Oil Shale a Bad Idea, part 297: Daily Kos: Bad Idea in the Arid West, or, Why Don’t We Grow Carrots? http://t.co/rruYjMpX via @dailykos
The Dearborn Press & Guide wrote up a feature about my mom’s Montessori schools. Dearborn Heights Montessori Center turns 40 this year. In paragraph seven, you’ll see that I can take credit for the entire thing.
“At the time there were very few options available,” said Neff, who first enrolled her son in an area day care program. “He cried more and more each day.”
I still cry every day, but nobody seems to be founding Montessori schools in response.
An artist's conception of my mom, my brother and me circa early 1970s (I was blonde back then, which my blonde daughters disbelieve) with a woefully incomplete pink tower. Background puggle was not involved in the founding of Dearborn Heights Montessori Center.
I’m proud of her. The scale of the operation amazes me still. More than 100 teachers, many of whom have been around for decades. The main branch is a former elementary school On John Daly just north of Cherry Hill in Dearborn Heights. I’ve kind of lost track of the others, though it’s in the article.
One of my early jobs (my first job was selling fruit/candy from a hand-pushed cart with giant red wooden wheels at Greenfield Village, now known as The Henry Ford. As an aside, had Henry Ford been a rapper instead of an industrialist, he would have called himself “The Henry Ford,” I think, as in “The Henry Ford is in the House, yo.” Note that The Henry Ford remains a world-class place to visit, though I will not be there trying to sell you apples for 50c each or three for a dollar) was as a daycare instructor. There I learned that small children are just like adults — there are angsty ones and sweet ones, funny ones (albeit with poorly refined wit still — but you can see where it’s going) and, of course, budding assholes. I also learned how to make ants on a log for snack, and frozen grapes, a clutch of which shiver away in my Denver freezer as I type.
I also drove moving trucks as the school bounced from leased building to leased building in the western suburbs of Detroit during the late 1980s and early 1990s, recruiting friends as movers. If you think moving a house is good exercise, try a school sometime. You come out looking like Lou Ferrigno.
People don’t think of nonprofits as being the fruits of entrepreneurship, but my mom was a high-school English teacher until I came along. She developed into an appropriately miserable mother of two insane boys born 16 months apart (one of us was a ‘whoops,’ though I will not divulge which).
Then I started being miserable in what I actually remember to be an incredibly unwelcoming daycare environment. Rather than just whacking me with a yardstick or whatever parents in the early 1970s did, she took note and decided there was an opportunity to a) shut me up and b) focus her ample energies and creativity on something besides watercolors and needlepoint and wondering when it’s OK to take the next valium (the last of these speculation on my part).
And boom, a school, with thousands of kids and, now, kids-kids. My kids would go there, too, but the 1,256-mile one-way commute would wear me down. I do wish they could.
MedPage Today: Warmup Prevents ACL Tears in Girl Athletes http://t.co/eilJCU8I via @AddThis
Bill McKibben on The Great Carbon Bubble: http://t.co/g8vWknLA via @thinkprogress
The U.S. Department of Interior’s decision to limit land leases on oil shale — a euphemism for rock mixed with kerogen with the energy content of french fries — was wise. I wrote up a story pitch after the Bush Administration decision to vastly expand oil shale leasing in 2008; it offers some perspective on the new approach, which reflects Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s skepticism of the energy source.
In brief, Interior simply said if Shell and others in the oil business can prove that the costs, water and energy inputs, and environmental damage associated with isolating and cooking — to like 700 degrees F, for 2-3 years — all that buried kerogen is worth it, then the government will reconsider opening up some portion of the Bush cadre’s 2-million-acre gift. Until then, you’ve got 722 square miles (ten times the area of Washington D.C.) in three states to prove your case.
Doing otherwise is like reserving vast bodies of water for hydrogen fusion startups.
Kereogen-infused rock, a.k.a. oil shale
The usual cacophony of oil-bought politicians are expressing outrage. But any claims that oil shale is a realistic fix for our petro-addiction must be taken with extreme skepticism. The Center of the American West did a great write-up on oil shale five years ago, still valid today. And here’s my pitch:
For a century, petroleum reserves triple the size of the Saudi Arabian hoard thwart repeated attempts at its harvesting. Then an obscure scientist at a major oil company comes up with a better way. From solid black rock more than a thousand feet beneath desolate and parched mesas bubbles up crude so light and sweet refineries hardly need to touch it — hundreds of thousands, even millions of barrels per day. Enviros and statisticians skulk back to their yurts and cubicles; with ingenuity and pluck,Americacan indeed drill its way out of its oil problems.
It sounds too good to be true, and it probably is. Still, Royal Dutch Shell and others are selling their oil shale dreams, and the federal government is buying them. Shell’s Mahogany Research Project, into which the company has poured an estimated $200 million, gets its name from the “mahogany zone” shale of western Colorado, where each ton of rock could yield a barrel of oil or more — a million barrels per acre, geologists say. Small test plots have shown Shell’s “In Situ Process” of cooking oil shale where it lies really does work.
A schematic of Shell's in-situ oil-shale extraction process, courtesy Rand Corporation.
In late November, the Bush Administration issued its midnight regulations related to oil shale. They established, among other things, an initial royalty rate of just 5 percent, amounting to a subsidy of billions of dollars. U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, (D-Colo.) called it a “pittance.” Gulf of Mexico oil platforms pay royalties of 18.75 percent. Underground coal mines pays 8 percent. The new rules have oil shale royalty rates inching up after five years of production, until they match the 12.5 percent onshore oil and gas drillers pay. But the new rules don’t mention that Shell’s new process can extract its million barrels per acre within two years of opening the tap. The regulation also erases minimum lease sizes, such that oil companies could exploit entire leases, one after the other, without ever paying more than this “pittance.”
The Bureau of Land Management formulated its rules despite oil companies’ refusal to disclose production cost estimates or their proposed water or electricity needs, which would be gargantuan should oil shale make a dent ravenous U.S. consumption.
Republicans including Newt Gingrich and Orrin Hatch trumpet oil shale’s potential and want to start pumping ASAP; Democrats, take pause at the technical uncertainties and potential environmental damage and generally want to take things slow. Fortune and other business publications fawn over the Shell technology and the limitless potential of geologically half-baked oil reserves beneath the sagebrush deserts of Colorado,Wyoming and Utah. The Bureau of Land Management plans to open nearly 2 million acres of federal land, an area roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park, to oil-shale leasing. BLM Director Jim Caswell says the 800 billion barrels of shale oil could “meetU.S. demand for imported oil at current levels for 110 years.”
That would, of course, mean cooking enough kerogen to extract some 13 million barrels of oil per day — an impossible volume. The BLM’s recent environmental impact statement lays out its substantial environmental damage estimates based on a 200,000 barrel-per-day industry. A RAND Corporation study for the U.S. Department of Energy study views a 1 million to 3 million barrel-per-day out as possible major-league production numbers. For perspective, the Gulf of Mexico produce about 1.4 million barrels per day; Alaska yields about 700,000 barrels per day; and the entire United States pumps about 5 million barrels per day. If oil-shale development happens, oil companies will make a fortune as the hunting town of Meeker, now in “a dusty corner of northwestern Colorado,” as Fortune put it, morphs into a high-desert Houston.
There would be benefits. Domestic oil shale production would improve trade balances and slow the flow of dollars to hostile petro-states. It would raise tax revenues and create thousands of jobs. But the consequences could be staggering.
Shale production could suck arid western Colorado dry. It would bring land devastation well beyond that of the drill-pad-pocked landscapes scarred by the Wyoming natural gas boom. Powering the heaters of a million-barrel-per-day oil shale operation would mean doubling Colorado’s current electricity production. Even if oil companies eventually harness the natural gas derived from extraction, it would take a dozen behemoth fossil-fuel power plants generate the electricity. There would be transmission lines, pipelines, countless trucks and rigs and the utter devastation of the lands unfortunate enough to overlay the shale. All this to get at rock with the pound-for-pound energy content of potatoes. Randy Udall, a western Colorado energy expert and oil shale critic has quipped: “If someone told you there were a trillion tons of Tater Tots buried 1,000 feet deep, would you rush to dig them up?” (His brother Mark, a Democrat who this month won the open Colorado U.S. Senate seat, supports “a responsible process for oil-shale development.”)
Indeed, shale’s energy content per pound of raw material just two thirds that of wood, 40 percent that of coal, and 20 percent that of conventional crude oil. Its extraction would deliver only about three times the energy required to wrestle it from the ground — with estimates as low as 1.2 times as much. That’s comparable to corn-based ethanol, a fuel much maligned for its paltry energy return on investment. The RAND study concluded that even a massive operation would have little impact on energy security or global oil prices. What’s more, shale oil’s extraction and eventual consumption would pump perhaps half again as much carbon into the atmosphere as conventional oil.
Seventy percent of our richest oil-shale reserves are on federal land. Before the country agrees to oil shale, taxpayers should have the full story.
Useful perspective on a hot topic: @WashPost: Planned Parenthood in one chart http://t.co/yQvfc0UD
Political strategy from a retired English teacher: A rant about regressives – The #DenverPost http://t.co/fpZNpSF2 via @denverpost
Thoughtful piece on the political liability of “perfection”: The price of perfection http://t.co/XcdWVdn5
NASA has released a phenomenal image:
Big Blue Marble, 2012 Edition. Click through and download the hi-res image to zoom in. It's worth your time.
Taken by the the Suomi NPP spacecraft on January 4. Ball Aerospace built the NPP spacecraft; the instrument, the snappily named Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), is Goddard’s work. Unbelievable.
If it looks vaguely familiar, that’s Earth. It’s kind of camera-shy, and when we’re focused on vital issues like the latest Romney-Gingrich throwdown in Florida, it doesn’t much have to worry about the paparazzi. But Apollo 17 astronauts famously caught it off guard nearly 40 years ago, on December 17, 1972.
Big Blue Marble, 1972 edition
The above shot is credited with changing the way we look at Earth. The astronauts talked about how vulnerable our home appeared. They had a wide-angle view, and it was one blue marble and a helluva lot of killer black space.
One thing the newer image brings that the first didn’t is the wisp of atmosphere. It’s a halo, really.
Neither image deigns to recognize our physical presence. We seem invisible, all seven billion of us, our roads, bridges, buildings, bases, factories, mines, airports, warehouses, malls, everything. Many among us still can’t fathom that we can have a global impact. Looking at these shots, it’s not hard to understand why.
It’s befitting that our biggest global impact is invisible to us, too — gases, CO2 primarily, colorless, odorless, necessary for life on Earth, but also a risk to sea life (acidification) and sea-shore life (beachfront condos). That impact is very real, very measurable. If you don’t trust science, go see a faith healer next time you have strep throat.
But check out how thin that atmosphere is. A NOAA scientist — actually this guy (congratulations, Russ) — once described it to me as a sheet of paper on a standard basketball-size globe. Look how beautiful that planet is. Think about how we’re a part of it. How, far from being lords of it, our presence, from a few thousand miles away, can’t even be seen — only felt.
This is either the coolest or most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t decide. http://t.co/vEjhNfiM
