Jungle Law  

Vanity Fair has an article on Chevron Texaco's destruction of the Amazonian rainforest in Ecuador and efforts to try seek redress by the local inhabitants.

In 1972, crude oil began to flow from Texaco's wells in the area around Lago Agrio ("sour lake"), in the Ecuadorean Amazon. Born that same year, Pablo Fajardo is now the lead attorney in an epic lawsuit—among the largest environmental suits in history—against Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001. Reporting on an emotional battle in a makeshift jungle courtroom, the author investigates how many hundreds of square miles of surrounding rain forest became a toxic-waste dump.

In a forsaken little town in the Ecuadorean Amazon, an overgrown oil camp called Lago Agrio, the giant Chevron Corporation has been maneuvered into a makeshift courtroom and is being sued to answer for conditions in 1,700 square miles of rain forest said by environmentalists to be one of the world's most contaminated industrial sites. The pollution consists of huge quantities of crude oil and associated wastes, mixed in with the toxic compounds used for drilling operations—a noxious soup that for decades was dumped into leaky pits, or directly into the Amazonian watershed. The company that did much of this work was Texaco—an outfit with a swashbuckling reputation worldwide. It signed a contract with Ecuador in 1964, began full-scale production in 1972, and pulled out 20 years later. In 2001, Texaco was swallowed whole by Chevron, which by integrating its operations nearly doubled in size. The lawsuit against it in Lago Agrio was filed in 2003, though the legal antecedents go back much further. Having dragged on for four years, the suit may continue for half again as long. Chevron is represented by high-priced firms of experienced lawyers in Quito and Washington, D.C., whose collective fees run to millions of dollars annually. Its antagonists are 30,000 Amazonian settlers and indigenous people, who call themselves Los Afectados—the Affected Ones. These plaintiffs are represented by a low-budget but serious team of North American and Ecuadorean attorneys, who are backed by a Philadelphia law firm that is known for class-action securities litigation and has gambled that this case, though risky, can actually be won. ...

As for the plaintiffs themselves, under Ecuadorean law they are not suing individually, and personally may never see a dime. They have sued to seek compensation for past damages and to force Chevron to clean up the residual mess that continues, they believe, to taint the soil and water today. It is unclear how a cleanup would proceed and to what extent it could succeed, but over decades the cost might run to $6 billion or more—making this potentially the largest environmental lawsuit ever to be fought. And fight is the word. The case has become emotional for both sides, with few signs of willingness to compromise. Worldwide the oil industry is watching. Lago Agrio is a forsaken little town where something rather large is going down.

Der Spiegel has an interesting article on a village in Schleswig Holstein that is trying to achieve community control of its power generation - something we'll see more and more of as renewable energy generation becomes widespread and smarter grids allow everyone to generate electricity - not just large utilities.

Börnsen, Germany, is a tranquil little place. When farmers there need a barbeque grill for their village festival, or money to renovate the local kindergarten, they ask "Walter" down at the village hall. Walter Heisch is mayor of this village near Hamburg. "Just about everyone knows everyone else," he writes on the community's website. "We see each other at the grocery store."

When it comes to the issue of energy, though, tempers rise, and Heisch turns into a combative village elder -- a figure straight from the Asterix comic book series, as the miniature of Gallic chieftain Majestix on the mayor's desk suggests. And that's when Börnsen turns into a tiny pocket of resistance.

The enemy, in this case, is the German energy firm E.on.

Börnsen has shown E.on's local subsidiary in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, E.on Hanse, how a small town can escape domination by a corporate energy giant by producing its own electricity and gas -- and how an average family can save about €75 ($100) a year in natural gas costs alone.

The statistics are from a state-wide price comparison prepared by Germany's Federal Cartel Office late last year, and they paint a picture of a village where quite a bit functions without support from the all-powerful utility.

Since E.on doesn't want Börnsen to give other municipal energy suppliers ideas, though, the giant utility has decided to pull out of Börnsen's energy-saving venture. The giant is defending itself, and that has Börnsen residents up in arms. "E.on is a bad word in Börnsen," says Joachim Reuland, head of the village-run utility, "Gas und Wärmedienst Börnsen GmbH," or just GWB.

Ten years ago, Börnsen residents decided to build small communal heating power stations, powered by natural gas, which now supply heat to new housing developments and electricity to 80 percent of the village. The boilers at the three miniature power plants are "filled with a magic potion," says Reuland with a smile.

Börnsen has simply gotten a jump on what the major municipal utilities want to pursue as part of the gradual deregulation of the European energy market: Many German cities and towns want to reduce their dependence on big energy firms by building their own local power plants. The public works departments of eight German cities -- including Hanover, Frankfurt am Main, and Munich -- came together just last week to form an alliance that could become a fifth major player in a market dominated by a virtual cartel of four companies: E.on, RWE, Vattenfall and EnBW.

The project in Börnsen started with a citizens' initiative to secure a greener local energy supply. The village's proximity to the Krümmel nuclear power plant only 12 kilometers (seven miles) away -- and nightly alarms that brought half the village into the streets in pajamas -- had caused a lot of disgruntlement. Reuland co-founded an initiative to establish the local utility, GWB, in 1996. A municipal gas utility called Hamburger Gaswerke (in nearby Hamburg) served as a supplier and owner of a 40 percent interest in the company.

This arrangement worked well until four years ago, when E.on Hanse acquired Hamburger Gaswerke. That was when "all the hullabaloo" started, according to Mayor Heisch. He says E.on asked the village to abandon its gas supply concept. "Instead of using our communal heating power stations, E.on wanted people to buy natural gas from them," says Heisch, "because that way there was more profit in it for them" ...

Roland Piquepaille at ZDNet has a post on OLED lighting reportedly achieving 100% energy efficiency.

You all know that incandescent light bulbs are terribly inefficient, turning only 5% of the electricity they consume into light. Fluorescent lamps are better using up to 25% of its energy as light. And solid state lighting devices lose only 50% of the energy they received. But now, researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) claim they've developed organic lighting devices which are 100% efficient. The researchers think it's possible to produce these solid-state lighting devices based on OLED technology at low cost. If this is true, this would be of major benefit to the environment by conserving energy and natural resources.

These organic lighting devices have been developed by a team led by Ghassan Jabbour, professor at the ASU School of Materials, and Jian Li, an assistant professor in the same department. In addition, Jabbour is director of optoelectronics research and development at the Flexible Display Center at ASU.

What's particularly significant about the researchers' work is that their optimized device adopts an even simpler structure than any yet reported by other research groups. "There is no waste of electricity," Jabbour says. "All the current you are putting into the device is being used to produce light. It's the first time something like this has been demonstrated. Nobody else has shown a 100 percent internal quantum efficiency for lighting devices using a single molecular dopant to emit white light."

This research work has been published in Advanced Materials under the name "Excimer-Based White Phosphorescent Organic Light-Emitting Diodes with Nearly 100 % Internal Quantum Efficiency" (Volume 19, Issue 2, Pages 197-202, January 2007). Here are two links to the paper reference and a short comment about it. "By combining the monomer and excimer/aggregate emission of FPt, a white OLED can be obtained. Incorporating the novel host material 26mCPy and engineering the charge balance properties, Jabbour and co-workers used FPt to demonstrate, for the first time, nearly 100% internal quantum efficiency in white OLEDs."

Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger has a post on the meaning of Earth Day. I don't think I've ever seen anyone compare Dave Roberts or Alex Steffen to "Marvin the paranoid android" before, so this one gets top marks for memorability. I also like the line "survival trumps ideology" - thats as Viridian as it gets...

Marvin: I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.
Trillian: Well, we have something that may take your mind off it.
Marvin: It won't work, I have an exceptionally large mind.
Trillian: Yeah, we know.

Alex Steffen and Dave Roberts have big minds, and they are depressed, and not looking forward to Earth Day.

Alex and Sarah at Worldchanging say that Earth Day has “become a ritual of sympathy for the idea of environmental sanity. Small steps, we're told, ignoring the fact that most of the steps most frequently promoted (returning your bottles, bringing your own bag, turning off the water while you brush your teeth) are of such minor impact (compared to our ecological footprints) that they are essentially meaningless without larger, systemic action as well."

Dave at Grist is shocked, shocked that only 60% of Americans believe that global warming has begun to affect the climate and frets that most people are wary of any government effort to protect the environment by imposing restrictions on how they live, work or get around. He agrees with Alex and Sarah and says “Yup. The time for "small steps" is long past. It's time for people to wake the hell up.”

Lloyd at TreeHugger thinks that Dave, Sarah and Alex should go outside and look around. In the rest of the developed world, the issue is either settled and the governments are committed, or the various parties are competing to out-green each other. In Britain a conservative leader puts turbines on his roof; in Canada a centrist leader names his dog Kyoto. Politicians everywhere don’t lead public opinion, they follow it, and when public opinion says go green, even right wing Australians ban incandescents. Survival trumps ideology.

We all know that changing a lightbulb is meaningless if we are building coal fired power plants like mad. The issues at stake will be dealt with at the government level, not in our chandelier. Small steps lead to comprehension.

Small steps lead to education and awareness and that leads to votes and votes lead to change. Educated voters toss out Richard Pombo and elect Jerry McNerney. Educated voters don't vote for an Obama who panders to the coal industry, or a McCain now pandering to the ethanol states.

Events like Earth day, Green issues of magazines, and yes, even solar powered bikinis raise awareness and shift public opinion. Educated voters see through the wall of propaganda designed to confuse and polarize.

60% of Americans believe that global warming has begun to affect the climate. That is enough to change a government, and we should take every Earth Day, Hang up your laundry day, take back your shopping cart day or whatever other day we can to encourage the small incremental changes in people that add up to an environmentally aware majority that understands the impacts of their actions and behavior.

The majority of the population doesn’t like listening to people who make them want to stick their head in the oven, they want to listen to people tell them how to live a better and happier life, which is why Oprah and Martha have more readers than Alex and Dave. We need that majority.

So lets all go get on our bikes on Earth Day, go have an organic beer and a local lunch, buy something at a small-mart and tell a few people about a neat new way to save a quart of water when you brush your teeth. Every small step helps.

Also at TreeHugger, a post on "The Big Five For Climate"

Back In February Dr. James Hanson, of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, gave a seminal speech to the National Press Club about the five most critical actions needed from the US Congress in response to the risk of impending climate catastrophe. Paraphrasing, Dr. Hansen said the needs are to:
1.) place a "moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants until we have the technology to capture and sequester the CO2";
2.) put a gradually rising price on emissions";
3.) mandate maximum achievable energy-efficiency standards on vehicles, buildings, appliances, and so on;
4.) ask the National Academy of Sciences to do a study on the risk of polar ice sheet collapse;
5.) Reform the way in which agencies of the Federal government communicate scientific characterization of risk and introduce effective campaign finance reform, so that special interests no longer have such a big influence on policy-makers.

It's not long, and it's well written. Go read "Why we can't wait." at The Nation.

MetaEfficient has a post on a UK skyscraper that is being renovated to incorporate solar panels on a significant part of the external surface (and a number of wind turbines on the roof).

The facade of this Manchester skyscraper (owned by CIS, an insurance company) was original covered with small mosaic tiles, but after only six months, they began to detach and fall. A solution was needed, and a company called solarcentury came up with a clever idea replacing the failing tiles with solar cells.

Not only do the solar cells provide a weatherproof barrier, they also generate about 390kW of power for the building. In total, 7,244 Sharp 80W modules are used to cover the entire service tower (but apparently only 4898 of these modules are "live" the others are "dummy modules" — strange). The building also has 24 wind turbines on the roof, which provide 10% of the total power used by the building.

Robert at Entropy Production has a engineer's introduction to Organic Photovoltaics.

Photovoltaic cells are large-scale electronic junctions that absorb sunlight and generate electricity. The most typical type under commercial production today is the polycrystalline Silicon cell. It is typically a 300 μm thick wafer of polycrystalline silicon that has been doped to have an excess of positive electrical charge carriers (positive or p-type) on the back surface and an excess of negative charge carriers (negative or n-type) on the facing surface. [Reminder: a hole is a pseuodo-particle commonly seen in semiconductor materials that represents an absence of an electron and behaves very similarily to a positively charged electron.] An aluminium surface acts as the cathode while a transparent conductive oxide layer such as Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) is applied to the sunward face as the anode for the purposes of collecting holes and electrons, respectively. Commercial Silicon solar cells typically convert incoming solar radiation (insolation) to electricity with an external efficiency of 12 % under Air Mass 1.5 Standard illumination.

The cost of generating electricity via photovoltaics is generally not competitive with conventional thermal power generation except for sites isolated from the existing grid. The high cost of photovoltaics is generally not due to the low efficiency but rather the cost of semiconductor-grade silicon and the extensive material processing required. The high capital cost of photovoltaics also constitutes a barrier to their entry to market as they must be amortized over their forty year lifespan. One of the main hopes of organic photovoltaics is that they can be produced using simple, low-tech, low-energy input techniques.

In an effort to reduce the quantity of zone-refined material required for photovoltaic production a number of thin-film technologies have been proposed. These include: hydrogenated amorphous and microcrystalline silicon, Cadmium Telluride, Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS) and various organic semiconductor concepts. The organic photovoltaic family includes systems based on short-chain polymersand/or conjugated polymers paired with carbon fullerenes (also known as Buckeyballs) or dye-sensitized inorganic nanocrystals ...

Technology Review has an article on yet another sugarcane or corn derived biofuel - propane. While it is claimed to have much better energy density and EROEI than alternatives like ethanol, it still suffers from the same drawback as most other biofuels - you are burning food (and most likely depleting soil) when you use this fuel.

MIT researchers say they have developed an efficient chemical process for making propane from corn or sugarcane. They are incorporating a startup this week to commercialize the biopropane process, which they hope will find a place in the existing $21 billion U.S. market for the fuel.

While much of the attention on biofuels has focused on ethanol, the process developed by the MIT researchers produces propane, says Andrew Peterson, one of the graduate students who demonstrated the reactions. Propane is used in the United States for residential heating and some industrial processes, and to a limited extent as a liquid transportation fuel. "We're making a demonstrated fuel" for which a market and an infrastructure already exist, says Peterson, who works in the lab of chemical-engineering professor Jefferson Tester and has founded the startup C3 BioEnergy, based in Cambridge, MA, to commercialize the technology.

Propane, which is currently made from petroleum, has a higher energy density than ethanol, and although it is often used in its gaseous form, it's the cleanest-burning liquid fuel.

The C3 BioEnergy process depends on supercritical water--water at a very high temperature and pressure--which facilitates the reactions that turn a biological compound into propane. Peterson wouldn't reveal the starting compound, but he says that it is a product of the fermentation of the sugars found in corn or sugarcane. The reaction is driven by heat, requiring no catalysts. At supercritical temperature and pressure, Peterson says, "water does bizarre things. It becomes like a nonpolar solvent" and mixes with the organic compounds. Once the reaction has taken place, the solution is kept under high pressure and cooled to room temperature so that the propane comes out of the solution and floats to the top. "We've demonstrated that we can make propane," says Peterson. "Now we're trying to optimize the reaction rate and get it to a scalable stage."

Peterson says the biopropane conversion has a good energy balance: not much fossil fuel needs to be burned during production. The reaction does not require the input of a large amount of energy because the heat that's key to the biopropane conversion is recoverable using a heat exchanger, a device that transfers heat in and out of a fluid.

MonkeyGrinder has a post on the dubious wisdom of turning trees into fuel. I have a long time reader at Weyerhaeuser if SiteMeter is to be believed - care to make a comment ?

Project looks at trees for biofuel

Forest-product companies have gotten pretty good over the years at squeezing as much lumber, paper pulp and chemicals out of their trees as they can. Now they're hoping to squeeze one more useful product out of the trees and the lands they're grown on -- transportation fuel.

Federal Way-based Weyerhaeuser Co. said Thursday that it has signed an agreement with petroleum giant Chevron Corp. to study commercial production of biofuels from cellulose-based sources, including trees and other crops that might be grown on Weyerhaeuser lands.

I'm getting tired of making this point, but if trees become a feedstock for liquid fuel, it won't be long before our "reserves" are thinned considerably. Look what the jackasses said about corn ethanol. Wouldn't affect the price of food. Now Mexico is running out of corn tortillas - - but that's ok, right? Even funny?

So yeah, take down the trees. This is not a green solution, this is a chainsaw response to OPEC directed at our own forests. (Oh sure, first they come for the managed tree farms...)

MonkeyGrinder also had a post recently on "Peak peak oil modelling".

The issues around peak oil are interesting and important. I do what I do with the expectation that everyone engaged in this topic do the best they can, in the manner they are accustomed, be they scientist or artist to acknowledge and integrate this crisis in a positive way into our daily lives.

The work is noticed. And the notice of the work gets noticed, as when one A.M. Samsam Bakhtiari presents a paper where he states:

“Having seen the results of Prof. Guseo's GBM model, it became clear that the modeling phase of 'Peak Oil' had come to an abrupt close and that henceforward 'Peak Modeling'
should be shelved once and for all. Some experts still seem unconvinced as they continue to compare and weigh results generated by all types of available models --- as, for example, 'The Oil Drum' [3] and 'TrendLines' [4] websites.”

I’ll bet Prof. Guseo is a swell guy but just because the globe appears to have edged beyond the production peak doesn’t mean critical analysis stops.

So cheers to work completed, cheers for more to come, and cheers for open and transparent disagreements. The water level in the pool rises and everyone smartens up. Even us so-called doomer types.

Mark at the Wall Street Journal's energy blog has a post on Big Oil on Peak Oil.

Yesterday, Energy Roundup reported on a conference call in which energy bloggers got a chance to quiz American Petroleum Institute CEO Red Cavaney on a host of topics.

The most active participant in that call was Robert Rapier, a chemical engineer and blogger at The Oil Drum and his own R-Squared Energy Blog. He had solicited a bucketful of questions from readers of those blogs and filled the call’s awkward silences with them.

Today, the API posted the transcript of the call, and Rapier used it to write up his impressions of the conversation. The full post is well worth a read, but here are a couple of highlights.

Cavaney’s sanguine response about the question of peak oil got Rapier wondering about his own position on the question. Rapier believes there’s a 90% probability the peak will occur within the next 10 years. Cavaney, on the other hand, seems to be thinking more along the lines of 2044 at the earliest.

“So the question in my mind became, ‘Why is there such a divide, and how do we address it?‘” Rapier writes. “Because I don’t believe we can just afford to write off people who think peak is a long way off. We have to look at our position and their position and figure out what the problem is. If they believe they have credible information that we don’t have, they should share it. And where we have challenges to this data, or other criticisms (I meant to mention Cantarell, and the fact that the North Sea peaked prior to expectations) then they should be addressed and incorporated.”

In response to Rapier’s question about the environmental impact of squeezing oil from the Canadian tar sands, Cavaney said, essentially, that operators would continuously improve their method for tar-sands extraction, ostensibly improving the environmental impact as they go. Rapier was not impressed. “I am not so sure that ‘we will figure it out’ is [a] sufficient [answer],” he writes. “Sometimes we only figure it out after the environmental cost has been too high.”

The UK Daily Telegraph reckons Al Gore is assembling an election campaign team for the next US presidential election.

Friends of Al Gore have secretly started assembling a campaign team in preparation for the former American vice-president to make a fresh bid for the White House. Two members of Mr Gore's staff from his unsuccessful attempt in 2000 say they have been approached to see if they would be available to work with him again.

Mr Gore, President Bill Clinton's deputy, has said he wants to concentrate on publicising the need to combat climate change, a case made in his film, An Inconvenient Truth, which won him an Oscar this year.