BP in Whiting has invested $100,000 in 2009 in the East Chicago Carnegie Arts Association to be used toward operating expenses. Show from left to right are Dave Ryan, executive director Lakeshore Chamber; Kathleen Oppolo, Carnegie Arts Association board member; East Chicago Mayor George Pabey; Lisa Woodruff Hedin, executive director Carnegie Arts Association; Tom Keilman, director of government and public affairs BP Products North America; Mike Ebert, co-chair Carnegie Arts Association; Lauren Bukovac, campaign coordinator Carnegie Arts Association
With such a concentration of heavy industry, Northwest Indiana depends on an array of dirty power plants to generate the needed electricity.
via [ Post-Trib ] NIPSCO plant makes dubious national list - Four area plants named in report on CO2 emissions By Gitte Laasby
Northern Indiana Public Service Co.’s R.M. Schahfer Generating Station in Wheatfield is the 43rd-dirtiest power plant in the nation in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report released Tuesday.
The report also states that Indiana power plants emitted the fourth-most carbon dioxide pollution in the nation in 2007.
Four of Northwest Indiana’s power plants are mentioned in the report by Environment America, “America’s Biggest Polluters: Carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in 2007″: The R.M. Schahfer Generating Station, Michigan City Generating Station, Bailly Generating Station and Whiting Clean Energy. Combined, they emitted more than 18.9 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2007. That’s the equivalent of more than 3.3 million cars.
Power plants are the single-largest source of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions, according to the report. The emission numbers come from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s acid rain program, which requires power plants to report certain emissions.
“America’s fleet of coal-fired power plants emitted more than 80 percent of CO2 pollution from U.S. power plants in 2007 and 36 percent of the total U.S. CO2 pollution, as well as disproportionate amounts of smog- and soot-forming pollutants, toxic mercury, and other toxic air pollutants,” the report says.
Gabriel Filippelli, chairman of the Department of Earth Sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University-Purdue at Indianapolis, said cutting emissions is key to avoiding the most dangerous effects of global warming, but would also reduce soot pollution, which can lead to asthma, and mercury pollution, which can damage the nervous system.
About half of the country’s electricity comes from coal, which has the highest carbon content of any fossil fuel per unit of energy, according to the report.
“We should be moving to clean, renewable energy like wind and solar. At least, old and new plants should be required to meet the same modern standards for global warming pollution. No plants currently have to meet standards for global warming pollution, making them unchecked contributors to global warming,” said Megan Severson, Midwest field organizer for Environment America.
The EPA has proposed requiring new and significantly modified power plants and industries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Within a few months, the U.S. Senate is expected to consider a cap-and-trade proposal to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Older plants pollute proportionally more than new plants. Plants built before 1980 produced 73 percent of America’s carbon emissions although they represent less than half of the plants, the report said. For each year older a coal generator is on average, it creates an additional kilo of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity it produced.
Severson said older plants emit more carbon dioxide because newer plants burn natural gas while older ones mainly burn coal. She said efficiency may be another reason newer plants emit less than older ones, but couldn’t elaborate.
The data in the table originate from “Energy demands on water resources”, report to the congress, 2006 [ link ]
For the past century, America has invested significant research, development, and construction funding to develop both fresh surface- water and groundwater resources. The result is a water infrastructure that allows us to harness the vast resources of the country’s rivers and watersheds, control floods, and store water during droughts to provide reliable supplies of freshwater for agricultural, industrial, domestic, and energy uses. During this same period, the U.S. developed extensive natural resources such as coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium and created an infrastructure to process and transport these resources in an efficient and cost-effective manner to consumers. These two achievements have helped stimulate unprecedented economic growth and development.
However, as population has increased, demand for energy and water has grown. Competing demands for water supply are affecting the value and availability of the resource. Operation of some energy facilities has been curtailed due to water concerns, and siting and operation of new energy facilities must take into account the value of water resources. U.S. efforts to replace imported energy supplies with nonconventional domestic energy sources have the potential to further increase demand for water.
ENERGY AND WATER INTERDEPENDENCIES
Water is an integral element of energy resource development and utilization. It is used in energy-resource extraction, refining and processing, and transportation. Water is also an integral part of electric-power generation. It is used directly in hydroelectric generation and is also used extensively for cooling and emissions scrubbing in thermoelectric generation. For example, in calendar year 2000, thermoelectric power generation accounted for 39 percent of all freshwater withdrawals in the U.S., roughly equivalent to water withdrawals for irrigated agriculture (withdrawals are water diverted or withdrawn from a surface-water or groundwater source) (Hutson et al., 2004).
Each day Humble supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier!
The giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet the petroleum energy Humble supplies — if converted into heat — could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second. To meet the nation’s growing energy needs for energy, Humble has applied science to nature’s resources to become America’s Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research Humble provides energy in many forms — to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the “Happy Motoring” Sign is the World’s First Choice!
A New York University School of Law survey found near unanimity among 144 top economists that global warming threatens the United States economy and that a cap-and-trade system of carbon regulation will spur energy efficiency and innovation.
“Outside academia the level of consensus among economists is unfortunately not common knowledge,” Richard Revesz, dean of the law school, said during a press conference on Wednesday. “The results are conclusive – there is broad agreement that reducing emissions is likely to have significant economic benefits.”
The law school’s Institute for Policy Integrity sent surveys to 289 economists who had published at least one article on climate change in a top-rated economics journal in the past 15 years. Half of those economists responded anonymously to a dozen questions that solicited their opinions on a range of issues, from the impact of climate change on particular industries to how the benefits of reduced greenhouse-gas emissions should be calculated.
The Institute for Policy Integrity surveyed a group of the top economic experts on climate change to solicit their views on several key questions that affect climate change policy. The pool of economists was selected by searching the top twenty?five economics journals over the past fifteen years and identifying all articles related to climate change. The roughly 300 authors of those articles were contacted and sent a survey, and more than half replied. The results showed surprising consensus on some questions, but continued debate on others.
The results were:
84% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that “the environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as described by leading scientific experts, create significant risks to important sectors of the United States and global economies.”
75% agreed or strongly agreed that “uncertainty associated with the environmental and economic effects of greenhouse gas emissions increases the value of emission controls, assuming some level of risk?aversion.”
Agriculture was the domestic economic sector most identified as “likely to be negatively affected by climate change,” with 86% of respondents selecting this sector.
91.6% preferred or strongly preferred “market?based mechanisms, such as a carbon tax or cap?and?trade system” over command?and?control regulation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
80.6% preferred auctioning carbon allowances rather than freely distributing allowances.
97.9% agreed or strongly agreed that “placing a ‘price on carbon’ through a tax or cap?and?trade system will increase incentives for energy efficiency and the development of lower?carbon energy production.”
57% agreed that the U.S. government should commit to greenhouse gas reductions “regardless of the actions of other countries,” while an additional 15.5% agreed that it should do so “if it can enter a multilateral emissions reduction treaty with some countries,” and 21.8% agreed the U.S. should move forward “if other major emitters commit to reducing emissions through a global.” Only 0.7% would wait until all countries commit to action, and 2.1% thought the U.S. should not act regardless of the actions of other countries.
92.3% agreed or strongly agreed that “most of the environmental and economic effects of greenhouse gas emissions will be felt by future generations.”
37.5% responded that “benefits to future generations” should be evaluated “by discounting them at a constant discount rate,” while 36.8% stated that they should be evaluated “by using alternative discounting methodologies (such as hyperbolic discounting),” and 16.7% stated that they should be evaluated “by reference to moral inquiries unrelated to discounting.”
The median value for a discount rate used to evaluate impacts on future generations, if discounting was to be used, was 2.4%, but there was wide variation, suggesting that there is no clear consensus.
The median social cost of carbon estimate was $50, but there was very wide variation, suggesting that there is no clear consensus on the exact extent of the harm created by each unit of greenhouse gas emissions.
“When we think of a green economy, it should be an economy where we don’t have any throw away resources. We don’t have any throw away species. We don’t have any throw away children or neighborhood either. We don’t have any throw away nations either.”
- Van Jones
As a resident of East Chicago Indiana this message resonates with me.
Update (9-5-09): Since the right has turned the heat up on Van Jones in an effort to discredit him and weaken the efforts he has championed, I thought it important to repost this video.
I live in an industrial fenceline community which is home to mostly poor minorities, and I have been apart of regional planning efforts that have not been too kind to them. If you follow this blog you will undoubtedly recognize that the population that lives here does not share in the quality of live most Americans have come to know.
Based on my experience I would say Van Jones’ criticism of industrial policy isn’t strong enough. Not only do East Chicago and Gary receive a disproportionate share of the negative externalities of industry (pollution, disinvestment, congestion, neglect, and the occasional explosion), they also receive a disproportionate share of the benefits. With a low industrial tax rate, these communities receive very little tax benefit. The political leadership has also awarded these industries with tax abatements (BP recently received a $165 million tax abatement in East Chicago). These communities also receive very little wage benefit to support the local population, as most wage earners and contractors choose to live in other less polluted middle-class communities. Most economic development dollars received by industry also go to other less polluted middle-class communities.
One other very important fact that needs to be better articulated is how these industries crowd out, or hold down other markets. This can be attributed to the negative externalities, and the general lack of quality of life.
One example of how this has effected other markets is what happened twenty-five years ago when BP, then Standard Oil, was forced to relocate there professional training facility from Whiting Indiana to Naperville Illinois. They simply could no longer attract professionals to the region due to quality of life issues. They ended up donating their whiting facilities to St. Joseph College. Today, BP’s Naperville facility is a LEED certified campus.
You can find many examples in the housing and retail markets…
1. A decrepit machine, especially an old car; a rattletrap.
2. A failure; a flop.
The Clunker Stimulus and Emerging Markets
Could the Obama administration be seen as a major turning point in environmental and economic history because of something called the “Cash for Clunkers” Program?
“In virtually no time, the clunker program has become a national pastime. It has captured the public’s imagination in a way that no other federal stimulus has. Everyone is talking about it. And I truly believe that consumer spirits have been buoyed by the prospect of going out and buying a new car — even with federal assistance, and even under the duress of federal mileage standards. After a very dreary year or two, people might just have fun trading in their clunkers and buying something new,”
Now that everyone seems happy with Obama’s Clunker Program, it’s time to look at maximizing the benefits. A very clear and obvious question has to do with using tax payer money as a loss leader to finance the program. Certainly the program was meant to kick start a faltering auto industry, and begin to replace older inefficient and environmentally suspect products, but if we take this opportunity we could kick start emerging markets as well. By privatizing the clunker programs we could potentially open a number of new cradle to cradle markets to incentivize the reuse and recycling of materials.
Granted this model wouldn’t replace the regime of “design obsolescence,” but it would replace basing design obsolescence on the production of inferior materials, manufacturing processes, and technology, with superior materials, manufacturing processes, and technology. This is exactly what we accomplished in the computer industry these past thirty years.
Yesterday I heard on NPR how “Clunkers” are being “killed” and then recycled. As it turns out only the ferous metals are being recycled back into production, everything else is sent to land fills - not a very sustaining prospect for an ecologically minded Administration.
In my mind, it no longer makes sense for governments to clean up behind dirty and wasteful industries to maintain the balance of a sustainable earth. We have lived through the abundance of managing scare resources to having few remaining resources, and now we must manage through a determination of risk. The public burden of excess pollution and waste has become too large to be sustainable. The costs of clean-up projects and waste storage facilities are too taxing on the public wallet, and for those who would like to see lower taxes and a smaller government, they may find shrinking what we put into our land fills as one way to go.
Beside expanding the salvage market a Clunkers market could lead to the creation of a whole new manufacturing model that incentivizes the design of materials and processes for their life-cycle use and reuse, while limiting waste. In so doing auto manufacturers have the opportunity to expand the resell and reuse of materials from used vehicles. Who knows, some one may even develop a business plan to mine our land fills for used raw materials.
In business there is a saying “throwing good money after bad.” The idea is that it is better to cut your losses and go with something else than to continue a losing strategy that drains your resources. for the energy sector it follows that it would be better to cut losses with oil and go with some other alternative, but like our banking sector, the U.S. government seems to have the same boneheaded belief that our commitment to oil is too large to give up on. But unlike the banking system, oil is a limited resource. At some point in the near future America has to move forward with an alternative resource. The question today is at what cost to the environment are we going to continue our relationship with oil?
I found this article this morning about throwing good energy after bad, or clean after dirty. I suppose adding Palin’s name to the title is suppose to appeal to some obvious instinct.
Environmentalists fear at least half of the relatively clean-burning Alaskan North Slope gas will end up fueling tar sands operations in Alberta, where the pipeline will end, instead of coming to the lower 48 states to replace carbon-intensive coal in power plants. The tar sands operations already consume about 20 percent of Canada’s natural gas, and they are expected to need as much as twice that by 2035.
Two opposing sides of America’s energy future are at war in the coalfields of southern West Virginia, an Aljazeera English People and Power Documentary.
Massey Energy, a coal company, wants to mine Coal River Mountain using a surface mining technique called mountaintop removal, but local residents and environmentalists through acts of civil disobedience are trying to save the mountain in order to build a wind farm instead and mine coal underground.
This struggle at local level reveals a national conflict, confronting global warming while simultaneously stimulating the US economy.
Residents are hoping that Barack Obama, the US president, who criticised mountaintop removal as a presidential candidate, will intervene by banning the practice altogether, probably the only way the wind project on Coal River Mountain could prevail.
The study makes a number of interesting conclusions:
When externalities such as public health and environmental quality are factored in, a mountaintop removal mine ends up losing $600 million over its expected 17 year life. The costs of these externalities are taken in by the public in the form of health expenses and environmental clean up costs as well as lost resources, like ginseng and wild game. A wind farm would remain profitable over its life, forever.
The Raleigh County Government would receive $1.74 million each year from the property taxes on a wind farm, whereas only $36,000 would make its way back to Raleigh County from the severance taxes on the coal taken out of Coal River Mountain. And the money from the wind farm comes in forever.
A scenario where a local wind industry came to the Raleigh County was considered. In this scenario, over 1700 people would be employed at a local wind turbine production facility. A facility such as this would only be placed in an area where wind farms were going up.
In the span of Human history, the Alberta Tar Sands project is the largest industrial project initiated by Humans, larger than China’s 3 Gorges Dam. This project is the driving force behind the BP expansion here in East Chicago, and the air I will be expected to breath.
Andrew Nikiforuk’s video is about the best overview of the project I have found.
Some from the energy sector argue that if Americans continue to consume energy at present rate of increase then this is not a project of choice but of necessity. Unfortunately that discussion has not been held in public. What this project does tells us is that the present condition of our energy sector is struggling severely to keep up with the energy demands of the American life style in an environment of diminishing efficient resources. Seven years ago the American energy sector shifted its reliance from the Sweet Crude of Saudi Arabia to the Sour Dirty Crude of the Tar Sands. Since then we have attempted to rely on far inferior energy resources to support our high energy consumptive life style.
With the Tar Sands the energy return on energy investment (EROEI) falls
from
1-barrel investment to produce 100-barrels of product (for sweet crude)
to
1-barrel investment to produce 5-barrels of product (for dirty sour crude from the Tar Sands)
The fact that we are shifting our dependence on a resource with such diminished efficiencies reveals some of the true costs of the last sixty years. Other costs include:
Deforestation: The tar sands ranks second to the Amazon Rainforest Basin in its rate of deforestation on the planet, and wiping out the ancient Boreal Forest in Canada.
Increased CO2 Emissions: The tar sands mining procedure releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production.
What I can gather from my minor position is that our obvious neglect of exponential growth and demand has reframed the discussion and limited the realm of possible solutions for our energy needs. A generation of ineffective confrontation with clear evidence puts us at this disadvantage. I realize I need to come to grips with the fact that we live in an era where positive action is a lagging indicator.
Most Americans have no knowledge of this colossal project. They have no knowledge of the reasons why it has been initiated nor the socio-economic and environmental impacts it may have. They just know that the cost of gas has gone up. The issues surrounding the project are only just beginning to enter the public discourse - long after our public and commercial leaders have committed us to this solution.
Recently, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu addressed the issue publicly (not behind closed doors as in Cheney’s Energy Task Force).
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu told the Reuters Global Energy Summit that the balance between the environmental impact from the huge energy resource in northern Alberta and its importance to U.S. energy supply is a complicated one that will require solutions from the industry.
Environmental groups have mounted major campaigns to get the message out to Americans that the expansion of Canada’s oil sands industry threatens to intensify global warming, deforestation and damage to water resources.
“It’s a complicated issue, because certainly Canada is a close and trusted neighbor and the oil from Canada has all sorts of good things. But there is this environmental concern, so I think we’re going to have to work our way through that,” he said. “But I’m a big believer in technology.”
Canada is the largest foreign supplier of oil to the United States and its oil sands represent the biggest deposits of crude outside the Middle East.
The Canadian and Alberta governments as well as the oil industry are going to great lengths to ensure that U.S. energy and environmental policies do not put oil sands-derived crude at a disadvantage in its most important market.
The resource is mined in open pits as well as produced in wells with the aide of steam pumped into the ground. Then it must be processed by upgrading plants into light oil that can be fed into refineries.
There is concern about the large amount of energy required to produce oil sands, Chu said. He said Canadian producers point out they are making strides in extracting the crude “more cleanly.”
Cutting the energy used to extract a barrel of oil sands crude would be “economically good and it will be environmentally much better,” he said.
CROWN POINT | The Hammond-based Calumet Project and the California-based Global Community Monitor, have notified BP Whiting Refinery of their intention to sue under citizen suit provisions of the federal Clean Air Act.
The potential lawsuit will press for penalties that could total more than $30 million.
PLAINFIELD, Ind., May 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Judge Larry McKinney today issued a ruling in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana calling for Duke Energy to shut down three units at the company’s West Terre Haute Wabash River Station no later than Sept. 30, 2009.
The BP project in East Chicago has many ramifications not only for the health of local residents who live under the plumb of BP, but also upstream political cultures who trade on the investment of BP. The political elite are very much aware of the increase risk factors and the data that reveals local residents losing additional personal wealth due to this project. In a era that has become ever more sensitive to increased risk factors due to environmental pollution, the thought of increasing toxic releases will suppress even further the future assessed values of properties in this very poor community, leaving East Chicagoans in even weaker position to compete in the future economy.
In addition to the loss of health and personal wealth the residents of East Chicago, who pay the highest property taxes in the state, are expected to provide $165,000,000 in charity to BP for a tax abatement. The construction phase of the project has already begun, but for some reason East Chicago and whiting businesses and restaurants are not seeing new business from construction workers. It appears BP is staging workers in Lancing Illinois and frequenting their businesses and restaurants.
I am discussed in local environmentalist who speak on behalf of such projects because of job creation. What do they know about economic development. 40% of East Chicago’s Adult population are considered functionally illiterate, with less than 2% obtaining a collage degree required for one of the ~70 jobs at BP. I think my circle of friends skew this.
Nikiforuk called it comparable to “mountaintop” coal mining in the Appalachian region. Moreover, the industry has made ripples in America’s energy policy, he said. Canada’s tar sands have been touted as a sustainable alternative to oil fields in Saudi Arabia. Canada has become the No. 1 oil source for the U.S., a trend that likely will continue, he said.
“You’re trading bloody oil for dirty oil,” he said. “Which is like shifting your mortgage from Countrywide to Bear Stearns and hoping it’ll solve your problems.”
The expansion of refinery capacity at BP brings with it questions about future air quality and emissions, Nikiforuk said. So far, BP has not adopted the stringent standards in place at refineries in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
Back in 2007 again, and coming at environmental advocacy from a different angle. The negative impacts are not all environmental they were also financial. In a community with the poorest census tracks in the state, yet paying the highest property taxes in the state at 8.45% this give-away to BP (without any job creation for East Chicagoans) is insane.
In fact we know that the project will lower residential property values and cap incremental increases in the future.
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