Geologists are so…. earthy
Most people don’t think of geologists as environmentalists, in fact at best, think of them as weird people who like rocks. Geologists tend to be so… earthy! Down to earth… practical and mind-numbingly realistic. Geologist also belong to that rare subset of scientists who get out there and spend most of their time outside, away from computer and software modelling and actually interacting with nature. They tend to see the results of changes man makes on the environment all the time.
They also know where the resources came from to make society what it is today, worse, they know those sources are for the most part, finite. It puzzles them that for nearly 50 years, they accepted the world was going to run out of oil, it wasn’t a question of how, it was simply a question of when. Supply and demand… another constant in a geologist’s life, especially geologists who work in the resource sector. Supply and demand dictates whether or not they will have a job tomorrow, so they tend to keep close tabs on that! And they’ve known for decades, oil was going to run out! They know it took hundreds of millions of years for Mother Nature to create oil, and it has taken mankind less than 200 years to use it all up. Supply and demand…
Of course, increasing demand and shrinking supplies lead many a geologist to wonder how they were going to get to their remote locations to find these dwindling resources if other scientists and engineers, those who like plodding away under flourescent lights, doodling on paper and tinkering with their computers, didn’t start planning alternate ways to use other energy sources on this planet to keep society chugging along at its present comfort levels?
Oh those geologists… They could see what was coming, but they were to practical, to earthy and far far to realistic to really garner any media attention – if the media had even come asking.
And now the geologists are meeting in Kentucky to discuss ‘carbon sequestration.’ Carbon sequestration is a marvelous stop gap measure by which CO2 emissions from coal powered plants are pumped back down into the earth. Carbon sequestration is rapidly being billed as the panecea for all the global warming woes of the world… It is via carbon sequestration, the coal industry in America has now begun showing adverts claiming they are giving the world clean energy (see below).
Well… those earthy geologist think its a great idea as well.. But they are also a little concerned that the coal plants are churning out a lot more CO2 than can possibly sequestered at this time (despite the nice silver building in the above video). So they wanted to meet to discuss how this could be made more effective.
But ask them if its viable right now, and they’d probably cringe a little at the above advert. In fact, New Scientist magazine (27 March, 2008) did a little bit of research as well into the subject and discovered rather horrifyingly, that the world was no where near ready to ramp up to the levels to seriously sequester all that carbon dioxide! In fact, the first commercially available carbon sequestration plants are 25 years of Research and Development AND $20 billion dollars down the road! With the above ad, you’d think the coal plants were aleady swinging into action and pumping the excess CO2 into the ground but actually, by promoting that perception, they are buying themselves a 20-30 year free pass to continue business as usual.
To make matters worse, a couple of people who seem to be well connected with coal mining commented that actually, most of what comes out of a coal mine is not coal, and if you open cut coal, the CO2 escapes anyway while the coal is being removed from the ground!
And what of those geoogists? Well for decades now, the geologists have been advocating that waste uranium from nuclear power plants be buried in geologically stable areas. Of course, no area on this planet seems to be geologically stable enough for nuclear waste (never mind that it sits there in pods all over the planet waiting to be mined in the first place). And the same should apply to carbon sequestration – where on this planet is a geologically stable enough environment that you can be sure earthquakes won’t produce cracks in which the CO2 will escape back to the surface, possibly causing a sudden spiking in the temperatures?
And thats why these geologists are meeting… It’s not that they don’t think its a great idea, but you gotta be sure! And they are also aware that it isn’t being practised at the scale being toted in the media. Worse, any geologist associated with the resource industry has seen it take 5-10 years to bring any mine or plant into production – there is a lag to these ideas. Mind you, if these carbon sequestration plants do eventually happen, they will probably be spread all over the planet (wherever here are coal powered plants) and it is possible if one cracks wide open, then the damage won’t be so bad as burying all the uranium waste in one spot in one country… Hmmm – food for thought for nuclear energy lovers!
Geologists…. so earthy, so realistic, so un-media worthy!
