Monday~Oil
“Now mankind seemed bent on undoing in just a few centuries what nature had so slowly accomplished. Human Actions have changed the CO2 and dust content of the atmosphere. This may appreciably alter world climate.[…]~Baring human extinction, there will never come an end to man’s need for enlightened self restraint — The conservation ethic as Leopold* understood it.” William R. Catton, Jr~Overshoot~1980
“There is an area in Canada almost the size of the state of Florida where the tar sands oil extraction has left vast swaths of dead zones. These zones are so toxic that birds can’t fly over them because they will die. It’s like a vertical column of death from hundreds of meters below the surface and a thousand meters or more above the surface. Entering equates with instant death. This will exist for thousands of year into the future because no one knows how to deal with this destruction. Murder on such a grand scale that Hitler would be envious of. This is just Canada. There are other patches on Earth leaving the the same type of scars. All because industrial civilization is a culture of murder, a murdering of Earth. Our only, beautiful home, Earth. It makes me want to weep and never stop. It has to stop or humans perish.” J Allen~2021
Assessing Oil
Leopold* is Aldo Leopold. “The Conservation Ethic,” Journal of Forestry 31 (Oct. 1933)
This is Earth Week because the 51st Earth Day is Thursday this week, April 22nd. I will write essays on various threats that are murdering Earth and her children. Today it’s time for some hard truths about our biggest addiction, oil.
Tar sands oil from Canada*. For every barrel of bituman(the part sent to the refinery, still needing more processing before oil is extracted for refining) there in 1.5 barrels of tailings. As of 2017, 1.2 billion(B) cubic meters have accumulated in Alberta’s boreal forest. Cost for cleanup is $130B, Canadian($C) which will be passed to the taxpayers. Sounds familiar. Industry destroys during the extractive process, pulls up stakes moves and Taxpayer foot the bill. The same happens here in the US for various mining industries. Other industries as well but oil is the focus today. * The Narwhal https://thenarwhal.ca/oilsands-tailings-ponds-plants-cleanup/ There is some good news in that plants may be helpful in the cleanup effort. If given a reasonable chance Earth is an exceedingly powerful regenerator of life. She exudes life from every square meter of multiple surfaces. From the deepest ocean to the top of Everest, life exists in one form or another.
Refineries
There are oil refineries all over Earth. In a culture addicted to oil there are lots of places to process raw crude oil to make it useful to get our fix, for ours cars, lawnmowers, crop harvesters, container and cruise ships, oil tankers, oil trains, trucks to get our food to market for Sunday dinner with the family. Countless uses for oil. Without oil industrial civilization collapses, its just that simple. Once brought to the surface it needs transport to the refiners which needs oil to get it there, trucks, trains, ships. Then once refined into gasoline, kerosene(jet fuel), diesel(Trucks, heavy equipment, ships, etc), oil for engines, lubrication in general, and many other uses and our nemesis, plastics. More is need to get it to fix(gasoline) stations at the 7-Eleven’s for our cars. No oil, no plastics, or much of anything else for that matter.
So what happens to the tailings from the refineries? Hmm, can’t find it. But I did find that they do pump tons of pollution into the atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide(SO2), where acid rain comes from, and volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), there’s always a methane flare at a refinery to keep the methane from accumulating and blowing the refinery to smithereens. Occasionally one does let loose with an explosion shutting it down for a while. Sometimes even killing a few people along with it. Like when a meth cook blows his barn up, cooking up an addictive substance we put in our veins or noses. Same idea, different scale. Sometimes the meth cook dies also.
One may notice from the two photos that refineries are industrial scale operations. I know we have at least one here in New Mexico, you can see if from Interstate 40 heading west out of Albuquerque. They are everywhere because everybody is addicted to oil so some extent or another. If there’s a PC screen, a smart phone, or even a plastic wrapper over your loaf of bread you are part of the addicted to oil agglomeration. Your fridge, it’s lined with plastic. And I’m not sure how to get away from it at this late stage. My pad’s full of oil based things. I’m sure everyone that doesn’t live in a cave relies on oil, it’s just that ubiquitous.
We do now have to find some ways to mitigate its use. Electric cars? They still need lube for bearings. And power from some energy generating station. So far there isn’t quite the panacea that the greenies are promising. Without oil, and fossil fuel, usually coal, or methane(CH4-natural gas, hence,-{gas}); also included, hydro-power from dams, or nuclear powered stations. Wind farm harvesting, or solar power harvesting, which are adjuncts at best, don’t offer the raw power needed to power industrial civilization.
So a dilemma presents itself. As oil stocks dwindle and burning it throws megatons of CO2 and other pollutants back into the atmosphere, what are we humans going to do? We’ve built civilization on a mono substance, oil, that we 1) can’t so without; 2) that we need for crop tending in a big way; 3) that has a finite amount in Earth’s storage nooks and crannies, most of which the easily extractable oil has been extracted and used. What really happens when it’s gone? Will we roast ourselves first before it’s all used up?
So far we haven’t run out of oil. They fracked in the central US to force what was left out of the cracks and crevices they couldn’t pump up to begin with. But that’s starting to run low also and the debt incurred in the fracking boom will soon come home to roost. There will be billions in debt and no oil sales with which to pay it back. I know!, lets get the taxpayer to foot the bill as more government debt. Folks can’t get out of student debt but oil giants can and will, I can almost guarantee it. Then where the oil come from? The North Pole? Well Santa’s pulled up stakes and relocated to an undisclosed location on solid land, just don’t tell the kiddies.
The main oil reserves are under the oceans or the tar sands touched on at the top of this essay. I’ve read that in tar sands oil extraction, by the time you get a gallon of gasoline out you’ve put a bit over a gallon’s worth of energy in to acquire it. It loses energy in the process. A less than zero sum game. Like buying a thousand lotto tickets, for $2G’s worth of tickets and winning a cool$100 dollars back. And Canada is left with toxic wasteland that goes for miles.
Without oil, humans starve. Part of the dilemma, a pickle of first order magnitude. Civilization collapses because of extreme overshoot. Bacteria does it in Petri dishes, humans are doing in, and on, Earth. Overshoot always, without fail, leads to collapse.
Picture the crops we need to bake our bread or corn to grind into tortillas. Now picture what happens when the allegorical bridge needed for fertilizer, harvesting machines, machines for grinding into usable flour, trucks to the market, which all depends on oil goes away. Most humans will also. The leaders of the industrial world better start trying to solve this major problem or billions of people will starve. I’ve haven’t seen anything bantered around about this major issue except in some books I’ve read and I don’t make notes but I assure my readers this is a major issue to solve. Now
To Finish
I haven’ even started on what we are usually hearing about in the media. Global warming forced climate change. Oil is a big part of that. So is industrial civilization which no matter how it’s powered is a big heat generator. It can’t not be. Just the pavement and concrete alone absorbs energy from the Sun, and stores it to be released back in the dark of night. It accumulates in hot climates like deserts, anywhere really, where there’s covered surface with man made materials. There will be many pickles. I’ll only have time to touch on the most pressing issues this week. Today it was info on oil. Tomorrow will be another important matter. Perhaps try to use a bit less oil in the meantime.
Military
The military is the biggest hog on oil. Just what was used during the display in the photo above would run a small fleet of vehicles for a year, like UPS trucks, for instance. Keeping fleets of ships, lots of 24/7 aircraft flying, trucks, other hardware, always operational, uses astronomical amounts of this now increasingly precious resource. There is a finite amount of oil and if people are starving they won’t care about some war half way around the planet, they will be skirmishing to get food from somewhere. So leaders; how about saving some oil for crops to feed the people of the world? Crops do no good if there’s no way to harvest them.
All the land that Bill Gates has been buying lately does no good without fertilizer because the soil’s been turned to shit from over-planting, not letting it recover, or rotation of crops like farmers in the last few centuries did. The dust bowls of the 1930’s will return if crops aren’t properly tended, or the climate will be so dry that lack of oil won’t matter, there won’t be anything to harvest. Food my friends, will be just as important as the nasty ol’ climate change as talked about in increasingly more corporate publications.
End
So oil is a huge issue. So are crops. So is climate change. Others too. Many pickles have to be solved if humanity is to survive. There are just too many mouths to feed reliably. Maybe this year and the next, it’ll be OK, but what’s happening now is unsustainable. It just isn’t. Even I wish it was but I’m short on agronomy; let those educated in that field start tackling that issue and find ways that don’t require oil to live for future generations. Now. Finally be as kind as possible to one another as these issues I’m discussing this week take center stage. I’m watching too, to see what ‘they’ will say on Thursday, Earth Day; it will be interesting. Peace, All, The Ol’ Hippy
