Sunday, July 31, 2011
Alberta Tarsands Pipeline: Keystone to Our Tombstone?
With the world's oil reserves dwindling, and production at a plateau for the last 4 years, oilmen view putting into production the world's huge tarsands deposits as key to averting peak oil and the harrowing descent on the other side. Mining these tarsands was not economical until the price of oil rose to its recent highs above one hundred dollars a barrel. Now their moment has come. Alberta and Venezuela, with the richest deposits, have estimated reserves of 3.6 trillion barrels, compared to remaining global conventional deposits of 1.75 trillion barrels. Venezuela has had political problems in organizing the capital-and-technology intensive process of harvesting these reserves, but Alberta has aggressively moved to successfully mine, seperate, recombine and finally export as heavy crude the little globules of bitumen. They have been doing this during those four years, keeping the flow of oil going in the face of steady diminishment. Canada's tarsands project is the finger in the oil dike, allowing the global economy to continue its addiction to petroleum, just barely.
The problem is that our fossil fuel habit is rendering earth atmosphere suffocating through the steady increase in CO2. Burning fossil fuels is the chief contributor to accelerating climate change. Getting these little bituminous globules, nicknamed tar, into a form that can flow through a pipeline is complicated and expensive, both in dollars and in carbon emissions. The globules are mixed with sand, clay and low-grade ores, and must be “fracked” by using high-pressure steam, which requires a lot of water. Canada has plenty of that, but exporting drinking water and channeling it into agriculture, which a warmer, drier world is going to be even more desperate for, might be more important uses (never mind the forests and lakes and birds who need it). In addition, miners must burn natural gas to liquify the viscous oil sufficiently so it will flow through the pipes. Overall, emissions from tar sands production are 3x that of conventional crude.
But this is only the beginning of the problems of utilizing this marginal source of oil. It contains 11x the nickel and sulfur, 6x the nitrogen, and 5x the lead of conventional oil. What happens with these pollutants when you refine this crude (after hydrofracking) into gasoline? You guessed it. When the Soviets were forced to abandon their client Cuba, the Cubans needed to use local deposits of heavily sulfured petroleum to run their power grid. Burning it has created severe air pollution.
Mining tarsands is an environmental catastrophe, its toxic tailing ponds visible from space. When fully implemented, the surface mining will strip away a total area of forest and peat the size of Florida. Alberta alone creates more CO2 than 145 nations. Put another way, it stands sixth among nations in emissions. As Ryan Salmon, energy policy advisor to National Wildlife Federation put it, the site of extraction constitutes “wholesale destruction of the ecosystem.” It is the single most destructive project on earth.
Alberta is remote, far to the west of Canada, so how do they get this heavy crude to market? Though there are nearer ports, the big refinery complex around Houston is an attractive target for extension of an existing pipeline to Oklahoma. Another has been built to Wisconsin (jauntily and ironically named the Alberta Clipper), with the Great Lakes nearby for shipping, but the proposed Trans Canada pipeline, called the Keystone, would complete a pipleline running through the heartland to Texas. It seems to be key to reaching a global market, with the oil-starved US being the first beneficiary.
After quickly granting the permit to build the pipeline to Wisconsin, the US State Department has called for a series of studies before granting permission for the transcontinental Keystone, responding to protests from environmentalist groups and landholders along the route, including tribes of both the US and Canada. Studies show that a rupture could release 7 million gallons of oil. But that pales in comparison to the environmental costs of the basic operation, which is fundamentally flawed from an ecological point of view. State is calling for a decision by the end of the year. It is ultimately up to the President, and some sources say he will decide by the end of September.
Stopping this project is not going to be easy. It already has a lot of momentum. To encourage President Obama to make the right decision, a politically tough one, Bill McKibben has called for greens to up the stakes. He and 350.org are calling for an ongoing action at the White House gates, running August 20-September 3, waves of protesters, with many each day willing to commit civil disobedience. I am one of them.
This is a key moment for the US and world energy economy. It is also an absolutely crucial moment for maintaining a climate for human life as we know it. If there is no Keystone, then the arch of toxic economy is weakened. Put into place, it may well complete the tombstone of civilization. Think about that as you plan where you'll be during those two last weeks of summer.
The problem is that our fossil fuel habit is rendering earth atmosphere suffocating through the steady increase in CO2. Burning fossil fuels is the chief contributor to accelerating climate change. Getting these little bituminous globules, nicknamed tar, into a form that can flow through a pipeline is complicated and expensive, both in dollars and in carbon emissions. The globules are mixed with sand, clay and low-grade ores, and must be “fracked” by using high-pressure steam, which requires a lot of water. Canada has plenty of that, but exporting drinking water and channeling it into agriculture, which a warmer, drier world is going to be even more desperate for, might be more important uses (never mind the forests and lakes and birds who need it). In addition, miners must burn natural gas to liquify the viscous oil sufficiently so it will flow through the pipes. Overall, emissions from tar sands production are 3x that of conventional crude.
But this is only the beginning of the problems of utilizing this marginal source of oil. It contains 11x the nickel and sulfur, 6x the nitrogen, and 5x the lead of conventional oil. What happens with these pollutants when you refine this crude (after hydrofracking) into gasoline? You guessed it. When the Soviets were forced to abandon their client Cuba, the Cubans needed to use local deposits of heavily sulfured petroleum to run their power grid. Burning it has created severe air pollution.
Mining tarsands is an environmental catastrophe, its toxic tailing ponds visible from space. When fully implemented, the surface mining will strip away a total area of forest and peat the size of Florida. Alberta alone creates more CO2 than 145 nations. Put another way, it stands sixth among nations in emissions. As Ryan Salmon, energy policy advisor to National Wildlife Federation put it, the site of extraction constitutes “wholesale destruction of the ecosystem.” It is the single most destructive project on earth.
Alberta is remote, far to the west of Canada, so how do they get this heavy crude to market? Though there are nearer ports, the big refinery complex around Houston is an attractive target for extension of an existing pipeline to Oklahoma. Another has been built to Wisconsin (jauntily and ironically named the Alberta Clipper), with the Great Lakes nearby for shipping, but the proposed Trans Canada pipeline, called the Keystone, would complete a pipleline running through the heartland to Texas. It seems to be key to reaching a global market, with the oil-starved US being the first beneficiary.
After quickly granting the permit to build the pipeline to Wisconsin, the US State Department has called for a series of studies before granting permission for the transcontinental Keystone, responding to protests from environmentalist groups and landholders along the route, including tribes of both the US and Canada. Studies show that a rupture could release 7 million gallons of oil. But that pales in comparison to the environmental costs of the basic operation, which is fundamentally flawed from an ecological point of view. State is calling for a decision by the end of the year. It is ultimately up to the President, and some sources say he will decide by the end of September.
Stopping this project is not going to be easy. It already has a lot of momentum. To encourage President Obama to make the right decision, a politically tough one, Bill McKibben has called for greens to up the stakes. He and 350.org are calling for an ongoing action at the White House gates, running August 20-September 3, waves of protesters, with many each day willing to commit civil disobedience. I am one of them.
This is a key moment for the US and world energy economy. It is also an absolutely crucial moment for maintaining a climate for human life as we know it. If there is no Keystone, then the arch of toxic economy is weakened. Put into place, it may well complete the tombstone of civilization. Think about that as you plan where you'll be during those two last weeks of summer.
Labels: 350.org, Alberta Clipper, Bill McKibben, ecological catastrophe, fracking, Keystone, peak oil, Ryan Salmon, Trans Canada pipeline
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The Knife Edge Universe, Complexity, and Collapse
After the Big Bang, the universe evolved on a knife edge. If it had expanded a little faster, it would have been an explosion producing the rapid dissipation of the infant universe. If it had gone just a tad slower, it would have collapsed back on itself. What we have is the perfect rate of expansion, sustaining the miracle of the known universe, including our galaxy, our sun, and us, at the midpoint of the turning world.
Civilization also exists on the knife edge. If you leave out the scattered indigenous tribes and the subsistent poor, the rest of us are hugely dependent upon an extremely complex system whose interconnecting parts must function exceedingly efficiently just for us to be fed, housed, and maintain optimum living temperatures. As most of you realize by now, this is made possible by fossil fuels, with petroleum the wonder fuel that has made it all possible. If the US trucking fleet were grounded for three days, food would rapidly disappear from the supermarket shelves, and most people wouldn't know where to get more. But the “petroleum interval” (Thomas Berry) is rapidly drawing to a close, with nothing on the horizon to replace the luxury it afforded us.
Peak Oil is now accepted even by the oil industry (though the exact time is under debate. I simply note here that production has held steady now for four years, while demand has continued to increase rapidly). Shrewd observers now speak of Peak Everything, and the necessity to constantly organize it on the knife-edge produces a high likelihood for collapse. The funny thing is, we've gotten so used to it functioning this way (those of us, now two generations, who didnt' know the Depression or WWII rationing) that we've become complacent. This is just the way it is. Though politicians have moved slowly, responding more to lobbyists than policy analysts, business is positioning itself to respond to the inevitable, in some cases even lobbying for cap and trade, which could well be the next boondoggle, certainly ripe for a derivatives market. Meanwhile the public is an uneducated cheerleader for the corporation making the slickest ads, sleepwalking through the supermarket on a knife's edge.
There is not much room to maneuver. We could make transport fuel by liquifying coal, as Germany did during WWII, but that would add to the already intolerable carbon burden of the earth system, and hasten Peak Coal. The same would be true if we went to a substantially electric vehicle system, since coal is the main source of electricity. Nuclear power plants, for which I have previously argued, might help make up the gap, but they are prohibitively expensive to be built in enough quantity or fast enough for us to stay on the knife-edge of our present lifestyle. Another huge factor slowing down nuclear expansion is the lack of trained engineers. Talk about complexity!
“But we can do it all with renewables,” progressives cry. By 2030, we are on a pathway to fulfilling 15% of our power needs with renewables (including hydropower, which is close to maxed out in the developed world). But the crucial factor here, pointed out by James Kunstler, and now Sharon Astyk (see next post), is that all that hardware has to be built from a platform powered by fossil fuels. We can only build a modest first generation of renewables with the remnant of fossil-powered energy. Going from that 15% to a “sustainable” steady state simply isn't possible. Without fossil fuels, how will my solar panels be replaced when they start to give out after 20 years?
We live on a knife-edge, and each moment is a miracle. The Shaivites insist that the universe is created and destroyed every moment. The point is standard Vedanta: the Creator/Self is all that exists, and the self, world, and supposed deities are all projections, all Maya. So there are two ways to leave the knife-edge universe. One is through the heat-death of matter-energy, with other interesting exit points like the Singularity I wrote about a few posts back. The other is simply to shut down the whole projection by re-immersing with the Self who made and continues to make the world, the epiphenomenal dance of Shiva and Maya.
The complex dance is now habitual. Just paying attention would reveal the miraculous nature of it all. Real or unreal, there is an alternative to the dizzying speed and complexty of modernist society, and it would be a solution to the twin peaks, Peak Commodities and the Towering Tsunami of Climate Change, hovering over our unprotected heads. Collapse would bring on involuntary simplicity. And if it comes soon enough, the complexity of natural systems would have a chance to reassert itself after being increasingly usurped by the complexity of human technology. If it comes too late, then the knife-edge within which we enjoy the miracle of material existence will finally implode, leaving the possibility of evolving higher life and consciousness to other places in the universe.
Civilization also exists on the knife edge. If you leave out the scattered indigenous tribes and the subsistent poor, the rest of us are hugely dependent upon an extremely complex system whose interconnecting parts must function exceedingly efficiently just for us to be fed, housed, and maintain optimum living temperatures. As most of you realize by now, this is made possible by fossil fuels, with petroleum the wonder fuel that has made it all possible. If the US trucking fleet were grounded for three days, food would rapidly disappear from the supermarket shelves, and most people wouldn't know where to get more. But the “petroleum interval” (Thomas Berry) is rapidly drawing to a close, with nothing on the horizon to replace the luxury it afforded us.
Peak Oil is now accepted even by the oil industry (though the exact time is under debate. I simply note here that production has held steady now for four years, while demand has continued to increase rapidly). Shrewd observers now speak of Peak Everything, and the necessity to constantly organize it on the knife-edge produces a high likelihood for collapse. The funny thing is, we've gotten so used to it functioning this way (those of us, now two generations, who didnt' know the Depression or WWII rationing) that we've become complacent. This is just the way it is. Though politicians have moved slowly, responding more to lobbyists than policy analysts, business is positioning itself to respond to the inevitable, in some cases even lobbying for cap and trade, which could well be the next boondoggle, certainly ripe for a derivatives market. Meanwhile the public is an uneducated cheerleader for the corporation making the slickest ads, sleepwalking through the supermarket on a knife's edge.
There is not much room to maneuver. We could make transport fuel by liquifying coal, as Germany did during WWII, but that would add to the already intolerable carbon burden of the earth system, and hasten Peak Coal. The same would be true if we went to a substantially electric vehicle system, since coal is the main source of electricity. Nuclear power plants, for which I have previously argued, might help make up the gap, but they are prohibitively expensive to be built in enough quantity or fast enough for us to stay on the knife-edge of our present lifestyle. Another huge factor slowing down nuclear expansion is the lack of trained engineers. Talk about complexity!
“But we can do it all with renewables,” progressives cry. By 2030, we are on a pathway to fulfilling 15% of our power needs with renewables (including hydropower, which is close to maxed out in the developed world). But the crucial factor here, pointed out by James Kunstler, and now Sharon Astyk (see next post), is that all that hardware has to be built from a platform powered by fossil fuels. We can only build a modest first generation of renewables with the remnant of fossil-powered energy. Going from that 15% to a “sustainable” steady state simply isn't possible. Without fossil fuels, how will my solar panels be replaced when they start to give out after 20 years?
We live on a knife-edge, and each moment is a miracle. The Shaivites insist that the universe is created and destroyed every moment. The point is standard Vedanta: the Creator/Self is all that exists, and the self, world, and supposed deities are all projections, all Maya. So there are two ways to leave the knife-edge universe. One is through the heat-death of matter-energy, with other interesting exit points like the Singularity I wrote about a few posts back. The other is simply to shut down the whole projection by re-immersing with the Self who made and continues to make the world, the epiphenomenal dance of Shiva and Maya.
The complex dance is now habitual. Just paying attention would reveal the miraculous nature of it all. Real or unreal, there is an alternative to the dizzying speed and complexty of modernist society, and it would be a solution to the twin peaks, Peak Commodities and the Towering Tsunami of Climate Change, hovering over our unprotected heads. Collapse would bring on involuntary simplicity. And if it comes soon enough, the complexity of natural systems would have a chance to reassert itself after being increasingly usurped by the complexity of human technology. If it comes too late, then the knife-edge within which we enjoy the miracle of material existence will finally implode, leaving the possibility of evolving higher life and consciousness to other places in the universe.
Labels: big bang, climate change, coal liquification, involuntary simplicity, peak oil, petroleum interval
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Earth's Midpoint, Leaning Towards Empty
Mid-afternoon vast emptiness. Perfectly still, the sun beaming off the rhododendron leaves, tree branches frozen in their lacy patterns.On the window, sixty ladybugs flit, crawl and tumble, herded by two wasps. At the fulcrum of each day there is a moment when you think of the 10,000 things to do, or the books to read, or the silent hungry writing desk, or the four directions in which you could walk through these mountains.Today, at such a moment, going outside to pee in the compost, smelling the cold fresh air and feeling acutely alive...
On such an afternoon you entered the Udaigiri Caves of Madhya Pradesh, the Middle State, and while the sun blazed outside on the Malwa Plain, watched a thousand hanging bats turning as one to observe you. Another time, you lay with Judith in a North Alabama's farmer's wide latewinter field to make love, a helicopter buzzing us in lazy circles. Afterwards, lying there, this vast turning cosmos - the same huge emptiness as if nothing had happened. Our little moment spent, we were ant-husks to the voyeurs above, who buzzed on.
The core of these moments is that nothing you could do would really matter, and, recognizing this, there is a fleeting desire to do nothing, to extend the nap, or go cuddle the dog. This moment is so sweet, so empty of action, like you are harvesting the whole 15 billion years' yearning of the Fireball universe - a net zero. But what passion is summed in that level scale! You are at a fulcrum bridging that blue sky, and the scythe of time is dead still, all desires that were ready to clamor forth herded, momentarily checked. It is at such a moment when the perfect action is to string the tanpura.
MITTELPUNKT II
High Noon; look up. The Greeks knew the outcome of a battle by observing who had the momentum when the sun first started to set, that is the instant after noon. If you didn't have Helios with you when he started his downward course, it was just too much inertia to fight the combined forces of your present position and the sun's setting gravity.
December 28, 2006. Earth's Mittelpunkt, when all the energy we have usurped started running back into the system. The trees around me told me this, on this deck. Above me, a prop-plane, at Mittelpunkt since childhood, droning through the sky. Birdsong, a dog yapping in the distance. The huge space, the eternal space-time of it. Then, the sting of wool on my ankle, and I'm here.
Expert oil geologist Kenneth Deffeyes reached his mittelpunkt on December 16, 2005, when he announced global Peak Oil on NPR, tagging the moment when we had pumped half the available oil from the earth's entrails. He reached his date not by intuition or listening to the dying hemlocks, but by graphing all the data on oil availability and extraction rates. The NPR statement was radio theater, not a statement of scientific fact, based on probability. Extremely high probability.
High Noon: Mittelpunkt. Last hours of ancient sunlight Hartman calls it. We've used up half the stored sunlight, and we are now headed inexorably towards twilight. This solar peak is simultaneous with the setting sun of human history. Peak Oil, now being pictured on graphs spreading around the earth in corporate offices, schools and coffee tables, is chronological. But it is also a moment with quality, what the Greeks called kairos. In the heat of battle, there was a quality to the moment, not just a ticking of time. At just this moment Hector fell, and all that followed was pregnant within that moment: his being dragged around the walls, his wife and children enslaved, the recording of the Greeks victorious. Last hours of ancient sunlight.
On such an afternoon you entered the Udaigiri Caves of Madhya Pradesh, the Middle State, and while the sun blazed outside on the Malwa Plain, watched a thousand hanging bats turning as one to observe you. Another time, you lay with Judith in a North Alabama's farmer's wide latewinter field to make love, a helicopter buzzing us in lazy circles. Afterwards, lying there, this vast turning cosmos - the same huge emptiness as if nothing had happened. Our little moment spent, we were ant-husks to the voyeurs above, who buzzed on.
The core of these moments is that nothing you could do would really matter, and, recognizing this, there is a fleeting desire to do nothing, to extend the nap, or go cuddle the dog. This moment is so sweet, so empty of action, like you are harvesting the whole 15 billion years' yearning of the Fireball universe - a net zero. But what passion is summed in that level scale! You are at a fulcrum bridging that blue sky, and the scythe of time is dead still, all desires that were ready to clamor forth herded, momentarily checked. It is at such a moment when the perfect action is to string the tanpura.
MITTELPUNKT II
High Noon; look up. The Greeks knew the outcome of a battle by observing who had the momentum when the sun first started to set, that is the instant after noon. If you didn't have Helios with you when he started his downward course, it was just too much inertia to fight the combined forces of your present position and the sun's setting gravity.
December 28, 2006. Earth's Mittelpunkt, when all the energy we have usurped started running back into the system. The trees around me told me this, on this deck. Above me, a prop-plane, at Mittelpunkt since childhood, droning through the sky. Birdsong, a dog yapping in the distance. The huge space, the eternal space-time of it. Then, the sting of wool on my ankle, and I'm here.
Expert oil geologist Kenneth Deffeyes reached his mittelpunkt on December 16, 2005, when he announced global Peak Oil on NPR, tagging the moment when we had pumped half the available oil from the earth's entrails. He reached his date not by intuition or listening to the dying hemlocks, but by graphing all the data on oil availability and extraction rates. The NPR statement was radio theater, not a statement of scientific fact, based on probability. Extremely high probability.
High Noon: Mittelpunkt. Last hours of ancient sunlight Hartman calls it. We've used up half the stored sunlight, and we are now headed inexorably towards twilight. This solar peak is simultaneous with the setting sun of human history. Peak Oil, now being pictured on graphs spreading around the earth in corporate offices, schools and coffee tables, is chronological. But it is also a moment with quality, what the Greeks called kairos. In the heat of battle, there was a quality to the moment, not just a ticking of time. At just this moment Hector fell, and all that followed was pregnant within that moment: his being dragged around the walls, his wife and children enslaved, the recording of the Greeks victorious. Last hours of ancient sunlight.
The other characteristic of the kairos of the early twenty-first century is that we are on the cusp of runaway Global Warming. By a fit of burning like there was no tomorrow the beneficiaries of the industrial revolution have doomed future generations to tribal battles like the Greeks fought, too many people with too scarce resources. One is going on right now in the Sudan, another in Palestine, yet another in Iraq. Burning the stores of ancient sunlight, we are releasing CO2 in a global bonfire, trapping the sun's heat. The geologian Thomas Berry calls this fit of burning the "petroleum interval." Though brief, it has been pivotal, levering us into unsustainable territory, past our species boundaries to the precipice of population crash. We are subject to the same laws of population as the "dumb" animals and silent plants. Peak Oil and Global Warming are two spikes produced by the same madness: to splurge when there's available food and energy. We are like a ferocious algal bloom.
The sound of that prop-plane has always comforted me, made me feel secure. Once, though, when I was ten, I dreamt that it was suspended over Mobile's Crawford Park, and I ran to catch the Soviet nuke it had released. The huge round bomb just touched my hands as the dream dissolved. What do our ten-year olds do when they realize we are in global eco-crisis, midpoint turning quickly to endgame?
Labels: eco-crisis, global warming, high noon, peak oil, petroleum interval, population crash
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
