Like most of you perhaps, I have been watching the BP oil rig disaster and oil spill with growing horror. It appears unforgivable lapses in backup operating and safety procedures were committed by the rig operators including BP, Transocean and Haiburton staff in a challenging physical situation that is testing the limits of petroleum extraction technology. In addition, everyone involved from BP to the media to the Federal government has been lying to the public about the extent and quantity of oil being released into the Gulf.

Reports are now saying that outflow rates from the leaks were unreported by a factor of a magnitude, instead of the still terrible 5,000 bpd or 210,000 gallons, of basically toxic crude oil, the actual rates is probably more than 50,000 bpd or more than 2,000,000 gallons ever day. This poisonous flow is dumping itself into one of the richest biological ecosystems in the world, one that supports multi-billion fisheries that provide food for millions of people. Massive wildlife and environmental devastation is possible – uh, likely and is probably happening at this very moment.

Now it is almost impossible to write down the hyperbolic language equal to the ecological damages being wrought, so here are some web sites for further research:

Here what the Center for Biological Diversity is saying: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/public_lands/energy/dirty_energy_development/oil_and_gas/gulf_oil_spill/index.html

Deepwater Horizon Response Team – Official Unified Command:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/site/2931/

British Petroleum efforts at stemming the leaks:
http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=40&contentId=7061813

It looks like this could be a disaster in which nobody wins and that the technological capabilities of British Petroleum, the Gulf of Mexico oil response industries, the US Coast Guard and all the departments of the Federal Government may be inadequate to deal with the problem. Surely some ideas like burning the oil on the water and spraying tons upon tons of a chemical dispersant seem to reflect a lack of intelligence and concern for the greater environment and perhaps more than a bit of desperation.

So what is a concerned citizen to do, what can be done for a crisis that threatens to leave a wondrously productive bioregion devastated? Fortunately the Southern working man, maligned as he is in stereotype and image, has come up with a solution.

See these web sites for demonstrations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5SxX2EntEo

Now I was raised on a commercial dairy farm and grew up baling hay. The eldest son of an insanely hard working man, I spent my summers loading and unloading wagons and stuffing hay barns, moving at least 5,000 bales a year at least three times per bale.

As soon as I seen the video, I recognized that this was a practical idea, one not only likely to be effective in capturing oil residues, but also likely to be cheaper and easier to implement than most any other spill mitigation strategy. On our farm, we used straw for exactly this purpose, we would cover spills of diesel fuel, which happen occasionally when you use multiple tractors and other power equipment, with straw. Then we would trample over it, rake it back and forth over the spill, let it sit and remove the oil residue covered debris. This works.

This concept has already been submitted by me to the Deepwater Horizon Response Team through their web interface form, the following is a slightly edited version of that suggestion. Because of the importance and urgency of the GOM oil spill situation, you are getting this suggestion in rough form. I hope to add blog posts in the next week that will elaborate on how the US farming and fishing communities can come together to use hay and straw bales as an solve the GOM crisis themselves.

Hay/Straw bales as solution

Alfalfa hay and grain straw are an extremely abundant resource throughout the farming belt which includes all of the Southern states afflicted by this massive oil spill. There are many ways in which hay and straw bales can be deployed to protect beaches, reefs and marshes and to soak up the oil spill in the water. Bales of hay and/or straw can be used to soak up oil and tar balls floating on the water or stacked in a line onshore to protect beaches, marshes or wetlands.

Consider some of the methods – our overwhelmed – to say it mildly – authorities have or are using to combat the spreading oil spill. They skimmed a portion of it and lit that on fire, but weather conditions fought against this year. Presently they are doing massive aerial spraying of some type of detergent dispersant that regular news reports describe as toxic, with unknown effects to the food chain and web of life. So, our formal strategies to solve an almost unbelievably huge pollution crisis are to create more air and water pollution with possibly worse effects than the oil spill.

Now a positive solution is to soak up the oil as easily deployable and inexpensive as possible in a way that the oil residue is recoverable for its thermal (and/or chemical feedstock) value. Bales are compact and can be deployable in a multitude of ways according to the environmental conditions. The great things about using hay bales to collect oil are that they are organic, are simple and easy to apply, are relatively low cost and are regionally abundant.

This is a very simple concept, but it is one that may prove more cost-effective in soaking up the spill and capturing most of the oil for recovery as fuel than any other mitigation strategy available. Since the complex technological solutions hasn’t yet stopped the oil spill (nothing might until the relief wells are drilled and completed), our culture and country would be wise to apply simple solutions that offer possibilities of working well and that can/would involve large numbers of interested people in the mitigation and restoration processes.

Now let’s take the hay/straw bale solution one step further. After the bales are placed onshore or in the water where they have soaked up oil, we then pick them up to capture and utilize the petroleum. Processes can be set up to collect these bales of alfalfa hay or straw when saturated, replacing them with clean bales and transporting the oil soaked bales to either modified coal power plants for electrical generation or to biomass gasification units.

What’s Required

Standard hay/stack bales bought from regional farms, possibly floated down Mississippi on barges.

The equipment needed would just be that to find, buy and transport the hay or straw bales from the farmers and ranchers inland to the shorelines and water area afflicted by the oil spill. This would be existing and possibly underemployed barges, ships, fishing boats, trucks, wagons and possibly the rail infrastructure. Barges and truck to transport the bales to the sites they are needed at, barges are probably most cost-effective

Bale barriers along shoreline

Placing bales of alfalfa or straw on the beach can be done by anyone, property owners, community groups, National Guard and volunteers. There can be a concerted effort to enlist volunteers, community groups and paid workers to place bales in lines along beaches, marshes and the complete shoreline exposed to the growing oil spill.

Bales may be stacked in ways that protect shorelines from waves pushing the oil inside into the reefs and marshes. The bales may need to be strapped down onshore with wire or rebar metal poles to hold the bales onto the ground on the shorelines and wetlands.

People will protect what is theirs and what they love, in this case their homes, their land, their seashores. There are huge numbers of ready workers and volunteers to place and strap down the bales on the shorelines and wetlands.

It may take less than 2,000,000 bales to protect more than 1,000 miles of shoreline, beaches and marshes. Even if the bales were replaced when saturated with oil or damaged by the elements several times over the duration of this oil spill, this is doable and affordable.

Bale boons

Bales of hay and straw will float on the water to absorb the oil sheen of the spill. Using the bales as absorbent boons may be as simple as strapping them together with some non-corrosive wire. We can create floating absorbent boons by tying bales together as with corrosion resistant wires and dropping them off from ships-barges-fishing vessels on top of the oil spill in the water.

Boats, perhaps fishing boats that have wrenches and cranes to pull up trolley and drag lines. These boats can be employed to both drop bales and bale boons onto the oil spill and to retrieve the oil saturated bales.

There is also the possibility of stringing dozens of bales together and pulling them by boat through the oil spill, although this may be very consumptive of fuel for the boats.  Dragging the boons of hay/straw bales may not be much more effective than dumping the bale boons off the barge or ship and letting them passively drift with the oil spill absorbing what they can as waves push them toward shore.

Perhaps the most expensive part of the process will be retrieving the oil soaked bales, which may require much physical labor by workers in protective gear. However many fishing boats would have the cranes, wrenches and drag lines to retrieve the strings of bales simply.

Because the bales are so abundant and inexpensive, they can be replaced on a regular basis when they are saturated with oil. Mitigating the spill effectively with hay/straw bales will require monitoring their pick up of petroleum residues and hauling them onto collector ship when saturated.

Hay/straw info – some comments about supply

Standard bales of alfalfa hay or possibly the straw of grains like wheat, oats, barley, flax, etc. typically weigh 50 to 70 lbs. and are approximately 3′-4′ x 2′ x 12″-15.” They are a widely sold and traded agricultural product in the beef raising parts of the USA, which included much of the farming belt.

Hay bales are abundant and we are just beginning baling seasons with the grain harvest and straw baling about a month to two months away. The first cutting of alfalfa for the year is probably starting to happen now in the southern states most afflicted by the oil spill. Alfalfa hay bales or straw bales can be sourced from farmers and ranchers throughout Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and the Mississippi basin.

Hay bales are relatively cheap, less than $3 a bale for a 50 pound bale of alfalfa based upon current US prices: http://future.aae.wisc.edu/data/monthly_values/by_area/2053?tab=feed

Straw is probably less than 50% the cost of hay.

Possibly more than 50,000,000 bales could be bought off the agricultural market before the supply of livestock feed increases the price of beef.

Bales can be purchased from commercial hay brokers, loaded onto barges in quantities from 500 to 10,000 or more and floated down the Mississippi River to wherever they are needed in the GOM oil spill.

Biomass Gasification

The ideal goal is to recover the lost petroleum residue from the environment to save its remaining value as a thermal fuel source or chemical feedstock. With the hay and straw bales being plant material, they have the advantage of being burnt with the oily residues as power plant fuel or gasified into syn-gas feedstock. The chemical and thermal value of the oil residue, if recoverable by gasification, will help pay the cost, at least a portion, of retrieving the bales and the surrounding environmental restoration.

Oily bales may be a combustible hazard, so rapid transport to centralized collection points for biomass gasification or burning for power plant fuel will be necessary. So to reclaim the thermal or chemical values of the oil-soaked bales, centralized locations to collect the oil saturated bales will need to be set up, before shipment to power plants or biomass gasification units to gasify the oil hay into syn-gas for chemical processing or producer gas for clean up into natural gas usage-pipelines.

Major investment would be the biomass gasification units to harvest whatever value is in the recovered oil. These biomass gasification units can be built for not only this emergency, but as future power sources in gasifying biomass. Modular gasification units that can be build and deployed quickly are necessary. If the biomass recovery gasification units may prove more difficult to attain or build in time, the oil saturated bales may be used as fuel in coal generating plants.

Social and Political Considerations

There is another advantage to supporting a groundswell response from the grass root communities afflicted upon by this disaster. This is a public relation advantage to the government and oil industry in that thousands of farmers and small truckers could be contracted with to supply the bales. BP had suffered immense bad publicity from the job losses to the maritime community this oil spill causes. Contracting with farmer suppliers for the hay bales to soak up the oil would be putting money back into the working communities of the region.

This low tech spill control strategy has the potential to create many temporary labor jobs and involve whole communities in constructive responses to the calamity of the oil spill.  Placing and retrieving the bales could become temporary employment for men and women who have lost their jobs in the fishing and tourism industries. The putting back of restoration money into the communities and working people of the afflicted communities could help alleviate the bad publicity and public anger over the spill.

Call to Action

To those of us looking at resource depletion consequences it is becoming blatantly obvious how water and watershed issues will prove more critical and important than energy depletion for our long term survival. It is imperative that our society makes its long-term decisions regarding energy, land-use and industrial development based upon
how the extraction industries will affect the permanent sustainability, safety and security of our water sources, ground tables and regional watersheds.

The urgent, absolutely important demand is that we as individuals, communities, peoples, cultures need to think beyond just confronting the realities of resource depletions, climate change, and the predations of nation-states, military industrial complexes and armed thugs to about how we - as people, society, culture and bioregion can get from where we are to a sustainable future. Even though, we as a generation are facing perhaps the greatest challenges in human history.

We need to ask ourselves these questions and then to abide by the answers however harsh or frightening:

What would a perennial culture(s) that would last 100-200-500-5000 years look like and what can we as citizens alive in the richest and most prosperous era in history do to make this happen?”

What can we as a people and a culture do today to ensure that humans, animals, forests and ecosystems, salmon and orcas, rivers and fresh water, fertile soil, alive cities, machines and technology, literacy and scientific knowledge will still be here 50, 200, 500 and 5,000 years from now?

We need to understand that the real underlying shortages are fresh water, soil fertility and biological diversity. Recognize that certain energy and resource extraction industries are extremely environmentally destructive and leave devastated waste lands, poisoned soil, depleted aquifers and distorted, polluted watersheds in their wake. Among the villains are coal companies, tar sand mining/processing industries, ethanol fuels from corn production and possible deepwater offshore oil field development as witness by the magnitude of this oil spill.

Conclusion

Because of the flexibility of using bales of alfalfa or straw to soak up the oil spill, we should consider using them as one of our central and primary ways to mitigate the potential environmental consequences of this oil spill. Hay bales are readily available, are not a complex, unproven technology, require no hard to source material and are low cost. They should be in the front line of Deepwater Horizon’s spill mitigation strategy.

On January 15th, the Global Justice Ecology Project published an open letter on development of biofuels. The Oil Drum picked up the story the following day and opened a discussion on the subject. Gail the Actuary’s comments offer a good summary:

I personally agree with many of the agrifuel issues mentioned in this letter, but I do not agree with the solutions. The authors seem to want to eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear, substituting wind and solar. This is not possible, in my view.

To me, this means the biofuels issues we’ve discussed here at Seattle Peak Oil are finally coming into wider acceptance in the peak oil and sustainability communities. Unfortunately, this usually means that the public will still pursue the current, misguided policy objectives until they catch up with the vanguard thinking, which usually takes several years.

What it comes down to is the fact that we don’t “need” 21 million barrels of oil per day. The best evidence for this is the fact that the rest of the world makes do with so much less. And not just “a lot” less: embarrassingly less. Because I’m aware of this fact, I’m often stunned into silence when I hear people say that America “needs” biofuels. They obviously haven’t ever seen a chart like the one below.

If you chunk up the rest of the world into United-States-sized population groups, each chunk of 300 million people only uses 3.5% of the world’s oil output. The 300 million Americans, however, use around 25% of the world’s oil.

The point of the exercise is this: if we cut back to zero imports tomorrow, American domestic oil production would still supply us with 7% of the world’s energy. We would still have twice as much energy wealth, per capita, as the average of the rest of the world lives on right now.

Perhaps the exhausting debates between “continued oil” vs. “no more oil” could be cut usefully short by simply asking Americans to live on domestic oil only, as a start. This would be an environmental win, a fiscal win and a humanitarian win also. And we’d still have more oil than most of the world’s people. And it might actually be achievable!

Of course, I’m not suggesting that anyone take up with such a plan: Americans would rather court a collapse than accept “socialism”, and that is probably what they will get. I only pose these ideas to illustrate my point. It helps to see the numbers and think about things differently. Then, when we talk about how we “need” biofuels so we can avoid being merely twice as rich as the rest of the world, the biofuels project starts to sound exactly as absurd as it is.

But not quite.

The full scope of the absurdity doesn’t really come to the fore until we realize that we’re considering exchanging our secure supplies of food and water because we’re not content to be twice as energy rich as the rest of the world. We’re so used to a century of indoor plumbing that it is very hard for people to understand how water can become so scarce that we might fight wars over it in the future.

The water issue has not been covered well yet, and not often either. But that is changing. A recent article in the Times Online actually raises the war-for-water issue. Again, the public won’t be coming around to thinking about this properly for some time, but it is fantastic to see the realities faced in small corners of the media, and not just blogs and citizen-run websites like ours.

What it comes down to is that we need water and food much, much more than we need growing industrial economies and 150 horsepower cars at our disposal. The sooner we figure that out, the better off my kids will be in the future.

Let’s face it: We don’t need a single drop of biofuels. Ever.

-Robert

Seattle Peak Oil is not focused on alternative energy because we’re beyond the bargaining stage of dealing with our energy future. We view most alternative liquid fuels projects as efforts to avoid any disruption to the way we live today. As such, we see them as both futile and largely unhelpful.

Needs vs. Wants

While it is true that our industrial growth-based economy would fall apart without the ability to keep increasing resource consumption endlessly, that fate is already sealed by the circumstance of a finite planet. We don’t need alternative fuels to lose this battle, and they can’t help us win it either: you just can’t produce your way out of a resource crisis.

Yet, many alternative energy advocates still insist that we will “need” biofuels in the future. Actually, the U.S. is still the third largest producer of oil in the world, so we believe that terms like “need” are inappropriate in this context. Without imports, the U.S. would still be incredibly wealthy among nations, but we might have to return to oppressive and humiliating habits like walking once in a while.

Poverty With Dignity

This points out some serious problems in America today, especially the fact that we don’t leave any cultural space for poverty with dignity in this country. If profligate energy use is our measure of status, then we’re set to suffer mightily in the coming decades. Perhaps that’s why the alternative fuels prospect is so deeply attractive to so many, and is nationally considered to be the only realistic option.

We at Seattle Peak Oil see another possible option on the table: failure. We should reserve a seat at the table for failure; give ourselves some room to live fulfilling and happy lives even if we won’t be able to meet the expectations we set for ourselves in the past.

Quest for Fire

Other advocates for biofuels focus on the common belief that these fuels are “green”. While there are many raging debates about food-vs-fuel, whether biofuels really are carbon neutral, or how much energy they return, there is almost no debate on the question of whether they are actually green in the first place, or what that would mean. The idea that biofuels are “green” has become so widely agreed upon that it isn’t even questioned anymore.

We question it.

While a banana might be more “green” than a barrel of crude oil, we strongly dispute the idea that YOU are “green” if you find a way to BURN the banana instead of eating it.

Save the Cars!

One of the strangest aspects of the biofuels movement is that people calling themselves “green” or “environmentalist” are actually promoting the continuation of both the growth economy and mass motoring as a national pastime. Not only that, but they are putting a “green” stamp of approval on all the things that real environmental activists have fought against for decades.

What a strange world we live in!

Presentation

In an effort to raise these issues, Robert Nelson delivered the following presentation to the group at our monthly meeting on January 8th, 2009. Use the resources below to view the slides online, or download the whole presentation and take advantage of the detailed speaker’s notes which include research, data and links to support the case made within.

Original PowerPoint 2003 file:

An Alternative Perspective on Biodiesel
Save to hard drive and use PowerPoint to view speaker’s notes.

Or, view the presentation slides online using the viewer below:

You’ll want to use the “full screen” button in the authorstream control bar or else the text is going to be very hard to read:

Yes, time for another rant. The new movie “Fuel” has all the green folk in a tizzy about how Jay Inslee and Barack Obama are going to make us independent from oil. We just need American can-do attitude and our old friend science to help us out.

The blog for the film’s website today has a photo of the guy who made the film with a cardboard “Biodiesel, No War Required” sign. I guess he isn’t reading our blog, eh?

The blog is also sporting a story snippet with link from the Seattle Times titled:

“Fuel”: A persuasive argument for kicking our addiction to oil

The title should be:

“Fuel”: A thoughtless argument for continuing to use energy like pigs!

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I used to get upset about political things.

I used to get upset about Bush. Before that, I used to get upset about Newt. Before that I got upset about abortion clinic bombers.

None of that upsets me now that I found out about peak oil. Part of the reason is that I’ve come to see humans in a different light. I used to buy into all of our Enlightment notions about freedom and individual choice, but one famous peak oil and energy writer has taught me to look at things from a different perspective.

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