There Will Be No Other End Of The World

Okay -- here's kind of a crazy story. Well, it seems crazy to me, not being a geologist or an oil refiner.

The National Energy Technology Lab (NETL), owned and operated by the Department of Energy, "supports DOE’s mission to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States." All they do is study coal, oil and natural gas.

February 28, about two weeks ago, NETL sent out a press release about the furthering of a new program "sequestering" dangerous carbon dioxide gas. What does that mean? Does it mean that the emissions won't get to read the newspaper for two weeks? Will have to stay in a seedy motel and miss work?

No. It means they are injecting CO2 gas into holes in the earth to see if this would be a viable mean of storing the negative product of our emission-filled lives -- holes formerly filled by oil and coal.

There is the added benefit that by injecting oil basins with the gas it is possible to extract more oil than could previously be retrieved. Displacement as opposed to suction, I presume.

So they are doing this -- in Michigan -- to see how the gas will react.

This from a separate DOE website:

"In an enhanced oil recovery application, the integrity of the CO2 that remains in the reservoir is well-understood and very high, as long as the original pressure of the reservoir is not exceeded."

Umm... as long as...

Youtube has a bunch of videos of Co2 bombs going off. Soda bottle size bombs that explode and make some holes -- in earth in buildings...

"The Norwegian oil company, Statoil, is injecting approximately one million tonnes per year of recovered CO2 into the Utsira Sand, a saline formation under the sea associated with the Sleipner West Heimdel gas reservoir. The amount being sequestered is equivalent to the output of a 150-megawatt coal-fired power plant."

Yesterday I went on a walk in the woods with Sara, a veterinarian turned science professor. She showed me various different signs of spring -- mating bird songs and snow specked with snow fleas. These little jumping creatures have a life cycle of about two days. All they do is wake up, mate eat and jump. I said I wanted to write about them, but she said they were too beautiful to be written about with oil. Then we saw a red plastic gas jug littering the woods. I argued it was not simple to think of backing up our lives -- undoing transportation and mechanization that has altered the lives of humans. Maybe I'm just jealous that she gets to go to Florida next week and I don't.

I feel like I've been very disjointed lately -- almost like one story a day doesn't express what I want to right now -- it's an avalanche of stupidity -- a genocide of shortsightedness and greed and impossibility...

I do stupid things all the time. I set off on endeavors that are clearly misplaced from the start that pose the potential to cause harm...

Still,

They are experimenting with filling the earth with gas.

NOTE: March 13 -- yesterday someone told me that CO2 is inert and would not be dangerous in this capacity. I have to track someone down to tell me about it now...