Go Green

The New York Times has a story about the natural gas boom and how some are saying it’s good for the environment. Others question whether or not the boom will last. The story quotes Aubrey McClendon, chairman and CEO of Oklahoma City’s Chesapeake Energy Corp.:

“It’s almost divine intervention,” said Aubrey K. McClendon, chairman and chief executive of the Chesapeake Energy Corporation, one of the nation’s largest natural gas producers. “Right at the time oil prices are skyrocketing, we’re struggling with the economy, we’re concerned about global warming, and national security threats remain intense, we wake up and we’ve got this abundance of natural gas around us.”

Senior Democrats in Congress are getting behind natural gas, portraying it as an alternative fuel for transportation that can serve as a stopgap until renewable sources of energy, like solar and wind power, become economical on a broad scale.

“You can have a transition with natural gas that is cheap, abundant and clean,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC.

–John Sutter

By John Sutter

Oklahoma Secretary of the Environment Miles Tolbert resigned today to work as an environmental attorney at an Oklahoma City law firm.

The announcement came in the morning, and Tolbert spoke about the global energy crisis and climate change over lunch at the Downtown Rotary Club in Oklahoma City.

Listen to most of that speech here. (sorry, the very end is cut off, but there are more than 20 minutes of it). Also watch a video, below, of Tolbert listing the top environmental issues that he sees facing Oklahoma, and check out this week’s environment podcast, which recaps the resignation and talks about some of the environment issues in the state.

[video: Outgoing Oklahoma Secretary of the Environment Miles Tolbert on the most pressing environmental issues in Oklahoma.]

At the noon speech, Tolbert said environmental issues can be touchy in Oklahoma.

“Oklahomans care a lot about the environment, but they are suspicious about the traditional ways of protecting it,” he said. He said the country and the state are having a serious conversations about environmental issues “for the first time in a generation.”

A Rotarian introduced Tolbert, saying he’s been close to both presidential candidates: he sat behind Obama at Harvard Law School and behind McCain on a recent flight to Washington, D.C.

Tolbert said both candidates have “scurried around” to do something about high energy prices, and he’s disappointed that they are posturing as if they could bring back cheap energy in a snap.

“The days of cheap, secure and plentiful energy are over,” he said.

Oil production has declined in Oklahoma since World War II, and Oklahoma oil production in 2007 equaled the state’s production in 1910, he said. The world has exhausted its supply of easy-to-get oil, he said, and therefore needs to be looking towards long-term solutions, not quick fixes.

The answer isn’t to look for one miracle fuel, Tolbert said before proceeding to list flaws with all available forms of energy. Here’s a summary of his thoughts:

Coal: cheap but “profoundly dirty.”

Solar: seems perfect, but panels are made with toxics like mercury and cadmium, which makes large-scale production dangerous.

Nuclear: clean, but we don’t have a way to safely dispose of the radioactive waste.

Wind: clean and available in Oklahoma, but the wind doesn’t always blow, and engineers haven’t figured out how to store the power or transport it over long distances.

Hydro: clean, but all resources are tapped.

Biofuel: land used for fuel can’t be used for food; plus water, fertilizer and insecticides go into the production, which takes resources and levies risks on the environment.

“So are we doomed? Are we going to freeze to death in the dark?” Tolbert asked.

No, he said, we just need to work with all of these energy sources and improve upon them.

That work is a major industry, he said, since the United States spends $1 billion per day importing oil.

Oklahoma is hard at work chasing that money, he said, but he said the federal government has been slow to develop the “green jobs” behind alternative energy sources. Many of those jobs are going to Europe, where countries mandated renewable energy use.

Among the projects he listed in Oklahoma: a hog processing plant in Guymon that’s turning pig fat into fuel; wind farms in northwest Oklahoma; company in northeast Oklahoma trying to turn chicken waste into fuel; and state-funded research on switchgrass, a native plant, that can be turned into fuel.

Everyone”from backyard thinkers … to sophisticated academic researchers” is working to find better alternative energy solutions, he said.

Tolbert also plugged an idea that he said is not as sexy as wind turbines or switchgrass, but is as important: using less energy.

Without much fanfare, the U.S. is poised to use 4 percent less gas this year than last, he said. That may not seem like a big deal, but it’s the equivalent of putting 10 million electric cars out on the roads in a year, he said.

The “quiet simple steps” are sometimes the most effective, he said. The state Corporation Commission may soon consider a push for energy efficiency, he said.

All of these measures combat the U.S.’s dependency on foreign oil, create jobs and fight climate change, he said. Oklahomans tend to get caught up on climate change as controversial, he said, but many of the methods for addressing the problem have other benefits to public health or for energy independence.

He said America is up to these daunting challenges.

“American ingenuity and industry solved these problems once, and it can do so again — if we let it,” he said.

[What do you all think of his comments? Feel free to post below. On the newsok story, some of you joked about the resignation: “He has done a good job. The Briar Patch will miss him,” one Oklahoma City reader wrote. “Fighting the Poultry Pluckers must be more profitable than going green, huh?” wrote Candace from Lakeland. Russell, from Oklahoma City, wrote that resigning “wasn’t a very green thing to do.”]

By John Sutter

Some Oklahoma farmers are getting paid to fight global warming by sinking carbon into their fields. It’s a concept that’s based on simple science: plants are made of carbon, and they pull some of it out of the air and store it underground. If, instead of plowing up the land or using it for crops, farmers plant native grasses or trees, they’re essentially cleaning up some greenhouse gases that are emitted by power plants and cars.

In this week’s environment podcast, I talk with two conservationists who are interested in hooking Oklahoma farmers up with people or groups who will pay them for these efforts. Some countries — like Canada and the European Union — regulate carbon dioxide emissions in a way that allows polluters to pay other people (maybe farmers in Oklahoma) to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

The market here is small. But a group called the Oklahoma Carbon Initiative is going to put a Web site (address is yet to be decided) up next month to help educate Oklahomans about so-called “carbon credit” payments. The group will even buy carbon from individual farmers and then sell it in packages to markets.

Here’s some background from the EPA.

And a diagram of the carbon cycle. Basically, people are looking for ways to put carbon back in the ground, since we’ve burned so many carbon-based fossil fuels, thus putting an excess of carbon in the atmosphere.

By John Sutter

State Rep. Randy Terrill — the Moore Republican best known for authoring Oklahoma’s hard-line immigration law, once considered to be the toughest in the nation — announced this week that he will again propose legislation to promote alternative energy in Oklahoma, according to a news release.

“In Oklahoma, we have done a good job of encouraging new oil-and-gas exploration,” the release says. “It’s time to give support to alternative energy technologies that will generate energy in the quantity that we require.”

The legislation is said to offer tax credits for people who install solar, wind or geothermal energy in their homes. It would give a 40 percent rebate on the costs of installing wind or solar energy, the release says.

Thought this was interesting since environmental issues often come with a liberal tag.

Mozambique is set to expand its natural gas industry so the African country can reduce its dependence on petroleum. The country wants to power cars using its natural gas reserves, which the BBC says are estimated at 3.6 trillion cubit feet in one province.

Sounds a LITTLE bit like the “Pickens Plan”: the billionaire is calling for increased wind energy for electricity and a transfer of natural gas assets to cars.

Facebook IS international these days …

–John

By John Sutter

Couple of interesting articles on T. Boone Pickens. He’s got more on his plate than predicting oil prices and writing fat checks to Oklahoma State.

First, from Business Week, a story about his water rights purchases in Texas:

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property.

Then, from a WSJ blog, more on wind power debates in Congress. The “choicest remarks” in the debate came from Pickens, the blog reports. Pickens owns the world’s largest wind farm, located in the Texas Panhandle:

If we take the natural gas we’re using for electrical generation and move it to transportation, we can replace 38 percent of our foreign oil imports. And that, sports fans, is a real number. (Pickens)