We collectively in society have a pervasive belief that big problems are someone else's to solve. When someone points out a problem to us our general reaction is to ask what they intend to do about it. I am not sure when it became that he who recognizes a problem has the responsibility to fix it. Where is the responsibility of the person(s) who created the problem in the first place? To me the first responsibility of someone who recognizes a large systemic problem that they cannot fix themselves, especially one not of their own making, is to make others aware of it so they can collectively fix it, or avoid it if it can't be fixed.
I have a confession to make. I cannot fix global warming and climate change. I cannot prevent peak oil. I can not solve resource nationalism. I cannot correct the global freshwater crisis. I cannot rebuild the planet's lost soil fertility. All of these problems are beyond my meagre talents to rectify. All of them will affect me as much as the next person so I very much want to see them corrected but I am powerless, on my own, to do anything significant about them. Does that mean, therefore, that I should just accept them (like the old quote from Anonymous suggests, "Accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.") and wait for someone else to recognize them, speak about them and offer solutions? I am personally very skeptical of anyone promising solutions to large global problems. They are generally simplistic and focused on the symptoms, not the underlying cause. And I do not believe you can effectively solve any problem unless you correct the underlying cause. Fixing the symptoms without fixing the underlying cause just sets up a return visit to fix other symptoms, and then others. The symptoms may change but the problems will persist.
Why do I write about global problems without proposing solutions? The problem with proposing solutions to large problems, especially systemic global problems, is this. What is the next response when you tell someone a solution to a problem? "That's great. Now go do it and don't bother me about it anymore."
Let me illustrate. I could tell you that the underlying cause of peak oil is that we are using far too much oil and have become too dependent on it and have no other alternatives to fall back on when it can no longer satisfy our needs. The solution? Reduce our oil dependence, reduce our oil consumption through greatly improved efficiencies, develop and ramp up the alternatives for us to fall back on so we are ready as the oil supply diminishes. "Great. Now go away and do it and don't bug me." See how it works?
The solutions to our global problems are not simple. They are as complex as the intricate web of underlying causes of the problems. No one can tell you "in seventy-five words or less" how to solve peak oil, global warming or any of the other serious global problems on the horizon. If the primary requirements for any proposed solution are simplicity, brevity and the ability to be done (by someone else, of course) without affecting people's lifestyles then no workable solutions can be put on the table. Period!
Why do peak-oilers wallow in despair? Because people do want brief, simplistic solutions that will not affect their lifestyle. Well, how about this. That lifestyle is the underlying cause of peak oil, global warming, resource depletion, soil contamination, the freshwater crisis, pollution and the rest of the whole long list of global problems we are facing. This planet cannot sustain a massive population of a single parasitic species at the very top of the food chain (we 6.6 billion humans) in the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. For starters we have to drastically change and simplify our lifestyles, stop globalization, eliminate our obsession with and dependence on the personal auto, abandon the perpetual growth economy, re-orient our consumption to satisfying needs not wants, oh, and reduce our population to one billion by the the middle of this century. But that does not fit within the criteria that acceptable solutions must satisfy - brevity, simplicity and no changes.
Because there are no solutions that can satisfy those criteria!
Of course there are solutions! But they are complex, intricate, they are going to be painful, and they are going to involve massive changes. At this late stage there is no other option. The time for simple, easy solutions was centuries ago when the contributors to the problems we have created were simple and easy. But the layers of complexity that we have added to those problems are going to require similar layers of complexity in the solutions. And governments and politicians, industry and the media continually telling people what they want to hear - that there are no problems, that life is good, that the American way of life is not negotiable, and that people living beyond their means is acceptable (nay, required) - simply serves to make the proposal of "real" solutions that much more difficult and to be viewed as that much more unacceptable.
Peak-oilers are seen as pessimists and doom-n-gloomers because they won't share in the false euphoria that permeates mainstream society. We wont sing Kumbaya and validate the cornucopean proclamations of society's cheerleaders. Most importantly, and very mistakenly, we are accused of wishing for the collapse of human society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Don't shoot the messenger.
Every peak-oiler I know hopes beyond hope to be able to head off some of the disasters they see coming by alerting unaware people to those disasters in hope they will collectively take action and make the necessary changes and sacrifices to prevent them or reduce their impact. The pessimism comes from the constant confirmation that that is unlikely to happen. People do not seem to be interested in saving themselves, their children and their grandchildren if it means giving up or changing anything. So be it! At least we try. You can't force people to unplug themselves from the matrix. All you can do is try to make them aware that they are part of it. If they like it in there and feel comfortable and secure and don't want to come out, all you can do is move on and try to save those that you can. It's very lonely and often times it seems like the easiest course of action is to just give up and re-insert the plug and rejoin the matrix. After all, your chances of survival on your own, while the matrix is still there, are very remote. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?
But enjoy what exactly? What benefits are there to be derived from blissful ignorance of the problems we have created and continue to make worse? It's a little like marching knowingly into the Auschwitz gas chambers blithely joining in the celebration of the wonderfully cleansing shower they have told us we are about to have. You know you are about to be gassed to death but you go along with the pretense and put on your best, silk bathrobe.
How do we solve all of the problems I talk about? With a universal change in attitude. We have to collectively start treating the earth and the environment like we are part of it, like we belong to it rather than it belonging to us. How we achieve that, I do not know. Maybe we need massive, penalizing luxury taxes on all non-essential goods. Maybe we need to build into every item the true environmental cost and compel both the manufacturers and users of those products to invest that money in correcting the environmental damage done by their manufacture and use. I don't know what the answers are. But I do know there are answers. I may know some of them. You may know some of them. Charlie on the next block may know some. But if we never talk about the problems, if we continue to act like they don't exist, we will never solve them.
The solution to any problem starts with the understanding and acceptance that there is a problem that needs solving. And I don't think we have collectively reached that point yet. I believe the majority of people still think everything is fine and life is great. And why wouldn't they? Every mountain of a problem is reduced by the media and politicians to a molehill and every tiny molehill of a solution is built up as a Mount Everest. Black is white, red is green and pigs fly.
I am as guilty as the next person and as much a part of the problem, perhaps more guilty because I already know the things I should be doing but am not. Others can at least plead ignorance, even if selective and voluntary. I can only plead advancing age and ill health. But we do have to fix the problems, if the human race is to have any long-term survivability as a viable species, and the time to do so is rapidly running out. Fixing the problems will not involve more of the same. We cannot continue on with human society as it is presently constituted. There must be a serious change in direction. There simply are not sufficient resources - be that oil, natural gas, coal, water, soil, a wide variety of metals and minerals, or any other resources - to continue on the way we have, especially for these past few hundred years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
One of the most controversial and painful subjects of discussion among peak-oilers is the so-called die-off. This is the theory (strongly held belief?) that when we pass peak oil the massive global human population, which has virtually exploded since the Industrial Revolution but, most particularly, since the beginning of the oil age in which time it has more than tripled, will begin to diminish rapidly back to a level, it is believed, approximating global population before the Industrial Revolution. That population was about one billion. This theory or belief is based on an analysis of the amount of energy (most derived from oil and other fossil fuels) required to produce the food and other life essentials needed by a human population, and the close co-relation between population and energy use. (See my article in this blog, Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth).
It is reasonably estimated, for example, that in western industrialized societies it takes about ten calories of energy, again mostly from fossil fuels, to produce every calorie of food. That, to me, despite being a shocking ratio, is a very low, conservative estimate. Why? Because it does not take into account the massive amount of topsoil loss caused by so much human agriculture and the effort, time and energy that will be required to revitalize that soil to the level needed to produce the food needed by the population without modern agricultural machinery, chemicals and practices (See my article in this blog, Post-Peak Agricultural Capacity). It does not take into account the damage done to our lakes, rivers and oceans from agricultural run-off and the effort and energy it will require to recover them. It does not account for the massive depletion and toxification of the planet's underground aquifers, especially non-replenishable fossil aquifers like the Ogallala aquifer in Western U.S. (See my water articles in this blog; The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis, Peak Water, and Mining Water), and the effort, energy and time that will be involved in bringing them back to health. It does not account for the spent and wasted energy that will be involved in crop losses in storage without modern storage techniques. In other words, it is an estimate that has little applicability to human society on the other side of peak oil where, one way or another, the food needed by the population will have to be produced without today's prodigious energy inputs.
Whatever level of population exists on the other side of peak oil, and regardless of all the other "things" that population produces and consumes and surrounds itself with, that population is going to require the same quantities of food per person as today's population. If every calorie of that food requires ten calories of energy to produce where is that energy to come from without those fossil fuels? Obviously if it is to be produced from human power, manual labour, human energy, we will not survive long as a species if we are expending ten calories of human energy for every calorie of food we produce and consume. Food production in our modern, globalized society is perhaps one of the most inefficient uses of energy we are guilty of. There is absolutely no choice but to find greater efficiencies in food production on the other side of peak oil. But we are constantly told, and very incorrectly so, that food production using fossil energy and the practices instituted with the Green Revolution are the most efficient in history. They are the most efficient in one respect only, the reduction of the amount of human labour involved in that food production. We use so much energy in food production because we have replaced human energy with machines, massive, energy-gobbling machines. We produce more food with fewer man-hours of effort than at any time in human history. But we do so, and can do, only because of the massive amount of energy fossil fuels have allowed us to exploit. The practices we use today simply are not applicable to a post-fossil-fuel world. We are going to have to relearn agriculture and food production, and we need to begin now.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Mining Water
(See also my articles Peak Water and The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis in this blog.)
The term "mining water" is increasingly used to refer to the extraction of groundwater, usually by pumps, from underground aquifers. Get used to the term. At the rate we are polluting our surface water in lakes and rivers and the rate at which freshwater sources are drying up under the assault of global warming and human development it may soon be the only potential source of clean drinking water we or our children and grandchildren have left. It is an appropriate term in many ways.
Water is a finite resource that is constantly recycled - like the metal in beer cans - and many of the underground aquifers from which we extract it are non-replenishable, meaning once it is gone, like a vein of ore, it's time to shut off the pumps and go home or move on to another aqua-motherlode. Even those aquifers that are replenishable, however, have a long-established, generally-low rate at which they will replenish ("Water that enters an aquifer remains there for an average of 1,400 years, compared to only 16 days for rivers."[5]. Extract more water than the rate at which it will refill and you start the process of depleting, and possibly irreversibly damaging, the reservoir. The land over many aquifers that have been over-exploited shows clear signs of sinking and compression due to the underground void left as the water is extracted.
Changing weather patterns generally, and the more pronounced changes being brought on by global warming, and the persistent human habit of draining marshes and wetlands for development, many of which are the source of replenishment for underground aquifers, are also changing the rate at which many aquifers replenish, usually negatively. Unless aquifer replenishment rates are tracked with changes in the climate and local development ("The Yellow river in China, Colorado River in North America, and the Murray River in Australia are amongst the Earth's major rivers that are regularly sucked dry.")[1], those dependent on an aquifer for water may find their wells suddenly going dry even though they have not increased their water extraction.
There is another aspect to the term "mining water" that is particularly worrisome for the future. Water rights to surface water in most areas today require a water rights license, even if the water runs through or touches your property. That license spells out what source of water you have access to and how much water from that source you are permitted to use. If the term and concept of "mining water" works its way into government bureaucratic lexicon you may also need a license to access the groundwater beneath your own property - some jurisdictions already require it - a license that similarly specifies how much of that water you have a right to use. In international trade agreements, and in the conditions attached to IMF and Worldbank loans to developing countries, water services and water rights are a commodity that is increasingly required to be open for commercial trade. It is possible, as clean surface water sources become increasingly scarce, that your groundwater may become an important tradeable commodity for which you are going to have to compete against the highest commercial bidder. With the majority of aquifers already under pressure from over exploitation governments everywhere may decide that growing demand for commercial groundwater access is exactly why there is a need of government control and private access restriction.
For me, in addition, the term also has a strong personal meaning which, I believe, clearly illustrates a broader issue. The southeastern Ontario community I grew up in was a mining town. A mile southeast of home, the constantly-growing, flat-top mountain of slag clearly visible from anywhere in town and the surrounding area, there was a large, open-pit iron ore mine that was the town's main employer during my growing-up years. When they had tapped out the economically-recoverable iron - there was still plenty of iron but they would have had to go underground to get it - the mining company shut off the pumps that kept the pit from flooding and walked away. They even ripped up their rail line that once delivered tons of crude ore to Lake Ontario for shipping across the lake to a Pennsylvania processing facility. They left behind a massive hole in the ground over 600 feet deep and a mile across.
For the past forty years that "hole" has been filling up with clear, blue water, draining every aquifer in the area. Whether they are replenishable I don't know since no appropriate survey of local aquifers has ever been conducted, though they are currently being studied as part of a broader, provincial groundwater survey. There isn't a well within miles, nonetheless, that still has water in it. The community, fortunately, takes its municipal water from the river that runs through town but the water mains end at the town limits. The farmers and other rural residents in the area over aquifers that are draining into the mine, being all those south and east of the town, have been left without a water supply. Perhaps, in another hundred years or so, when the water level in the "mine" comes up to the level of what was the local water table, those wells may produce water again, if they are replenishable and the flow characteristics of the aquifers haven't been irreversibly damaged. The periodic tremors in the area since the mine closure are a sign, unfortunately, that some such damage may be occurring as the aquifers drain, or may have occurred as a result of the tremendous blasts while the mine was in operation.
A full two thirds of the world's people already rely almost exclusively on underground aquifers for their drinking water and over half of global agricultural irrigation uses groundwater. But a third of the world's population lives in areas that are already seriously water-stressed. Where the UN established minimum daily requirement is 10 gallons of water per person these areas have an availability of only 1-3 gallons per day and much of the daily challenge and activity revolves around how to acquire water. Water for sanitation and basic hygiene is one of the greatest challenges in these areas and thousands die every day from infections and water-borne diseases. "One child dies every eight seconds from a waterborne disease; 15 million children a year."[4]
Overall as many as half the world's aquifers are already over-exploited, being drawn upon at a rate greater than they can be or are replenished. Too often a slowly-replenishing aquifer that has served the needs of local farmers and residents for centuries comes under pressure from high volume extraction for commercial use. This, for example, was the case for one aquifer in India where a well-known soft drink company built a plant in the area and drew on the aquifer for the water to make their soft drinks. Hundreds of wells in the area went dry, wells that had been in continuous use for hundreds of years, because the replenishment rate on the aquifer could not keep up with the traditional demand plus the high volume extraction by the software company. Repeated law suits consistently came down on the side of the soft drink company. The rapidly growing global demand for clean bottled water is also putting major pressure on many aquifers, most of them deep, pristine non-replenishable fossil aquifers.
Water in an aquifer, like oil in a reservoir, generally does not exist as a unified body like a vast underground lake. But it can. More commonly, it may saturate a layer of sand underground, like the Alberta tar sands, or it may trickle slowly through cracks and cavities in a rock formation. Look at the face of any rock cliff and you will generally see the telltale vertical dark streaks where water is oozing out of these cracks in the stone. Aquifers may be vast in terms of their overall size, like the Ogallala aquifer - a non-replenishable, fossil aquifer - which covers most of the U.S. midwest. Or they may cover only a few thousand square meters or less. And they may be just a few feet below the surface or a mile or more down.
Our romantic image of a water well is the picturesque round bricked well with the peaked roof and a pull-up rope wound round a hand-cranked pulley. The vast majority of wells, however, and most of those developed over the past half-century, are drilled wells with a pump, sometimes a hand pump, sometimes a windmill, but most often a mechanical pump run by electricity or a gasoline engine. It is these powerful electrical and gasoline-driven pumps that have allowed us to exploit ever deeper aquifers, some over a mile deep, in ever greater volumes (while global population has tripled in the past century global water usage has grown more than six-fold, most of that growth from underground aquifers).
Under China's arid north plain, where much of the country's vast quantities of wheat and other grains are grown, there is a shallow aquifer that has been relied upon for centuries to supply water to mostly hand-dug wells. The replenishment rate is slow but for many centuries the amount of water being used from it was below that recharge rate. Now that aquifer has been seriously over-exploited and has been, effectively, sucked dry. But there is also a deeper aquifer under the north plain that is now being tapped thanks to powerful new mechanical pumps. The problem is this deep reservoir is a non-replenishable aquifer, the fossil water in it having been sequestered there for thousands of years. With more and more wells sunk down to this deep aquifer it too may be sucked dry within a few decades leaving China's breadbasket that feeds much of her 1.6-billion people without a source of much-needed irrigation. China's grain production, in fact, has already fallen while half a billion people have been added to the population from its "peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest."[2]
An aquifer, like an oil reservoir, covers a large enough area that multiple wells can draw from it at the same time. In India, for example, the relatively few aquifers in the country are being tapped into by more than 22-million wells. And like oil, each additional well drilled into an aquifer increases the depletion rate and has the potential and often does decrease the water available to the other wells. This becomes seriously apparent when the extraction rate of all the wells exceeds the replenishment rate of the aquifer. This vast mining of aquifers in India, for example, is taking its toll and is "lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters (20 feet) per year."[2]
There are literally thousands of legal agreements worldwide covering the right of use of surface water in lakes and rivers. But as much as 97% of the world's liquid freshwater is not in these lakes and rivers but rather in underground aquifers. There are essentially no existing agreements covering the use of groundwater, even though many aquifers cross national borders and their over-exploitation on one side of the border is a strong potential source of conflict and even war. Those few agreements that even mention groundwater cover it as an aside and something to be dealt with in the future. But that future is now, if there is to be a future for the world's aquifers and drinkable water for future human generations.
We are taking our underground water sources for granted and treating them with the same reckless abandon that we treat our lakes, rivers and the oceans. "Toxic chemicals are contaminating groundwater on every inhabited continent, endangering the world's most valuable supplies of freshwater, reports a new study from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based research organization."[3] Just a few U.S. examples, which are similar to examples from other continents, will illustrate the depth and breadth of the problem.
* "Water utilities in the midwestern United States, a region that is highly dependent on groundwater, spend $400 million each year to treat water for just one chemical, the pesticide atrazine. According to the U.S. National Research Council, initial cleanup of contaminated groundwater at some 300,000 sites in the United States could cost up to $1 trillion over the next 30 years."[3]
* "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that about 100,000 gasoline storage tanks are leaking chemicals into groundwater. In Santa Monica, California, wells supplying half the city's water have been closed because of dangerously high levels of the gasoline additive MTBE."[3]
* "Sixty percent of the most hazardous liquid waste in the United States - 34 billion liters per year of solvents, heavy metals, and radioactive materials - is injected directly into deep groundwater via thousands of "injection wells." Although the EPA requires that these effluents be injected below the deepest source of drinking water, some have entered underground water supplies in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Oklahoma."[3]
Man is the only species on this planet able to and in the practice of exploiting earth's sequestered resources like oil, natural gas, coal, minerals, and water. Apart from the fact we claim an exclusivity that excludes other species with whom we reluctantly share this planet we also, particularly in this past century, seem to have no sense of responsibility for sharing them with future generations of humans, our own children and grandchildren. The resources they will need for their very survival are being voraciously gobbled up and discarded as an assumed birthright in our greedy demands for support of our increasingly decadent lifestyle. If this robbing from future generations were accidental because we did not understand the long-term implications of over-exploitation it would be bad enough. But it is not accidental. We do understand. Our governments and industry organizations pump out reams of statistics every day detailing our crime. And yet we continue on, as if to say to our grandchildren, "To hell with you. I'm going to have a good time as long as I can and it's your problem to figure out how to survive on what's left when our party is over."
==============
Additional reading material:
1) A Global Water Crisis
2) Aquifer Depletion
3) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
4) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
5) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
The term "mining water" is increasingly used to refer to the extraction of groundwater, usually by pumps, from underground aquifers. Get used to the term. At the rate we are polluting our surface water in lakes and rivers and the rate at which freshwater sources are drying up under the assault of global warming and human development it may soon be the only potential source of clean drinking water we or our children and grandchildren have left. It is an appropriate term in many ways.
Water is a finite resource that is constantly recycled - like the metal in beer cans - and many of the underground aquifers from which we extract it are non-replenishable, meaning once it is gone, like a vein of ore, it's time to shut off the pumps and go home or move on to another aqua-motherlode. Even those aquifers that are replenishable, however, have a long-established, generally-low rate at which they will replenish ("Water that enters an aquifer remains there for an average of 1,400 years, compared to only 16 days for rivers."[5]. Extract more water than the rate at which it will refill and you start the process of depleting, and possibly irreversibly damaging, the reservoir. The land over many aquifers that have been over-exploited shows clear signs of sinking and compression due to the underground void left as the water is extracted.
Changing weather patterns generally, and the more pronounced changes being brought on by global warming, and the persistent human habit of draining marshes and wetlands for development, many of which are the source of replenishment for underground aquifers, are also changing the rate at which many aquifers replenish, usually negatively. Unless aquifer replenishment rates are tracked with changes in the climate and local development ("The Yellow river in China, Colorado River in North America, and the Murray River in Australia are amongst the Earth's major rivers that are regularly sucked dry.")[1], those dependent on an aquifer for water may find their wells suddenly going dry even though they have not increased their water extraction.
There is another aspect to the term "mining water" that is particularly worrisome for the future. Water rights to surface water in most areas today require a water rights license, even if the water runs through or touches your property. That license spells out what source of water you have access to and how much water from that source you are permitted to use. If the term and concept of "mining water" works its way into government bureaucratic lexicon you may also need a license to access the groundwater beneath your own property - some jurisdictions already require it - a license that similarly specifies how much of that water you have a right to use. In international trade agreements, and in the conditions attached to IMF and Worldbank loans to developing countries, water services and water rights are a commodity that is increasingly required to be open for commercial trade. It is possible, as clean surface water sources become increasingly scarce, that your groundwater may become an important tradeable commodity for which you are going to have to compete against the highest commercial bidder. With the majority of aquifers already under pressure from over exploitation governments everywhere may decide that growing demand for commercial groundwater access is exactly why there is a need of government control and private access restriction.
For me, in addition, the term also has a strong personal meaning which, I believe, clearly illustrates a broader issue. The southeastern Ontario community I grew up in was a mining town. A mile southeast of home, the constantly-growing, flat-top mountain of slag clearly visible from anywhere in town and the surrounding area, there was a large, open-pit iron ore mine that was the town's main employer during my growing-up years. When they had tapped out the economically-recoverable iron - there was still plenty of iron but they would have had to go underground to get it - the mining company shut off the pumps that kept the pit from flooding and walked away. They even ripped up their rail line that once delivered tons of crude ore to Lake Ontario for shipping across the lake to a Pennsylvania processing facility. They left behind a massive hole in the ground over 600 feet deep and a mile across.
For the past forty years that "hole" has been filling up with clear, blue water, draining every aquifer in the area. Whether they are replenishable I don't know since no appropriate survey of local aquifers has ever been conducted, though they are currently being studied as part of a broader, provincial groundwater survey. There isn't a well within miles, nonetheless, that still has water in it. The community, fortunately, takes its municipal water from the river that runs through town but the water mains end at the town limits. The farmers and other rural residents in the area over aquifers that are draining into the mine, being all those south and east of the town, have been left without a water supply. Perhaps, in another hundred years or so, when the water level in the "mine" comes up to the level of what was the local water table, those wells may produce water again, if they are replenishable and the flow characteristics of the aquifers haven't been irreversibly damaged. The periodic tremors in the area since the mine closure are a sign, unfortunately, that some such damage may be occurring as the aquifers drain, or may have occurred as a result of the tremendous blasts while the mine was in operation.
A full two thirds of the world's people already rely almost exclusively on underground aquifers for their drinking water and over half of global agricultural irrigation uses groundwater. But a third of the world's population lives in areas that are already seriously water-stressed. Where the UN established minimum daily requirement is 10 gallons of water per person these areas have an availability of only 1-3 gallons per day and much of the daily challenge and activity revolves around how to acquire water. Water for sanitation and basic hygiene is one of the greatest challenges in these areas and thousands die every day from infections and water-borne diseases. "One child dies every eight seconds from a waterborne disease; 15 million children a year."[4]
Overall as many as half the world's aquifers are already over-exploited, being drawn upon at a rate greater than they can be or are replenished. Too often a slowly-replenishing aquifer that has served the needs of local farmers and residents for centuries comes under pressure from high volume extraction for commercial use. This, for example, was the case for one aquifer in India where a well-known soft drink company built a plant in the area and drew on the aquifer for the water to make their soft drinks. Hundreds of wells in the area went dry, wells that had been in continuous use for hundreds of years, because the replenishment rate on the aquifer could not keep up with the traditional demand plus the high volume extraction by the software company. Repeated law suits consistently came down on the side of the soft drink company. The rapidly growing global demand for clean bottled water is also putting major pressure on many aquifers, most of them deep, pristine non-replenishable fossil aquifers.
Water in an aquifer, like oil in a reservoir, generally does not exist as a unified body like a vast underground lake. But it can. More commonly, it may saturate a layer of sand underground, like the Alberta tar sands, or it may trickle slowly through cracks and cavities in a rock formation. Look at the face of any rock cliff and you will generally see the telltale vertical dark streaks where water is oozing out of these cracks in the stone. Aquifers may be vast in terms of their overall size, like the Ogallala aquifer - a non-replenishable, fossil aquifer - which covers most of the U.S. midwest. Or they may cover only a few thousand square meters or less. And they may be just a few feet below the surface or a mile or more down.
Our romantic image of a water well is the picturesque round bricked well with the peaked roof and a pull-up rope wound round a hand-cranked pulley. The vast majority of wells, however, and most of those developed over the past half-century, are drilled wells with a pump, sometimes a hand pump, sometimes a windmill, but most often a mechanical pump run by electricity or a gasoline engine. It is these powerful electrical and gasoline-driven pumps that have allowed us to exploit ever deeper aquifers, some over a mile deep, in ever greater volumes (while global population has tripled in the past century global water usage has grown more than six-fold, most of that growth from underground aquifers).
Under China's arid north plain, where much of the country's vast quantities of wheat and other grains are grown, there is a shallow aquifer that has been relied upon for centuries to supply water to mostly hand-dug wells. The replenishment rate is slow but for many centuries the amount of water being used from it was below that recharge rate. Now that aquifer has been seriously over-exploited and has been, effectively, sucked dry. But there is also a deeper aquifer under the north plain that is now being tapped thanks to powerful new mechanical pumps. The problem is this deep reservoir is a non-replenishable aquifer, the fossil water in it having been sequestered there for thousands of years. With more and more wells sunk down to this deep aquifer it too may be sucked dry within a few decades leaving China's breadbasket that feeds much of her 1.6-billion people without a source of much-needed irrigation. China's grain production, in fact, has already fallen while half a billion people have been added to the population from its "peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest."[2]
An aquifer, like an oil reservoir, covers a large enough area that multiple wells can draw from it at the same time. In India, for example, the relatively few aquifers in the country are being tapped into by more than 22-million wells. And like oil, each additional well drilled into an aquifer increases the depletion rate and has the potential and often does decrease the water available to the other wells. This becomes seriously apparent when the extraction rate of all the wells exceeds the replenishment rate of the aquifer. This vast mining of aquifers in India, for example, is taking its toll and is "lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters (20 feet) per year."[2]
There are literally thousands of legal agreements worldwide covering the right of use of surface water in lakes and rivers. But as much as 97% of the world's liquid freshwater is not in these lakes and rivers but rather in underground aquifers. There are essentially no existing agreements covering the use of groundwater, even though many aquifers cross national borders and their over-exploitation on one side of the border is a strong potential source of conflict and even war. Those few agreements that even mention groundwater cover it as an aside and something to be dealt with in the future. But that future is now, if there is to be a future for the world's aquifers and drinkable water for future human generations.
We are taking our underground water sources for granted and treating them with the same reckless abandon that we treat our lakes, rivers and the oceans. "Toxic chemicals are contaminating groundwater on every inhabited continent, endangering the world's most valuable supplies of freshwater, reports a new study from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based research organization."[3] Just a few U.S. examples, which are similar to examples from other continents, will illustrate the depth and breadth of the problem.
* "Water utilities in the midwestern United States, a region that is highly dependent on groundwater, spend $400 million each year to treat water for just one chemical, the pesticide atrazine. According to the U.S. National Research Council, initial cleanup of contaminated groundwater at some 300,000 sites in the United States could cost up to $1 trillion over the next 30 years."[3]
* "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that about 100,000 gasoline storage tanks are leaking chemicals into groundwater. In Santa Monica, California, wells supplying half the city's water have been closed because of dangerously high levels of the gasoline additive MTBE."[3]
* "Sixty percent of the most hazardous liquid waste in the United States - 34 billion liters per year of solvents, heavy metals, and radioactive materials - is injected directly into deep groundwater via thousands of "injection wells." Although the EPA requires that these effluents be injected below the deepest source of drinking water, some have entered underground water supplies in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Oklahoma."[3]
Man is the only species on this planet able to and in the practice of exploiting earth's sequestered resources like oil, natural gas, coal, minerals, and water. Apart from the fact we claim an exclusivity that excludes other species with whom we reluctantly share this planet we also, particularly in this past century, seem to have no sense of responsibility for sharing them with future generations of humans, our own children and grandchildren. The resources they will need for their very survival are being voraciously gobbled up and discarded as an assumed birthright in our greedy demands for support of our increasingly decadent lifestyle. If this robbing from future generations were accidental because we did not understand the long-term implications of over-exploitation it would be bad enough. But it is not accidental. We do understand. Our governments and industry organizations pump out reams of statistics every day detailing our crime. And yet we continue on, as if to say to our grandchildren, "To hell with you. I'm going to have a good time as long as I can and it's your problem to figure out how to survive on what's left when our party is over."
==============
Additional reading material:
1) A Global Water Crisis
2) Aquifer Depletion
3) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
4) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
5) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Peak Water
(See previous article "The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis"[10] in the blog.)
The real impact of the peaking of any finite resource is that long-established demand continues to rise while the supply goes into terminal decline. This is the nexus of a crisis. In our growth-addicted global society to it means that growth of whatever sectors of the economy and society rely on that resource must cease. There is much discussion and debate about peak oil and the broad impact it will have on our energy-hungry global society. But we are facing another peak which will ultimately have even more devastating consequences.
Peak water!
There is a not unreasonable tendency to think of water as a renewable resource. Seventy-five percent of the earth's surface, after all, is covered with it. And the planet has a very efficient hydro-cycle where water is constantly recycled and recirculated. The rain that falls on a field of Kansas corn rose as water vapour from the vast warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean. But salt water is largely unusable and the surface freshwater contained in lakes and rivers is only a minuscule 0.3 percent of the water on the planet and about ten percent of the total freshwater which is only 2.5% of the planet's total water supply. Ninety percent of the world's freshwater is locked up in ice caps and glaciers or sequestered in deep underground aquifers. In fact, according to the Worldwatch Institute "Some 97 percent of the planet's liquid freshwater is stored in underground aquifers."[9]
Over half the freshwater usage in the world (estimates are as high as 75% and growing) comes from these underground aquifers, water that is replenished, if at all, over slow geological time frames, not seasonal replenishment like surface water. "Water that enters an aquifer remains there for an average of 1,400 years, compared to only 16 days for rivers."[9] Many of the world's major aquifers that are heavily relied upon for agriculture, like the Ogallala Aquifer in the western U.S. (about 400-million cubic meters of drawdown per year)[1], the Arabian Aquifer and the deep aquifer under the North China Plain (the shallow aquifer is replenishable but has largely been sucked dry)[7], are non-replenishable, fossil aquifers mostly formed during and after various ice ages. Once such an aquifer is depleted it is gone, forever. With replenishable aquifers there is generally at least the potential for aquifer recovery if the aquifer has not been contaminated and the rate of drawdown is reduced to below the replenishment rate. Coastal aquifers, however, can become increasingly contaminated, not surprisingly, from salt-water intrusion if the drawdown exceeds the natural replenishment rate. Once that happens, as is the case in much of the middle east and central Asia, the aquifer, though it may be full of water, is no longer usable.
But there is increasing concern that vital aquifers everywhere are becoming contaminated with toxins. A new study from the Worldwatch Institute reveals that "this first global survey of groundwater pollution shows that a toxic brew of pesticides, nitrogen fertilizers, industrial chemicals, and heavy metals is fouling groundwater everywhere, and that the damage is often worst in the very places where people most need water."[9] "Sixty percent of the most hazardous liquid waste in the United States-34 billion liters per year of solvents, heavy metals, and radioactive materials-is injected directly into deep groundwater via thousands of "injection wells." Although the EPA requires that these effluents be injected below the deepest source of drinking water, some have entered underground water supplies in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Oklahoma."[9] And the U.S. EPA estimates "that about 100,000 gasoline storage tanks are leaking chemicals into groundwater. In Santa Monica, California, wells supplying half the city's water have been closed because of dangerously high levels of the gasoline additive MTBE."[9] A close personal friend in Australia with a permaculture farm found the groundwater below their property contaminated from just such a source, a petrol station just up the road with leaky storage tanks.
Over the last century while the world population has tripled global freshwater usage has increased more than six-fold with the bulk of that increase being ground water from deep aquifers. And it is estimated that as much as 90% of the global population increase to the middle of this century will be in areas that are already facing critical freshwater supply constraints[5] either as a result of surface water contamination ("Some two million tons of waste per day are disposed of within receiving waters, including industrial wastes and chemicals, human waste and agricultural waste" according to the UN)[1] or aquifer depletion[9].
Where the minimum daily water availability per person established by the United Nations is ten gallons, these water-challenged areas have daily water availability now of less than three gallons per person, many of them 1.5 gallons or less. "Unless population growth can be slowed quickly by investing heavily in female literacy and family planning services, there may not be a humane solution to the emerging world water shortage." states the report Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages.[5] Nearly 1.7 billion people do not have access to sufficient water for basic personal hygiene. "Infectious waterborne diseases such as diarrhea, typhoid, and cholera are responsible for 80 percent of illnesses and deaths in the developing world, many of them children. One child dies every eight seconds from a waterborne disease; 15 million children a year."[1]
On average agriculture is responsible for over seventy percent of the freshwater a nation consumes. It is reliably estimated that with current agricultural irrigation practices every ton of wheat or corn produced, for example, consumes 1000 tons of freshwater. About sixty percent of that usage, however, is wasted through losses from leaky irrigation ditches, run off and field evaporation.[1]
When nations begin to run into serious water constraints they have to make up lost agricultural production with imports, particularly of grains. "This can be seen with Iran and Egypt, both of which now import more wheat than Japan, traditionally the world's leading importer. Imports supply 40 percent or more of the total consumption of grain--wheat, rice, and feedgrains--in both countries. Numerous other water-short countries also import much of their grain. Morocco brings in half of its grain. For Algeria and Saudi Arabia, the figure is over 70 percent. Yemen imports nearly 80 percent of its grain, and Israel, more than 90 percent."[5] As the report Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages says, "Since a ton of grain equals 1,000 tons of water, importing grain is the most efficient way to import water. World grain futures will soon in effect become world water futures."[5]
But grain imports are already becoming increasingly problematic. The numbers involved are massive. According to the report, Aquifer Depletion, "Overall, China’s grain production has fallen from its historical peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest."[7] With the combined impact of global warming, surface water pollution, aquifer depletion and continuing population increases the ability to make up agricultural shortfalls in the world market is diminishing. The global emergency food grain reserves, on which the poorest of the world's poor are dependant, have over these past several years fallen from a marginal 119-day supply to a critical 53-day supply and those reserves are still declining. In fact, with the increased demand for seed grains driven by the rush for biofuels that decline is accelerating.
Agriculture, of course, is not the only use we make of fresh water. Industry consumes 20% and residential consumption accounts for ten percent. In the arid nations currently experiencing or facing near-term critical freshwater shortages, however, agriculture is responsible for ninety percent of all freshwater usage. With the combination of demand for agriculture and that of domestic and industrial use in growing cities, the aquifers - many of them non-replenishable - underlying the larger cities in many developing countries - on which those cities are totally dependant - are depleting at rates of 3-8 meters per year and may be totally exhausted within the next 20-25 years.[5] "Nearly one third of all humanity relies almost exclusively on groundwater for drinking, including the residents of some of the largest cities in the developing world, such as Jakarta, Dhaka, Lima, and Mexico City."[9]
As surface water in lakes and rivers becomes increasingly polluted and as surface water sources dry up under the impact of global warming future generations may have to increasingly rely on groundwater sources for their very survival. It is our responsibility to protect it for both those future generations and ourselves. "Groundwater contamination is an irreversible act that will deprive future generations of one of life's basic resources," said Payal Sampat, author of Deep Trouble: The Hidden Threat of Groundwater Pollution. "In the next 50 years, an additional 3 billion people are expected to inhabit the Earth, creating even more demand for water for drinking, irrigation, and industry. But we're polluting our cheapest and most easily accessible supply of water. Most groundwater is still pristine, but unless we take immediate action, clean groundwater will not be there when we need it."[9]
The following were important sources of material and research for this article.
1) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
2) A Global Water Crisis
3) Water Crisis - World Water Council
4) Water Deficits Growing In Many Countries
5) Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages
6) The Ogallala Aquifer Depletion
7) Aquifer depletion
8) Report: Water crisis hits rich countries
9) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
10) The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis
The real impact of the peaking of any finite resource is that long-established demand continues to rise while the supply goes into terminal decline. This is the nexus of a crisis. In our growth-addicted global society to it means that growth of whatever sectors of the economy and society rely on that resource must cease. There is much discussion and debate about peak oil and the broad impact it will have on our energy-hungry global society. But we are facing another peak which will ultimately have even more devastating consequences.
Peak water!
There is a not unreasonable tendency to think of water as a renewable resource. Seventy-five percent of the earth's surface, after all, is covered with it. And the planet has a very efficient hydro-cycle where water is constantly recycled and recirculated. The rain that falls on a field of Kansas corn rose as water vapour from the vast warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean. But salt water is largely unusable and the surface freshwater contained in lakes and rivers is only a minuscule 0.3 percent of the water on the planet and about ten percent of the total freshwater which is only 2.5% of the planet's total water supply. Ninety percent of the world's freshwater is locked up in ice caps and glaciers or sequestered in deep underground aquifers. In fact, according to the Worldwatch Institute "Some 97 percent of the planet's liquid freshwater is stored in underground aquifers."[9]
Over half the freshwater usage in the world (estimates are as high as 75% and growing) comes from these underground aquifers, water that is replenished, if at all, over slow geological time frames, not seasonal replenishment like surface water. "Water that enters an aquifer remains there for an average of 1,400 years, compared to only 16 days for rivers."[9] Many of the world's major aquifers that are heavily relied upon for agriculture, like the Ogallala Aquifer in the western U.S. (about 400-million cubic meters of drawdown per year)[1], the Arabian Aquifer and the deep aquifer under the North China Plain (the shallow aquifer is replenishable but has largely been sucked dry)[7], are non-replenishable, fossil aquifers mostly formed during and after various ice ages. Once such an aquifer is depleted it is gone, forever. With replenishable aquifers there is generally at least the potential for aquifer recovery if the aquifer has not been contaminated and the rate of drawdown is reduced to below the replenishment rate. Coastal aquifers, however, can become increasingly contaminated, not surprisingly, from salt-water intrusion if the drawdown exceeds the natural replenishment rate. Once that happens, as is the case in much of the middle east and central Asia, the aquifer, though it may be full of water, is no longer usable.
But there is increasing concern that vital aquifers everywhere are becoming contaminated with toxins. A new study from the Worldwatch Institute reveals that "this first global survey of groundwater pollution shows that a toxic brew of pesticides, nitrogen fertilizers, industrial chemicals, and heavy metals is fouling groundwater everywhere, and that the damage is often worst in the very places where people most need water."[9] "Sixty percent of the most hazardous liquid waste in the United States-34 billion liters per year of solvents, heavy metals, and radioactive materials-is injected directly into deep groundwater via thousands of "injection wells." Although the EPA requires that these effluents be injected below the deepest source of drinking water, some have entered underground water supplies in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Oklahoma."[9] And the U.S. EPA estimates "that about 100,000 gasoline storage tanks are leaking chemicals into groundwater. In Santa Monica, California, wells supplying half the city's water have been closed because of dangerously high levels of the gasoline additive MTBE."[9] A close personal friend in Australia with a permaculture farm found the groundwater below their property contaminated from just such a source, a petrol station just up the road with leaky storage tanks.
Over the last century while the world population has tripled global freshwater usage has increased more than six-fold with the bulk of that increase being ground water from deep aquifers. And it is estimated that as much as 90% of the global population increase to the middle of this century will be in areas that are already facing critical freshwater supply constraints[5] either as a result of surface water contamination ("Some two million tons of waste per day are disposed of within receiving waters, including industrial wastes and chemicals, human waste and agricultural waste" according to the UN)[1] or aquifer depletion[9].
Where the minimum daily water availability per person established by the United Nations is ten gallons, these water-challenged areas have daily water availability now of less than three gallons per person, many of them 1.5 gallons or less. "Unless population growth can be slowed quickly by investing heavily in female literacy and family planning services, there may not be a humane solution to the emerging world water shortage." states the report Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages.[5] Nearly 1.7 billion people do not have access to sufficient water for basic personal hygiene. "Infectious waterborne diseases such as diarrhea, typhoid, and cholera are responsible for 80 percent of illnesses and deaths in the developing world, many of them children. One child dies every eight seconds from a waterborne disease; 15 million children a year."[1]
On average agriculture is responsible for over seventy percent of the freshwater a nation consumes. It is reliably estimated that with current agricultural irrigation practices every ton of wheat or corn produced, for example, consumes 1000 tons of freshwater. About sixty percent of that usage, however, is wasted through losses from leaky irrigation ditches, run off and field evaporation.[1]
When nations begin to run into serious water constraints they have to make up lost agricultural production with imports, particularly of grains. "This can be seen with Iran and Egypt, both of which now import more wheat than Japan, traditionally the world's leading importer. Imports supply 40 percent or more of the total consumption of grain--wheat, rice, and feedgrains--in both countries. Numerous other water-short countries also import much of their grain. Morocco brings in half of its grain. For Algeria and Saudi Arabia, the figure is over 70 percent. Yemen imports nearly 80 percent of its grain, and Israel, more than 90 percent."[5] As the report Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages says, "Since a ton of grain equals 1,000 tons of water, importing grain is the most efficient way to import water. World grain futures will soon in effect become world water futures."[5]
But grain imports are already becoming increasingly problematic. The numbers involved are massive. According to the report, Aquifer Depletion, "Overall, China’s grain production has fallen from its historical peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest."[7] With the combined impact of global warming, surface water pollution, aquifer depletion and continuing population increases the ability to make up agricultural shortfalls in the world market is diminishing. The global emergency food grain reserves, on which the poorest of the world's poor are dependant, have over these past several years fallen from a marginal 119-day supply to a critical 53-day supply and those reserves are still declining. In fact, with the increased demand for seed grains driven by the rush for biofuels that decline is accelerating.
Agriculture, of course, is not the only use we make of fresh water. Industry consumes 20% and residential consumption accounts for ten percent. In the arid nations currently experiencing or facing near-term critical freshwater shortages, however, agriculture is responsible for ninety percent of all freshwater usage. With the combination of demand for agriculture and that of domestic and industrial use in growing cities, the aquifers - many of them non-replenishable - underlying the larger cities in many developing countries - on which those cities are totally dependant - are depleting at rates of 3-8 meters per year and may be totally exhausted within the next 20-25 years.[5] "Nearly one third of all humanity relies almost exclusively on groundwater for drinking, including the residents of some of the largest cities in the developing world, such as Jakarta, Dhaka, Lima, and Mexico City."[9]
As surface water in lakes and rivers becomes increasingly polluted and as surface water sources dry up under the impact of global warming future generations may have to increasingly rely on groundwater sources for their very survival. It is our responsibility to protect it for both those future generations and ourselves. "Groundwater contamination is an irreversible act that will deprive future generations of one of life's basic resources," said Payal Sampat, author of Deep Trouble: The Hidden Threat of Groundwater Pollution. "In the next 50 years, an additional 3 billion people are expected to inhabit the Earth, creating even more demand for water for drinking, irrigation, and industry. But we're polluting our cheapest and most easily accessible supply of water. Most groundwater is still pristine, but unless we take immediate action, clean groundwater will not be there when we need it."[9]
The following were important sources of material and research for this article.
1) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
2) A Global Water Crisis
3) Water Crisis - World Water Council
4) Water Deficits Growing In Many Countries
5) Water Shortages May Cause Food Shortages
6) The Ogallala Aquifer Depletion
7) Aquifer depletion
8) Report: Water crisis hits rich countries
9) The Hidden Freshwater Crisis
10) The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis
Monday, March 17, 2008
"No Wolf! No Wolf!"
If recent events haven't convinced you that we are headed for a meltdown and you need to start preparing for a rocky future, then you are definitely living in an impenetrable state of denial. I was fascinated watching and listening to a group of talking heads on CNN filling time waiting for President Bush to take the podium for his March 14, 2008 speech to the Economic Club of New York. They were discussing how he couldn't be too up-beat because it would scare people but he couldn't sound too down because it would scare people and he couldn't use the "R" word (recession) because it would panic people. Essentially they were trying to decide the words to convince people the economy is still in great shape when clearly it is headed into the tank.
During the same newscast they talked about how the chief executive at Bear Stearns kept responding to people's queries about the company's health by saying things were great, then "suddenly", on the morning of the 14th (was it just happenstance the timing of this coincided with the President's speech before the Economics Club?) the company says things have changed dramatically in the past 24 hours (Yeh, Right!) and the company - the 4th or 5th largest investment bank in the U.S. and considered too large to fail - had to be bailed out by a competitor (J.P.Morgan who, on the morning of the 17th announced they were buying Bear Stearns for $2.00 a share, shares that had cost $173.00 only a year earlier) and the Federal Reserve, this just a week after the Federal Reserve already pumped $200-billion into the market in an ultimately failed attempt to maintain market liquidity as the markets simply continued their downward slide, closing the week under the 12,000 mark where not long ago they were over 14,000.
And on the same day there is news that the nation's largest petroleum refiner, Valero, has put up a third of its refineries for sale - which will likely ultimately result in their closure - further decreasing the number of operating refineries in the U.S. (now a third of the number they were twenty years ago) where a new refinery hasn't been built in thirty years. And all this week oil has held steady around $110. a barrel and gasoline in two states has topped $4.00 a gallon, many weeks before the summer driving season, while Dick Cheney is going to the middle east, cap-in-hand, after Bush failing in his recent trip, to beg OPEC to pump more oil (they claim they are already pumping more than their customers are ordering) to bring the price of oil down on the world markets, and oil majors are busily announcing two-year-old, geologically-questionable oil discoveries trying to convince people that fantastic new oil discoveries continue to be made. And the U.S. dollar has fallen to all-time lows against the Euro and the Yen over the same period - and possibly a bunch of other currencies that no one pays any attention to - while gold climbed over $1,000. an ounce (interestingly the price of oil in gold has remained relatively steady these last couple of years). And over 63,000 jobs were lost from the U.S. economy in the past week. And the experts say we have only reached the end of the beginning of the U.S. mortgage meltdown while in the same week there was an announcement that the overall, multi-trillion-dollar American mortgage debt now exceeds total American home equity. In several states the foreclosure rate is in excess of five percent and people find it better to cut their losses by simply walking away from their house and leaving it to the banks. Is this the American way of life that is not negotiable, Mister Cheney? If the mortgage industry today began a margin call requiring home-owners to make up the difference between their mortgage and their home equity the collapse would be complete.
All of this in the same week?! I guess the question the CNN people were pondering is a valid one. How, in the midst of all this, do you somehow convince people that the economy is strong and healthy? How about the truth? That would be innovative! If the economy isn't strong and healthy, if it is going in the tank, why are they debating how to convince people it is healthy? People are not idiots, despite consistent attempts to treat them that way. They can see what is happening. What? Are all CNN viewers non-English-speaking who don't understand the lies and deception they are discussing? Isn't continuing to tell them the economy is healthy when it is not the negative equivalent of crying wolf? Excuse my mixed fairy tales but isn't it like the three little piggies covering their eyes and crying "No wolf! No wolf!" when the huffing and puffing is already done and the damned thing is breaking through the door? How are people ever to believe you when you then say the economy is healthy and it really is? If that ever happens again.
We peak-oilers - and I proudly wear that label - are consistently derided as pessimistic doom-n-gloomers. We dare point to the harsh realty that the world's finite supply of oil is about to go into irreversible terminal decline (conventional crude has already done so). Is a pessimist simply anyone who has abandoned their rose-coloured glasses - or orange-tinted, or yellow, or green or blue - and chosen instead to look at this imperfect world as it really is? In my mind optimism, not religion, is the opiate of the masses. And far easier to sell.
I am now convinced more than ever before that the global economy is soon to come crashing down about our ears. It is a house of cards and we are currently engaged in a game of Russian Roulette removing card after card from the supporting levels. Whether it collapses from the bottom, as with the mortgage meltdown, or comes crashing down from the top with the collapse of Bear Stearns, Northern Rock and other banks, and the Federal Reserve itself taking on unrecoverable debt trying to keep the financial market afloat, it doesn't really matter. As we saw with the World Trade Center, a monolith that begins to collapse from the top makes just a messy a pile of rubble in the end as one that starts at the bottom.
Two years ago, long before all of this began, I wrote an article (available on my blog) entitled Why There Will be a Fast Crash and not a Slow Decline. In that article I focused on trust and faith being the underpinning of an economy, especially a debt/growth-based economy as most modern, globalized economies are, and how an erosion of that trust, especially a rapid erosion, results in a crashing down of that economy, whether that be a company like Enron or Worldcom, a nation, or the entire global economy. We are now witnessing that rapid erosion of trust and faith in the U.S. and global economy.
It gets really messy from here on. All modern economies are based on growth and debt-based expansion of the money supply. But more importantly the underpinning of the economy, the fuel if you will, is energy, especially energy derived from cheap, abundant supplies of oil. Modern economic expansion is fueled by cheap oil!
It appears that the growth in conventional oil ended in 1999-2000. It further appears, though this is still uncertain and hotly debated, that the growth in global crude production/supply may have ended in 2005, perhaps early 2006. The continuing growth in liquid fuel supplies since then (government industry departments and industry reporting agencies increasingly shift to reporting "all liquids" to mask this) has been a function of alternatives like tar sands (which, despite the fact it is bitumen and not oil, the U.S. DoE now wants to classify as "conventional" crude), CTL (coal to liquid), GTL (natural gas and methane to liquid), biofuels, and steadily dipping into SPRs (strategic petroleum reserves). Similarly growth in electricity supplies has been increasing dependant on alternatives like solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and, in many nations, nuclear, but also increasingly from coal and, increasingly, lower, dirtier grades of coal.
The energy support for the rate of economic growth required - with a debt-based growth of the money supply - to keep the economy from going into terminal contraction, however, is greater than can continue to be made up by costly alternatives to oil and conventional electricity generation. As their application expands alternatives are running into their own resource limitations (e.g. natural gas, copper, zinc, silicon, uranium, cadmium, potassium, lithium, selenium, nickel, et al) and the rate of expansion of those alternatives (still only representing a very small fraction of overall energy generation) is already beginning to slow. They simply are not scalable to the point that they can replace even a significant portion of the current energy options.
It is popular in the oil patch, and to an increasing extent in economics, to blame tree-huggers, greenies and environmentalists for the lack of access to those "vast" untapped reserves of oil that must surely lie under ANWR and the Arctic Ocean and off the east coast and in Antarctica and under Central Park and a thousand other off-limits places. Of course there is plenty of oil, if those greenies would just let the oil companies drill for it. It's a catchy tune, as long as you don't have to deliver on your cornucopean "belief" in those vast reserves.
And it is equally popular to claim that advances in technology will dramatically increase the recovery rate from reserves. But every instance of the use of new technology in recent years (in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Mexico's Cantarell, the North Sea, the North Slope, et al) has simply increased, often dramatically, the rate of decline once the field passes peak which, of course, is reached sooner than it otherwise would have been because of the higher rate of extraction achieved with the new technology. That new technology has not increased the total recovery (often decreasing it by damaging the reservoir), just the speed of extraction. Over the past couple of decades, partly the result of reservoir damage from new technology, and despite continuous advances in extraction technology, the average rate of production per well has, in fact, steadily declined.
There is no odd coincidence in the timing of the surge in oil prices, in all energy prices, the surge in gold prices, the carry-on impact on all other prices, the rapid decline in the value of the hegemonic U.S. dollar, the frantic rush to biofuels that threatens to dramatically increase world hunger, the first wave of the total collapse of the housing market, and the collapse of two major banks in the past year. A fuzzy look in the rearview mirror suggests that global crude oil production peaked in 2005. The "unexpected" events that have occurred since that time are the first indicators of an energy-decline-induced global economic collapse from which we will not recover.
What is the alternative to money?
During the same newscast they talked about how the chief executive at Bear Stearns kept responding to people's queries about the company's health by saying things were great, then "suddenly", on the morning of the 14th (was it just happenstance the timing of this coincided with the President's speech before the Economics Club?) the company says things have changed dramatically in the past 24 hours (Yeh, Right!) and the company - the 4th or 5th largest investment bank in the U.S. and considered too large to fail - had to be bailed out by a competitor (J.P.Morgan who, on the morning of the 17th announced they were buying Bear Stearns for $2.00 a share, shares that had cost $173.00 only a year earlier) and the Federal Reserve, this just a week after the Federal Reserve already pumped $200-billion into the market in an ultimately failed attempt to maintain market liquidity as the markets simply continued their downward slide, closing the week under the 12,000 mark where not long ago they were over 14,000.
And on the same day there is news that the nation's largest petroleum refiner, Valero, has put up a third of its refineries for sale - which will likely ultimately result in their closure - further decreasing the number of operating refineries in the U.S. (now a third of the number they were twenty years ago) where a new refinery hasn't been built in thirty years. And all this week oil has held steady around $110. a barrel and gasoline in two states has topped $4.00 a gallon, many weeks before the summer driving season, while Dick Cheney is going to the middle east, cap-in-hand, after Bush failing in his recent trip, to beg OPEC to pump more oil (they claim they are already pumping more than their customers are ordering) to bring the price of oil down on the world markets, and oil majors are busily announcing two-year-old, geologically-questionable oil discoveries trying to convince people that fantastic new oil discoveries continue to be made. And the U.S. dollar has fallen to all-time lows against the Euro and the Yen over the same period - and possibly a bunch of other currencies that no one pays any attention to - while gold climbed over $1,000. an ounce (interestingly the price of oil in gold has remained relatively steady these last couple of years). And over 63,000 jobs were lost from the U.S. economy in the past week. And the experts say we have only reached the end of the beginning of the U.S. mortgage meltdown while in the same week there was an announcement that the overall, multi-trillion-dollar American mortgage debt now exceeds total American home equity. In several states the foreclosure rate is in excess of five percent and people find it better to cut their losses by simply walking away from their house and leaving it to the banks. Is this the American way of life that is not negotiable, Mister Cheney? If the mortgage industry today began a margin call requiring home-owners to make up the difference between their mortgage and their home equity the collapse would be complete.
All of this in the same week?! I guess the question the CNN people were pondering is a valid one. How, in the midst of all this, do you somehow convince people that the economy is strong and healthy? How about the truth? That would be innovative! If the economy isn't strong and healthy, if it is going in the tank, why are they debating how to convince people it is healthy? People are not idiots, despite consistent attempts to treat them that way. They can see what is happening. What? Are all CNN viewers non-English-speaking who don't understand the lies and deception they are discussing? Isn't continuing to tell them the economy is healthy when it is not the negative equivalent of crying wolf? Excuse my mixed fairy tales but isn't it like the three little piggies covering their eyes and crying "No wolf! No wolf!" when the huffing and puffing is already done and the damned thing is breaking through the door? How are people ever to believe you when you then say the economy is healthy and it really is? If that ever happens again.
We peak-oilers - and I proudly wear that label - are consistently derided as pessimistic doom-n-gloomers. We dare point to the harsh realty that the world's finite supply of oil is about to go into irreversible terminal decline (conventional crude has already done so). Is a pessimist simply anyone who has abandoned their rose-coloured glasses - or orange-tinted, or yellow, or green or blue - and chosen instead to look at this imperfect world as it really is? In my mind optimism, not religion, is the opiate of the masses. And far easier to sell.
I am now convinced more than ever before that the global economy is soon to come crashing down about our ears. It is a house of cards and we are currently engaged in a game of Russian Roulette removing card after card from the supporting levels. Whether it collapses from the bottom, as with the mortgage meltdown, or comes crashing down from the top with the collapse of Bear Stearns, Northern Rock and other banks, and the Federal Reserve itself taking on unrecoverable debt trying to keep the financial market afloat, it doesn't really matter. As we saw with the World Trade Center, a monolith that begins to collapse from the top makes just a messy a pile of rubble in the end as one that starts at the bottom.
Two years ago, long before all of this began, I wrote an article (available on my blog) entitled Why There Will be a Fast Crash and not a Slow Decline. In that article I focused on trust and faith being the underpinning of an economy, especially a debt/growth-based economy as most modern, globalized economies are, and how an erosion of that trust, especially a rapid erosion, results in a crashing down of that economy, whether that be a company like Enron or Worldcom, a nation, or the entire global economy. We are now witnessing that rapid erosion of trust and faith in the U.S. and global economy.
It gets really messy from here on. All modern economies are based on growth and debt-based expansion of the money supply. But more importantly the underpinning of the economy, the fuel if you will, is energy, especially energy derived from cheap, abundant supplies of oil. Modern economic expansion is fueled by cheap oil!
It appears that the growth in conventional oil ended in 1999-2000. It further appears, though this is still uncertain and hotly debated, that the growth in global crude production/supply may have ended in 2005, perhaps early 2006. The continuing growth in liquid fuel supplies since then (government industry departments and industry reporting agencies increasingly shift to reporting "all liquids" to mask this) has been a function of alternatives like tar sands (which, despite the fact it is bitumen and not oil, the U.S. DoE now wants to classify as "conventional" crude), CTL (coal to liquid), GTL (natural gas and methane to liquid), biofuels, and steadily dipping into SPRs (strategic petroleum reserves). Similarly growth in electricity supplies has been increasing dependant on alternatives like solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and, in many nations, nuclear, but also increasingly from coal and, increasingly, lower, dirtier grades of coal.
The energy support for the rate of economic growth required - with a debt-based growth of the money supply - to keep the economy from going into terminal contraction, however, is greater than can continue to be made up by costly alternatives to oil and conventional electricity generation. As their application expands alternatives are running into their own resource limitations (e.g. natural gas, copper, zinc, silicon, uranium, cadmium, potassium, lithium, selenium, nickel, et al) and the rate of expansion of those alternatives (still only representing a very small fraction of overall energy generation) is already beginning to slow. They simply are not scalable to the point that they can replace even a significant portion of the current energy options.
It is popular in the oil patch, and to an increasing extent in economics, to blame tree-huggers, greenies and environmentalists for the lack of access to those "vast" untapped reserves of oil that must surely lie under ANWR and the Arctic Ocean and off the east coast and in Antarctica and under Central Park and a thousand other off-limits places. Of course there is plenty of oil, if those greenies would just let the oil companies drill for it. It's a catchy tune, as long as you don't have to deliver on your cornucopean "belief" in those vast reserves.
And it is equally popular to claim that advances in technology will dramatically increase the recovery rate from reserves. But every instance of the use of new technology in recent years (in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Mexico's Cantarell, the North Sea, the North Slope, et al) has simply increased, often dramatically, the rate of decline once the field passes peak which, of course, is reached sooner than it otherwise would have been because of the higher rate of extraction achieved with the new technology. That new technology has not increased the total recovery (often decreasing it by damaging the reservoir), just the speed of extraction. Over the past couple of decades, partly the result of reservoir damage from new technology, and despite continuous advances in extraction technology, the average rate of production per well has, in fact, steadily declined.
There is no odd coincidence in the timing of the surge in oil prices, in all energy prices, the surge in gold prices, the carry-on impact on all other prices, the rapid decline in the value of the hegemonic U.S. dollar, the frantic rush to biofuels that threatens to dramatically increase world hunger, the first wave of the total collapse of the housing market, and the collapse of two major banks in the past year. A fuzzy look in the rearview mirror suggests that global crude oil production peaked in 2005. The "unexpected" events that have occurred since that time are the first indicators of an energy-decline-induced global economic collapse from which we will not recover.
What is the alternative to money?
Monday, February 11, 2008
Our Dangerous Infrastructure II
The real purpose of war - perhaps unintended benefit would be better phrasing - is to destroy aging infrastructure and produce a justification for spending the massive amounts of money required to rebuild or replace it. This is the intent behind war reparation payments, the victor paying for the reconstruction for the vanquished.
Under peacetime conditions governments and industry seem reluctant to commit the necessary funds and resources needed to properly maintain or replace aging infrastructure. In Europe and Asia the emphasis has been on maintaining old, well-built infrastructure. In America and the neo-west the emphasis has been on controlled demolition and replacement. Europe and Asia build infrastructure to last in perpetuity. In the neo-west we build with a designed life-span, usually not more than fifty years, then try to see how far beyond that lifespan we can go.
Most of the modern world as we know it, visible and invisible, has been built since the conclusion of WWII. Europe, like a phoenix, rose from the ashes of that war and integrated the massive amount of new replacement infrastructure with those bits of the old that had evaded the bombs. Japan and much of southeast Asia had to do the same. But North America - and Australia for that matter - has not had a war to purge it of its aging infrastructure in well over a century. Like Europe, new has been integrated with the old, though that old is much less old than European old.
The core of the unseen and taken-for-granted infrastructure underlying all North American cities large and small, however, is well over a century old and has long exceeded its designed lifespan. Even the shiny new suburbs with their modern infrastructure are tied to and equally dependent on the century-plus old infrastructure at the core of the cities they surround and to which their infrastructure is integrated, e.g. integrated water systems, electrical systems, telephone systems, transportation systems, and more.
Despite the fact infrastructure maintenance is consistently underfunded and maintenance is woefully inadequate - the prefered strategy is most often being to wait until it breaks down because the emergency created makes it easier to justify the extraordinary funds needed to fix or replace it - prodigious amounts are, nonetheless, spent on that maintenance. And that cost rises with each passing year, as does the gap between maintenance required and maintenance performed.
Underappreciated in all of this is that maintenance and upkeep of the massive infrastructure on which our society is built requires equally massive amounts of highly specialized technology and equipment for its maintenance. And therein lies my primary concern and the reason I keep returning to the issue of infrastructure in this blog. As we approach, arrive at and pass peak oil this issue will become increasingly important. Our undermaintained infrastructure, the vast bulk of which has been built in the sixty years since the end of World War II with a designed lifespan generally of fifty years, will be entering a period of terminal decay at the same time as the energy resources of the world, on which their maintenance depends, enter a period of terminal decline. The technology required to maintain that infrastructure will be increasingly unusable as it too decays and as replacement parts or replacement technology are increasingly unavailable. Much of this equipment is specifically designed, engineered and built as a one-off to satisfy the needs of a particular piece of infrastructure. The infrastructure which underpins our society which has always been a societal asset will increasingly become a massive and dangerous social liability.
Our communities, most particularly our cities, are seriously unnatural environments. In order for such large numbers of people, or any species, to live packed together at such close quarters in one place requires all manner of judiciously maintained infrastructure to prevent those places becoming health and environmental death traps. There are very few species that naturally live together in one place in large numbers, and even fewer in the numbers that human communities reach. Ants, bees, termites, corral and bats are a few that come to mind. Ants, bees and termites have worker classes whose job it is to keep the community - the bee hive or the ant hill or termite mound - clean and maintained. Bats live at the top of caves while their waste is dropped to the bottom of the caves where it is used by countless insects and micro-organisms. And corral rely on various species of fish and other marine organisms and the movement of ocean currents to clean away their refuse. Most animals living together in large numbers live in herds that are constantly on the move from one place to another, never staying in one place long enough for their waste to become a problem for the herd. But the safe maintenance of the living environment for community-based species is an ongoing battle for all of them and requires that their communities be frequently abandoned and new communities started. I would very much doubt that we could find an anthill or termite mound or beehive that has been a continuous site of occupation for thousands or even hundreds of years.
The greater the amount of infrastructure there is on which a community relies the greater is the reluctance to abandon it. The more you have, the more you have invested, the more there is to lose in doing so. And for we humans, the longer a community exists the greater the intangibles, such as history and the arts, that are also lost in abandoning the community. The longer we stay in one place the more reluctant we are to move on. Nowhere, it seems, is that moreso than with our cities. Our attachment and commitment to our cities, in fact, is far stronger it seems than our sense of nationalism and patriotism, both of which must be artificially reinforced. Our sense of kinship and belonging with our community seems far more natural, almost tribal by comparison.
This is going to be a serious social conundrum as we slide down the back side of Hubbert's Peak. Those cities, at least the large ones of over a half million population, are simply not going to be sustainable or supportable in a post-peak world. They exist in a virtual vacuum critically dependent on the outlying areas that surround them for their very survival. They will ultimately have to be abandoned but there will exist a passionate reluctance to do so. Serious time and critical resources will be wasted trying to make them survivable and sustainable. There will be powerful voices that remind us of the strong and long-surviving city states of the past like Athens, Rome, Chichen Itza and Machu Pichu. But there is no comparison between them and our fragile, technology-dependent cities of today. As their massive infrastructure decays and becomes increasingly dangerous, that hanging-on will become increasingly dangerous as well.
Even those great city states of the past were abandoned, some many times over the course of history. They also generally relied, it must be remembered, on a significant slave population who, like the workers in the ant colony and bee hive, were responsble for maintaining with brute force the infrastructure of those city states. To expect to take a modern day New York or London or Los Angeles or Tokyo back to the type of city state that existed in the past is folly in the extreme. It simply is not possible, even with slave labour. Our modern cities require armies of highly trained, technically proficient workers to keep them maintained. It can't be done with shovels and hammers. Just as the equipment and technology required to do the maintenance will become unusable because it can't be maintained or replaced, so too will the knowledge base for doing the maintenance begin to disappear as the institutions for training that army of maintenance specialists disappear. One way or another all of that infrastructure will ultimately simply be left to decay.
But what happens as it does? Dams burst. Bridges collapse. Glass fronted steel towers rain down showers of glass shards. Elevators plummet to the sub-basement. Tunnels flood or collapse. Sewers break and release toxins into surrounding soil. Water systems break and cause serious flooding before they eventually stop working all together. Concrete reinforced shorelines break down and weakened soil begins to wash away. Elevated highways collapse. And on and on. When our infrastructure begins to break down for the last time it will not be an "oh well" event. Each of those individual breakdowns will potentially be catastrophic events. The breach of a single dam on any of our rivers is very likely to cause cascade failures of every other weakened, under-maintained dam downstream from the original collapse. Any community in the way will be defenseless.
We do not know exactly when peak oil will be, or if it has already happened. We do not know how rapid the decline in global energy supplies will be on the other side of that peak. But we do know we have a global society based on expansion of the money supply through credit as the underpinning to an economic paradigm of perpetual growth. And we can reasonably surmise that when the global energy supplies go into decline so too will that global economy for industrial growth will stop. When it does it is very likely that the current luke-warm commitment to infrastructure maintenance will all but totally disappear as cost-cutting becomes the primary tool for attempted survival. The rate of decay of that already over-aged infrastructure will accelerate dramatically and there will no longer be the funds, the resources, the commitment, the energy nor the technology to upgrade it or replace it.
And yet our politicians continue to base our short-term and long-term plans on more growth, more new infrastructure, always more. They continue to operate as though our society as it exists can and will go on forever, or at least until they are out of office and it becomes someone else's problem. We cannot and must not allow them to keep leading us further down that path.
We cannot enter this future in such a way that that infrastructure will simply be left to decay. Any infrastructure than can not be maintained in a post-oil, post-technological age must be decommissioned before that age is thrust upon us. We don't need more dams. We need to be decommissioning those that already exist. We don't need more highways, more skyscrapers, more bridges, more of everything. We need to seriously evaluate the maintainability of every piece of infrastructure once we pass peak oil and if it is deemed unmaintainable once we enter that age it must be disposed of now, while we still have the funds, the energy, and the technology to do so.
Infrastructure and infrastructure maintenance are invisible issues to most of society. They are not at all sexy, certainly not the type of stuff that election platforms are built on. We must, however, somehow force them to become just that. We must demand of our politicians a vision and a platform that deals with the reality of peak oil and global energy decline. And that vision and platform must incorporate a strong component of how our aging infrastructure will be dealth with once they are elected. If we do not demand this of our politicians then we are condoning their taking us on a sleepwalk into a very dangerous future of terminal infrastructure decay. I don't want to see that for our children. They deserve better from us.
Under peacetime conditions governments and industry seem reluctant to commit the necessary funds and resources needed to properly maintain or replace aging infrastructure. In Europe and Asia the emphasis has been on maintaining old, well-built infrastructure. In America and the neo-west the emphasis has been on controlled demolition and replacement. Europe and Asia build infrastructure to last in perpetuity. In the neo-west we build with a designed life-span, usually not more than fifty years, then try to see how far beyond that lifespan we can go.
Most of the modern world as we know it, visible and invisible, has been built since the conclusion of WWII. Europe, like a phoenix, rose from the ashes of that war and integrated the massive amount of new replacement infrastructure with those bits of the old that had evaded the bombs. Japan and much of southeast Asia had to do the same. But North America - and Australia for that matter - has not had a war to purge it of its aging infrastructure in well over a century. Like Europe, new has been integrated with the old, though that old is much less old than European old.
The core of the unseen and taken-for-granted infrastructure underlying all North American cities large and small, however, is well over a century old and has long exceeded its designed lifespan. Even the shiny new suburbs with their modern infrastructure are tied to and equally dependent on the century-plus old infrastructure at the core of the cities they surround and to which their infrastructure is integrated, e.g. integrated water systems, electrical systems, telephone systems, transportation systems, and more.
Despite the fact infrastructure maintenance is consistently underfunded and maintenance is woefully inadequate - the prefered strategy is most often being to wait until it breaks down because the emergency created makes it easier to justify the extraordinary funds needed to fix or replace it - prodigious amounts are, nonetheless, spent on that maintenance. And that cost rises with each passing year, as does the gap between maintenance required and maintenance performed.
Underappreciated in all of this is that maintenance and upkeep of the massive infrastructure on which our society is built requires equally massive amounts of highly specialized technology and equipment for its maintenance. And therein lies my primary concern and the reason I keep returning to the issue of infrastructure in this blog. As we approach, arrive at and pass peak oil this issue will become increasingly important. Our undermaintained infrastructure, the vast bulk of which has been built in the sixty years since the end of World War II with a designed lifespan generally of fifty years, will be entering a period of terminal decay at the same time as the energy resources of the world, on which their maintenance depends, enter a period of terminal decline. The technology required to maintain that infrastructure will be increasingly unusable as it too decays and as replacement parts or replacement technology are increasingly unavailable. Much of this equipment is specifically designed, engineered and built as a one-off to satisfy the needs of a particular piece of infrastructure. The infrastructure which underpins our society which has always been a societal asset will increasingly become a massive and dangerous social liability.
Our communities, most particularly our cities, are seriously unnatural environments. In order for such large numbers of people, or any species, to live packed together at such close quarters in one place requires all manner of judiciously maintained infrastructure to prevent those places becoming health and environmental death traps. There are very few species that naturally live together in one place in large numbers, and even fewer in the numbers that human communities reach. Ants, bees, termites, corral and bats are a few that come to mind. Ants, bees and termites have worker classes whose job it is to keep the community - the bee hive or the ant hill or termite mound - clean and maintained. Bats live at the top of caves while their waste is dropped to the bottom of the caves where it is used by countless insects and micro-organisms. And corral rely on various species of fish and other marine organisms and the movement of ocean currents to clean away their refuse. Most animals living together in large numbers live in herds that are constantly on the move from one place to another, never staying in one place long enough for their waste to become a problem for the herd. But the safe maintenance of the living environment for community-based species is an ongoing battle for all of them and requires that their communities be frequently abandoned and new communities started. I would very much doubt that we could find an anthill or termite mound or beehive that has been a continuous site of occupation for thousands or even hundreds of years.
The greater the amount of infrastructure there is on which a community relies the greater is the reluctance to abandon it. The more you have, the more you have invested, the more there is to lose in doing so. And for we humans, the longer a community exists the greater the intangibles, such as history and the arts, that are also lost in abandoning the community. The longer we stay in one place the more reluctant we are to move on. Nowhere, it seems, is that moreso than with our cities. Our attachment and commitment to our cities, in fact, is far stronger it seems than our sense of nationalism and patriotism, both of which must be artificially reinforced. Our sense of kinship and belonging with our community seems far more natural, almost tribal by comparison.
This is going to be a serious social conundrum as we slide down the back side of Hubbert's Peak. Those cities, at least the large ones of over a half million population, are simply not going to be sustainable or supportable in a post-peak world. They exist in a virtual vacuum critically dependent on the outlying areas that surround them for their very survival. They will ultimately have to be abandoned but there will exist a passionate reluctance to do so. Serious time and critical resources will be wasted trying to make them survivable and sustainable. There will be powerful voices that remind us of the strong and long-surviving city states of the past like Athens, Rome, Chichen Itza and Machu Pichu. But there is no comparison between them and our fragile, technology-dependent cities of today. As their massive infrastructure decays and becomes increasingly dangerous, that hanging-on will become increasingly dangerous as well.
Even those great city states of the past were abandoned, some many times over the course of history. They also generally relied, it must be remembered, on a significant slave population who, like the workers in the ant colony and bee hive, were responsble for maintaining with brute force the infrastructure of those city states. To expect to take a modern day New York or London or Los Angeles or Tokyo back to the type of city state that existed in the past is folly in the extreme. It simply is not possible, even with slave labour. Our modern cities require armies of highly trained, technically proficient workers to keep them maintained. It can't be done with shovels and hammers. Just as the equipment and technology required to do the maintenance will become unusable because it can't be maintained or replaced, so too will the knowledge base for doing the maintenance begin to disappear as the institutions for training that army of maintenance specialists disappear. One way or another all of that infrastructure will ultimately simply be left to decay.
But what happens as it does? Dams burst. Bridges collapse. Glass fronted steel towers rain down showers of glass shards. Elevators plummet to the sub-basement. Tunnels flood or collapse. Sewers break and release toxins into surrounding soil. Water systems break and cause serious flooding before they eventually stop working all together. Concrete reinforced shorelines break down and weakened soil begins to wash away. Elevated highways collapse. And on and on. When our infrastructure begins to break down for the last time it will not be an "oh well" event. Each of those individual breakdowns will potentially be catastrophic events. The breach of a single dam on any of our rivers is very likely to cause cascade failures of every other weakened, under-maintained dam downstream from the original collapse. Any community in the way will be defenseless.
We do not know exactly when peak oil will be, or if it has already happened. We do not know how rapid the decline in global energy supplies will be on the other side of that peak. But we do know we have a global society based on expansion of the money supply through credit as the underpinning to an economic paradigm of perpetual growth. And we can reasonably surmise that when the global energy supplies go into decline so too will that global economy for industrial growth will stop. When it does it is very likely that the current luke-warm commitment to infrastructure maintenance will all but totally disappear as cost-cutting becomes the primary tool for attempted survival. The rate of decay of that already over-aged infrastructure will accelerate dramatically and there will no longer be the funds, the resources, the commitment, the energy nor the technology to upgrade it or replace it.
And yet our politicians continue to base our short-term and long-term plans on more growth, more new infrastructure, always more. They continue to operate as though our society as it exists can and will go on forever, or at least until they are out of office and it becomes someone else's problem. We cannot and must not allow them to keep leading us further down that path.
We cannot enter this future in such a way that that infrastructure will simply be left to decay. Any infrastructure than can not be maintained in a post-oil, post-technological age must be decommissioned before that age is thrust upon us. We don't need more dams. We need to be decommissioning those that already exist. We don't need more highways, more skyscrapers, more bridges, more of everything. We need to seriously evaluate the maintainability of every piece of infrastructure once we pass peak oil and if it is deemed unmaintainable once we enter that age it must be disposed of now, while we still have the funds, the energy, and the technology to do so.
Infrastructure and infrastructure maintenance are invisible issues to most of society. They are not at all sexy, certainly not the type of stuff that election platforms are built on. We must, however, somehow force them to become just that. We must demand of our politicians a vision and a platform that deals with the reality of peak oil and global energy decline. And that vision and platform must incorporate a strong component of how our aging infrastructure will be dealth with once they are elected. If we do not demand this of our politicians then we are condoning their taking us on a sleepwalk into a very dangerous future of terminal infrastructure decay. I don't want to see that for our children. They deserve better from us.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity
There has been much discussion among peak-oilers, most notably on the various Peak Oil Yahoo groups like Energy Resources, Running on Empty 2 and Energy Roundtable, and on sites such as ASPO, Energy Bulletin, Life After the Oil Crash and Wolf At The Door about the link between Peak Oil, global agriculture and the overshoot of earth's fossil-fuel-facilitated, artificial carrying capacity as we pass peak oil and start on the downslope of terminal decline. Much of this discussion is under the controversial and uncomfortable title of Die-Off, an extreme title that causes many observers and pundits to actively avoid consideration and discussion of carrying capacity when talking about post-peak societal changes and impacts. But it is time to push the discussion of peak oil and the carrying capacity relationship to the forefront.
Of late a new wild card has been inserted into the discussion, bio-fuels. There is lately so much mania and hype about bio-fuels. Every morning my e-mail in-basket contains at least one fully-packed Google Alert on "world hunger and bio-fuels". So many governments see them as the answer to both oil depletion and global warming. Much of this seems to be a means of avoiding upsetting or confronting the wealthy and strong (their own voters) in the increasingly traditional way by pushing the problem on the poor and weak of the under-developed world. The bi-product is that far too many people in responsible positions are failing to grasp the obvious.
The glaringly obvious point is, we can't feed the world's population today even with the artificial carrying capacity afforded by fossil fuels. The more energetically we pursue bio-fuels and take food-producing land out of the world food pool and shift it over to the world energy pool the more we reduce that artificial carrying capacity. As a result, the closer we move to the world's natural carrying capacity and the fewer people we can feed. In these early months of 2008 the world loses up to 40,000 people per day to starvation and other nutrition-related diseases. It is estimated that the amount of bio-fuel required to fill the tank of one SUV is enough to feed one person for one full year. How many more lives will it cost for every 1000 bio-fuel fill-ups? For every million gallons of bio-fuel production?
Over the past several years an ever-increasing proportion of new vehicle sales has been in the light truck category which is dominated by SUVs and vans, not to mention the loathsome Hummer. I am not a fan of SUVs and vans as personal vehicles and regularly flip the bird to Hummers as they rumble past like Bradley armored personnel carriers. These vehicles are not subject to the same fuel efficiency standards imposed on regular automobiles. They also require the consumption of far greater energy in their production. They are throw-backs to the big gas-guzzling eight-cylinder monster cars (the old behemoths with the massive tail-fins) of the fifties and sixties that, in my humble opinion, appeal to those that rely on their vehicle as a status symbol and a manifestation and extension of their assumed strength and prowess.
The almost global mania for bio-fuels pushes the envelope of carrying capacity in two ways. It takes land that should be producing food and diverts it to the production of crops to produce those bio-fuels, thereby reducing the amount of food that can be produced and badly reducing the amount of organic matter being returned to increasingly deficient soil. Billions of tons of top-soil deprived of organic matter are disappearing every year. The global emergency food grain reserves have now shrunk to the lowest level since those reserves were established as a buffer against poor harvests and crop loss. They are now less than a sixty days supply, far too low to accommodate any broad crop failures or losses in the primary northern hemisphere food grain producing nations. The food inventories of the worlds Aid agencies are shrinking while contributions and government support are inadequate to keep up with rising prices in these critical food grains. This is a particularly worrisome reality as the incidence of extreme weather events increases due to global warming and climate change.
But the push for bio-fuels also increases the cost of food in general pushing additional millions of people each year out of the breadline because they simply cannot afford the increasing cost of food. Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry every day because they could not afford to buy it. In other words, even the food that is being produced is not available for economic reasons, to either the poor and hungry needing the food the most or to the food aid agencies who supply emergency food support to the world's malnourished as a last resort.
The world's major developed nations, particularly those in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) have announced targets of satisfying from five to as much as fifteen percent of their liquid fuel needs through bio-fuels over this next one to two decades. This could represent global bio-fuel production of up to five hundred million gallons of bio-fuels per day just to satisfy today's consumption, not to mention the 4-5% increase in demand each year. This would divert food grains and other food crops like Casava and Palm Oil to the production of bio-fuels every day sufficient to feed as many as twenty to twenty-five million people for a year. If these targets are ever met or even approached, and I do not believe it is possible, the long-held economists' dream of a world full of people living an American standard of life will be met because everyone lower on the economic food chain will have died of starvation. As George Monbiot suggests in his Guardian article, The western appetite for bio-fuels is causing starvation in the poor world, it would be better and more humane to just refine those millions of people directly into fuel for our vehicles than let them starve to death by converting their food into fuel.
The decline of the artificial global carrying on the downslope is the most important issue in the peak oil debate. It is the truth that cannot be spoken. The harder we work to avoid discussing it coupled with this manic global push for bio-fuels the faster we push ourselves into an artificially-induced overshoot and die-off. It is time to stop avoiding this discussion of the uncomfortable and throw the idiocy of bio-fuels into sharp perspective. At the heart of the issue is the question that must be asked and answered. How many lives is our happy motoring worth? That little sticker on the fuel pump at the local gas station that shows the breakdown of each dollar spent on gasoline should be upgraded to show the cost in human lives.
Of late a new wild card has been inserted into the discussion, bio-fuels. There is lately so much mania and hype about bio-fuels. Every morning my e-mail in-basket contains at least one fully-packed Google Alert on "world hunger and bio-fuels". So many governments see them as the answer to both oil depletion and global warming. Much of this seems to be a means of avoiding upsetting or confronting the wealthy and strong (their own voters) in the increasingly traditional way by pushing the problem on the poor and weak of the under-developed world. The bi-product is that far too many people in responsible positions are failing to grasp the obvious.
The glaringly obvious point is, we can't feed the world's population today even with the artificial carrying capacity afforded by fossil fuels. The more energetically we pursue bio-fuels and take food-producing land out of the world food pool and shift it over to the world energy pool the more we reduce that artificial carrying capacity. As a result, the closer we move to the world's natural carrying capacity and the fewer people we can feed. In these early months of 2008 the world loses up to 40,000 people per day to starvation and other nutrition-related diseases. It is estimated that the amount of bio-fuel required to fill the tank of one SUV is enough to feed one person for one full year. How many more lives will it cost for every 1000 bio-fuel fill-ups? For every million gallons of bio-fuel production?
Over the past several years an ever-increasing proportion of new vehicle sales has been in the light truck category which is dominated by SUVs and vans, not to mention the loathsome Hummer. I am not a fan of SUVs and vans as personal vehicles and regularly flip the bird to Hummers as they rumble past like Bradley armored personnel carriers. These vehicles are not subject to the same fuel efficiency standards imposed on regular automobiles. They also require the consumption of far greater energy in their production. They are throw-backs to the big gas-guzzling eight-cylinder monster cars (the old behemoths with the massive tail-fins) of the fifties and sixties that, in my humble opinion, appeal to those that rely on their vehicle as a status symbol and a manifestation and extension of their assumed strength and prowess.
The almost global mania for bio-fuels pushes the envelope of carrying capacity in two ways. It takes land that should be producing food and diverts it to the production of crops to produce those bio-fuels, thereby reducing the amount of food that can be produced and badly reducing the amount of organic matter being returned to increasingly deficient soil. Billions of tons of top-soil deprived of organic matter are disappearing every year. The global emergency food grain reserves have now shrunk to the lowest level since those reserves were established as a buffer against poor harvests and crop loss. They are now less than a sixty days supply, far too low to accommodate any broad crop failures or losses in the primary northern hemisphere food grain producing nations. The food inventories of the worlds Aid agencies are shrinking while contributions and government support are inadequate to keep up with rising prices in these critical food grains. This is a particularly worrisome reality as the incidence of extreme weather events increases due to global warming and climate change.
But the push for bio-fuels also increases the cost of food in general pushing additional millions of people each year out of the breadline because they simply cannot afford the increasing cost of food. Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry every day because they could not afford to buy it. In other words, even the food that is being produced is not available for economic reasons, to either the poor and hungry needing the food the most or to the food aid agencies who supply emergency food support to the world's malnourished as a last resort.
The world's major developed nations, particularly those in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) have announced targets of satisfying from five to as much as fifteen percent of their liquid fuel needs through bio-fuels over this next one to two decades. This could represent global bio-fuel production of up to five hundred million gallons of bio-fuels per day just to satisfy today's consumption, not to mention the 4-5% increase in demand each year. This would divert food grains and other food crops like Casava and Palm Oil to the production of bio-fuels every day sufficient to feed as many as twenty to twenty-five million people for a year. If these targets are ever met or even approached, and I do not believe it is possible, the long-held economists' dream of a world full of people living an American standard of life will be met because everyone lower on the economic food chain will have died of starvation. As George Monbiot suggests in his Guardian article, The western appetite for bio-fuels is causing starvation in the poor world, it would be better and more humane to just refine those millions of people directly into fuel for our vehicles than let them starve to death by converting their food into fuel.
The decline of the artificial global carrying on the downslope is the most important issue in the peak oil debate. It is the truth that cannot be spoken. The harder we work to avoid discussing it coupled with this manic global push for bio-fuels the faster we push ourselves into an artificially-induced overshoot and die-off. It is time to stop avoiding this discussion of the uncomfortable and throw the idiocy of bio-fuels into sharp perspective. At the heart of the issue is the question that must be asked and answered. How many lives is our happy motoring worth? That little sticker on the fuel pump at the local gas station that shows the breakdown of each dollar spent on gasoline should be upgraded to show the cost in human lives.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The Sorry State of Environmental Conscience of Tarsands Operators
It is not my normal practice in this blog to forwrd whole new stories. However, I have written several articles in the blog about the tar sands and I wanted to add this to that portfolio. I will add no comment, letting the article speak for itself.
---------------------
Report compares environmental performance of oilsands companies; none good
Thu Jan 10, 12:12 AM
Bob Weber, The Canadian Press
EDMONTON - A new report comparing the environmental performance of Alberta's oilsands producers against each other has found that even the winners have little to brag about.
And the groundbreaking study by the Pembina Institute and the World Wildlife Fund, released Thursday, suggests the provincial government's reliance on industry to voluntarily do the right thing for the land, water and air of northern Alberta has failed.
"These are the largest petrochemical companies in the world," said Rob Powell, one of the report's authors.
"It just seems that for some reason they're getting away with not stepping up to the plate, and the government has to answer for that."
The report compares 10 operating and proposed oilsands mines using data supplied by the companies and publicly available government sources. It asks 20 questions grouped around the topics of environmental management, land, air emissions, water and climate change.
Companies were asked if they had third-party verification of their environmental management (only Albian Sands and Imperial did), or if they had targets to reduce their water use or air emissions (none did). Other questions concerned land reclamation plans, tailings production and public reporting.
All data was adjusted to be comparable. Only mining operations were considered. The companies had chances to comment on the data last June and again in September.
The answers to each question were scored and the results expressed as a percentage of the possible maximum.
The best the Alberta industry could do was Albian's 56 per cent for its existing Muskeg mine. Syncrude and Syneco ranked last, with only 18 per cent.
The 10 companies examined in the report, in the order of their ranking, are Albian Sands Muskeg, Total E&P, Petro-Canada Oil Sands (TSX: PCA.TO), Shell Canada (TSX: SHC.TO), Imperial Oil (TSX: IMO.TO), Suncor (TSX: SU.TO), Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., (TSX: CNQ.TO), Albian Sands Muskeg expansion, Syncrude and Syneco.
The most dismal results were for water use and climate. No company scored better than 50 per cent on the five water-related questions, and only three scored any marks at all for plans to deal with greenhouse gas production - although Albian's existing Muskeg mine racked up 66 per cent.
The wide variation in scores and the fact different companies dominated different categories means they aren't sharing best practices and the government's not making them, said Powell.
"We're not getting the kind of regulatory oversight that's required to achieve a reasonable standard of environmental performance. Why are they not insisting that these companies perform to the best available current standard?"
Powell says it's particularly telling that Albian's proposed expansion to its Muskeg mine ranks far lower than its existing project, scoring only 26 per cent.
The report estimates what would happen if all companies performed to the highest level in each category.
Emissions of two contributors to acid rain, nitrous dioxide and sulphur dioxide, could be cut by 79 and 47 per cent. Tailings could be eliminated. Water sucked from the Athabasca River could be reduced by 59 per cent.
Emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, could fall by 66 per cent.
"This is not pie in the sky," Powell said. "These are all things that companies are either doing now or that some companies that have sought approval say they will be able to do."
The first of the report's short list of five recommendations is that government needs to enforce acceptable standards and continuously improve them.
"Our survey clearly shows that a reliance on voluntary implementation of best practices is not resulting in adequate environmental management," it says.
It also criticizes government reluctance to provide information on environmental performance.
"The government actually collects some of this information but they don't share it with the public," said Powell. "A great deal of digging was required (for this report)."
Recommendations for industry include implementation of best practices and making information available in a consistent format that makes comparison possible.
"All of the companies could do better and our hope is that companies will compare themselves," said Powell.
---------------------
Report compares environmental performance of oilsands companies; none good
Thu Jan 10, 12:12 AM
Bob Weber, The Canadian Press
EDMONTON - A new report comparing the environmental performance of Alberta's oilsands producers against each other has found that even the winners have little to brag about.
And the groundbreaking study by the Pembina Institute and the World Wildlife Fund, released Thursday, suggests the provincial government's reliance on industry to voluntarily do the right thing for the land, water and air of northern Alberta has failed.
"These are the largest petrochemical companies in the world," said Rob Powell, one of the report's authors.
"It just seems that for some reason they're getting away with not stepping up to the plate, and the government has to answer for that."
The report compares 10 operating and proposed oilsands mines using data supplied by the companies and publicly available government sources. It asks 20 questions grouped around the topics of environmental management, land, air emissions, water and climate change.
Companies were asked if they had third-party verification of their environmental management (only Albian Sands and Imperial did), or if they had targets to reduce their water use or air emissions (none did). Other questions concerned land reclamation plans, tailings production and public reporting.
All data was adjusted to be comparable. Only mining operations were considered. The companies had chances to comment on the data last June and again in September.
The answers to each question were scored and the results expressed as a percentage of the possible maximum.
The best the Alberta industry could do was Albian's 56 per cent for its existing Muskeg mine. Syncrude and Syneco ranked last, with only 18 per cent.
The 10 companies examined in the report, in the order of their ranking, are Albian Sands Muskeg, Total E&P, Petro-Canada Oil Sands (TSX: PCA.TO), Shell Canada (TSX: SHC.TO), Imperial Oil (TSX: IMO.TO), Suncor (TSX: SU.TO), Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., (TSX: CNQ.TO), Albian Sands Muskeg expansion, Syncrude and Syneco.
The most dismal results were for water use and climate. No company scored better than 50 per cent on the five water-related questions, and only three scored any marks at all for plans to deal with greenhouse gas production - although Albian's existing Muskeg mine racked up 66 per cent.
The wide variation in scores and the fact different companies dominated different categories means they aren't sharing best practices and the government's not making them, said Powell.
"We're not getting the kind of regulatory oversight that's required to achieve a reasonable standard of environmental performance. Why are they not insisting that these companies perform to the best available current standard?"
Powell says it's particularly telling that Albian's proposed expansion to its Muskeg mine ranks far lower than its existing project, scoring only 26 per cent.
The report estimates what would happen if all companies performed to the highest level in each category.
Emissions of two contributors to acid rain, nitrous dioxide and sulphur dioxide, could be cut by 79 and 47 per cent. Tailings could be eliminated. Water sucked from the Athabasca River could be reduced by 59 per cent.
Emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, could fall by 66 per cent.
"This is not pie in the sky," Powell said. "These are all things that companies are either doing now or that some companies that have sought approval say they will be able to do."
The first of the report's short list of five recommendations is that government needs to enforce acceptable standards and continuously improve them.
"Our survey clearly shows that a reliance on voluntary implementation of best practices is not resulting in adequate environmental management," it says.
It also criticizes government reluctance to provide information on environmental performance.
"The government actually collects some of this information but they don't share it with the public," said Powell. "A great deal of digging was required (for this report)."
Recommendations for industry include implementation of best practices and making information available in a consistent format that makes comparison possible.
"All of the companies could do better and our hope is that companies will compare themselves," said Powell.
Monday, January 07, 2008
CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration) and Peak Oil
One cannot realistically study the issue of peak oil without also dealing with the question of peaking of other fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal. The peaking and/or depletion of one will seriously affect the others as they are leaned on as substitutes. But one also cannot deal with the issue of peak oil, peak energy and fossil fuel usage in general without also fully understanding and taking into account the other serious and highly related issue on the global horizon; global warming and climate change. It is, in fact, our past tendencies to focus on energy without consideration of environmental implications that have led us to this point in human history where both are simultaneously manifesting themselves as serious global problems.
Carbon Dioxide (CO2), the primary Greenhouse Gas (by volume) that causes global warming, is the chief bi-product from the burning of fossil fuels. But it is, by no means, the only source of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Nor is it, by itself, a pollutant. Global warming is caused not by the simple presence of CO2 in the atmosphere but by the level of concentration of CO2. The greater the volume of CO2 present the greater the impact on raising earth's temperature. In fact a certain level of CO2 in the atmosphere is required to maintain earth's temperature in a range suitable for the support of life. Without our atmosphere and the heat-trapping effects of atmospheric CO2 earth would be a cold, inhospitable planet incapable of supporting life, just as Mars appears to be today. So although the current upsurge in global warming is partly caused by man and his burning of fossil fuels, the aim in addressing and correcting this is not to eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere but to bring the levels of atmospheric CO2 back to where they naturally should be and maintain them in the range required by life on earth.
Our abuses of our planet and its environment and atmosphere have left us with little option but to maintain our assumed role of custodian. We can not endanger that environment and the lifeforms of this planet that depend on it, as we have already done, and stand back and expect the environment to correct itself. This planet's natural checks and balances have evolved, just like living organisms do, over long, slow geological time. Man is an aggressive, abusive, gregarious species that changes the environment not in slow geologic time but in the rapid-fire, staccato pace of our technological innovation and development. Nature simply has no way to keep up with the pace we have set. Like the tortoise, it will win in the end. But that end is a long way off and calamitous changes lie between now and that finish line.
The simple truth is we must stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at the levels we have since the onset of the industrial revolution some two hundred and fifty years ago. Since the greatest volumes of those anthropogenic CO2 gases derive from our burning of fossil fuels it is in that area that we must make changes. But that presents us with a huge problem. Our human society is founded on the burning of fossil fuels. The global economy is driven by fossil fuels. Without them that global economy and global human society, as they are currently constituted, would simply fall apart. Despite the belief by purists, which I am often accused of being, that that is exactly what should happen, the simple reality is it will not. There is simply too much at stake for our leaders to allow the system to fail by pulling the plug.
What, then, are the alternatives? How do we carry on our society as it is and still reduce the amount of CO2 we are releasing into the atmosphere? Most of those in power and the cornucopian advisers, economists and technocrats to whom they listen, seem intent on putting their eggs in the CCS basket (Carbon Capture and Sequestration). For those unfamiliar with CCS, it "refers to the provision of long-term storage of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere, underground, or the oceans so that the buildup of carbon dioxide (the principal greenhouse gas) concentration in the atmosphere will reduce or slow."[3] The most frequently discussed and proposed method is the injection of CO2 extracted from concentrated exhaust from things like power plants into old abandoned oil wells, gas wells, mines and similar structures. Other proposals, looking for an economic return from the sequestration, involve increasing the injection of CO2 into active oil wells, for example, to increase well head pressure and improve oil extraction.
Carbon sequestration, after all, is quite simple. Nature does it all the time. Plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen, "sequestering" the carbon by using it in building new plant matter. The oceans act as a natural carbon sink by absorbing huge volumes of CO2 into seawater. But why leave it to nature to do for free when we can develop and use expensive new technology to do it ourselves? After all, the more money we put into that technology the more it beefs up the GDP and benefits the economy. As long as human society is driven by money and economics that is the point of view that will prevail. But hugely expensive carbon capture programs get quietly cancelled, stalled or put on the back burner [1, 8, 9, 10, 17, 19] just as quickly as they get loudly announced and proclaimed [4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18]. In some cases the cancellation of a program happens just a few short weeks after it was announced, most often without any carbon having been sequestered at all.
A far more serious and potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is Methane, which is about twenty times as powerful as a greenhouse gas. Methane, like CO2, naturally occurs in the biosphere and the levels at which it normally occurs are not a problem. In fact, like CO2, atmospheric Methane is an important part of maintaining earth's temperature in the range required by living organisms. But human activities have dramatically increased the concentration of Methane in the earth's atmosphere and threaten to seriously and dangerously increase that concentration. Vast amounts of Methane have been sequestered by nature in swamps, in Arctic permafrost and, most importantly, as Methane Hydrates trapped in sediment at the bottom of the oceans and seas and in Arctic permafrost.
Getting those who are responsible for national energy needs to think of both energy production and climate change at the same time, however, seems to have great potential for creating problems as big as it solves. Methane you see, unlike CO2, can be used as a fuel (technically it is natural gas) and, therefore, is being looked at extensively, particularly Methane Hydrates, as a possible alternative in the face of declining fossil fuel reserves. There is several times as much usable Methane in the world, most in the form of Methane Hydrates, than all of the fossil fuels combined. The world's two most populous countries with a combined population of nearly three billion, India and China, seem intent on not waiting that long to capitalize on this energy source. They are looking seriously at using vast reserves of Methane Hydrates off their coasts as an alternative now as a "solution" to their high volume of CO2 generation from the burning of coal and other fossil fuels[20]. This makes as much sense as heating your house by burning the lumber with which it was built. Methane Hydrates are very unstable constructs that are quickly dissipated into the atmosphere at normal air temperature and pressure (see my December 2006 article "Methane hydrates: the next great energy source?" in my blog at http://oilbeseeingyou.blogspot.com/2006/12/methane-hydrates-next-great-energy.html ). Accidentally releasing into the atmosphere during extraction an amount of Methane more than five percent the volume of the CO2 they are currently generating will, in fact, result in a greater impact on global warming than their current CO2 releases.
Governments the world over, including the U.S. federal government, are making serious research money available for research, testing and development of serious carbon sequestration projects. And as is always the case when a handful of government money is thrown into the trough, organizations are lining up to get at it. But it seems they are all doing so with the hope and assumption that they can make money out of it beyond taxpayer money to fund the research. The only viable CCS projects seem to be those involving high-volume sources lik3e power plants and geosequestration into old wells and mines. The hard reality is, and often the reason that projects so enthusiastically announced are so quietly and quickly cancelled, is that the high volume sources and the geological formations into which the CO2 can be sequestered often do not occur in the same location. To have to move the CO2, in either gaseous or liquid form, over long distances by pipeline in order to sequester it becomes prohibitively expensive.
Most serious projects that have not yet been cancelled are looking at projected dates at least one to two decades out before completion of a fully functional CCS infrastructure. By that time oil and other fossil fuels will be into serious decline and the generation of anthropogenic CO2 may well be in decline by that time simply because there is not enough fuel left to burn to keep it on the increase. That will not, of course, solve the global warming problem as the impact on global warming from the CO2 already in the atmosphere will still take decades to reach its maximum. CCS still has the potential, therefore, to be one of the biggest White Elephants our technological society has yet produced. Or is that White Elephant grey from industrial pollution?
------------------
Sources and further reading;
1) Oil giants abandon plans for ‘uneconomic’ green power plant
2) Geologic Sequestration Research
3) Carbon Sequestration
4) Scientists deepen confidence in technique to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
5) Carbon capture and storage
6) Carbon Capture and Storage
7) Piping carbon back into the ground
8) Norway sticks with CCS gas power plant plan -PM
9) What Future for Carbon Capture and Sequestration?
10) A cautionary tale of carbon capture
11) Carbon Capture Research
12) Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage
13) Carbon capture and sequestration project set for large-scale test
14) Carbon Capture Moves Ahead
15) Million Tons of CO2 Will Be Injected Under Illinois
16) Gov Blagojevich Invites President to Visit Mattoon, Site of FutureGen Project - December 21
17) Futuregen's Plan to Bring CCS to Illinois in Trouble?
18) Navajo Times: "Desert Rock a needed project for Navajo Nation" (Dec 22 2007)
19) Energy Northwest ditches project to bury emissions
20) China and India Exploit Icy Energy Reserves
Carbon Dioxide (CO2), the primary Greenhouse Gas (by volume) that causes global warming, is the chief bi-product from the burning of fossil fuels. But it is, by no means, the only source of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Nor is it, by itself, a pollutant. Global warming is caused not by the simple presence of CO2 in the atmosphere but by the level of concentration of CO2. The greater the volume of CO2 present the greater the impact on raising earth's temperature. In fact a certain level of CO2 in the atmosphere is required to maintain earth's temperature in a range suitable for the support of life. Without our atmosphere and the heat-trapping effects of atmospheric CO2 earth would be a cold, inhospitable planet incapable of supporting life, just as Mars appears to be today. So although the current upsurge in global warming is partly caused by man and his burning of fossil fuels, the aim in addressing and correcting this is not to eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere but to bring the levels of atmospheric CO2 back to where they naturally should be and maintain them in the range required by life on earth.
Our abuses of our planet and its environment and atmosphere have left us with little option but to maintain our assumed role of custodian. We can not endanger that environment and the lifeforms of this planet that depend on it, as we have already done, and stand back and expect the environment to correct itself. This planet's natural checks and balances have evolved, just like living organisms do, over long, slow geological time. Man is an aggressive, abusive, gregarious species that changes the environment not in slow geologic time but in the rapid-fire, staccato pace of our technological innovation and development. Nature simply has no way to keep up with the pace we have set. Like the tortoise, it will win in the end. But that end is a long way off and calamitous changes lie between now and that finish line.
The simple truth is we must stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at the levels we have since the onset of the industrial revolution some two hundred and fifty years ago. Since the greatest volumes of those anthropogenic CO2 gases derive from our burning of fossil fuels it is in that area that we must make changes. But that presents us with a huge problem. Our human society is founded on the burning of fossil fuels. The global economy is driven by fossil fuels. Without them that global economy and global human society, as they are currently constituted, would simply fall apart. Despite the belief by purists, which I am often accused of being, that that is exactly what should happen, the simple reality is it will not. There is simply too much at stake for our leaders to allow the system to fail by pulling the plug.
What, then, are the alternatives? How do we carry on our society as it is and still reduce the amount of CO2 we are releasing into the atmosphere? Most of those in power and the cornucopian advisers, economists and technocrats to whom they listen, seem intent on putting their eggs in the CCS basket (Carbon Capture and Sequestration). For those unfamiliar with CCS, it "refers to the provision of long-term storage of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere, underground, or the oceans so that the buildup of carbon dioxide (the principal greenhouse gas) concentration in the atmosphere will reduce or slow."[3] The most frequently discussed and proposed method is the injection of CO2 extracted from concentrated exhaust from things like power plants into old abandoned oil wells, gas wells, mines and similar structures. Other proposals, looking for an economic return from the sequestration, involve increasing the injection of CO2 into active oil wells, for example, to increase well head pressure and improve oil extraction.
Carbon sequestration, after all, is quite simple. Nature does it all the time. Plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen, "sequestering" the carbon by using it in building new plant matter. The oceans act as a natural carbon sink by absorbing huge volumes of CO2 into seawater. But why leave it to nature to do for free when we can develop and use expensive new technology to do it ourselves? After all, the more money we put into that technology the more it beefs up the GDP and benefits the economy. As long as human society is driven by money and economics that is the point of view that will prevail. But hugely expensive carbon capture programs get quietly cancelled, stalled or put on the back burner [1, 8, 9, 10, 17, 19] just as quickly as they get loudly announced and proclaimed [4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18]. In some cases the cancellation of a program happens just a few short weeks after it was announced, most often without any carbon having been sequestered at all.
A far more serious and potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is Methane, which is about twenty times as powerful as a greenhouse gas. Methane, like CO2, naturally occurs in the biosphere and the levels at which it normally occurs are not a problem. In fact, like CO2, atmospheric Methane is an important part of maintaining earth's temperature in the range required by living organisms. But human activities have dramatically increased the concentration of Methane in the earth's atmosphere and threaten to seriously and dangerously increase that concentration. Vast amounts of Methane have been sequestered by nature in swamps, in Arctic permafrost and, most importantly, as Methane Hydrates trapped in sediment at the bottom of the oceans and seas and in Arctic permafrost.
Getting those who are responsible for national energy needs to think of both energy production and climate change at the same time, however, seems to have great potential for creating problems as big as it solves. Methane you see, unlike CO2, can be used as a fuel (technically it is natural gas) and, therefore, is being looked at extensively, particularly Methane Hydrates, as a possible alternative in the face of declining fossil fuel reserves. There is several times as much usable Methane in the world, most in the form of Methane Hydrates, than all of the fossil fuels combined. The world's two most populous countries with a combined population of nearly three billion, India and China, seem intent on not waiting that long to capitalize on this energy source. They are looking seriously at using vast reserves of Methane Hydrates off their coasts as an alternative now as a "solution" to their high volume of CO2 generation from the burning of coal and other fossil fuels[20]. This makes as much sense as heating your house by burning the lumber with which it was built. Methane Hydrates are very unstable constructs that are quickly dissipated into the atmosphere at normal air temperature and pressure (see my December 2006 article "Methane hydrates: the next great energy source?" in my blog at http://oilbeseeingyou.blogspot.com/2006/12/methane-hydrates-next-great-energy.html ). Accidentally releasing into the atmosphere during extraction an amount of Methane more than five percent the volume of the CO2 they are currently generating will, in fact, result in a greater impact on global warming than their current CO2 releases.
Governments the world over, including the U.S. federal government, are making serious research money available for research, testing and development of serious carbon sequestration projects. And as is always the case when a handful of government money is thrown into the trough, organizations are lining up to get at it. But it seems they are all doing so with the hope and assumption that they can make money out of it beyond taxpayer money to fund the research. The only viable CCS projects seem to be those involving high-volume sources lik3e power plants and geosequestration into old wells and mines. The hard reality is, and often the reason that projects so enthusiastically announced are so quietly and quickly cancelled, is that the high volume sources and the geological formations into which the CO2 can be sequestered often do not occur in the same location. To have to move the CO2, in either gaseous or liquid form, over long distances by pipeline in order to sequester it becomes prohibitively expensive.
Most serious projects that have not yet been cancelled are looking at projected dates at least one to two decades out before completion of a fully functional CCS infrastructure. By that time oil and other fossil fuels will be into serious decline and the generation of anthropogenic CO2 may well be in decline by that time simply because there is not enough fuel left to burn to keep it on the increase. That will not, of course, solve the global warming problem as the impact on global warming from the CO2 already in the atmosphere will still take decades to reach its maximum. CCS still has the potential, therefore, to be one of the biggest White Elephants our technological society has yet produced. Or is that White Elephant grey from industrial pollution?
------------------
Sources and further reading;
1) Oil giants abandon plans for ‘uneconomic’ green power plant
2) Geologic Sequestration Research
3) Carbon Sequestration
4) Scientists deepen confidence in technique to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
5) Carbon capture and storage
6) Carbon Capture and Storage
7) Piping carbon back into the ground
8) Norway sticks with CCS gas power plant plan -PM
9) What Future for Carbon Capture and Sequestration?
10) A cautionary tale of carbon capture
11) Carbon Capture Research
12) Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage
13) Carbon capture and sequestration project set for large-scale test
14) Carbon Capture Moves Ahead
15) Million Tons of CO2 Will Be Injected Under Illinois
16) Gov Blagojevich Invites President to Visit Mattoon, Site of FutureGen Project - December 21
17) Futuregen's Plan to Bring CCS to Illinois in Trouble?
18) Navajo Times: "Desert Rock a needed project for Navajo Nation" (Dec 22 2007)
19) Energy Northwest ditches project to bury emissions
20) China and India Exploit Icy Energy Reserves
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Sorry for the Silence............
My apologies for the lack of new material and the lack of approving your messages for the last several weeks. I blew my modem a few weeks back and was without connection to the internet until now.
But I'm back............
In fact you will see a new article "Will Tar Sands Peak in 2015?" that has been written and patiently sitting on my computer waiting for me to get reconnected.
For those of you who may have thought I had disappeared for good, no such luck. I'll be here whining and bitching and complaining about our energy myopia for as long as I can.
The time away wasn't a total waste, however. Deprived of the internet I managed to get some much needed work done on my next book.
Thanks for your patience.
Richard Embleton
richard.embleton@sympatico.ca
But I'm back............
In fact you will see a new article "Will Tar Sands Peak in 2015?" that has been written and patiently sitting on my computer waiting for me to get reconnected.
For those of you who may have thought I had disappeared for good, no such luck. I'll be here whining and bitching and complaining about our energy myopia for as long as I can.
The time away wasn't a total waste, however. Deprived of the internet I managed to get some much needed work done on my next book.
Thanks for your patience.
Richard Embleton
richard.embleton@sympatico.ca
Will Tar Sands Peak in 2015?
OPEC continue to warn the industrialized nations that their assumptions are overly optimistic about how much the OPEC members will be able to ramp up production to meet demand over the coming decades. It seems the industrialized nations, or more specifically the U.S. DOE, are guilty of the same effusive optimism when it comes to the ramp-up potential in Canada's tar sands. At least one well respected analyst, Chris Skrebowski, long time energy professional and editor of the British-based Petroleum Review, believes the tar sands production will peak in 2015-2020 at 3 million barrels a day or less.
In the wake of a period of tumultuous energy problems originating in Russia's erratic supply policies (they seem intent on using energy as a political weapon) and their current and future impact on Germany, that country's Energy Watch Group recently released a report on their current projections for world energy - and particularly world oil - trends into the short- and medium-term future. One of the key points in that report was a projection that Canada's tar sands production would be up to a level of 4-million barrels a day by 2030.
Canada's NEB (National Energy Board), in fact, suggest that if oil prices stay high it could reach 5-6 million barrels a day by 2030. Energy analyst,Chris Skrebowski, takes issue with such projections. He finds even the EWG projection of 4-million b/day overly optimistic and in an interview with Julian Darley of GPM (Global Public Media) he explains why, in his expert and considered opinion, the tar sands production will peak in 2015-2020, well below that EWG projection. Julian Darley noted that Skrebowski's 2015-2020 date is "dramatically earlier than almost anybody puts it at." Skrebowski reminded him that since the tar sands projects started in the richest central section "we do know, in general terms, that we always will get leaner."
Recent Canadian news reports seem to suggest that Chris Skrebowski is probably more right than wrong. A November, 2007 Toronto Globe and Mail article titled High costs trim forecast for oil sands production suggests that the NEB (National Energy Board) is now projecting a maximum production level in 2015 of only 2.8 million b/d, 200,000b/d lower than their own commonly used 3-million, because of industry discomfort with capital and operating cost overruns of up to 100% on all current tar sands projects. Assuming that Chris Skrebowski is right about peaking in 2015-2020, that suggests tar sands production will never be ramped up beyond 3-million b/d.
What is the real situation with the tar sands? How can there be such a disparity in the estimates for future tar sands production?
In his interview with Julian Darley, Chris Skrebowski highlighted several challenges for the tar sands industry over the foreseeable future. Three that may or may not be soluble are;
* the availability of the high volumes of water needed for tar sands processing,
* the availability of gas or alternative means of heating the tar sands. Greg Stringham, a vice-president of CAPP (the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers), said the gas price used by the NEB for its main forecast – $7 per million BTU – is on the pessimistic side. "It would be too low to support investment in high-cost unconventional and tight gas projects and not high enough to reduce demand," he said.
* and; how vigorously the various levels of government choose to legislate and enforce environmental controls. Various parties, from the municipality of Fort MacMurray to a host of environmental organizations have called for a moratorium on new projects until environmental impact studies can be completed. Canadian governments have a dubious track record of allowing major projects to proceed before the required environmental assessments are completed only to find, when the studies are done, that they should have blocked the project. Having approved the go ahead they leave themselves with no option but to allow the project to continue.
The one challenge that Chris Skrebowski sees as insoluble, as it is a limit of geology, is that the tar sands have a wide variability in quality. Current operations are being conducted in the bitumen-rich central area of the tar sands deposits. Bitumen, not oil, is what the tar sands hold. It is a thick, tar-like substance which needs further, energy-intensive processing, after the energy-intensive extraction, to be converted into a synthetic liquid crude. In the central areas the tar sands contain about 12 percent bitumen, up to 14% in a few sweet spots. At that level of bitumen concentration tar sands oil production is economically profitable and also has a slightly positive EROEI for strip mining operations. Even in these areas, however, in situ production - which involves injecting steam into the tar sands to separate the bitumen from the sand so it can be pumped to the surface like crude oil - thus far has a negative EROEI because of the higher energy requirements and also because the bitumen concentrations, due to higher levels of biodegradation, are generally lower deeper in the tar sands deposits where in situ has to be used.
As the central areas currently being exploited are worked out, which Chris Skrebowski projects they will be by 2015-2020, operators will have to move out of these central areas into the periphery of the reserves. That is where the problem is. In these peripheral areas Skrebowski suggests the bitumen content drops off to about 8 percent. He sees an open question whether operations will continue to be profitable and have a positive EROEI at these much lower bitumen concentrations.
Skrebowski, in fact, may be optimistic. Several studies, including one called PHOTON conducted specifically for the tar sands industry by the University of Calgary, have found that bitumen concentration in a reserve varies considerably both vertically in the reserve but also across the reserve. That variability ranges from under 5 percent to a high of 13-14 percent. Outside of the central areas currently being exploited, however, the bitumen concentration is consistently under 10 percent even in shallow strip-minable sections.
Analysis of the Utah "tar sands", by comparison, which are really hard shale, not pliable sands, has also showed that their content may be as low as 3-5 percent (the Orinoco tar sands in Venezuela have a bitumen concentration of only up to about 10 percent). This suggests that, from an EROEI perspective, the Utah tar shale could never be exploited economically unless..... the U.S. government decided they were critical and lavished huge subsidies on any organization prepared to exploit it "in the interest of national security". The same, of course, can be said of Canada's tar sands. If they are deemed crucial to North American or U.S. energy security organizations may be financially encouraged to continue their exploitation whatever the cost. Dick Cheney's NEPDG (National Energy Policy Development Group) described Canada's tar sands as "a pillar of sustained North American energy and economic security."
At some point in the foreseeable future Canada's domestic energy needs and U.S. Energy policy are headed for an inevitable clash. Canada's conventional oil production is already in decline and will continue to decline. Natural gas production is barely holding despite an unprecedented amount of drilling in the last couple of years. And Canada's domestic energy needs are growing at 3-4% per year. It is a worrying prospect for Canadians as energy sovereignty was effectively surrendered under the NAFTA agreement. Canada's energy resources must, under the agreement, be open and accessible to corporate energy interests. To date, four of the five oil majors (Royal Dutch/Shell, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and TotalFina) have invested or committed themselves to invest billions of dollars in tar sands development. National oil companies have also staked their claim, ranging from Norway's Statoil to China's Sinopec.
Whether strip mining or in situ processing is used in the exploitation, however, using tar sands as a source of oil is an unquestioned environmental disaster. And the oil majors have a very poor environmental track record in almost every area of the world in which they operate. Oil derived from tar sands causes greenhouse gas emissions (because of the high energy use, particularly natural gas cooking of the bitumen) 3-4 times higher than conventional liquid crude extraction. But sixty-five percent of the world's oil, it is estimated, is contained in tar sands, not as liquid crude. If governments continue to see oil as critical to their national interests and a key underpinning of their national economy and the global economy, they may still choose to continue to try to keep the wheels on the runaway train by exploiting the widespread tar sands deposits of various descriptions and quality wherever they can be found. Over seventy countries contain tar sands deposits including the U.S.A., Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, Indonesia, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, Jordan, Madagascar, Colombia, Albania, Romania, Spain, Portugal, Nigeria and Argentina. Within the United States, oil sand deposits occur mainly in Utah, Alaska, Alabama, S.W. Texas, California, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Missouri with scattered deposits in other states. None of these other areas equals Canada's tar sands for volume or quality however.
The Canadian region defined as "the Athabaska tar sands" covers an area over 140,000km2 of once virgin boreal forest, a larger area than the state of Florida. It is estimated to hold an equivalent 1.7 trillion barrels of oil or more. But of that only 150-200 billion barrels (about 10 percent) may be recoverable "with today's technology and under current and anticipated economic conditions". But with "the cost of adding a new b/d of synthetic crude production capacity in the oil sands now rang[ing] between $80,000 and $100,000", as per the National Energy Board, that could require additional capital investment of $300-500 billion (currently about $100 billion of further investment has been scheduled or committed) to ramp up to the "desired" production levels of 3-4 million b/d, let alone the optimistic and probably unachievable 6 million b/d suggested as possible by the NEB. As capital costs keep rising exponentially, even that cost of $100,000 per b/d is likely on the low side for future projects, particularly if they are in situ operations or are operations in the peripheral, bitumen-poor areas of the reserves.
On top of escalating capital costs the tar sands industry is also running into severe unanticipated operating costs due to shortages of manpower and equipment, high infrastructure and equipment maintenance costs due to the climatic extremes under which they operate, increased royalty demands from the Alberta provincial government and a host of other costs. With the experiences in Canada's tar sands as a model, the most advanced and successful tar sands exploitation to date in the world, it is reasonable to wonder to what extent governments and energy corporations will be willing to gamble the huge sums needed to undertake similar developments in other areas of the world.
The NEB continues to stick with the belief that the market price of oil will drive tar sands production, seemingly ignoring the EROEI return issue. In their view, "If oil prices – now nudging $100 (U.S.) a barrel – remain high, Canada's crude output could rise to almost six million b/d by 2030, of which five million b/d would come from the oil sands," the NEB report, entitled Canada's Energy Future, states. "Conversely, if oil prices fall to around $35 a barrel, Canada would only produce about three million b/d of crude by 2030, and only 2.7 million b/d of that would be from the oil sands."
Tar sands are not an environmental problem, however, just because of the high greenhouse gas emissions. As the article America's Claim on Our Tar Sands puts it, "The magnitude of the environmental risks and liabilities arising from Canada's tar sands rush is unprecedented in the history of North American energy production. Growing awareness about the global warming and environmental consequences of relying upon growth in tar sands production throws into sharp relief the perils of our addiction to oil in the 21st century."
Everything about the tar sands is big, most significantly, but not only, its global warming and environmental implications -- leading some to now describe the tar sands as "Canada's dirty secret." The tar sands mines are each as big as 150 square miles and may be 300 feet deep, each leaving a tremendous scar on the landscape. Depending on the bitumen concentration, 4-6 tons of material must be moved and processed for every barrel of synthetic crude produced. Over 80 per cent of the established tar sands reserves are deeper and must be extracted in situ. Reclaiming and cleaning up the land damaged by tar sands operations will be a monumental task. According to the paper The Harm the Tar Sands Will Do, "after 40 years of mining, not a single operation has received a reclamation certificate from the government of Alberta. Suncor Energy's operation, the longest-operating tar sands mine, says it has reclaimed 858 hectares of land since starting operations in 1967, less than nine per cent of the land its operations have disturbed to date. Syncrude Canada, the largest daily producer of tar sands, says its operations have disturbed 18,653 hectares since 1978, with just 4,055 hectares of land reclaimed. None of this reclaimed land has been certified as such. At best, reclamation of the tar sands region will be a large-scale experiment that is unlikely to restore a self-sustaining boreal forest ecosystem within the next century."
Water usage is the other major environmental problem with the tar sands. Even at 12% bitumen concentration, tar sands mining operations (in situ operations use even higher volumes) withdraw two to 4.5 barrels of fresh water from the Athabaska River for every barrel of oil they produce. Current operations, to achieve about 1 million b/d production, are permitted to withdraw more than 349 million cubic metres of water per year, a volume equivalent to the amount required by a city of two million people. But unlike city effluent waters, which are treated and released back into the river, tar sands mining effluent becomes so contaminated that it must be impounded in huge, man-made containment ponds. Water withdrawals for tar sands surface mining operations pose threats to both the sustainability of fish populations in the Athabasca River (which is already turned brown from the pollution from seepage from the containment ponds and various spills and is too contaminated to be used for community water), and to the sustainability of the Peace-Athabasca Delta (until now one of the last unspoiled delta regions in the world), jeopardizing the subsistence and commercial fisheries of local aboriginals.
Based on the environmental destruction being wrought by tar sands operations it is to be hoped that Chris Skrebowski is right in his belief the tar sands will peak by 2015-2020. It must then be further hoped that when the economic viability disappears the operators will quietly and discretely fold their tents and slip away, that governments don't continue to financially encourage their exploitation with massive subsidies. Those hopes may be unrealistic in view of the belief of the current U.S. administration under George Bush and Dick Cheney that they are critical to U.S. economic and energy security. With the short time they have left in office there is little to celebrate in the pending change in administration. None of the potential future presidents seem to be intent on changing the country's energy direction or policies. Perhaps in the remaining months of the presidential race one of them will take the energy bull by the horns and inject some sanity into the country's energy policies. Yeh, right!
================================
Sources and additional material;
Chris Skrebowski on alarming new peak oil report
America's Claim on Our Tar Sands
The Harm the Tar Sands Will Do
Pour-point depression of crude oils by addition of tar sand bitumen
Oil Sands
Oil (Tar) Sands
Strip Mining for Oil in Endangered Forests
Athabasca Tar Sands
Tar Sand
High costs trim forecast for oil sands production
Heavy oils and tar sand(HOTS) fluid research at Calgary.
Reservoir and Bitumen Heterogeneity in Athabasca Oil Sands
In the wake of a period of tumultuous energy problems originating in Russia's erratic supply policies (they seem intent on using energy as a political weapon) and their current and future impact on Germany, that country's Energy Watch Group recently released a report on their current projections for world energy - and particularly world oil - trends into the short- and medium-term future. One of the key points in that report was a projection that Canada's tar sands production would be up to a level of 4-million barrels a day by 2030.
Canada's NEB (National Energy Board), in fact, suggest that if oil prices stay high it could reach 5-6 million barrels a day by 2030. Energy analyst,Chris Skrebowski, takes issue with such projections. He finds even the EWG projection of 4-million b/day overly optimistic and in an interview with Julian Darley of GPM (Global Public Media) he explains why, in his expert and considered opinion, the tar sands production will peak in 2015-2020, well below that EWG projection. Julian Darley noted that Skrebowski's 2015-2020 date is "dramatically earlier than almost anybody puts it at." Skrebowski reminded him that since the tar sands projects started in the richest central section "we do know, in general terms, that we always will get leaner."
Recent Canadian news reports seem to suggest that Chris Skrebowski is probably more right than wrong. A November, 2007 Toronto Globe and Mail article titled High costs trim forecast for oil sands production suggests that the NEB (National Energy Board) is now projecting a maximum production level in 2015 of only 2.8 million b/d, 200,000b/d lower than their own commonly used 3-million, because of industry discomfort with capital and operating cost overruns of up to 100% on all current tar sands projects. Assuming that Chris Skrebowski is right about peaking in 2015-2020, that suggests tar sands production will never be ramped up beyond 3-million b/d.
What is the real situation with the tar sands? How can there be such a disparity in the estimates for future tar sands production?
In his interview with Julian Darley, Chris Skrebowski highlighted several challenges for the tar sands industry over the foreseeable future. Three that may or may not be soluble are;
* the availability of the high volumes of water needed for tar sands processing,
* the availability of gas or alternative means of heating the tar sands. Greg Stringham, a vice-president of CAPP (the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers), said the gas price used by the NEB for its main forecast – $7 per million BTU – is on the pessimistic side. "It would be too low to support investment in high-cost unconventional and tight gas projects and not high enough to reduce demand," he said.
* and; how vigorously the various levels of government choose to legislate and enforce environmental controls. Various parties, from the municipality of Fort MacMurray to a host of environmental organizations have called for a moratorium on new projects until environmental impact studies can be completed. Canadian governments have a dubious track record of allowing major projects to proceed before the required environmental assessments are completed only to find, when the studies are done, that they should have blocked the project. Having approved the go ahead they leave themselves with no option but to allow the project to continue.
The one challenge that Chris Skrebowski sees as insoluble, as it is a limit of geology, is that the tar sands have a wide variability in quality. Current operations are being conducted in the bitumen-rich central area of the tar sands deposits. Bitumen, not oil, is what the tar sands hold. It is a thick, tar-like substance which needs further, energy-intensive processing, after the energy-intensive extraction, to be converted into a synthetic liquid crude. In the central areas the tar sands contain about 12 percent bitumen, up to 14% in a few sweet spots. At that level of bitumen concentration tar sands oil production is economically profitable and also has a slightly positive EROEI for strip mining operations. Even in these areas, however, in situ production - which involves injecting steam into the tar sands to separate the bitumen from the sand so it can be pumped to the surface like crude oil - thus far has a negative EROEI because of the higher energy requirements and also because the bitumen concentrations, due to higher levels of biodegradation, are generally lower deeper in the tar sands deposits where in situ has to be used.
As the central areas currently being exploited are worked out, which Chris Skrebowski projects they will be by 2015-2020, operators will have to move out of these central areas into the periphery of the reserves. That is where the problem is. In these peripheral areas Skrebowski suggests the bitumen content drops off to about 8 percent. He sees an open question whether operations will continue to be profitable and have a positive EROEI at these much lower bitumen concentrations.
Skrebowski, in fact, may be optimistic. Several studies, including one called PHOTON conducted specifically for the tar sands industry by the University of Calgary, have found that bitumen concentration in a reserve varies considerably both vertically in the reserve but also across the reserve. That variability ranges from under 5 percent to a high of 13-14 percent. Outside of the central areas currently being exploited, however, the bitumen concentration is consistently under 10 percent even in shallow strip-minable sections.
Analysis of the Utah "tar sands", by comparison, which are really hard shale, not pliable sands, has also showed that their content may be as low as 3-5 percent (the Orinoco tar sands in Venezuela have a bitumen concentration of only up to about 10 percent). This suggests that, from an EROEI perspective, the Utah tar shale could never be exploited economically unless..... the U.S. government decided they were critical and lavished huge subsidies on any organization prepared to exploit it "in the interest of national security". The same, of course, can be said of Canada's tar sands. If they are deemed crucial to North American or U.S. energy security organizations may be financially encouraged to continue their exploitation whatever the cost. Dick Cheney's NEPDG (National Energy Policy Development Group) described Canada's tar sands as "a pillar of sustained North American energy and economic security."
At some point in the foreseeable future Canada's domestic energy needs and U.S. Energy policy are headed for an inevitable clash. Canada's conventional oil production is already in decline and will continue to decline. Natural gas production is barely holding despite an unprecedented amount of drilling in the last couple of years. And Canada's domestic energy needs are growing at 3-4% per year. It is a worrying prospect for Canadians as energy sovereignty was effectively surrendered under the NAFTA agreement. Canada's energy resources must, under the agreement, be open and accessible to corporate energy interests. To date, four of the five oil majors (Royal Dutch/Shell, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and TotalFina) have invested or committed themselves to invest billions of dollars in tar sands development. National oil companies have also staked their claim, ranging from Norway's Statoil to China's Sinopec.
Whether strip mining or in situ processing is used in the exploitation, however, using tar sands as a source of oil is an unquestioned environmental disaster. And the oil majors have a very poor environmental track record in almost every area of the world in which they operate. Oil derived from tar sands causes greenhouse gas emissions (because of the high energy use, particularly natural gas cooking of the bitumen) 3-4 times higher than conventional liquid crude extraction. But sixty-five percent of the world's oil, it is estimated, is contained in tar sands, not as liquid crude. If governments continue to see oil as critical to their national interests and a key underpinning of their national economy and the global economy, they may still choose to continue to try to keep the wheels on the runaway train by exploiting the widespread tar sands deposits of various descriptions and quality wherever they can be found. Over seventy countries contain tar sands deposits including the U.S.A., Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, Indonesia, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, Jordan, Madagascar, Colombia, Albania, Romania, Spain, Portugal, Nigeria and Argentina. Within the United States, oil sand deposits occur mainly in Utah, Alaska, Alabama, S.W. Texas, California, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Missouri with scattered deposits in other states. None of these other areas equals Canada's tar sands for volume or quality however.
The Canadian region defined as "the Athabaska tar sands" covers an area over 140,000km2 of once virgin boreal forest, a larger area than the state of Florida. It is estimated to hold an equivalent 1.7 trillion barrels of oil or more. But of that only 150-200 billion barrels (about 10 percent) may be recoverable "with today's technology and under current and anticipated economic conditions". But with "the cost of adding a new b/d of synthetic crude production capacity in the oil sands now rang[ing] between $80,000 and $100,000", as per the National Energy Board, that could require additional capital investment of $300-500 billion (currently about $100 billion of further investment has been scheduled or committed) to ramp up to the "desired" production levels of 3-4 million b/d, let alone the optimistic and probably unachievable 6 million b/d suggested as possible by the NEB. As capital costs keep rising exponentially, even that cost of $100,000 per b/d is likely on the low side for future projects, particularly if they are in situ operations or are operations in the peripheral, bitumen-poor areas of the reserves.
On top of escalating capital costs the tar sands industry is also running into severe unanticipated operating costs due to shortages of manpower and equipment, high infrastructure and equipment maintenance costs due to the climatic extremes under which they operate, increased royalty demands from the Alberta provincial government and a host of other costs. With the experiences in Canada's tar sands as a model, the most advanced and successful tar sands exploitation to date in the world, it is reasonable to wonder to what extent governments and energy corporations will be willing to gamble the huge sums needed to undertake similar developments in other areas of the world.
The NEB continues to stick with the belief that the market price of oil will drive tar sands production, seemingly ignoring the EROEI return issue. In their view, "If oil prices – now nudging $100 (U.S.) a barrel – remain high, Canada's crude output could rise to almost six million b/d by 2030, of which five million b/d would come from the oil sands," the NEB report, entitled Canada's Energy Future, states. "Conversely, if oil prices fall to around $35 a barrel, Canada would only produce about three million b/d of crude by 2030, and only 2.7 million b/d of that would be from the oil sands."
Tar sands are not an environmental problem, however, just because of the high greenhouse gas emissions. As the article America's Claim on Our Tar Sands puts it, "The magnitude of the environmental risks and liabilities arising from Canada's tar sands rush is unprecedented in the history of North American energy production. Growing awareness about the global warming and environmental consequences of relying upon growth in tar sands production throws into sharp relief the perils of our addiction to oil in the 21st century."
Everything about the tar sands is big, most significantly, but not only, its global warming and environmental implications -- leading some to now describe the tar sands as "Canada's dirty secret." The tar sands mines are each as big as 150 square miles and may be 300 feet deep, each leaving a tremendous scar on the landscape. Depending on the bitumen concentration, 4-6 tons of material must be moved and processed for every barrel of synthetic crude produced. Over 80 per cent of the established tar sands reserves are deeper and must be extracted in situ. Reclaiming and cleaning up the land damaged by tar sands operations will be a monumental task. According to the paper The Harm the Tar Sands Will Do, "after 40 years of mining, not a single operation has received a reclamation certificate from the government of Alberta. Suncor Energy's operation, the longest-operating tar sands mine, says it has reclaimed 858 hectares of land since starting operations in 1967, less than nine per cent of the land its operations have disturbed to date. Syncrude Canada, the largest daily producer of tar sands, says its operations have disturbed 18,653 hectares since 1978, with just 4,055 hectares of land reclaimed. None of this reclaimed land has been certified as such. At best, reclamation of the tar sands region will be a large-scale experiment that is unlikely to restore a self-sustaining boreal forest ecosystem within the next century."
Water usage is the other major environmental problem with the tar sands. Even at 12% bitumen concentration, tar sands mining operations (in situ operations use even higher volumes) withdraw two to 4.5 barrels of fresh water from the Athabaska River for every barrel of oil they produce. Current operations, to achieve about 1 million b/d production, are permitted to withdraw more than 349 million cubic metres of water per year, a volume equivalent to the amount required by a city of two million people. But unlike city effluent waters, which are treated and released back into the river, tar sands mining effluent becomes so contaminated that it must be impounded in huge, man-made containment ponds. Water withdrawals for tar sands surface mining operations pose threats to both the sustainability of fish populations in the Athabasca River (which is already turned brown from the pollution from seepage from the containment ponds and various spills and is too contaminated to be used for community water), and to the sustainability of the Peace-Athabasca Delta (until now one of the last unspoiled delta regions in the world), jeopardizing the subsistence and commercial fisheries of local aboriginals.
Based on the environmental destruction being wrought by tar sands operations it is to be hoped that Chris Skrebowski is right in his belief the tar sands will peak by 2015-2020. It must then be further hoped that when the economic viability disappears the operators will quietly and discretely fold their tents and slip away, that governments don't continue to financially encourage their exploitation with massive subsidies. Those hopes may be unrealistic in view of the belief of the current U.S. administration under George Bush and Dick Cheney that they are critical to U.S. economic and energy security. With the short time they have left in office there is little to celebrate in the pending change in administration. None of the potential future presidents seem to be intent on changing the country's energy direction or policies. Perhaps in the remaining months of the presidential race one of them will take the energy bull by the horns and inject some sanity into the country's energy policies. Yeh, right!
================================
Sources and additional material;
Chris Skrebowski on alarming new peak oil report
America's Claim on Our Tar Sands
The Harm the Tar Sands Will Do
Pour-point depression of crude oils by addition of tar sand bitumen
Oil Sands
Oil (Tar) Sands
Strip Mining for Oil in Endangered Forests
Athabasca Tar Sands
Tar Sand
High costs trim forecast for oil sands production
Heavy oils and tar sand(HOTS) fluid research at Calgary.
Reservoir and Bitumen Heterogeneity in Athabasca Oil Sands
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