Environment | Bill's Views on Most Everything

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Three Unjustified Political Causes

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Gas Rig in Western Colorado

There are three causes, fracking, GMO’s, and the XL pipeline that to me are spurious. There is a lot of hysteria around the issues with little critical examination taking place. People seem to be taken in by bad science, bad reporting, and demagoguery.

Fracking is an old technology that expanded when horizontal drilling along with fracking opened up huge amounts of territory to oil and gas extraction. The oil and gas was there all along, geologists knew about it, but it was trapped in what the industry calls tight strata, mostly shale.

Traditionally, oil and gas has come from fairly porous rock that allows the oil and gas to migrate to the wells. Tight strata is not porous, and the oil and gas tends to stay in place. hydraulic fracturing breaks the rock, allowing the oil and gas to move to the well. Fracking is not new technology. It was being used around my home town in the 1950’s. The big change came with horizontal drilling, hugely expanding the amount of rock that can be fractured from one drill hole.

If there is impervious rock above the area being fractured, the only route for the oil and gas to escape is up the drill hole. Done right, the oil and gas go into a pipeline or a tank with no surface contamination. The problem is that it is often not done right.

BP Spill

It’s been clear for a long time, reinforced by the big BP spill in the gulf, that drilling so often not done right. Oil companies are infamous for lying, cheating, and stealing. They get away with it in part because nobody knows what they are doing. Meters are bypassed, mineral rights owners, including the Government, are underpaid, horizontal wells go outside their boundaries, and proper drilling methods are bypassed.

The big BP spill in the gulf happened because a defective blowout preventer was put in service. No one is going to know, right? It is a mile under water. We all know and BP is going to owe billions.

The problems we are seeing with fracking, groundwater contamination, flaming water faucets, polluted water dumped into streams, all come from cheating. With fracking, drillers cheat by not properly lining the drill holes. The correct method is to pump concrete between the side of the hole and the smaller steel casing that carries the oil and gas to the surface. It requires high pressure pumps and a lot of concrete. Done right, it works just fine. But, it is a long way down that hole and you cannot stand beside the wellhead and tell what was done. What can be done is to sample ground water and air. If there is contamination, it was not done right. Incidentally, our old friend Halliburton is the big oil well service company that does much of the well lining.

Until alternate energy is much bigger than it now is, we need oil and gas, and domestic production is preferable to foreign imports. Otherwise, turn off your air conditioning, junk the furnace, and sell the car. So, let’s regulate. We need monitoring for contaminants and on-site inspectors. All that is done in construction, but the oil and gas industry has avoided most oversight.

Fear is the reason for the opposition to fracking. People don’t understand the technology, big oil rigs along subdivisions and water trucks on the highway are imposing. They see news reports that show flaming faucets

Flaming Faucet

without explaining the cause other than blaming fracking. Flaming railroad oil train wrecks. Pipeline leaks in California. The oil and gas industry has a public relations problem.

The biggest fracking failure was 45 years ago in Western Colorado. The government detonated a 40 kiloton nuclear bomb down a drill hole near Parachute, Colorado. Lots of natural gas was liberated, but it is radioactive. People just will not accept radioactive gas coming into their homes. I think this long ago event is what started fracking fear.

Unless you get around on horseback or bicycle, stay off the power grid and light, heat, and cool your house with renewable energy, you need oil and gas. With regulation, it can be safe. We can then put more time and energy into developing clean energy.

Parts two and three will examine GMO food and the XL Pipeline. Stay tuned.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment, Fear

Energy

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Solar Panels

Carol and I are concentrating on how we use energy. Watching “Cosmos” with Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointing to the sun and saying, “It’s Free!” is partly responsible. I did a lot of research for my talk on Front Range Colorado flooding. One conclusion I reached is that the climate change we are now experiencing will lead to more floods.

Releasing fossil carbon into the atmosphere is setting up a worldwide crisis of unparalleled magnitude. Drought, wildfires, floods, sea level rise, and pollution will affect millions worldwide. The environmental changes have already increased political instability. Syria and sub-Saharan Africa are cases in point.

Here in the U.S., rhetoric and denial are the most visible response to the looming disasters. Those who make money from fossil energy deny the problem and buy inaction in Congress. Public utilities seem to be much more interested in selling gas and power produced from coal and gas than switching to renewables. Wind farms are on the increase and more commercial solar power installations are being built, but the pace is fairly slow.

Germany is a leader in switching to renewables, but recent stories that over 70 percent of production is from renewables is exaggerated. The fact is that their wind and solar production is increasing, while coal use is declining. China is starting to move to renewables, but is the world leader in coal use, and coal production is increasing. In China, 66% of their power comes from coal compared to 49% in the U.S. The switch to gas from coal is on, driven by cheaper gas (from fracking) and the high cost of coal plant pollution controls. Burning gas has about half the carbon footprint of coal, but it is still burning huge amounts of carbon sequestered millions of years ago.

Worldwide people and governments are starting to respond to the dangers of fossil fuel generated climate change, but slowly. So what are we to do? Join the grassroots green energy movement. People use all this energy, so people have to use less. Less gasoline, less natural gas, less electricity, and most of all, less coal.

So what is a couple from Denver to do? We aren’t much for marching in the streets or being rabid environmentalists, but we want to do our part. Activism begins at home. In our case, home is a brick bungalow built in 1937, when builders were not concerned with energy efficiency. The main thing builders did in the 1930’s did was build smaller houses. Ours has 830 square feet on the main floor. It is a far cry from the 2400 square foot houses that are today’s norm.

We did add a 400 square foot sunroom that we can close off from the rest of the house. In the winter, it is at 40 degrees, and an exhaust fan pulls cool air from the basement in summer. We have a modern high efficiency furnace and water heater. We have increased the attic insulation twice, first to R36, then to R50. The original steel casement windows are terrible for leaking cold air in winter, and hot air in summer. We have historical designation on the house which means keeping those windows, but we installed inside storm windows that stop those wintry breezes.

Carol forces me to tolerate 68 degrees in winter and 78 degrees in summer. That mainly means either more or less clothes depending on the season. At night the programmable thermostat is set for 56 degrees, but the house seldom cools off that much. I did break down and get some fleece lined slippers instead of my beloved L.L. Bean moccasins. The basement, with my man cave, gets cold. I guiltily run an electric heater. Someday we will insulate those cold basement walls.

When we increased the attic insulation the first time we also put in attic ventilation. We had rooftop vents installed and put a large vent in the north gable to introduce cooler outside air. When we re-roof we will add more vents. Prior to that, the only ventilation was a small vent over the entryway. It sure did get hot up there.

The air conditioner has a device provided by our electric utility that runs it less often during periods of high demand for power on hot days. To reduce air conditioner use we open the house up in the evening and run fans to exhaust hot air and bring in cooler outside air. Denver averages a thirty degree difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures. Texans, eat your hearts out. When we have to have a new roof in the next few years we will add an attic fan. They are noisy, but they exhaust hot air in the house and cool the attic.

The big thing we are doing now is adding solar electricity with our new garage. We have needed a garage for some time. We have never been able to park a car in the old one, designed for a 1937 Ford. My shop area, the gardening stuff, until recently my motorcycle, and the bicycles filled it up. Our block has an alley, which is a crime conduit. We have had several break-ins, and want our cars inside.

The solar panels will go on the garage and sunroom roofs. When we replace the roof on the older part of the house, we will add enough panels to produce all the power we need. We will be at about 80% with the house and sunroom panels.

So we are slowly going green. It is possible for individuals to make a difference. If more of us do it, it will pressure governments and the utility companies to get serious about energy. It will take grass roots action to make it happen. Boulder, Colorado is threatening to take over Xcel energy’s infrastructure in their city. That is a message to the utility companies that they have to get serious about renewable energy or lose their customers city by city. I am hopeful that meaningful change is going to happen. I don’t think it is enough to stop some of the climate changes we are seeing, but we are slowly starting to try living with our planet, not exploit it to our extinction.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment, Home Improvement, My Story, Stories

Colorado’s Front Range Floods

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Bill One comment

2013 Flood

Those of us who live along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains enjoy a unique set of circumstances; a fine climate, mountain views, a mountain playground, and rivers that provide much of our water needs. There are millions of people living in an urban area that runs from Pueblo to Fort Collins.

Most of the time, the physical setting and the climate combine to make the Front Range a fine place to live. There is risk, however. Most of the time we don’t have quite enough water for every need. The people are along the Front Range, and the water is on the western slope. On occasion, we have way too much water. We are subject to drought, our own waste of the water we have, and the floods that come out of the mountain canyons.

To understand these problems requires a look at two histories, the Rocky Mountain history for the last 75 million years and human history from 1859. Around 75 million years ago the Rockies began to form. As they grew, they also wore down. The debris from the mountains spread from their base to as far as Nebraska.

The streams were bigger then. Drive east to Bijou Creek and see the valley that obviously was not formed by the current flow in the creek. The wind blew. It still does, leaving eolian sand deposits. Sand Creek, draining the area east through Stapleton and into Aurora is appropriately named. You can identify the sand hills – they are grazing land, not good for farming. That sand and dirt comes from as far as Utah and coats our cars.

Today, the Rockies are not eroding as fast as they did during the ice ages, but they are still coming down. Back in the Precambrian when I took geology, the assumption was that erosion was a steady, gradual process. Taking the long view, that is so, but on a human time scale, erosion is punctuated by periodic floods. Some of the floods are from spring runoff from wet winters. The catastrophic floods pound out of the canyons when storms park themselves over an area and it rains. And rains. Sometimes it rains more in a few hours than it does in several normal years. Sometimes the rain is where the people are, just east of the mountains.

Large amounts of moist monsoonal air from the Gulf of Mexico move north along the Rockies and encounter a cold front coming from the west. Sometimes the rains are short in a fairly small area. At other times, as in 2013, the rain comes down over a large area, and it rains for days. To humans, these storms seem like unusual events, but they have been happening for millions of years. Along with normal erosion, they have filled the Denver Basin with 13,000 feet of debris. That is a lot of rocks and mud.

1864 Cherry Creek Flood

One of the first recorded monsoonal floods was in 1864, not long after Denver was settled. Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians told the settlers seeking fortune not to build where Cherry Creek and the South Platte meet. The town builders built there anyway. It was a logical town site. Trails met, grass, trees, and water were available, and the gold-rich mountains just a short distance away. Much of the new town went downstream.

The town was rebuilt in the same place. Floods came again. Denver flooded in 1876, 1885, 1894, 1912, 1921, 1933, and 1965. Pueblo flooded in 1921, the Big Thompson in 1976, Manitou Springs and Colorado Springs in 2013, and much of the Front Range from Denver to Fort Collins in 2013. The link is from the Atlantic Monthly, with dramatic images from the 2013 flooding.

Most vulnerable are towns at the base of the mountains: Manitou Springs, Palmer Lake, Morrison, Golden, Boulder, Lyons, Loveland, and Fort Collins. Towns along the South Platte, St. Vrain, Cache La Poudre, and Big Thompson rivers are at special risk.

Jamestown 2014

Will people stop building there? Rebuilding is underway in every area flooded in 2013. While researching this piece I traveled to Boulder, Jamestown, Lyons, and the farmland along the St Vrain. I saw travel trailers parked nest to damaged homes with building permits on the flood-damaged houses.

Some actions do prevent floods. Denver has Cherry Creek, Bear Creek, and Chatfield dams. They are flood control dams designed to capture floodwaters. Let’s hope they are big enough.

The photo above has a lot of rock in the foreground. The rocks range in size from sand and silt to head size. They were exposed by the 2013 flood, but were deposited by a previous flood that had enough force to carry that debris and dump it there. upstream, there are narrow gulches with the lower ends scoured down to bedrock. That debris went further downstream.

The Rocky Mountains are on the way to the Mississippi river delta in Louisiana. It will take many millions of years, but they will wear down and become Mississippi mud. Floods will hasten the process.

Posted in Colorado History, Environment, Floods

It’s Not Easy Being Green

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

I chose this title because Kermit and I are kindred spirits. I went through most of my life thinking I must be green or something because things just did not go as well for me as for others. An ADD diagnosis and treatment has made my life easier. Poor Kermit, however, is still green.

I do try to be green in the other sense of the word. I am something of an environmentalist. I give money, feel self-righteous about environmental issues, write about issues, and live a typical American consumer life.

Note: the American consumer life is not very green. Two people, two cars. We are so committed to two cars we are replacing our one car garage (with no room for a car) with a big two car garage with room for two cars, three bicycles, workbench, emergency generator, power lawn mower, and all the tools.

You know the formula for the number of bicycles: n+1. N being the number of bicycles you currently have. That is the American consumer way. Spend to the end. When I was growing up in Fruita, I thought we were pretty well off. Car (even if it was a Nash), travel trailer, two week vacation and several weekend jaunts every year, a good TV, a remodeled kitchen, and all our needs met. The closets were not jammed with clothes, we didn’t get ten catalogs in the mail every week, the furniture and carpets were worn, and the garage had a dirt floor.

The consumer society was in operation in the decades after the war, but it has drastically accelerated in the last thirty years or so. I am sitting in Starbucks with my $4.00 cup of coffee looking at the Mercedes SUV’s parked side by side. The customers are served by well-educated Millennials glad to have a job in the service sector so they can pay their rent.

Most current middle class families are two income families struggling to support lifestyles centered on spending. Cars, computers, smartphones, iPads (I’m writing this on one), Italian granite countertops, 30 cubic foot refrigerators, Viking ranges, 52″ TV’s in several rooms, It goes on and on. This debt-ridden opulence is in contrast with the debt-ridden Millenials in the service sector and the millions trapped in poverty.

There is too much income disparity and entirely too much wasteful consumption. The consumption, fueled by all the demand created by sophisticated marketing, is socially and environmentally harmful. I look around, and I am part of the problem. As the Buddhists say I am trapped on the wheel of desire. The gasoline I burn in my 4×4 comes from Alberta tar sands. The cheap natural gas heating my home is produced by fracking. Most of our food is produced hundreds or thousands of miles away.

We try. We recycle, compost, use drip irrigation, have a small lawn, and a small house by current standards. We just upgraded our attic insulation to R50. We are adding LED light bulbs regularly. We have to avoid fluorescent bulbs as Carol is sensitive to the UV light they emit.

We are buying more organic produce and dairy products. We buy meat from grass fed livestock raised using sustainable methods, and it’s local. We are cooking more at home and when we do go out, we are picky about the restaurants we visit.

Are we green? Not so much. We are working at it, and we may someday be as green as Kermit.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment, Geology, Memoirs

More on Fracking and Clean Coal

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Some good news and bad news in the energy business.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper promulgated new regulations that should go a long ways toward ending pollution from oil and gas wells. Each well will have monitoring equipment that can detect any emissions from the well Here is a link.

The bad news, Duke Energy has a lot of coal ash ponds in the southeast, and one collapsed into the river. Duke is a powerful lobbyist, and has successfully avoided any strict regulation or penalties up to this point. This event may change that.

i am struck by the corporate attitude to these harmful and costly events. Lobbyists are paid, campaigns are funded, lots of false rhetoric is expended fighting regulatory oversight of mining, drilling, and processing operations. “Regulations and government intrusion kills jobs.” So little regulation goes into place until a hugely expensive disaster occurs, with cleanup costs far exceeding the costs to do the job right.

i think fighting regulation is due to the constant corporate pressure to have a good quarterly profit. Expenses that cut into short-term profit are avoided by managers who avoid or never see reports from the field warning of potential environmental problems.

In my experience, weak managers who lack foresight and the ability to sell needed projects to the higher-ups tend to focus on cost cutting. Tanks leak, ash retention ponds fail, and faulty blowout preventers fail, all in the name of quarterly profits.

Last quarter’s numbers look good, but the overall profit picture is not so good for Freedom Industries, Duke Energy, or BP Petroleum.

My favorite case in point is when Freon was banned due to ozone layer damage. The refrigeration industry fought the change until they realized that they were the ones to do the work replacing Freon.

Rather than killing jobs, environmental regulation created jobs and benefited everyone, and the consumer paid the cost, fair enough for having a cool house and car.

Coal Ash Spill

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment

Clean Coal

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

After WWII, a lot of research was done examining propaganda techniques. The impetus was how Nazi propaganda was used to control the German people. A major technique is The Big Lie: take an obvious falsehood, such as the international Jewish Conspiracy, and repeat it so often that the citizens start believing in it.

A current Big Lie here is Clean Coal. Take a look at a coal train, coal mine, or coal fired power plant and you can see that coal is not clean. Yes, coal is somewhat cleaner than in past years, but the evidence is overwhelming that coal is our dirtiest energy source.

I am from Western Colorado, and my father liked to tell stories about the coal smoke cloud over Grand Junction in the days when coal was used to heat most houses and businesses.

In Colorado, most power plants have converted from coal to cleaner natural gas. In other areas of the country, however, natural gas supplies are tighter and gas costs more than coal. Things have not slowed down much in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin coal mines. I live close to the rail lines that pass through Denver. At any time of the day, there are several coal trains stopped waiting in line to go over the grade that is Monument Hill. Those trains are headed to Texas and other southern states

On February 10, I see a news story that the CEO of the company that spilled that coal-washing chemical in West Virginia ducked a hearing on the spill, this after they filed bankruptcy to avoid responsibility for the mess. In West Virginia, coal is king, regardless of the consequences. Hundreds of thousands had their drinking water made unusable for weeks.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, there has been an ongoing battle between corporate profit-driven industries and their actions; and those who are harmed by those actions. People harmed have turned to government for help, and the political response has made news since the first runaway horse and wagon killed someone. Many businesses are responsible, and try their best to do no harm while making a profit. Many other businesses, however, see profit as the goal that overrides any other concern.

Here in Colorado, the Ludlow Massacre, the most violent labor dispute in U. S. History grew out of the conditions workers were forced to endure in the Southern Colorado coal fields. Poor pay, long hours, constant danger, and poor living conditions prevailed throughout the industry and led to a series of violent strikes in all the coal-bearing regions of the state that climaxed in Ludlow in 1914. The governor called out the state militia to support the company owners against the strikers. The militia attacked the makeshift tent camp the miners had built, burned it, and killed about 115 women and children. The violence did not end.

Violence was done to the people by a combination of government and mine owners in Southern Colorado, and violence is being done to the people of West Virginia by a chemical company, part of the coal industry; and weak government regulation. The real violence is being done to us all from the pollutants going into the air and water.

In the short run, natural gas is less damaging than coal, but the real need is to make the switch to renewable energy. President Carter proposed a move to renewables early in his administration, even putting solar panels on the roof of the White House. President Reagan removed the panels, cut the National Renewal Energy Laboratory by 90 percent, and the country moved backwards, accelerating the rise in global temperature and presenting us with the crisis we now face.

The U.S. Foot dragging in energy policy combined with the rapidly growing fossil energy consumption in China and India, is generating a global crisis that will only get worse before it gets better. For us, the task is to get away from coal, then all hydrocarbons.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment

Fracking

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

The United States is experiencing an energy boom. Oil and gas production is steadily growing, mostly due to new technology in use in older oil fields that were once regarded as exhausted, and development of new areas like the Williston Basin in North Dakota and the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania. Here in Colorado, the boom-bust economy of the Western Slope experienced a major boom. In the Denver Basin, mostly in Weld county, drilling has increased dramatically.

Why this oil and gas boom when just a few years ago, oil and gas production had been declining for years. Fracking, where a well is driven down into petroleum-bearing strata once regarded as unproductive because the rock was not porous enough to allow the petroleum to flow into the well, can now become productive when the rock is hydraulic fractured by pumping water under tremendous pressure into the rock layers. The rock breaks, and the sand and chemicals hold the fractures open enough to allow the oil and gas to migrate into the drill hole.

Fracking is not new. I am from Western Colorado, and in the 1950’s the region experienced a double boom. The government needed uranium to build bombs, and oil and gas were in great demand. My paper route doubled with all the new people moving in for good-paying jobs. Fracking was in use then, but had limitations as the amount of rock broken around a vertical drill hole was limited. Today, however, that has changed because of horizontal drilling, where a well is drilled into the desired rock layer then the drill makes a 90-degree turn and drills horizontally, increasing the amount of rock in that layer that can be fractured.

The result of this technology is that the U.S. is moving toward energy independence. Our dependence on the Middle East for oil is almost gone. New jobs are being created, oil prices have stabilized, and a new energy era has dawned.

All good, right? No. There is always a cost. Fracking requires water. Millions of gallons of water are injected into the earth. Some comes back up, but it is dirty stuff that sometimes is cleaned up, sometimes not. Here in Colorado water is a scarce resource, and most of the water used in fracking is lost.

The oil rigs need roads and solid pads for the equipment. Well-developed oil fields are a maze of roads and pads that have no other use. I became aware of the damage flying over the overthrust belt in southern Wyoming. The land in that arid region will be scarred, and wildlife habitat reduced, for centuries.

The cost most people are concerned about is the pollution around the wells. Lighting the gas coming out of the water tap in the kitchen sink is the most publicized problem. Odors, toxic fluids coming out of the wells, air pollution, and an increase of respiratory illness near the wells are all of concern. The result is there is a great deal of opposition to fracking. In northern Colorado, several cities have banned fracking, with the oil and gas industry engaged in a major political battle.

All this opposition is the oil companies’ fault. There is a huge amount of money to be made from the oil and gas produced by fracking, and the drillers are working as fast as they can to make that money. In the process, they cheat. There are proven means to prevent any unwanted gasses and fluids from migrating to the surface around a well. Good well casing practices, assuring there is an impervious layer of rock above the fracture zone, and well-placed concrete between the well casing and the surrounding rock. All this casing and concrete is expensive, and in a mile-deep hole in the ground. So, cheat. Use rotten casing, less cement, and loose strata above the production layer; all lead to environmental damage at the surface when the well leaks. The damage does not have to happen.

Just as fracking technology is well-developed, the means of protecting the area around the wellhead are available. The key is requiring the drillers to use those means. It is not enough to pass laws saying don’t do it. It takes monitoring with enough inspectors on site to assure proper practices are followed. The monitoring can be funded by a tax on production. (The producers cheat at production figures as well). The result can be more jobs and safe oil and gas production.

Here in Colorado, with a Governor familiar with the oil and gas industry and a good political climate, solid regulation can happen. In Texas, however, the oil industry has controlled the state government for many years. Lots of folks stand to get sick there, and massive amounts of greenhouse gas are entering the atmosphere. With widespread public outcry about the environmental damage, the political climate may change enough to allow good governmental regulation.

The real solution to our global warming and climate change problem is to end the use of hydrocarbons we dig out of the earth. Coal, oil, and natural gas have to go. This is not going to happen soon. We can, however reduce the impact by moving from coal to natural gas as fuel in power plants. This has happened in Colorado, but huge amounts of coal still go to power plants in the south and east. More natural gas production can reduce coal consumption. The plants will still pollute, but at a lower amount. Fracking is the means. The next step is to accelerate our transition to renewal energy sources.

Fracking, if done properly with a good regulatory structure, can reduce our dependence on the Middle East for oil, and can reduce domestic coal use. There will be less environmental damage, and the economy will benefit. All we need is less hysteria and good regulation.

Here is a letter to the editor from The Denver Post 2-21-14 on fracking.

Posted in Environment, Geology