In noting that coal and oil will prevent the United States from taking steps to mitigate global heating, Peter Montague, executive director of the Environmental Research Foundation, notes that a powerful profit incentive motivates fossil fuel corporations and politicians have aligned themselves with this centralized power infrastructure, not only because of the campaign contribution, but also because of their very nature.

“Whoever owns the fossil fuels, the big central power plants, and the distribution systems can call the shots,” whereas development of renewable energy sources, which a federal RPS (Renewable energy Portfolio Standard) would necessitate, is perceived as “tossing a hand grenade into the current corporate / political structure.” It’s Christmas time, let’s be hospitable. We should toss in some green pineapples, too.

While reporting projected GHG emissions, it was economic issues that mainly were considered when European Strategic Energy Technology Plan compared different sources of electrical generation, i.e., cost, efficiency, import dependency, fuel price sensitivity and proved reserves.

Maintaining profits for hell-based energy companies is, above all else, of interest to those companies and their politicians. Since such interests comprise the existing power structure, perhaps those, who advocate properly managed, sustainable practices that provide energy while providing some relief to the vexing problems of energy supply and mitigation of anthropogenic GHG (Green House Gases), also should focus upon the profits made by fossil fuel companies.

Is there a way to reduce in a significant way the amount of GHG emissions associated with fossil fuels while supporting their economic viability? The answer would seem to be “No”, at least not in terms of redirecting subsidies away from the worst polluters and toward renewable energy resources.

Yet, as previously noted, there may be a biotechnological approach that may help to meet the ongoing expectations of fossil fuel power structure while avoiding destruction of life on the planet as we know it. The amazingdrx suggests that we convert the dirty coal to clean natural gas under ground with carefully designed bacteria.

Use the natural gas in distributed solid oxide fuel cell/turbine generators (twice the efficiency of coal power plants) with co-generation heat used as well. An ultimately coal backed up system to insure the grid against renewable energy variability and storms.

Leave the coal where it’s at, extract clean natural gas. And, add bio-gas from the waste stream into the mix.

Also a smart grid would allow power to be shut down in emergencies to selective devices connected to the grid anywhere. Your lights and essentials would stay on in your home, instead of the whole grid blacking out from overload.

(Photo: University of Calgary)

As reported in the journal Nature, based upon a combination of microbiological studies, laboratory experiments and oilfield case studies, researchers from three separate programs: at the University of Calgary, University of Newcastle in the U.K., and Norsk Hydro Oil & Energy in Norway, contend that biodegradation is the result of anaerobic fermentation.

The research team… discovered an intermediate step in the biodegradation process. It involves a separate family of microbes that produce carbon dioxide and hydrogen from partly degraded oil, prior to it being turned into methane. This paves the way for using the microbes to capture this CO2 as methane, which could then be recycled as fuel in a closed-loop energy system. This would keep the CO2, a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming and climate change, out of the atmosphere.

Understanding how crude oil biodegrades into methane, or natural gas, opens the door to being able to recover the clean-burning methane directly from deeply buried, or in situ, oil sands deposits, says Steve Larter, U of C petroleum geologist in the Department of Geoscience who headed the Calgary contingent of the research team.

The oil sands industry would no longer have to use costly and polluting thermal, or heat-based, processes (such as injecting steam into reservoirs) to loosen the tar-like bitumen so it flows into wells and can be pumped to the surface.

“The main thing is you’d be recovering a much cleaner fuel,” says Larter, Canada Research Chair in Petroleum Geology. “Methane is, per energy unit, a much lower carbon dioxide emitter than bitumen. Also, you wouldn’t need all the upgrading facilities and piping on the surface.”

Biodegradation of crude oil into heavy oil in petroleum reservoirs is a problem worldwide for the petroleum industry. The natural process, caused by bacteria that consume the oil, makes the oil viscous, or thick, and contaminates it with pollutants such as sulphur. This makes recovering and refining heavy oil difficult and costly.

Larter further proposes that the process, “occurring all over the Earth, in any oil reservoir where you’ve got biodegradation,” could be rapidly accelerated with the proper care and feeding of the microbes. The process of during oil into methane definitely would need to be sped up. “Instead of 10 million years, we want to do it 10 years,” Larter says. “We think it’s possible. We can do it in the laboratory. The question is: can we do it in a reservoir?”

Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage requires small amounts of fresh water and large water re-cycling facilities. Natural gas or cheap coal fired electricity is used to create the steam, which increases the total GHG emissions associated with use of fuel made from oil recovered from bitumen. Surface mining is even more destructive to the environment; Philadelphian Treehugger John Laumer says “at least five times more carbon dioxide” then would conventional “sweet crude” oil production.

At great cost to our precious air and water resources, the heavy oil / oil sands industry “now manages to recover only about 17 per cent of a resource that consists of six trillion barrels worldwide.” It is hoped that the research team has found a way that the hard-to-handle bitumen and contaminants could remain deep underground and only clean-burning natural gas recovered. The petroleum industry already has expressed interest in trying to accelerate biodegradation in a reservoir, Larter says. “It is likely there will be field tests by 2009.”

Meanwhile, there is yet only a faint public outcry in the United States against the continuing prevarication by the fossil fuel power structure. Why? Patrick Mazza believes that the issue is so large and encompassing as to make it incomprehensible. Plus anthropogenic emissions that contribute to disastrous climate change “is happening all around us, as a result of the most mundane of our activities – driving a car, turning on the lights, buying stuff made and transported with fossil energy.”

“It’s hard for us,” argues Muzza, “to see what’s happening because we are so enmeshed in it.” We as yet, have not had to suffer from our and our ancestors’ GHG excesses, and some hope that we can avoid “anything as brutal as what Australia is going through.”
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