Our World and Everything in It

The U.S. has an overabundant supply of natural gas. We’re being told that it’s a fuel for the future. Other countries are creating cars that run on natural gas and the U.S. is losing out. Are we?

I heard on ABC news the other day that natural gas is going up 22% this winter when we use the stuff to heat our homes. Looking around at some of the country’s newspapers it appears the increase may be higher. Parts of Pennsylvania expect over a 33% increase, and Frankfurt, Kentucky claims that natural gas is up 70% from last year. If you’re wondering why natural gas is going up when it’s oil that’s high not the gas, and oil never seemed to affect the price of natural gas before, it’s because of demand.

So here we are again with a fossil fuel that has to be extracted, and boy are we devastating some beautiful places in America extracting the stuff, while demand continues to rise so the costs are getting out of hand no differently than oil. And we’re still screaming for offshore drilling for more oil? This should be a big kick in the pants to get away from fossil fuel forever. What is it we’re not getting? 

Natural gas prices weren’t all that bad until oil got so outrageously expensive. Industries that can either use oil or natural gas have switched to gas. Meanwhile, we started using more natural gas to produce electricity. Natural gas consumption always used to be predominantly in the winter months, for heating purposes, now because of industry and demand for electricity for A/C, natural gas prices aren’t fluctuating cyclically. They’re just plain going up and up.

Just dandy huh? We need to get off this merry go round and realize that in the future we must adapt to a potpourri of energy sources, like some wind, some solar, some geothermal, etc., or we’re just going to keep hitting the same demand wall.

Calling for the U.S. to move solely to electricity may sound like we’re putting all our eggs in one basket too but electricity is the one source of power that appears to know no bounds for it’s generation. All types of things can be converted to electricity. With the advent of the hydrogen fuel cell and PEM’s, electricity will have even more ways to keep us in power in the future.

I knew what my blog was going to be today when I caught the new Exxon Mobil advertisement for the ENVIRONMENT over the weekend. I stopped dead in my tracks. I almost fell over. Of course no one around me understood all the fuss I made. We’re-in-the-business-of-oil-not-the-environment-Exxon Mobil was publicly announcing investment in a cleaner future. Unbelievable!

I immediately thought of the Rockefeller’s public announcement to Exxon Mobil to contribute to alternative energy sources for the environment. It was a little over a month ago. Here it is, a short time later and a commercial appears on TV from Exxon Mobil relative to technological advances to help the environment. It was a prime spot on CNN too. I heard something about cars of the future running on something other than gas. To tell the truth I was so stunned that Exxon had this commercial out, I had to go to Exxon’s website to see for myself.

It was a pretty easy presentation of facts done with videos. The videos are just enough to let everyone know Exxon is working for the environment although 2 presentations out of 3 are for same ole, same ole oil and natural gas.  The first video is about drilling for oil and how new technology will allow them to drill less wells. Not such a good point. The second is about compressing natural gas. Natural gas may burn clean but the way natural gas drilling takes a toll on the surrounding area is devastating. The 3^rd presentation is the charm. It’s about lithium ion batteries and their use in hybrid cars of the future. This is very good news.

So Exxon Mobil is giving up the attitude problem and finally investing in the environment. Hopefully it’s more than the other oil companies. It always sounds good that they are investing millions, but we have to remember these companies make profits in the billions so the percentages invested for the environment are ridiculously low. In mid-March I did a blog about the top oil companies and what they actually did contribute to the environment and Exxon got a big fat zero. So things are looking up from there.

http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2008/04/30/rockefellers-pressure-exxon-mobil-to-invest-in-alternative-energy/

http://www.media.exxonmobil.com/media/microsite/index1.html

http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/2008/03/18/how-much-does-big-oil-really-invest-in-alternative-energy/

We’re hearing a lot lately about drilling for oil. There are people so naive to think that by drilling in the Arctic or anywhere else we will see an instantaneous reduction in prices at the pump. Anyone with any street smarts should know that an instant price reduction like that means that the whole scenario about oil and availability is a fabrication. Some people evidently think that drilling for oil is like sticking a straw in a glass of chocolate milk when in reality the process of extraction is getting tougher and more expensive as the world’s oil supplies get more elusive.

A quote from a National Geographic article from 4 years ago states:

Others think that by curbing our oil use and developing sustainable alternatives now, we can delay the peak and wean ourselves more easily when the inevitable happens. There are many things you can do to ease the transition, says Alfred Cavallo, an energy consultant in Princeton, New Jersey. And you can have a very nice life on a sustainable system. Of course, not everyone is going to be driving SUVs.

 

This was the idea in 2004, yet in 2008, people in the U.S., some of the biggest fossil fuel hogs in the world are still arguing about global warming, and just curtailing the movement to replace fossil fuels with clean alternative energy sources once and for all.  In 2002, George Bush even admitted that global warming is man made and exacerbated by the fossil fuel industry. Yet the argument against environmentalism continues. Think how far ahead we could have been by now, and how many people could have had new employment with progressive companies in green business.

The Bush/Cheney administration has loosed so many environmental laws and/or ignored them that many citizens in many states are experiencing the result of companies like Halliburton devastating the terrain in search of natural gas and/or oil. Think of humans as giant mosquitoes. We’ve bit the earth in search of oil like blood over 500,000 times. The U.S. alone has approx. 500,000 abandoned/operating mines also. We’re abusing the earth plain and simple. Now we want to keep using coal fired plants and forcing the resulting CO2 emissions from them deep into the earth. Forcing gas into the earth has a bad sound to it, and is not an exact science yet. We don’t know what will happen.

When we think of environment we immediately think of air and water, but the earth is taking an awful hit too. Before we even think to drill more, more, more, we need to gage how much fossil fuel we really need, not what we currently, hungrily devour. And in order to do that we need to establish a baseline, which can’t be done until we restrict all extraneous usage and lower speed limits, car pool, change light bulbs, use a clothesline, shut off our techie equipment–you know, the easy stuff. It’s the least we can do.

Until we’ve done our part, we shouldn’t expect poor Mother Earth to keep doing hers to the extreme. Our world is sick and could use some TLC. Conserve first, drill later if at all.

.http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/does_the_us_lack_sufficient_oil_refining.html

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0406/feature5/fulltext.html

Many of us had lovely ash trees in our yard once upon a time, and there are many parks around Michigan that have yet to clear out all of the ash trees that died from the ash borer, a simple bug.
Well, there are a lot more bugs to come and we can thank global warming for it.

Colorado is bearing the brunt of an increase in bark beetle bugs that have killed millions of acres of lodge pole pines. These pines are exactly what their name describes, tall, tall trees pine trees whose needled branches are disproportionately at the top third of the entire trunk, think Q-tip. The bottom portion of the trunk is a straight shot of wood, used to build log lodges.

An article on abcnews.com stated 1.5 million acres are already wiped out and all of the lodge pole pines may be gone in 3 to 5 years. It said the infestation was first noticed in 1996. What the heck takes so long for our agencies to act on anything? I lost my ash tree, and the whole time Bayer brand systemic spray would have worked. By time I applied anything to my tree, it was already too late. I know what I found for news before that. Our state officials said nothing worked against the ash borer…so people failed to act. State officials were wrong!

Colorado officials said, “the infestation was concentrated in five northern Colorado counties straddling the Continental Divide and has reached southern Wyoming.” The amount of trees taken by the beetles increased 1500 percent last year and “forest officials attributed the spread of the beetle to warm winters and drought. Susan Gray, group leader for forest health management with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Region, said only 20-below-zero temperatures for a sustained period can kill the beetles.” Keep an eye on your spruce trees! Spruce and aspen pines are susceptible to the beetle also.

To add insult to injury relative to our trees and forests, the Bush administration looks to weaken the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. This rule protects millions of acres of trees in Idaho against the oil, natural gas, timer, and mining industries. According to Earthjustice, Idaho contains more unspoiled wild forest than any state outside Alaska, providing the last intact forest habitat for countless fish, wildlife, and plant species. These areas are enjoyed by hunters, anglers, hikers, and all who treasure the backcountry. Earthjustice disclosed why Bush is pushing the Roadless Rule aside:

The administration’s proposal will open the door to logging millions of pristine acres, risk dangerous toxic contamination from mining, degrade clean fish-bearing streams and important wildlife habitat, and fail to live up to the public’s overwhelming desire to protect all of these areas for future generations.

This forest giveaway could lead to 545 million tons of phosphate being mined on nearly 8,000 unspoiled acres near Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. Any increase in phosphate mining would worsen the already serious problem of selenium poisoning in local streams and aquifers. Selenium is an extremely dangerous contaminant known to cause birth defects, which bio-accumulates in the food web — persisting for centuries after entering the environment.

Read more about this and sign a petition to stop President Bush before he weakens the Roadless Rule even more. We’re already losing trees and a lot of our landscape from extreme weather, i.e., floods, fires, tornadoes, and now bugs. Does the Bush administration have a clue about conservation? Do they even care? Trees protect us from the sun, and take CO2 out of the air for Pete’s sake, and the powers that be want to give them away to big money.

About the pine beetle infestation:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=4133205

More about Bush sidestepping the Roadless Rule: http://www.earthjustice.org/our_work/campaigns/roadless_rule.html
Sign the petition to save our national forests: http://action.earthjustice.org/campaign/roadless_ID_0308
 

Back in February before the flu bug got me I read an article in the Detroit Free Press called “Beneath state: A warming solution, Friday, February 22, 2008, Section A, by Tina Lam, about Michigan being the first state to inject CO2 into the earth somewhere around Gaylord. The article said Michigan’s bedrock is perfect for storing the CO2 between layers of the rock. It also said 3 times that it is experimental.

The well head is about 8 feet high with all type of sensors and an underground pipe that sends the CO2 from DTE’s Turtle Creak natural gas plant to the well. The article said CO2 is a by-product of natural gas extracted from underground. The injection process will stop by the end of this month (March).  The well will hold 10,000 tons of CO2.  There are many of these wells that were already used for oil and gas, some 55,000 of them in Michigan! Who knew? And there’s a push to drill for more oil in the lakes? It looks like someone has been busy at it all along. How many wells are there like this in the country? Add over 500,000 abandoned mines too and it truly is a “Swiss Cheese Nation” as I called it before. The term “rape and pillage” comes to mind. Some of these wells are a mile deep. Ouch.

The gas is well below 3,000 feet of any layer from which drinking water comes and spokesman John Austerberry said the CO2 is harmless, that “even if it somehow escaped, it wouldn’t harm anyone.”
Anybody remember a blog I did with the title: “CO2 Buildup Causes Lake to Explode?” Might want to read that again. http://www.blogsmonroe.com/world/?p=226. It’s the first thing I thought about.

American and European opinion differed greatly on that explosion in Africa’s Lake Nios in Cameroon.  It happened in 1986. The lake exploded from 1.6 million tons of CO2 gas being released that had settled on the bottom. Over 1700 people were asphyxiated up to 16 miles away along with all their livestock, some 3000 head of cattle. I’m thinking about the “experimental” word again and lucky us.

I got my heating bill the other day, was going to blog about it, and have lost it. Does that mean I don’t have to pay it? I know. It was higher and I figure everyone else is suffering much, much worse. My bill combined with $78.00 for electric was $303.00, I think. That’s what they’re getting this month anyway, since I’ve lost the bill. I looked at my bill enough and compared it to last month’s bill that it’s pretty much memorized. There was a funny charge on there, one from 2005, and another just like it for 2006. They were small, like $1.46 or something but the 2006 charge wasn’t on last month’s bill. Are we going to find one for 2007 on the next? I don’t like when things just appear on my bill that weren’t there before.  It looks like something was passed back in 2004 or sooner that is just now showing up. Sneaky.

The total bill was $60.00 higher than last month, granted it has been cold, but we just had January thaw 3 weeks early. It lasted long enough for my Jack in the Pulpit plants to grow large and green in my flowerbeds. We found fruit trees budding. I think we just stopped paying attention to our habits relative to our bigger bill. Slip up a little and it shows big. We have a small gas wall unit in the back of the house. The main furnace and the wall unit should never be turned up at the same time. Since this last bill, if I’m home and it’s sunny, the main furnace gets shut off for at least 2 hours in the afternoon. The reason? I have twelve ft. of windows across my living room facing south, and the tree out front is a Maple, no leaves. If I open the blinds, I can feel the heat. I say utilize that sunshine, solar panels or not. I also turn the heat down when I use the oven. Don’t waste that toasty warmth when dinner is done; open the oven door until it cools down. Make sure and block drafts under doors. Clothes drapes and blinds at night or windy days. Reverse the blades on your overhead fans to keep heat from lingering around the ceiling.

Pay attention. I didn’t, and it showed up on my bill, and quickly. Take advantage of everything you can to lower your bill. Some energy companies are offering a choice to consumers to lock in a low rate over a few years. I just received an offer from IGS Energy to lock in a rate of 0.849 per CCF. CCF is the per unit cost of your gas bill.  Look at your bill. It should be way beyond point anything right now, more like 2.80. Ouch! I would say any other source that can guarantee a year round price of anything 0.9 or lower is a really good deal. I presently have MxEnergy and have one more year at 0.851 CCF. MichCon charges me a fee of course, something like 37.00 of my $225.00 gas bill went for carrier costs, but hey my bill is still lower than most. IGS is presently offering the lowest rate. If you sign up with MxEnergy now the cost per unit will be 1.069. Realize that the locked in price is year round. It will be above the going per unit rate for gas in the summer. That is why it’s important to keep that per unit cost under 0.9. If you pay too much for gas in the summer it offsets your savings for gas in the winter, the same for carrier charges. But, I think it’s a safe bet to say that over the duration of the next 3 years that 0.849 CCF will beat anything out there for wintertime rates.

I’ll  blog next month when I find out if paying attention pays off. Considering how cold this past week has been, I’d be happy to get another $300.00 bill. If I can actually lower it by paying better attention to our habits, and without suffering, it will be worth the effort.

Over the weekend a discussion about prices of natural gas came up. Why is natural gas so high priced? It isn’t a petroleum by-product or anything. And we’re supposed to have plenty of the stuff. Well by time I looked everything up, it turns out we have a natural gas shortage on the way. Production of natural gas has been declining for a while. Hurricane Katrina didn’t help the offshore drilling for natural gas in the gulf either.

What I found while looking to find why natural gas prices are high is that most of our power plants are fueled with natural gas. So when we use electric, natural gas is used in massive amounts by that industry. An article in Rolling Stone about all types of fossil fuels stated: 

 American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite  frenetic new drilling, and disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the  acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power  generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to  run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate  matters, gas isn’t easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a  vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at  minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified)   at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to  site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe  targets for terrorism.

Not good. I also caught an article about Conoco Phillips being prepared to fund a new natural gas pipeline off the north slope of Alaska through Canada to us down here. It would cost over 30 billion dollars. But it wasn’t clear the route they plan to take and the environmental impact this pipeline would make. The article made it appear CP wasn’t concerned with government funding for the project, which usually means they can circumvent any major regulations, by the government.

The NRDC had an article particularly about any proposed pipelines for natural gas out of Alaska. Are they on their toes or what? Until everyone gets the details of just how Conoco Phillips plans on building this pipeline and through where, everyone needs to rethink yet another unrenewable fuel.

Despite everything I read, our demands are so high that if the energy source is not renewable on a mass scale, we are just buying ourselves a quick fix not a cure. Read all the articles below. They each give a perspective. I can see that there just may be an alternative in the mix that will keep the environment safe, offer a tremendous service that will give us enough natural gas until we come up with a permanent fix, not to mention a lot of jobs will be created for that pipeline. It’s little too early to tell if this is a good feasible idea.

I know I like to stay warm in the winter, and prefer gas because I live in the country. My mother always said to have a gas stove in the country. You will always have food and warmth if the power fails. We also have a wall unit with no electronics. If the pilot is on, I have heat even without electricity.  But I’m hoping that with so many incredible advances I’ve seen and read about, we might not need a pipeline anytime soon. I have to think that maybe by time that pipeline is finished, it could end up being an outmoded energy solution. What I do know is that we better get moving on something we can all live with well into the future.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emergency

http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/rep/chap3.asp.

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/bus?guid=20071130/4750ea50_3ca6_1552620071201-448662628.
 

I’m proud to say that my last two energy bills didn’t exceed $115.00, that’s electric and gas combined. And I haven’t finished changing out all my light bulbs yet. I still want to get a hot water tank cozy cover. My house is about 1500 square ft. with a pole barn and a pool. Plus I’m home all the time, working on my laptop, with the TV or music on.  

 So far, we’ve got blinds on every window in the house now. Blocking sunlight is the easiest way to keep the heat out of the house. In the winter, the blinds keep any drafts away also. Since we installed just two overhead fans, one in the front of the house, and one in back, it’s really made a difference. The A/C did not go on much this summer. I don’t like using my gas oven in the summer at all. It’s too hot. Every meal is planned so it is either in the microwave, on the grill, or on the stovetop. I haven’t run my dryer at all since I got my clothesline. I exercise in the pool all summer so a shower to me is simply rinsing off. My husband caulked all the windows again inside and out. We unplugged the old fridge in the barn for good. And finally we had our attached garage dry walled and decided to insulate it also. This has made a really big difference. Even the window in the garage has a blind that filters out sunlight. With the garage at least 10% cooler than it used to be, the kitchen stays cooler.  

These are some pretty minor things folks. As I finish changing out the light bulbs, and take care of the hot water tank, I may get my bill down a little lower. Winter is no threat because I get my gas from a secondary supplier MXEnergy at a much cheaper per unit (ccf) rate. It’s a little higher than normal in the summer 80 ccf compared to 30 or 40, but in the winter when ccf might go as high as 240, I’m really still locked in at 80. The only drawback is that DTE charges a fee for using someone else, and not all of my gas can come from MXEnergy, which I think is a racket. But my bills are still cheaper, so shop around for natural gas if you can.

Eminent Domain is a well-known issue in Monroe County. Signs “No Eminent Domain” sprouted across lawns in Erie against the railroad. Michigan is one of nine states with ballot issues in the recent election that resulted in restricting eminent domain. We know the problem well. Eminent domain is a landowner’s worst nightmare next to Mother Nature. It strips a citizen of property rights in a blink much like a tornado that is seen and gone.

Frank Eathorne, a 3^rd generation rancher in Wyoming voted for Bush-Cheney and didn’t mind the big oil and gas boom that brought jobs and

royalties to the state. He figured it couldn’t be all that bad, until it hit home. Frank thought he owned 32,000 acres. Turns out he only owns the grass on top. The federal government owns most of what is beneath. Washington has no ethics where oil is concerned. Frank built a new home in a far corner of his property to get away from the noise of 40 oil wells, 80 miles of pipeline, and 3 railroad tracks.

Why should we care? Frank voted for the environmental grinches. The federal government is doing this everywhere though. In a year-end push, the Republican Congress is going to hit the floor in support of anything big energy. Our national parks and forests are up for grabs. “The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service have been selling long term leases of wild, pristine public lands to oil and gas companies determined to lock them up for development for decades,” Earthjustice Newsletter Dec. 2006. The federal government wants to poke around our public lands without review of consequences for the environment. Some examples:

• The BLM tried to lease the remaining 389,000 acres of previously protected land in Alaska. The entire Arctic coast in Alaska outside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would belong to oil and gas developers.

• Clinton’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule was tossed. It protected 50 million acres of wild national forests and grasslands from building roads, logging, and development. It was a powerful tool against developers. A federal court judge has only recently reinstated it.
• The Bush Administration has habitually tried to permit drilling in the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming
• The BLM is trying to open 90% of New Mexico’s Chihuahua Desert to drilling. It is a biologically diverse desert ecosystem and an energy developer’s land grab.
• In 2005, the Forest Service opened up 52,075 acres to new drilling in forests.

Closer to home, the AuSable River’s South Branch area is being threatened by Savoy Energy. Michigan’s Dept. of Environmental Quality approved a permit to drill near the secluded spot. The state owned 5,300 acres of wilderness surrounds miles of the AuSable’s South Branch. It is the Mason Tract and one of the greatest trout fishing areas in the lower 48. George W. Mason, an auto industrialist donated the land to preserve the experience of the river and the wild. The state owns the top land. The federal government own the subsurface mineral rights. This area is in trouble. A road was started, destroying the old forest area of the south branch. Earthjustice has halted the progress for now.

How do the feds get around drilling in areas that are protected? It’s called slant drilling. If they can’t legitimately let big energy drill somewhere, they lease the surrounding land to set up slant drills. They drill at an angle into the ground beneath the protected land. Los Padres National Forest has 20 such drills around one end of its perimeter. Some of the drills are positioned near sensitive habitats. One is near Lake Piru already listed as impaired by the EPA. It’s not just about a couple of drills.  As Frank found, there are also deep wells and miles of pipeline. Expanded oil drilling in Los Padres will also emit 12,179 more pounds of air pollutants per day.

This is an awful lot of activity on behalf of fossil fuels by the federal government. Aren’t we  repositioning ourselves for new sources of renewable energy? It looks like we’re hearing the old “fork tongue” again.  We need to voice our concerns to congress and push for alternatives. We need incentives for companies that think green. We need to stop the demand for fossil fuels that gives the wrong people power.  Our land has been high-jacked. The song says “This land is your land, this land is my land.” And I want it back!

 
 
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