part two Water Awareness Journey

As we sped north towards Shreveport past Cypress stands draped with soft silvery Spanish Moss and more upland stands of oak, tupelo and gum a distant dark plume of smoke rose into the sky. We began passing huge flat fields of stubble. Rice. They're burning off the fields.

Orange flames flickered at the base of the smoke- a hundred black vultures circled and swirled over the highway and a hundred more roosted in the trees beside the huge field. We flashed by the two half mile long lines of flame burning perpendicular to the highway. Each line slowly drew away from the other as it advanced across the field. We felt the heat in our car as we flashed past this apocalyptic hell field with its smoke and blackened charred earth. A bad day for the mice. A good day for the vultures.

I learned from a farm newspaper picked up at a gas station that salt water intrusion now threatens the irrigated rice crop. In a land of fifty plus inches of rain a year, a forty inch rain fall is severe drought and ground water depletion is a real problem. The ag interests are seeking more diversions from the Mississippi. I wonder. How long will it be before we see increased withdrawals from Lake Michigan through the Chicago Canal to water the rice fields?

We rolled north to Shreveport and near that city the first signs of the Haynesville shale gas boom appeared. Well pads, rigs, the distinctive plastic lined open pit lagoons for flowback water began appearing along the roadside. We overhauled a tanker spilling a dribble of water that sprayed onto the road. As we passed the red cab we saw Haliburton on the door. We then overhauled a second tanker, also dumping his load on the road. We did not test the liquid. We don't know for sure it was polluted. But why would a truck dump good water on the highway? As my co- captain observed- one truck, maybe a screw up. But two trucks traveling together?? That's a bit beyond statistical likelihood of simple stupidity or incompetence. That looked an awful lot like standard corporate operating procedure.

Louisiana is a poor and sparsely populated state. It has suffered severely from chemical contamination and oil pollution for decades. It's logical to assume that few people are monitoring the industry and even fewer thank they can change its behavior here. A Google search for environmental websites dealing with shale gas drilling here turned up very little in the way of activist information.

A day and two tanks of gas later the little blue Honda and its crew were passing through the Permian Basin of west Texas. Here for eighty years oil has been extracted. Ten years ago the supply was dwindling and the basin was thought to be nearly sucked dry. Then fracking began. Today industry believes another 30 billion barrels of oil may be 'recovered' from the Permian. Odessa, Midlands, and Monahans are booming 24 -7. The trucks roll constantly, day and night on I 10. The lot in front of the motel we stayed at was full of trucks. More than two thirds had drilling gear or were tankers. On a Sunday morning they were rolling at 7 am. On Saturday I watched ten trucks go by four of which were tankers. An industry publication says it's like another Kuwait has been added right here in the good old USA. “It is almost as if the laws of scarcity have been repealed” gushed the industry observer.

But not for Texas water supplies. It takes seven to nine barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil. And each well may use up to 13 million gallons of water. The drillers get it from ground water. Even as the worst drought ever recorded in the state has shriveled and parched Texas, they are pumping millions of gallons of freshwater into the oil wells and recovering and re using less than a quarter of it. This “unregulated gluttonous use of freshwater” as one Texas newspaper called it, has gotten so bad that Governor Perry signed into law last year a regulation that the drillers reveal the quantity of water used for each well. Pretty amazing considering how friendly Texas generally is to the industry.

The drillers can use brackish water extracted from deeper under the ground. But it costs more and with the supplies of gas and oil on the increase gas prices and profits are dropping. This is not the time to spend more on recycling and cleaning up water. So use it up. Quick before the regulations get put in place. The last few surviving ranchers and farmers can go to work driving trucks. At least until 2020. Then the latest boom will go bust. Actually an industry paper reported on the day I wrote this that a “much needed correction” was in the works as the industry began cutting back on shale gas drilling investments. Will New York's moratorium stand?

We filled up the gas tank again and drove on.

We drove past a dried up orange grove in Arizona and empty pastures in New Mexico. We drove past unused fields whitened and poisoned by irrigation salts. We drove over the Canal that supplies the hay fields of southern California. And we drove over the Rio Grande where I saw one very small puddle fed by a tiny trickle.

Drought and water scarcity, writes William deBuys in his book “A Great Aridness”, are a different sort of “natural” catastrophe. It comes on gradually and grinds away at the economic system built up upon a customary supply. In ancient times New Mexico and Arizona peoples successfully practiced dry land farming for centuries. Then seven hundred years ago the last great drought arrived. The society unraveled. Archaeologists have found large numbers of broken human bones and skulls- broken by human on human violence.

Will forethought and science prevail in this fossil fuel dependent society of today? We have the technology to do it differently. We passed a 250 MW concentrated solar utility plant under construction west of Tucson. We passed a hybrid diesel delivery truck in Louisiana. I walked by a tiny smart car over by the library yesterday. Rain does still fall, at least occasionally. The sun still shines and plants still grow. For now.

water awareness part one

Our Water Awareness Journey

I'll get back to the pellets and biomass soon. Right now while it's fresh in my mind I want to share observations of a cross country trip where we observed what happens when there is too much and too little water and people have made unwise choices regarding same.

The lake watcher headed west with her co captain and a crew mate from Wolcott a few days ago. Our first destination was the deep south where we became acutely aware of the impacts of too much water. We traveled from Mobile Bay west to the fabled French Quarter of New Orleans which largely escaped the rage of Katrina. Biloxi however did not. I had noticed the occasional groupings of live oaks around weedy plots as we drove the coast highway. When we neared the old gulf city of Biloxi these groupings became more frequent. Broken bleached snags and stumps marked the seaward median strip where once a complimentary row of oaks reached out over the highway to lace branches with the land side trees. We saw large multistory casinos with ripped and tattered siding exposing the steel beams beneath. A bill board touted Slab Removal 1.50 per square foot. We saw concrete street lamp bases still sprouting wires, bent and uprooted fire hydrants, and many many slabs with ragged live oaks and for sale signs usually listing a banking contact. It will be many years before Mississippi recovers from Katrina and its 25 foot storm surge.

Do you think that just maybe the banks might decide not to finance new mansions with waterfront views there?

The vital bustling colorful flavorful raucous French Quarter was largely untouched by Katrina. Humans are a resilient species and they're still busy trading and dealing and selling to the tourists in the Big Easy. We took a mule wagon ride ( mules stand the heat better then horses) with Daryl the guide and Willie providing pull. Before boarding I observed two notices taped to the seat backs. One had a three inch header PETA LIES the second with smaller print outlined the mule welfare guidelines of Willie's employer. He heads back to the barn when it hits 95 degrees. Daryl was a 22 year veteran of the tourism guide biz. He had been with his street wise mule for about 13 years.

Do you know where The Music was born? Not in the French Quarter. It was born in the Treme ( pronounced Trem-may). Daryl told us with pride in his voice. This, I now know, was one of the city's oldest neighborhoods where the free people of color lived. He also told us a well regarded producer had created an HBO series about the area and he had a bit part in one episode as a dancer. Later we had a beer and listened to three young black male musicians and a young white female vocalist wail out the blues. The waiter smiled and thanked me when I put a tip in the muscians' jar. The 99 % are still scrapping and scraping by in New Orleans. They even spare the tourist a smile and a cheery hello now and then.

Katrina largely spared the Lafitte swamp, too, but here we saw the first signs of drought. Crispy brown withered vegetation and dry bare earth lay beneath the tall straight Cypress trees and their knees. One tiny puddle of water under the boardwalk contained a dozen minnows. No alligators to our regret. But the treetops were busy with birds-winter warblers, sparrows, titmice and chickadees with an accent and slightly different plumage than New York black caps.

We stopped at the visitors center to inspect the restrooms and here a volunteer told us the swamp was under the influence of the great southwestern drought. But not to worry. The gaiters find holes, the turtles and fish repopulate, the birds go somewhere. But what the swamp can't deal with is giant Salvinia. This and a trio of other invasive south American plants how rapidly spreading through the bayous are weaving a choking mat of vegetation so thick you can walk on it in some places. You can't hand pull it- it takes a dredge and in five weeks it repopulates. A bit disheartened by this we moved on.

Next hydro fracking and a historic drought in the Permian Basin of west Texas.

pellets fish and clean water

Pellet stoves happy fish and clean beaches. First in a series

What has a wood burning stove got to do with a less smelly beach? Bear with me. This will take a couple of paragraphs.

Erosion is not good for lakes. When dirt washes off bare land, it often carries antibiotics, persistent pollutant chemicals and endocrine disrupters and pathogenic bacteria with it. If the mud has come from a cornfield or some other land with row crops on it, the runoff frequently carries fertilizers that end up fertilizing algae and rooted weed growth in the lake. Too much nitrate and phosphate pollution from agriculture has caused toxic blue green algae blooms, near shore “dead zones” with no oxygen, and botulism outbreaks that killed thousands of birds on Lake Erie and Ontario. So how are pellet stoves mixed up with this?

Pellet stoves are an increasingly popular way to heat houses in the rural areas of the Great Lakes region. Most use sawdust that has been formed into little cylindrical pellets that look like rabbit chow. In areas with lots of trees, waste sawdust pellets bagged up as fuel are very competitive with propane and heating oil if you have a special stove to burn them in. Northern Europe has modernized pellet stove designs because the fuel burns much cleaner than cordwood. In fact, late last December a bulker loaded with 28,000 tons of pellets left a terminal near Norfolk Virginia for Germany where homes and businesses burn about 1.6 million tons a year. Europe in general is increasing its consumption of pellet fuel and one industry trade group predicts that use could double in eight years from the current 11 million tons to 15 to 25 million tons.

But as clean burning easy to use pellet stoves become popular, the available sawdust supply dwindles. It takes seventy years to grow a decent sized tree. It takes seventy days to grow a field of perennial grasses or golden rod. And native grasses can make fuel pellets too. A hundred years ago people burned hay and straw and dried cow chips out on the tree less prairies. Straw stoves have been around for years in Scandinavia and in rural areas of the U.S. In fact back in the 1870s straw burning steamers were being used on threshing rigs. And people have burned wheat and rye grain in stoves. Back in 1988 when I saw my first pellet stove in Watertown it was burning spoiled corn kernels. So the interest in grass pellets now on the upswing simply continues the long standing practice of getting heat energy from farm crops and waste fiber.

Stay with me for one more paragraph.

Many grasses are perennial plants. They develop huge strong root systems that penetrate deep into the ground. A good hay seeding of perenial grasses that's fertilized regularly can last for at least a decade as the farmer takes off two or three cuttings a year. All that time, the grass holds the soil on the field even as it provides forage for cows, or cover for nesting birds and wildlife. Given ample fertilizer you can produce five tons of biomass per acre in the Lake Ontario watershed. That biomass, like wood, can be turned into pellet fuel and used in heating. At the time I wrote this the retail prices of wood pellets were running 260 to 300 dollars a ton. And it can reduce soil erosion and inputs of fertilizers and chemicals into Lake Ontario too One way it does so is if farmers plant wide buffer strips of grass near streams and creeks to soak up the excess manure they apply to their fields. This keeps the fertilizer out of the water. Planting perennial grasses on steep slopes also keeps that priceless resource we call 'dirt' in place. As Jared Diamond author of the ground breaking book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed points out, history shows repeatedly that when a society loses its topsoil, it can not long endure.

In a press release from a German company announcing construction of a pellet plant in east Texas that will produce 500,000 tons of fuel a year German Pellets says;

“Wood pellets are the fuel of the future. They are produced from the renewable raw material wood, meaning that a sustainable supply is guaranteed. In addition, wood pellets are significantly less expensive than fossil fuels. Pellets are a clean, CO2-neutral fuel, which means they do not contribute to climate change or pollute the environment. “

Possibly. But some folks right here in Ontario and Quebec and upstate NY and Vermont are thinking grass pellets may be the fuel of the future. Our next article will take a look at REAP and Cornell and some other endeavors to create sustainable affordable bio fuel from land that should not be growing corn.

coming next- can cattails contribute to 'energy independence' from the Middle East?