October 2024 Networker: The Damage of False Solutions |
| Volume 29 (10), October 2024 |
| It’s midnight and the doves are in tears.* In the introduction to the New York Times’ opinion series, At the Brink, which addresses the threat of nuclear weapons in an unstable world, the editors write: “Nuclear war is often described as unimaginable. In fact, it’s not imagined enough.” They are challenging us to get informed, get up to date, on “possible conflicts that could turn nuclear in Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East.” From the jawbone of a donkey
To the atom bomb
Science and progress
What have you done Our executive director, Carolyn Raffensperger, writes periodically about technology gone wrong—so often due to the tunnel-vision profit motive and utter disregard for peace, health, and democracy—and how we at SEHN work to find (or create) the openings to expose truths, challenge bad policies, and help change course. And, as our colleague Peter Montague reminded us on our staff meeting recently, with regard to our ongoing confrontation of misguided carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, we are indeed tipping the scales. We are experiencing success on several fronts in this truly deranged rollout of CCS, though much remains to be done. In this edition of the Networker, both Carolyn and senior scientist and writer-in-residence Dr. Sandra Steingraber expand our examination of CCS through different lenses. Carolyn writes about the absence of water protective policies, prompted by a frightening leak in a monitoring well at a CCS site in Decatur, Illinois. Though the community did not yet know, in August the EPA issued the responsible company, Archer-Daniels-Midland, a notice of violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act. In her monthly column, Sandra recounts the discovery of the scientific properties of supercritical CO2, the form necessary for its use in enhanced oil recovery. One could debate the plusses and minuses of other uses supercritical CO2 (decaf, anyone?), but we stand firmly against its use as an enabling technology for the fossil fuel industry to drill, drill, drill. As we grapple with injudicious technology and policy (on all governmental levels), our minds are on the upcoming U.S. election. On social media we are sharing information from trusted allies on voting rights and accessibility (our own graphics consultant Mo Banks works for the singular Andrew Goodman Foundation). We have colleagues taking time off to do voter education, get out the vote, and work the polls on election day. Off hours, I just finished writing 200 postcards with Postcards to Swing States. We’re not naïve about the damage already done or the massive public investment into false solutions. Our children to their graves have gone
Still your tanks keep rolling on
Science and progress
What have you done But we also believe we have a fighting chance to change course. As individuals we have this commitment to ourselves, families and communities, and as the staff of SEHN we have this commitment to you. Warmly,
Carmi Orenstein, MPH *Italicized song lyrics ©The Felice Brothers, used by permission. “It’s Midnight and the Doves are in Tears” is track 12 on Valley of Abandoned Songs. |
Carbon Capture and Storage: Underestimating the Ingenuity of Fools |
| by Carolyn Raffensperger, Executive Director |
| “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
– Douglas Adams Peter Warshall, the great biologist and editor of the now-defunct Whole Earth Review, once said that for every recipe that calls for energy, add water. Warshall’s statement is more wildly true now as we face the energy transition with its massive changes both in consumption and generation of power. Many of us are keenly aware of how much more energy we will need in the future because of emerging technologies like AI and cryptocurrencies. But the mix of energy sources is also changing. One dimension of the energy transition is how desperately the fossil fuel industry is fighting to keep oil, gas, and coal in that mix. Of course, the fossil fuel giants have figured out a way to both keep extracting fossil energy and claim to be solving the climate problem: carbon capture and storage (CCS). CCS is the fossil fuel industry’s proposal to have its cake and eat it too: capture its CO2 pollutant, compress it, send it through a nationwide sewer system of pipelines, and then force it underground for either long-term burial or, more commonly, to get more oil or gas out of the ground. We are told that these wells for sequestration and enhanced oil recovery are fool-proof and will keep the CO2 underground forever. If you think these are rare proposals only happening in some remote state, google your own state and “carbon capture and storage” to see what could be coming to you. We’ve focused on CO2 pipelines connecting the capture facilities with the sequestration or enhanced oil recovery wells, because the pipelines threaten so much land, so many communities, and pose such unique dangers. We knew that a rupture of these pipelines could asphyxiate all breathing things within their kill-zone. We knew that they could pollute the water. We knew that they required lots of energy to capture, compress, and ship the CO2 which meant they only add to the climate burden. We knew the CO2 pipelines were dangerous given the massive failure of a pipeline in Satartia, Mississippi. We had not focused on the grave, vast threat of the underground storage or enhanced oil recovery to water. Until now. We just learned that CO2 sequestration wells located at Archer Daniel Midland’s grain processing plant in Decatur, Illinois had leaked. There are only four of these permanent sequestration, Class VI wells that are operating in the United States, although many more are planned for states including Louisiana, Texas, North Dakota, Montana, Pennsylvania, and California (among others). Continue Reading |
RePercussion Section: Effusing the Oil Fields—A Short History of Supercritical CO2 |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence |
| In 1822, a free Black man in South Carolina, Denmark Vesey, attempted to lead a revolution. The plot included the mass execution of slave owners and the emancipation of enslaved people from the city of Charleston. Thousands secretly pledged to participate. However, before they could carry out this uprising, the plan was leaked and Vesey was hanged—along with 34 of his co-conspirators. At the same moment, across the ocean in France, another man was doing something else with the barrel of a gun. Baron Charles Cagniard de la Tour dropped a flint ball down its chute, filled it with various liquids, sealed it up, exposed it to heat, spun it around and noticed that at a certain temperature, the splashing sounds inside the barrel entirely disappeared. Thus was discovered, in the same year a massive slave revolt was put down, the supercritical state of fluids. *** Somewhere in middle school science class, we all learned about the three phases of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Water turns to humidity via evaporation. And the humidity of our exhaled breath becomes droplets on the windshield via the phase change called condensation. Water in the freezer becomes ice cubes. Snow in the sunlight vanishes via sublimation—a physical transformation that skips the liquid phase altogether and sends a solid into the air as a vapor. A liquid, by definition, is something that has a volume but no shape. It flows. Its shape is whatever container it is placed within. You can leave off the lid, and there it is. A liquid, critically, can dissolve things. Like sugar in tea. By contrast, a gas has neither shape nor volume. It’s the holy ghost of the trinity. The molecules of a gas bounce around and, if you open the lid, they leave. Whereas water splashes on the floor, steam rises, whistling as it goes, and escapes the tea kettle. Also, critically, a gas has the power to effuse through solids. Supercritical fluids blur the distinction between liquid and gas. They flow like a liquid and can serve as a solvent, but they can also pass through solid materials like a gas. Supercriticality is created when a substance is brought above a certain temperature and pressure—the critical point—and its phase boundary disappears. Flowing like a liquid and effusing like a gas means that the chimeras called supercritical fluids are used to extract things. Continue Reading |
SEHN’s executive director, Carolyn Raffensperger, and science director, Ted Schettler, were quoted in this Inside Climate News piece addressing the profound risks posed by carbon capture and storage (CCS) wells, and the lack of free, prior and informed consent on the part of the impacted communities. The occasion for the piece was Archer-Daniels-Midland’s leaking CCS well in Decatur, Illinois. Carolyn was a panelist for the New Yorkers for Clean Power Teach-In: “The False Solutions Jeopardizing NY's Climate Progress,” speaking about CCS. Watch Video. Dr. Schettler, who has a long history of work on this issue, spoke with Trellis (formerly GreenBiz) about the new law in California banning DEHP in IV bags, and its market implications. “The toxicity (and) circularity issues go hand in hand, in the sense that if you redesign using safer polymers, you then get away from the toxicity, and you begin to open up the opportunities for reusing those safer plastics.” Dr. Schettler was also featured on this Fierce Healthcare podcast, “Minimizing plastics use and risk in healthcare.” Listen Here. Our staff continued to be called upon to provide scientific and policy insight on the many ecological crises caused by the fossil fuel industry. Dr. Schettler was interviewed for a collaborative piece from the non-profit digital magazine Undark and the Santa Fe Reporter about New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s proposal to reuse oil industry wastewater. “It’s almost guaranteed that if the particular state does not require much more rigorous testing, there are going to be hazardous chemicals that are going to be spread on the land, or make their way into waterways.” The fracking science Compendium, created by our program Concerned Health Professionals of New York, continues to be the go-to source for the body of work addressing fracking’s risks and harms. This Washington, Pennsylvania Observer-Reporter piece names the Compendium and quotes one of our reviewers, Dr. Ted Ketyer: “The science is in. Study after study shows fracking can’t be done safely anywhere, including in Pennsylvania… Look, we have enough scientific and medical studies, we have enough data to say fracking is dangerous, and the closer you live to it, the higher the risk to you and your family.” The Compendium was also referenced in an Op-Ed in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel. Two oil and gas-related Food & Water Watch press releases carried quotes from Dr. Steingraber, “Scientists Call on Biden Admin. to Follow the Facts on LNG Exports and Gas-Sourced Hydrogen, Citing Alarming New Research on Methane Emissions,” and “130 Groups Urge Energy Dept. to Consider Clean Water Impacts of LNG Export Permitting.” Dr. Steingraber spoke on behalf of SEHN program Concerned Health Professionals of New York as part of a rally and kayaking event on the Hudson River in New York, protesting expansion of the Iroquois fracked gas pipeline: “Expansion of the pipeline is not needed… We know the climate crisis calls us to end all new fossil fuel build-out, lest we hit unfixable tipping points.” Read Here. Hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, this webinar on “Scientists and Activists vs Fossil Fuel finance,” featured Dr. Steingraber. View Webinar. Sandra, long known for her seminal work on pesticides and health, spoke with Iowa Public Radio on the role that exposure to agricultural chemicals may be playing in Iowa’s cancer rates. |
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