Got Sludge?

Look at the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; the entire ecosystem may be imperiled for decades. Think we should stop off-shore exploration and drilling? On May 27^th, even as the big Gulf leak was plugging up, the President extended the moratorium on granting deepwater oil drilling permits by six months… but this cannot last. We’re heroin addicts, but the needle flows difficult oil… deepwater oil… messy and difficult to get oil. The easy fields are running out. Take a good look at this chart that appeared in the May 17^th DailyFinance.com: & nbsp;

Look very carefully at the projections for the immediate future. Notice how the aqua area (existing and mostly easy oil) almost disappears and how the very light blue and yellow (read: “really tough to get at” oil) get a whole lot fatter? And we’ve got to squeeze the nasty stuff from what’s left of the once “easy” fields.

“The chart's most striking feature is the rapid decline in existing capacities of large, mature fields such as Cantarell in Mexico, which after yielding 11 billion barrels of oil has seen production fall from 2 million barrels per day (BPD) to 770,000 BPD… Enhanced recovery technologies such as nitrogen injection are expected to pick up the slack by retrieving more oil from older fields, and unconventional sources such as Canadian oil-sand deposits will add modestly to global production. Industry sources estimate Canadian oil sands will produce 3 million barrels per day by 2015 -- a welcome quantity but small compared to the current global output of about 85 million BPD…To put those numbers in perspective, the U.S. consumes about 18.7 million BPD and produces 5.3 million BPD domestically.” DailyFinance.com.

Think about what disasters we will face in the future. Guess we should turn to coal instead, right? Clean coal! Clean only if you shove the toxic burn-off back into the ground for future generations to figure out how to “clean it.” Clean if you believe coal ash is a nice playful substance that doesn’t cause headaches, coughing, nosebleeds and maybe an early trip to the morgue. Safe if you ignore little side effects like the nasty flood in Tennessee – toxic waste everywhere – that made the sludge from the Exxon Valdez (which ran aground and dumped a mere 10.8 million gallons of crude in Prince Williams Sound, Alaska on March 24, 1989) look like a birdbath: “[On December 22, 2008] a 60-foot-tall dam broke at a holding pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston power plant in Roane County, Tenn., dumping more than a billion gallons of toxic coal ash onto a nearby community and into the Clinch and Emory rivers… The largest industrial waste spill in U.S. history, the ash slide covered more than half a square mile, damaging 42 residential properties, knocking one home completely off its foundation and rendering three others uninhabitable. It dumped some 2.66 million pounds of 10 toxic pollutants including arsenic, lead, and mercury into the nearby rivers -- more than all the surface-water discharges from all U.S. power plants in 2007 according to a recent analysis. "The pollutants in coal ash have been linked to health problems including cancer, liver damage, and nervous disorders." Grist.org (Dec 22,2009) What have we done to ourselves? How do we get out of this mess? When is this possible?

I'm Peter Dekom and energy addicts make lousy global citizens.