By Robert Bostick, 12-02-08

The climate situation is much, much worse than most know because: The oil and gas industry has been mining for oil using fresh water, carbonated, fresh water- to pressurize their wells, since the mid 1800,s; they also use phosphoric acid, the ingredient needed for RNA and DNA formation. They only use fresh water. Salt water will not do; if you see it mentioned it is the rare case of desalinization. As a consequence, they have used up as much fresh water from our planet as they have produced oil since the beginning, which is now a little over 150 years ago.

Unlike other industrial use of H2O, the depth they put the water means it is never coming back to the water table, and it is polluted, because the acid brew has been dissolving the crust of the earth slowly -but surely, chewing up metals dissolving them into their sulfides and even forming methane gas, a simple chemical reaction when you have CO2 and H2O way down there in the earth where there is a lot of fully decayed carbon. We are a closed system. We are not making any new water at this point in our planet's history. Our shortage of water on Earth today, and it is getting critical, is due to the oil and gas industry, not only because they remove water, but because when you remove water from rivers, lakes and streams, and the depth gets lower and narrower, it evaporates faster. and soon you have drought.

Removing it directly from the water table has even worse results. Rain for the most part stays in place; what goes up comes back down. The only new water comes from rain storms in coastal areas where water evaporates from the ocean and comes back down on the land.

Now you know what caused the dust bowl in the 30's; it was the first round of oil exploration in Texas, Oklahoma, California, Wyoming, Kansas, etc. all the water they used from the immediate area to drill.

I sent Andersen Cooper an email when he stood in front of the disappeared Lake Chad in CNN's Planet in Peril series, a program sponsored by Conoco Phillips, to tell us the lake had disappeared due to global warming. I suggested that he go back and tell the public that the water was used by his sponsor and other fossil fuel producers from the early 1900 on to drill for oil in the Middle East and Africa. He did not take me up on my suggestion; I did not even get an answer, but I notice that Conoco Phillips is no longer a sponsor; now it is Dow Chemical the company that makes all those "petro" chemicals.

Methane gas likes water; with fresh water, and fresh water only, it can form its hydrate. It does this by compressing itself about 170 times into an ice lattice. Methane in all but one case on Earth needs low temperature and high pressure to form as it does deep in the earth where the industry finds oil and gas . The one exception to the rule is the Arctic; it is the only place that methane can form its hydrate at atmospheric pressure, because it gets cold enough to put it in the hydrate stability zone without high pressure. In fact, that is where methane hydrates were first discovered on modern day Earth, in the late 1930's, and they were discovered by the oil and gas industry forming in their pipe line, which was only buried a few feet deep in the Arctic permafrost, and which the industry had built from Norman Wells in Canada's North West Territories to Alaska's Pacific coat to serve the needs of World War II for the allies.

Now you would think that it would have made the cover of Time magazine, something new- never seen on earth before, and you would think that the oil and gas industry might have figured out, or at least had a passing thought that what they were doing in the Arctic, draining all the summer permafrost lakes, ponds and puddles and the Mackenzie river to use for oil well pressurization, had something to do with this new "thing." You will see online if you research the Canol pipeline (at least the last time I looked), that they say they had to shut the pipe line down, because it had problems, but they do not say what the problems were.

The oil and gas industry grabbed 'Groucho Marx's flying duck,' and had it fly away with this new secret word . . "methane hydrate." You may have seen the 'duck' recently, without fanfare, dropping in and quickly out again with this now decades old cloistered word; most recently on the top left hand corner of page three in big newspapers in a story about this thing called gas hydrate.

The duck uses the Associated Press for its delivery , and the duck is fibbing. It says that there may be some new technology that will allow the hydrates on the North Slope of Alaska to be harvested; the duck then tells us that the oil companies are skeptical. Of course the duck really knows just what the oil men know: You cannot harvest an explosion. So this story is really a prelude to either the implosion or the explosion of Alaska's North Slope because: Methane gas likes its hydrate-bride better than anything else and when it gets threatened by something say like the Arctic summer heat and thinks it is going to have to return to its gaseous form( destabilize), it counters this with a cleaver little attribute; It takes up heat into its methane molecule, a lot of heat, a very lot of heat; it can hold up to 400 degree F- in every molecule of methane -without- and I repeat -without melting the ice that encircles it. Pretty nifty, huh? Well alas at some point in time it cannot hold on to its water-bride any longer, and it destabilizes, first fizzling and then exploding, and it releases the gas and the heat. That is why for the first time, in 1941, after two years of geared up production for the war you had a 101 degree F day in the Sub Arctic.

All winds originate from the Arctic. You cannot normally get Palm Springs weather in the Sub Arctic, without an artificial stimulus, and the coldest places on earth cannot warm faster than the hottest places- without a outside stimulus also. So you see the reason the Arctic ice is melting faster than everyone thought, is because it is warm enough now to start chain reactions every summer and leak tons of released hydrate (gas), into the atmosphere and the Beaufort Sea, and it is chock full of heat, tremendous heat from up to 85 Arctic summers.

if you would like to learn more things that you do not know about the clever little tricks of methane gas -and ice ages- and Marco Polo's mud volcano, the Dracula of the daylight hours, and something called -Enhanced Oil Recovery, surf the Internet for these terms.

Reply

↓↑report

How much energy does this cost?

Reply

↓↑report

A sudden release of a large amount of CO2 could be deadly, that is a potential hazard with all of these "sequestering" schemes.

Reply

↓↑report

Seems to me the best way to CO2 is to do something with it we've been doing for years - turn it into plastic. Plastic doesn't biodegrade, it's stable for thousands and thousands of years, and we product so much of it annually that there's millions of tons of potential CO2 locked up in it. Sounds kind of silly at first, but maybe all that plastic sitting in the landfills is better for the environment.

Reply

↓↑report