Energy in NEPA: Past, present, and future

On July 3, 1778, a militia made up mostly of men in their 40's and teenage boys, with a few experienced soldiers sprinkled in, took up arms to defend the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania (at the time known as the Wyoming Valley in Connecticut, for reasons which are as bizarre and confusing today as they were way back then) from encroaching Tory Rangers and their Iroquois allies. The militia's actions were guided more by bravery than by good sense, and what at first was a comedy of errors and a textbook example of  how not to conduct a military campaign soon turned into a rout, and then a massacre. Many of those who survived the initial battle did not survive the immediate aftermath, as men and boys were murdered at close range even as they were promised safety, and captured prisoners had their heads smashed in in an act of brutality that sickened the people of England when word reached them of what had come to be known as the Wyoming Massacre.

Today a friend and I walked the route of the Battle of Wyoming, from the initial point where the men and boys lined up to confront the skirmishers who would draw them into a trap, to the point where the broken line of inexperienced soldiers took a stand against the more highly skilled Rangers and their native allies, to the point where the Iroquois attacked the line's left flank from their position of concealment as it wheeled about inexpertly to face them, to the places where the fleeing members of the militia sought safety and escape - and, more often, found death.

This post isn't about that.

As we processed from the initial lining-up point in Wyoming (which is not where the Battle of Wyoming was fought - it was fought in Exeter; "Wyoming" is a more recent construct, named in honor of those who died in the battle,) our guide directed our attention to a utility cut that showed some of the terrain as it was 234 years ago, before fill was added to the river flats beyond the precipitous drop to the south to allow construction of houses even closer to the Susquehanna. And that was where a striking vista displayed itself.

 

It's a little hard to tell from this first photo, but this image encompasses much of this region's past, present, and future. First, the river flat, showing what  the terrain might have looked like in centuries past. While I always think of Pennsylvania - my part of it, anyway - as being "Penn's Woods" and much like the densely forested area seen beyond the transmission tower, reports from the time of the Battle of Wyoming describe the area as sparsely wooded with white and yellow pine and some oak "shrubs." Much of the land would have been cleared for agriculture, and there was very little in the way of underbrush.

The trees beyond the tower in the distance - some 850 or so feet from where I took this picture -  mark the shore of the Susquehanna, which was the goal of the fleeing survivors of the Battle of Wyoming, who hoped to make it downriver to the relative safety of Fort Wilkes-Barre and Forty Fort. (No one thought to have boats tied up on the riverbanks for use if needed.) Beyond those trees, the black hills are actually culm banks well beyond the opposite riverbank, nearly a mile from where I was standing. "Culm" is the rock waste product from anthracite mining, a mixture of slate and low-grade coal that cannot be refined further in an economical manner. So instead it is piled up in great hills that once covered much of the landscape of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The culm is separated from the coal in buildings called "coal breakers," like the gray boxy building in the middle left.

Beyond the culm bank, more than six miles from where I stood to take this photo, is a line of wind turbines along a ridge. They can be seen here behind and to the sides of the transmission tower.

Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, coal from the Wyoming Valley supplied power to this nation and its industrial expansion. Anthracite coal burns hot and relatively cleanly, at least when compared to the more common bituminous coal found in West Virginia and elsewhere. Coal mining provided a source of income to many of the people of this area. But it also killed and sickened may of those same workers, through mining accidents and "black lung," the buildup of coal dust in the lungs that resulted in emphysema and, ultimately, death. As revenue from coal mines dwindled, with the Knox Mine Disaster being be final straw, the coal mining companies abandoned their operations and left the area - placing upon the residents of Northeastern Pennsylvania the burden of dealing with the consequences of coal mining: the mine fires, the poisoned creeks and streams contaminated by flowing through old mines, the unpredictable collapses of old mines - where else other than Northeastern Pennsylvania are homeowners required to buy mine subsidence insurance, just in case a gaping hole should open on their property and consume some or all of their house?

The wind turbines are a more recent addition to the landscape. I noticed them suddenly back in 2006, though they may have been constructed months before I spotted them as I was coming home one afternoon. This group is just one of several constructed throughout Northeastern Pennsylvania. They  are not without controversy; some have criticized them for causing bird deaths. Turbine operators are hardly blase about bird-turbine collisions, as such a thing can easily damage a turbine blade. Turbines have "off" switches and are frequently turned off for servicing; it would be no large matter to temporarily shut down the turbines during times when they  might interfere with migrating birds.

Two aspects of Northeastern Pennsylvania's energy picture are not seen here. Some feel that Pennsylvania is not an ideal location for solar energy generation. However, Pennsylvania receives about as much incident solar energy as Germany, the nation  that is a world leader in the generation of electricity from sunlight. By following the German model, Pennsylvania can easily become a successful solar electricity generator. And anyone who still doubts is directed to view the (literally) green solar energy collection and conversion systems throughout this image. Yes, that's right - trees.

One other piece of the energy picture remains. (Two, if you count nuclear, which I don't; we have a local nuclear power plant in Salem Township near Berwick, it's past its rated lifetime, it's under consideration for expansion, and it supplies its energy to New York and New Jersey.) That is the extraction of natural gas entombed in layers of shale using a process known as hydro-fracturing, or "fracking." It is neither a safe nor a carefully-executed process, according to an article in no less a publication than the Wall Street Journal. It has resulted in numerous documented cases of drinking-well contamination. The uncontrolled release of methane - a clean-burning fossil fuel that happens to be an extremely powerful greenhouse gas when released directly into the atmosphere - has been detected. Migrating (and sometimes spilled or even dumped) fracking chemicals have resulted in ground and water contamination, even road damage. Fracking consumes many millions of gallons of water, locking it underground in deep shale prisons and effectively removing it from the hydrosphere forever.And accidents caused by reckless "roughnecks" imported into the area from other states have resulted in at least one death.  Meanwhile, residents dealing every day with the consequences of coal mining in the area are not entirely convinced that gas-drilling companies can be trusted when they state that they will clean up after themselves.

Two hundred and thirty-four years ago some brave and foolish men and boys took upon themselves the task of defending their homes, their farms, what they thought of as their homeland, from invading marauders bent on its destruction. Today, many of us feel the same when it comes to energy development. We have options available to us that will increase our energy independence and decrease our need for fossil fuels. We also have an option available that will slip the yoke of fossil-fuel dependence upon our necks while at the same time resulting in immediate and long-term environmental consequences.  Which one will we choose?

Where there are trains, there will be train wrecks

I first heard that piece of wisdom about ten years ago. I was the DVD Asset Manager for our DVD Compression, Encoding, and Authoring facility. I was responsible for finding out every item of video, audio, and everything else that would be going onto a client's DVD, extracting those assets from the client, then figuring out the best way to digitally compress those assets to fit the available space, maximizing quality and minimizing wasted space. Once I had the "bit budget" worked out, I would turn it and the assets over to our video compression and audio encoding groups, and they would transform the video and audio into a form that our Authoring group could assemble onto what would become the DVD Master. All very complex and sophisticated and time-consuming. All being done on complex and sophisticated and expensive and sensitive computer systems.

And the power in our building had just gone out for the third time in two weeks.

I was furious. We were in a separate building from our main facility. It was actually the ancient, original home of our company, a place with some significance in the history of the place. But I believe it also had the ancient, original wiring in the building, despite our massive power requirements. Thunderstorms could easily knock the power out, as could the wind, and possibly a little old lady turning on the air conditioning in the house next door. But each time it happened, we lost all of the work that was in progress on that project, and would have to start the process over again. It would throw the schedule off by hours, sometimes a day or more, and might cause other projects for other customers to be bumped.

Our Facilities Maintenance people came down and did whatever it is they did in situations like that. For all I know they jammed pennies into fuses, tied broken wires together with bits of twine, and laid out rat poison to try to avoid a repeat of the problem. I stopped the head of Facilities Maintenance and asked him why this was happening and what could be done to avoid it in the future. And he just grinned at me in his condescending way and said "Where there are trains, there'll be train wrecks."

I pointed out to him that there was a train that ran less that twenty feet from the front of the building, and that this was hardly a comforting or reassuring thought.

Where there are coal mines, there will be coal mining accidents - and there are twenty-nine dead in West Virginia. Where there are gigantic oil drilling platforms there will be oil drilling accidents - and millions of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Where there is hydrologic fracturing of deep, "impermeable" deposits of natural gas trapped within the Marcellus Shale, using a mixture of water taken from local streams and rivers and proprietary chemicals whose identities are kept secret from state and local governments and the individuals on whose land the "hydrologic fracturing" is taking place, there will inevitably be a migration of these secret chemicals and now-contaminated water back into the groundwater, potentially turning Northeastern Pennsylvania into one big Superfund site. Yes, yes, and yes.

Part of most energy strategies for the future involves a dramatic increase in the number of nuclear power plants in the United States.

Where there are trains, there will be train wrecks.

The wrong way to embrace the future of the energy industry

Fourteen months ago I wrote something. I believe I sent it to Senator Arlen Specter, and Representative Paul Kanjorski, and the Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice and Times-Leader. This is what I wrote:

Northeastern Pennsylvania and the world of tomorrow

Someday every rooftop will be covered in solar cells. Every mountain ridge will sport a chain of wind turbines. Every car will be powered by Lithium-ion batteries.

Northeastern Pennsylvania has a long and proud history of industry. Coal mining. Manufacturing. People who know what it is to work hard.

All that is becoming a thing of the past. Coal mining ended with the Knox Mine Disaster, when corporate greed placed short-term profit above the safety of the miners - and the long-term sustainability of the industry. The number of manufacturers in this area has dwindled to just a handful. One of the largest employers in the area, the Tobyhanna Army Depot, was on the short list for closures on September 10th, 2001.

The economic crisis that has gripped the rest of the nation, and the world, is nothing new here. We have coped with hard times off and on for decades. Now, those hard times are mostly on.

Northeastern Pennsylvania is home to many institutions of higher education. King's College. Wilkes University. Misericordia University. Marywood University. The University of Scranton. We educate students from throughout the region and from places farther afield, and then we send them off into the world - but do not encourage them to stay here, where the primary industries have become call centers, warehouses, and distribution centers.

The world of tomorrow needs to be built somewhere. There need to be facilities for manufacturing solar cells and wind turbines and Lithium-ion batteries. These are the things that will power the future. These are the technologies that will make the future possible.

We have the industrial know-how. We have the skilled workforce and the tradition of doing hard work. We have the brainpower and management training, if we can manage to hold onto it.

The world of tomorrow needs to be built somewhere. Why not here? Why not Northeastern Pennsylvania?

I never heard back from Specter. I never heard back from Kanjorski. I didn't even think the newspapers took note of this, although a text string search revealed that it was at least published on the Times-Leader's website.

Still, I wasn't worried about this. Maybe I had put a bug in someone's ear, planted a seed which would germinate in time. I counseled myself to be patient.

Patient, my ass.

From today's Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice:

Kanjorski: W-B could host energy institute

Published April 10, 2010

By Michael R. Sisak
Staff Writer

U.S. Rep. Paul Kanjorski's vision for the future of natural gas drilling along the Marcellus Shale centers on a proposed energy institute in Wilkes-Barre - a national laboratory where scientific, economic and environmental research would shape public policy and a cohesive master plan.

Kanjorski shared details of his proposal during an interview Friday with The Citizens' Voice editorial board. He said he would present the plan to President Barack Obama - whose approval could direct millions of federal dollars to fund the institute - at a White House meeting on April 19...

Yep, that's it. Sure, we have the work force, we have the infrastructure, we have the educational resources to take on the future energy needs of the world. We have wind generators springing up throughout the area, using parts manufactured elsewhere and trucked in. We have several competing solar panel installation firms, most of them importing their solar panels from China. (One of them imports them from Delaware.) Hybrids with lithium-ion batteries are not uncommon sights on our roads and highways. And what does Kanjorski (D-Nanticoke, for crying out loud!) put his political muscle behind? Setting up an "institute" boondoggle - "a public-private partnership between the federal government and regional colleges and universities which would support a 'smart growth' approach to the gas drilling and infuse the region with more than 1,000 jobs."

In other words: create a dependency relationship that will result in an infusion of millions of dollars and over a thousand jobs - but if and only if the people of Notheastern Pennsylvania bend over and allow their region to be raped, again, but this time by gas extraction giants like Chesapeake Energy and Encana instead of the coal barons of old.

Of course, such an institute - "a national laboratory where scientific, economic and environmental research would shape public policy and a cohesive master plan" - will take time to create, and it will take even more time for it to produce a "cohesive master plan." But Marcellus Shale extraction is happening now, right now. Wells are getting contaminated. Bad things are happening. And the people who stand to profit from all this aren't about to wait for any "cohesive master plan", unless they are forced to. (Cue the cries of "TYRANNY!") Shutting down or even slowing Marcellus Shale extraction activity would certainly obviate the need for any such "institute" - and the "millions of dollars" and "over a thousand jobs" that come with it. (I would bet a shiny nickel that the "private" side of the "public-private partnership" would involve major contributions and controlling interests from such groups as Chesapeake Energy and Encana.)

Coal mining has left Northeastern Pennsylvania horribly scarred, both by a blighted landscape and by the perception of the "coal miner mentality" - a term which no two people use to mean exactly the same thing, but which is always used detrimentally. At this point the coal mining industry should be seen as mature and developed to the point that no institutes would be needed to draw up cohesive master plans. Yet the events of this past week in West Virginia have shown that the industry, or at least individual companies within the industry, are still not to the point where their "best practices" do not result in a massive explosion and the deaths of twenty-nine miners - and the likely shutdown of the primary income source for an entire community. How much longer will it take for the fledgling Marcellus Shale extraction industry to even reach that point?

Dear Representative Kanjorski: WTF? So many opportunities to bring industry and jobs and - well - opportunities to Northeastern Pennsylvania, and this is what you've chosen to embrace? Time for this voter to start researching alternatives.

See also:
Circumlocution for Dummies: Kanjo is out of it

Telling us what to think

Fossil fuels are amazing things. They are literally concentrated solar energy: sunlight converted through photosynthesis into organic matter that then died en masse in a certain special way that allowed the biochemical makeup of these dead things to be preserved and slowly transformed over hundreds of millions of years into materials that could later be extracted from their stony encasements and distilled into energy sources or used directly as energy sources.

When you burn a bit of coal or light a burner on a gas stove or drive around in your internal combustion engine-powered car you are releasing the concentrated converted solar energy of untold numbers* of trees and plants. It's really a pretty awesome thing, if you think about it. And a pretty frightening thing, if you think about it a little harder - like, about how much of this concentrated sunshine is actually available, how fast it's being used, how long it will last, and how long it will take to make some more.

Energytomorrow.org, an American Petroleum Institute industry advocacy / anti-regulation group, has been on a blitz to make sure you think about this the right way. "Most Americans agree," they tell us, that our country needs more energy - "from all sources." The Americans who agree are smiling and happy, their faces turned upward, ready to embrace the future. And the Americans who don't agree? Well, in their 49% of the pie chart that appeared in the ads that were in heavy rotation just a few weeks ago - lots of ad buying going on here - the Americans who don't agree are looking down, away from the camera. Afraid. Ashamed. Unwilling to face the future, betraying their children and their fellow Americans to a future of dependence on foreign energy suppliers.

The problem is this: current methods of extracting natural gas from shale deposits that underlie some parts of the United States - you know, the place where "Americans" live - are dangerous and have both immediate and long-term effects on the surrounding water table, nearby watersheds, and the people who depend upon these resources. When natural gas extraction begins in an area, local well water becomes mysteriously contaminated, water begins to burn, animals that drink it die - all in what the natural gas extractors maintain are a series of remarkable coincidences.

Now, of course, we can expect anti-progress luddites to make such wild claims. And, after all, is this really such a steep price to pay for energy independence, at least in the short term? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. So what if a few animals die from manganese contamination (a remarkable coincidence, totally unrelated); so what if a few water wells explode (it was eventually going to happen anyway); so what if some people you've never met and probably wouldn't even like if you did have to start getting all their drinking and washing and bathing water trucked in because the stuff coming out of their wells is, by yet another remarkable coincidence, too dangerous to use? All those smiling, forward-thinking people on the pie chart said this is a good thing. The nice lady from Energytomorrow.org told us so!

An abandoned coal breaker at the intersection of the Sans Souci Parkway and Dundee Cross Road in Hanover Township, PA

A few years ago there was a nifty ad campaign touting coal as the fuel of tomorrow. It featured young, well-muscled models, men and women alike, flexing and heaving as they toiled in a coal mine to the strains of "Working In A Coal Mine." Today's coal was clean, and extraction was much different from the bad old days. It would be the energy source of the future, and would guarantee America's independence from evil foreign energy merchants, as long as those meddling environmentalists didn't stand in the way. I'm not certain, but I believe the end of the ad campaign coincided with the Sago Mine Disaster in 2006, in which an explosion trapped thirteen coal miners underground for days - and twelve of them died.

Kayak Dude, of The Susquehanna River Sentinel, warned a week ago that the ante was about to be upped, and that the "patriot card" was about to be played. And sure enough, groups like Chesapeake Energy have now launched extensive ad campaigns - in this area, at least - that explicitly link willingness to go along with the unrestricted, unregulated extraction of natural gas with patriotism. If you love America, they're telling us, you won't stand in our way.

Advertising is designed specifically to tell you what to think. If done correctly, it convinces you that the opinions voiced on behalf of the advertiser's client are in fact your own. We have seen plenty of examples of this in the political sphere, where perfectly ordinary people have been manipulated into believing the most extraordinary things - and then loudly expressing these beliefs as their own. It's emotional manipulation. Meme manipulation. And it works.

Next time you see one of these ads, ask yourself: What are they selling? What are they trying to get me to believe? And why?

*Well, I have no idea how many trees and how many days of sunlight went into making a golf ball-sized bit of anthracite or a gallon of gasoline. I'm sure somebody has figured that out.