Energy

There is an interesting piece in today’s Perspective in the Denver Post by Patty Limerick, Director of the Center for the American West on electronic education and communication. Not directly related to our usual subjects, but may be of interest to those of you in the education biz. I’ll be taking my first online course in January, so I was particularly interested.

But this reminded me of her earlier piece from a few weeks ago on her work with fracking. I’ve posted links to the Frackingsense podcasts before, and even wrote a post “What if Your Governor Had Worked in Natural Resources,”based on one here.

Here’s an excerpt from the Denver Post op-ed; here’s the link:

Ardent critics, hold your fire for a moment. In making this statement, I have some notable allies who carry a lot more credibility than I do. One has written that the issue of hydraulic fracturing comes with many complications, making “it difficult for someone who knows how complex [the issue] is to take a firm, absolute stance on it. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.”

This wise remark appeared in a stack of student-written course papers. Required to attend a public lecture in the Center of the American West’s FrackingSENSE series, my students are assigned to listen to the talk and, afterward, to speak with members of the public seated near them. Many of the papers were charged with the students’ hope that their elders will cut back on the shouting and take part in a civil discussion shaped by the consideration of evidence rather than the denunciation of opponents. How would we pursue this improved conversation? Here are three ideas:

1. We could talk about providing better aim to the concerns, worries, anxieties and fears raised by hydraulic fracturing. Many opponents of the process are preoccupied with the risk of groundwater contamination from compounds in the fracturing fluid that, under high pressure, shatters the shale in which natural gas or oil is “trapped.” This preoccupation is an understandable legacy of the years in which many oil and gas companies refused to disclose the contents of fracturing fluid, a practice that could not have been better designed to foster and maintain public distrust. Fortunately, a shift — produced by regulation and by voluntary action in companies — toward the disclosure of fracturing fluid contents is already well underway.

Moreover, my colleague Joe Ryan, a University of Colorado environmental engineering professor, has laid out a valuable way to appraise the contents of fracturing fluid. Of the nearly 1,000 compounds that have been included in the inventories and lists, Ryan has pointed out, only a limited number have the capability of harming human beings. To pose a danger, these compounds must be hazardous to human health, mobile enough to get to humans, and persistent enough to avoid breaking down to something less hazardous while traveling toward the humans. Identifying compounds with these qualities generates a much shorter set of targets for our wariness.

With more efficient ways to worry, we can direct greater attention to the construction and maintenance of wells, casings, cement, surface storage containers, and mechanisms and equipment on the surface. It is time to think more about the risks posed by leaks and spills on or near the surface, while downsizing worries over the fracturing process that occurs thousands of feet beneath these areas of risk.

Risk = hazard + outrage

2. Our public conversation should attend carefully to the genuine distress triggered by the arrival of oil and gas development in a setting of homes and schools. Consider the insightful formula offered by expert Peter Sandman: “Risk = hazard + outrage.” While the scientists and engineers can help us by collecting data and assessing the physical dimensions and qualities of a hazard, a sense of powerlessness — of being subjected to an un-chosen, involuntary ordeal — is a major driver of worry, stress and fear. The noise, lights, traffic and disruption that come with drilling and production make a dissonant and disorienting addition to life in a town or suburb. Here I propose a simple trade-off for improved conversation: I ask people in the industry to recognize more legitimacy in the concerns of their residential neighbors, and I ask worried residents of the towns and suburbs affected by natural gas production to speak more openly about their communities’ dependence on natural gas for heating and petroleum for transportation.

3. We would all benefit from more modest expectations of the likelihood that scientific findings will, on their own, chart the route to sound decisions and policies. Especially in studies of public health, rather than giving us confident and certain predictions, experts must convey their results in probabilities of risk. The scientists’ mental world involves calculating and estimating the probability of an undesirable thing happening. The public’s mental world accents an entirely different question: “If there is a chance of risk, will I or my family members prove to be the ones injured by that risk?” The scientists are trying to speak in statistical terms about broad populations; a member of the public is asking, “Am I in danger?” In a calm conversation, we can conjure up ways to connect and reconcile these two very different ways of thinking.

Below are some excerpts from her longer paper that I think could equally be true of our usual resource disputes and here is a link..

An Over-Arching Consideration: Giving Up On “Education”

The word “education” is on the verge—or perhaps over the verge—of becoming more trouble than it is worth in the public exchange over natural gas development. All sides declare that it is crucial to “educate” the public. With the rarest exception, “educate the public” can be translated to mean “say or write (or Tweet, or post on Facebook) something to get the public to agree with me.” The phenomenon called “confirmation bias” has a hold on every sector of the population, leading people to appraise new studies and their findings by one criterion, “Does this study confirm what I already believe?” Opening up the framework of public discussion to accommodate more listening and reflection would present a pleasant alternative to the assumption that “education” is a one-way, unilateral process in which one group produces and distributes information and all others simply absorb and believe it.

What I Will Never Forget, and Will Be Telling the Nurses’ Aides in the Assisted Living Place in the Decades Ahead

When you feel a surge of confidence in your ability to predict the future, be humble. Be very humble. Case in point: Ten years ago, the conventional wisdom was that the United States was in a precarious position in energy independence, with a declining rate of production of both natural gas and oil. Recently, the New York Times made this statement: “The United States is set to become the world’s leading producer of natural gas in 2015 and oil in 2017, according to the International Energy Agency (July 27, 2013).” Once-confident prophets of scarcity were shown to have taken a major misstep in their predictions of scarcity. This is a lesson that any individual, trying to envision the future, should keep constantly in mind.

Proprietary, Voluntarily Disclosed Limericks
(No “Halliburton Exemptions” in the World of Doggerel Verse)

Knowledge is tragically lacking
On the complicated practice of fracking.
Convinced they are right,
People rush into fight,
And no agency regulates yakking.

When you try to be neutral on fracking,
You’re a quarterback set up for sacking.
You can assert and declare
That you’re going to be fair,
But you still won’t escape frequent whacking.

Here is a link to a Denver Post story on new Colorado rules..the reason I’m posting it (other than I suspect oil and gas is not covered well in other places) is to “catch people doing something right.” It seems like a great environmental step forward, so I would like to give a shout-out to the environmental groups who worked on this (assuming as always, that this is reported accurately).

Environment groups, led by the Environmental Defense Fund, helped craft the proposed rules.

“First in the nation, direct regulation of methane from oil and gas production facilities is a big, exciting step forward,” Conservation Colorado director Pete Maysmith said.

Below is the description of the draft regulations.

State health officials rolled out groundbreaking rules for the oil and gas industry Monday to address worsening air pollution, including a requirement that companies control emissions of the greenhouse gas methane, linked to climate change.

The rules would force companies to capture 95 percent of all toxic pollutants and volatile organic compounds they emit.

This would cut overall air pollution by 92,000 tons a year — roughly equivalent to taking every car in the state off the road for a year, state health chief Larry Wolk said. Such reductions could help bring Colorado’s heavily populated Front Range, where smog and ozone are on the rise, back into compliance with federal air quality standards.

No state has adopted rules directly limiting methane emitted by oil and gas operations. Federal government and United Nations authorities are developing rules to try to reduce such emissions because they are a large factor in global warming.

“These are going to amount to the very best air quality regulations in the country,” Gov. John Hickenlooper said.

He credited executives from Anadarko, Encana and Noble Energy — the state’s largest producers — for compromising and helping minimize environmental harm from drilling before the cost implications are fully known.

“They understand it is a shared responsibility,” he said, “and they have really stepped up.”

Under the rules, companies would have to:

• Detect leaks from tanks, pipelines, wells and other facilities using devices such as infrared cameras.

• Inspect for leaks at least once a month at large facilities and plug leaks.

• Adhere to more stringent limits on emissions from equipment near where people live and play.

• Use flare devices to burn off emissions from facilities not connected to pipelines.

Noble Vice President Ted Brown said the prescribed practices are “the right thing to do” but added that “it’s a tough rule.”

He and counterparts from Anadarko and Encana said they support the proposed rules as a way to operate more safely and build public trust.

“Regulatory certainty is important to the company, and doing the right thing also is important to the company,” Encana’s Lem Smith said. Reducing industry air pollution will bring a “quantifiable environmental benefit.”

Note that they are:
Using what carbon accounting folks would call “residues” that would be otherwise burned.

Moving the refineries around to take advantage of moving areas of dead trees. In Region 2, we used to talk about the “crows on bison carcass” model (biomimicry?) of moving small refineries and chippers around to each area as they had massive tree deaths. Many small things are just as good at getting rid of things as a few large things.

It’s interesting that Paustian felt the need to say “we’re not industry dupes”, given that the “industry” is nascent. And it sounds like EDF and TWS are there as well. His statement about energy plantations, while obvious to folks in the Interior West, is probably directed at the critique found in the scientific literature that 1) people “are projected to” use biofuel plantations, 2) which can be environmentally bad 3) therefore biofuels are environmentally bad. Note that projections are made up by specific people under the science blanket but essentially are assumptions about the future. Therefore the logic is essentially that “we think people might do bad things, therefore the technology is bad.” That’s why it makes sense not to believe scientific papers about a technology unless they are talking specifically about what you plan to do, where you plan to do it, and how you plan to do it.

Trucks will haul these refineries — wood-chippers and chemical conversion tubes — to locations near forests where dead trees are available. ConocoPhillips, British Petroleum, General Electric and Google are among the investors in what is described as a quest for cleaner, renewable fuel.

“Getting diseased wood out of forests more rapidly is going to reduce the risks of severe fire,” Vilsack said in an interview Tuesday.

The issue is whether timber across millions of acres of forests hit by a now-slowing beetle epidemic can be tapped in a way that minimizes erosion. The mini refineries are seen as viable alternatives to large biofuel plants, which could cost $500 million and require costly transport of timber.

Growing pressure to address climate change from fossil fuel greenhouse-gas emissions is, along with competition for oil, driving the Department of Defense and commercial airlines to develop new sources of fuel, Vilsack said.

“We’re interested in finding out ways we can use wood to produce energy,” he said. “We’re interested in determining ways we can help restore the health of our forests, reduce fire hazards,
Trucks will haul these refineries — wood-chippers and chemical conversion tubes — to locations near forests where dead trees are available. ConocoPhillips, British Petroleum, General Electric and Google are among the investors in what is described as a quest for cleaner, renewable fuel.

“Getting diseased wood out of forests more rapidly is going to reduce the risks of severe fire,” Vilsack said in an interview Tuesday.

The issue is whether timber across millions of acres of forests hit by a now-slowing beetle epidemic can be tapped in a way that minimizes erosion. The mini refineries are seen as viable alternatives to large biofuel plants, which could cost $500 million and require costly transport of timber.

Growing pressure to address climate change from fossil fuel greenhouse-gas emissions is, along with competition for oil, driving the Department of Defense and commercial airlines to develop new sources of fuel, Vilsack said.

“We’re interested in finding out ways we can use wood to produce energy,” he said. “We’re interested in determining ways we can help restore the health of our forests, reduce fire hazards, protect communities and create jobs in rural areas.”

CSU ecologist Keith Paustian, the project leader, said university scientists in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana will study refinery operations in forests filled with beetle-killed trees. Piles of down timber that otherwise would be burned may be used.

Paustian said they’ll focus on “what you would take, how you would take it, how you process it and how you would do it in a way that is environmentally responsible.

“On one hand, we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels due to the issues with greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change. We’ve got to be able to use some kind of renewable source,” he said. While wind power could provide electricity for cars, “we cannot make electric airplanes. Is there wood that could be removed that would benefit the environment as well as be a feedstock for renewable fuels?”

University researchers are to work with Cool Planet, which moved its headquarters from California this year and is building a biofuel plantation in Louisiana to convert fast-growing wood into 10 million gallons of fuel. About 70 gallons of fuel can be made from a ton of wood.

Cool Planet’s process breaks down cellulose to fuel, wastewater and charcoal-like chips.

Cool Planet has raised $64 million and plans to manufacture the mini refineries in Colorado, company director Wes Bolsen said.

The fuel is said to be identical to petroleum material used in regular gasoline. For airlines, the conversion is different because airline fuel chemically is closer to kerosene.

“The problem with the beetle-kill is, it is episodic,” Paustian said. “We have a lot of wood now, but it’s not going to come back every year.”

Wilderness and roadless forests are not to be tapped. Project advisers include the Environmental Defense Fund and Wilderness Society.

“In Colorado and Wyoming and a lot of the northern Rockies, the conditions are such that there’s no way you’re going to make biofuel plantations. You cannot grow the biomass fast enough here,” Paustian said. “But our situation now is that we’ve got a lot of dead wood that is, essentially, almost an environmental problem.

“We’re not industry dupes. This is very much an open-minded research project. Let’s do the due diligence. That’s what universities are supposed to do — objective, nonpartisan research.”