Usando garrafas PET e água como lâmpada natural

Em 2002, em pleno apagão, o mecânico de Uberaba percebeu que poderia escapar do breu pendurando no telhado de casa garrafas plásticas cheias de água.

"É uma garrafa PET de dois litros, com água limpa, duas tampinhas de água sanitária e um potinho de filme de máquina fotográfica para proteger do sol, para não estragar a tampa", ensina seu Alfredo.

A invenção atravessou divisas e virou atração no Parque Ecológico Chico Mendes, na Grande São Paulo. Também atiçou a curiosidade da ciência. O engenheiro elétrico Clivenor de Araújo Filho mediu a intensidade de luz de cada garrafa. "Essa luminosidade equivale a uma lâmpada entre 40 e 60 watts", constata.

"O banheiro era muito escuro e agora está claro. Ela não tem desvantagem nenhuma. Funciona quando chove, não tem goteira", garante dona Geralda.

A imagem é curiosa: bicos de garrafas para fora dos telhados no bairro todo.

Reportagem do Globo mostrando como a garrafa fez sucesso.

The Last Drop - Future water problems in Texas

The Last Drop

The good news is that Texas has an incredibly detailed plan for how to deal with the looming shortfalls in every one of its major urban areas. The bad news is that you can’t drink a plan.

by S. C. Gwynne

0915.2035

Everybody remembers September 15, 2035. Just as they can tell you where they were on September 11, 2001, they can recall what they were doing 34 years later on the day that Dallas and Fort Worth ran out of water. It came at the end of a brutal five-year drought. The population had been multiplying like bacteria, residents had done little to conserve their water, and municipal governments had not spent nearly enough money on building new pipelines and reservoirs. Finally, on September 15, a Saturday, the big water suppliers announced that they were shutting down the pipelines. That was the day nothing came out of the faucet. That was the day everything still living withered and died.

Does this seem like a far-fetched scenario, the sort of nightmarish confluence of human error and act of God that could never really happen? Then consider the events of the summer of 2006 in the northern and eastern suburbs of Dallas, a part of the area known to state water planners as Region C. An eighteen-month drought had left Plano, Richardson, Mesquite, and other suburbs in a precarious position, and there was still no rain forecast, no end in sight. As the cities smoldered, the huge reservoirs that served them dropped to ever more alarming levels. Jim Chapman Lake emptied to 15 percent of its capacity, Lavon Lake to 36 percent. People began to realize that there were no backups, no lines to other reservoirs. Water hogs were slapped with fines—more than six thousand levied in Plano alone. Locks were unceremoniously clamped onto delinquent sprinkler systems. Nervous citizens were told they might soon face a stage four emergency, a condition that would mean the end of nearly all lawn watering (and thus, soon enough, of nearly all lawns) and eventually strict rationing.

Luckily, that did not happen. Small rains came in late 2006, followed by very big rains in the spring and summer of 2007. Reservoirs refilled, the crisis was averted, life returned to normal. But for anyone paying attention, the episode was terrifying: 1.6 million people had come within a meteorological whisker of a catastrophic water shortage. And the drought of 2005—2006 was not even a particularly bad one. It was nowhere near as severe as the seven-year drought of the fifties, during which Dallas had to build an emergency pipeline to the Red River. That fix worked, but only because the population of Dallas proper was just 600,000 or so. Today it’s 1.2 million.

The simple fact is that Region C—which includes Tarrant, Dallas, Collin, Denton, Rockwall, and eleven other counties—is getting too big for its water supplies: Ever-increasing numbers of people and businesses are straining resources built to accommodate a much smaller crowd. Unlike the Panhandle and the Llano Estacado, which sit on top of North America’s largest aquifer, the Ogallala, Region C relies almost entirely on surface water; unlike rainy East Texas, its reserves of that commodity are quite limited. This makes Region C uniquely vulnerable to drought. The water contained in the twelve reservoirs that serve Dallas and Fort Worth is completely inadequate to meet future need. The state’s official projections for the water shortfall over the next fifty years are nothing less than astonishing.

These projections begin with explosive growth. Between 2010 and 2060, Region C’s population is expected to roughly double, from 6.6 million to 13.1 million. That will account for 28.5 percent of the state population. Water use will increase 87 percent, from 1.8 million acre-feet per year in 2010 to 3.3 million acre-feet in 2060. Meanwhile, as demand increases dramatically, existing sources of supply—rivers and lakes and groundwater in the area—will actually decline by 9 percent, mostly due to the silting in of reservoirs and the depletion of aquifers, leaving a shortfall of 1.93 million acre-feet per year. That is more than the entire current water usage in the area. (One acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, which, broadly speaking, is enough to meet the water needs of two suburban families for one year.)

The water problems that Texas as a whole faces are comparable. Water planners predict that, like Region C, Texas is expected to roughly double its population by 2060, to 46 million. Surface water will be the source of most of the water for our giant urban centers, yet existing groundwater and surface water supplies will drop, by about 18 percent, leaving a mind-boggling statewide shortfall of some 8.8 million acre-feet per year—the equivalent output of 85 large reservoirs.

Every major city in Texas has its own unique water problem: San Antonio relies almost entirely on groundwater and will need to find new supplies in aquifers other than the Edwards, the pumping of which is now limited by law; El Paso, long reliant on water from the Rio Grande and Pecos rivers and groundwater from two primary aquifers, will have to desalinate brackish groundwater and reuse reclaimed water to survive; Houston relies on groundwater and surface water but must wean itself off groundwater, because the more it pumps the more the city sinks into the earth.

Of all these, though, the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth face the worst dilemma, a sort of perfect storm of failing supply and skyrocketing demand, made palpably real by the recent drought. This area is going to need a colossal amount of water in the future. By 2035 it will have exhausted all its existing supplies. Where will it get the water it needs? The answer is not clear-cut, but the problem may be starting to make itself understood. “The perception here changed after 2005—2006,” says Jim Parks, the executive director of the North Texas Municipal Water District, which came under fire after the crisis for failing to provide sufficient reserves. “People started realizing that it is not a God-given right that water is going to be in those reservoirs.”

Among the fifty states, Texas may rank near the bottom in many categories—including environmental protection (forty-fifth), quality of parks and recreation (forty-ninth), and availability of mental health care (forty-sixth)—but there is one area of public policy where it ranks indisputably first: water planning. No other state knows with such precision how much water it has and how much it will have in the future. Every five years the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB), the state’s lead water planning and financing agency, produces a prodigious work of hydrologic scholarship known as the State Water Plan. Divvying up the state into sixteen regions, the plan pre-sents precisely articulated data on current and future supply and demand in each region and strategies for dealing with shortfalls. The 2007 version outlines more than 4,500 strategies to fix the fifty-year shortfall. All told, the price tag comes to $30.7 billion (Region C’s share is $13.2 billion). By contrast, the state of Georgia, whose principal city, Atlanta, came famously close to running out of water last year, has historically dedicated few resources to determining how much water it has, how much it will need, how well it can weather a drought, and what it will cost to fix its shortfalls.

Why is Texas so good at this? In part because its main population centers are located on the edge of what people used to call the Great American Desert. This historically treeless zone begins roughly at the 98th meridian, a line of latitude that bisects the state along the Interstate 35 corridor. With one foot in the semiarid or arid prairies and plains of the American West and the other in the rainy forests of the East, Texas has been hit hard, and often, by catastrophic droughts. The drought of the 1890’s killed off much of its nascent cattle industry. In the fifties a seven-year drought (Texas’s worst statewide drought ever) destroyed much of the state’s agriculture and caused 244 of the state’s 254 counties to be declared federal disaster areas. This led the state legislature to create the Texas Water Development Board, which published its first water plan in 1961.

The Last Drop

by S. C. Gwynne

(Page 2 of 4)

The board continued to meet, and its strategies grew more sophisticated, but by the late eighties it had become clear that its plans were not being acted on sufficiently. The planners in Austin were planning, but people in the rest of the state weren’t paying much attention. The short but viciously harsh drought of 1996 changed all that, leading directly to the unprecedented 1997 law requiring the regions of the state to come up with their own fifty-year plans. It also said that in order to be approved, any water rights or projects had to be included in the state water plan. It wasn’t until a decade later, however, that the water board got some real teeth. Legislation spearheaded by Republican senator Kip Averitt, of Waco, in 2007 gave the state the power to actually finance water projects, including more than three quarters of a billion dollars’ worth now in development. The water board now had some control over what got built and what didn’t. The bill also gave priorities in financing to cities with conservation plans and set in motion a process to establish a minimum “environmental flow” (or, an acceptable water level) for every stream and river in the state. These may sound like modest advances. In the world of water management, they were landmarks.

What all of this means is that there is, in fact, a plan for how to slake Region C’s thirst. It consists of four main strategies, staged to kick in at intervals over the next forty years: (1) Build four big reservoirs; (2) build pipelines to six lakes that are not currently hooked up to Metroplex water systems; (3) reuse wastewater, both in irrigation and cooling systems and by recycling it through rivers and wetlands; and (4) use less water (in the plan, conservation accounts for 11 percent of the future water supply).

On paper this plan looks sensible. Most of the water in the state is in East Texas—which gets 50 to 60 inches of rain per year, compared with the Metroplex’s 36 inches—so it makes sense for the big suppliers to look there for new water. It makes sense to build new reservoirs to hold that new water and to build new lines to pipe it to Region C. It makes sense to reuse water and to promote conservation. But in spite of how reasonable the TWDB’s plan might seem, it is going to be brutally difficult to carry out. Even to call it a plan may be inaccurate, since planning carries a certain expectation of accomplishment. Perhaps “vision” would be a better word. The TWDB’s problem, and ours, is that its vision is not shared by everyone. There are, in fact, significant disagreements over how the agency assesses our future water needs and how it proposes to satisfy them.

One of the best ways to understand the hurdles Region C’s water plan will have to overcome is to head for the bottomlands of the Sulphur River, about fifty miles outside Texarkana, in northeast Texas. Few of this area’s tiny communities can be found on a map. It is a place of small farms and ranches, dirt roads and oak forests, pastures and lovely rolling post oak savanna. It is also a land of creeks and sloughs and floodplains and the lush hardwood river bottom, and this has made it a big part of the proposed solution to the looming urban water shortages in the Metroplex. Region C’s basic strategy for the next half a century is quite simple: Lay pipelines eastward, to the rain-rich and relatively unpopulated regions of East Texas, where large dams and reservoirs will be built. The largest of these, by far, is the proposed Marvin Nichols Reservoir. At 72,000 acres (113 square miles), it would radically transform the Sulphur River area. Water planners insist that without it, Region C’s future will be in grave danger.

That’s not how Max Shumake sees it. Last November, I toured the river bottom with him from his hunting camp, a pretty place with an ancient single-wide, a couple of ATVs, and some chairs and tables with rifles spread across them. A dead bobcat hung splayed upside down from an old oak tree. Shumake and his family own 797 acres here. His view of what will happen to this land if Marvin Nichols gets built is stark. “Nothing that you see here will remain,” he said ruefully. “Cemeteries, churches, farms, ranches, and families that have been here for five generations. A healthy timber industry. Where you are standing now will be nine feet underwater.”

Shumake is the president of the Sulphur River Oversight Society (SOS), a local landowner group formed to oppose Marvin Nichols. It now claims six thousand members, the support of every state legislator in the area, and the backing of such environmental powerhouses as the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation. SOS and other reservoir opponents say that between the 72,000-acre lake and an additional 163,000 acres of federally mandated environmental “mitigation,” the Marvin Nichols project will not only destroy ranches and farms of multigenerational residents but also obliterate wildlife habitat, submerge 30,000 acres of rare hardwood bottomlands, and disrupt more than forty miles of a river that has already been dammed twice. The local timber industry would lose up to 1,300 jobs and $275 million in annual revenue, according to the Texas Forest Service.

“We just don’t think it is fair,” said Shumake, “to ask us to give up everything so that North Texas can put up to sixty percent of its water into watering lawns.”

His argument has two parts: (1) Dallas and Fort Worth consume water at a rate well above other big Texas cities and want to build new reservoirs only to avoid having to adopt more-difficult measures, such as limiting lawn watering (which on summer days does indeed account for 60 percent of all municipal use), and (2) there are other untapped sources of surface water, such as Toledo Bend Reservoir, on the Sabine River; Lake Texoma, on the Oklahoma border; and Wright Patman Lake, farther downstream on the Sulphur River, that should be used first. Shumake may be a country boy, but last spring his group and its allies showed their political muscle, causing a major fight in the state legislature over the preliminary designation of the four reservoir sites. They lost that fight but sent a clear message: Dallas and Fort Worth are in for a long, bloody struggle over the building of Marvin Nichols.

It will be even harder to build Fastrill Reservoir, another of the state’s proposed water sources, located about 130 miles due south of Shumake’s camp, on the upper Neches River. City of Dallas water planners have coveted the upper Neches for damming and impoundment. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) beat them to the punch by declaring it part of a national wildlife refuge in 2006. Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Water Development Board were furious, warning that the future of Dallas’s water supplies was at risk and that the feds were intruding into state water policy. In response, both the City of Dallas and the TWDB filed suits against the FWS, while some 20,000 Texans wrote letters in support of the refuge. Whatever the outcome of the suit (and right now it doesn’t look good for the plaintiffs), environmentalists have vowed to fight to protect the roughly 25,000 acres of forested wetlands.

It was not always this difficult to build dams and reservoirs. In the early and mid-twentieth century, reservoirs reigned supreme in the world of water management. In Texas, the heyday of the “big dam era” lasted from the thirties to the eighties. After that, the popularity of reservoirs began to wane, mostly for environmental reasons: They displace populations, destroy habitat and rivers, and negatively affect the condition and salinity of coastal estuaries. Plus they’re hard to build. Even if you can jump the political, environmental, and bureaucratic hurdles necessary to get one approved, it is likely to take fifteen to twenty years to actually finish one—nearly the same time horizon as for a new nuclear power plant. Of Texas’s 196 major reservoirs, 169 were built before 1980.

The responsibility for building Region C’s new reservoirs lies with the three giant utilities that control 75 percent of the area’s water: the Tarrant Regional Water District, the North Texas Municipal Water District, and Dallas Water Utilities. Tarrant and North Texas are wholesalers, selling water to cities; Dallas Water performs both wholesale and retail functions. Because there is little groundwater in the area, these governmental organizations with elected boards have by nature and tradition always been reservoir builders, securing their water by damming rivers in the Trinity River Basin. Dallas Water has five reservoirs, Tarrant Regional has four, and North Texas Municipal has three.

To a large extent, the future prosperity of Region C is in the hands of these agencies, and if you listen to the people who run them (and to the governor and a large number of elected state officials), new reservoirs are crucial to supplying the population’s future water needs. Water planners have proposed nineteen across the state. But the experiences with Nichols and Fastrill suggest that many—even most—may never see the light of day.

Reservoirs are just a part of the problem Dallas and Fort Worth will face in their attempt to pipe water from rural East Texas. Shumake is right—one of the most logical sources of supply in the area is the giant Toledo Bend Reservoir, in far East Texas, a little-used reservoir that was completed in 1969 by damming the Sabine River. It is the largest man-made body of water in the South and the fifth largest, by surface acres, in the United States. The river above it drains an area of 7,190 square miles. It is also, most importantly, the largest pool of water in the state that remains untapped by any large user, capable of producing an enormous two million acre-feet of water per year (Louisiana has rights to half of that). For this reason, Toledo Bend figures heavily in the water plan as a major source for all three of the big wholesalers.

The Last Drop

by S. C. Gwynne

(Page 3 of 4)

But actually getting hold of its water will not be easy. First, there’s the fact that the only way to transport water from Toledo Bend to the Metroplex is via a two-hundred-plus-mile, mostly uphill pipeline. Estimated cost: $1.1 billion. Estimated time to secure all the environmental permits and interbasin transfer rights: maybe twenty years. Aside from that, there are the possible environmental protections. Though nothing quite so violent as a new reservoir is being constructed, taking large amounts of water away from a river’s ecology has profound effects over the long term. The Sabine River Basin is a complex ecosystem that includes habitat for all sorts of animals. Precious cypress-tupelo swamps flourish near the river’s mouth. A large drop in river flow means higher salinity in the Gulf, coastal wetlands, and other sensitive areas. All this will provide the opposition with considerable ammunition, especially considering the 2007 water bill’s directive to the Legislature to establish minimum environmental flows.

“Everything becomes a trade-off,” says Kelly Brumbelow, a professor of civil engineering at Texas A&M University and a leading authority on water management. “You can move that water around, but only if you are willing to accept significant ecological impacts. Only if you are willing to take all of these estuaries and riverine ecosystems in East Texas and sacrifice them.” For decades, a willingness to make those trade-offs has paved the way for new dams and reservoirs. But Brumbelow says this is changing. “The students I see around here,” he explains, “the ones who are going to be making the decisions twenty or twenty-five years from now, they’re much more comfortable with the idea of environmental protection.”

The most obvious solution to the water problem is to use less water. This notion is both crushingly obvious and completely ignored by the average Texas water hog, who blithely takes thirty-minute showers, fills and refills his backyard pool, and runs the sprinkler for two hours a day, four days a week. Except in times of extreme drought, conservation, especially in big cities, is just not high on anyone’s agenda. This may be partly because, in Region C at least, municipal governments and utilities have never tried to make the case that it should be.

As a commodity, water is valueless. The utilities are granted free permits for it by the state. They do not pay for the water. What we pay them is based only on what it costs them to store it, haul it from the reservoir, and pay the salaries of their employees. Though a number of private landowners are starting to actually sell their groundwater to cities like San Antonio and El Paso, the overwhelming majority of the state’s water has no commodity value, as does, say, a barrel of oil. Because of this, business and industry have never been compelled to view it as anything particularly precious. Water in Texas is an economic paradox: It is rare, yes, but it is also dirt cheap, something nobody has ever cared much about saving.

The key measure of water consumption is gallons per capita per day. According to the TWDB’s most recent data, Richardson is the biggest user among Texas cities, at 275 gallons. Dallas isn’t far behind at 238. Plano is at 225. By contrast, Austin uses only 177 gallons per person per day, and San Antonio 142. Though the numbers are almost certainly skewed against the Metroplex because of the presence of so much industry, the area has done so little to promote conservation that it remains vulnerable to criticisms such as Shumake’s that it is draining the rivers, lakes, and wetlands of East Texas merely to water its lawns.

What complicates water conservation is that the big water wholesalers, like Tarrant Regional and North Texas Municipal, are not in a position to enforce it. (Dallas Water, within the city limits, is an exception.) Only the buyers of their water, the municipalities, can set watering rules or other consumption limits. The result is a hodgepodge of unorganized, unorchestrated conservation practices that vary widely from city to city. The state, of course, could take control of the matter and mandate strict conservation, but don’t hold your breath. It is extremely difficult to try and set consumption limits in a state where rainfall ranges from 55 inches per year, in Beaumont, to 10 inches a year, in El Paso. People in Port Arthur do not usually need to water their lawns; in Midland, lawns and gardens wither quickly without frequent irrigation.

Perhaps more important, there are the obstacles of culture and tradition. Most Americans bristle at the suggestion that limits be placed on their personal freedoms. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have come to include luxuriant showers, daily dishwasher cycles, and backyard hot tubs and pools. What’s more, for many Texans, especially those in fast-growing suburbs, lawns and gardens are regarded as an inalienable right. The look and feel, not to mention the dollar value, of homes in booming, affluent communities like Southlake and Frisco is based on St. Augustine grass and decorative shrubs. This is real money, and people will not want to give it up, no matter how much they are harangued about the moral righteousness and environmental correctness of Xeriscaping with ornamental cacti.

That is not to say that anyone is giving up. Water awareness campaigns are in their infancy in most of the state. And San Antonio—now the water planner’s poster child for smart conservation—has had enormous success in curtailing consumption. The city offers all sorts of carrot-and-stick incentives to save water: up to $525 in rebates for replanting your yard with low-water plants, a $100 washing machine rebate to replace your old water hog, free water-efficient toilets. New laws were also passed in 2005 and 2007 that require drought-tolerant grass for all new homes and businesses and rain sensors for lawn irrigation systems; prohibit charity car washes, except in existing commercial facilities; and require annual checkups for any watering system covering more than five acres. The city is now aggressively seeking out and working with golf courses and other mega-consumers to develop plans to save water. The result is a per capita consumption rate so admirably low that San Antonio has become the benchmark for conservation around the state.

But while individual consumers and businesses get most of the blame for poor conservation, one of the worst water wasters of all is neither a person nor a company. It is the system itself. Leaks. Much of the infrastructure that carries our water was built during the big-dam era and is now forty to fifty years old and badly deteriorated. In Fort Worth, a 2005 water audit showed that 7.2 billion gallons of water were lost to leakage—a thumping 16.7 percent of all the water used in the city that year.

“This is one of the dirty little secrets of urban water utilities,” says Brumbelow, the A&M professor. “There are lots of older utilities out there that are not doing a good job of keeping up their infrastructure. We’ve seen losses as high as forty percent.” (An extreme example of this elsewhere in the state is the Rio Grande Valley, where old, unlined dirt canals are used to get the water out to the fields, allowing literally millions of gallons to seep away into the ground.) The problem is bad enough that the TWDB now requires all retail public water suppliers to do water audits every five years. But knowing you have a leak and fixing it are not the same thing. As with so many other examples of sagging American infrastructure, no one wants to spend the billions of dollars it will cost to replace all the pipes, valves, pumps, and other hardware.

The final form of conservation in the state water plan goes by the innocuous-sounding name of “reuse.” It’s a wonderful concept, in all its forms. It means, quite simply, that water we have already used we will use again. Let’s take the most ordinary example. You flush your toilet, sending three and a half gallons of water and waste down the drain. The sewage system ferries your deposit to a wastewater treatment plant, where it is run through a series of filters. Sixty percent of the water in that plant ends up back in your local river. (It may dismay you to learn that in many rivers, particularly the ones downstream of a major city, much of the water you see is treated effluent. It’s fairly clean, though, often cleaner than the “wild” river water it is dumped back into.)

Once the effluent has been returned to the local rivers, it can be used to water golf courses, fill cooling towers at power plants, or in other applications that do not involve consumption. Theoretically, it can also be put directly into a reservoir to be consumed, presumably by you. Because of the gross-out factor inherent in such a process, this does not currently happen (nor is it envisioned in the 2007 water plan). However, in the most sophisticated and ingenious use, the river-borne effluent is pumped into a reservoir to be consumed, but not before being filtered by an artificially constructed wetland.

The Last Drop

by S. C. Gwynne

(Page 4 of 4)

That may sound a bit rarefied, the sort of experimental technology found only at research facilities, but exactly this kind of reuse accounts for an enormous amount of the water intended to save the Metroplex. It will come in the form of two projects. This year North Texas Municipal will complete a $250 million, 1,840-acre wetland on the east fork of the Trinity River, just east of the city of Dallas. The low-quality, sediment-filled water, mostly effluent and urban runoff, will be pumped into one side of the wetland; seven days later it will emerge on the other side, cleaner than the water in most reservoirs. This project is critical to the water supply of those same suburbs that were stricken by the 2005¬2006 drought and will help to ensure that a similar near-catastrophe does not take place again. The East Fork Raw Water Supply Project will generate 102,000 acre-feet of water per year, approximately the equivalent of one major reservoir.

A win-win situation, right? Not exactly. Even with such benign, natural technologies there is controversy. Farther down on the Trinity, the Tarrant Regional Water District has built an even bigger wetland, one that will produce 188,000 acre-feet per year. But in order to get rights to that water, the utility had to endure eight years of tough negotiations with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Texas Parks and Wildlife, the cities of Houston and Dallas, and various Galveston Bay organizations. Why? Because by reusing Region C’s effluent, Tarrant Regional would effectively be siphoning off water that would normally flow downstream in the Trinity to Houston and the Gulf. Houston depends on the Trinity for almost all of its surface water. (Which, by the way, means that on any given summer day some 95 percent of the water filling Houston’s two main reservoirs is effluent from Dallas and Fort Worth. Yes, that’s what I said: The toilets of Dallas supply the faucets and drinking fountains of Houston.)

“Reuse can add tremendously to the water supplies of Fort Worth and Dallas,” says Ronald Kaiser, a professor of water law and policy and the chair of the Texas A&M Graduate Water Degree Program. “But there are real limits to what they can do. If they reused all of their water, for example, several things would happen. The ecology of the Trinity would change dramatically. The river would run dry. But the big impact would be that Houston would come unglued because they have come to rely on those base flows.” Reuse—that great idea—will likely occasion major battles between Dallas and Houston in the coming years as these two thirsty populations compete for the dregs of the Trinity basin.

So if Region C doesn’t get its water from pipelines to East Texas, strict conservation, or reuse, where will it get its water? T. Boone Pickens thinks the answer to this question could be worth a lot of money. Never one to let an opportunity pass by, Pickens has come up with a scheme to pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer and sell it to the big suppliers in Region C. The Ogallala is pumped on a massive scale, irrigating corn, cotton, wheat, and sorghum crops in the areas around Lubbock and Amarillo and accounting for about 40 percent of all the water used in the state of Texas. Of course, it is being slowly depleted and sometime in the next century will run completely dry. But in the meantime, Pickens has been buying up groundwater rights in the area. His idea is to get one or more of the Metroplex’s three big suppliers to finance the building of a pipeline for about $2 billion; once the pipes are up and running, he’ll sell Region C the water in them.

This may sound like a perfect, if somewhat ecologically irresponsible, match of supply and demand, but in fact Pickens’s water is extremely expensive compared with the alternatives. According to a recent engineering study, his water would cost some $2.60 per thousand gallons, more than three times what it would cost to get water from the new reservoir on lower Bois d’Arc Creek (one of the four East Texas reservoirs proposed for Region C). Pickens’ scheme also costs more than piping water in from Toledo Bend. According to the main suppliers, there are only two sources of water more expensive than Pickens’s—a large aquifer that stretches south and east of Dallas, called the Carrizo-Wilcox, and the Gulf of Mexico (though, due to its prohibitive cost, desalinated Gulf water is not yet in the picture).

But Pickens persists. His project relies on the near absence of state regulation of groundwater. This circumstance may be short-lived—most water experts expect more-stringent state groundwater regulation in the next 25 years—but for now groundwater from either Pickens or the Carrizo-Wilcox remains on the table for all three water suppliers.

“Boone’s thing is certainly feasible,” says Jim Oliver, the general manager of the Texas Municipal Water District. “Water from the Carrizo-Wilcox is also feasible. But their markup is incredible, and they want a whole lot more money than what we can build other reservoirs for. Boone is revising his model. But he is just going to have to get real.”

In the midst of all this uncertainty about the future of the region’s water supply lies a single, tantalizing possibility. A solution so complete, a water supply so prodigious that it could take Region C through the next two centuries and actually remove the need for East Texas reservoirs like Marvin Nichols and Fastrill. From an engineering and cost perspective, it is astoundingly simple and cheap. The project was not included in the plan because of its extraordinary political sensitivity, which you will understand immediately when you learn the source of this gigantic volume of water: Oklahoma.

This is not a new idea. Oklahoma, particularly its eastern half, is swimming in rainwater, more water than its population of 3.6 million people (a little more than half that of the Metroplex) could ever imagine needing or using. In the eighties, the City of Dallas was behind a bill in the Oklahoma legislature that would have allowed Texas access to water from Oklahoma reservoirs. It failed, as did a similar attempt in 2000 by an alliance of suppliers and cities led by North Texas Municipal. Both efforts were met with heavy political opposition: “The Texans are coming to steal our water” and so forth. Oklahomans were so upset that they slapped a moratorium on all out-of-state water transfers.

Then the folks at Tarrant Regional came up with a solution. What if, instead of sticking Texas straws into Oklahoma reservoirs, they took the water after it left those reservoirs but before it hit the Red River (which is so salty it needs treatment)? Water, in other words, that Oklahoma does not use, water that normally flows into the Red River and then down through Louisiana, which has more water than it knows what to do with, and finally out into the Gulf of Mexico. There are 8 million acre-feet of such water, more than four times what Region C will need fifty years from now and nearly the total shortfall for the entire state of Texas in 2060. Tarrant Regional’s proposal is to take roughly 4 percent of this water from three pipeline access points: Cache Creek and Beaver Creek, in the western part of the state, and the Kiamichi River, in the east. They are willing to pay for it, and they agree that they would never have any rights to water in the reservoir itself. (The water would be shared by the three big suppliers.)

But a large number of Oklahomans still hate the idea of Texans sniffing around their water, fearing that this would be the first step in a larger assault on their drinking and sporting supplies. Tarrant Regional has sued Oklahoma in federal court, saying that the moratorium is unconstitutional. If it wins that case, it would then be allowed to apply for permits. If it gets such permits, it would probably not have to pay for the water, which is why the Oklahoma legislature is already playing a high-risk game. Like everything else in the water business, this will likely take years to negotiate and settle and then many more years before the pipelines are completed.

The Texas Water Development Board’s 2007 plan offers an implicit warning to the people of Region C: Implement the four proposed strategies (new reservoirs, new pipelines, reuse, and conservation) or your farms will die, your businesses will go bankrupt, and your cities will dry up. But as we’ve seen, executing even just one of these strategies can be demonically complex. Water politics are by nature deeply adversarial. There are literally thousands of competing interests. It is almost impossible to put forward a plan of any kind that does not cause harm to someone, somewhere. The issue is a sort of paradise for lawyers. Programs like “interbasin transfer” promise hellish, multiyear court battles. The environmentalists and “NIMBYists” who have tried to stop Fastrill and Marvin Nichols are merely previews of the future conflicts that will rage in Texas.

These conflicts will pit vote-rich cities against rural areas, farmers against suburbs and exurbs, Dallas against Houston, the Metroplex against landowners in the Panhandle, environmentalists against business and residential water users, Texas against Oklahoma and Louisiana, and Texas against federal and local governments. And when all the smoke has cleared, there is no guarantee that anyone will have been able to avert that hypothetical water catastrophe of September 15, 2035. It is entirely possible that the state that knows everything about its water problems may be powerless to solve them.

Links referenced within this article S. C. Gwynne http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/scgwynne.php S. C. Gwynne http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/scgwynne.php S. C. Gwynne http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/scgwynne.php S. C. Gwynne http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/scgwynne.php

Find this article at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-02-01/feature3.php?click_code=3ae47701fdff8cf7b5a769e5a5fb2157

The End of Oil is Nigh

The Gospel According to Matthew

For more than twenty years, an extremely successful Houston investment banker has been trying to convince the world that the end (of oil) is nigh. Now that people are finally starting to listen, is it too late?

by Mimi Swartz

2020.2025.2037

The Coronado Club, in downtown Houston, is an unlikely place to contemplate the end of life as we know it. Plush and hushed, with solemn black waiters in crisp black jackets, the private enclave practically exudes wealth and stability. Captains of local industry enter and exit purposefully, commanding their usual tables, wearing the best suits. Everybody knows everybody else. The light is flattering. The wine room is nicely stocked.

But here is Matthew R. Simmons, the head of one of the largest investment banking firms in the world, stabbing at his salad greens and heatedly discussing the chaos to come when, as he has long predicted, global oil production peaks and for the rest of our time on earth we struggle and suffer and barely endure under a diminishing supply of fuel until it disappears entirely. This idea is known as “peak oil,” and Simmons is its most fervent, and fearsome, apostle. As he puts it, “I don’t see why people are so worried about global warming destroying the planet—peak oil will take care of that.”

Slashing through his entrée, barely stopping for breath, he describes a bleak future, in which demand for oil will always surpass supply, the price will continue to rise—“so fast your head will spin”—and all sorts of problems in our carbon-dependent world will ensue. As fuel shortfalls complicate global delivery routes and leave farmers unable to run their tractors, we will face massive food shortages. Products made with petroleum, from asphalt and plastic to fabrics and computer chips, will also become scarcer and scarcer. Standards of living will fall, and people will not be able to pay their debts. Lending will tighten, and eventually there will be major defaults. Growth will cease, and hoarding will set in as oil becomes increasingly rare. Then, according to Simmons, the wars will begin. That is the peak oil scenario.

Simmons is an unlikely Cassandra in this, the energy capital of the world. He is a consummate insider—a friend of Mayor Bill White’s and of innumerable nabobs in the local as well as global energy business, a graduate with distinction from Harvard Business School, a Republican who advised presidential candidate George W. Bush on energy policy, and an extremely wealthy man. In 2006 his investment firm, Simmons and Company International, closed 35 transactions worth $8.7 billion and co-managed 19 offerings worth $6.7 billion. He lives with his wife, Ellen, in one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods and also owns a vacation house in Maine.

Yet at 64, Simmons opts to spend his days traveling the globe at his own expense, speaking at universities and business forums and to tiny alumni groups and just about anyone else, trying to convince an uninformed, uninterested populace that the end is very, very near. Like a lot of prophets, he has little patience for those who disagree with his message. He is an intense man, smallish and ruddy-complexioned, with a high, wide forehead and marble-blue eyes. Old ways of thinking—that the market will correct for skyrocketing prices, that the Saudis will always provide—drive him buggy. “Price has no impact on slowing demand,” he insists, as an anxious waiter hovers. “We’ve seen a stealth growth of eighteen million barrels a day, while the demand between the end of 1995 and last week went up tenfold.” What about when everyone said that Saudi Arabia was hiding vast reserves, ready to flood the world market and cause a price collapse? “That was the dumbest thing I ever heard,” he snaps. “What giant new oil finds have they reported in the last decade or so?”

Hardly anything escapes Simmons’s ire. He has no respect for those who, in his estimation, have not done their homework as diligently as he has. Daniel Yergin, one of the world’s foremost authorities on oil? “A silly person,” Simmons says. Ethanol? “A tragic scam.” Big Oil? “A brain-dead industry.” Pushing aside his plate, Simmons gives the top oil companies grades of D+, D-, D, and F, declaring, “The head of Exxon is a flake.”

“People used to talk about how tech had changed the name of the game in oil field development,” he reminisces, barely able to conceal his disgust with earlier industry predictions. “They said costs would come down. I thought it was BS. Tech sped up the decline curves.” He shoots his left arm nearly straight up, his palm stiff, like a rocket on takeoff. Then, hardly pausing to chew his food, he continues: “I spent two decades convincing myself that most conventional oil myths weren’t true. People thought I was nuts. They called me Matt the Alarmist.” Now he believes—“knows” might be a better word—that his conclusions spell doom for the American way of life unless people heed his warnings.

“The best we can hope for is a ten-year plateau,” Simmons says, skipping coffee. “This controversy is the single biggest risk for the twenty-first century.”

So can anything be done?

He looks sharply at me, the Coronado Club’s soft light reflected in his glasses, and shrugs, suddenly out of gas himself. “I’m a lot more concerned than I was three years ago,” he says.

the term “peak oil” was coined by M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist with Shell in the forties and fifties. At the time, the United States was the largest producer of oil in the world. But in 1956 Hubbert predicted that American oil dominance would peak fourteen years into the future. Though he was considered a serious crank by some contemporaries, just about everyone now knows that Hubbert was right. American crude production has been in decline since 1970, resulting in our current reliance on—some might say addiction to—foreign oil.

Hubbert’s model proposed that production of resources with a finite supply could be expected to follow a more or less symmetrical bell curve, meaning that the rate of decline once the peak was reached would be the same as the rate of increase had been. In other words, if worldwide oil production peaked in 2000, as Hubbert predicted it would, the rate of production in 2010 would match the rate in 1990. While Hubbert was wrong about his second prediction, many peak oil theorists believe he wasn’t wrong by much—that, in fact, peak oil was reached in 2005. Others put the date further into the future. The most optimistic peak oil supporters estimate that production will begin to decline after 2037.

Meanwhile, the peak oil debate has become one of the most fractious of our time, with Simmons and other advocates squaring off against their critics, not just over the timing of this supposed disaster but indeed over whether it will happen at all. Analysts like Yergin, who runs Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), contend that we are decades away from a peak, that there is plenty of oil left in the ground, and that new technologies will soon come online to help extract it more efficiently. This view, known as “nondramatic peak oil,” has a number of proponents, including the U.S. Geological Survey.

Other critics dispute Hubbert’s premise itself, arguing that oil production may never peak (this idea has been dubbed “cornucopian” by peak oil followers). There’s even a radical idea, known as the Abiogenic Theory, that holds that most petroleum comes not from dinosaur fossils but from naturally occurring carbon deposits, possibly dating to the formation of the earth, which are being regenerated as we speak. All attempts to understand production are vexed by the fact that oil reserves are always subject to debate. Just as it can be difficult to determine the status of a weapons program halfway around the world, it’s never easy to verify a country’s claims about how much oil it has.

In fact, Simmons and many others believe that Saudi Arabia, the largest supplier of oil to the U.S., has been fudging its production numbers for quite some time. In 1989 the famously secretive country claimed to have 170 billion barrels of oil in reserve. In 1990 the number had risen to 257 billion, despite the fact that no substantial fields had been discovered in Saudi Arabia since the Ghawar Oil Field, in the forties. Furthermore, oil in a new field gushes easily from the ground, and the complex technology now required to coax the oil from Ghawar and other large Saudi fields suggests that they are in deep decline.

Simmons believes that the worldwide peak was reached in 2005. He estimates the rate of decline for all oil production at somewhere north of 5 percent a year. At the same time, the global need for oil is expanding exponentially, particularly as China and India claim their places on the world stage. In India energy needs are expected to grow 72 percent by 2025; China’s are expected to roughly double during the same time frame. In seventeen years the world’s demand for oil may well be more than 50 percent greater than it is today, while production capacity may well sink to 1985 levels.

Most of the globe remains oblivious to this impending crisis, but the number of people who have come to see its logic is growing. The once-skeptical Energy Information Administration, a U.S. government bureau that keeps tabs on oil production, is slowly buying the argument, as is Sadad Al-Husseini, the former executive vice president of exploration and producing for Saudi Aramco. Simmons spends much of his day strategizing via BlackBerry with other peak oil believers, like Colin Campbell, the famed geologist; David Rutledge, a Caltech electrical engineering professor and wireless-communications expert; Robert L. Hirsch, a senior energy program adviser at the government-friendly Science Applications International Corporation; Maryland congressman Roscoe Bartlett; Randy Udall, the son of former Arizona congressman Mo Udall; and yes, T. Boone Pickens.

The Gospel According to Matthew

by Mimi Swartz

(Page 2 of 3)

Simmons’s Web site, immonsco-intl.com, which had just shy of 10 million visitors in 2006 alone, is designed to spread the word with a helpful if somewhat daunting compendium of gloomy speeches, papers, and PowerPoint presentations (“A Hungry World in Search of More Oil,” “Autopsy of Our Energy Crisis,” “Summer’s Over: Preparing for a Winter of Dis-content”). There is an ever-growing list of Web sites devoted to peak oil: theoildrum.com, oilcrash.com, and peakoilblues.com, a site dedicated solely to the emotional fallout of declining oil production. All hail Simmons as a hero and pose the kinds of questions no one much wants to think about answering. For instance: “If your family were permitted to purchase only five gallons of gasoline per week, how would this change your lifestyle?” Or the somewhat perkier query: “Given the likelihood of oil shortages in the future, what might be good careers for young people making choices today?”

This growing anxiety may help to explain why one resource that seems to be in decline along with the availability of fossil fuels is the optimism that was always so intrinsic to the oil-and-gas business. It used to be that if you went broke today, you could always start over tomorrow, and in the meantime the country club would keep your membership on the books until your next well came in. But suddenly people in Houston and beyond are beginning to suspect that there might not be many more giant deposits—in the North Sea, the Middle East, Venezuela, or even the deep end of the ocean—so somebody had better start talking about life after oil.

That job has fallen to Simmons, thanks in large part to his evangelical zeal. “Peak oil is not as complicated a topic as people think it is,” he likes to say. But getting people to grasp the ramifications—and adapt—is much harder.

It is a suspiciously warm Tuesday in early December, and Simmons has just flown from Houston to Miami on a chartered plane to give a speech to the International Regulators Offshore Safety Conference, a worldwide organization dedicated to offshore rig safety. Simmons never charges for these presentations because he feels they are the perfect marketing opportunity for his investment firm. “Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs have spent billions of dollars on advertising. We don’t spend any,” he says, his eyes twinkling with the thought of more than a few pennies saved. “When I speak, I get a sublime introduction. It’s branding of the highest order.”

Today he wears a natty battleship-blue suit set off with a white monogrammed shirt and a theme-appropriate camel-patterned Ferragamo tie. Simmons’ speech is titled “Is Our Energy System ‘Sustainable’? ” He has already told me on the ride over that the answer is no, but after a decade of being known as Dr. Gloom, he likes to present his information as coolly as possible. “If you try to make it dramatic . . . well, it’s dramatic enough,” he says. He’s convinced too that “reasonably intelligent people can absorb bad news as long as it isn’t presented smugly.”

After what is indeed a very florid intro given by a Swede (more than twenty nations are represented at this meeting), Simmons takes the stage confidently. Screens on either side of him display his slides of doom. In about fifteen minutes, he goes through a variation on his usual speech. Our refineries are decrepit. Demand from developing countries will exponentially increase. Seventeen percent of our daily supply comes from only ten supergiant fields, and if their reported production numbers are correct, all are in decline. The North Sea is depleted. Brazil is problematic. The “easy era” of offshore oil and gas is over.

“These aren’t new fields,” Simmons tells the crowd. “The newer fields are aging at an even faster rate, because the production is so intense to satisfy demand.” He moves on to the incredible increase in the price of drilling ($2 billion to $4 billion is now the norm; estimates for a new project in the Caspian Sea are about $137 billion) and the protracted time it will take to get new wells online.

The optimism espoused by critics of peak oil is “faith based,” he tells the crowd, dependent on questionable reserve reports, the unproven ability of technology to come to the rescue, and the highly theoretical availability of vast Canadian tar sands to replace the light, sweet crude of today. To counter those who say that market corrections will bring oil prices down, he projects a slide showing that demand for oil is currently “insatiable” at a time when many oil basins have already peaked. Need is so great here in the U.S. and in developing countries that improved technology only speeds the depletion of what’s left in the ground. Oil demand, Simmons says, could exceed 115 million barrels a day by 2020, an amount that will still leave China and India “energy paupers.”

Simmons’s critics often cite past price collapses, which theoretically indicate that there remains plenty of oil that can be provided with the turn of a well-timed spigot. But price declines have been short-lived, Simmons says, and while production has accelerated over the past decade, prices have soared. The best he has to offer is that high oil prices—up to $200 and $300 a barrel—could have a positive outcome, but only if the profits are spent on exploring, rebuilding infrastructure, and closing the ever-widening economic gap among people in the politically unstable nations of the oil-rich Middle East.

Clicking to his last slide, titled “It Is Easy to Miss an Approaching Crisis,” Simmons quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: “Revolutions, before they happen, appear to be impossible and after they occur they appeared to have been inevitable.” The illustration is of a rearview mirror reflecting rusting oil barrels, a drilling rig, storage tanks, a list of rising oil prices, and the words “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”

Afterward, Simmons makes his way quickly to the elevator. He usually stays around to pick up industry scuttlebutt about declining fields and faulty data, but he’s headed for South Africa the next morning, so he punches the button briskly.

A tall gray-haired man stops to say hello. “Great presentation,” he says.

“It’s not great news,” Simmons responds.

The man nods. “Most of us are gonna go jump off our balconies about now.”

Suicidal depression is not exactly the response Simmons would like his speeches to provoke, but it is preferable to the derision or indifference that his pitch used to receive. On the jet speeding back to Houston, with the Gulf of Mexico shimmering far below us, he explains his conversion from conventional businessman to pariah to, perhaps, visionary.

Born in Utah, in 1943, he grew up comfortably in a large, actively Mormon family believing he would follow his father into commercial banking. He had a hearty American childhood, reading Mad magazine and spending summers working on a cattle ranch. A naturally competitive child, he found his way in high school to the debate team, where he excelled. He still remembers the dicey topics—such as Nuclear Disarmament—and that he lost a state championship by being overconfident. The loss taught him that “the guy who had the best data owned the floor.”

After graduating from Harvard Business School, Simmons ignored the entreaties of professors who wanted him to teach and instead set about doing what he liked best, raising capital. He worked out of a small office in a tony section of Boston (“If you work on a shoestring, you don’t look like a serious person,” he says). His introduction to the world of oil and gas came in 1969, when he traveled to Palm Springs, California, to meet with Laddie Handelman, an offshore diving operator whom Simmons calls the Thomas Edison of deepwater drilling. Handelman wanted to sell his company, and Simmons put the deal together.

But this was only the beginning. Simmons was one of the first to see that the oil field—services industry could be more than just an adjunct to the oil business; instead, it could be—should be—a separate entity. (“The profit margins were so good!”) Soon his life took on a rhythm familiar to many oilmen. One year after the 1973 energy crisis, Simmons opened his own firm with his brother, L. E. Simmons, in Houston. They drew business from companies in Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska and from firms in the United Kingdom working in the North Sea. In 1975 he had an IPO for Handelman’s company, now known as Oceaneering, in which the investors’ value grew sixfold. Times were great. By 1979 oil was on its way to $50 a barrel, and Simmons was becoming a very rich man. Oil and gas had been good to him. He diligently studied the best journals and newsletters and thought he knew everything there was to know.

So, like everyone else, he was dumbfounded when oil collapsed in 1982. “For two or three years I couldn’t believe we’d survive,” he says, and in fact, Simmons and Co. came perilously close to shutting its doors.

The devastation, however, led Simmons to an epiphany. Instead of attributing his losses to plain old bad luck, he began analyzing the raw data himself. Looking at the numbers, he realized he should have seen the crash coming. Then and there he decided he would never again rely on “a club of energy economists.” He would rely on his own instincts and his own raw data and disregard the so-called experts.

Simmons’s research further suggested that the depression in oil prices was going to last for quite some time. He began traveling the country, offering this prediction and his analysis that the industry would not survive without consolidation. “Boy, did people in energy think that was stupid,” he says.

Still, Simmons persisted. “You know the Vietnam general who said in order to save the village we had to destroy it?” he told theoildrum.com in 2005. “To save the oil services, we had to destroy it. Some of the projects we worked on . . . we did a final analysis that said if these three companies come together, they can fire four thousand people and one thousand people will have sustainable jobs. I learned how to go to industry forums and tell people they all had AIDS.”

Simmons thought that people would listen to reason if it meant avoiding financial destruction. And many did accept his views. He put together the deal for the company that became Texas Eastern; he assisted the Norton Company in buying 50 percent of Eastman Christensen in the spring of 1989 and then, a few months later, handled the company’s $550 million sale to Baker Hughes. “What a wild way to end the eighties!” he recalls. Leaner and meaner, the industry surged forward.

Then, of course, oil prices collapsed again in the late nineties, the result of tremendous oversupply. The size of the glut was estimated at about 3.5 million barrels a day. Conventional wisdom held that this had been created by the failure of the Asian markets, OPEC’s overproduction, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Experts claimed that demand had peaked just as new technologies were getting the oil out of the ground faster than ever.

The Gospel According to Matthew

by Mimi Swartz

(Page 3 of 3)

Simmons’s private research showed something very different. He didn’t believe there was a glut at all. Instead, he thought the oil business was being ruined by bad math and a lack of common sense. “I don’t think we were understanding demand,” he says. During this time, he took a trip to China and got a glimpse of the future as he watched the country muscling its way into the modern age. He realized that, with developing nations driven by mobility and a passion for prosperity, “there is no glass ceiling to how big demand can grow.” As Simmons began to speak on this topic, he once again became the odd man out, disparaged this time for not being a trained economist.

In February 1999 oil was at $10 a barrel, and the experts believed that the price would stay low indefinitely. Instead, just a few days after the Economist published a story called “Drowning in Oil,” the petroleum ministers of Venezuela, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia took two million barrels off the market and prices went back up again, to $37 a barrel. Simmons, who had always suspected that the glut was a product of smoke and mirrors, was vindicated. He had come to distrust the International Energy Agency’s accounting. “I thought [that] either they had found data I’d never seen or they’re lazy,” he says. Or, perhaps, they just didn’t know: In 2000 Simmons served on a government energy task force; at meetings there was often no one else in the room who could name the largest oil fields in the Middle East, Mexico, or Angola.

Simmons went back to his studies, teaching himself not just more about oil but also about electricity and natural gas and how the businesses worked together. In February 2004, drawing on the lesson he’d learned in high school debate, he conducted a personal examination of the world’s largest oil fields, generating his own research data. His analysis suggested that production was already in decline throughout the Middle East. Though the Saudis were claiming to control 25 percent of the world’s oil field reserves, Simmons began to suspect that, in fact, their oil fields were aging rapidly and already required expensive and complex technology to extract their remaining reserves. This could only spell trouble for a world that was predicted to increase its oil needs by more than 50 percent by 2025. It seemed like a good time to hold the first peak oil conference. Fifty people attended the event, which was held in Sweden.

Shortly afterward, in 2003, Simmons was invited to Saudi Arabia by oilman Herbert Hunt. On a visit to an oil field there, he noticed the Saudis were using water pressure to get the oil out of the ground—a sure sign of an aging well. When he got back home, Simmons undertook another study, assembling 240 peer-reviewed papers on Saudi oil fields written by the Society of Petroleum Engineers—“It was about a foot tall,” Simmons says—and spending the end of a Maine summer reading through the stack, pinpointing evidence of decline. The research finally proved his long-held suspicions: Saudi supply was nowhere near what had been claimed for years.

But proving his hypothesis was bittersweet. Feeling something like a surge of panic, Simmons reported his findings in Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, a dense, four-hundred-page tome published by John Wiley and Sons in 2005. The book became an international best-seller, and Matthew Simmons became a true prophet of doom, the global authority on peak oil.

Mention the name Amy Myers Jaffe to Simmons and you will provoke a lot of sputtering. Jaffe is the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, the associate director of the Rice University Energy Program, and a frequent oil authority in the pages of, among other publications, the New York Times. In her forties, Jaffe also happens to be startlingly beautiful—almond eyes, flowing auburn hair—with a distinctively nasal New England intonation you might find particularly annoying when and if she’s disagreeing with you, which is a position Simmons finds himself in regularly these days.

“The question isn’t what’s left under the ground but where is it located and do I have access to it,” Jaffe tells me. In her opinion—and she is far from alone—there is plenty of oil but geopolitical issues and resource nationalism in oil-producing countries prevent investment by American firms. In addition, internal political problems in those countries inhibit their production capacities. This notion impresses Simmons not at all: “I’ve never tried to integrate geopolitics with the physics of oil and gas,” he sniffs.

Like Jaffe, Daniel Yergin’s CERA believes there is enough oil in the ground to keep us going for quite some time—3.74 trillion barrels, as opposed to the 1.2 trillion barrels the peak oil proponents claim. The group has produced a $499 downloadable report titled “Why the ‘Peak Oil’ Theory Falls Down—Myths, Legends, and the Future of Oil Resources.” Yergin likes to point out that this is the fifth time the world has been said to be running out of oil and that new sources or technologies always appear on the horizon to save us. CERA has argued that oil production won’t peak but will follow an “undulating plateau,” which should leave us plenty of time to come up with a solution to the problem of diminishing resources.

These opinions aren’t as reassuring as they sound. If Simmons believes the end is upon us, CERA’s time frame is just a few decades away. According to one of its papers: “During the plateau period in later decades, demand growth will likely no longer be largely met by growth in available, commercially exploitable natural oil supplies. Non-traditional or unconventional liquid fuels such as production from heavy oil sands, gas-related liquids (condensate and natural gas liquids), gas-to-liquids (GTL), and coal-to-liquids (CTL) will need to fill the gap.”

Simmons does not believe that the great industry hopes of Canadian tar sands or South American oil shales can ever fill this gap in time. They simply cannot produce the volume necessary to sustain the current levels of 80 million barrels used around the world every day. Simmons further counters that CERA’s plan to use this remaining time to squeeze the last drop of oil from declining wells is a fool’s errand. Companies will be spending more to get less and less out of the ground. “I’ve always said Dan [Yergin] was a fabulous historian,” Simmons says. “He’ll write the best history of how we crash.”

Then there are those who argue that simple economics will keep the oil business from imploding: As prices go up, demand will go down, until the price goes down and demand goes up again. “These were the same old arguments as to why oil would never stay above thirty dollars a barrel,” Simmons counters with impatience. “Free markets do not work when demand outstrips supply.”

One way of looking at the peak oil contretemps is to say that Houston boasts two Ivy League—educated oil authorities who are equally pessimistic about the future of petroleum but who disagree virulently with each other about the reasons why. Peak oil critics and peak oil supporters lob the same accusations at one another—that both camps use fuzzy data, that they don’t understand oil reserves, that they don’t understand the way markets work in this day and age. The fact that both sides believe that we have to move from a petroleum-based economy sooner or later is constantly and conveniently—for the major oil companies—overlooked. “We agree there’s a problem but for different reasons” is the way Jaffe puts it. “We know we’re moving to a carbon-restrained world. We know there’s a high risk of war in the Middle East over the next ten years.”

Fortunately, each side does offer a few solutions that are not necessarily contradictory. For a Republican zillionaire who thinks Nobel Prize winner Al Gore’s movie was “crappy,” Simmons’s proposals are surprisingly green. First, he believes the workforce should be liberated from the nine-to-five grind, because 70 percent of our oil is used for transporting people and goods. “The biggest inefficiencies are long-distance commuting and traffic congestion,” he says. “People shuffle into work and get on the Internet. You can have staff meetings by webcam.”

Simmons also thinks we should put an end to the global food distribution system that allows us to have Chilean watermelon in December. “We can’t afford to do this anymore,” he says. We should also harness the power of the oceans and move more goods over water, a proposition that isn’t as quaint as it sounds. It’s currently being done off the coast of Washington State. Most important, the public should insist on data reform that includes quarterly reports on reserves and field production numbers. It isn’t just the Saudis who are stretching things, he says. Exxon Mobil, for instance, ran into trouble with its 2004 data; after the company boasted that it was replacing its own production to the tune of 125 percent, the SEC calculated that the actual number was 83 percent. “We’ve wasted four years,” Simmons says.

Jaffe’s solutions are more concrete but probably no easier to enact: Make the oil companies put more of their money into research and development instead of shareholders’ pockets, and make legislators commit to improved education so that more students will study science and math and speed up the technological curve.

Not coincidentally, both Simmons and Jaffe agree that if Houston doesn’t step forward and embrace these changes, it will lose its place as the energy capital of the world and that as Houston goes, so will Texas. At one time, the city prospered whenever oil prices were high; since then, the reluctance of the oil companies to innovate and the foot-dragging of anti-tax politicians to support education have changed the calculus. The economy is shifting away from a dependence on natural resources to a dependence on knowledge. Blue-collar jobs that once defined the city are rapidly disappearing. The population will be, increasingly, poorer and less educated. Meanwhile, Department of Energy funding for research that once came this way is heading out of state, to places like California and Virginia, where progressive, innovative thinking is more welcome. “If Houston isn’t the intellectual incubator for new carbon management,” Jaffe warns, “someone else will be.”

Simmons concurs, in his way: “If Houston grasps the issue and the magnitude of the issue, it can lead the way,” he says, allowing himself an uncharacteristic moment of hope. Then, of course, he reverts to type: “If we keep our head in the sand, we’ll be like Tulsa in 1965,” he says, referring to a city that, until the seventies, was more important in the world of oil than Houston. “I am trying to scare people. To tell them to wake up. This is a real defining moment.”

Links referenced within this article Mimi Swartz http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/mimiswartz.php Mimi Swartz http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/mimiswartz.php immonsco-intl.com http://www.simmonsco-intl.com theoildrum.com http://www.theoildrum.com oilcrash.com http://www.oilcrash.com peakoilblues.com http://www.peakoilblues.com theoildrum.com http://www.theoildrum.com Mimi Swartz http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/mimiswartz.php

Find this article at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/2008-02-01/feature2.php?click_code=3ae47701fdff8cf7b5a769e5a5fb2157

The Hot Air of Climate Change, Part 8

The Hot Air of Climate Change, Part 8

By Kermit Frosch
Published: January 14, 2008, 08:33 AM

This is a multi-part series examining the current debate over "global warming", also known as "climate change".

We live in an era of tremendous technological change. One hundred years ago, most Americans lived or worked on a farm, or in some sort of farming-related service industry. Then, technology improved; one farmer could produce more food; so people went to work in factories, making goods to improve all our lives instead. In recent decades, technology improved again; now, instead of 10,000 people clocking in to a massive factory, you have a few dozen highly trained staff monitoring the computer systems that churn out even more stuff. Things have changed so much, that it's all too easy to say, "Everything is different now! The past doesn't matter!"

For all the changes in technology, human nature has not changed one iota. Our leaders today have the exact same natures that you would find in Caesar's Senate, Nebuchadnezzar's court, or for that matter, Ooga and Booga's cave; the only difference is how they manifest themselves. It's no longer beneficial to clonk your opponent over the head with a club, or poison their wine; so they don't. The end goals, however, are identical: our leaders all want money and power, as leaders always have.

So in considering the fraud of global warming, which has been so successfully perpetrated on most of the world despite being so transparently obvious, it's worth considering: why? How could we reach this point? Who would prostitute science, promote clear falsehoods, and attempt to destroy all the benefits of modern life, all for nothing? And the answer can be clearly seen, if we follow the money, and the power.

Money

As the children of a technological age, most of us have some sort of idealized conception of the scientist - an odd guy in a white coat slaving away in a lab, making amazing discoveries, to the exclusion of everything else in life. Most scientists you see in the movies cannot even comb their hair or wash their clothes; surely such pedestrian concerns as dating and mortgages are beneath them (or maybe above.)

But that view is totally contrary to the real world. No doubt there are some scientists whose whole life is in the lab, just as there are some businessmen whose whole life is the office, some musicians who care only for their music, and even some politicians who'd sell their own mothers for a bigger budget. Most scientists, though, are just like anybody else: they juggle test tubes from 9 to 5, then drive home in their SUV to watch American Idol. They'd like to have a nicer car; a bigger house; finer schools for their children; and, nowadays, maybe even the chance to participate in an IPO and become rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

And like anybody else, they respond to what's being demanded by the market. The trouble is, the market for science is an odd one. Really, it's two markets. There's certainly a market for science in the business world - Intel, Gilette, and countless other large companies employ thousands of researchers trying to come up with useful innovations. But that kind of science is not as prestigious as the other kind - the "pure research." Almost by definition, that sort of science is not useful - or at least, not obviously useful. Of course, there's certainly the hope that it might be useful - Einstein's Theory of Relativity has some interesting implications, and contributed to the development of the atomic bomb. But it didn't make any money for him or for any of his colleagues. The profit in nuclear weapons and nuclear power was quite disconnected from the research.

So where did Einstein work, anyway? At a university - Princeton, to be exact. In the United States, our system of major research institutions is designed to allow scientists the freedom to investigate pretty much whatever they themselves consider worthy of research, in the hope that they'll trip over something worthwhile. And it's worked fairly well for a long time.

The trouble is that science has gotten very very expensive of late. Time was when you could do useful, original research with a few dollars' worth of test tubes, chemicals, and beakers. Now, most of the easy stuff has long since been nailed down; to come up with anything really new, it takes a lab full of expensive computers, specialized measuring equipment, and all sorts of things. The money has to come from somewhere.

Thus, we have government funding of science, via grants. Many if not most science professors who are doing research at universities, may be receiving their paycheck from the university, but the actual money is coming from a government research grant. If the government grant ends, so does their salary.

Which brings us to the first reason why global warming has become the force that it is. Dr. John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel and a professional meteorologist (that is to say, a professional student of the weather), gives this explanation:

Scientists know that if they do research and results are in no way alarming, their research will gather dust on the shelf and their research careers will languish. But if they do research that sounds alarms, they will become well known and respected and receive scholarly awards and, very importantly, more research dollars will come flooding their way.

So when these researchers did climate change studies in the late 90's they were eager to produce findings that would be important and be widely noticed and trigger more research funding. It was easy for them to manipulate the data to come up with the results they wanted to make headlines and at the same time drive their environmental agendas. Then their like minded PhD colleagues reviewed their work and hastened to endorse it without question.

There were a few who didn't fit the mold. They did ask questions and raised objections. They did research with contradictory results. The environmental elitists berated them and brushed their studies aside.

Supposing a scientist did research, and reported that the sky is blue. He'd be ridiculed for wasting his time, and certainly wouldn't get any more money to burn on something so lame. But, suppose instead that he reported the sky to be green. Now, that would be new! Some might agree; others would disagree. But at the very least, more research would be required to resolve the issue - and the scientist's paycheck could continue.

And once the entire scientific establishment, or a large portion of it, is subsisting off of one single theme, do you think it likely that they would support research which might show that theme to be fraudulent?

Look at it this way: would any group of people support another person who was arguing the first group's beliefs to be wrong? Of course not! Any child in a playground could tell you this. So why do we think scientists are somehow more noble than anybody else? They aren't - they are mostly just ordinary people with ordinary problems, wanting the next raise.

But, why would their paymasters - the government - allow research dollars to be wasted in this way? The money might have been spent on some other, more useful (not to say true) science. Go and research a cure for cancer, or cold fusion, or something.

And that presents us with the other key driving force behind the global warming fraud.

Power

Just as with scientists, bureaucrats wish a better life for themselves. They want more prestige, more authority, a bigger budget, a larger staff, and certainly a bigger paycheck. If you are the administrator of some obscure and irrelevant government backwater, your prestige is not going to be very high, nor anything else. If, on the other hand, you are given the opportunity to transform your agency into a "happening place," wouldn't you jump at it? So, is it any surprise that the bureaucracy, top to bottom, jumped on board with the scientists to help create the "global warming crisis"? It's simply human nature at work!

But now, it's gone far beyond that. A growing bureaucracy is bad enough, but there are many leaders worldwide who have seen the opportunity, and the excuse, to increase their power on a global scale.

For what is regulation, but the opposite of freedom? By definition, as regulations increase, freedom decreases.

In San Francisco, you no longer have the freedom to choose what sort of bag you want at the grocery store - the government has chosen for you (paper).

California is seriously considering banning the ordinary light bulb - Thomas Edison must be rolling over in his grave. That would mean that you could no longer choose to have lights on a dimmer, since flourescents don't work with ordinary dimmers; it would also mean the poor could no longer choose to have well-lighted houses, since compact flourescent bulbs cost ten times as much as the old ones.

Nationally, you cannot even choose to buy a strongly-flushing toilet. The only legal toilets are "low-flow" such that one must flush it mutiple times to obtain any serious effect.

These are all relatively small and minor nuisances, and we've learned to work with (or around?) them. But little nuisances become big ones.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment has rejected the construction of much-needed new electric power plants.

Canada is trying to ban leaf blowers and gasoline lawnmowers, to cut down on carbon emissions.

Activists are attempting to disrupt and derail the desperately-needed expansion of Heathrow airport in London. As perhaps the most grossly-overcrowded and dysfunctional airport in the Western world, Heathrow has needed expanded facilities for decades, but the global-warming crowd would prefer flying to be as uncomfortable and inconvenient as possible to make people less inclined to fly. This impasse affects the entire traveling population of England, much of Western Europe, and Europe-bound Americans.

As we've already seen, the CAFE fuel-efficiency regulations in the United States have led to deaths, as people drive government-mandated smaller, lighter cars which are less safe than bigger, more heavily-built ones.

Yet, we see Al Gore flitting around the globe on a gas-guzzling, ozone-destroying private jet. He doesn't feel that global warming or climate change requires any sacrifice from him. Sacrifice is for little people like you and me.

The protesters will never shut down Heathrow airport - but by limiting its capacity, they will drive up the price of air travel. This is no big deal for the rich, but makes it harder for ordinary folks to go on vacation. The same is true of higher gas prices caused by environmental taxes, and of higher electric power prices caused by bans on new power plants. Sacrifice is for little people, not for plutocrats like Al Gore.

As people see their living standards declining, where will they naturally turn? To government, of course! We see this taking place with government fuel assistance programs; how much more so will this be, when the full cost of government regulations and environmental taxes are felt?

The global warming scam has been foisted upon the public for very good and clear reasons, not because it's true. The people involved have private motivations and beliefs, just as we all do. Scientists want research grants, more published papers, and to be listened to by the general public. Bureaucrats want a bigger department and more clout. Politicians want a crisis - any crisis - so they can ride to power with a "solution". Is there a secret conspiracy of the world's leaders, meeting in an underground chamber somewhere, to create this fraud for their own benefit? [Insert Dr. Evil laugh here.] No, almost certainly not. No conspiracy is needed. This all comes about simply by following the motivations of the various players involved. Follow the money and follow the power.

What's needed is a strong dose of truth and reality. Polls show that, although Americans are concerned about global warming, they're still far from convinced that the Al Gore path is the way to follow; we even saw this effect in an earlier discussion. In other countries, the measures taken to reduce carbon emissions are provoking a backlash. More and more voices are being heard, saying quietly, and then louder and louder, "It's a lie!"

Now you know the truth, and have the arguments to back it up. And with each person who actually studies the evidence and thinks it through, the forces of falsehood grow weaker. As Winston Churchill once observed,

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing... after they have exhausted all other possibilities."

Kermit Frosch is a guest writer for Scragged.com. Read other Scragged.com articles on environment and global warming

Ethanol - The Perfect Boondoggle

Ethanol - The Perfect Boondoggle

By Petrarch
Published: August 9, 2007, 09:28 AM

Western society, with its tremendous need for energy, has been primarily petroleum based since at least the Second World War. If you consider transportation needs alone, dependence on oil goes back further than that, to the 1920s. As a fuel, oil-based products have so many advantages that it is difficult to imagine any effective replacement. Electric? Either you need extremely expensive infrastructure, as with the overhead lines on high-speed railways, or you need heavy, expensive batteries filled with nasty chemicals. Coal? Chunks of filthy rock have their place, but in my car isn't one of them, and while there have been experiments with converting coal into something a little easier to use, they haven't been economically successful. Hydrogen and other gases? Aside from the question of where you get the hydrogen in the first place, storing high-pressure explosive gas in fast-moving vehicles has its disadvantages.

Now comes a solution which claims to present an answer to all these problems: ethanol. Since it comes from plants, ethanol is a renewable resource; and since it's a farm product, it can be produced anywhere that farming is feasible. Ethanol refining results in a liquid, which is far easier to transport and use than solids (coal) and gases (hydrogen). Ethanol even works with today's existing car technology, if it's mixed with ordinary gasoline; and with fairly minor modifications, an ordinary car can burn straight ethanol. What's not to like?

Well, there are a couple of technical problems with this approach. For one thing, it seems to be illegal to convert a normal car to run on ethanol. Cars are so heavily regulated that any change must be vetted by the government, and this one hasn't been. (Ethanol is not alone with this problem; bio-diesel falls foul of EPA regs too.) Another problem is the inherent chemistry of ethanol; it doesn't pack nearly as much of a punch as gasoline, so if you are using ethanol to fuel a car, your mileage goes down accordingly - in some cases, by quite a lot.

Even the environmental benefits of ethanol are somewhat questionable. Sure, ethanol comes from renewable plants. But, in the US, almost all ethanol comes from corn, which doesn't exactly grow wild. A corn farm requires large amounts of (petroleum-based) fertilizers; many miles driven by (petroleum-fueled) farm equipment; and even the conversion of corn into ethanol takes a great deal of energy, almost as much as the ethanol itself can produce. Studies at MIT conclude that the environmental benefit of ethanol is basically too close to call - that is, corn-based ethanol is so inefficient in other ways, that it's environmentally as harmful as gasoline. And goodness knows ethanol is not cheaper - in fact, each gallon of ethanol receives a 51-cent subsidy from the federal government, and it's still more expensive than the Saudi stuff!

So the only real reason that ethanol finds its way into our gas tanks, is the one we know to look for whenever something stupid is going on - government interference. The law requires oil companies to mix ethanol in with their gasoline, and to almost double the amount of it by 2012. However, this is an exercise in futility. Even if every last corn-cob grown in the US was lobbed into an ethanol refinery, that would still meet only 10% of our current petroleum consumption.

Are we going to give up our corn-on-the-cob and nacho chips, to fuel our cars? It's no laughing matter - the famous laws of supply and demand are already at work here. Every bushel of corn that's turned into ethanol, is a bushel of corn that is not available at the grocery store for you to eat. That pushes up the price of food. Of course, the frozen Birdseye is going to get more expensive - but it's surprising just how dependent our entire food chain is on corn. Perhaps we can afford to pay a little more for food, but the world's poor can't.

A great deal of meat is produced by feeding animals. Corn products, such as cornflour, are found in most cereals and a great many backed goods. How about dairy products, which come from corn-fed cows?

Then there's that famously unhealthy sweetener, corn syrup, which shows up in darn near everything. And therein lies a tale.

Traditionally, sugar has been the most common sweetener used in our food - either cane sugar, or sugar refined from sugar beets. Everyone is familiar with the white stuff you spoon into your coffee, and years ago food manufacturers did much the same thing on a larger scale, with train cars full of refined sugar. Then, in the 1970s, corn syrup was developed as a cheaper alternate source of sweetness. But corn syrup is not naturally cheaper than sugar, for many of the same reasons that ethanol is not naturally cheaper than petroleum - more refining is needed to turn the corn-cob into something useful. So how is it that corn syrup is cheaper? Again we find - government interference, through tariffs and subsidies.

The government subsidizes American sugar cane and sugar beet production, and places high tariffs and strict quotas on importing foreign sugar. The end result is that in the US, sugar costs about double the price paid elsewhere in the world, costing American consumers billions, and benefiting primarily industrial-scale producers such as ADM. Since the corn is grown in the US, it is not subject to import restrictions, and corn syrup can compete - but only because the price of sugar is twice what it ought to be.

Brazil is one of the world's leading producers of sugar, and is often cited as an example to follow when it comes to ethanol. Being a tropical country, Brazil has a very easy time growing sugar cane, which is not so easy in Iowa. And as sugar cane makes cheaper sugar than corn, so does sugar cane make ethanol more easily. In fact, the comparison is truly astonishing. An acre of sugar cane can produce 650 gallons of ethanol, as compared to 400 gallons for an acre of corn - but beyond that, 6,500 kcal of energy are required to produce one gallon of ethanol from sugar cane, most of which can be obtained by burning the sugar stalks. To get one gallon of ethanol from corn, it takes 28,000 kcal of energy - more than four times as much!

Why on earth are we attempting to grow the ethanol ourselves, when we have available a large, friendly country with 30 years of experience in producing ethanol, from an inherently more efficient source? Why don't we see ethanol tankers from Brazil pulling up to our docks every day?

By now, you can probably guess the answer already. Sure enough, the US has a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on imported Brazilian ethanol, enough to price it out of the market. The combination of tariffs on ethanol and other farm products, and our farm subsidies, has led to a great many problems in free trade agreements - if we won't lower our tariffs, other countries won't lower theirs, making it more difficult for American companies to export American products, as well as more expensive for us to buy things domestically.

So let's review for a moment. How are we robbed?

We are robbed at the gas pump, because of the government requirements for overpriced ethanol, a gift to factory farms and industrial agriculture.

We are robbed at the grocery store, because anything with corn in it is going up in price, as the corn is needlessly converted to ethanol by government decree, instead of being sold as food.

We are robbed again at the grocery store, because we are paying twice as much as we should for sugar, again a gift to big sugar corporations.

And we're robbed in our taxes, because we pay subsidies, both to farmers for growing corn and sugar, and to ethanol producers who must make ethanol inefficiently from corn, when Brazil can do it more efficiently and cheaply from sugar cane.

Anything else? Oh, yes, we are starving the poor by driving up world food prices, and damaging the environment in so doing.

A more perfectly destructive boondoggle would be hard to imagine. Our government at its finest!

Petrarch is a staff writer for Scragged.com. Read other Scragged.com articles on economics, regulation, Brazil, corn, farm subsidies, sugar, energy, ethanol and tariffs