Greening Antarctica  

While some things are meant to be green (like roofs, which increasingly are), other things aren't - like Antarctica.

The world's biggest meeting of Antarctic scientists has heard trees could be growing on the continent within a century.

More than 850 delegates are in Hobart this week for the combined meetings of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs.

US Professor Robert Dunbar, from Stanford University, says it is likely that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are set to double in the next century or two. The last time levels were that high was about 20 million years ago.

Professor Dunbar says Antarctica could return to how it looked then. "There were trees, there were bushes, there were fields of grass," he said. "In fact, the evidence of pollen fossils is that much of Antarctica was vegetated and these were plants that were able to adapt to periods of darkness. "But the key is that it wasn't cold enough to freeze water."

One positive aspect of melting ice sheets is that it makes it easier for desperate detritovores to find the remaining pockets of oil.

An international oil industry expert who says global oil supply has reached its production peak has warned places like Antarctica may not be safe from oil exploration.

Dr Ali Samsam Bakhtiari has given evidence to a Senate committee about his calculations that crude oil demand will out-strip supply within five or six years. He says one polar region in the Antarctic is already close to being exploited. "I hope that the oil industry will not go into Antarctica but when the price will be $200 or $300 per barrel, then anything can happen," he said.

Byron King from Whiskey and Gunpowder has a look at the impact of rising fuel prices on the airline industry, and the efforts being made by companies like Boeing to increase fuel efficiency. There seems to be some debate about the viability of using biofuels like ethanol for aviation, so energy efficiency may be the obvious best option - and given that I seem to have a few readers at Boeing, might I also suggest lobbying that helps prompt other sectors of the economy use less fuel (such as carbon taxes) might actually have a positive effect on the viability of the airlines in the long run. Bart also has some notes on the downsides of air travel at the end of the post on Energy Bulletin.

“What do you do when fuel is the price of champagne?” As a writer who focuses much on issues of Peak Oil, I believe that is an interesting way to ask the question. The last time I looked at the price of decent champagne (not even the high-end stuff), it was selling for the likes of $25 per bottle and up, or the equivalent of $125 per gallon. Ouch! So imagine a bottle of champagne with a fuel hose and nozzle running out of it. Try to envision some very pricey stuff bubbling out of the Dom Perignon-style bottle and into the fuel tank.

Oh, wait a minute. You do not have to imagine it. Just open up a recent copy of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, published by McGraw-Hill. There, in the center pages of the most widely read trade magazine in the high-end segment of the aviation industry, was a three-page advertisement that asks exactly this question and presents exactly this image on the first page. In the ad, Page 1, a fuel hose is running out of a champagne bottle. The sponsor of the ad was none other than one of the most famous corporate names in the world, Boeing. Welcome to the future of aviation.

Boeing isn't the only large organisation concerned about peak oil - the US military is clearly interested in prompting some scientific efforts to keep themselves airborne (which is a positive change from making a grab for oil producing regions).

DARPA sees which way the wind's blowing. They've put out a request for R&D proposals to try to find a way to produce military jet fuel from non-petroleum sources. Excerpt from the RFP:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agencys (DARPA) Advanced Technology Office (ATO) is soliciting proposals...for BioFuels.

The Defense Department has been directed to explore a wide range of energy alternatives and fuel efficiency efforts in a bid to reduce the military's reliance on oil to power its aircraft, ground vehicles and non-nuclear ships. DARPA is interested in proposals for research and development efforts to develop a process that efficiently produces a surrogate for petroleum based military jet fuel (JP-8) from oil-rich crops produced by either agriculture or aquaculture (including but not limited to plants, algae, fungi, and bacteria) and which ultimately can be an affordable alternative to petroleum-derived JP-8. Current commercial processes for producing biodiesel yield a fuel that is unsuitable for military applications, which require higher energy density and a wide operating temperature range. [...]

The goal of the BioFuels program is to enable an affordable alternative to petroleum-derived JP-8. The primary technical objective of the BioFuels program is to achieve a 60% (or greater) conversion efficiency, by energy content, of crop oil to JP-8 surrogate and elucidate a path to 90% conversion. Proposers are encouraged to consider process paths that minimize the use of external energy sources, which are adaptable to a range or blend of feedstock crop oils, and which produce process by-products that have ancillary manufacturing or industrial value.

When push comes to shove and oil shortages get underway in earnest, the military will surely be in a position to push its way to the front of the line. Evidently, they anticipate that being first in line may not be good enough.

Handwriting on the wall.

I didn't see much chat about this report about prospects for future Iraqi oil production (long a subject of much curiosity for me) but I'm sure many peakist's would scoff at the idea of Iraq producing 9 million barrels a day. Personally I think this is entirely possible (and for quite a long period of time) but the situation on the ground would make it seem unlikely in the foreseeable future.

Iraq's oil production could reach 9.0 million barrels a day in 2016, up from around 2.4 million barrels currently, the head of international oil producer Heritage Oil, said.

But the lack of a clear development strategy for Iraq's oil resources is delaying the much-needed foreign investment required to reach this level of production, Micael Gulbenkian warned in an interview with Portugal's Lusa news agency.

"Iraq has gigantic potential," said Gulbenkian Saturday, whose company has projects in the war-torn country. "The Iraqi economy is a failure. The country doesn't have the means to develop and explore its national resources."

Iraqi authorities are torn between a policy which would seek to keep the development of the country's oil resources in national hands and a policy of openness to foreign investment in the sector, he added.

Iraq expects its daily oil production to reach 6.0 barrels per day by 2012 and be challenging Saudi Arabia as the world's largest producer by 2015, Iraq's Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani said last month.

Interestingly the oil CEO quoted would appear to be a descendent of Calouste Gulbenkian (also known as Mr 5%), who was instrumental in the maneouvring over the oil fields in Iraq a century ago (which reportedly made him the richest man in the world for a time) and the creation of the Iraqi Petroleum Company and the associated "red line agreement". He eventually fled to Portugal as part of his endless quest to avoid paying tax, where he set up the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, which is well worth a visit if you ever find yourself in town.

It began with a character known as "Mr. 5%"- Calouste Gulbenkian - who, in 1925, slicked King Faisal, neophyte ruler of the country recently created by Churchill, into giving Gulbenkian's "Iraq Petroleum Company" (IPC) exclusive rights to all of Iraq's oil. Gulbenkian flipped 95% of his concession to a combine of western oil giants: Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch Shell, CFP of France, and the Standard Oil trust companies (now ExxonMobil and its "sisters.") The remaining slice Calouste kept for himself - hence, "Mr. 5%."

The oil majors had a better use for Iraq's oil than drilling it - not drilling it. The oil bigs had bought Iraq's concession to seal it up and keep it off the market. To please his buyers' wishes, Mr. 5% spread out a big map of the Middle East on the floor of a hotel room in Belgium and drew a thick red line around the gulf oil fields, centered on Iraq. All the oil company executives, gathered in the hotel room, signed their name on the red line - vowing not to drill, except as a group, within the red-lined zone. No one, therefore, had an incentive to cheat and take red-lined oil. All of Iraq's oil, sequestered by all, was locked in, and all signers would enjoy a lift in worldwide prices. Anglo-Persian Company, now British Petroleum (BP), would pump almost all its oil, reasonably, from Persia (Iran). Later, the Standard Oil combine, renamed the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia. Anglo-Persian (BP) had begun pulling oil from Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1927 and, in accordance with the Red-Line Agreement, shared its Kirkuk and Basra fields with its IPC group - and drilled no more.

The following was written three decades ago:

Although its original concession of March 14, 1925, cove- red all of Iraq, the Iraq Petroleum Co., under the owner- ship of BP (23.75%), Shell (23.75%), CFP [of France] (23.75%), Exxon (11.85%), Mobil (11.85%), and [Calouste] Gulbenkian (5.0%), limited its production to fields constituting only one-half of 1 percent of the country's total area. During the Great Depression, the world was awash with oil and greater output from Iraq would simply have driven the price down to even lower levels.

Plus ça change...

When the British Foreign Office fretted that locking up oil would stoke local nationalist anger, BP-IPC agreed privately to pretend to drill lots of wells, but make them absurdly shallow and place them where, wrote a company manager, "there was no danger of striking oil." This systematic suppression of Iraq's production, begun in 1927, has never ceased. In the early 1960s, Iraq's frustration with the British-led oil consortium's failure to pump pushed the nation to cancel the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and seize the oil fields. Britain was ready to strangle Baghdad, but a cooler, wiser man in the White House, John F. Kennedy, told the Brits to back off. President Kennedy refused to call Iraq's seizure an "expropriation" akin to Castro's seizure of U.S.-owned banana plantations. Kennedy's view was that Anglo-American companies had it coming to them because they had refused to honor their legal commitment to drill.

But the freedom Kennedy offered the Iraqis to drill their own oil to the maximum was swiftly taken away from them by their Arab brethren.

The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq's production at a sum equal to Iran's, though the Iranian reserves are far smaller than Iraq's. The excuse for this quota equality between Iraq and Iran was to prevent war between them. It didn't. To keep Iraq's Ba'athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam's war against Iran and giving the dictator $7 billion for his "Islamic bomb" program.

In 1974, a U.S. politician broke the omerta over the suppression of Iraq's oil production. It was during the Arab oil embargo that Senator Edmund Muskie revealed a secret intelligence report of "fantastic" reserves of oil in Iraq undeveloped because U.S. oil companies refused to add pipeline capacity. Muskie, who'd just lost a bid for the Presidency, was dubbed a "loser" and ignored. The Iranian bombing of the Basra fields (1980-88) put a new kink in Iraq's oil production. Iraq's frustration under production limits explodes periodically.

A History of Oil in Iraq - Suppressing It, Not Pumping It

* 1925-28 "Mr. 5%" sells his monopoly on Iraq's oil to British Petroleum and Exxon, who sign a "Red-Line Agreement" vowing not to compete by drilling independently in Iraq.

* 1948 Red-Line Agreement ended, replaced by oil combines' "dog in the manger" strategy - taking control of fields, then capping production-drilling shallow holes where "there was no danger of striking oil."

* 1961 OPEC, founded the year before, places quotas on Iraq's exports equal to Iran's, locking in suppression policy.

* 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. Iran destroys Basra fields. Iraq cannot meet OPEC quota. 1991 Desert Storm. Anglo-American bombings cut production.

* 1991-2003 United Nations Oil embargo (zero legal exports) followed by Oil-for-Food Program limiting Iraqi sales to 2 million barrels a day.

* 2003-? "Insurgents" sabotage Iraq's pipelines and infrastructure.

* 2004 Options for Iraqi OilThe secret plan adopted by U.S. State Department overturns Pentagon proposal to massively in crease oil production. State Department plan, adopted by government of occupied Iraq, limits state oil company to OPEC quotas.

The Energy Blog has an interesting (as always) post on "A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy".

An article describing a cryogenic, superconducting "SuperGrid" that would simultaneously deliver electrical power and hydrogen fuel is featured in the July issue of Scientific American.com.

The August 14, 2003 power failure that affected 48 million inhabitants of New York, northeastern US and Ontario and an even more extensive blackout that affected 56 million people in Italy and Switzerland a month later--called attention to the susceptibility of our power grids to failure. A more fundamental limitation of our grid is that it is poorly suited to handle the relentless growth in demand for electrical energy and the coming transition away from fossil-fueled power stations and vehicles to cleaner sources of electricity and transportation fuels. The following is but a sampling of the information in the report, which you may want to read, to fully understand the problem and the authors solution.

The authors are part of a growing group of engineers and physicists who have begun developing designs for a new energy delivery system they call the Continental SuperGrid. They envision the SuperGrid evolving gradually alongside the current grid, strengthening its capacity and reliability. Over the course of decades, the SuperGrid would put in place the means to generate and deliver not only plentiful, reliable, inexpensive and "clean" electricity but also hydrogen for energy storage and personal transportation. ...

Also at The Energy Blog, a "Roadmap for Development of Cellulosic Ethanol Production".

The U.S. DOE recently released a report detailing a roadmap for the development of cellulosic ethanol production. The report is based on the Biomass to Biofuels Workshop held December 7–9, 2005, in Rockville, Maryland, where more than 50 scientists representing a wide range of expertise convened to define barriers and challenges to the biofuel industry. This report is a roadmap, based on that workshop, for accelerating cellulosic ethanol research, helping make biofuels practical and cost-competitive by 2012 ($1.07/gal ethanol) and offering the potential to displace up to 30% of the nation’s current gasoline use by 2030. While other blogs and news articles have reported on the release of the report, no one has attempted to articulate the roadmap. The following are some brief excerpts from the report.

Fuels derived from cellulosic biomass—the fibrous, woody, and generally inedible portions of plant matter—offer an alternative to conventional energy sources that supports national economic growth, national energy security, and environmental goals. Cellulosic biomass is an attractive energy feedstock because supplies are abundant domestically and globally. It is a renewable source of liquid transportation fuels that can be used readily by current-generation vehicles and distributed through the existing transportation- fuel infrastructure. Ethanol from corn grain is an increasingly important additive fuel source, but it has limited growth potential as a primary transportation fuel.

2004_gasoline_ethanol_demand Achieving the ambitious goal of displacing 30% of the 2004 gasoline demand with biofuels by 2030 will require a rapid expansion of the fuel ethanol industry. Annual U.S. production will need to increase from about 4 billion gallons of corn grain ethanol to about 60 billion gallons per year from a variety of plant materials.

An annual supply of roughly a billion dry tons of biomass will be needed to support this level of ethanol production. A recent report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and DOE finds potential to sustainably harvest more than 1.3 billion metric tons of biomass from U.S. forest and agricultural lands by mid-21st Century (previous post).

The report found that only 6% of the 1.36 billion metric tons would come from grain, and since only about a billion tons are required, none of the feedstock need come at the expense of food producing acreage.

And to close, a blog post asking Where have all the butterflies gone? - one more victim of global warming ?

I was starting to think maybe I was crazy. But no, my perception seems to be pretty accurate. This spring and summer I have seen almost no butterflies. Practically zero. In fact, I would say less than 20. By this time last year and the previous year and most years before, I would see that many in week depending on my location. In fact, since being back in Missouri and spending lots of time in the garden, seeing 10 - 20 a day is not uncommon with 3-5 species represented in that count. Of course it's hard to say if one is seeing the same butterfly more than once but it's still very possible to get an idea if you're paying attention. Not only are we not seeing the butterflies but also zero caterpillars.

A few seconds of google turned up a whole slew of articles that verify my perception. Here's the first, Where have all the butterflies gone? : ...