The Renewable Energy Future  

The LA Times has a look at the potential for wind and solar power in California.

Remember rain?

As Los Angeles creaks through its driest year on record and nervously awaits its next explosive wildfire, many wonder if global warming is already taking a toll. Nobody really knows; California has always had intermittent droughts, after all. But climate models predicted this situation. Changes in ocean temperatures and currents driven by things such as the melting of the Greenland ice shelf -- which is happening a lot faster than scientists expected -- will probably produce an even more desert-like climate in L.A.

Efforts to slow or halt that process have to include a switch to cleaner energy. Coal-burning power plants account for more than 40% of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions (the key culprit in global warming) while supplying half our electricity. California is already on the case. Last year, it passed a law that says 20% of the state's electricity must come from renewable sources by 2010, and 33% by 2020. Even the sluggish federal government is considering a crackdown, with the House energy bill requiring that 15% of U.S. power come from renewable sources by 2020.

Renewable power is fueled by clean sources such as wind, sunshine, geothermal currents and ocean tides or waves. Though its potential is vast, serious technological and policy problems must be overcome before it will play much of a part in our energy mix. Here's a look at the hopes and hurdles for the two renewable sources likely to have the biggest effect on California.

Beside the 580 Freeway east of the San Francisco Bay, the hills are alive with the sound of . . . whooshing. Wind turbines cover the hills for miles around, some like giant eggbeaters but most looking like big airplane propellers on poles, spinning in the near-constant breeze through Altamont Pass. When it was built starting in 1981, this was the largest wind farm in the world, and it cemented California's place as a pioneer in alternative energy. Now it's an outdated relic, relying on old-fashioned technology that produces less power and kills more birds than modern equipment.

Altamont Pass was intended to spark a wind-power revolution in California, but it fizzled, largely because of low natural-gas prices that made renewable energy sources noncompetitive. The state has other small wind farms in Tehachapi, Solano County and San Gorgonio Pass near Palm Springs, but they're operating well below their potential. Although the state gets 11% of its electricity from all renewable sources -- among the best records in the country -- that percentage hasn't risen in the last four years.

Meanwhile, Texas has leapfrogged past California in wind-power generation. Texas has a number of natural advantages, such as plenty of wide-open, windy spaces, as well as some policy advantages. Ironically, the state's traditional hostility to environmental and other regulation is in this case a plus, making it easier to get government approval for wind farms. Elsewhere, they often run into flak from NIMBYs, bird lovers and environmentalists who worry about power lines cutting through environmentally sensitive areas to reach remote, windy spots. In California, proposed transmission lines from coming wind farms in Tehachapi are under fire, as are lines that would carry electricity from planned solar power plants in the Mojave Desert. To the east, wealthy homeowners in Cape Cod may succeed in blocking the Cape Wind offshore wind farm in the Nantucket Sound, a project that threatens to spoil their ocean views.

Wind turbines, especially the older devices in California, can be buzz saws for birds and bats, though newer, taller turbines seem less deadly. In any case, a study by the National Academy of Sciences found no evidence that wind farms are decreasing bird populations; global warming is a much bigger threat to birds and bats than wind blades. Renewable power is too important to allow such projects to be derailed by narrow interest groups, which is why California and other states should take steps to streamline the approval process.

The United States gets less than 1% of its power from wind, but the industry is growing at about 25% a year worldwide and, thanks mainly toTexas, the U.S. is building wind farms faster than any other country. The potential is almost limitless. A 2005 study by researchers at Stanford University found that there is enough wind worldwide to satisfy global electricity demand seven times over, even if only 20% of the power could be captured. Such theoretical figures, of course, don't address the practicalities of cost, access and variability (the wind doesn't blow all the time, so wind power has to be supplemented by other sources) that make harvesting so much wind power nearly impossible.

Besides community opposition, a key roadblock is the lack of transmission lines. Wind power has a classic chicken-and-egg problem: Investors don't want to build wind farms unless lines already exist to connect them to urban centers, and utilities don't want to add lines until the turbines are spinning. California, Texas and two other states have come up with a solution. In April, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission signed off on a plan to shift part of the cost of power lines to California consumers. Utilities can charge higher rates to pay for building lines to high-wind areas; once generators connect to the lines, the cost will be recovered via access charges paid by the wind farms. This should become a national model.

The first to benefit from the new regulation will probably be a transmission project from Southern California Edison that is eventually expected to carry 4,500 megawatts from wind farms planned in Tehachapi -- that's the equivalent of two nuclear power plants the size of San Onofre, or enough to power 2.9 million homes. ...

Enough solar energy hits the Earth in an hour to supply all the world's electricity needs for a year. A 100-square-mile area of Nevada, if equipped with solar devices, could supply the U.S. with all the power it needs, according to the Energy Department. Again, such pronouncements don't address the real-world practicalities. But given that neither coal nor nuclear power is a practical solution to global warming, U.S. research priorities are badly skewed.

If roof-mounted solar panels aren't quite ready for prime time, concentrated solar power systems might soon become a hit. These are usually arrays of reflectors installed in sunny areas like the Mojave Desert, where they concentrate sunlight to heat a liquid that turns to steam and powers a turbine. The Solar Energy Generating Systems, an installation of nine solar arrays in the Mojave that puts out 354 megawatts, has been considered the biggest such plant in the world, but it won't be for long. Five more Mojave plants are scheduled to come on line in the next few years; together they will generate more than 1,000 megawatts. These projects have to jump many of the same transmission hurdles as wind farms.

The government can do many other small things to encourage renewable power, like raising subsidies and extending production tax credits, but they would have only an incremental effect. There is one genuine solution to climate change: Users of fossil fuels must pay the full cost of their environmental damage. A carbon tax would instantly create a thriving market for clean, alternative power sources such as wind and solar. The tax is almost an inevitability; the only question is, how much damage does global warming have to wreak before it becomes politically acceptable?

The Science Show on ABC Radio National has an interview with Jeremy Leggett - "Solar technology and alternatives ready to replace fossil fuels".

Robyn Williams: Let's talk about solar for a little while because they sometimes say that solar can give you...they mention fractions of percentages based on what the cost of fossil fuels might be or carbon capture or trading and all the rest of it. What could you expect, say, by 2010, 2020? What are the hopeful figures of what we might rely on in cloudy Australia and even cloudy Britain?

Jeremy Leggett: They get very substantial very quickly because you're scaling up compound a 50% growth rate over recent years, and some of the estimates of what will happen as a result of all these billions flowing into one of the fastest-growing markets in the world are very optimistic indeed. That said, the problem with global warming is there are not magic bullets and solar, great as it is as a technology, certainly isn't a magic bullet. We need explosive growth and many billions to be flowing into every member of the clean energy family, the renewables and energy efficiency, and that would really enable us to get on track. And this is why the European Union has set a target of 20% renewables by 2020 and why you need targets to map back from in the endgame.

So I think people are going to be amazed at how fast...I can't quantify it but I think people are going to be utterly amazed at how fast this stuff can go. If you think of it this way, in cloudy Britain Solarcentury could go out tomorrow with the right partners in the construction industry and put up buildings that are not only zero carbon but are actually net generators of electricity, putting electricity into the grid by mixing and matching the micro-renewable technologies. And we can do that today, we can do it in a matter of weeks, and more than half the emissions come directly and indirectly from buildings in the UK, it's bigger than transport. So you get a feel for what could be done if you just had the willingness to believe that stepping outside the box and really going for this as though it were a meaningful future, what could be achieved would be pretty damn impressive.

Robyn Williams: I've talked to a number of people in America, in San Diego where there's actually an Australian engineer leading the team, designing buildings which require zero air-conditioning energy input. Zero. You just design them better. And there is similar work going on, especially in Melbourne and to some extent in Sydney. Now, you add to that the fact that, as you say, you can equip these buildings to have solar panels that then put energy into the grid, but what I want to ask you is something that we've discussed before in terms of batteries, big batteries like the redox, which was kind of patented at the University of NSW, and solved the problem of intermittence in both wind power and solar and maybe to some extent wave power. In other words, it doesn't matter that it's intermittent, you've got the big battery that can store this stuff and make it available as power [finger snap] like that.

Jeremy Leggett: Basically there's a great wave of innovation and all these technologies coming down the track at us, and plenty of developments in battery technology. There's no doubt that the storage nut will be cracked in a way that's very impressive in the years ahead, but in the short-term, as we look at the challenges now, we're less interested in batteries. We really want to get into the mainstream of housing, construction of industrial buildings. And if you look at the UK, there are many ways in which you can use the grid as a battery, even the national grid, you just plug in and pump out solar electricity during the day and take in normal electricity at night, and do the sums at the end of the year. And of course I've lived in a house where we did the sums and we generated more than we used, with constant occupancy and very cold chardonnay.

There are more innovative ways of doing this as well, and if you go to the little town of Woking in Britain there's a wonderful example there. They have micro-grids. Ever since 1990 they've been building up micro-grids in housing estates, and the power is coming primarily from combined heat and power, and yes, this is gas but very efficient use of fossil fuels. Could be biomass with current technology but it happens to be gas. And so they're generating heat and electricity in the winter when solar isn't at its best, and in the summer they don't need so much heat or electricity generation, but the electricity generation load can be taken by solar photovoltaics. So they're mixing and matching solar and gas combined heat and power, and that little borough has managed to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by more than 70% on 1990 levels. Shows what can be done.

So the micro-grids are a form of battery because the load is always matched within them. They're connected to the national grid, so if things do go pear shaped you can always turn the tap and in comes the electricity from the national grid, but they hardly have ever needed to use national grid electricity. It's a wonderful story and you sort of think to yourself, why aren't other towns copying that in Britain? Not easy to come up with an answer. Of course London is trying. The guy who dreamt all this up for Woking has been hired by our mayor in London who definitely gets it about all this stuff, Ken Livingstone, and said, 'Listen son, if you can do that for 80,000 people in Woking, you can jolly well do it for eight million in London.' Well, he's finding it a bit more difficult for some reason!

But the point is...the carbon arithmetic is such that we know we have to essentially get out of fossil fuels. We've got to have a managed withdrawal, a strategic withdrawal over a period of decades from all of them because we've just got such a small carbon budget left. If the climate scientists are right (and who knows, there's a strong school of thought that they've actually underestimated the problem because of the unquantifiable feedbacks in the climate system), we've just got a budget of perhaps, middle guess in the latest IPCC report, of about 300 billion tonnes of carbon in the budget that we can afford to burn if we're not to go above this...I'm sure many people in this audience know all this stuff, but 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere many scientists believe is a threshold we really don't want to go above. And to stay below that, that's really a managed withdrawal from fossil fuels.

Grist has a group of book reviews from Bill McKibben, including Bjorn Lomborg's "Cool It".

During the last year, momentum has finally begun to build for taking action against global warming by putting limits on carbon emissions and then reducing them. Driven by ever-more-dire scientific reports, Congress has, for the first time, begun debating ambitious targets for carbon reduction. Al Gore, in his recent Live Earth concerts, announced that he will work to see an international treaty signed by the end of 2009. Even President Bush has recently reversed his previous opposition and summoned the leaders of all the top carbon-emitting countries to a series of conferences designed to yield some form of limits on CO2.

The authors of the first two books under review have some doubts about a strategy that emphasizes limits on carbon emissions, Lomborg for economic reasons and Nordhaus and Shellenberger for political ones. Since any transition away from fossil fuel is likely to be the dominant global project of the first half of the twenty-first century, it's worth taking those qualms seriously.

Cool ItIn his earlier book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish statistician, attacked the scientific establishment on a number of topics, including global warming, and concluded that things were generally improving here on earth. The book was warmly received on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, but most scientists were unimpressed. Scientific American published scathing rebuttals from leading researchers, and its editor concluded in a note to readers that "in its purpose of describing the real state of the world, the book is a failure." A review in Nature compared it to "bad term papers," and called it heavily reliant on secondary sources and "at times ... fictional." E.O. Wilson, who has over the years been attacked by the left (for sociobiology) and the right (for his work on nature conservation), and usually responded only with a bemused detachment, sent Lomborg a public note that called his book a "sordid mess." Lomborg replied to all of this vigorously and at great length,1 and then went on, with the help of The Economist magazine, to convene a "dream team" of eight economists including three Nobel laureates and ask them to consider the costs and benefits of dealing with various world problems. According to his panel, dealing with malaria ranked higher than controlling carbon emissions, though again some observers felt the panel had been stacked and one of the economists who took part told reporters that "climate change was set up to fail." Lomborg later conducted a similar exercise with "youth leaders" and with ambassadors to the United Nations, including the former U.S. emissary John Bolton, with similar results.

In his new book, Cool It, Lomborg begins by saying that the consensus scientific position on climate change -- that we face a rise in temperature of about five degrees Fahrenheit by century's end -- is correct, but that it's not that big a deal. "Many other issues are much more important than global warming." In fact, he argues, it would be a great mistake either to impose stiff caps on carbon or to spend large sums of money -- he mentions $25 billion worldwide annually on R&D as an upper bound -- trying to dramatically reduce emissions because global warming won't be all that bad. The effort to cut emissions won't work very well, and we could better spend the money on other projects like giving out bed nets to prevent malaria.

Lomborg casts himself as the voice of reason in this debate, contending with well-meaning but woolly-headed scientists, bureaucrats, environmentalists, politicians, and reporters. I got a preview of some of these arguments in May when we engaged in a dialogue at Middlebury College in Vermont2; they struck me then, and strike me now in written form, as tendentious and partisan in particularly narrow ways. Lomborg has appeared regularly on right-wing radio and TV programs, and been summoned to offer helpful testimony by, for instance, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, famous for his claim that global warming is a hoax. That Lomborg disagrees with him and finds much of the scientific analysis of global warming accurate doesn't matter to Inhofe; for his purposes, it is sufficient that Lomborg opposes doing much of anything about it.

But Lomborg's actual arguments turn out to be weak, a farrago of straw men and carefully selected, shopworn data that holds up poorly in light of the most recent research, both scientific and economic. He calculates at great length, for instance, his claim that the decline in the number of people dying from cold weather will outweigh the increase in the number of people dying from the heat, leading him to the genial conclusion that a main effect of global warming may be that "we just notice people wearing slightly fewer layers of winter clothes on a winter's evening." But in April 2007, Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the panel of experts whose scientific data he prefers to cite, released a report showing, among many other things, that fewer deaths from cold exposure "will be outweighed by the negative health effects of rising temperatures world-wide, especially in developing countries."

In fact, the IPCC poses a serious problem for Lomborg. He accepts this international conclave of scientists and other experts early on in his book as the arbiter of fact on questions of global warming.3 Unfortunately for Lomborg, just as he was wrapping up this book the IPCC published, quite apart from the report of its April panel, its most recent five-year update on the economics and engineering of climate change solutions, which undercuts his main argument.

Consider Lomborg's central idea that we can't do much about global warming, and that anything we do attempt will be outrageously expensive. Lomborg bases his analyses on studies of the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated a decade ago. He argues that that protocol would make only the slightest dent during this century in how much the planet warms. This is a debater's point to begin with -- the Kyoto Protocol was only supposed to last through 2012; everyone knew it was at best a first step, and this first step was further weakened after attacks from conservative economists claiming that it would bankrupt the earth (attacks that kept the U.S. from ever signing on).

As it turns out, they were almost certainly wrong. Working Group III of the IPCC, which reported at the beginning of May, said at great length that in fact it was technically feasible to reduce emissions to the point where temperature rise could be held below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius -- the point where many climate scientists now believe global warming may turn from a miserable problem into a catastrophe. As the IPCC said:

Both bottom-up and top-down studies indicate that there is substantial economic potential for the mitigation of global GHG emissions over the coming decades, that could offset the projected growth of global emissions or reduce emissions below current levels.

The technologies cited as examples are numerous and varied, and reflect the immense amount of research into alternatives that has been conducted in the decade since Lomborg's estimates based on Kyoto data. They include hybrid cars, combined heat and power plants, better lighting, improved crop-plowing techniques, better forestry, higher-efficiency aircraft, and tidal energy, among others. These reflect precisely the kinds of human ingenuity that Lomborg says he wants to encourage, and they undermine the idea that we can't possibly get emissions under control. By contrast, the report shows that following the Lomborg path -- which essentially calls for some more funding for research and no governmental action -- will see carbon emissions rise as much as 90 percent worldwide by 2030. The IPCC conclusions, it should be said, were compiled by 168 lead authors, 84 contributing authors, and 485 expert peer reviewers, spanning a huge variety of relevant disciplines. This seems to me more convincing than Lomborg's "dream team" of eight economists gathered for a few days in Copenhagen.

Moreover, the IPCC team made it clear in their May report that it was not only feasible to make these changes but economically possible as well. They calculated that if we made this energy transition, the economy would grow very slightly more slowly than before -- about 0.12 percent more slowly annually, or 3 percent total by 2030. In other words, our children would have to wait until Thanksgiving 2030 to be as rich as they would otherwise have been on New Year's Day of that year.

This seems to me very good news -- I've long worried that the cost would be substantially higher. But it also makes a good deal of sense. Remember how, say, the auto industry warned that first seatbelts and then airbags would cripple them economically? As soon as the government mandated their use, manufacturers figured out how to make them more cheaply and easily than we would have guessed. We've seen the same results with other pollutants.

The IPCC report, to put it bluntly, eviscerates Lomborg's argument; maybe that's why he devotes but a single paragraph to it in the book, scoffing at "several commentators" who called the estimated reduction of 3 percent by 2030 "negligible." But though Lomborg will doubtless eventually produce a long disquisition on why he knows better than the 737 experts collaborating on the IPCC project, his bluff has been called. Consider the reaction of his old colleagues at The Economist, which only a few short years ago was underwriting his Copenhagen Consensus work. "Just as mankind caused the problem," the editors said, "so mankind can stop it -- and at a reasonable cost." The 0.12 percent a year drag on GDP? "The world would barely notice such figures," said the magazine, hardly noted for its casual attitude about economic growth.

Doubtless scientists and economists will spend many hours working their way through Cool It, flagging the distortions and half-truths as they did with Lomborg's earlier book. In fact, though, its real political intent soon becomes clear, which is to try to paint those who wish to control carbon emissions as well-meaning fools who will inadvertently block improvements in the life of the poor. Just ask yourself this question: Why has Lomborg decided to compare the efficacy of (largely theoretical) funding to stop global warming with his other priorities, like fighting malaria or ensuring clean water? If fighting malaria was his real goal, he could as easily have asked the question: Why don't we divert to it some of the (large and nontheoretical) sums spent on, say, the military? The answer he gave when I asked this question at our dialogue was that he thought military spending was bad and that therefore it made more sense to compare global warming dollars with other "good" spending. But of course this makes less sense. If he thought that money spent for the military was doing damage, then he could kill two birds with one stone by diverting some of it to his other projects. Proposing that, though, would lose him much of the right-wing support that made his earlier book a best seller -- he'd no longer be able to count on even The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Crikey had some interesting reader letters yesterday, from ex WA Premier Peter Dowding about September 11 and from an observant parent who noticed that John Howard's free internet blocker software doesn't just block porn sites, it blocks sites critical of the government. I should download it and see if I made the list (unlikely but you never know until you try)...

Peter Dowding on other significant September 11s:

Former WA Premier Peter Dowding writes: Re. "A reflection on the 9/11 anniversary" (11 September, item 23). I am reminded that whilst the world appropriately remembers the dead in the twin towers horror, the numbers of dead are miniscule compared to the hundreds of thousands of dead in the recent past in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon and many other places- killed with arms supplied and distributed (and in many cases used) by the US. Democracynow.org has also reminded us that there were these events on past 11 September: 11 September 1973, US-backed Pinochet forces rose to power in Chile to overthrow the democratically-elected Salvador Allende. Allende died in the presidential palace; On 11 September 1990, American anthropologist Myrna Mack was murdered by US-backed Guateleman security forces; On 9/11 1993, in the midst of the US-backed coup in Haiti, Antoine Azenery was dragged out of a church by coup forces and murdered in broad-daylight. He had been commemorating a massacre of parishioners at the Saint John Boscoe church that had occurred five years earlier on 11 September, 1988. Father Jean Bertrand Aristide had narrowly escaped death in that attack. He later became president of Haiti; On 11 September, 1977 in South Africa Steve Biko founder of the black consciousness movement was being beaten in the back of a van by apartheid forces. He died in the early morning hours of 12 September, 1977. Which really goes to show that 11 September should be a day of soul searching for the whole world, not a day to engage in breast beating only about the undoubtedly dreadful Al-Qaeda.

Evil and seditious websites:

Marita Schrader writes: Re. "The PM has 16,050 MySpace friends, actually, make that 9" (Friday, item 19). Having a curious 15-year-old boy in the house, I thought it prudent to download the much touted Integard online filter from australia.gov.au. I haven't had a problem with it until today I tried to click on the MySpace hyperlink in Mark Bahnisch's story in Crikey on Friday today a satirical site under the name of John Howard. Much to my surprise (tongue in cheek) the site was blocked by Integard! It cited Adult and Illegal content. Gets me thinking what else the government's filter will block. I'm off to find out whatever sites the government finds evil and seditious. I'll start with Britney!

Energy Bulletin notes that F William Engdahl has converted from peak oil believer to peak oil skeptic, announcing his belief in the abiotic oil theory. Engdahl is one of the better tinfoil merchants around, so I'm not entirely surprised that he has joined the majority of the conspiracy theory world in labelling peak oil a scam - besides his classic work on the history of the oil industry "A Century Of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order" (my usual warnings about purveyors of "international bankers" theories apply, especially as he is German, and shares the same surname as the organiser of the post-war fascist internationals for that matter), some of Engdahl's other theories include: the oil industry conspiracy against nuclear power, Is bird flu a Pentagon hoax ?, Hunting Asian Tigers: Washington and the 1997-98 Asia Shock and Another agenda behind ethanol. How much is true ? I haven't got the foggiest...

The good news is that panic scenarios about the world running out of oil anytime soon are wrong. The bad news is that the price of oil is going to continue to rise. Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Dick Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.

On a personal note, I’ve researched questions of petroleum, since the first oil shocks of the 1970’s. I was intrigued in 2003 with something called Peak Oil theory. It seemed to explain the otherwise inexplicable decision by Washington to risk all in a military move on Iraq.

Peak Oil advocates, led by former BP geologist Colin Campbell, and Texas banker Matt Simmons, argued that the world faced a new crisis, an end to cheap oil, or Absolute Peak Oil, perhaps by 2012, perhaps by 2007. Oil was supposedly on its last drops. They pointed to our soaring gasoline and oil prices, to the declines in output of North Sea and Alaska and other fields as proof they were right.

According to Campbell, the fact that no new North Sea-size fields had been discovered since the North Sea in the late 1960’s was proof. He reportedly managed to convince the International Energy Agency and the Swedish government. That, however, does not prove him correct.

Intellectual fossils?

The Peak Oil school rests its theory on conventional Western geology textbooks, most by American or British geologists, which claim oil is a ‘fossil fuel,’ a biological residue or detritus of either fossilized dinosaur remains or perhaps algae, hence a product in finite supply. Biological origin is central to Peak Oil theory, used to explain why oil is only found in certain parts of the world where it was geologically trapped millions of years ago. That would mean that, say, dead dinosaur remains became compressed and over tens of millions of years fossilized and trapped in underground reservoirs perhaps 4-6,000 feet below the surface of the earth. In rare cases, so goes the theory, huge amounts of biological matter should have been trapped in rock formations in the shallower ocean offshore as in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea or Gulf of Guinea. Geology should be only about figuring out where these pockets in the layers of the earth , called reservoirs, lie within certain sedimentary basins.

An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950’s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims conventional American biological origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is un-provable. They point to the fact that western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only to then find more, lots more.

Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory. The emergence of Russia and prior of the USSR as the world’s largest oil producer and natural gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.

Necessity: the mother of invention

In the 1950’s the Soviet Union faced ‘Iron Curtain’ isolation from the West. The Cold War was in high gear. Russia had little oil to fuel its economy. Finding sufficient oil indigenously was a national security priority of the highest order.

Scientists at the Institute of the Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences began a fundamental inquiry in the late 1940’s: where does oil come from?

In 1956, Prof. Vladimir Porfir’yev announced their conclusions: ‘Crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depths.’ The Soviet geologists had turned Western orthodox geology on its head. They called their theory of oil origin the ‘a-biotic’ theory—non-biological—to distinguish from the Western biological theory of origins.

If they were right, oil supply on earth would be limited only by the amount of hydrocarbon constituents present deep in the earth at the time of the earth’s formation. Availability of oil would depend only on technology to drill ultra-deep wells and explore into the earth’s inner regions. They also realized old fields could be revived to continue producing, so called self-replentishing fields. They argued that oil is formed deep in the earth, formed in conditions of very high temperature and very high pressure, like that required for diamonds to form. ‘Oil is a primordial material of deep origin which is transported at high pressure via ‘cold’ eruptive processes into the crust of the earth,’ Porfir’yev stated. His team dismissed the idea that oil is was biological residue of plant and animal fossil remains as a hoax designed to perpetuate the myth of limited supply.

Defying conventional geology

That radically different Russian and Ukrainian scientific approach to the discovery of oil allowed the USSR to develop huge gas and oil discoveries in regions previously judged unsuitable, according to Western geological exploration theories, for presence of oil. The new petroleum theory was used in the early 1990’s, well after the dissolution of the USSR, to drill for oil and gas in a region believed for more than forty-five years, to be geologically barren—the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the region between Russia and Ukraine.

Following their a-biotic or non-fossil theory of the deep origins of petroleum, the Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geophysicists and chemists began with a detailed analysis of the tectonic history and geological structure of the crystalline basement of the Dnieper-Donets Basin. After a tectonic and deep structural analysis of the area, they made geophysical and geochemical investigations.

A total of sixty one wells were drilled, of which thirty seven were commercially productive, an extremely impressive exploration success rate of almost sixty percent. The size of the field discovered compared with the North Slope of Alaska. By contrast, US wildcat drilling was considered successful with a ten percent success rate. Nine of ten wells are typically “dry holes.”

That Russian geophysics experience in finding oil and gas was tightly wrapped in the usual Soviet veil of state security during the Cold War era, and went largely unknown to Western geophysicists, who continued to teach fossil origins and, hence, the severe physical limits of petroleum. Slowly it began to dawn on some strategists in and around the Pentagon well after the 2003 Iraq war, that the Russian geophysicists might be on to something of profound strategic importance.

If Russia had the scientific know-how and Western geology not, Russia possessed a strategic trump card of staggering geopolitical import. It was not surprising that Washington would go about erecting a “wall of steel”—a network of military bases and ballistic anti-missile shields around Russia, to cut her pipeline and port links to western Europe, China and the rest of Eurasia. Halford Mackinder’s worst nightmare--a cooperative convergence of mutual interests of the major states of Eurasia, born of necessity and need for oil to fuel economic growth--was emerging. Ironically, it was the blatant US grab for the vast oil riches of Iraq and, potentially, of Iran, that catalyzed closer cooperation between traditional Eurasian foes, China and Russia , and a growing realization in western Europe that their options too were narrowing. ...

If the theory is true, I'm not entirely sure why everyone else couldn't just dig very deep wells as well and choke up the atmosphere with vast amounts of carbon dioxide from all the oil found. Admittedly it would wreak havoc on Exxon and co's share prices and thus be considered a bad thing by the US State Department and the like, but surely that would just get the war hawks on board the clean tech bandwagon (and I'm not talking about that small minority like James Woolsey and James Schlesinger who already are).

One data point of interest - the world's deepest oil well was was drilled at Sakhalin Island by Exxon's Russian subsidiary back in May.



Links:

* Dave Roberts - 'The privatization of responsibility'
* Fast Company - Working With the Enemy. Yet another view on the attempted greening of Walmart.
* Yahoo Tech - The World's Fastest Way to Kill Yourself. Electric motorcycles are fast - watch the video.
* SMH - The Second Coming Of Al Gore
* SMH - Xstrata Coal's offer too good to refuse. Anvil Hill gets a bigger backer.
* WorldChanging - No More Coal?
* TreeHugger - Mexican President Says No To Biofuels Law
* The Mogambo Guru - A Peek at the Peak Oil Problem
* Index Research - Iraq Oil Reality vs the NY Times
* SMH - Australian Pull-out No Problem: Iraq Envoy
* The Independent - Iraq to review legal status of private security companies
* Daily Kos - The Iraq Blackwater Test
* Huffington Post - Blackwater Banned In Iraq; See The Short Film That Exposes These War Profiteers
* Wesley Clark - The Next War
* AP - General Abizaid: World Could Abide Nuclear Iran
* Mother Jones - Homeland Security High School. Words fail me.
* Huffington Post - Researchers Say Many Languages Are Dying. What Wade Davis calls "ethnocide". Australia tops the list.
* National Geographic - Enduring Voices