Matt Simmons is one of the key voices in bringing Peak Oil to public awareness. His 2005 book Twilight in the Desert raised a lot of (as yet) unanswered questions about Saudi Arabia’s reserves and ability to actually ramp up production beyond around 9MBD in order to act as the global “swing” producer. I have a lot of respect for this work and Simmons appears to have respect in the industry he’s worked in for 40 years.

However, his comments on the BP Deepwater Horizon / Macondo blowout appear to indicate he’s a few cards short of a full deck. James Howard Kuntsler weighed in yesterday with a “what if he’s right?” I’ve spent a few hours at TheOilDrum.com digging into some of Simmons’s claims, all of which are unsubstantiated or just plain wrong:

1. There’s a lake of heavy crude lying at the bottom of the Gulf. In fact, there are confirmed plumes of hydrocarbons at various layers in the water column, but the concentrations are in the <1ppm range (NOAA, UGA, USF).
2. The casing, riser, string and Blow Out Preventer (BOP) all shot out of the hole and are lying along the floor of the GOM, miles away from an open hole gushing 120-200KBD into the gulf. In fact, GPS, the condition of the BOP and the fact of visible leaks seen by everyone coming from the riser and BOP indicate the well bore is intact and still in the hole.
3. Methane is toxic (this one’s my favorite- more toxic than hydrogen sulfide!!) and there’s tons of it out in the GOM which will kill everyone if its blown ashore in a hurricane. In fact this is patently absurd. Methane is an asphyxiant when it tops 15% concentration in air, but is not toxic per se.

So what’s going on here? Is he nuts? Is he deliberately dinking with the media in order to play BP stock (where he’s short)? Is he having us on? Is he deliberately making us think he’s nuts in order to short his own Peak Oil cred? Is he trying to make a point about how gullible the media are?

Of all of these, I’d prefer to believe the last one. I saw one interview where he was on with another industry insider and said something about using a nuclear device to close the well, then followed it with “Red Adaire used to do that,” with the other guy shaking his head up and down in agreement. I think what Red Adaire used to do, actually, was to extinguish well head fires with conventional explosives. So its fascinating to see that everyone will go along with an expert talking head even when they are spouting absolute malarkey.

Overview

Recent discussions on The Oil Drum and elsewhere have thrown the question of sustainability into stark relief. What is sustainability? What makes one thing or system sustainable and another not so? Is there a framework or model for comparing relative sustainability? How do we measure and account for all aspects of sustainable systems?

Permaculture offers a set of specific approaches to these questions, although in some cases more detail is needed. For example, the need to perform “careful energy accounting” is recommended (if not required) without any real guidance as to how one would actually go about this. Holmgren and Mollison seem to agree that Howard Odum’s emergy approach to this issue is the best available tool, but even Holmgren admits to never having learned it.

My goal in this article is to sketch out some of the issues that play into a more comprehensive and detailed approach to sustainability, starting from Permaculture approaches with which I’m familiar.

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I attended the Biophysical Economics 2nd International Conference in Syracuse on Friday and sat through a long day of very intensive, eye-opening presentations. The first part of the day covered ERO(E)I, with presentations by David Murphy and Bryan Sell.

Sell’s presentation, on the EROI of shale natural gas plays was most instructive. He studied and compared a conventional well region (Indian Cty, PA) with the longest-running shale play, the Barnett Shale (Wise Cty. TX). Both areas offer around 11,000 wells, and are mature, yielding good data sets.

The first thing to note was that the wells in the Barnett have a much greater initial yield than current conventional wells, about 10x the peak production, although lifetime volumes were not this high. Usually, this is the number the gas companies throw around- initial production, which comes online in the first year.

There is a linear ramp up to peak production, usually in the first year, followed by a very steep exponential decline. Most wells in the Barnett are done in 7 years or less. More disturbing than this is that the overall field has shown the same curve shape, in a fractal relation to wells and groups of wells. In 2000, production in the study area was peaking at 180 MCF / day and declining over 7 years. By 2007, production was peaking much higher at 300 MCF / day, but declining much more rapidly in 3-4 years. The EROI went from 84:1 in 2000 to 38:1 in 2007, and overall volume per well had also dropped to half over the same period. This trend suggests another halving in 7 years, a 10% decline rate. Despite initial positive EROI, Barnett will show lower EROI than the conventional PA play in about 10 years time.

Recent studies have shown only 28% of these wells have been profitable, and Sell showed costs per foot drilled in the Barnett at $150, three times conventional well costs. Shale plays also tend to be much deeper than conventional wells, driving up per-well cost.  The Marcellus and Haynesville plays are more difficult and deeper than Barnett, and cost per foot drilled is double or more what it is for Barnett.

While Chesapeake, XTO and others have touted that the Barnett will yield 26 TCF, Sell calculates that the actual recoverable will not exceed 8.8 TCF.

The numbers don’t add up. The earlier profitable wells, and new initial peaks are being used to pay off debt and early entrants’ royalties. Even in the Barnett, this Ponzi approach will not last, and the 8.8 TCF may turn out to be optimistic as the economics start feeding back.

This need to keep ratcheting up production explains the tremendous pressure to open up the Marcellus, but it is clear that if Barnett doesn’t pay, none of the others will either.

One of the reasons for staying here, aside from the fact it’s half the price of rooms up closer to Amherst, and aside from the big white man presiding over it all, is the fact that its a short walk to Chicopee Reservoir. The coffee’s so bad here I had to go to McDonald’s (hey, the late Paul Newman says it’s organic) on the way, hoping for a peaceful walk by the water’s edge. When I arrived I found:

I was trying to come up with a good caption for this. Sustainable Beach Straightening- NOT!? Why we’re all going to die? Resource Use 101? Creating Disorder from Harmony? Your Tax Dollars at Work? This after the customer in McDonalds was complaining about the sales tax. “We call it Taxachussets” said the barista, or whatever they call burger-flippers nowadays. Notice the guy has a hearing protective device on. So much for quiet.

Well, on I go to the conference. I’m missing Dave Jacke’s talk on the spiritual side of forest gardening as well as David Yarrow’s integrated food and energy workshop. Luckily, Phil is giving his Two Faces of Money talk this afternoon, and there’s a workshop on legal barriers to sustainability. Then of course Paul Allen’s keynote tonight. More to come…

After crazy driving all day, including a little side trip down to Hartford to see my sister- and brother-in-law’s new house and deliver a big gold mirror and old picture, and pick up an electric mower for my dad, and getting lost in downtown Hartford (plenty of signs for 91 South, but none for North), I got up to the conference just before 8. Registration had closed so I went into the main ballroom (packed with people) to hear Paul Stamets lay it down with regard to mushrooms.

I first heard about Paul at my first permaculture class, where I learned that mycelium networks communicate ecological information across great distances, distribute nutrients among plants across species, even to the point of moving growth from a damaged side of a forest to the other side. So my expectations were high and Stamets gave an outrageous talk on the many amazing qualities of fungi.

Here’s a link to a partial version of Paul’s talk.
First, he told us about Amadou (coincidentally I’ve been listening to Amadou et Mariam), a mushroom with historical roots, as it was used to carry fire from one place to another. Paradoxically, when boiled in water, Amadou mycelium are highly flamable and were used in Europe to create firearms.

Then he described a symbiotic relationship with a fungus and grasses allowing them to grow in 160 degree water at Yellowstone. He showed old growth forest with baby hemlocks on the floor thriving, although there was insufficient light for photosynthesis; they were being “fed” by mycelium in guild with alder and birch trees. Recently an aquatic gilled mushroom has been discovered. We have identified only 10% of the estimated 150,000 species and a theme of the talk was “how little do we know.”

Mushrooms are similar to humans in that we both inhale O2 and exhale CO2. Fungi have generally anti-bacterial properties, and as they de-compose they specifically select bacteria essential to plant growth. Mycelium nets contain bladders that hold and transport water over great distances. The largest organism on earth, a honey mushroom covering over 2200 acres was shown from aerial photos.

Mycelium networks form a highly optimized, redundant network structure, and behave like neurons: as information or chemistry is passed along a network path it grows in capacity. The information appears to batch and pulse and this was shown in a microscopic movie of transmission along mycelium nets. Fungi have been shown to have survived, indeed been sole survivors of two previous extinction events.

Then, Stamets got into some very interesting practical applications. First off, mycelium remediation of hydrocarbon-poluted soil, which reduced hydrocarbon counts from 20,000 ppm (2%) to around 200 ppm over the course of 8 weeks. This experiment used oyster mushroom. He mentioned the fungal production of enzymes cellulase and lignase which are effective at breaking down wood and cellulose, then later showed a bottle of “myconol” lit and burning as a candle.

He pointed out that mushrooms are hyper-accumulators of heavy metals, so the oysters growing in the old hydrocarbon-polluted dirt are no good for eating, but you can create more mycelium by taking the base of the mushroom and rolling it in the ubiquitous material cardboard. In fact sheet mulching is so effective because it creates conditions very favorable to mycelium, which by the way are favored by earthworms. Stamets scoured the literature but found no science published on preferences of earthworms for mycellated vs. non-mycellated material, so he conducted his own experiments.

Then he showed a filtering system created from mycellated woodchips stuffed into burlap sacks and used to create a swale on contour. This was very effective in reducing e coli in runoff from farms into waterways.

Perhaps the most amazing story he told was when he was asked by a National Geographic photographer to gather a very rare garcon [sp?] mushroom which only appears in Douglas Fir snags in old growth. They were out on a boat in Desolation Inlet, BC looking along the shore for evidence of this rare fungus. After several hours the photographer asked about a Haida pictograph site and they went to visit and found garcon growing right there. The shape had a strange Venus of Willendorf resemblance. Later it was discovered that Haida artifacts in museums were carved not from wood but from garcon.

There was some more about the anti-tubercular qualities of this particular mushroom and the great medical benefits of using mushroom products that are not only anti-viral but anti-bacterial as well; most deaths from viral infections are caused by the follow-on bacterial infections. He also patented a process for eliminating carpenter ants and termites using mycelium.

For me, though, the real kicker was the idea of “packaging” seeds and mycelium in innoculated cardboard. This has great guerilla gardening potential, can use the mail system, etc. He showed a baby “old growth” forest of hemlock, birch, cedar grown this way.
I don’t think anyone minded that Stamets went on for about a half hour longer than scheduled and he received an standing O for his great work. It was an amazing kick off to the conference.

My most recent trip to the Catskills revealed even more frenetic activity than was evident in June. This includes massive infrastructure, especially in the form of pipelines and right-of-way cuts over forested ridges for feeder branches. The new Millenium pipeline, which will run from Corning east then south and eventually to New Jersey is a mammoth 36″ natural gas replacement for a current 12″ line. That’s a 10-fold increase in capacity. Not one well has been drilled in New York State, yet the writing is on the wall.

© 2008 Russell Honicker

What does this sort of approaching resource extraction orgy have to do with the Third World? After all, as a spokesperson for the NYSDEC said, “this isn’t Wyoming; this is New York!” We are the new Third World. Having raped the rest of the world, time to start in earnest at home. Of course there’s a long history of this here: coal, railroads, oil, highways, farming etc.

The so-called economic growth we’ve been experiencing here in the North-and-West has been subsidized by resource extraction over the last 35 years in places like Ecuador, Zambia, Angola, Sudan, East Timor and the like. Murder, authoritarianism, theft, lies, and squalid urban poverty accompany each new “discovery.” Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls this the “Resource Curse.” John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man calls it unofficial U.S. Policy. There was a recent news story about Indian farmers unceremoniously removed from their lands to make way for a new 900 acre Tata plant. This is our real economic engine.

While op-eds to the NYT place the blame for poverty on proponents of biofuels and opponents to Genetically Modified (GM) foods, and praises the efforts of our good friends at the World Bank, the reality is that our wealth has been, and is being stolen from distant parts of the world. We have been exporting poverty to the Third World for decades. While death squads are palatable or at least ignorable in some of these places, somehow the idea of mercenaries in Delaware and Broome Counties seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, residents report that Haliburton and Blackwater have arrived, along with military helicopters performing alarming seismic testing. Exporting poverty is no longer limited to other countries; we’re bringing it to the Catskills and Southern Tier.

Others have made this point before, but our agriculture is now more of a mining operation than anything else. We frack for natural gas to generate nitrogen fertilizer, applied in massive doses to sterile soil as anhydrous ammonia, most of which washes off into the Mississippi and then the Gulf of Mexico, spawning a “dead zone” (one of 150 worldwide) the size of Massachusetts. Phosphate fertilizer is mined in the Caribbean and in Canada.  Diesel and Gasoline comes from Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, by way of Port Arthur and Beaumont. The irrigation water is thousands of years old, mined from the once-huge Ogalalla reservoir, which is being rapidly depleted. All that produces starchy corn and soy beans that then act as inputs to other industrial food production processes like livestock, vegetable oils, soft drinks, and yeah, biofuels. It’s hard to find any actual food in our food systems- that is food that comes from rain, soil and sunshine. Rather, it’s all predominantly the end product of “drill, baby, drill.”

Finally, let’s tie this all back to the current global financial crisis, which is immediately a crisis of real estate and foreclosures, a crisis of land. Naturally, it is a crisis of much more. Ultimately, it’s a crisis of dissociation of money power from reality. All the working business models involve slavery, theft, monopoly or addiction.

Okay, that’s pretty negative. In order to end on a positive, a huge Greenerminds Congratulations and Thank You to Maura Harrington, who stared down Royal Dutch Shell last week.

[UPDATE 15:30 EDT] The Guardian Weekly has another success story- native Peruvians protect the Amazon basin.

Finally, a major news outlet (sort of) is covering the environmental damage from hydraulic fracturing (”fracking”) for natural gas in shale deposits. The Christian Science Monitor covers the story at a relatively high level (hat tip TOD). Interesting how the API always says “there’s a concrete casing so the water is fine.” NYC seems to finally be waking up and have put a 1 mile buffer around the reservoirs they own in the Catskills. The rivers in the area of the Marcellus shale drain into Hudson, Delaware, and Ohio river systems and Chesapeake Bay watersheds.
I previously posted about what this means for New York here.

When are they going to start talking about this instead of pigs, dogs, lipstick, etc?

Last night, R. sent me a link to an Albany Times-Union article based on investigations by WNYC and ProPublica about the gas drilling nightmare. Today is the deadline for the Guv to sign (or not) Assembly bill A10526 which streamlines the permitting process and greatly increases the permissable well densities.

This morning the audio popped up on TOD: Local. I highly recommend listening to this, and if you are a New Yorker, call the Governor’s office and ask for a veto.

[UPDATE 7:27 PM EDT]

More links. Here’s Delaware Riverkeepers’ brief on gas drilling in NY and PA. And in case anyone thinks the DEC can or will protect air, water, habitat and people, some reports by EANY.

Unfortunately it looks like the Governor signed the rushed-through last minute bill. What’s quite disturbing to me is that, according to Judith Enck (interviewed on WNYC yesterday), the bill was actually written by the DEC staff. Patterson is also directing the DEC to do more assessment of the impacts to water, air, noise, soil and so on. Will the staff be beefed up? Probably not as NY is facing large budget deficits. But how will the DEC have time to do all the research and assessments necessary? They’re obviously busy drafting legislation at the behest of the gas companies to streamline their permitting and making it easier to put more wells in.

[UPDATE 7/24 12:17 PM EDT]

Found a blog on Barnett Shale in the Fort Worth Basin area in Texas, which is apparently the formation most similar to Marcellus. I have an opportunity to attend a conference in Ft. Worth in September, so I hope to check out some of this first hand. Some of the reports are showing leases worth $17,000 per acre signing bonus, with royalties of 25%.

I watched Escape from Suburbia the other night. Phil and Tom are featured in the film, and I wanted learn more about what they are doing in NYC. The movie covers a number of efforts across North America to deal with and find solutions to Peak Oil, and secondarily Climate Change and poverty, mainly through local food production. At least local food production was a theme.

What was most moving to me was the segment on LA’s South Central Community farm, a 14 acre community project at ground zero of urban gardening. This farm had private plots for 350 local families who grew food, medicinals and ornamentals. They started a market because people there were growing things not available anywhere else in LA. Horrifyingly, the city took back the land and sold it to a “logistics” company to build a warehouse there, because “people in South Central need jobs.” Despite community action and protest, the site was bulldozed on camera while the urban farmers could only look on in despair.

Carolyn Baker points out in her review what this means. Relocalization is not currently threatening to the powers that be, but will be soon, and we can expect a very nasty backlash. This example is just a taste of that. I’m relating this to the Archdruid’s post a couple of days ago about the misconception that collapse will somehow mystically be okay, and not too violent. I doubt that. The image I have of collapse is not a bunch of spontaneously emerging ecovillages, but something like New Orleans, post-Katrina, times every major metropolitan area in the world. I see pain in our future.

The conclusion I’m coming to, inescapably, is that food, relocalization and gardening are political. The good news is that gardening also seems to be a great way of organizing people in a way that doesn’t overtly seem political. In other words, like me, it’s only after gardening for some years that one comes to understand that gardening is political.

There seem to be two approaches to fighting the Beast. One is to go head to head, like Gandhi, Mandela or MLK. Another is to go underground like the mycelium network and stay off the radar until there is enough strength or pain to stand and fight. The danger is that being underground can become comfortable and the standing up never happens, or it gets co-opted before the groundswell.