Nature's Version of Waterboarding

Think of it as the difference between a refreshing drink of water and undergoing waterboarding.   We used to expect the former from nature but now, all too often, it's the latter.

Las Vegas is an object lesson.   The desert city is now forced to drain its essential freshwater from a distant corner of the state via a canal system.   Until nature shows up but then it's often in the form of deluge triggering flash floods.

The city, that averages 4.5 inches of rain annually, got hit with a 1.75 inch downpour that left parts of the city flooded, like this parking lot at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:

The floods have hit various spots throughout the American southwest.   Yet this sort of urban flooding is now established world wide.   Many municipal storm sewer systems are not designed to handle the sort of rainfall patterns they're now experiencing.  Runoff becomes concentrated and backs up, resulting in heavy flooding.   From Britain to the Philippines to China to the United States and elsewhere, heavy flooding is becoming commonplace.

Many of these areas are also beset by sustained drought that can harden the ground and make it impervious.   Then, when floodwaters arrive, they don't seep into the ground but simply run off into what the Mexicans call arroyos, normally empty streambeds carved out by centuries of flash flooding.

Today's floods, just like today's droughts, evidence our broken hydrological cycle.   Surface temperatures warm, increasing evaporation.   Atmospheric temperatures warm, increasing volumes of water vapour, itself a powerful greenhouse gas.   Warmer, wetter conditions create more atmospheric energy that results in erratic precipitation patterns and severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity.   Some regions get hit by torrential rains, others are bypassed and experience drought.

This is occuring this year in most of the world's greatest grain producing countries - the United States, Australia and Russia in particular.   Food prices globally are already spiking.  A continuation of this threat will destabilize already wobbly countries around the world.

Predictable, reliable and moderate rainfall has been a vital part of mankind's introduction of agriculture that, in turn, facilitated the rise of civilization.   With but a few exceptions, farmers could count on receiving the right amounts of rainfall at the right times throughout the planting/growing/harvest cycle.   Too much rain or too little rain at any stage and the crop might fail.

Despite demographic predictions that the world population will reach 9-billion by 2050, perhaps 15-billion by 2100, the hydrological cycle problem could make those projections unrealistic.  At 7-billion, mankind's ecological footprint is already placing us in a severe "overshoot" deficit.   World Overshoot Day this year fell on August 22nd, several weeks earlier than just a few years ago.  In effect, mankind now uses a full year's worth of the Earth's renewable resources before the end of August, leaving us to "eat our seed corn" for the balance of the year.   This deficit is only going to be worsened by disruptions in agricultural production from droughts and floods.

We are being overtaken by events.   The theme of Gwynne Dyer's latest column could be "nobody saw it coming."  But it's here and we're going to have to find ways to live with it - better systems to collect and hold rainwater, curbs to water usage and wastage, improved agriculture and food distribution, for starters.   We're also going to have to realistically price carbon to whatever extent necessary to decarbonize our economies and our societies.  Above all else we'll need to develop technologies to strip atmospheric carbon in massive amounts.

For mankind this is likely the fight of our lives.   Yet that is still a far cry better than having to fight for our lives.

The Latest Tar Sands Subsidy - Albertans Assume Liability for Carbon Sequestration Failure

In theory, capturing CO2, liquifying it and pumping the highly pressurized liquid into underground chasms is a great way to get rid of the harmful greenhouse gas.  In theory.

Unfortunately it's theoretical and replete with unresolved questions that leave "CCS" an unproven option.   While a pilot project is being run in Saskatchewan, no one has run a successful operation on the scale that would be needed to sequester carbon emissions from the Tar Sands.

But, assuming that the empty reservoirs beneath Alberta could be used to house massive volumes of liquid carbon dioxide, what then?  There's a huge problem.  That pressurized CO2 could leak out and when it reaches the surface it's very lethal.  So you have to monitor what's happening underground and on the surface and somebody may have to compensate anyone damaged (i.e. "killed") if when leaks occur.  And just who is that 'somebody' going to be?   Why that would be the people of Alberta.

The province, the Alberta conservatives, say there'll be a fund into which the province and Big Oil will chip in to monitor the CCS wells.   That's probably true, at first.   However scientists warn that the need to monitor will do on effectively for ever, millenia at a minimum.   So does anybody think Big Oil is planning on picking up the cost of that monitoring into perpetuity?  What a joke.

But then there's the leakage thing, compensating the dead and injured.   Big Oil isn't even sticking around for that one.   In fact the sweetheart deal the Alberta Cons have cooked up leaves the people of Alberta liable - forever and ever, amen.  And, as Andrew Nikiforuk points out in Tar Sands, Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, not only is the rock vulnerable to failing under the pressure of liquified CO2 but that area is perforated with drilled wells, 300,000 in all.   In other words it's just a matter of time before there's a failure and large volumes of lethal, concentrated CO2 reach the surface.

CCS sounds good until you look at it and read between the lines of the deal that Alberta has cooked up with Big Oil.   Then it begins to look like a formula for disaster.

Who Isn't Convinced on Carbon Capture? Exxon, Chevron and Shell, That's Who

The next time Big Oil and those in their thrall, including Messrs. Harper & Ignatieff, give you the standard drivel about how CCS, carbon capture & sequestration, is going to redeem the Athabasca Tar Sands disaster, tell'em to look Down Under.

Australia. The Gorgon natural gas field off Barrow Island. Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell have agreed to invest in the project - but their money comes with a hitch as Big Oil money almost always does.

In the case of Australia's Gorgon gas field the hitch is an indemnity against damages from all that sequestered carbon dioxide escaping hundreds of years into the future. And that indemnity comes from where? Why, from the Australian taxpayers of course. The Fossil Fuelers negotiated an indemnity from the Australian government for the toxic time bomb they'll be creating underground.

Australian energy minister Martin Ferguson boasts that the Gorgon and similar LNG projects will transform Australia into an "energy superpower." Sound familiar?

The Australian government says "no worries" to the idea of anything ever, ever going wrong with the sequestered CO2 although the Gorgon field sits astride geological fault lines and there have been eight tremors there over the past 30-years.

If they got away with it in Australia, how long before Alberta's Oil Patch goes after Alberta and Ottawa for the same sweetheart deal?

Hard Landing for Clean Coal

They're latter day Alchemists, the scientists of the Dark Ages who promised to turn base lead into gold. Today they've returned to tantalize us with dreams of "clean coal," an abundant, non-polluting and virtually limitless supply of cheap energy that lies, not in the Middle East, but right here under our own feet.

Like all dubious schemes, the clean coal idea is delightfully simple. Burn dirty coal to produce electricity but, instead of releasing all that toxic greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, you "sequester" it. In other words, you capture the CO2 before it leaves the smokestack, compress it until it liquifies, and then pump all that nasty stuff into subterranean chambers where it can be stored, out of sight/out of mind, forever. Or so the story goes.

The Devil, of course, is in the details.

The first detail is where do you store this stuff? The next is what happens if, Heaven forbid, the stuff leaks back out to the surface? Then there's the detail about making this technology work and at an affordable price. Don't forget to work out who'll be on the hook when we have those unfortunate accidents, other than nearby surface dwellers who'll be dead.

You see, to make this work, you have to find a way to secure CO2 at a high-enough pressure that it's compressed enough to liquify it. High pressure, like high water, is always looking for a way out. Stick a pin in a balloon and you'll get the idea. In terms of subterranean caverns, a seismic event substitutes nicely for the pin.

Now my own Vancouver Island has coal resources. Yet this big tectonic plate subduction zone I call home isn't an ideal candidate. When the "Big One" hits (and we keep getting reminded that could be any day) it's been predicted by some that the entire island could be shifted eastward up to 15 feet.

But surely there are better places, aren't there? There must be places that are absolutely seismically stable, eh? Hmmm, maybe not. The reality is that you don't need a scale 9 or an 8 or even a 7-Richter event to pop one of these underground, high-pressure balloons. But earthquakes are only part of the equation. You see, ground moves even without earthquakes. There's a whole bunch of things going on under your feet every day. There are gases and liquids down there. There's heat down there, a lot of it. You've got things like underground rivers upon which our groundwater resources rely.

So, carbon sequestration brings an inevitable risk of failures and leaks, so what? Well that all depends on a number of factors such as the size of the gas escape, whether it's detected quickly, how many people are in proximity to the leak and, of course, whether you're one of them. The stuff is colourless and odourless so... well, just sayin'.

Harper latched on to a long underway carbon capture experimental plant in Saskatchewan, slapped his picture on it and presented it to the gullible national press corps as "his" sequestration initiative. Yippee, we're saved! Stevie came through after all! A few problems. It's an experimental operation, an experiment. It's but one plant, just one. It assumes that the storage part (the hard part) is viable. It ignores the reality that, even if all the problems are solved and we do manage to find a means of truly secure sequestration, transforming our coal plants into clean coal plants will take decades to accomplish - time we haven't got - and a lot more money than we imagine.

But what about the United States? Surely if there's one country that ought to be pursuing clean coal technology it's America, right? Of course it is. American wealth is bleeding out to buy foreign oil to feed its fossil fuel dependency. The US sits on enormous coal reserves. Switching from Islamic oil to domestic coal energy is so obvious, it's a no brainer. Everyone's on side - Bush, McCain, Obama, Congress, even Oprah (although it's rumoured that tool, Dr. Phil is, predictably, waffling).

However, according to the New York Times, America's clean coal initiative is faltering:

"...the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.

Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.

“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Plans to combat global warming generally assume that continued use of coal for power plants is unavoidable for at least several decades. Therefore, starting as early as 2020, forecasters assume that carbon dioxide emitted by new power plants will have to be captured and stored underground, to cut down on the amount of global-warming gases in the atmosphere.
Yet, simple as the idea may sound, considerable research is still needed to be certain the technique would be safe, effective and affordable.

Scientists need to figure out which kinds of rock and soil formations are best at holding carbon dioxide. They need to be sure the gas will not bubble back to the surface. They need to find optimal designs for new power plants so as to cut costs. And some complex legal questions need to be resolved, such as who would be liable if such a project polluted the groundwater or caused other damage far from the power plant."

It's becoming obvious that the miracles of carbon capture and carbon sequestration are an awfully long way off. This ought to be the technological challenge for America for the 21st century, something on the scale of the Manhattan Project.

It's much too important and far too early to write this off. Perhaps a genuine president willing to invest funding equal to a small hunk of America's warfighting budget could make this a reality. There are so many unknowns, neglected opportunities. However what is apparent is that we can't rely on carbon capture technologies as a solution to our GHG problems. We can't bank on it at all because the clock is running and it may just be too little, too late.

More Thoughts on Clean Coal

Clean Coal theory is dangerous. As global warming skeptics constantly point out, there's always some uncertainty about theories.

Why is Clean Coal just a theory? Because no one has yet shown that the amount of CO2 that needs to be captured to establish a viable, clean coal-fired electricity system can be safely and permanently sequestered. It requires a lot of emptiness - underground reservoirs where the carbon can be stored under very high pressure. The reservoirs need to be in reasonable proximity to the capture source. The further you need to pump the stuff the greater the expense and the risk of something going wrong.

Here's a little something they don't want to tell you: there's not remotely enough reservoir space to pull this off. That's why it's all gimmickry, a diversion. So if, in theory, you had an infinite amount of reservoir space and if, in theory, enough of that reservoir space was suitable to safely store high pressure CO2 and if, in theory, enough of that suitable reservoir space was sufficiently close to make sequestration economically viable, then you've got, in theory, an answer.

So, the first question for Mr. Harpo - how much viable storage capacity exists? Second question - how much CO2 can be safely and permanently sequestered in the existing storage? Third question - how much of Canada's electricity requirements can ever be realized through clean coal technology?

It sounds great, in theory, but sometimes you have to ask the practical questions.

So, What's Holding You Back?

A plaintive op-ed piece in today's Globe & Mail about carbon capture and sequestration. The item, written by oil patch spokesman Steve Kaufman, lauds the idea of industrial emitters employing proven technology to capture carbon emissions before they escape the factories and refineries that produce them and then bury the captured carbon underground.

By leveraging the expertise that already exists here to develop the technologies, infrastructure and regulatory models necessary for the creation of a large-scale carbon capture and storage network, Canada would become a global leader in addressing climate change.

The basic technology for carbon capture and storage is already proven and safe. The practice of injecting carbon dioxide into oil fields for enhanced oil recovery has been going on for more than three decades in the United States. Deep geological carbon capture and storage projects currently operating in Norway, Algeria and Saskatchewan are each eliminating about one million tonnes of emissions annually.

Good idea, Steve, so what's holding your people up? You have to go well down into the article to find it - government subsidies.

Long-term carbon dioxide storage and monitoring will require the kind of visionary government policies and funding mechanisms required for other historic Canadian infrastructure projects such as the Canadian Pacific Railway and the trans-Canada pipeline system. In terms of its potential for transforming industrial activity, creating a national carbon capture and storage infrastructure could be no less significant.

Maybe Steve's right. Maybe government should pick up the tab for a national, carbon capture and sequestration programme. And, here's my "maybe". Maybe the government should impose a carbon tax to cover the costs of this programme. I think it's called "make the polluter pay", a principle that's been widely accepted already and should be applicable to GHG emitters. No handouts on this one. There's no way I'm willing to subsidize the Tar Sands polluters while they wallow in today's gas price windfalls.