Hi. Can we talk?
I'm not sure if you've ever given it much thought but..... we are heading for a measurable and persistent decline in available global energy resources that will eventually leave us in a no-energy world. Seriously!
I assume you have heard about peak oil. Well, it's not just oil. It's natural gas, coal, hydro electricity, nuclear power, virtually all forms of energy. Oh, and of course global warming is happening at the same time. Have you ever considered what all that is going to mean to you? To your lifestyle? To the lives of your children and their children?
No? Well think about it. Please!
I don't want to rain on your parade, put a damper on your party. But things are going to change. Hell, they already are. And not for the better. Maybe you just haven't noticed.
I don't mean for you to become a (pick one; peakster, peaknik, peak-oiler, nut job), although that is certainly an option. But it takes years of study to be able to read between the lines of the utter crap politicians and the mainstream media throws at us as they struggle to avoid talking about reality. But won't you at least look at both sides of the debate? And there is a debate, and will continue to be a debate as long as so much effort is being put into keeping you from seeing the reality of the situation.
Just as denial is no way to deal with grief, it is no way to deal with energy decline and climate change. Sooner or later you have to stop trying to avoid reality and face up to it, however painful that may be.
I'm not going to go into a long song and dance here of trying to overwhelm you with the statistics. I'm not even going to try to convince you that peak oil is real. I have written over a hundred articles on this blog already aimed at doing that. And there are so many other sites doing the same. But a thousand articles aren't going to do the job unless you can be convinced to read them, unless you can be convinced to open your mind. And that is what I am trying to do here.
I know peak oil and the thought of terminal energy decline is scary. Very! I remember years ago when I first understood the implications of peak oil. I was paralyzed with fear. It took me well over a year to accept it as reality and to start looking beyond peak oil to what life is going to be like on the other side. I realized that denying it was not going to stop it from happening. There was going to be a peak and there was going to be a life on the other side of it. If I didn't think about it, allow for it, plan for it, prepare for it, then it was going to just happen to me and I would be caught up in a huge flood of unprepared people struggling trying to adjust to the massive changes it will bring. I didn't want to be part of that flood. And I don't think you do either.
Where do we look for an example of what life will be like in a post-carbon, post-oil, post-energy world? We can look to history, study what life was like before the industrial revolution. We can look to the third world, the poor countries where people live without energy and survive on $2.00 a day. We can look to various TV reality programs that place people intentionally in a non-industrial, agrarian lifestyle for a season, a year, several years. We can look to heritage villages like Toronto's Black Creek Pioneer Village, or Eastern Ontario's Upper Canada Village, or Australia's Olde Sydney Towne. In so many ways the post-carbon world will very likely look and function very much like the pre-carbon, pre-industrial world.
I am, in a sense, luckier than most around me. I can look to my own past, my own upbringing and childhood. Yes! I've been around for a few years. I was raised in a home where we heated with wood. We had a large, multi-tentacled wood furnace in the cellar and a large cookstove in the kitchen. Each year from the time I was twelve I would go with my stepfather and a neighbour out to the woodlot to cut our winter's supply of wood. We had no running water and no well, used an outhouse with old newspapers for toilet paper, bathed immodestly in a galvanized tub on the kitchen floor (in a house with five older sisters), carried pails of water from a neighbours pump a couple hundred yards up the street, got up first on cold winter mornings to restart the fire in the furnace and cookstove and break the ice on top of the water bucket. We closed off a major part of the house in winter to save on heat needs. We packed snow against the outside of the house in winter to help with insulation. The outside of my bedroom window, and other windows, was covered in plastic sheeting from fall until spring. We hard a large half-acre garden that produced much of what went into the cellar in mason jars every fall. For protein my step-father would bag a deer most years and that was supplemented with a couple of galvanized garbage cans full of sucker fish caught in the fall, and the odd stolen chicken through the winter.
You will, I am sure, see hardship in that. I see fond memories. But......... could I go back to living like that again? No. My health is deteriorating and I am getting on in age. If I were younger, yes. I could do it.
But what about you? If you've never lived like that it would be a very hard adjustment to make. I don't think most people could. Sooner or later, though, there may not be a choice. I never gave it a second thought as I was growing up. For a time I guess I never imagined that people could live any other way, at least not until a television found it's way into our home. But if you have lived your entire life in what we see as normal society today, how will you ever adopt to a lifestyle like that in which I was raised? Or even more primitive, like the lifestyle my parents and grandparents grew up with?
Think about it. Please!
Friday, September 25, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
How Much is that Energy Really Worth?
We have long-passed the point where we can continue to value energy in terms of dollars or any other currency. We lost that luxury when the total global production of energy peaked and began to decline, more specifically when the net energy per person went into decline globally.
As in the case of any commodity, when the availability of supply can no longer keep pace with demand then the availability, from that point onward, dictates the price of the commodity. It is no longer a buyer's market.
Global energy consumption per capita peaked sometime during the 1990s. Since that point the global population increase has been greater than the total global increase in energy production and energy consumption.
Although the rate of growth of per capita energy consumption in the US - which today uses roughly 25% of all energy used globally - has decreased from 2.5% in the early 1990s to less than 1.5% in 2008, it is still on the increase. Obviously, with a total global energy supply on the decline and U.S. per capita consumption still on the rise, the percent of total global energy use by the U.S. is on the increase while much of the rest of the world, particularly the third world, are being priced out of the energy market and are already having to cope with ever-decreasing energy availability.
Energy, unlike almost every other commodity, requires the consumption of some of itself - energy - in the production of itself. The more energy we produce the more energy consume in producing it. That is called EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested). It can be difficult to equate one form of energy to another, especially since the pricing of different forms of energy is not consistent when it comes to the value of the energy produced. You will often see the acronym BOE used in regards to energy. This stands for Barrels of Oil Equivalent. And that is very important when trying to understand EROEI.
Let us take that to the extreme for simplicity's sake. Let us suppose the only form of energy available on this planet is oil, rather than the more complex Barrels of Oil Equivalent. The EROEI, therefore, shows how much energy, in the form of oil, is used in order to produce that oil. Obviously you want to use as little oil as possible to produce that oil because it is only the oil produced in excess of the oil used that is available for other uses than producing the oil in the first place.
At the beginning of the oil age it is estimated that the amount of energy used to produce the readily available, high quality oil with which the oil industry began was about one barrel used for every 100 barrels produced. Ninety-nine out of every 100 barrels of oil produced was available to be used for other than producing oil.
In the time since then, of course, the energy cost per barrel of oil produced has steadily risen. On average, when considering all forms of oil like tar sands and deep water, we get a little more than ten barrels of oil for every barrel of oil invested. In fact, when it gets to tar sands and ultra-deep-water oil and bio-fuels produced from corn ethanol, the EROEI ratio gets very close to 1:1. It takes almost the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of oil. If we ever pursue producing oil from the various shale deposits like Bakken it could take more energy to produce every barrel than what we get out of it.
The peak oil theory, contrary to what certain denialists continue to claim, does not suggest we are running out of oil. In fact most knowledgeable peak oil pundits will quickly point out that we will probably never run out of oil completely. What the peak oil theory does say is that we will reach a point where the flow, the rate of production, can no longer be increased, that demand will thereafter be greater than production and that that gap will widen year by year.
Once you pass that peak, as well, the energy gas of the energy produced will increase inexorably, pushing the world ever faster toward depletion. From the peak onward the cheap, easily-accessible, high quality oil has all been consumed. There is still oil left but it is much more expensive, in terms of energy consumption, to produce it. From peak onward, therefore, the amount of oil produced in excess of the amount of oil consumed in its production declines faster than the overall decline in the rate of production.
When the energy consumed in producing a barrel of oil passes the total energy contained in a barrel of oil, it doesn't matter what form of energy is used to produce that oil or what price that energy form is set at. At that point it takes more energy to produce energy than the energy produced. There is no energy surplus, over and above production energy cost, available to do anything other than produce oil.
So how much is our energy really worth, when calculated in terms of energy used in its production? Are we prepared to continue to produce oil and other forms of energy even when it takes more energy to produce it that what we get out of it? It is a question we will soon have to answer if our approach to peak oil continues to be; use as much as we can as long as we can and then figure out what to do for an encore. We don't yet see the net reduction in global energy production, the global energy consumption per capita. That price is being paid by the third world. But reality will soon come home to roost. Soon either the whole rest of the world will have to give up all claims to energy to support North America's energy habit or we will all be in the same rapid race to the bottom, ourselves included. Or we can all fight for what is left.
As in the case of any commodity, when the availability of supply can no longer keep pace with demand then the availability, from that point onward, dictates the price of the commodity. It is no longer a buyer's market.
Global energy consumption per capita peaked sometime during the 1990s. Since that point the global population increase has been greater than the total global increase in energy production and energy consumption.
Although the rate of growth of per capita energy consumption in the US - which today uses roughly 25% of all energy used globally - has decreased from 2.5% in the early 1990s to less than 1.5% in 2008, it is still on the increase. Obviously, with a total global energy supply on the decline and U.S. per capita consumption still on the rise, the percent of total global energy use by the U.S. is on the increase while much of the rest of the world, particularly the third world, are being priced out of the energy market and are already having to cope with ever-decreasing energy availability.
Energy, unlike almost every other commodity, requires the consumption of some of itself - energy - in the production of itself. The more energy we produce the more energy consume in producing it. That is called EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested). It can be difficult to equate one form of energy to another, especially since the pricing of different forms of energy is not consistent when it comes to the value of the energy produced. You will often see the acronym BOE used in regards to energy. This stands for Barrels of Oil Equivalent. And that is very important when trying to understand EROEI.
Let us take that to the extreme for simplicity's sake. Let us suppose the only form of energy available on this planet is oil, rather than the more complex Barrels of Oil Equivalent. The EROEI, therefore, shows how much energy, in the form of oil, is used in order to produce that oil. Obviously you want to use as little oil as possible to produce that oil because it is only the oil produced in excess of the oil used that is available for other uses than producing the oil in the first place.
At the beginning of the oil age it is estimated that the amount of energy used to produce the readily available, high quality oil with which the oil industry began was about one barrel used for every 100 barrels produced. Ninety-nine out of every 100 barrels of oil produced was available to be used for other than producing oil.
In the time since then, of course, the energy cost per barrel of oil produced has steadily risen. On average, when considering all forms of oil like tar sands and deep water, we get a little more than ten barrels of oil for every barrel of oil invested. In fact, when it gets to tar sands and ultra-deep-water oil and bio-fuels produced from corn ethanol, the EROEI ratio gets very close to 1:1. It takes almost the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of oil. If we ever pursue producing oil from the various shale deposits like Bakken it could take more energy to produce every barrel than what we get out of it.
The peak oil theory, contrary to what certain denialists continue to claim, does not suggest we are running out of oil. In fact most knowledgeable peak oil pundits will quickly point out that we will probably never run out of oil completely. What the peak oil theory does say is that we will reach a point where the flow, the rate of production, can no longer be increased, that demand will thereafter be greater than production and that that gap will widen year by year.
Once you pass that peak, as well, the energy gas of the energy produced will increase inexorably, pushing the world ever faster toward depletion. From the peak onward the cheap, easily-accessible, high quality oil has all been consumed. There is still oil left but it is much more expensive, in terms of energy consumption, to produce it. From peak onward, therefore, the amount of oil produced in excess of the amount of oil consumed in its production declines faster than the overall decline in the rate of production.
When the energy consumed in producing a barrel of oil passes the total energy contained in a barrel of oil, it doesn't matter what form of energy is used to produce that oil or what price that energy form is set at. At that point it takes more energy to produce energy than the energy produced. There is no energy surplus, over and above production energy cost, available to do anything other than produce oil.
So how much is our energy really worth, when calculated in terms of energy used in its production? Are we prepared to continue to produce oil and other forms of energy even when it takes more energy to produce it that what we get out of it? It is a question we will soon have to answer if our approach to peak oil continues to be; use as much as we can as long as we can and then figure out what to do for an encore. We don't yet see the net reduction in global energy production, the global energy consumption per capita. That price is being paid by the third world. But reality will soon come home to roost. Soon either the whole rest of the world will have to give up all claims to energy to support North America's energy habit or we will all be in the same rapid race to the bottom, ourselves included. Or we can all fight for what is left.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Defining the Continuum from here to Post-Carbon Sustainability
To define a continuum or path of transition from today to life in the post-carbon world it is necessary to start with a reasonably clear vision of that post carbon world. Largely this vision has to be local, or at least regional, centered on the area in which you live or will live at that time.
It is always awkward forecasting the future. There are so many variables. But it is easier, in my mind, to predict what life will be like in that post-carbon world than at any point during the transition. If you can start with a clear vision of the destination you are in a better position to define your own transition path.
What will the post-carbon world look like? Here are just fifteen examples of the changes you will see in society as we slide down the energy-decline slope.
* The focus of life will be very much local, not the global focus of today. Sustainability will mean local self-sufficiency and self-reliance, either individually or as a community.
* Consumerism will be dead, dead, dead. The keyword will have become need, not want. Gone with consumerism will be the vast advertising industry that fuels consumerism today.
* Society will clearly not be dominated by the automobile. Electric cars may hang on for a while, as might cars running on locally-produced bio-diesel. The ultimate demise of the automobile will be, however, not a lack of fuel to run them but the inability to maintain the automobile manufacturing industry, an industry today based on planned obsolescence. Yes, it would be possible to make durable, rugged cars that would last decades, perhaps a century or more. But that would entail a complete overhaul of the industry mindset.
* Globalization will have died well before we enter the post-carbon world. In fact it is very much in the process of unwinding now. The massive fuel demands of large-scale trans-oceanic transport and the tremendous raw material demands of the ship-building industry simply are not going to be feasible in a world of net declining resources.
* Communities will produce all, or almost all, of their own food. If they trade it will likely be with other nearby communities but this will likely be limited to crisis times such as after crop failures.
* Travel will not be what it is today. Airlines will be a thing of the past, unless they convert to blimps and hot air balloons. Before that the industry will likely survive for a while as a luxury for the monied elite. Trans-oceanic shipping will be extremely limited, unless it reverts to sail but even then would be limited. Possibly, and hopefully, the once expansive railway system and services will be rebuilt in time but that is going to require a government commitment which, at the moment, seems very unlikely. The concept of travelling for vacation will probably disappear over time. The current highway systems will initially fall into disrepair and ultimately be abandoned to be reclaimed by nature. Some of the routes they followed may still be used, on horseback and on foot, since many of the early highways followed routes that were already well in use before that. People in cold climates will not travel south to escape winter but will, in fact, be very travel restricted by that winter weather.
* The manufacturing industry, if it survives, will be seriously downsized and refocused on society's needs, not the competitive and advertising-stimulated wants of today.
* Manufacturing processes will likely be reverse engineered so that production can be dispersed to regional areas where they will serve a discrete regional market.
* Housing will change dramatically, downsizing from the ubiquitous McMansions of today to the small, energy-efficient, cozy cottages and bungalows that were prevalent in our parents' time.
* Classical, perpetual-growth economics will have died a painful death. It is, indeed, in the process of dying now, real growth having already died years ago with the appearance of growth being propped up by a myriad of smoke-and-mirrors financial instruments. The wheels fell off in 2008 with the $147 dollar price for oil. Economists, if money is to continue as the lifeblood of human society, will have to find ways for that society to survive within a no-growth economy.
* The face of retail will change dramatically. Malls will be dead. A tremendous shake-out of the retail sector will have major casualties. What retail survives will mostly move into residential areas, close to the customer, and be run out of the home, not separate rental or owned space.
* The village or neighbourhood open-air market will become the primary source of commerce. Much of the commercial business will be for repair, maintenance, refit, mend, fix as the throw-away society dies.
* Many people assume the very useful internet will survive the decline in oil. It won't. The internet is cheap-energy- and technology-intensive. Cheap energy is even now disappearing as costs go up and available resources decline. And to think the computer manufacturing industry will survive the end of cheap energy is wishful thinking in the extreme. So the internet will not survive the end of cheap energy. Your ability to have and use a computer in any form in a post-carbon world will depend on your personal ability to fix, maintain and program it yourself, and your ability to personally or communally produce the energy to run it.
* Large cities with their multi-million populations and their rings of suburbs will not survive the end of cheap energy in their present form. They cannot be made food self-sufficient and do not have the internal resources to become self-reliant. They are critically dependent on massive infrastructure that is now expensive to maintain and, in the future, impossible to maintain. Cities in pre-industrial times generally did not exceed a million population (and those were rare), were surrounded by rich farmland (now covered by suburbs), depended on a large slave population (currently replaced by energy slaves), and generally had good water access for moving trade and commodities by sail and barge (now replaced by energy-intensive rail, trucking, ship and air).
* Medicine will become far less ubiquitous and far less technology intensive. That technology requires a thriving manufacturing industry that exists only because of cheap energy. And both the manufacture and use of that equipment consumes a great deal of energy. Every advance in technology has, in my opinion, reduced the ability and willingness of doctors to make a patient diagnosis with medical skills alone. This has been largely necessitated by our litigation-prone society.
How will you chart your course to sustainability through that minefield? It won't be easy because it depends so much on timing. The first thing that you must do, if you are to be successful, is keep a close eye on the news. The signs will be there but you have to develop a very active and effective bullshit filter. You will have to be able to read between the lines. You have to use something other than the corporate dominated and controlled mainstream media to get at the truth behind what that mainstream media is telling you. Use sources like the internet, alternative newspapers, independent TV and radio.
If you wait for the mainstream media to present a clear and honest picture, like those who were surprised at the financial downturn, it will be too late. And, most importantly, you have to follow the news regularly, even keep notes, in order to spot the trends that are developing. The mainstream media are not going to suddenly one day run a headline that says we've run out of cheap oil - all that's left is shale and tar sands. What they will do instead is probably barrage you with stories about the marvellous new technologies that allow us to extract oil from shale and how that technology will extend the oil age by hundreds of years.
Fair warning will be available but you will have to search for it, dig for it, find sources that you trust and rely on them. Seeing, recognizing and accepting those warnings should, in most cases, give you enough chance to avoid the worst. It is, in my opinion, a terrible waste of your energy trying to convince others what is coming. Those who rely exclusively on the mainstream media will laugh at you and call you a doomer until the shit hits the fan. Then they will simply avoid you.
Good luck and enjoy the trip!
It is always awkward forecasting the future. There are so many variables. But it is easier, in my mind, to predict what life will be like in that post-carbon world than at any point during the transition. If you can start with a clear vision of the destination you are in a better position to define your own transition path.
What will the post-carbon world look like? Here are just fifteen examples of the changes you will see in society as we slide down the energy-decline slope.
* The focus of life will be very much local, not the global focus of today. Sustainability will mean local self-sufficiency and self-reliance, either individually or as a community.
* Consumerism will be dead, dead, dead. The keyword will have become need, not want. Gone with consumerism will be the vast advertising industry that fuels consumerism today.
* Society will clearly not be dominated by the automobile. Electric cars may hang on for a while, as might cars running on locally-produced bio-diesel. The ultimate demise of the automobile will be, however, not a lack of fuel to run them but the inability to maintain the automobile manufacturing industry, an industry today based on planned obsolescence. Yes, it would be possible to make durable, rugged cars that would last decades, perhaps a century or more. But that would entail a complete overhaul of the industry mindset.
* Globalization will have died well before we enter the post-carbon world. In fact it is very much in the process of unwinding now. The massive fuel demands of large-scale trans-oceanic transport and the tremendous raw material demands of the ship-building industry simply are not going to be feasible in a world of net declining resources.
* Communities will produce all, or almost all, of their own food. If they trade it will likely be with other nearby communities but this will likely be limited to crisis times such as after crop failures.
* Travel will not be what it is today. Airlines will be a thing of the past, unless they convert to blimps and hot air balloons. Before that the industry will likely survive for a while as a luxury for the monied elite. Trans-oceanic shipping will be extremely limited, unless it reverts to sail but even then would be limited. Possibly, and hopefully, the once expansive railway system and services will be rebuilt in time but that is going to require a government commitment which, at the moment, seems very unlikely. The concept of travelling for vacation will probably disappear over time. The current highway systems will initially fall into disrepair and ultimately be abandoned to be reclaimed by nature. Some of the routes they followed may still be used, on horseback and on foot, since many of the early highways followed routes that were already well in use before that. People in cold climates will not travel south to escape winter but will, in fact, be very travel restricted by that winter weather.
* The manufacturing industry, if it survives, will be seriously downsized and refocused on society's needs, not the competitive and advertising-stimulated wants of today.
* Manufacturing processes will likely be reverse engineered so that production can be dispersed to regional areas where they will serve a discrete regional market.
* Housing will change dramatically, downsizing from the ubiquitous McMansions of today to the small, energy-efficient, cozy cottages and bungalows that were prevalent in our parents' time.
* Classical, perpetual-growth economics will have died a painful death. It is, indeed, in the process of dying now, real growth having already died years ago with the appearance of growth being propped up by a myriad of smoke-and-mirrors financial instruments. The wheels fell off in 2008 with the $147 dollar price for oil. Economists, if money is to continue as the lifeblood of human society, will have to find ways for that society to survive within a no-growth economy.
* The face of retail will change dramatically. Malls will be dead. A tremendous shake-out of the retail sector will have major casualties. What retail survives will mostly move into residential areas, close to the customer, and be run out of the home, not separate rental or owned space.
* The village or neighbourhood open-air market will become the primary source of commerce. Much of the commercial business will be for repair, maintenance, refit, mend, fix as the throw-away society dies.
* Many people assume the very useful internet will survive the decline in oil. It won't. The internet is cheap-energy- and technology-intensive. Cheap energy is even now disappearing as costs go up and available resources decline. And to think the computer manufacturing industry will survive the end of cheap energy is wishful thinking in the extreme. So the internet will not survive the end of cheap energy. Your ability to have and use a computer in any form in a post-carbon world will depend on your personal ability to fix, maintain and program it yourself, and your ability to personally or communally produce the energy to run it.
* Large cities with their multi-million populations and their rings of suburbs will not survive the end of cheap energy in their present form. They cannot be made food self-sufficient and do not have the internal resources to become self-reliant. They are critically dependent on massive infrastructure that is now expensive to maintain and, in the future, impossible to maintain. Cities in pre-industrial times generally did not exceed a million population (and those were rare), were surrounded by rich farmland (now covered by suburbs), depended on a large slave population (currently replaced by energy slaves), and generally had good water access for moving trade and commodities by sail and barge (now replaced by energy-intensive rail, trucking, ship and air).
* Medicine will become far less ubiquitous and far less technology intensive. That technology requires a thriving manufacturing industry that exists only because of cheap energy. And both the manufacture and use of that equipment consumes a great deal of energy. Every advance in technology has, in my opinion, reduced the ability and willingness of doctors to make a patient diagnosis with medical skills alone. This has been largely necessitated by our litigation-prone society.
How will you chart your course to sustainability through that minefield? It won't be easy because it depends so much on timing. The first thing that you must do, if you are to be successful, is keep a close eye on the news. The signs will be there but you have to develop a very active and effective bullshit filter. You will have to be able to read between the lines. You have to use something other than the corporate dominated and controlled mainstream media to get at the truth behind what that mainstream media is telling you. Use sources like the internet, alternative newspapers, independent TV and radio.
If you wait for the mainstream media to present a clear and honest picture, like those who were surprised at the financial downturn, it will be too late. And, most importantly, you have to follow the news regularly, even keep notes, in order to spot the trends that are developing. The mainstream media are not going to suddenly one day run a headline that says we've run out of cheap oil - all that's left is shale and tar sands. What they will do instead is probably barrage you with stories about the marvellous new technologies that allow us to extract oil from shale and how that technology will extend the oil age by hundreds of years.
Fair warning will be available but you will have to search for it, dig for it, find sources that you trust and rely on them. Seeing, recognizing and accepting those warnings should, in most cases, give you enough chance to avoid the worst. It is, in my opinion, a terrible waste of your energy trying to convince others what is coming. Those who rely exclusively on the mainstream media will laugh at you and call you a doomer until the shit hits the fan. Then they will simply avoid you.
Good luck and enjoy the trip!
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Finding the Continuum From Here to Sustainability
Social evolution is, in itself, a continuum. But just as species evolution is. according to many prominent biologists, marked by punctuated equilibrium (sudden mutational blips in the midst of long periods of evolutionary stasis), so too has been the development or evolution of human society. The smooth, steady continuum is a myth, just as the smooth bell-curve that depicts peak oil is a myth. The path of any evolutionary process is as uneven as an untended cobblestone road.
In the case of both species evolution and human social evolution, the punctuated equilibrium has been generally a function of available energy. When a species overshoots the energy carrying capacity of its environment (which for most means exceeding the food supply) sudden bursts in evolutionary change happen as certain existing mutations in the gene pool are suddenly favoured by the changes in environment. Mutations are common but it takes certain conditions for them to become favoured.
In the case of other species that energy is derived from food alone. Only in the case of man does external energy, in the form primarily of fossil fuels, enter the picture. Our use of external energy has for millenia interrupted the cyclical nature of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium, smoothing out the large peaks and valleys of natural evolution because we have in that time had access to and used more energy than what we are limited to in the natural food supply.
There has been little change in our man-made environment, little opportunity for mutations to achieve dominance in human species. But as our hospitals and medical journals will reveal, mutations happen all the time. That creates the potential for an uncomfortable relationship; the longer the period of stasis the more abrupt and dramatic the period of punctuated equilibrium will be when it comes.
Human society (as opposed to the human species) has, however, gone through a process of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium each time there has been a major change in our energy supply, as with the discovery of a new energy source (See my articles in this blog; Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth and Alternative Energy, Add-ons and Replacements ). This was the case with the taming of wind power, the discovery of peat, coal, oil, electricity, natural gas, the taming of water to produce hydro-electricity, uranium to produce nuclear power and even the advent of agriculture.
As with any other species taking a new food item into its diet, each of those energy sources has been exploited as an add-on to our ever-increasing energy mix. With each new energy source discovered, the proportion of total energy use satisfied by the old sources decreases (though the absolute usage may stay as high as it was) in favour of the new, usually more efficient energy source. An energy source is rarely abandoned by choice once it has been incorporated into the energy mix.
Only depletion that forces the abandonment of an energy source seems to be able to accomplish that. This could be seen, for example, in Cuba with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the virtual, and sudden, elimination of oil as an energy source for that country. They were suddenly forced into finding a way to live without what had been their dominant energy source. (It is interesting to note now that oil has been discovered in Cuba's territorial waters the U.S. and the oil majors want to challenge Cuba's claim to those waters so they can have access to the oil.) Similarly, wood as a source of heat energy was virtually abandoned in Britain, due to massive deforestation, as coal became the dominant heating fuel in its place.
Life on the way up the energy slope, as each new source of energy is exploited, is as herky-jerky and traumatic as the punctuated equilibrium of species evolution. A look at the the past three centuries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is the history of dramatic and sudden changes affecting the whole of society. The Industrial Revolution itself dramatically changed the landscape of Europe and North America in just a couple of decades as coal became a primary industrial fuel as well as the preferred home-heating fuel.
As would be expected, the way down the energy slope will also he very uneven. Never in human history, however, have we had a period when the net total energy available was in decline. But that will be the case with peak oil because natural gas, coal, uranium, hydro-electric production all appear as though they will be peaking at roughly the same time. Is there another magic energy source waiting in the wings? It is possible - through various alternatives like wind, solar, methane, tidal and other alternatives - to replace the energy derived from one of those sources (except oil). But there is no other energy source that is seen as even fractionally possible to replace our total energy mix, or replacing oil alone.
If, however, you can accept that species evolution has been a continuum, and that human social evolution to this point has been a continuum, then it should be possible for you to see the changes that will happen as a result of peak oil as a continuum. That can help take the fear out of the peak oil issue. The most frightening aspect about peak oil for most people is the dramatic and abrupt changes it will make in the way we live our lives.
But change is change, whether it is perceived as good or bad. Change is what you make of it. If you approach it with fear and negativism it will be difficult and traumatic, even debilitating. If you approach it with excitement and a sense of adventure, however, it can be a life-confirming experience. Peak oil, after all, will happen whether you like it or not. The changes that it will bring will happen whether you like them or not. You may as well make the best of it.
A continuum through peak oil to a post-carbon future will be a process of transition, adapting to and adopting changes into your lifestyle that move you inexorably toward the lifestyle you will have to be living in that post-carbon world. There is a growing grass-roots transition-town movement that started in Britain but has expanded to other parts of the world, including North America. These are communities that are planning how their community will transition into a post-carbon world. Some of these are medium-sized cities, many small towns. Admittedly, many of those efforts are faltering because they fail to get the wider community involved. But the fact that the movement keeps expanding means, hopefully, that a critical mass is building.
The continuum that so many are looking for in order to find comfort in accepting the peak oil theory and/or joining the peak oil movement has to be found in understanding what the post-carbon world will look like. Knowing that it is possible to reasonably understand the evolutionary changes society will go through between now and then. One absolute, however, is that the continuum, the transition, can not be found in or based on business as usual, by clinging to the present. That is a dead-end path.
In the case of both species evolution and human social evolution, the punctuated equilibrium has been generally a function of available energy. When a species overshoots the energy carrying capacity of its environment (which for most means exceeding the food supply) sudden bursts in evolutionary change happen as certain existing mutations in the gene pool are suddenly favoured by the changes in environment. Mutations are common but it takes certain conditions for them to become favoured.
In the case of other species that energy is derived from food alone. Only in the case of man does external energy, in the form primarily of fossil fuels, enter the picture. Our use of external energy has for millenia interrupted the cyclical nature of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium, smoothing out the large peaks and valleys of natural evolution because we have in that time had access to and used more energy than what we are limited to in the natural food supply.
There has been little change in our man-made environment, little opportunity for mutations to achieve dominance in human species. But as our hospitals and medical journals will reveal, mutations happen all the time. That creates the potential for an uncomfortable relationship; the longer the period of stasis the more abrupt and dramatic the period of punctuated equilibrium will be when it comes.
Human society (as opposed to the human species) has, however, gone through a process of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium each time there has been a major change in our energy supply, as with the discovery of a new energy source (See my articles in this blog; Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth and Alternative Energy, Add-ons and Replacements ). This was the case with the taming of wind power, the discovery of peat, coal, oil, electricity, natural gas, the taming of water to produce hydro-electricity, uranium to produce nuclear power and even the advent of agriculture.
As with any other species taking a new food item into its diet, each of those energy sources has been exploited as an add-on to our ever-increasing energy mix. With each new energy source discovered, the proportion of total energy use satisfied by the old sources decreases (though the absolute usage may stay as high as it was) in favour of the new, usually more efficient energy source. An energy source is rarely abandoned by choice once it has been incorporated into the energy mix.
Only depletion that forces the abandonment of an energy source seems to be able to accomplish that. This could be seen, for example, in Cuba with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the virtual, and sudden, elimination of oil as an energy source for that country. They were suddenly forced into finding a way to live without what had been their dominant energy source. (It is interesting to note now that oil has been discovered in Cuba's territorial waters the U.S. and the oil majors want to challenge Cuba's claim to those waters so they can have access to the oil.) Similarly, wood as a source of heat energy was virtually abandoned in Britain, due to massive deforestation, as coal became the dominant heating fuel in its place.
Life on the way up the energy slope, as each new source of energy is exploited, is as herky-jerky and traumatic as the punctuated equilibrium of species evolution. A look at the the past three centuries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is the history of dramatic and sudden changes affecting the whole of society. The Industrial Revolution itself dramatically changed the landscape of Europe and North America in just a couple of decades as coal became a primary industrial fuel as well as the preferred home-heating fuel.
As would be expected, the way down the energy slope will also he very uneven. Never in human history, however, have we had a period when the net total energy available was in decline. But that will be the case with peak oil because natural gas, coal, uranium, hydro-electric production all appear as though they will be peaking at roughly the same time. Is there another magic energy source waiting in the wings? It is possible - through various alternatives like wind, solar, methane, tidal and other alternatives - to replace the energy derived from one of those sources (except oil). But there is no other energy source that is seen as even fractionally possible to replace our total energy mix, or replacing oil alone.
If, however, you can accept that species evolution has been a continuum, and that human social evolution to this point has been a continuum, then it should be possible for you to see the changes that will happen as a result of peak oil as a continuum. That can help take the fear out of the peak oil issue. The most frightening aspect about peak oil for most people is the dramatic and abrupt changes it will make in the way we live our lives.
But change is change, whether it is perceived as good or bad. Change is what you make of it. If you approach it with fear and negativism it will be difficult and traumatic, even debilitating. If you approach it with excitement and a sense of adventure, however, it can be a life-confirming experience. Peak oil, after all, will happen whether you like it or not. The changes that it will bring will happen whether you like them or not. You may as well make the best of it.
A continuum through peak oil to a post-carbon future will be a process of transition, adapting to and adopting changes into your lifestyle that move you inexorably toward the lifestyle you will have to be living in that post-carbon world. There is a growing grass-roots transition-town movement that started in Britain but has expanded to other parts of the world, including North America. These are communities that are planning how their community will transition into a post-carbon world. Some of these are medium-sized cities, many small towns. Admittedly, many of those efforts are faltering because they fail to get the wider community involved. But the fact that the movement keeps expanding means, hopefully, that a critical mass is building.
The continuum that so many are looking for in order to find comfort in accepting the peak oil theory and/or joining the peak oil movement has to be found in understanding what the post-carbon world will look like. Knowing that it is possible to reasonably understand the evolutionary changes society will go through between now and then. One absolute, however, is that the continuum, the transition, can not be found in or based on business as usual, by clinging to the present. That is a dead-end path.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Keys to Sustainability
Sustainability has recently become an issue that more and more people are taking seriously. It should have always been a no-brainer but wasn't; but better late than never. Sustainability means, by clear implication, self-sufficiency and self-reliance over the long term.
The current increase in awareness and interest is, of course, partly due to the most serious global economic crisis since the great depression, through which even the uninitiated are finally seeing that our global, perpetual-growth-oriented economic system is no longer sustainable, if it ever was.
Yet, however, when most people think at all about sustainability they are still thinking in terms of economic sustainability, about sustainability of the materialistic lifestyle to which we have become accustomed this past half century, sustainability of sprawling suburbia and the family car, about sustainable development and growth, some way to sustain business as usual. But it's the thought that counts. Right?
The ability to get a significant number of people to think about real sustainability, long-term societal, environmental and species sustainability, is going to require a deep and fundamental change in mindset. The core of sustainability planning can not be that which is itself unsustainable. A problem cannot be its own solution.
I see it all the time, even in the peak oil groups in which I participate. People assume that a certain aspect of civilization or technology which they are particularly dependant upon will survive. So many people assume, for example, that if/when society collapses the internet will survive. It is so useful, after all. But most people are surprised to learn that it takes a tremendous amount of energy and technology to run the internet, especially in its global incarnation with which we have become so accustomed. I have friends in England, Germany, Brazil, South Africa, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand with whom I communicate all the time. It may be by e-mail. It may be live chat, either by text or even, frequently, by video and audio using our webcams. Sure, it's great. But I definitely do not assume that facility will still exist if society and the global economy seriously and terminally collapse.
The basic problem is that people think about changes relative to what currently is. They get fixated on what they are going to lose. They view the whole journey into the future negatively, as a journey away from the present with which they are knowledgeable and comfortable, like somebody moving out of their well-loved old house after the bank forecloses, rather than an exciting journey toward the future, like someone happily choosing to move into a new or different house.
The simple reality that seems to elude most people in the discussion about peak oil is that peak oil means peak food! There are far more people (6.6 billion) on this planet than the planet can sustain naturally, without the use of fossil fuels (many serious and credible researchers estimate the natural carrying capacity to be between 500 million and 1.5 billion). When those fossil fuels go into serious and irreversible decline, which they will, we are going to have to try to feed our massive population without them. Sustainability means, simply, the ability to feed the population, whether that consideration be local or global.
So, forget about the present! Our current society as it is can not survive peak oil. It is the business as usual of our human society that has turned peak oil into a crisis, if not an outright disaster/catastrophe. The loss of oil, after all, is not a crisis by itself. The crisis is created by our deep dependence on oil, especially for the production, processing and distribution of food.
Don't bemoan what we are leaving behind. Think about where we are going forward to. What will that future look like? If you are focused on the past the future will make itself and you will have to live with the results, whatever they are. Only by focusing on that future do you have any potential of controlling what that future will be. One way or another, a post-fossil-fuel future is coming. You can prepare for it but you can't prevent it. The best way not to be negatively affected by oil depletion is to not be dependent on oil. Set yourself free now, and many people are proving that is possible, while it is in your control to do so rather than have it forced on you.
I don't know what the future will be like. There are far too many variables. But I am reasonably convinced that whatever society emerges will not be based on cities as we have come to know them this past century (in recent decades we have reached the point where over half the world's population live in cities). Cities do not, and generally cannot, produce all of the resources they consume nor manage the refuse they generate (Toronto recently went through a 5-week garbage strike during which 25,000 tons of garbage piled up temporary dump sites in parks and rinks).
Modern cities, with their ever-expanding suburban sprawl and centralized concentration of business, industry and labour, are unsustainable, a product of the high energy age that will follow the energy downslope into the abyss. They draw their resources from ever larger externalities, starting with regions criss-crossed with canals and railways at the onset of the Industrial Revolution and now expanded to sucking in resources from all over the globe, those resources moved about the globe by energy-intensive ships and aircraft.
Long term sustainability as we approach and pass the end of the high-energy age is going to have to see a reversal of that trend. The focus will be forced into ever-decreasing spheres, from the global resource base down to the regional and community resource base. Sustainability for a community will mean resource self-sufficiency and community self-reliance. That which a community needs will have to be available within the community or its immediately surrounding area, only rarely by trade with neighbouring communities.
Let's look at some of the key components of that future community self-reliance and self sufficiency.
Seeds
The first key to community self-sufficiency will be food self-sufficiency, the ability of a community to produce all of the food needed to sustain its population. Almost all agriculture today is dependent on centralized seed companies. The crop varieties available are limited, having shrunken steadily since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Access to seeds is dependent on those central seed companies and an energy-intensive global distribution system. There are several companies, like Monsanto, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Cargill, whose corporate objective is to control the means of global food production. Increasingly seeds are both hybridized and genetically engineered, many with terminator genes so they will not produce seed, negating the age-old practice of seed-saving, saving the seed from this year's crop to produce next year's crop.
As global industry falters and the global distribution system grinds to a halt for lack of energy that seed system will, at first, become increasingly unreliable with the energy expense of distributing anything to rural areas. Eventually it will simply disappear.
For any community to be self-sufficient beyond the end of the oil and high-energy age it is going to have to become both willing and able to produce next year's seed from this year's crop. It is going to have to develop and maintain local crop variations suited to the local climate and soil conditions. This requires critical farming skills that have been lost over this past century that are going to have to be relearned before a community can develop this type of self-sufficiency. This will, of course, require some head start time (reliable estimate is two decades) so that the skills are built up before the industrial seed industry collapses.
There are, however, other aspects of this that require a head start as well. Few farmers today keep on hand seed for two years of crops. Why should they? They get their seed fresh each year from the seed company. If we wait until the seed companies collapse, however, where are the seeds going to come from with which to get started without them? If your crops are already in the ground, assuming they aren't genetically modified with terminator genes, you are going to have to let a significant portion of your crop go to seed at the end of the season in order to have enough seed for next year's crop. But suppose the seed industry collapses in winter or spring, after you have harvested your crops and before new seeds would normally be ordered. You will be absolutely dead in the water.
If you start saving seed now, or soon, you will not only develop skills in seed-saving but you will have your own seed on hand in the event of the collapse of the seed industry. You will also develop the knowledge of what crops are genetically modified and learned to avoid them in favour of natural crops that will produce seed which you can save.
This is not that easy, however. The seed industry is extremely aggressive in protecting its turf. Saving seed from crops produced using seeds purchased from a major seed company will probably be prohibited by law. You need to learn what heritage seeds are available to you, generally from small local seed companies, and use those as your starting point. Even then, however, as was the case with Percy Schmeiser and others, if your crop gets cross-contaminated from a nearby crop from patent-protected or genetically modified seed, you may be prohibited by law from saving seed produced by that entire crop. And the courts thus far have come down very much in favour of the seed companies in these cases. So there are many roadblocks in the way of your early preparation for this and almost all aspects of future sustainability. But persevere.
Water
In order to be self-sufficient and self-reliant on the other side of the energy collapse a community is going to be critically dependent on a safe, reliable, clean water supply. That's a no-brainer, right? There are the municipal water supply, the heavy duty industrial pumps to supply water for crop irrigation, water purification systems, running water in all the houses. All of these, of course, require a heavy investment of funds both to acquire but also to maintain. Once we are seriously into energy decline and the global distribution system begins to collapse and global industry runs into supply and distribution and cost problems all of these systems will begin to break down. Not too long afterward they will simply cease to function. The community is going to need in place a water supply system that is not dependent on fossil fuels, big expensive industrial machinery and equipment, heavy and expensive maintenance, and capable of supplying sustainably all of the community's water needs.
Unless you are starting a new community from the ground up, and I am definitely not recommending this, that is going to have to be done through an established, and probably very conservative, community council. Getting them to replace the current water systems with a new one designed for a post-fossil-fuel age that they do not understand is fast approaching is not going to be an easy task but, as with seeds above, waiting until it becomes a necessity is not going to work. The groundwork is going to have to be laid well in advance.
The safety issue concerns the presence of water management infrastructure upstream from the community. Dams, causeways, canals and canal locks, and other similar infrastructure has a limited lifespan and requires extensive and expensive maintenance. If any of these are upstream from the community the potential for catastrophic inundation of the community is elevated and the potential for interruption of the water supply gets greater over time. Global warming also has a significant potential to impact the future viability of your water supply, both in terms of seasonal flow and contamination. In addition, any industrial infrastructure upstream, such as mining operations with their toxic tailing ponds, has the high potential of contaminating your water source once maintenance of that infrastructure ceases with the collapse of the company or the industry.
Soil Fertility
Soil, like water, is critically important to all life on earth. The foundation for all higher life-forms is the plants that grow in the soil. Over millions of years nature has perfected techniques for creating, building and maintaining soil fertility for crops, fields, woodlands and wetlands.
Unfortunately nature's systems were not built around man. Our use of pesticides kills the important micro-organisms in the soil that are critical to fertility. Our use of artificial fertilizers seriously upsets the natural complex balance of minerals in the soil, those fertilizer focusing on primarily just three elements; nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. Herbicides destroy the other plants (we call them weeds) that are critical to support for the broad spectrum of soil micro-organisms that create complex soil fertility. Our monocropping encourages the overpopulation of specific groups of micro-organisms at the expense of others. Our plowing of fields upsets and even destroys the soil environment particular micro-organisms need, exposing deep soil organisms to the deadly (for them) air and the sun, suffocating shallow sub-surface micro-organism by burying them deep in the soil. Constant use of heavy farm equipment and plowing have built up a hardpan 6-8 inches below the surface that prevents the movement of critical micro-organisms up and down through the soil, prevents many plants from sinking roots deep enough to get sub-surface water, and builds up a layer of toxins just above the hardpan. Our constant irrigation of crops leaches critical nutrients out of the top soil, causes those crops to develop shallow root systems negating the ability of roots to bring minerals up from the deep sub-soil to the topsoil to nourish plants and micro-organisms and to bring up water from deep within the soil. The combination of over-irrigation and constant application of agro-chemicals has dramatically increased the salt content in the soil, so much so that long-used commercial agricultural soil and even whole farms have had to be abandoned because of the salt burden.
Almost all commercial agricultural soil is sterile, with all the nutrients for plants supplied by fertilizers and other agrochemical additives, soil and plant immune system functions dependent on pesticides and herbicides, water supplied by mechanical irrigation. When the advancing energy crisis forces us to farm without those the fertility needed to grow crops on that soil will simply not exist. It will have to be carefully rebuilt, either by nature or by us, before those soils can produce healthy, abundant crops. With the current levels of global population producing sufficient food on chemically sterilized soils will be impossible, another reality that will force the focus away from global and down to regional and community.
The basic components that must be restored to sterile soils are a full spectrum mineral complex, carbon, organic matter, nitrogen and, most importantly, a broad spectrum of soil micro-organisms. There are many soil improvement techniques that are beneficial, such as creating terra preta soil, but over time the full complexity of living soil must be restored if sustainability is to be achieved.
Farming skills
There is an unfortunate tendency today to think that those who own and run and work on farms are farmers, that they know how to farm. A fairer characterization would be mechano-chemical food producers. Take away their chemicals and their big equipment and and their mechanical irrigation and they wouldn't know where to begin.
There are, in the industrialized world in which we live, very few traditional farmers left and even fewer of their children are choosing to follow in their parents' footsteps. There are far too few to serve as a base for a new, post-fossil-fuel farming industry when the fossil fuels run out and the high-tech farm equipment stops running. That is not to suggest that traditional farming is the only method by which to produce sufficient volumes of food to feed a significant community. Permaculture, for example, is proving to be an excellent technique. But this too requires the long-term development of an extensive, in-the-field skill set, only the rudiments of which can be learned in a classroom.
The farming skills necessary to eke the optimum amount of food out of a piece of land are not easily come by. Even our agricultural schools today tend to focus on chemical/industrial farming techniques. Those fortunate enough to be learning traditional farming skills are doing so at the hand of one of those few traditional farmers still practicing their craft, by apprenticing at their shoulder.
And, of course, today's industrial farms are far too large to be farmed using traditional farming skills. They are designed for and dependent on fossil fuels and large equipment, designed for technological efficiency. They use specialized varieties of seeds to produce crops that can be efficiently harvested with massive mechanization. A return to traditional farming will also necessitate a return to traditional-sized farms, small, labour-intensive farms. The transition from industrial farming to traditional is going to require major land redistribution. The good news is that crop yields using traditional techniques (once the fertility of the soil has been re-established) are 20-50% higher or better.
Sustainable forest management
In any climate, particularly northern climates like Canada and Northern Europe, forests are going to be critical for sustainability in a post-fossil-fuel age. Unfortunately, in the climates in which they will be most needed the forests have long-since been decimated by clear cutting for agricultural land, building materials and urban development and expansion.
Most of the major forests that remain today are not near the population centers that are going to need them in a post-oil world. In a post-oil world forests are going to be needed still for building materials, for fuel, for soil retention and as a habitat for wild animals which will probably increasingly be turned to as a food source. As animal habitat what forests remain are sadly lacking, those forests hacked up into disconnected stands that offer little in the way of contiguous habitat.
In order to not further decimate the forests as fossil fuels run down and then run out a great deal of forest regrowth is going to be needed. It takes, if one includes hardwoods like maple and oak, a hundred years or more to grow a forest from seedlings. Even with the most optimistic peak oil forecasts we do not have that long. There is a lot of reforestation taking place today but most of that is for fast growing softwoods like pine, the objective of which is to quickly produce trees that can again be cut commercially. Sustainable forest management is only being practiced in a few places.
We need a massive, broad-based reforestation effort now to ensure that those forests are going to be there when the fossil fuels can no longer satisfy our needs. We need to stop the clearing and degredation of what forests still remain and give them an opportunity to develop old growth.
Draft Animals
Before fossil fuels farming was conducted using a combination of human and animal power. Before the advent of the automobile the population of horses in North America exceeded the number of humans. Today it is a small fraction of the human population and the vast majority of what stock does exist is for pleasure riding and racing. There are very few draft horses around and even fewer oxen, mules and donkeys.
The amount of labour that is going to be required to produce the food needed for a global human population of 6.6 billion plus when the fossil fuels have gone into irreversible decline is going to be massive. To enter that era without a massively increased stock of draft animals will mean that all of that work is going to have to accomplished with human labour. That will require well over half the human population (experienced) just producing food. It will take a minimum of two decades to build up the stock of draft animals to a level that we can effectively manage food production for that level of population without fossil fuels and mechanized farm equipment.
Non-mechanized farm equipment
Most of the non-mechanized farm equipment still in existence is being used for planters on suburban lawns or as decoration in front of country stores or rusting away behind dilapidated barns. There are few, if any, manufacturers of this equipment left in the industrialized world. An industry to produce such equipment is unlikely to build up before the demand is there for the product.
That presents an interesting Catch-22. The demand is not likely to be there before the fossil fuels needed for mechanized farming have gone into serious decline. It is unlikely that a whole new industry with heavy fossil fuel needs is going to be able to get off the ground when those very fossil fuels have gone into heavy decline. And government subsidies to facilitate development of such an industry are unlikely with a rapidly eroding tax base due to a shrinking labour market with the inevitable demise of industry as we know it.
Additionally that non-mechanized farm equipment manufactured and used in under-developed and developing countries, though it could in theory fill the need in the industrialized world, will not likely become available in the industrialized world due to the lack of raw materials and fuels in the countries of origin and the lack of shipping and fuel for it to be transported to the industrialized world.
Unless the political leadership in the industrialized world accept the imminence of peak oil, understand the implications that that event will encompass, and take it very seriously while there is still time to prepare, the transition to a post-carbon society in the industrialized world is going to be a very painful one.
Of course, another piece of non-mechanized equipment (not necessarily for the farm) that is manufactured and available in abundance in underdeveloped and developing countries is the bicycle. Utilitarian, rugged and, relative to the recreation and sport cycles available in the industrialized world, inexpensive. The bicycle is the perfect personal transport for a post-carbon world.
Trades, Arts and Crafts
Probably the greatest change on the community landscape over the past century is the loss of local community trades, arts and crafts. The former personal and community self-reliance has been traded for the convenience of the global market place driven by the availability of cheap, reliable fuel. Gone is the village blacksmith, the village cobbler, the village tailor, the village dressmaker, the village butcher. Gone are the local handmade furniture, clothings, the owner-built home, the locally-milled grain. Gone are the jacks-of-all-trades, which would describe half the population a century ago. Those trades that still exist within most communities are practiced in specialization to the exclusion of all others.
The village of a century ago could have survived the loss of oil. Hell the people might not even realize it had happened until well after the event when they noticed no trucks had come through town in the past six months. That same community today may have trouble surviving that six months. They would have long since run out of not just fuel but food and probably most durable goods, and be in no position to replace them locally. If that were the dead of winter in most Canadian communities teams of people would have to clean out the bodies in the spring.
Self-reliance.......... Without a global manufacturing and distribution system, or even a national one, self-reliance for the individual and the community, especially rural communities, is critical one we get well into the post-peak era. If the global and national manufacturing and distribution systems to not crash suddenly they will disintegrate gradually, becoming increasingly unreliable until they finally break down. The impact of this will be hardest in rural communities away from the manufacturing centers.
Conclusion
Peak oil is going to mean much more than the loss of oil and derivative fuels and other products. It is going to mean peak food, in an overpopulated world of over 6.6 billion people. The ability to produce food for that level of population with petro-chemical inputs will be severely hampered because of the impact that chemically-based farming has had on the commercial agriculture soils in the industrialized, food exporting countries of the world. It is going to take decades of highly focussed effort to ready ourselves for food self-sufficiency in a post-peak world, decades that should have started long ago.
With billions of lives at stake, including those of people in the industrialized world, we cannot afford to enter the peak oil era naively optimistic that technology will see us through, that we will find and develop alternative energy sources in time. And we certainly can't afford to enter this era blissfully ignorant of the severe ramifications of getting there unprepared.
The current increase in awareness and interest is, of course, partly due to the most serious global economic crisis since the great depression, through which even the uninitiated are finally seeing that our global, perpetual-growth-oriented economic system is no longer sustainable, if it ever was.
Yet, however, when most people think at all about sustainability they are still thinking in terms of economic sustainability, about sustainability of the materialistic lifestyle to which we have become accustomed this past half century, sustainability of sprawling suburbia and the family car, about sustainable development and growth, some way to sustain business as usual. But it's the thought that counts. Right?
The ability to get a significant number of people to think about real sustainability, long-term societal, environmental and species sustainability, is going to require a deep and fundamental change in mindset. The core of sustainability planning can not be that which is itself unsustainable. A problem cannot be its own solution.
I see it all the time, even in the peak oil groups in which I participate. People assume that a certain aspect of civilization or technology which they are particularly dependant upon will survive. So many people assume, for example, that if/when society collapses the internet will survive. It is so useful, after all. But most people are surprised to learn that it takes a tremendous amount of energy and technology to run the internet, especially in its global incarnation with which we have become so accustomed. I have friends in England, Germany, Brazil, South Africa, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand with whom I communicate all the time. It may be by e-mail. It may be live chat, either by text or even, frequently, by video and audio using our webcams. Sure, it's great. But I definitely do not assume that facility will still exist if society and the global economy seriously and terminally collapse.
The basic problem is that people think about changes relative to what currently is. They get fixated on what they are going to lose. They view the whole journey into the future negatively, as a journey away from the present with which they are knowledgeable and comfortable, like somebody moving out of their well-loved old house after the bank forecloses, rather than an exciting journey toward the future, like someone happily choosing to move into a new or different house.
The simple reality that seems to elude most people in the discussion about peak oil is that peak oil means peak food! There are far more people (6.6 billion) on this planet than the planet can sustain naturally, without the use of fossil fuels (many serious and credible researchers estimate the natural carrying capacity to be between 500 million and 1.5 billion). When those fossil fuels go into serious and irreversible decline, which they will, we are going to have to try to feed our massive population without them. Sustainability means, simply, the ability to feed the population, whether that consideration be local or global.
So, forget about the present! Our current society as it is can not survive peak oil. It is the business as usual of our human society that has turned peak oil into a crisis, if not an outright disaster/catastrophe. The loss of oil, after all, is not a crisis by itself. The crisis is created by our deep dependence on oil, especially for the production, processing and distribution of food.
Don't bemoan what we are leaving behind. Think about where we are going forward to. What will that future look like? If you are focused on the past the future will make itself and you will have to live with the results, whatever they are. Only by focusing on that future do you have any potential of controlling what that future will be. One way or another, a post-fossil-fuel future is coming. You can prepare for it but you can't prevent it. The best way not to be negatively affected by oil depletion is to not be dependent on oil. Set yourself free now, and many people are proving that is possible, while it is in your control to do so rather than have it forced on you.
I don't know what the future will be like. There are far too many variables. But I am reasonably convinced that whatever society emerges will not be based on cities as we have come to know them this past century (in recent decades we have reached the point where over half the world's population live in cities). Cities do not, and generally cannot, produce all of the resources they consume nor manage the refuse they generate (Toronto recently went through a 5-week garbage strike during which 25,000 tons of garbage piled up temporary dump sites in parks and rinks).
Modern cities, with their ever-expanding suburban sprawl and centralized concentration of business, industry and labour, are unsustainable, a product of the high energy age that will follow the energy downslope into the abyss. They draw their resources from ever larger externalities, starting with regions criss-crossed with canals and railways at the onset of the Industrial Revolution and now expanded to sucking in resources from all over the globe, those resources moved about the globe by energy-intensive ships and aircraft.
Long term sustainability as we approach and pass the end of the high-energy age is going to have to see a reversal of that trend. The focus will be forced into ever-decreasing spheres, from the global resource base down to the regional and community resource base. Sustainability for a community will mean resource self-sufficiency and community self-reliance. That which a community needs will have to be available within the community or its immediately surrounding area, only rarely by trade with neighbouring communities.
Let's look at some of the key components of that future community self-reliance and self sufficiency.
Seeds
The first key to community self-sufficiency will be food self-sufficiency, the ability of a community to produce all of the food needed to sustain its population. Almost all agriculture today is dependent on centralized seed companies. The crop varieties available are limited, having shrunken steadily since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Access to seeds is dependent on those central seed companies and an energy-intensive global distribution system. There are several companies, like Monsanto, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Cargill, whose corporate objective is to control the means of global food production. Increasingly seeds are both hybridized and genetically engineered, many with terminator genes so they will not produce seed, negating the age-old practice of seed-saving, saving the seed from this year's crop to produce next year's crop.
As global industry falters and the global distribution system grinds to a halt for lack of energy that seed system will, at first, become increasingly unreliable with the energy expense of distributing anything to rural areas. Eventually it will simply disappear.
For any community to be self-sufficient beyond the end of the oil and high-energy age it is going to have to become both willing and able to produce next year's seed from this year's crop. It is going to have to develop and maintain local crop variations suited to the local climate and soil conditions. This requires critical farming skills that have been lost over this past century that are going to have to be relearned before a community can develop this type of self-sufficiency. This will, of course, require some head start time (reliable estimate is two decades) so that the skills are built up before the industrial seed industry collapses.
There are, however, other aspects of this that require a head start as well. Few farmers today keep on hand seed for two years of crops. Why should they? They get their seed fresh each year from the seed company. If we wait until the seed companies collapse, however, where are the seeds going to come from with which to get started without them? If your crops are already in the ground, assuming they aren't genetically modified with terminator genes, you are going to have to let a significant portion of your crop go to seed at the end of the season in order to have enough seed for next year's crop. But suppose the seed industry collapses in winter or spring, after you have harvested your crops and before new seeds would normally be ordered. You will be absolutely dead in the water.
If you start saving seed now, or soon, you will not only develop skills in seed-saving but you will have your own seed on hand in the event of the collapse of the seed industry. You will also develop the knowledge of what crops are genetically modified and learned to avoid them in favour of natural crops that will produce seed which you can save.
This is not that easy, however. The seed industry is extremely aggressive in protecting its turf. Saving seed from crops produced using seeds purchased from a major seed company will probably be prohibited by law. You need to learn what heritage seeds are available to you, generally from small local seed companies, and use those as your starting point. Even then, however, as was the case with Percy Schmeiser and others, if your crop gets cross-contaminated from a nearby crop from patent-protected or genetically modified seed, you may be prohibited by law from saving seed produced by that entire crop. And the courts thus far have come down very much in favour of the seed companies in these cases. So there are many roadblocks in the way of your early preparation for this and almost all aspects of future sustainability. But persevere.
Water
In order to be self-sufficient and self-reliant on the other side of the energy collapse a community is going to be critically dependent on a safe, reliable, clean water supply. That's a no-brainer, right? There are the municipal water supply, the heavy duty industrial pumps to supply water for crop irrigation, water purification systems, running water in all the houses. All of these, of course, require a heavy investment of funds both to acquire but also to maintain. Once we are seriously into energy decline and the global distribution system begins to collapse and global industry runs into supply and distribution and cost problems all of these systems will begin to break down. Not too long afterward they will simply cease to function. The community is going to need in place a water supply system that is not dependent on fossil fuels, big expensive industrial machinery and equipment, heavy and expensive maintenance, and capable of supplying sustainably all of the community's water needs.
Unless you are starting a new community from the ground up, and I am definitely not recommending this, that is going to have to be done through an established, and probably very conservative, community council. Getting them to replace the current water systems with a new one designed for a post-fossil-fuel age that they do not understand is fast approaching is not going to be an easy task but, as with seeds above, waiting until it becomes a necessity is not going to work. The groundwork is going to have to be laid well in advance.
The safety issue concerns the presence of water management infrastructure upstream from the community. Dams, causeways, canals and canal locks, and other similar infrastructure has a limited lifespan and requires extensive and expensive maintenance. If any of these are upstream from the community the potential for catastrophic inundation of the community is elevated and the potential for interruption of the water supply gets greater over time. Global warming also has a significant potential to impact the future viability of your water supply, both in terms of seasonal flow and contamination. In addition, any industrial infrastructure upstream, such as mining operations with their toxic tailing ponds, has the high potential of contaminating your water source once maintenance of that infrastructure ceases with the collapse of the company or the industry.
Soil Fertility
Soil, like water, is critically important to all life on earth. The foundation for all higher life-forms is the plants that grow in the soil. Over millions of years nature has perfected techniques for creating, building and maintaining soil fertility for crops, fields, woodlands and wetlands.
Unfortunately nature's systems were not built around man. Our use of pesticides kills the important micro-organisms in the soil that are critical to fertility. Our use of artificial fertilizers seriously upsets the natural complex balance of minerals in the soil, those fertilizer focusing on primarily just three elements; nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. Herbicides destroy the other plants (we call them weeds) that are critical to support for the broad spectrum of soil micro-organisms that create complex soil fertility. Our monocropping encourages the overpopulation of specific groups of micro-organisms at the expense of others. Our plowing of fields upsets and even destroys the soil environment particular micro-organisms need, exposing deep soil organisms to the deadly (for them) air and the sun, suffocating shallow sub-surface micro-organism by burying them deep in the soil. Constant use of heavy farm equipment and plowing have built up a hardpan 6-8 inches below the surface that prevents the movement of critical micro-organisms up and down through the soil, prevents many plants from sinking roots deep enough to get sub-surface water, and builds up a layer of toxins just above the hardpan. Our constant irrigation of crops leaches critical nutrients out of the top soil, causes those crops to develop shallow root systems negating the ability of roots to bring minerals up from the deep sub-soil to the topsoil to nourish plants and micro-organisms and to bring up water from deep within the soil. The combination of over-irrigation and constant application of agro-chemicals has dramatically increased the salt content in the soil, so much so that long-used commercial agricultural soil and even whole farms have had to be abandoned because of the salt burden.
Almost all commercial agricultural soil is sterile, with all the nutrients for plants supplied by fertilizers and other agrochemical additives, soil and plant immune system functions dependent on pesticides and herbicides, water supplied by mechanical irrigation. When the advancing energy crisis forces us to farm without those the fertility needed to grow crops on that soil will simply not exist. It will have to be carefully rebuilt, either by nature or by us, before those soils can produce healthy, abundant crops. With the current levels of global population producing sufficient food on chemically sterilized soils will be impossible, another reality that will force the focus away from global and down to regional and community.
The basic components that must be restored to sterile soils are a full spectrum mineral complex, carbon, organic matter, nitrogen and, most importantly, a broad spectrum of soil micro-organisms. There are many soil improvement techniques that are beneficial, such as creating terra preta soil, but over time the full complexity of living soil must be restored if sustainability is to be achieved.
Farming skills
There is an unfortunate tendency today to think that those who own and run and work on farms are farmers, that they know how to farm. A fairer characterization would be mechano-chemical food producers. Take away their chemicals and their big equipment and and their mechanical irrigation and they wouldn't know where to begin.
There are, in the industrialized world in which we live, very few traditional farmers left and even fewer of their children are choosing to follow in their parents' footsteps. There are far too few to serve as a base for a new, post-fossil-fuel farming industry when the fossil fuels run out and the high-tech farm equipment stops running. That is not to suggest that traditional farming is the only method by which to produce sufficient volumes of food to feed a significant community. Permaculture, for example, is proving to be an excellent technique. But this too requires the long-term development of an extensive, in-the-field skill set, only the rudiments of which can be learned in a classroom.
The farming skills necessary to eke the optimum amount of food out of a piece of land are not easily come by. Even our agricultural schools today tend to focus on chemical/industrial farming techniques. Those fortunate enough to be learning traditional farming skills are doing so at the hand of one of those few traditional farmers still practicing their craft, by apprenticing at their shoulder.
And, of course, today's industrial farms are far too large to be farmed using traditional farming skills. They are designed for and dependent on fossil fuels and large equipment, designed for technological efficiency. They use specialized varieties of seeds to produce crops that can be efficiently harvested with massive mechanization. A return to traditional farming will also necessitate a return to traditional-sized farms, small, labour-intensive farms. The transition from industrial farming to traditional is going to require major land redistribution. The good news is that crop yields using traditional techniques (once the fertility of the soil has been re-established) are 20-50% higher or better.
Sustainable forest management
In any climate, particularly northern climates like Canada and Northern Europe, forests are going to be critical for sustainability in a post-fossil-fuel age. Unfortunately, in the climates in which they will be most needed the forests have long-since been decimated by clear cutting for agricultural land, building materials and urban development and expansion.
Most of the major forests that remain today are not near the population centers that are going to need them in a post-oil world. In a post-oil world forests are going to be needed still for building materials, for fuel, for soil retention and as a habitat for wild animals which will probably increasingly be turned to as a food source. As animal habitat what forests remain are sadly lacking, those forests hacked up into disconnected stands that offer little in the way of contiguous habitat.
In order to not further decimate the forests as fossil fuels run down and then run out a great deal of forest regrowth is going to be needed. It takes, if one includes hardwoods like maple and oak, a hundred years or more to grow a forest from seedlings. Even with the most optimistic peak oil forecasts we do not have that long. There is a lot of reforestation taking place today but most of that is for fast growing softwoods like pine, the objective of which is to quickly produce trees that can again be cut commercially. Sustainable forest management is only being practiced in a few places.
We need a massive, broad-based reforestation effort now to ensure that those forests are going to be there when the fossil fuels can no longer satisfy our needs. We need to stop the clearing and degredation of what forests still remain and give them an opportunity to develop old growth.
Draft Animals
Before fossil fuels farming was conducted using a combination of human and animal power. Before the advent of the automobile the population of horses in North America exceeded the number of humans. Today it is a small fraction of the human population and the vast majority of what stock does exist is for pleasure riding and racing. There are very few draft horses around and even fewer oxen, mules and donkeys.
The amount of labour that is going to be required to produce the food needed for a global human population of 6.6 billion plus when the fossil fuels have gone into irreversible decline is going to be massive. To enter that era without a massively increased stock of draft animals will mean that all of that work is going to have to accomplished with human labour. That will require well over half the human population (experienced) just producing food. It will take a minimum of two decades to build up the stock of draft animals to a level that we can effectively manage food production for that level of population without fossil fuels and mechanized farm equipment.
Non-mechanized farm equipment
Most of the non-mechanized farm equipment still in existence is being used for planters on suburban lawns or as decoration in front of country stores or rusting away behind dilapidated barns. There are few, if any, manufacturers of this equipment left in the industrialized world. An industry to produce such equipment is unlikely to build up before the demand is there for the product.
That presents an interesting Catch-22. The demand is not likely to be there before the fossil fuels needed for mechanized farming have gone into serious decline. It is unlikely that a whole new industry with heavy fossil fuel needs is going to be able to get off the ground when those very fossil fuels have gone into heavy decline. And government subsidies to facilitate development of such an industry are unlikely with a rapidly eroding tax base due to a shrinking labour market with the inevitable demise of industry as we know it.
Additionally that non-mechanized farm equipment manufactured and used in under-developed and developing countries, though it could in theory fill the need in the industrialized world, will not likely become available in the industrialized world due to the lack of raw materials and fuels in the countries of origin and the lack of shipping and fuel for it to be transported to the industrialized world.
Unless the political leadership in the industrialized world accept the imminence of peak oil, understand the implications that that event will encompass, and take it very seriously while there is still time to prepare, the transition to a post-carbon society in the industrialized world is going to be a very painful one.
Of course, another piece of non-mechanized equipment (not necessarily for the farm) that is manufactured and available in abundance in underdeveloped and developing countries is the bicycle. Utilitarian, rugged and, relative to the recreation and sport cycles available in the industrialized world, inexpensive. The bicycle is the perfect personal transport for a post-carbon world.
Trades, Arts and Crafts
Probably the greatest change on the community landscape over the past century is the loss of local community trades, arts and crafts. The former personal and community self-reliance has been traded for the convenience of the global market place driven by the availability of cheap, reliable fuel. Gone is the village blacksmith, the village cobbler, the village tailor, the village dressmaker, the village butcher. Gone are the local handmade furniture, clothings, the owner-built home, the locally-milled grain. Gone are the jacks-of-all-trades, which would describe half the population a century ago. Those trades that still exist within most communities are practiced in specialization to the exclusion of all others.
The village of a century ago could have survived the loss of oil. Hell the people might not even realize it had happened until well after the event when they noticed no trucks had come through town in the past six months. That same community today may have trouble surviving that six months. They would have long since run out of not just fuel but food and probably most durable goods, and be in no position to replace them locally. If that were the dead of winter in most Canadian communities teams of people would have to clean out the bodies in the spring.
Self-reliance.......... Without a global manufacturing and distribution system, or even a national one, self-reliance for the individual and the community, especially rural communities, is critical one we get well into the post-peak era. If the global and national manufacturing and distribution systems to not crash suddenly they will disintegrate gradually, becoming increasingly unreliable until they finally break down. The impact of this will be hardest in rural communities away from the manufacturing centers.
Conclusion
Peak oil is going to mean much more than the loss of oil and derivative fuels and other products. It is going to mean peak food, in an overpopulated world of over 6.6 billion people. The ability to produce food for that level of population with petro-chemical inputs will be severely hampered because of the impact that chemically-based farming has had on the commercial agriculture soils in the industrialized, food exporting countries of the world. It is going to take decades of highly focussed effort to ready ourselves for food self-sufficiency in a post-peak world, decades that should have started long ago.
With billions of lives at stake, including those of people in the industrialized world, we cannot afford to enter the peak oil era naively optimistic that technology will see us through, that we will find and develop alternative energy sources in time. And we certainly can't afford to enter this era blissfully ignorant of the severe ramifications of getting there unprepared.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Massive Marine Methane Hydrate Destabilization/Release a Potential Major Positive Feedback Mechanism in Accelerating Global Warming
First, a few words about the denial industry
Perhaps the favorite argument of those anxious to take society down a dangerous path - such as that of exploiting a new energy resource like methane hydrates - when there is opposition to that intent out of concern of the risk and danger involved, is to demand that those opposed to their actions prove the alleged danger.
It is an argument that has been increasingly supported by politicians hoping to keep the wheels on the growth-dependent global economy and others who stand to gain from the actions being debated. The growth on which their power depends derives from energy, lots of it.
It seems that invariably the approach favoured by those in power is to let the debated actions continue until that proof of danger is produced, hoping that such proof will not materialize. But almost invariably the satisfactory proof demanded is extremely illusive and in the time it takes to produce that proof an extraordinary amount of damage has already been achieved. All too often the society is already far too advanced down the path to dependence on that resource that the ultimate decision is to carry on, that the risk is deemed manageable, minor and acceptable relative to the perceived benefits being achieved.
While that proof is being developed, and even after it has been presented and supported by countless experts, the tactics of denial, misinformation and disinformation not only continue but accelerate. Whenever any minor point of contention can be created, when any minute error of detail in the proof can be found, it is vigorously put forward as proof that the entire proof is invalid. For every thousand experts endorsing the proof a small number of often highly-paid industry shills are put forward to claim that the debate is not over, that the research is not conclusive, that the proof is incomplete and full of holes, and that the proof should not be allowed to stand in the way of progress.
The concept of using risk, doubt and uncertainty as a need for caution seems to be lost in favor of recklessly proceeding. The logic of demanding proof of safety rather than proof of danger is ignored.
This is the tactic that has been used in industry opposition to the climate change argument. The amount of time and money having to be expended/wasted on the inevitable proof because of this industry opposition and campaign of disinformation is almost enough, and is intended, to dissuade those working on that proof from even bothering. Fortunately, for society, they are not dissuaded.
Any potential crisis that could possibly block or slow economic progress is deemed less a problem than the economic crisis that a more cautious approach could bring about. There is no long term view and no environmental or societal conscience when it comes to economics. There is only the short term profit motive which trumps all other considerations.
Now back to our scheduled programming
There is growing debate today, as the reality of diminishing global oil reserves sinks in, about methane hydrates as a potential energy source and the potential global risks and dangers in their exploitation. The optimism is rapidly waning that economical carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology will be developed to allow the use of coal to be cleaned up to a level that will alleviate global warming. Governments and energy industries throughout the world are increasingly looking at methane as the next great energy source. After all, there is estimated to be more carbon locked up in methane hydrates than in all of the other fossil fuels combined, enough to power human society, according to the optimists, through to the end of this millennium.
But the risks inherent in the exploitation of methane from hydrates are very, very real and every effort must be made to push awareness of those risks out into the public arena to help prevent us from blindly following self-appointed, self-interested leaders down a path rife with dangers that have been vigorously and intentionally kept from public view with a campaign of denial, misinformation and disinformation.
Again I digress
Before I go any further it is, I believe, important to clarify something. I am not suggesting for a moment that those in government or the individuals in corporations like energy companies are setting out to intentionally destroy the world or even to do damage to society. Most of those individuals are probably basically good people who believe that they are doing the best that they can for their companies, their countries, for humanity. I believe strongly that the basic problem is the nature of the corporation and other institutions like government.
Both are created by people but once created the people within those institutions must follow the tunnel-visioned objectives of the institution regardless of their personal beliefs or sense of ethics and morality.
Corporations are, legally at least, artificial people, like computers in a sense. But neither corporations nor computers by their nature have the essential elements that define humanness. They have no soul, no ethics, no morality. They have specified objectives laid out for them by their people and do not allow human fallibility to get in the way of pursuing and, if possible, achieving those single-minded objectives. Failure to do so will see a person removed and replaced by someone who will get with the program.
Institutions and corporations differ from real people in another important respect. They potentially have an existence, a life, well in excess of the lifespan of their human components. The parts are easily replaced without significantly altering the whole.
Back on Track
What are Methane Hydrates? Most methane in the world is a gas - like natural gas and similarly usable as an energy source - formed from organic matter broken down by bacteria. Methane hydrates are molecules of methane gas trapped in a water-ice cage. The hydrate reserves occur, primarily in the oceans along continental shelf margins, and in Arctic permafrost. Methane is also released, in gaseous form, from swamps, peat bogs, shallow lakes and by various animals like ruminants (e.g. cattle, buffalo, water buffalo). There is some small-scale commercial production of methane gas, in Denmark for example, using animal manure in huge methane digesters that use natural bacteria to break down the organic matter and produce the gas which is drawn off and used like natural gas.
Methane hydrates were little studied and only poorly understood before the last three decades. Even now full understanding is still potentially decades away. Although debated, many experts and scientists believe there may be more carbon energy locked up in marine and permafrost methane hydrates than in all of the oil, natural gas and coal in the world combined. That makes them a very attractive potential energy source as world reserves of those three fossil fuels decline. That potential as an energy source is, in fact, the primary financial driver to the study of methane hydrates.
But there are a few important points about methane hydrates that raise red flags and strongly suggest that we proceed with caution in any intent to exploit them for energy.
Perhaps the favorite argument of those anxious to take society down a dangerous path - such as that of exploiting a new energy resource like methane hydrates - when there is opposition to that intent out of concern of the risk and danger involved, is to demand that those opposed to their actions prove the alleged danger.
It is an argument that has been increasingly supported by politicians hoping to keep the wheels on the growth-dependent global economy and others who stand to gain from the actions being debated. The growth on which their power depends derives from energy, lots of it.
It seems that invariably the approach favoured by those in power is to let the debated actions continue until that proof of danger is produced, hoping that such proof will not materialize. But almost invariably the satisfactory proof demanded is extremely illusive and in the time it takes to produce that proof an extraordinary amount of damage has already been achieved. All too often the society is already far too advanced down the path to dependence on that resource that the ultimate decision is to carry on, that the risk is deemed manageable, minor and acceptable relative to the perceived benefits being achieved.
While that proof is being developed, and even after it has been presented and supported by countless experts, the tactics of denial, misinformation and disinformation not only continue but accelerate. Whenever any minor point of contention can be created, when any minute error of detail in the proof can be found, it is vigorously put forward as proof that the entire proof is invalid. For every thousand experts endorsing the proof a small number of often highly-paid industry shills are put forward to claim that the debate is not over, that the research is not conclusive, that the proof is incomplete and full of holes, and that the proof should not be allowed to stand in the way of progress.
The concept of using risk, doubt and uncertainty as a need for caution seems to be lost in favor of recklessly proceeding. The logic of demanding proof of safety rather than proof of danger is ignored.
This is the tactic that has been used in industry opposition to the climate change argument. The amount of time and money having to be expended/wasted on the inevitable proof because of this industry opposition and campaign of disinformation is almost enough, and is intended, to dissuade those working on that proof from even bothering. Fortunately, for society, they are not dissuaded.
Any potential crisis that could possibly block or slow economic progress is deemed less a problem than the economic crisis that a more cautious approach could bring about. There is no long term view and no environmental or societal conscience when it comes to economics. There is only the short term profit motive which trumps all other considerations.
Now back to our scheduled programming
There is growing debate today, as the reality of diminishing global oil reserves sinks in, about methane hydrates as a potential energy source and the potential global risks and dangers in their exploitation. The optimism is rapidly waning that economical carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology will be developed to allow the use of coal to be cleaned up to a level that will alleviate global warming. Governments and energy industries throughout the world are increasingly looking at methane as the next great energy source. After all, there is estimated to be more carbon locked up in methane hydrates than in all of the other fossil fuels combined, enough to power human society, according to the optimists, through to the end of this millennium.
But the risks inherent in the exploitation of methane from hydrates are very, very real and every effort must be made to push awareness of those risks out into the public arena to help prevent us from blindly following self-appointed, self-interested leaders down a path rife with dangers that have been vigorously and intentionally kept from public view with a campaign of denial, misinformation and disinformation.
Again I digress
Before I go any further it is, I believe, important to clarify something. I am not suggesting for a moment that those in government or the individuals in corporations like energy companies are setting out to intentionally destroy the world or even to do damage to society. Most of those individuals are probably basically good people who believe that they are doing the best that they can for their companies, their countries, for humanity. I believe strongly that the basic problem is the nature of the corporation and other institutions like government.
Both are created by people but once created the people within those institutions must follow the tunnel-visioned objectives of the institution regardless of their personal beliefs or sense of ethics and morality.
Corporations are, legally at least, artificial people, like computers in a sense. But neither corporations nor computers by their nature have the essential elements that define humanness. They have no soul, no ethics, no morality. They have specified objectives laid out for them by their people and do not allow human fallibility to get in the way of pursuing and, if possible, achieving those single-minded objectives. Failure to do so will see a person removed and replaced by someone who will get with the program.
Institutions and corporations differ from real people in another important respect. They potentially have an existence, a life, well in excess of the lifespan of their human components. The parts are easily replaced without significantly altering the whole.
Back on Track
What are Methane Hydrates? Most methane in the world is a gas - like natural gas and similarly usable as an energy source - formed from organic matter broken down by bacteria. Methane hydrates are molecules of methane gas trapped in a water-ice cage. The hydrate reserves occur, primarily in the oceans along continental shelf margins, and in Arctic permafrost. Methane is also released, in gaseous form, from swamps, peat bogs, shallow lakes and by various animals like ruminants (e.g. cattle, buffalo, water buffalo). There is some small-scale commercial production of methane gas, in Denmark for example, using animal manure in huge methane digesters that use natural bacteria to break down the organic matter and produce the gas which is drawn off and used like natural gas.
Methane hydrates were little studied and only poorly understood before the last three decades. Even now full understanding is still potentially decades away. Although debated, many experts and scientists believe there may be more carbon energy locked up in marine and permafrost methane hydrates than in all of the oil, natural gas and coal in the world combined. That makes them a very attractive potential energy source as world reserves of those three fossil fuels decline. That potential as an energy source is, in fact, the primary financial driver to the study of methane hydrates.
But there are a few important points about methane hydrates that raise red flags and strongly suggest that we proceed with caution in any intent to exploit them for energy.
- Methane hydrates are pockets of methane trapped in a cage of water ice. They occur where they do because they require very specific conditions of temperature and pressure to be stable. Raise the temperature and/or lower the pressure and the molecules break down and release the methane gas.
- The methane in the hydrates is held at a density 160 times that of methane in the atmosphere, meaning as it escapes from the hydrate it expands 160 times.
- Methane in the atmosphere is more than 60 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2). It is, however, much shorter lived. It oxidizes fairly quickly in the atmosphere. But it oxidizes to CO2 which is much more stable and much longer lived than the methane itself.
- The temperature at which methane hydrates are stable is not the densest form of water ice. That means that methane hydrate molecules are always subject to two opposing pressures as they warm; the ice forming the cage wants to contract and the methane inside the cage wants to expand. That makes the stability zone in which methane hydrates can exist very narrow and unstable with the slightest changes in temperature and pressure.
- Below the bottom of the hydrate stability zone (HSZ) there is generally more methane but without the hydrates, in gaseous form trapped in the pores of sediment and capped or held in place by the methane hydrates above. Disrupting the cap of methane hydrates, therefore, runs the risk of massive releases of methane not just from the hydrates but of the gaseous methane below the hydrates.
- There have been numerous accidental releases of methane hydrates in the past fifty years in connection with deep sea oil and gas drilling operations (methane hydrates often occur in conjunction with oil and natural gas deposits), extraction platform seabed anchoring, dredging operations, undersea landslides triggered by volcanoes and earthquakes, shifts in undersea temperatures with changes in ocean currents, in the Arctic as sea temperatures rise, and more.
- The risk of accidental releases of the methane gas increases dramatically when we begin to work directly on methane hydrate reserves. Certain suggested methods of methane hydrate exploitation represent very great risks. One of these is sonic destabilization of the methane hydrates which has the potential of destabilizing large sections of the reserves, not just the segment being focused on.
- Most methane hydrates in both undersea reserves and in Arctic permafrost are loosely dispersed and not sufficiently concentrated to allow economical recovery for use as energy.
Most sub sea methane hydrate deposits occur on the downslope edge of continental shelves. - The risk of massive landslides occurring - potentially resulting in tsunamis - from a large release of methane gas is, therefore, quite high. There is considerable and growing geological evidence that this has occurred several times in earth's past, often in the warming periods at the end of ice ages.
And that is potentially the greatest concern with methane hydrates, whether or not we attempt to exploit them as an energy resource. Scientific studies in the Arctic have already shown that methane venting from the ocean floor is increasing as the temperature of Arctic waters climbs. And Arctic temperature rise is much more rapid, and will continue to be so, than in the tropics as global warming proceeds.
That release of methane as global warming proceeds sets up a powerful positive feedback mechanism that accelerates the warming. Geological science has shown that methane did not initiate the end of ice ages but accelerated the process. We are in a period of overall global warming. I will leave aside the question of whether that is caused by man or by a change in the sunspot cycle. It is irrelevant. A two degree Celsius rise in average global temperature is more than enough to trigger massive methane hydrate releases. That same two degree rise anywhere, such as in the Arctic, threatens release of the hydrate reserves in that area. The temperature rise in Arctic waters is already heralding the beginning of the acceleration of Arctic methane hydrate releases. Potential changes in the course or temperature of the Atlantic thermal currents could also threaten major methane hydrate reserves along the east coast continental shelf of North America from the Caribbean to the Arctic.
I'm certain that those in favor of progress at any price, those in the energy industry, the denial lobby surrounding governments everywhere, will be able to find small errors in my argument to declare them null and void. That, after all, is their job. Don't let them fool you. The risks to our planet and our global human society are high enough to demand that they prove their case.
=============================================================
The following can offer some additional reading and were used as source material for some of the newer components of my argument.
1) Could changing ocean circulation have destabilized methane hydrate at the Paleocene/Eocene boundary?
2) Methane Hydrate and Abrupt Climate Change
3) METHANE HYDRATE DESTABILIZATION, DEGLACIATION AND OCEANIC ANOXIA, AND BIOLOGICAL INNOVATION IN THE LATE NEOPROTEROZOIC
4) Methane hydrate destabilization as a result of anthropogenic warming
5) Global Climate Destabilization is Major Security & Economic Threat
6) Methane Hydrates Research
7) Methane seeps,methane hydrate destabilization,and the late Neoproterozoic postglacial cap carbonates
8) Methane Hydrates Issues and Opportunities
9) Methane hydrates in the sea floor
10) Could Methane Trigger a Climate Doomsday Within a Human Lifespan?
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Methane Hydrates Turning Into Alternative Energy Solution of Choice
The news on intended methane hydrate exploitation continues to get increasingly scary. Here is just a recent survey of article and news headlines and titles.
- Methane Timebomb Ticking - Boilingspot.blogspot.com
- The USGS assessment of abrupt climate change - Energy and Environment Viewpoint
- Bush urges US to stake claim to Arctic territory in last-gasp energy grab - C-Questor group newsletter
- Scientific deep ocean drilling: Revealing the Earth's secrets - Doxtop
- Japan digs ocean deep to find natural resources - Methane Hydrates - Greenpacks
- USGS: Alaskan gas could heat millions of homes - Top Gold News
- Study: Lots of recoverable frozen gas in Alaska - blog Rubens
- Methane hydrate extraction - Mercury Rising
- "Ice That Burns" May Yield Clean, Sustainable Bridge to Global Energy Future - Newswise
- Japan to drill offshore for methane hydrate - EnergyCurrent
- Japan aiming to commercialize new ocean resources in 10 years - iStock Analyst
- Govt to Study: Exploit ocean resources - Asian news feed
- Ice That Burns Could Be a Green Fossil Fuel - Newscientist.com
- Flammable ice is the future of the human idea alternative energy - Anrosoft
- Flammable ice could be carbon-neutral fuel - pound360
- Scientists have found ecological way to burn methane. - The Science
- Boosting energy production from 'ice that burns' - Science centric
The volume of material being released on the subject of exploiting methane hydrates as an energy source is dwarfed by the plethora of articles detailing the activity in the area of Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). The combination of these two bode very badly for global warming. The potential for accidental release of large volumes of methane from hydrates and the inability to develop an economically viable technology and methodology for CCS very much weakens the potential for decreasing anthropogenic greenhouse gasses to a level that global warming can be arrested.
Our hunger and lust for new energy sources, as oil and natural gas resources begin to decline after peak oil, continues to put pressure on governments everywhere to weaken the regulations for carbon emissions. CCS is, through carbon trading, showing all the hallmarks of turning into another taxpayer-subsidized ponzi scheme with every other corporation, whether or not they are involved in the energy industry, lining up at the taxpayer trough looking for their share of the research money and stockpiling carbon credits waiting for legislation that will drive up the price as carbon emitters are forced by implemented legislation into buying credits.
As you will see in the archives of this blog, I have written several articles on both CCS and methane hydrates. With the lack of material in mainstream media, however, the potential for any public pressure in these areas continues to be weak. If it stays weak and public pressure never develops the desire of those in power to keep the train speeding toward the precipice rather than putting on the brakes will rule the day. Sooner or later some sanity must seep into the circles of power or we are going to pay a tremendous price to support their lust for power.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
This Financial Crisis ain't the big one, just a strong foreshock
I generally try to avoid wading into the discussion/debate on finances and economics. There are so many others in the debate that you can't hear yourself think. And besides, it's a rigged game and as soon as anyone thinks they have a viable solution the rules of the game change.
But....... I see so much of what I consider misreading of the current economic crisis that I thought; What the hell? Can't possibly be any more wrong than a lot of that hog swill I've been reading. So here goes.
The vast majority of economists, politicians and business leaders seem to believe - at least for public consumption - that the current economic crisis, like all past economic crises, is a temporary problem that will soon be corrected and we will get back on the growth gravy train. Politicians and pundits spend a good part of every day in front of TV cameras and media microphones trying to convince you that recovery is just around the corner and that you should take the padlock off your wallet and get out there and spend. What else are they going to tell you? The truth? God forbid!
There are probably just as many unlistened-to people at the opposite extreme, who believe that this crisis is unlike any other and that the end of our high-tech, virtual society is at an end. Though, in my opinion, neither group is right, the latter is more right than the economic optimists.
This is not the end. It is, again in my opinion, a strong foreshock of the final, devastating economic crisis to come. I do not believe we are that far away, for reasons I will detail below. I believe the Big One will be upon us within three years. Actually, I'll qualify that a little tighter; within three years of the beginning of the economic recovery. Why?
But....... I see so much of what I consider misreading of the current economic crisis that I thought; What the hell? Can't possibly be any more wrong than a lot of that hog swill I've been reading. So here goes.
The vast majority of economists, politicians and business leaders seem to believe - at least for public consumption - that the current economic crisis, like all past economic crises, is a temporary problem that will soon be corrected and we will get back on the growth gravy train. Politicians and pundits spend a good part of every day in front of TV cameras and media microphones trying to convince you that recovery is just around the corner and that you should take the padlock off your wallet and get out there and spend. What else are they going to tell you? The truth? God forbid!
There are probably just as many unlistened-to people at the opposite extreme, who believe that this crisis is unlike any other and that the end of our high-tech, virtual society is at an end. Though, in my opinion, neither group is right, the latter is more right than the economic optimists.
This is not the end. It is, again in my opinion, a strong foreshock of the final, devastating economic crisis to come. I do not believe we are that far away, for reasons I will detail below. I believe the Big One will be upon us within three years. Actually, I'll qualify that a little tighter; within three years of the beginning of the economic recovery. Why?
If we do not find some way of loosening the grip of finance and economics on the running of human society I can't see, given so many resource constraints and the rapid devaluation of money in the current financial crisis, how we can possibly have or even think we have a full economic recovery and long-term future for human society as it is currently constituted.
- Almost all proposed political, financial and economic solutions to the current economic crisis assume that the resources to restart and maintain the growth economy to achieve recovery are there. The harsh reality is they are not. We have already passed peak oil and the peak in countless other resources. Continuous growth simply is not possible when available resources are in decline. The continuing denial of this reality gets in the way of designing effective solutions.
- Even in a global recession we are still using up around 30 billion barrels of oil a year. We hit peak oil in spring 2005 (The Oil Drum suggests it was in 2008). That has been disguised by bringing alternative fuels (like biofuels, CTL, GTL and tar sands) on line, by switching from reporting crude oil to reporting all liquids, and by the current economic crisis reducing demand and distracting attention from energy concerns.
- If demand rises from present levels by 2% per year, and supply continues to fall from those peak oil levels by 2% per year, by 2020 demand will exceed supply by over 17-billion barrels/year and rising. The negative economic impact, even if nations agree to stabilize oil prices, will be in excess of $20-trillion/year globally and rising (each barrel of oil is the foundation of well over $1000 of economic activity).
- Energy projects throughout the world, particularly oil, are being cancelled or put on hold every day - waiting for oil prices to recover to and stabilize at levels the world could not cope with a year ago - since the beginning of this financial crisis. Such projects will not be restarted quickly, even when the credit tap is turned back on.
- Even if the global economy begins to recover this year (which looks increasingly unlikely), there will not be enough oil (or other energy resources or many other resources) next year to satisfy demand. Recovery/growth plans will fall short by nearly $5-trillion. By 2015 they will fall short by over $10-trillion annually. There simply are not enough energy resources left in the world to power enough economic growth to recover from the current economic crisis where tens of trillions of dollars (some say hundreds of trillions) of wealth have been lost. If product demand returns and continues to track the promises of economic growth, rather than the reality of diminishing supply, then hyper-inflation should set in within the next three years as product demand will, by that time, exceed product supply by over $10-trillion/year.
- In the U.S., and probably other newer western nations like Canada and Australia, as suggested in joeplanner.blogspot.com "at least as much land has been developed .... in the last 15 years as in the previous 400 years of our history." And all of that land development has been for the expansion of auto-dependant residential and retail suburbia through the use of ever-escalating debt. The infrastructure development and maintenance costs for all that new developed land are threatening to bankrupt governments at all levels.
- In the past several decades in North America retail space per person, mostly in malls, has risen from four to nearly 40 square feet. That is 10-30 times greater retail space per person than in any of the nations of Europe. Even with the current economic crisis, as much as a quarter of that retail space now sits empty and suburban malls are dying at an alarming rate. And this is just the beginning.
- The Baker-Hughes Rig Count survey suggests that operational drill-rig counts in North America are down 10-15% since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, with further declines in rig count continuing every week. The oil industry is not gearing up for an economic recovery. They are betting on continuing declines. And are not likely to be on the leading edge of the recovery, like they were in the 1990s when they got burned badly. The cost of oil projects is magnitudes greater than it was then and they need a much higher oil price to justify development.
- The Baltic Dry Index, which tracks global trans-oceanic shipping, reports massive declines in shipping contracts throughout the world. The downside of that is that many ship owners, already running at the margins due to increased fuel and docking costs, are decommissioning their ships. The fleet available to support a rebuild of global trade to the levels needed for an economic recovery will not be there in the short run. With continued failures in the ship building industry, not to mention shortage of energy and raw materials, the ability to ramp up global shipping will be seriously constrained.
I am often accused of talking doom and gloom. Guilty as charged. Unrealistic optimism and unbridled greed have brought us to the point of a global financial crisis that will, by the time this is over, make the Great Depression look like a picnic. A pessimist, as the saying goes, is an informed optimist. I strongly believe its time for a little of what the majority insist on calling pessimism but is, in reality, REALISM. Perpetual growth is not sustainable, is not possible. It is a myth, a ponzi scheme.
As politicians, industry leaders and the media succeed in breaking down your resistance and convince you that the economy is headed into recovery and you return, even if slowly, to your old debt-based spending habits the reality of the barriers to that recovery will begin to be very apparent. Not enough oil. Not enough coal. Not enough natural gas. Not enough uranium. Not enough progress in wind energy. Not enough iron. Not enough copper. Not enough lithium. Not enough. Not enough. Not enough.............
The public reaction to this economic crisis has been, considering the depth and magnitude of it, surprisingly muted and passive. The demonstrations and riots have been very limited. It is as if we are all in a state of shock. And our leaders would like to keep us there, thank you very much, until recovery is under way. But every day more and more people are waking up. More and more people are opening their eyes and ears and reading between the lines. It is very unlikely that that passivity will characterize public response to the next and more major crisis just around the corner. Enough is enough already. No more bailouts. No more golden parachutes. No more unsustainable growth. It's time to face reality and redesign the system for the resource depleted world that is quickly becoming reality. It is time for true leadership, for leaders in touch with reality. End the greed. End the pork barrel spending. End the pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams. Give us that hard dose of reality and tell us how to deal with it. I think our leaders will be surprised at how ready and able people are to deal with. But that's just my opinion.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
They're Tar Sands, not Oil Sands!
It's a common practice. Euphemisms. When the mere name of something takes on negative connotations then change the name. When Allegheny Airlines gets dubbed Agony Airlines, change the name. Why would anyone want to buy death insurance? Let's call it life insurance.
And when the perception of the tar sands turns negative, no problem. We'll just call it the oil sands. Everybody loves oil. Hell, the world runs on oil. The only problem is, they're not oil sands.
What comes out of the tar sands is not oil. It is, in fact, tar, bitumen, the same sticky, smelly stuff they build roads with. With a lot of processing, using up a lot of energy and other precious resources like clean water, it can be turned into a synthetic oil which, with further processing using up a lot more energy and other resources, can be turned into gasoline. But it takes almost as much energy to produce a gallon of gasoline from tar sands as the energy you get out of the gallon of gasoline.
Oil, on the other hand (at least the easy to recover oil with which the oil age began) can return as much as a hundred times more energy than what it costs to process it. Even the more expensive, difficult to find, extract and process oil which we are dealing with today returns far more energy than what it costs to process it.
Euphemisms like oil sands are a form of whitewash having but one purpose. They cover up the less attractive, seamy side of the issue. Tar sands is, hands down, the dirtiest, most polluting source of energy on the planet. The once pristine environment of northern Alberta and the Yukon and Northwest Territories are being absolutely destroyed by the tar sands operations. People living in the region are developing cancers and other deadly diseases at an alarming rate far exceeding that in any other region of the country. Communities downstream on the Athabasca River can no longer use the water from that river.
The tar sands are not an energy boom. They are an energy boondoggle.
All the press of late focuses on the massive amounts of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants the tar sands operations generate. The pipedream of CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) is touted as the answer to that problem, if it ever proves out and becomes economically viable.
But CCS will do nothing for cleaning up the massive containment ponds full of liquid toxins. It will do nothing to clean up the Athabasca River and the Arctic Ocean that are receiving all of the uncontained toxins. It will do nothing for restoring the environment that is being raped by the tar sands operations. Nature laid down a benign overburden of rock and soil above the tar-soaked sands over millions of years and built a bountiful natural environment despite the toxic swamp lying beneath it. That overburden is being progressively stripped away by tar sands operators, exposing the tar sands below. What is left when they shut down their operations and walk away is a toxic landscape incapable of supporting life even at a minimal level.
So let's stop with the euphemism. Even the label of tar sands does not adequately portray the horrific nature of what is being unleashed in the Athabasca region. But these recent attempts to further con the nation and the world into thinking the tar sands are harmless are bordering on the criminal. Let's call them what they are. Let's shut them down. And let's focus our efforts on figuring out how to undo the massive amount of damage that has already been done rather than trying to figure out how to continue that damage more efficiently and faster.
What the hell is the point of making a mistake as big as the tar sands without learning from it?
And when the perception of the tar sands turns negative, no problem. We'll just call it the oil sands. Everybody loves oil. Hell, the world runs on oil. The only problem is, they're not oil sands.
What comes out of the tar sands is not oil. It is, in fact, tar, bitumen, the same sticky, smelly stuff they build roads with. With a lot of processing, using up a lot of energy and other precious resources like clean water, it can be turned into a synthetic oil which, with further processing using up a lot more energy and other resources, can be turned into gasoline. But it takes almost as much energy to produce a gallon of gasoline from tar sands as the energy you get out of the gallon of gasoline.
Oil, on the other hand (at least the easy to recover oil with which the oil age began) can return as much as a hundred times more energy than what it costs to process it. Even the more expensive, difficult to find, extract and process oil which we are dealing with today returns far more energy than what it costs to process it.
Euphemisms like oil sands are a form of whitewash having but one purpose. They cover up the less attractive, seamy side of the issue. Tar sands is, hands down, the dirtiest, most polluting source of energy on the planet. The once pristine environment of northern Alberta and the Yukon and Northwest Territories are being absolutely destroyed by the tar sands operations. People living in the region are developing cancers and other deadly diseases at an alarming rate far exceeding that in any other region of the country. Communities downstream on the Athabasca River can no longer use the water from that river.
The tar sands are not an energy boom. They are an energy boondoggle.
All the press of late focuses on the massive amounts of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants the tar sands operations generate. The pipedream of CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) is touted as the answer to that problem, if it ever proves out and becomes economically viable.
But CCS will do nothing for cleaning up the massive containment ponds full of liquid toxins. It will do nothing to clean up the Athabasca River and the Arctic Ocean that are receiving all of the uncontained toxins. It will do nothing for restoring the environment that is being raped by the tar sands operations. Nature laid down a benign overburden of rock and soil above the tar-soaked sands over millions of years and built a bountiful natural environment despite the toxic swamp lying beneath it. That overburden is being progressively stripped away by tar sands operators, exposing the tar sands below. What is left when they shut down their operations and walk away is a toxic landscape incapable of supporting life even at a minimal level.
So let's stop with the euphemism. Even the label of tar sands does not adequately portray the horrific nature of what is being unleashed in the Athabasca region. But these recent attempts to further con the nation and the world into thinking the tar sands are harmless are bordering on the criminal. Let's call them what they are. Let's shut them down. And let's focus our efforts on figuring out how to undo the massive amount of damage that has already been done rather than trying to figure out how to continue that damage more efficiently and faster.
What the hell is the point of making a mistake as big as the tar sands without learning from it?
Sunday, January 04, 2009
2009 - Trying to Rebuild the House of Cards
What a year 2008 was. So much greed got bitch-slapped in the wallet. Fat-cat fights broke out on Wall Street as they all scrambled for the new Federal Reserve kitty litter. Bubbles were bursting everywhere like over-inflated bubble-wrap turf at the Super Bowl.
The big question is how far is this unravelling going to go? And what will happen when Wiley Coyote finally succumbs to gravity and hits bottom, wherever bottom is? The other important thing, for me, controversial as it may be, is to put 2008 in a peak oil perspective. I tend to do that. Based on the statistics, it appears that we hit peak oil in the spring of 2005. That, of course, is hotly debated. Those in power and those honest and unbiased mouthpieces for the energy industry and oil companies still claim that peak oil is decades away. And proponents of the abiotic oil theory claim that oil is self-regenerating and infinite (queue Bobby McFarren singing Don't worry, be happy!).
I don't like to engage in the statistical debate. There is a general lack of reliability in all of those statistics. There is always a major political component behind what gets reported. OPEC nations, for example, who doubled their reported reserves when they formed OPEC and established reserve-dependent production quotas, have never changed the numbers they report despite decades of drawdown on those reserves. Oil statistics, as with most statistics, are as meaningless as a sumo wrestlers new year's resolution to lose weight and can be interpreted many ways to support a variety of agenda.
There is little question that energy costs (the cost of all forms of energy rose in tandem with the price of oil) were a significant contributor to the economic collapse that began in 2008. Whether they were a cause or a coincidence is unclear. One of the debates that will probably persist through 2009 is whether peak oil or commodity speculators drove the price of oil up to $147.67. The statistics suggesting that we hit peak in the spring of 2005 do exist. But it is a question of interpretation.
From the time that M. King Hubbert first correctly forecast, in the early 1950s, that the U. S. lower-48 oil production would peak in 1970 (he further forecast that global production would peak in or about 2000, a date that was delayed by the oil crises of the 1970s and '80s) the basis of the peak oil argument has been a simple one. It was and still is based on production of conventional crude. The reason is simple. When global conventional crude passes the peak and goes into decline the combination of other sources will not be able to offset the declines in conventional crude. What has changed over the years, rather, in an attempt to disguise that inevitability, is the official definition of oil that is included in government and industry statistics.
Oil reserve reporting, for example, has been loosened from its original proven to provable. Those within the oil industry would like it loosened further still, perhaps all the way to ultimately recoverable. Such distinctions may be lost on all but industry insiders but it makes a tremendous difference in defining something like peak oil.
More importantly, the industrial and political definition of oil itself has changed significantly over the past few decades, as well as the definition of the liquid fuels such as gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and marine fuel normally derived from oil. The definition of oil has expanded far beyond conventional crude as well. It now encompasses synthetic crude produced from tar sands and oil shale, synthetic biofuels, extra heavy oil, vegetable and plant inputs to biofuels, deep water oil. It has also expanded to encompass, as barrels of oil equivalents (BOE), substances like natural gas, methane, and coal used as raw material for producing liquid fuels through processes like GTL (Gas to Liquid) and CTL (Coal to Liquid). Essentially anything that can be converted into liquid fuels, such as recycled motor oils and used cooking oil, either is or eventually will be included in the definition of oil. Whether or not this is an intentional misdirection to disguise the rapid decline in oil reserves, the effect on public awareness is the same.
However, even incorporating deepwater crude and extra heavy oil (which the majority of the world's refineries are not designed to process), global oil discoveries peaked way back in the 1960s and have been declining ever since. We are now producing or extracting every year over four barrels of oil for every new barrel of oil discovered, and have been consuming more oil per year than that discovered for nearly three decades. Taken on a field by field basis, peak generally follows discovery by about thirty years, but this can vary significantly from one field to another. Some will peak and go into decline in as short a time as ten years. Some large fields like Gawhar, Cantarell and Burgan may not reach peak production for forty or fifty years.
There is an ever-accelerating effort to find or identify alternatives from which liquid fuels can be produced. For a variety of reasons that effort is meeting ever-growing opposition. The push for bio-fuels resulting in rapidly rising food grain prices is largely seen as a major contributor to increasing world hunger. There is rapidly accelerated destruction of old growth rainforests to bring more land into bio-fuel production. Financing has been diverted into bio-fuel subsidies from research and development funding for other viable energy alternatives like solar and wind. There has been increased land consolidation for efficient fuel crop production pushing more indigenous, self-sufficient farmers off their land in poor third world countries.
Massive investments continue in tar-sands and oil-shale operations, possibly the most environmentally destructive energy projects on the planet. Coal production (coal is the dirtiest, least energy-dense of the fossil fuels) is again on the rise, using ever-poorer grades of coal for the production of liquid fuels. Massive volumes of natural gas are being diverted to liquid fuels or used as the energy source for tar-sands and oil-shale processing. And all of these efforts are running into increased public opposition as the damage they do becomes clearer.
So how will all of this play out in 2009? In 2008 oil prices rocketed up to over $147.00 per barrel only to collapse, right along with the stock markets and the global economy, to under $40.00 per barrel by year end. There was a serious amount of demand destruction, in rich and poor nations alike, in the second half of the year. Repeated production cuts by OPEC have not succeeded in halting the plummeting price of oil. Where oil, according to the experts, was way above what the fundamentals would support at $147.00, it is now as far below the fundamentals at $40.00 and lower.
No one seems to be quite sure what the fundamentally supportable price of oil should be anymore. It is likely that this confusion and uncertainty of oil prices will continue through 2009. Prices may, if there are signs of some measurable economic recovery, be driven by speculators back above the $100.00 per barrel mark, perhaps even surpassing the $147.00 level of mid 2008. If there are no signs of economic recovery, however, the downward momentum will likely see the global economy contract even further. Moving from recession to depression is clearly a possibility. The fundamentals will not again form the basis of oil prices until the economic turmoil settles. Just as there was a fear (of war) premium built into the price on the way up, there is a fear (of recession/depression) penalty built into it on the way down.
There is one unavoidable truth underlying all of this, however. Whatever the price of oil, somewhere around 30-billion barrels of it will be consumed globally in 2009. When we are talking about total, remaining, recoverable oil of less than a trillion barrels that is still a lot of drawdown. It appears that we are on a global production plateau with minor new discoveries and alternatives thus far effectively offsetting (hiding?) the production decline in existing fields. This will likely delay the recognition and admission of peak oil in official circles until we fall off the plateau and have clearly and unarguably begun our slide down the depletion slope. The demand destruction during the current global economic uncertainty will lengthen the plateau slightly and delay a little longer that recognition and admission. On the other hand, major developed nations may decide to take advantage of the temporarilly low oil prices to top up their Strategic Petroleum Reserves, which China has already begun to do.
The other reality is, however, that more and more effective voices are beginning to talk about peak oil in government, in the mainstream media and in books. A momentum is beginning to build, a momentum that has been a long time coming. The Exxons and CERAs and EIAs can no longer cavalierly dismiss peak oil and sweep it under their tired old threadbare carpet. The experts are beginning to have to justify the credibility they have been granted and increasingly it is clear the emperor has no clothes. Their reassurances and promises are increasingly being recognized for what they are: sleights of hand, parlour tricks, smoke and mirrors. The house of cards is built on shifting sand.
Increasingly the deniers and naysayers are now resorting to claiming that peak oil is a manufactured hoax meant to drive up the price of oil. Up until now they had comfortably clung to the accusation that peak oilers are a wacko fringe using fudged statistics. As more and more of those peak oilers are previous respected members of their own profession and industry (people like Fatih Birol, Matt Simmons, Ali Samsan Baktiari and Colin Campbell) armed with the same statistics as the so-called experts, that old accusation has finally lost the credibility it should never have had. Once those brave people leave the oil industry they no longer have a professional obligation to push the industry or corporate agenda. They are free to tell the truth and deal with the harsh reality of peak oil.
I believe that in 2009, partly because of the global financial crisis and partly in spite of it, peak oil will move its way toward the top of the agenda for the governments of developed and developing nations throughout the world. With the tremendous amount of debt incurred with the global financial crisis, the large amount of wealth lost, the major devaluation and revaluation of currencies through the printing of trillions of dollars of new money to bail out the economy, the on-going captivity of the world's governments by the perpetual growth economic paradigm, those governments will try to direct a great deal of energy into the recovery of their national economies. As they do so the reality of declining global energy reserves is going to smack them in the face. The hole we have dug with this collapse of the virtual economy is deep enough that there are not enough of those reserves left to push energy production to the levels that such a major recovery can be achieved.
By the end of 2009, I believe, we will either invent and implement a new economic paradigm that is not based on perpetual growth, or we will, in trying to recover, turn the current global recession into a global depression, not the second Great Depression but the Last Great Depression. We may finally come to the full realization that it is not money that makes the world go round. It is energy. You can always print more money but it has no value, like the Emperor's new clothes, if there is no energy. Money has no value unless it is working and it can't work without energy.
Oh, and one last truth or reality for 2009...... These are certainly interesting times in which to live. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
The big question is how far is this unravelling going to go? And what will happen when Wiley Coyote finally succumbs to gravity and hits bottom, wherever bottom is? The other important thing, for me, controversial as it may be, is to put 2008 in a peak oil perspective. I tend to do that. Based on the statistics, it appears that we hit peak oil in the spring of 2005. That, of course, is hotly debated. Those in power and those honest and unbiased mouthpieces for the energy industry and oil companies still claim that peak oil is decades away. And proponents of the abiotic oil theory claim that oil is self-regenerating and infinite (queue Bobby McFarren singing Don't worry, be happy!).
I don't like to engage in the statistical debate. There is a general lack of reliability in all of those statistics. There is always a major political component behind what gets reported. OPEC nations, for example, who doubled their reported reserves when they formed OPEC and established reserve-dependent production quotas, have never changed the numbers they report despite decades of drawdown on those reserves. Oil statistics, as with most statistics, are as meaningless as a sumo wrestlers new year's resolution to lose weight and can be interpreted many ways to support a variety of agenda.
There is little question that energy costs (the cost of all forms of energy rose in tandem with the price of oil) were a significant contributor to the economic collapse that began in 2008. Whether they were a cause or a coincidence is unclear. One of the debates that will probably persist through 2009 is whether peak oil or commodity speculators drove the price of oil up to $147.67. The statistics suggesting that we hit peak in the spring of 2005 do exist. But it is a question of interpretation.
From the time that M. King Hubbert first correctly forecast, in the early 1950s, that the U. S. lower-48 oil production would peak in 1970 (he further forecast that global production would peak in or about 2000, a date that was delayed by the oil crises of the 1970s and '80s) the basis of the peak oil argument has been a simple one. It was and still is based on production of conventional crude. The reason is simple. When global conventional crude passes the peak and goes into decline the combination of other sources will not be able to offset the declines in conventional crude. What has changed over the years, rather, in an attempt to disguise that inevitability, is the official definition of oil that is included in government and industry statistics.
Oil reserve reporting, for example, has been loosened from its original proven to provable. Those within the oil industry would like it loosened further still, perhaps all the way to ultimately recoverable. Such distinctions may be lost on all but industry insiders but it makes a tremendous difference in defining something like peak oil.
More importantly, the industrial and political definition of oil itself has changed significantly over the past few decades, as well as the definition of the liquid fuels such as gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and marine fuel normally derived from oil. The definition of oil has expanded far beyond conventional crude as well. It now encompasses synthetic crude produced from tar sands and oil shale, synthetic biofuels, extra heavy oil, vegetable and plant inputs to biofuels, deep water oil. It has also expanded to encompass, as barrels of oil equivalents (BOE), substances like natural gas, methane, and coal used as raw material for producing liquid fuels through processes like GTL (Gas to Liquid) and CTL (Coal to Liquid). Essentially anything that can be converted into liquid fuels, such as recycled motor oils and used cooking oil, either is or eventually will be included in the definition of oil. Whether or not this is an intentional misdirection to disguise the rapid decline in oil reserves, the effect on public awareness is the same.
However, even incorporating deepwater crude and extra heavy oil (which the majority of the world's refineries are not designed to process), global oil discoveries peaked way back in the 1960s and have been declining ever since. We are now producing or extracting every year over four barrels of oil for every new barrel of oil discovered, and have been consuming more oil per year than that discovered for nearly three decades. Taken on a field by field basis, peak generally follows discovery by about thirty years, but this can vary significantly from one field to another. Some will peak and go into decline in as short a time as ten years. Some large fields like Gawhar, Cantarell and Burgan may not reach peak production for forty or fifty years.
There is an ever-accelerating effort to find or identify alternatives from which liquid fuels can be produced. For a variety of reasons that effort is meeting ever-growing opposition. The push for bio-fuels resulting in rapidly rising food grain prices is largely seen as a major contributor to increasing world hunger. There is rapidly accelerated destruction of old growth rainforests to bring more land into bio-fuel production. Financing has been diverted into bio-fuel subsidies from research and development funding for other viable energy alternatives like solar and wind. There has been increased land consolidation for efficient fuel crop production pushing more indigenous, self-sufficient farmers off their land in poor third world countries.
Massive investments continue in tar-sands and oil-shale operations, possibly the most environmentally destructive energy projects on the planet. Coal production (coal is the dirtiest, least energy-dense of the fossil fuels) is again on the rise, using ever-poorer grades of coal for the production of liquid fuels. Massive volumes of natural gas are being diverted to liquid fuels or used as the energy source for tar-sands and oil-shale processing. And all of these efforts are running into increased public opposition as the damage they do becomes clearer.
So how will all of this play out in 2009? In 2008 oil prices rocketed up to over $147.00 per barrel only to collapse, right along with the stock markets and the global economy, to under $40.00 per barrel by year end. There was a serious amount of demand destruction, in rich and poor nations alike, in the second half of the year. Repeated production cuts by OPEC have not succeeded in halting the plummeting price of oil. Where oil, according to the experts, was way above what the fundamentals would support at $147.00, it is now as far below the fundamentals at $40.00 and lower.
No one seems to be quite sure what the fundamentally supportable price of oil should be anymore. It is likely that this confusion and uncertainty of oil prices will continue through 2009. Prices may, if there are signs of some measurable economic recovery, be driven by speculators back above the $100.00 per barrel mark, perhaps even surpassing the $147.00 level of mid 2008. If there are no signs of economic recovery, however, the downward momentum will likely see the global economy contract even further. Moving from recession to depression is clearly a possibility. The fundamentals will not again form the basis of oil prices until the economic turmoil settles. Just as there was a fear (of war) premium built into the price on the way up, there is a fear (of recession/depression) penalty built into it on the way down.
There is one unavoidable truth underlying all of this, however. Whatever the price of oil, somewhere around 30-billion barrels of it will be consumed globally in 2009. When we are talking about total, remaining, recoverable oil of less than a trillion barrels that is still a lot of drawdown. It appears that we are on a global production plateau with minor new discoveries and alternatives thus far effectively offsetting (hiding?) the production decline in existing fields. This will likely delay the recognition and admission of peak oil in official circles until we fall off the plateau and have clearly and unarguably begun our slide down the depletion slope. The demand destruction during the current global economic uncertainty will lengthen the plateau slightly and delay a little longer that recognition and admission. On the other hand, major developed nations may decide to take advantage of the temporarilly low oil prices to top up their Strategic Petroleum Reserves, which China has already begun to do.
The other reality is, however, that more and more effective voices are beginning to talk about peak oil in government, in the mainstream media and in books. A momentum is beginning to build, a momentum that has been a long time coming. The Exxons and CERAs and EIAs can no longer cavalierly dismiss peak oil and sweep it under their tired old threadbare carpet. The experts are beginning to have to justify the credibility they have been granted and increasingly it is clear the emperor has no clothes. Their reassurances and promises are increasingly being recognized for what they are: sleights of hand, parlour tricks, smoke and mirrors. The house of cards is built on shifting sand.
Increasingly the deniers and naysayers are now resorting to claiming that peak oil is a manufactured hoax meant to drive up the price of oil. Up until now they had comfortably clung to the accusation that peak oilers are a wacko fringe using fudged statistics. As more and more of those peak oilers are previous respected members of their own profession and industry (people like Fatih Birol, Matt Simmons, Ali Samsan Baktiari and Colin Campbell) armed with the same statistics as the so-called experts, that old accusation has finally lost the credibility it should never have had. Once those brave people leave the oil industry they no longer have a professional obligation to push the industry or corporate agenda. They are free to tell the truth and deal with the harsh reality of peak oil.
I believe that in 2009, partly because of the global financial crisis and partly in spite of it, peak oil will move its way toward the top of the agenda for the governments of developed and developing nations throughout the world. With the tremendous amount of debt incurred with the global financial crisis, the large amount of wealth lost, the major devaluation and revaluation of currencies through the printing of trillions of dollars of new money to bail out the economy, the on-going captivity of the world's governments by the perpetual growth economic paradigm, those governments will try to direct a great deal of energy into the recovery of their national economies. As they do so the reality of declining global energy reserves is going to smack them in the face. The hole we have dug with this collapse of the virtual economy is deep enough that there are not enough of those reserves left to push energy production to the levels that such a major recovery can be achieved.
By the end of 2009, I believe, we will either invent and implement a new economic paradigm that is not based on perpetual growth, or we will, in trying to recover, turn the current global recession into a global depression, not the second Great Depression but the Last Great Depression. We may finally come to the full realization that it is not money that makes the world go round. It is energy. You can always print more money but it has no value, like the Emperor's new clothes, if there is no energy. Money has no value unless it is working and it can't work without energy.
Oh, and one last truth or reality for 2009...... These are certainly interesting times in which to live. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
The real problem with Methane Hydrates is Sliding under the Radar
There has certainly been a lot of discussion lately about methane hydrates. You may have missed it unless you, like most concerned about global peak oil and peak energy, specifically search and listen for it. Most of that discussion, quite understandably in our energy-addicted world, has centered on the potential of using these vast reserves of methane as a fuel source. Methane hydrates, after all, contain more carbon energy than all of the world's oil, natural gas and coal combined.
Those estimates, like hot air, are, in fact, expanding all the time. Some estimates suggest methane hydrates may contain 3-4 times the carbon energy of all global fossil fuels combined.
For those not familiar, methane hydrates are molecules of methane gas (the basic constituent of natural gas) locked in a cage of water ice.
They exist in two places throughout the world. Marine methane hydrates exist on most of the world's continental margins, particularly along the subduction zone of tectonic plates such as along the west coast of North America. Methane hydrates also occur in land-based and sub-sea frozen permafrost in Alaska, Northern Canada, Russian Siberia, far northern Europe, and in small deposits in Antarctica.
The sheer volume of methane hydrates and their occurrence on shore in permafrost and near offshore on continental margins do make them an attractive prospect as a future, accessible, post-oil energy source. There has been far more research into the potential exploitation of methane hydrates than was ever the case for oil, natural gas or coal. The requisite geology and, now, the location of these deposits are well known. All that stands in the way of exploiting this vast energy resource - from the point of view of energy executives, economists and politicians - is the extraction technology, the global distribution technology and network, the economic evaluation and the financing to build the massive infrastructure that would be needed to effectively and efficiently exploit it fully. No problem! It may, in fact, still be several decades - in a business as usual climate - before all of these factors can be dealt with and methane from hydrates can be exploited commercially.
There are, of course, other points of view. Paleoclimatologists are increasingly convinced that massive and surprisingly sudden releases of submarine methane hydrates have been responsible for periodic and disastrous rapid rises of global temperature, largely resulting in the quick - in geologic terms - end of past ice ages. The study of deep ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, the study of areas of ocean floor zones of extensive pock marks and growing evidence of current increasing methane releases from melting permafrost and the Arctic Ocean floor all strongly lend credence to this hypothesis.
All of that, of course, makes methane hydrates and their possible release as a gas into the atmosphere a serious concern, in this period of increasing concern about global warming, from an environmental point of view. Methane in the short term, you see, is 62 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Over ten to twenty years time as it oxidizes in the atmosphere it weakens to just 20 times the potency as a GHG compared to carbon dioxide. After about ten years atmospheric methane completely oxidizes. But that isn't the end. It oxidizes into carbon dioxide and remains a greenhouse for another century.
Another, and perhaps the least understood and certainly the least discussed, point of view about methane hydrates involves physics. The physical nature of methane hydrates and the quite distinct physical properties of water - specifically H2O - and of methane (CH4) independently function both as a barrier to exploitation and as a serious environmental risk in conjunction with global warming.
Submarine methane hydrates primarily occur in what has been called the Hydrate Stability Zone. This is a relatively narrow zone where the combination of water temperature and water pressure are suitable for the formation and, more important, the stability of methane hydrates. In general, at present, this is 300 to 500 meters below the ocean surface but varies and is very specific in different locations depending on water temperature. The geology of the area is also a very important factor; whether the bottom is sandstone, other stone, coarse silt or fine silt. All of these variables affect the ability to form methane hydrates and the way those hydrates will be distributed in that medium.
All methane hydrates, you may have guessed from the above, are not created equal. The water ice that forms the hydrate cage and the methane gas in that cage are both essentially consistent but the manner in which they combine to form the hydrate varies considerably. And so does the volatility and stability of those deposits.
I will not go into a great detailed discussion of those differences. I will limit it to a couple of key factors.
Water - more specifically H2O which is only water above 0C and becomes vapour at higher temperatures - reaches its maximum density of 999.9720 kilograms per cubic meter at a temperature of 3.98C. At the freezing temperature of 0C its density has reduced to 998.8395 kilograms per cubic meter, 988.1170 at -10C. The critical part of that range, with regard to methane hydrates, is that from 0C to 3.98C. That is where we will focus.
The lower density of H2O as ice (998.8395) at 0C (even lower if the ice is super cooled) is what allows ice to float on the surface of water. Average global ocean temperatures today (this has varied over geological time, especially during different eras of ice age and global warming) is 2C. At 2C H2O has a density 999.9400 between that of ice at 0C of 998.8395 and the maximum density at 3.98C of 999.9720. It still supports, therefore, the lighter ice even in the Arctic.
Anyone in a northern climate is familiar with spring thaw. As the water below ice warms in the spring it first expands, pushing up and cracking the ice, until it reaches its maximum density at 3.98C of 999.9720. Above that temperature the water begins to shrink (will reach a density of 999.7026 at 10C) as the temperature rises, leaving a gap of air between the ice and the water below. The ice can, as most young boys in northern rural areas can attest, be left high and dry and collapse under the weight of a person walking on it.
Because of the lower density (greater buoyancy) of ice relative to sea water, submarine methane hydrates are always under pressure, physically wanting to rise to the surface. The deposits only become "relatively" stable when anchored by sufficient sediment on the ocean bottom. When and if that "anchorage" breaks down or is swept away, for example, by a sub-surface landslide, the hydrates can suddenly be released into the water and rise toward the surface.
Now the other side of the problem. At 1 atmosphere, methane is a liquid below a temperature of -182.5C. There is no known naturally occurring liquid methane on earth. Above that temperature methane is a gas. Its density constantly diminishes as the temperature/pressure gradient rises. To my knowledge, which is incomplete, scientists have not really answered the question of why the methane trapped in hydrates is stable in that form. The density of the gaseous methane in hydrates is 162 times greater than methane gas in the atmosphere. At the temperature and pressure of the sea water around and above the hydrate deposits, the methane gas contained in the hydrates should have much lower density (occupy much more space) than it does. This physical anomaly means that the pressure on the methane gas to expand is constantly at odds with and pushing against the ice cage enclosing it. This is a key component of the essential instability of methane hydrates.
Gas density generally decreases far more rapidly for gases than liquids or solids as temperature rises or pressure decreases. That means two factors can affect the stability of methane hydrates currently in the hydrate stability zone. Changes in sea level can affect the water pressure in the zone: a drop in sea level can decrease the pressure. Changes in temperature of the water can have the same effect. Increase of the temperature above the current average 2C can also dramatically affect that stability.
Global warming, ironically, fortunately means we are in an era of rising sea levels, not lowering sea levels. The pressure that pushes down on and stabilizes methane hydrate deposits in the oceans is, therefore, increasing, not decreasing. Global warming, however, also means that water temperatures, as well as atmosphere temperatures, are on the rise.
Much of the debate around global warming centers on whether we are heading for a global temperature increase of 2C, 4C or higher. On the surface these seem like such small numbers to be the center of such passionate debate. But the critical temperature spread we are dealing with is between 2C (the current average global ocean temperature) and 3.98C (the temperature at which H2O reaches its maximum density (it will shrink, lowering sea level and decreasing oceanic water pressure between those two temperatures) and begins to decrease in density: begins to expand again). That is a temperature differential of just 1.98C.
As the ocean temperature rises it doesn't matter what the specific temperature in the local hydrate stability zone currently is because that zone is a product of both temperature and pressure. In the Barkley Canyon off the coast of Vancouver Island, for example, the hydrate stability zone is at a depth of 850 meters, much deeper than the normal hydrate stability zone of 300m to 500m depth in other locations. As the temperature in the hydrate stability zone rises at whatever depth it occurs, however, the stability of the hydrates will diminish.
The individual physical characters of the water ice that makes up the hydrate cage and the methane gas trapped inside accelerate this instability. As the temperature rises (generally from 2C to 3.98C) the ice forming the hydrate cage shrinks as it is influence by the temperature of the surrounding water and begins to soften as the physical bonds holding the ice in a stable structure weaken. This shrinking puts further pressure on the methane gas inside, increasing its density. But the methane gas inside that cage is already 162 times the density it is at 1 atmosphere and is under considerable pressure to expand. As the temperature rises in the hydrate stability zone and the ice cage weakens and the methane gas's pressure to expand increases, the stability of the hydrate diminishes rapidly. The upward pressure on the hydrate ice, which wants to float up to the surface (the methane gas trapped inside is also more buoyant than the ice or the surrounding water), also increases as the temperature rises.
To my knowledge no scientific studies have yet been conducted that pinpoint exactly where on the temperature/pressure gradient the water ice cage of the hydrate ruptures and releases the methane gas into the surrounding environment. There is mounting evidence that the number of subsea methane vents in the Arctic, which is generally warming faster than other oceans, is increasing, as is the volume of methane gas issuing from those vents. This suggests that, in the Arctic at least (which holds the highest concentrations of methane hydrates of all the oceans), the temperature rise is already compromising methane hydrate stability.
In areas of fine sea bottom sediment, which is the case in the majority of methane hydrate deposits, the methane hydrates form stratified seams. Proceeding downward, each seam acts as a "cementing" cap, holding hydrate seams and free methane below in place. The disassociation or breakdown of hydrates as the ocean temperature increases will proceed from the top of the hydrate deposit downward. In these seamed, soft-sediment deposits that means that the top seam, which functions as a cap on all the methane and hydrates below, will break down first. It's ability to function as a cap disappears and the risk of a rapid, potentially massive release of methane increases dramatically.
The same sort of results that can occur naturally through warming of the waters around the methane hydrate deposit can also occur if the submarine methane hydrate deposits are destabilized by human activity. Any attempts to drill into methane hydrate deposits, whether exploratory or commercially for energy production, can break down the stability of the hydrates, particularly in association with rising temperatures, either in the surrounding sea water or from the drilling itself (the favourite intended method of extraction is to inject hot water into the hydrate deposits).
The current discussion and debate surrounding the intended exploitation of methane hydrate deposits involves energy experts, various types of scientific experts, and anxious, eager governments. If that is where it stays I am not very confident that scientific reason and caution will win out. The general public, including you, must put methane hydrates on their radar and be prepared to hold accountable those pushing for methane hydrate exploitation. Public pressure must become a key element of making sure that we do not rush into over-exuberant and overly-optimistic exploitation of this resource, to the detriment of mankind, other living species and the planet itself.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Hundreds of articles, papers and web sites were researched as part of writing this article. I have not listed them here as the list would be far too long. If anyone is interested in those references and links, however, they can contact me by e-mail and I will gladly supply them. My e-mail address is; richard.embleton@sympatico.ca
Hundreds of articles, papers and web sites were researched as part of writing this article. I have not listed them here as the list would be far too long. If anyone is interested in those references and links, however, they can contact me by e-mail and I will gladly supply them. My e-mail address is; richard.embleton@sympatico.ca
Also see my other Methane Hydrate articles in this blog;
Methane Hydrates: What are they thinking?
http://oilbeseeingyou.blogspot.com/2008/12/methane-hydrates-what-are-they-thinking.html
Methane hydrates: the next great energy source?
http://oilbeseeingyou.blogspot.com/2006/12/methane-hydrates-next-great-energy.html
http://oilbeseeingyou.blogspot.com/2006/12/methane-hydrates-next-great-energy.html
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