day 1 of ASPO-USA’s conference was an enlightening perspective from a good number of viewpoints on a variety of environmental and energy matters concerning us today and tomorrow.  It was a great privilege to attend a meeting of so many minds today, but I do have to say, I was a little disappointed in the turnout.  Very few public officials seemed to feel the matter of peak oil and energy and resource security matters deserved their attention on this first day of the conference, and only a handful of media were on hand to record today’s proceedings.

I felt a real diversity in the audience and speakers was lacking as well.  As I scanned over the audience and listened to today’s questions (didn’t manage to get myself called on today, but we’ll see if I can get the moderator’s attention at Arthur Berman’s session tomorrow) there was certainly a diversity of intellectual viewpoints expressed, but it was disappointing to look out onto a sea of mostly white, middle-aged faces.  It is our younger generation that holds the greatest stake in the critical resource and environmental challenges of tomorrow, and we must begin to speak out for ourselves and our own interests in these issues that will define our future and the fate of the world in the century and more to come.  Just as importantly, it is imperative that the voices of communities of color be heard, who have very often been and are still today disproportionately affected by many of the environmental and public health hazards created by our modern, industrial-energy-based society.  To consider a path forward on energy without paying heed to environmental justice matters is to ignore the very most pressing problems of environmental health, the toxic byproduct from communities handed the privilege of outsourcing their ecological footprint to someone else’s backyard.

While the conference provided a great deal of analysis on the availability of oil and other fossil fuels, another matter needing attention that was scarcely discussed was the impending and critical shortage of many other mineral resources, perhaps most importantly including rare earth minerals, and the urgent need to develop practical and environmentally sound ways of developing supply chains for not just energy, but all the minerals we take for granted that have become so important to such modern luxuries as radar systems, hard drives, cellular phones, hybrid car batteries, gearless wind turbines, and of course, oil refining catalysts.  A presentation providing an update on rare earth and other critical material issues would certainly be more than appropriate considering the subject matter dealt with at this event (Hint: ASPO, I’d be more than happy to fill this role for you or moderate such a session if needed at next year’s conference, and may or may not know one or two other people who could talk about it too, unless the shortage hits before October 2011 and spells The End Of The World As We Know It).

HIGHLIGHT: Catching a Cheseapeake Energy employee making an offhand remark to the woman sitting next to her about the climate change sessions being “balderdash.”  Very professional, and bonus points for using a word seldom heard since the 18th century.  Her comment went a long way toward showing just how much the natural gas companies really care about building climate-friendly bridges to the future, or whether they are really just interested in making a quick buck off those who might otherwise make an actual difference and in the process burn down some of those same bridges.

Some of the more memorable sessions I attended today:

Jeffrey Brown, independent petroleum geologist, spoke about the effect of net oil exports on the availability of the petroleum fuels we so take for granted in virtually everything in society that moves.  The supply of total world oil production and the amount that is actually exported from the countries producing it, from the standpoint of a country that imports the vast majority of its oil like, say, the United States of America, is actually a lot more important than the effects of the ”global peak” (which, incidentally, already occurred, back in late 2004).  The take-home point was that we all need to start thinking about the peak oil issue @ way sooner than right now, and going back to just yesterday won’t even help in the slightest.

Jonathan Callahan informed us that Gas Balancing Alerts were forced three times in the United Kingdom last year, and while he believes overall world production of natural gas will continue to increase, natural gas is of course a regional game, and it is in the very near future (actually, the present) that natural gas and other shortages will begin to rear their ugly heads in the UK and elsewhere.  Don’t hold your breath for an explosion in U.S. shale gas availability either, although given the amount of fracking going on over here, you might want to just hold your breath in general.

Oh, and of course, lest you forgot about China’s coal-truck-induced 20-day traffic jams, China is burning a lot of coal.  A lot lot lot.  India too.  Also, the United States and the rest of the world still burn a lot of coal – even more than before, in fact.  All told, pretty much more coal all around than anyone in their right mind can possibly imagine, and definitely way more than anyone would ever want to.  In fact, we burn so much coal that we may darn well be pretty tootin’ close to doing something a lot of people thought we could never ever do: run out of it.

Quick question I never got to ask Dave Summers, (Heading Out over on TheOilDrum), just to play devil’s advocate: According to Dave, the claim by some recently published research that we have already reached global peak coal production is false because unlike oil, we can directly measure how much coal remains by going underground and looking at the “thickness,” and we know a lot still remains.  While some coal reserves have been downgraded to mere resources, he asserts that as the global coal price rises, they will surely be upgraded to reserves again.  My question: if the price of coal rises, why the hell are we still mining coal?  I thought the only reason we mined it was because it was so cheap, at least until you start actually putting a price on its pollution?  And isn’t it a bit of an oversimplification to outright dismiss alternative energy technologies while reducing modern coal mining to “a pick and a shovel”?  One could just as easily say solar energy is as simple as planting trees, or that wind energy is as simple as putting up a sail (actually, come to think of it, they are).  Unlike a few professed photovoltaic “skeptics” (you can show someone something a billion times and they’ll still be convinced it doesn’t work), we know there are actual alternatives to burning coal to generate what people are actually looking for.  Sure, we’ll still have plenty of coal for the future – coal to hopefully make into graphene and activated carbon.  We just won’t have enough to burn for energy.

Finally, in what certainly seems to me to be an abuse of the ”net energy” concept and a little graphplay that hopefully wasn’t lost upon an audience that professes not to be innumerate, I’m sure the Dutch will be interested to know that you can’t actually get any energy from the wind (and I guess unlike oil and gas, better technogy doesn’t improve the outlook either).  What a shame.

Looking forward to Day 2, and I’ll do my best to be a real thorn in everyone’s side!

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

Pop Go The Weasels

Posted by wastedenergy on October 7, 2010

The oil and gas people are lucky almost nobody reads their industry news save for themselves.  Because when you take a look at what the insiders have been saying lately, you get the sense that they agree with what I, and the other skeptics, have been saying, a lot more than they might care to admit directly.  If  you read the linked article here carefully, you’ll notice that the latest industry talk concerning shale gas, which is supposed to be America’s reliable domestic energy source for the next “hundred years” or so, is all about the poor performance of existing “shale plays” and the inability of exploration and production interests to make back anywhere close to the amount of money they have sunk into drilling wells and building pipelines, especially at the prices of gas being traded today on the New York Mercantile Exchange, as if a single price were even capable of representing the different costs of bringing natural gas to market in all the different regions of the country.

So that whole cheap, clean, abundant natural gas thing is all a myth, no matter how much industry mavens like Chesapeake want to promote it, particularly all over the Metro station that services the U.S. Capitol.  Not that I have any idea why they would have chosen that particular site to sell their message.  After all, most of our policymakers are well-versed in energy and natural resource issues, and surely they wouldn’t be fooled by an industry-led P.R. campaign.

In any case, the point to keep in mind about “energy tomorrow” in the form of natural gas or any other fossil fuel (we seem to be at the peak of global coal production as well) is that either it ain’t cheap, or it just won’t be there (as in, it won’t be in our pipelines anytime soon).

What exactly would be the reason for papering over the bubble?  Who benefits?  Certainly not skeptics of the optimistic outlook speaking the truth within the industry, like Arthur Berman.  It seems dissent is not tolerated within this industry.  And certainly not consumers, who will have to pay the cost of whatever energy we are using, even if investment decisions are based on false and even intentionally misleading assumptions about what kinds of energy really are expensive.  It does look like there might be some benefit for the oil and gas producers, however.  There is a certain weaselish quality in the rhetoric of the natural gas promoters in particular, selling the idea that we can have cheap energy as long as we increase our investment in gas production, infrastructure, and electrical generating facilities while simultanously using today’s low gas prices as a reason to avoid a full-on commitment to renewables.  It was only January back when Boone Pickens was telling us he was all but ready to get out of the wind energy business altogether and cancelling his turbine orders because the price of natural gas was so cheap.  Now he’s saying natural gas rigs should remain idle until the price rises because it’s impossible to make back the cost of marginal production at current prices. 

So which is it, Boone?  Is gas cheap or expensive?  I don’t care about the gas in the pipeline today; “today” is the least important time when talking about energy.  Tell me something that actually matters in determining what kind of energy investments we should be making for tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.

Remember, different energy sources, with different manufacturing bases requiring expansion under different strategies, still compete against each other for their respective share of the energy market.  There’s no real reason why you need natural gas before you can build renewables; all it really does is expand the existing manufacturing base and production infrastructure to make the United States and the world more dependent on fossil fuels.  Where incrementalism might make sense in building up the capability to shift to renewable energy, it makes no sense at all in committing to half-measures that do nothing but reinforce a status quo that cannot be sustained.  The gas just isn’t there.

Why does ultra-short-term price matter at all?  Power generating facilities are long-term capital investments.  The energy we use today is a result of decisions made decades ago; we need to think about 10-, 25-, 50- and even 100-year prospects, not the price of oil and gas today or the day-to-day movement of markets, based on factors that could not be more irrelevant to much-needed long-term planning prospects.  Moreover, over that long run, the price of natural gas, or any other finite energy source, only moves in one direction.  So even if natural gas really is a viable “transition fuel” – and given the emphasis of the ad campaigns on how we have supposedly barely scratched the surface of its potential, it seems some have already lost sight of the transition concept – completing the transition through a robust commitment to truly clean energy, renewable energy, is at least as important as the initial, gas-powered phases.

I’m off now to this year’s ASPO-USA conference here in Washington.  I hope to learn something new and connect with other truth-minded individuals more interested in the big picture of resource constraints tomorrow than in making a quick buck today.  Hopefully I will be able to do a bit of liveblogging, or at least post-blogging, during and after the conference, and I will be sure to report back anything especially interesting that I hear while in attendance.  Wish me luck!

Posted in Energy Consumption | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Playing With Fire

Posted by wastedenergy on September 11, 2010

By all accounts, 2010 has not been a good year in the press for fossil fuel interests.  The media furor surrounding the Deepwater Horizon blowout that killed eleven rig workers and the subsequent release of nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico highlighted some of the risks associated with continued reliance on increasingly remote energy resources in challenging and hostile territory.  The coverage has raised the profile of discussions surrounding a host of other incidents that might otherwise be considered unfortunate but rather mundane and un-newsworthy, from major mining accidents around the world to a pair of ruptured pipelines carrying synthetic crude from the Canadian tar sands, and even another, albeit smaller, rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this month (though no one was injured and, so far as anyone has been able to tell, no additional oil has been released as a result of this particular incident).  Meanwhile, the rhetoric in public discussions over how to manage the problem of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels heated up along with the weather this summer, with Bill McKibben’s F-bombs speaking for many other advocates for change as the U.S. Senate deferred action on the issue and the EPA assured industry leaders that its regulatory approach would not be too tough on business.

If public scrutiny of fossil fuel businesses goes back at least to the days of Standard Oil, the lines recited by business and government leaders to deflect criticism and assure the public that they are working on the problem and that everything will soon get back to normal certainly come across as old hat as well.  Oil companies’ methods of demonstrating their commitment to our collective energy future and to the development of renewable alternatives and energy efficiency are tried and true, since they perfected the art of appearing profoundly concerned during the oil shocks of the 1970′s that followed the peak in U.S. Lower 48 oil production and OPEC’s subsequent assumption of control of the world supply of oil.  So it is hardly unfair for critics to view as insincere the token commitments we see today, with utilities like Southern Company touting their “common sense” approach to energy (hint: common sense involves an awful lot of coal) and oil majors Exxon-Mobil, Shell and BP investing large-sounding sums, though never quite enough to threaten the viability of their oil business, in development of algal biodiesel, energy efficiency technologies, and solar panels.

One oil billionaire in particular has been making the rounds on the media and public speaking circuit for the past couple of years, talking up a big game about what his umbrella company, BP Capital Management, has been doing to help save America from its energy crisis by investing in gas, gas, gas, more gas, and, on a particularly breezy day, wind power (although only if the price of gas is not too low).  In case you forgot about the other BP, here he is:

The Gasman Cometh: Is the wildcatter and corporate raider ready to fight for a clean energy future?

With some players in the energy business going as far as to claim that the U.S. will become “the next Saudi Arabia of energy” with its vast resource of shale gas, with many businesses and potential leaseholders eager to cash in on a potential drilling boom, and with politicians and industry groups clamoring to proclaim natural gas as “the cleanest fossil fuel,” “a transition fuel,” and “a bridge to America’s Clean Energy Future,” the race is on to tap into sources of gas north, south, east and west. 

Unfortunately, making that transition hasn’t been quite as much of a gas as some of the rhetoric might suggest.  For one thing, Pickens and some of the electric utilities have been a bit wishy-washy on making the transition move past the gas phase: with gas prices so low, they say, there isn’t really much point in dealing with all the hassle of actually doing the renewable part, as it’s just not competitive.  The part you don’t hear about as much is that with gas prices so low, natural gas isn’t really terribly competitive either: the limited field experience with shale gas suggests that the short shelf life of gas wells may not be enough to recoup the investment in more expensive horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology, at least not at today’s prices of $4 or 5 per thousand cubic feet.  The high costs of drilling and widespread reports of contamination of water supplies from drilling fluids also raise questions about the long-term viability of shale gas as an energy source.  And the quantity of oil consumed and pollution generated by trucks carrying drilling fluid and equipment to and from drilling and disposal sites places in doubt many of the potential benefits of gas for cutting consumption of imported oil and cutting pollution from dirtier fossil fuels.  At the very least, companies involved in gas drilling will soon face an additional cost of complying with EPA’s request for information on chemicals used in fracturing fluid, although as per the 2005 U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act, fluid disposal sites will still not be required to comply with the same clean water regulations applied to other industries.

With so much potential resource available, both conventional and unconventional natural gas are sure to continue playing a role in the U.S. energy mix, as they have for decades.  But even the ”cleanest” fossil fuel is hardly as unproblematic or as secure in its long-term supply as its promoters suggest, for both economic and ecological reasons.  And unfortunately, the recent spike in hydraulic fracturing (and, from time to time, in the chemical oxygen demand of the municipal water supply) isn’t the only boom associated with natural gas.  With most of the U.S. reliant on natural gas for heating, we’ve most all become accustomed to inviting the gas man into our homes, but what might really make some of the problems with dependence on any fossil fuel hit home are the big accidents, like the gas pipeline explosion last week in California that left four Bay Area residents dead and turned the surrounding area into a hollow burnt-out shell.  And of course, it was the gas flowing from the Macondo well that ignited aboard the Deepwater Horizon and caused the rig to catch fire and sink on that fateful day in April.  What these accidents and the steady accumulation of hydraulic fracturing horror stories reveal is that in the end, dependence on any finite energy resource means you’re playing the same game: depletion, risks from an ever-expanding network of infrastructure, and continually increasing costs both at the wellhead and to the environment and public health. 

Play with fire, and you’re bound to get burned eventually.

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

Training Wheels

Posted by wastedenergy on September 8, 2010

What has four wheels and flies?  If you guessed “an automobile culture that’s rotten to its core,” you may be onto something.  But what can be done to make it right?

We can start by looking at what makes it wrong, a big part of which is reliance on polluting liquid fuels that just don’t come as easy as they once did.  We already know that a dependence on fossil fuels harms the environment and will make life increasingly difficult for more and more people as we progress into the twenty-first century.  The fuels that remain in the ground are expensive, hard to reach, and often of very low quality, and even those fuels that will be made available will require massive diversions of capital and resources to enormous new production facilities and transportation infrastructure, reprepresenting ever-growing  network of Deepwater Horizons waiting to happen and an escalating assault on the stable climate systems upon which human civilization has been precariously built.  But imagine life with no vehicles, no motorized transport at all, and the consequences are also far more dire than a cancelled vacation here and there.  The inability to maintain efficient networks of transportation and delivery easily means the end of economic growth, and even beyond that, the total collapse of markets, prospects of not just wars but world wars for remaining supplies, and perhaps even the utter end of technological humankind as we know it.  Some people believe it is already too late to do anything about it and that our current economic troubles represent merely the beginning of a much longer, inexorable descent into chaos and societal collapse.  They may be right, and it is a sobering thought indeed.  They are even more likely to be right if we do little to nothing to change our energy consumption patterns in advance of what lies over the horizon.

Clearly, the consequences of an imminent and possibly quite steep decline in supplies of motor fuels are vastly more far-reaching than a few more cents, or even dollars, per gallon.  And yet most of us think nothing of burning a few gallons of the stuff every day taking the kids to soccer practice, or more than a few lifting a giant chunk of metal into the sky to carry us across paltry distances, albeit only after spending an hour or two checking in.  Meanwhile, the political aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon has focused less on viable alternatives and long-term planning and more on meaningless bickering over a moratorium on deepwater drilling, as if that even addressed the issue at hand.  Imagine what it takes to keep pumping a few billion gallons every single day year in and year out, and you get a sense of just how irrelevant any new drilling and any new discoveries will be in prolonging the fantasy of happy motoring.  And it’s not just cars, either: without oil, we can’t run all manner of planes, trains and automobiles, from the tractors working the fields to the trucks that deliver food to the grocery, to all the aircraft packed with fresh off-season produce flown in daily from the other half of the world, never mind all those plastics and industrial materials from fungicide to hand soap.  So regardless of how one might feel about new drilling and pipelines filled with synthetic tar sand crude, it would seem to be a no-brainer to support infrastructure needed to actually get OFF oil in a few areas, and at the very least save what remains for where it is really needed.  Right?

Wrong.  Here you can find yet another case proving that you don’t have to know the first thing about how the world actually works to get a business degree, or even to teach business.  For one thing, it demonstrates the kind of paralytic thinking on investments for the future and myopic focus on immediate short-term matters that has for so long held back economists from adequately performing their charge of helping society make good decisions in allocation of resources, the same sort of thinking that got us to the point of crisis in the first place and now threatens any hope of a real and lasting economic recovery.  Forget the proven track record of high-speed rail in Europe and the fact that China is now making laps around the United States in becoming the technological leader of the new century.  Conveniently ignore that austerity measures help nobody, that no infrastructure project has ever succeeded without the support of government institutions, and that it was the abandonment of government support for critical infrastructure, under the misleading banner of reducing debt, that caused the Great Depression to sink to its lowest depths in the late 1930′s.  Continually call for delay and cancellation of the transition to sustainable transportation infrastructure by reiterating the self-fulfilling prophecy that jobs in manufacturing will be added elsewhere rather than at home.  And never mind the casual sidestepping of the job creation benefits and economic revitalization along new rail corridors in a state like California suffering under staggering unemployment.  It is the following sentence that is especially telling, and troubling, in indicating where we stand on addressing matters of energy and our collective future:

“California doesn’t need high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles: With 10 airports and six competing airlines, we don’t have to worry about one strike or terrorist shutting down the whole system.”

Does anything about the above statement seem a bit odd in light of the physical reality of fossil fuels and the crushing effects of oil dependence upon the economy?  Do the authors truly believe that a terrorist attack is the only thing that could cause a systemic failure in such a transportation network?

It is the total ignorance on matters of natural resources and ecology of today’s business and political leaders, the voices speaking loudest on matters of how to best address, or rather ignore, our economic crisis, that should truly raise alarms.  If leading “thinkers” like these have their way, you can forget about any kind of smooth transition away from the fossil fuel economy.  Theirs is a  prescription to crash and burn, and yet they cannot even see the stakes at hand because the very ideology embedded in their academic and professional training does not allow them to understand or even acknowledge the physical limitations of business-as-usual, as set by immutable geological and ecological principles.  With this level of thinking on economic matters, you can be sure we’ve crossed the bridge to nowhere and are now headed full bore off the cliff and into the sea.  We’d better start laying down some track turning us back around in the opposite direction, and fast.

At long last, it’s time to leave the past behind…

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Urban Planning | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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