Peak Everything, Overshoot, & Collapse

Challenges to making California’s grid renewable

Posted on September 10, 2019 by energyskeptic

The critical role of natural gas in meeting electricity demand with intermittent wind and solar resources. 2013. Velerity

What follows is a report from the California Energy Commission. But in less bureaucratic language, this may summarize it better (Petersen 2019):

“I’ve always been amazed at a strange mental disconnect that’s common among renewable power advocates. On one hand, they freely acknowledge that industrial societies can’t function without stable power grids to supply electricity on demand, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and with 99.999% reliability. On the other hand, they insist that we have a moral duty to use non-dispatchable, intermittent, and generally unreliable power from renewables despite the fact that intermittency is the mortal enemy of a stable electric grid. The electrons from wind turbines and solar panels may be green and squeaky clean, but their intermittent electric current is the grid equivalent of sewage in a mountain stream.

According to the California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, the biggest challenge of managing a greener grid is maintaining a precise balance between supply and demand as the percentage of intermittent power from renewables increases. To meet the challenge, CAISO is working overtime to develop a fleet of flexible power resources with the capacity to:

Sustain upward and downward ramp;
Respond for a defined period of time;
Change ramp directions quickly;
Store energy or modify energy use;
React quickly to meet expected operating levels;
Start with short notice from a zero or low-electricity operating level;
Start and stop multiple times per day; and
Accurately forecast operating capability.

While the contract price for green electricity from a wind- or solar-farm may be cheaper than the contract price for electricity from a conventional power plant, the downstream cost of making green power stable, reliable, and useful in the electric grid can be immense, which is why electricity in states that have implemented renewable portfolio standards is often more costly than it is in states that haven’t implemented RPS programs.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Meier, A. May 2014. Challenges to the integration of renewable resources at high system penetration. California Energy Commission.

Energy Research and Development Division Final report. 2014. California Energy Commission, California Institute for Energy and Environment, Alexandra von Meier California Institute for Energy, and Environment University of California

Excerpts

Successfully integrating renewable resources into the electric grid at penetration levels to meet a 33 percent Renewables Portfolio Standard for California presents diverse technical and organizational challenges.

Renewable and distributed resources introduce space (spatial) and time (temporal) constraints on resource availability and are not always available where or when they are wanted.

Although every energy resource has limitations, the constraints associated with renewables may be more stringent and different from those constraints that baseload power systems were designed and built around.

These unique constraints must be addressed to mitigate problems and overcome difficulties while maximizing the benefits of renewable resources. New efforts are required to coordinate time and space within the electric grid at greater resolution or with a higher degree of refinement than in the past. This requires measuring and actively controlling diverse components of the power system on smaller time scales while working toward long‐term goals. These smaller time scales may be hourly or by the minute, but could also be in the milli‐ or even microsecond range.

To cope with intermittent renewables there needs to be

reserve generation capacity at least a day
dispatchable generation with high ramp rates in MW/s
generation with regulation capability
dispatchable electric storage
electric demand response (from customers)
direct load control down to a 5-second time scale without impacting end-use (!) their exclamation mark, not mine in http://uc-ciee.org/downloads/Renewable_Energy_2010.pdf

It also important to plan and design around the diverse details of local distribution circuits while considering systemic interactions throughout the Western interconnect. Simultaneously coordinating or balancing these resources in an electric under a variety of time and distances, without any specific technology to assist, is defined as a “smart grid.”

Temporal coordination specifically addresses the renewable resources time‐varying behavior and how this intermittency interacts with other components on the grid where not only quantities of power but rates of change and response times are crucially important.

Research needs for temporal coordination relate to:

resource intermittence,
forecasting and modeling on finer time scales;
electric storage and implementation on different time scales;
demand response and its implementation as a firm resource;
and dynamic behavior of the alternating current grid, including stability and low‐frequency oscillations, and the related behavior of switch‐controlled generation.

Different technologies, management strategies and incentive mechanisms are necessary to address coordination on different time scales.

Spatial coordination refers to how resources are interconnected and connected to loads through the transmission and distribution system. This means connecting remote resources and also addressing the location‐specific effects of a given resource being connected in a particular place. The latter is particularly relevant for distributed generation, which includes numerous smaller units interconnected at the distribution rather than the transmission level.

Research needs for spatial coordination relate to: technical, social and economic challenges for

long‐distance transmission expansion;
problematic aspects of high‐penetration distributed generation on distribution circuits, including clustering, capacity limitations, modeling of generation and load, voltage regulation, circuit protection, and prevention of unintentional islanding;
microgrids and potential strategic development of microgrid concepts, including intentional islanding and variable power quality and reliability.

A challenge to “smart grid” coordination is managing unprecedented amounts of data associated with an unprecedented number of decisions and control actions at various levels throughout the grid.

This report outlined substantial challenges on the way to meeting these goals.

More work is required to move from the status quo to a system with 33 percent of intermittent renewables. The complex nature of the grid and the refining temporal and spatial coordination represented a profound departure from the capabilities of the legacy or baseload system. Any “smart grid” development will require time for learning.

Researchers concluded that time was of the essence in answering the many foundational questions about how to design and evaluate new system capabilities, how to re‐write standards and procedures accordingly, how to create incentives to elicit the most constructive behavior from market participants and how to support operators in their efforts to keep the grid working reliably during these transitions. Addressing these questions early may help prevent costly mistakes and delays later on.

CHAPTER 1: Introduction to the Coordination Challenge

Successfully integrating renewable resources in the electric grid at high penetration levels – that is, meeting a 33 percent renewables portfolio standard for California – requires diverse technical and organizational challenges. Some of these challenges have been well‐recognized in the literature, while others are emerging from more recent observations. What these challenges have in common is that they can be characterized as a coordination challenge. Renewable and distributed resources introduce space or location (spatial) and time (temporal) constraints on resource availability. It is not always possible to have the resources available where and when they are required.

New efforts will be required to coordinate these resources in space and time within the electric grid.

A combination of economic and technical pressures has made grid operators pay more attention to the grid’s dynamic behaviors, some of which occur within a fraction of an alternating current cycle (one‐sixtieth of a second). The entire range of these relevant time increments in electric grid operation and planning spans fifteen orders of magnitude: from the micro‐second interval on which a solid‐state switching device operates, to the tens of years it may take to bring a new fleet of generation and transmission resources online or as a billion seconds (a season).In the spatial dimension, it is also the case that power systems have expanded geographically and become strongly interdependent over long distances, while local effects such as power quality are simultaneously gaining importance. About six orders of magnitude covered ‐ from the very proximate impacts of harmonics (on the scale of an individual building) to the wide‐area stability and reliability effects that reach across the Western Interconnect, on the scale of a thousand miles.

Because of their unique properties, any effort to integrate renewable resources to a high penetration level will push outward time and distance scales on which the grid is operated. For example, it will force distant resource locations to be considered as well as unprecedented levels of distributed generation on customer rooftops.

The physical characteristics of these new generators will have important implications for system dynamic behavior.

In extending the time and distance scales for grid operations and planning, integrating renewable resources adds to and possibly compounds other, pre‐existing technical end economic pressures.

This suggests at least a partial definition for what has recently emerged as a” Holy Grail” or the “smart grid.” The “smart grid” is one that allows or facilitates managing electric power systems simultaneously on larger and smaller scales of distance and time.

Special emphasis is at the smaller end of each scale, where a “smart grid” allows managing energy and information at higher resolution than the legacy or baseload system.

The fact that solar and wind power are intermittent and non‐dispatchable is widely recognized.

More specifically, the problematic aspects of intermittence include the following:

High variability of wind power. Not only can wind speeds change rapidly, but because the mechanical power contained in the wind is proportional to wind speed cubed, a small change in wind speed causes a large change in power output from a wind rotor.

Solar and wind power forecasting obviously hinges on the ability to predict temperature, sunshine and wind conditions. While weather services can offer reasonably good forecasts for larger areas within a resolution of hours to days, ranges of uncertainty increase significantly for very local forecasts. Ideally, advance warning could be provided at the earliest possible time before variations in solar and wind output occur, to provide actionable intelligence to system operators.

Needed:

Real‐time forecasting tools for wind speed, temperature, total insolation (for PV) and direct normal insolation (for concentrating solar), down to the time scale of minutes

Tools for operators that translate weather forecast into renewable output forecast and action items to compensate for variations.

A related question is the extent to which the variability of renewable resources will cancel or compound at high penetration levels, locally and system‐wide. Specifically, we wish to know how rapidly aggregate output will vary for large and diverse collections of solar and wind resources.

Needed: • Analysis of short‐term variability for solar and wind resources, individually and aggregate, to estimate quantity and ramp rates of firming resources required.

Analysis of wide area deployment of balancing resources such as storage, shared among control areas, to compensate effectively for short‐term variability.

2.1.3 Background: Firming Resources Resources to “firm up” intermittent generation include

reserve generation capacity
dispatchable generation with high ramp rates

The various types of firming generation resources are distinguished by the time scale on which they can be called to operate and the rate at which they can ramp power output up or down.
The most responsive resources are hydroelectric generators and gas turbines.

The difficult question is how much of each might be needed.

Electric storage includes a range of standard and emerging technologies:

pumped hydro
stationary battery banks
thermal storage at solar plants
electric vehicles
compressed air (CAES)
supercapacitors
flywheels
superconducting magnetic (SMES)
hydrogen from electrolysis or thermal decomposition of H2O

An inexpensive, practical, controllable, scalable and rapidly deployable storage technology would substantially relieve systemic constraints related to renewables integration.

The spectrum of time scales for different storage applications is illustrated in Figure 5.

months: seasonal energy storage (hydro power)
4‐8 hours: demand shifting
2 hours: supplemental energy dispatch
15‐30 minutes: up‐ and down‐regulation
seconds to minutes: solar & wind output smoothing
sub‐milliseconds: power quality adjustment; flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) devices that shift power within a single cycle

Given that storing electric energy is expensive compared to the intrinsic value of the energy, the pertinent questions at this time concern what incentives there are for electric storage, at what level or type of implementation, and for what time target.

Alternating ‐current (a.c.) power systems exhibit behavior distinct from direct‐current (d.c.) circuits. Their essential characteristics during steady‐state operation, such as average power transfer from one node to another, can usually be adequately predicted by referring to d.c. models. But as a.c. systems become larger and more complex, and as their utilization approaches the limits of their capacity, peculiar and transient behaviors unique to a.c. become more important.

3 Eto, Joe et al. 2008. Real Time Grid Reliability Management. California Energy Commission, PIER Transmission research Program. CEC‐500‐2008‐049.

The increased need to manage California’s electricity grid in real time is a result of the ongoing transition from a system operated by vertically integrated utilities serving native loads to one operated by an independent system operator supporting competitive energy markets. During this transition period, the traditional approach to reliability management—construction of new transmission lines—has not been pursued due to unresolved issues related to the financing and recovery of transmission project costs. In the absence of investments in new transmission infrastructure, the best strategy for managing reliability is to equip system operators with better real-time information about actual operating margins so that they can better understand and manage the risk of operating closer to the edge.

Traditional rotating generators support grid stability by resisting changes in rotational speed, both due to magnetic forces and their own mechanical rotational inertia. Through their inherent tendency to keep rotating at a constant speed, these generators give the entire AC system a tendency to return to a steady operating state in the face of disturbances. Legacy power systems were designed with this inertial behavior in mind.

Large fossil fuel and nuclear generators naturally promote 60-Hz grid stability because their rotational speed is constant due to magnetic forces and inertia. Despite disturbances they to revert to a steady operating state. But the inverters that renewable energy use to supply AC power depend on very rapid on-off switching within solid-state semiconductor materials. It’s possible that at some point when a larger percent of power comes from renewables, these inverters will destabilize the grid voltages, frequencies, and oscillations by not responding collectively well to temporary disturbances and that we’ll need to keep large rotating generators to maintain stability.

Unlike conventional rotating generators, inverters produce alternating current by very rapid on‐off switching within solid‐state semiconductor materials. Inverters are used whenever 60‐Hz AC power is supplied to the grid from

c. sources such as PV modules, fuel cells or batteries
variable speed generators, such as wind whose output is conditioned by successive a.c.‐c.‐a.c. conversion (this does not include all wind generators, but a significant fraction of newly installed machines). What we do not understand well are the dynamic effects on a.c. systems of switch‐controlled generation:
How will switch‐controlled generators collectively respond to temporary disturbances, and how can they act to stabilize system voltage and frequency?
What will be the effect of switch‐controlled generation on wide‐area, low‐frequency oscillations?
Can inverters “fake” inertia and what would it take to program them accordingly?
What is the minimum system‐wide contribution from large, rotating generators required for stability?

Needed:

Modeling of high‐penetration renewable scenarios on a shorter time scale, including dynamic behavior of generation units that impacts voltage and frequency stability
Generator models for solar and wind machines
Inverter performance analysis, standardization and specification of interconnection requirements that includes dynamic behavior
Synchro‐phasor measurements at an increased number of locations, including distribution circuits, to diagnose problems and inform optimal management of inverters

CHAPTER 3: Spatial Coordination

Relevant distance scales in power system operation span six orders of magnitude, from local effects of power quality on the scale of an individual building to hundreds or even thousands of miles across interconnected systems. A “smart grid” with high penetration of renewables will require simultaneous consideration of small‐ and large‐scale compatibilities and coordination.

3.1 Transmission Level: Long-distance Issues

3.1.1 Background: Transmission Issues

The need for transmission capacity to remote areas with prime solar and wind resources is widely recognized. It is worth noting that renewable resources are not unique in imposing new transmission requirements. For example, a new fleet of nuclear power plants would likely be constrained by siting considerations that would similarly require the construction of new transmission capacity. In the case of solar and wind power, however, we know where the most attractive resources are – and they are not where most people live. Challenges for transmission expansion include social, economic and technical factors. Social and economic challenges for transmission expansion include • Long project lead times for transmission siting, sometimes significantly exceeding lead times for generation

NIMBY resistance to transmission siting based on aesthetics and other concerns (e.g., exposure to electromagnetic fields) • Higher cost of alternatives to visible overhead transmission • Uncertainty about future transmission needs and economically optimal levels

On the technical side, • Long‐distance AC. power transfers are constrained by stability limits (phase angle separation) regardless of thermal transmission capacity • Increased long‐distance AC power transfers may exacerbate low‐frequency oscillations (phase angle and voltage), potentially compromising system stability and security

Both of the above technical constraints can in theory be addressed with a.c.‐d.c. conversion, at significant cost. The crucial point, however, is that simply adding more, bigger wires will not always provide increased transmission capacity for the grid. Instead, it appears that legacy a.c. systems are reaching or have reached a maximum of geographic expansion and interconnectivity that still leaves them operable in terms of the system’s dynamic behavior. Further expansion of long‐distance power transfers, whether from renewable or other sources, will very likely require the increased use of newer technologies in transmission systems to overcome the dynamic constraints.

3.1.2 Research Needs Related to Transmission

On the social‐political and economic side, research needs relate to the problems of deciding how much transmission is needed where, and at what reasonable cost to whom. In addition, options for addressing siting constraints can be expanded by making transmission lines less visible or otherwise less obtrusive. Needed: • Analysis of economic costs and benefits to communities hosting rights of way • Political evaluation of accelerated siting processes • Continuing analysis to identify optimal investment level in transmission capacity relative to intermittent generation capacity, and to evaluate incentives • Public education, including interpretation of findings regarding EMF exposure • Continuing R&D on lower‐visibility transmission technologies, including compact designs and underground cables

Needed: • Dynamic system modeling on large geographic scale (WECC) providing analysis of likely stability problems to be encountered in transmission expansion scenario, the benefit potential of various d.c. link options • Continuing R&D on new infrastructure materials, devices and techniques that enable transmission capacity increases, including: dynamic thermal rating, power flow control, e.g. FACTS devices o fault current controllers, intelligent protection systems, e.g. adaptive relaying, stochastic planning and modeling tools, new conductor materials and engineered line and system configurations4

CHAPTER 4: Overarching Coordination Issues

Refinement of both spatial and temporal coordination – in other words, “smartness” – demands a substantial increase of information flow among various components on the electric grid. This information flow has implications for system control strategies, including the role of human operators. Some of this coordination is specifically associated with renewable and distributed resources, requiring increased information volume for • mitigating intermittence of renewable resources accommodating siting constraints for renewable and distributed generation

Problematic issues in the context of information aggregation include the following: • How much data volume is manageable for both operators and communications systems? • What level of resolution needs to be preserved? • What data must be monitored continuously, and what opportunities exist to filter data by exceptional events? • How can information best be presented to operators to support situational awareness?

Once data have been selected and aggregated into manageable batches, they must be translated or somehow used to frame and inform action items for operators. For example, we might ask what local information goes into an operator’s decision to switch a particular feeder section, or to dispatch demand response, generation or storage. Operating procedures are necessarily based on the particular sets of information and control tools available to operators. The introduction of significant volumes of new data as well as potential control capabilities on more refined temporal and spatial scales also forces decisions about how this information is to be used, strategically and practically. Issues concerning actionable items include the following: • What new tasks and responsibilities are created for grid operators, especially distribution operators, by distributed resources? • How are these tasks defined? • What control actions may be taken by parties other than utility operators? Needed: • Modeling of distribution circuit operation with high penetration of diverse distributed resources, including evaluation of control strategies. 4. Locus of Control

A question related to the definition of action items is who, exactly, is taking the action. With large amounts of data to be evaluated and many decisions to be made in potentially a short time frame, it is natural to surmise that some set of decisions would be made and actions initiated by automated systems of some sort, whether they be open‐loop with human oversight or closed‐loop “expert systems” that are assigned domains of responsibility. Such domains may range from small to substantial: for example, automation may mean a load thermostat that automatically resets itself in response to an input (e.g. price or demand response signal); distributed storage that charges or discharges in response to a schedule, signal or measurement of circuit conditions; or it could mean entire distribution feeders being switched automatically.

Finally, it would be naive to expect any substantial innovation in a technical system as complex as the electric grid to proceed without setbacks, or for an updated and improved system to operate henceforth without failures. Rather than wishing away mistakes and untoward events, the crucial question is what corrective feedback mechanisms are available, not if but when failures do occur. This includes, for example, contingency plans in response to failures of hardware, communications or control algorithms, cyber‐security breach, or any other unexpected behavior on the part of a system component, human or machine. A higher degree of spatial and temporal resolution in coordinating electric grids – more information, more decisions, and more actions – means many more opportunities for intervention and correction, but first it means many more opportunities for things to go wrong.

CHAPTER 5: Conclusion

The effective integration of large amounts of new resources, including distributed and renewable resources, hinges on the ability to coordinate the electric grid in space and time on a wide range of scales. The capability to perform such coordination, independent of any particular technology used to accomplish it, can be taken to define a “smart grid.”

Ultimately, “smart” coordination of the grid should serve to • mitigate technical difficulties associated with renewable resources, thereby enabling California to meet its policy goals for a renewable portfolio • maximize beneficial functions renewable generation can perform toward supporting grid stability and reliability

Much work lies between the status quo and a system with 33 percent of intermittent renewables. Due to the complex nature of the grid, and because the refinement of temporal and spatial coordination represents a profound departure from the capabilities of our legacy system, any “smart grid” development will require time for learning, and will need to draw on empirical performance data as they become available. Time is of the essence, therefore, in answering the many foundational questions about how to design and evaluate new system capabilities, how to re‐write standards and procedures accordingly, how to incentivize the most constructive behavior from market participants, and how to support operators in their efforts to keep the grid working reliably in the face of these transitions. With all the research needs detailed in this white paper, the hope is that questions addressed early may help prevent costly mistakes and delays later on. The more aggressively these research efforts are pursued, the more likely California will be able to meet its 2020 goals for renewable resource integration.

References

Petersen, J. 2019. CAISO Data Highlights Critical Flaws In The Evolving Renewables Plus Storage Mythology. seekingalpha.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Western Wind and Solar Integration Study. May 2010. http://wind.nrel.gov/public/WWIS/

Vittal, Vijay, “The Impact of Renewable Resources on the Performance and Reliability of the Electricity Grid.” National Academy of Engineering Publications, Vol. 40 No. 1, March 2010. http://www.nae.edu/Publications/TheBridge/Archives/TheElectricityGrid/18587.aspx

Posted in Grid instability | Tagged california, grid, instability, intermittency, renewable, smart grid, solar, wind | 1 Comment

One million plant & animal species at risk of extinction

Posted on August 31, 2019 by energyskeptic

As usual, no mention of birth control or carrying capacity.

2019-9 Huge decline in songbirds linked to common insecticide (neo nicotinoids). National Geographic.

Plumer, B. 2019. Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace. New York Times.

Extinction rates are tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years.

Over the past 50 years, global biodiversity loss has primarily been driven by activities like the clearing of forests for farmland, the expansion of roads and cities, logging, hunting, overfishing, water pollution and the transport of invasive species around the globe.

All told, three-quarters of the world’s land area has been significantly altered by people, the report found, and 85 percent of the world’s wetlands have vanished since the 18th century.

Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.

As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.

The report is not the first to paint a grim portrait of Earth’s ecosystems. But it goes further by detailing how closely human well-being is intertwined with the fate of other species.

“For a long time, people just thought of biodiversity as saving nature for its own sake,” said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,which conducted the assessment at the request of national governments. “But this report makes clear the links between biodiversity and nature and things like food security and clean water in both rich and poor countries.”

A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines.

But as these natural landscapes wither and become less biologically rich, the services they can provide to humans have been dwindling.

Humans are producing more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural productivity on 23 percent of the planet’s land area, the new report said. The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.

The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient.

Posted in Biodiversity, Extinction | Tagged biodiversity, extinction | Comments Off

Global wildlife populations have fallen 60% in just 40 years

Posted on August 28, 2019 by energyskeptic

Below is a summary of the World Wildlife Fund report.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Hale, T. 2018. Global Wildlife Populations Have Fallen By 60 Percent In 40 Years, WWF Report Reveals. iflscience.com

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has just released its biennial Living Planet Report 2018, a colossal report to track the health of the world’s wildlife populations. All in all, it paints a truly damning picture of “runaway human consumption” and the damage it’s afflicting on the world’s biodiversity.

Global populations of monitored vertebrate species have declined in size by 60 percent on average between 1970 and 2014, according to the report, which utilizes data from the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) Living Planet Index and the IUCN Red List of threatened species, among others. The leading driver behind this steep decline is human consumption, which has led to to the degrading of habitat through agriculture, as well as the direct overexploitation of wildlife, such as overfishing and poaching.

“Science is showing us the harsh reality our forests, oceans, and rivers are enduring at our hands. Inch by inch and species by species, shrinking wildlife numbers and wild places are an indicator of the tremendous impact and pressure we are exerting on the planet, undermining the very living fabric that sustains us all: nature and biodiversity,” Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International, said in a statement.

It’s worth highlighting what that “60 percent” figure means exactly – because it doesn’t mean there were 60 percent fewer animals on the planet in 2014 compared to 1970. The report tracked 16,704 different populations of over 4,000 vertebrate species from 1970 to 2014. Across all of these populations, on average, the populations declined by 60 percent. Some small populations could theoretically suffer a 90 percent loss just by a handful of individuals dying. Even if most larger populations only decline by a tiny percentage, the small populations’ large losses will bring the total average up.

Freshwater wildlife has seen the most dramatic decline of all, with an average population drop of 83 percent since 1970. The tropics are also among some of the hardest hit ecosystems, with South and Central America suffering average population declines of 89 percent.

Posted in Biodiversity, Extinction | 1 Comment

Enough Copper to Electrify the World?

Posted on August 25, 2019 by energyskeptic

Preface. Copper is essential for modern civilization and any hope of migrating to renewable energy, since solar, wind, tidal, hydro, biomass and geothermal use 5 times more copper than traditional power generation in fossil and nuclear power plants. Nothing matches copper for electric wiring, which is used in power generation, power transmission & distribution, telecommunications, vehicles, cookware,and hundreds of kinds of electrical equipment. It’s used on integrated circuits, printed circuit boards, vacuum tubes, magnetrons in microwave ovens, electric motors. Copper is used in buildings for its corrosion resistance in roofs, flashings, gutters, and so on. It’s used in ships to protect against barnacles and mussels, and aquaculture and health care due to its antimicrobial, corrosion-resistance, and prevention of biofouling. Wikipedia Copper has even more uses.

As you can see in Figure 1, Chile produced the most copper of any nation — a quarter of all copper in 2021. Figure 2 shows that in 2022, Chilean production dropped to 2004 levels due to water scarcity, declining grades of ore, depletion rates, tax increases, regulatory uncertainty and other factors.

Figure 1. Largest copper producing countries 2021 (million metric tons). Source: www.usgs.gov

Figure 2. Chile copper production 2000-2022

Elon Musk told a closed-door Washington conference of miners, regulators and lawmakers that he sees a shortage of EV minerals coming, including copper and nickel (Scheyder 2019). In 2024, Scheyder wrote a fantastic book about mining. A must read book to understand the impact mining will have on the planet and all about how mining works, the energy involved and more — quite interesting. Basically for climate change, we are crossing many of the other 8 existential boundaries and destroying the earth in arguably worse ways, and it is not clear to me at all that mining and renewables affects climate change one bit, you will see in Sheyder’s book (reviewed below) what a tremendous amount of fossils are used in mining, and recycling, which is also mining but barely happening for most metals.

Learn more about copper and other mineral shortages here: Michaux S (2021) The Mining of minerals and the Limits to growth. Geological Survey of Finland.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Scheyder E (2024) The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives. Atria.

Battery 4 main parts: an anode, cathode, electrolyte, and separator. An anode is typically made with graphite. A cathode is made with lithium and, depending on design, a mix of nickel, manganese, cobalt, or aluminum. Between the two is an electrolyte solution often made of lithium, with a separator composed of plastic in between. Inside an EV’s motor sits more than a mile of copper wiring that is used to help turn power from the battery into motion.

The bigger the battery, the more metals needed. The Model 3 uses 0.11 kilograms (kg)/2.2 lbs of lithium for every kWh. So Tesla’s 55.4 kWh battery was built with 6 kg of lithium, 42 kg of nickel, nearly 8 kg of cobalt, 8 kg of aluminum, nearly 55 kg of graphite, and about 17 kg of copper, with even more aluminum and copper elsewhere in the battery.

China has some lithium reserves locked in hard-to-extract deposits. China is the world’s largest copper consumer and aggressively buys the red metal, a major conductor of electricity, from Chile, Peru, and other nations. U.S. copper production dropped nearly 5 percent from 2017 through 2021.

No new mines for any of these metals have opened in the United States for decades, with the exception of a small Nevada copper facility in 2019. Yet multiple projects have been proposed that could produce enough copper to build more than 6 million EVs, enough lithium to build more than 2 million EVs, and enough nickel to build more than 60,000 EVs.

The United States wants to go green, but to do that, it will need to produce more metals, especially lithium, rare earths, and copper. That means more mines. And mines are very controversial in the United States. Who wants to live next to a giant hole in the ground? Mines are dusty, increase truck traffic, and use dynamite for blasting that can rattle windows and crack foundations. Many mines throughout history have polluted waterways and produced toxic waste that scarred landscapes for generations.

They also require astronomical amounts of water to operate. Stewart Udall, who ran the U.S. Interior Department under Presidents John. F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, described mining as a “search-and-destroy mission.”

The process to produce these metals can vary widely by type and is vastly different than oil and natural gas production.

China has been scouring the world the past 20 years for cobalt, lithium, copper, and other metals. After the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, Chinese mining companies began negotiating with the Taliban to develop the Mes Aynak copper deposit, about two hours outside of Kabul. China’s mining companies spent billions of dollars buying cobalt mines in the Congo. In Argentina, China has invested in six major lithium projects. As 2023 dawned, India began scouring Argentina’s reserves of copper and lithium to sate its burgeoning EV industry.

Recycling alone cannot provide the materials needed to fuel the global green energy transition.

The United States is watching its petroleum dependence on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries transition into a dependence on China, Congo, and others for the building blocks of green energy devices. China has threatened to block exports to the United States of rare earths. The United States is expected to produce just 3 percent of the world’s annual lithium needs by 2030, even though it holds about 24% of the world’s lithium reserves.

In Brazil, a tailings dam collapsed and released a torrent of toxic sludge that quickly devastated much of the nearby countryside and killed almost 300 people. After that, Brazil’s government outlawed the type of tailings dam design that had collapsed, but the U.S. did not follow suit, fueling concern in Minnesota, Arizona, and other states that similar collapses could happen there if new mines were built. Where exactly? “We’ll be looking up at a 500-foot dam containing 1.6 billion tonnes of toxic waste and wondering when it is going to collapse and bury the community,” an Arizonan said of Rio Tinto’s plans to build a large copper mine and tailings waste storage site.

Are risks—even tragedies—such as these to be tolerated on the road to a green energy future?

Copper, one of the best electricity-conducting metals, is easy to shape and form, is corrosion-resistant, and binds well with other metals. Only silver conducts electricity better, but silver is more expensive than copper.

The average 747 jetliner from Boeing has 135 miles of copper wiring, and every American household has an average of 400 pounds of copper wiring and piping. Freeport-McMoRan’s Morenci, the largest copper mine in North America, uses Caterpillar 797 trucks to haul ore; inside each of those trucks’ radiators is at least 400 pounds of the red metal.

About 75% of the copper used throughout history has been mined since the Second World War.14 And the world’s lust for copper is set to only grow. In 2022, annual copper consumption was 25 million tonnes. By 2050, it’s projected to more than double to 53 million tonnes.

There is not expected to be enough copper to meet that 2050 target without more mines and more recycling. Without adequate copper supply in the 21st century, wars could very well be fought over copper, the consultancy S&P Global has warned. The U.S. would have to boost its copper imports from about 44% of its supply in 2022 to as much as 67% by 2035, unless it produces more of its own.

The discovery of the Resolution Copper deposit in the 1990s tested that tweak. It took more than a decade for Rio Tinto and BHP to study the deposit. They bored more than a hundred exploratory drills into the Earth, at a cost of more than $1 million each. They built the deepest mine shaft in the United States, a 7,000-foot-deep structure on a small sliver of adjoining land they controlled. They discovered that if they built the mine, it would supply a quarter of the copper consumed each year in the United States. Because the copper deposit is so deep, Rio and BHP also discovered it likely could not be extracted by digging from the surface but rather from below with a method known as block caving, whereby a large section of rock is undercut, creating an artificial cave that fills with its own rubble as it collapses under its own weight. That would cause a crater 2 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep, in what the mining industry terms a “glory hole.” (Yes, really.) Thus, to harvest the copper would require the destruction of a site considered as important to the San Carlos Apache as St. Peter’s Basilica is to Roman Catholics. The mine could use as much as 590,000 acre-feet of water over the course of its life, roughly 192 billion gallons, equal to nearly 5 gallons of water for every pound of copper, an alarming amount for a state that had been in a drought since 1994. The amount of water would be enough to supply 168,000 homes for 40 years. The mine would also produce a pile of waste rock stored behind a tailings dam that would be 500 feet tall and cover an area of 6 square miles. By 2013, Rio and BHP had started the U.S. federal permitting process, though as of this writing they have not obtained the permits. In 2004, it had taken a 55% stake in the Resolution Copper project to BHP’s 45%, giving it effective control over strategy, budget, and most important, outreach to the local communities, including Superior and the San Carlos Apache. Rio and BHP by 2021 had spent more than $2 billion on the project, without producing an ounce of copper. In its bid to win over local hearts and minds, Rio had promised to hire fourteen hundred workers—nearly half of the town’s population—with an average salary of $100,000, more than quadruple the 2020 average.

Who cares, Nosie was saying, if you have a high-paying job if the environment is destroyed? The proposed mine itself was a symptom of a way of life that cared only for money, he said. “That means everything here that is left, all water, all light, the beauty of environment, what brings people back here and then the holy and sacredness of this, is totally gone.

About 200 miles east of Phoenix sits the town of Morenci and its roughly 1,500 residents. Morenci has a copper mine that covers 100 square miles and is still growing. It is the largest mine for any metal on the North American continent, churning out 900 million pounds of copper in 2022. Every day a fleet of 154 mining trucks moves 815,000 tonnes (1.8 billion pounds) of rock, with each truck bed capable of carrying 236 tons (520,290 pounds) per load. Much of the copper at the Morenci deposit is considered low-grade, ranging somewhere between 0.23 and 0.5 percent. That means for every 100 pounds of rock those trucks move, about a quarter to half a pound is copper. A lot of rock needs to get moved, and a lot of waste rock needs to be stored somewhere. The mine also paid no royalties to the state or federal governments—just like every other Freeport-owned mine in the United States.

“The world is becoming much more electric,” Freeport-McMoRan’s chief executive, Richard Adkerson, told me. “Electricity means copper.”

After drilling and blasting Morenci’s pits, Freeport then loaded rock onto trucks and hauled it to one of two basic types of processing. One method is to crush the rock in giant tumblers that turn 24/7, mill it into a fine powder, and then lightly process it into what’s known as copper concentrate, before sending it to a nearby smelter, where the concentrate is melted and then put into molds for various products, including pipes. Another method is to pile the rock onto leach pads, where an acid concoction is applied via drip irrigation to tease out the copper, after which the acid solution—known as a Pregnant Leach Solution, containing 2 grams of copper for every liter—is collected at the bottom of the pad and processed into flat sheets of the red metal known as copper cathode by using electrical currents. A quarter of the nearly 100 square miles that compose the Morenci mine site holds tailings ponds that store the muddy detritus of the mining process.

Freeport now has a big problem: finding miners. More than half of Western miners in 2021 were over the age of 45. A fifth were over 60 and nearing retirement. The U.S. government formed a committee aimed to address this aging workforce and “public perceptions about the nature of mining.” In China in 2020, just one mining school enrolled more mining students than were enrolled in all of the United States. Adkerson and other Freeport executives visited universities, trying to convince students to change their majors to mining engineering.

But despite copper’s role in the green energy transition, few young people in the West wanted to help procure it. By 2023, when Freeport’s copper production in the United States fell not because of weak commodity prices or weather or economic tensions, but because the company did not have enough workers. And Quirk and Adkerson warned the problem would only get worse. “Our work is hard work,” Adkerson said. “It’s harder to drive a big-haul truck than it is to drive an Amazon or UPS or FedEx truck.”

Zaremba H (2022) The Energy Transition Could Be Derailed By A Looming Copper Shortage. Oilprice.com

“…a looming copper shortage threatens to completely derail the clean energy transition, and by extension, climate pledges across the world. According to a recent report from S&P Platts, if copper shortfalls follow projected trends, climate goals will be “short-circuited and remain out of reach.”

Copper is particularly effective in a wide range of low-carbon alternatives because of its relatively high electrical conductivity and low reactivity. It’s not that traditional energy production and transmission and gas-powered vehicles don’t use copper in their manufacturing – it’s just that renewables and electric vehicles require a whole lot more of it. “An EV requires 2.5 times as much copper as an internal combustion engine vehicle,” reports CNBC. “Meanwhile, solar and offshore wind need two times and five times, respectively, more copper per megawatt of installed capacity than power generated using natural gas or coal.”

S&P projects that current levels of demand will nearly double by the year 2035, climbing to a whopping 50 million metric tons. That figure will climb to more than 53 million metric tons by 2050, which amounts to “more than all the copper consumed in the world between 1900 and 2021.

Richard A. Kerr. February 14, 2014. The Coming Copper Peak. Science 343:722-724.

Production of the vital metal will top out and decline within decades, according to a new model that may hold lessons for other resources.

If you take social unrest and environmental factors into account, the peak could be as early as the 2020s

As a crude way of taking account of social and environmental constraints on production, Northey and colleagues reduced the amount of copper available for extraction in their model by 50%. Then the peak that came in the late 2030s falls to the early 2020s, just a decade away.

After peak Copper

Whenever it comes, the copper peak will bring change. Graedel and his Yale colleagues reported in a paper published on 2 December 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that copper is one of four metals—chromium, manganese, and lead being the others—for which “no good substitutes are presently available for their major uses.”

If electrons are the lifeblood of a modern economy, copper makes up its blood vessels. In cables, wires, and contacts, copper is at the core of the electrical distribution system, from power stations to the internet. A small car has 20 kilograms (44 lbs) of copper in everything from its starter motor to the radiator; hybrid cars have twice that. But even in the face of exponentially rising consumption—reaching 17 million metric tons in 2012—miners have for 10,000 years met the world’s demand for copper.

But perhaps not for much longer. A group of resource specialists has taken the first shot at projecting how much more copper miners will wring from the planet. In their model runs, described this month in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling, production peaks by about mid-century even if copper is more abundant than most geologists believe.

Predicting when production of any natural resource will peak is fraught with uncertainty. Witness the running debate over when world oil production will peak (Science, 3 February 2012, p. 522).

The team is applying its depletion model to other mineral resources, from oil to lithium, that also face exponentially escalating demands on a depleting resource.

The world’s copper future is not as rosy as a minimum “125-year supply” might suggest, however. For one thing, any future world will have more people in it, perhaps a third more by 2050. And the hope, at least, is that a larger proportion of those people will enjoy a higher standard of living, which today means a higher consumption of copper per person. Sooner or later, world copper production will increase until demand cannot be met from much-depleted deposits. At that point, production will peak and eventually go into decline—a pattern seen in the early 1970s with U.S. oil production.

For any resource, the timing of the peak depends on a dynamic interplay of geology, economics, and technology. But resource modeler Steve Mohr of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), in Australia, waded in anyway. For his 2010 dissertation, he developed a mathematical model for projecting production of mineral resources, taking account of expected demand and the amount thought to be still in the ground. In concept, it is much like the Hubbert curves drawn for peak oil production, but Mohr’s model is the first to be applied to other mineral resources without the assumption that supplies are unlimited.

Exponential growth

Increasing the amount of accessible copper by 50% to account for what might yet be discovered moves the production peak back only a few years, to about 2045 — even doubling the copper pushes peak production back only to about 2050. Quadrupling only delays peak until 2075.

Copper trouble spots

The world has been so thoroughly explored for copper that most of the big deposits have probably already been found. Although there will be plenty of discoveries, they will likely be on the small side.

“The critical issues constraining the copper industry are social, environmental, and economic,” Mudd writes in an e-mail. Any process intended to extract a kilogram of metal locked in a ton of rock buried hundreds of meters down inevitably raises issues of energy and water consumption, pollution, and local community concerns.

Civil war and instability make many large copper deposits unavailable

Mudd has a long list of copper mining trouble spots. The Reko Diq deposit in northwestern Pakistan close to both Iran and Afghanistan holds $232 billion of copper, but it is tantalizingly out of reach, with security problems and conflicts between local government and mining companies continuing to prevent development. The big Panguna mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, has been closed for 25 years, ever since its social and environmental effects sparked a 10-year civil war that left about 20,000 dead.

Are we about to destroy the largest salmon fishery in the world for copper?

On 15 January the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a study of the potential effects of the yet-to-be-proposed Pebble Mine on Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska. Environmental groups had already targeted the project, and the study gives them plenty of new ammunition, finding that it would destroy as much as 150 kilometers of salmon-supporting streams and wipe out more than 2000 hectares of wetlands, ponds, and lakes.

Gold and Oil have already peaked

Copper is far from the only mineral resource in a race between depletion—which pushes up costs—and new technology, which can increase supply and push costs down. Gold production has been flat for the past decade despite a soaring price (Science, 2 March 2012, p. 1038). Much crystal ball–gazing has considered the fate of world oil production. “Peakists” think the world may be at or near the peak now, pointing to the long run of $100-a-barrel oil as evidence that the squeeze is already on.

Coal likely to peak in 2034, all fossil fuels by 2030, according to Mohr’s model

Fridley, Heinberg, Patzek, and other scientists believe Peak Coal is already here or likely by 2020.

Coal will begin to falter soon after, his model suggests, with production most likely peaking in 2034. The production of all fossil fuels, the bottom line of his dissertation, will peak by 2030, according to Mohr’s best estimate. Only lithium, the essential element of electric and hybrid vehicle batteries, looks to offer a sufficient supply through this century. So keep an eye on oil and gold the next few years; copper may peak close behind.

References

Gorman, S. August 30, 2009. As hybrid cars gobble rare metals, shortage looms. Reuters.

Scheyder, E. 2019. Exclusive: Tesla expects global shortage of electric vehicle battery minerals. Reuters.

Posted in Mining | Tagged peak coal, peak copper, peak gold, peak oil, renewables | 3 Comments

Climate change risks could cause an American “Fukushima”

Posted on August 10, 2019 by energyskeptic

Preface. Nuclear power plants need a constant supply of electric power to pump cool water into a reactor’s core.

Ninety percent of them, 54 plants, have at least one flood risk exceeding their design.

If flooding stops the power supply long enough, as happened in Fukushima, the core can overheat, melting through its container, as well as the nearby spent nuclear fuel pools which unlike the core, are in the open air, releasing deadly levels of radiation.

***

Flavelle, C., et al. 2019. U.S. Nuclear power plants weren’t built for climate change. Bloomberg.

Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, 35 miles south of Miami, was designed to withstand a storm surge of 16 feet, according to documents submitted to regulators by its owner, Florida Power & Light Co. But the updated storm surge is expected to range from 17.4 feet to 19.1 feet at different parts of the plant. Last year, Florida Power & Light sought permission from regulators to extend Turkey Point’s operating license until 2053.

The Waterford power plant, a half-hour drive up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, was designed to withstand a maximum storm surge of 23.7 feet above sea level, according to documents provided to the NRC by Entergy Corp., which owns the plant. The company told regulators that a combination of storm surge and river flooding would create a maximum surge of 31.8 feet.

One of the largest gaps in storm surge protection is at Dominion Energy Inc.’s Surry Power Station, whose two reactors sit on a peninsula jutting into the James River just north of Norfolk, Va. The plant’s east side, which is most exposed to a potential storm surge, was designed to withstand a wall of water as high as 28.6 feet above sea level, Dominion told regulators. The company found that under current conditions, a storm surge combined with river flooding would bring a surge of as much as 38.8 feet.

The NRC directed the operators of the 60 or so working U.S. nuclear power plants to evaluate their current flood risk, using the latest weather modeling technology and accounting for the effects of climate change. Companies were told to compare those risks with what their plants, many almost 50 years old, were built to withstand, and, where there was a gap, to explain how they would close it.

That process has revealed a lot of gaps. But Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and others say that the commission’s new leadership, appointed by President Donald Trump, hasn’t done enough to require owners of nuclear power plants to take preventative measures—and that the risks are increasing as climate change worsens.

Ninety percent of plants, 54 of them, have at least one flood risk exceeding their design. Fifty-three weren’t built to withstand their current risk from intense precipitation; 25 didn’t account for current flood projections from streams and rivers; 19 weren’t designed for their expected maximum storm surge; 19 face three or more threats that they weren’t designed to handle.

The industry argues that rather than redesign facilities to address increased flood risk, which Jaczko advocates, it’s enough to focus mainly on storing emergency generators, pumps, and other equipment in on-site concrete bunkers, a system they call Flex, for Flexible Mitigation Capability. Not only did the NRC agree with that view, it ruled on Jan. 24 that nuclear plants wouldn’t have to update that equipment to deal with new, higher levels of expected flooding. It also eliminated a requirement that plants run Flex drills.

The commission’s three members appointed by President Trump wrote that existing regulations were sufficient to protect the country’s nuclear reactors. Jaczko disagrees as do the two Democratic appointees. “The majority of the commission has decided that licensees can ignore these reevaluated hazards,” commissioner Jeff Baran wrote in dissent. His colleague Stephen Burns called the decision “baffling.” Through a spokesman, the Republican appointees declined to comment.

“Nuclear power is weird—it exists to produce electricity, and at the same time it can’t exist without electricity,” says Allison Macfarlane, who chaired the NRC from 2012 through 2014. Plants need constant power to pump cool water into a reactor’s core; if flooding interrupts that power supply for long enough, as happened in Fukushima, the core can overheat, melting through its container and releasing deadly levels of radiation.

The true risk to U.S. nuclear facilities may be even greater than what the documents from the nuclear commission show. The commission allowed nuclear plant operators not only to perform their own estimates of current flood risk but also to decide what assumptions to make—for example, the maximum likely hurricane speed or how much rain would fall in an extreme storm. (The commission reviews that work.) The commission also rejected a recommendation by their own staff that would require nuclear power plants to update their risk assessments periodically to reflect the advancing threat of climate change.

Whatever the likelihood of a Fukushima-style disaster, the aftermath offers a glimpse of the costs of failure. Eight years later, much of the adjacent city of Okuma remains uninhabitable; in 2016 the Japanese government estimated total cleanup and compensation costs would approach $200 billion.

Posted in Climate Change, Nuclear Waste | Tagged climate change, Fukushima, meltdown, nuclear waste | 2 Comments

China is deforesting Russia

Posted on August 7, 2019 by energyskeptic

Preface. Here’s more than half of a New York Times article about China deforesting Russia. Yikes! Peak oil had better come soon before we denude the earth.

***

Myers, S. L. 2019. China’s Voracious Appetite for Timber Stokes Fury in Russia and Beyond. After sharply restricting logging in its own forests, China turned to imports, overwhelming even a country with abundant resources: Russia. New York Times.

From the Altai Mountains to the Pacific Coast, logging is ravaging Russia’s vast forests, leaving behind swathes of scarred earth studded with dying stumps.

The culprit, to many Russians, is clear: China. Chinese demand is also stripping forests elsewhere — from Peru to Papua New Guinea, Mozambique to Myanmar.

Since China began restricting commercial logging in its own natural forests two decades ago, it has increasingly turned to Russia, importing huge amounts of wood in 2017 to satisfy the voracious appetite of its construction companies and furniture manufacturers.

“In Siberia, people understand they need the forests to survive,” said Eugene Simonov, an environmentalist who has studied the impact of commercial logging in Russia’s Far East. “And they know their forests are now being stolen.”

Russia has been a witting collaborator, too, selling Chinese companies logging rights at low cost and, critics say, turning a blind eye to logging beyond what is legally allowed.

In the Solomon Islands, the current pace of logging by Chinese companies could exhaust the country’s once pristine rain forests by 2036, according to Global Witness, an environmental group. In Indonesia, activists warn that illegal logging linked to a company with Chinese partners threatens one of the last strongholds for orangutans on the island of Borneo.

Environmentalists say China has simply shifted the harm of unbridled logging from home to abroad, even as it reaps the economic benefits. Some warn that the scale of logging today could deplete what unspoiled forests remain, contributing to global warming.

At the same time, China is protecting its own woodlands.

Two decades ago, concerns about denuded mountains, polluted rivers and devastating floods along the Yangtze River made worse by damaged watersheds prompted the Communist government to begin restricting commercial logging in the nation’s forests.

The country’s demand for wood did not diminish, however. Nor did the world’s demand for plywood and furniture, the main wood products that China makes and exports.

It is one thing for Chinese demand to overwhelm small, poor nations desperate for cash, but it is another for it to drain the resources of a far larger country, one that regards itself as a superpower and a strategic partner to China.

The trade has instead underscored Russia’s overreliance on natural resources and provoked a popular backlash that strains the otherwise warm relations between the countries’ two leaders, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Protests have erupted in many cities. Members in Russia’s upper house of parliament have assailed officials for ignoring the environmental damage in Siberia and the Far East. Residents and environmentalists complain that logging is spoiling Russian watersheds and destroying the habitats of the endangered Siberian tiger and Amur leopard.

China’s stunning economic transformation over the last four decades has driven its demand. It is now the world’s largest importer of wood. The US is second. It is also the largest exporter — turning much of the wood it imports into products headed to Home Depots and Ikeas around the world.

More than 500 companies operate in Russia now, often with Russian partners, according to a report by Vita Spivak, a scholar on China for the Carnegie Moscow Center. Russia once delivered almost no wood to China; it now accounts for more than 20 percent of China’s imports by value.

Russia sells such logging concessions at prices that vary by region and type of wood, but on average, they cost roughly $2 a hectare, or 80 cents an acre, per year, according to Mr. Shmatkov of the World Wildlife Fund. That is far below the cost in other countries.

Government corruption, criminality and the lack of economic development in Siberia and the Far East have made the crisis worse.

Also, in many rural areas of the Russian Far East and Siberia, there are few other ways to make money, or to make a living, than stripping natural resources of the vast surrounding forests. Logging without contracts is also common, while arsonists are suspected of having set fires to forests, because scorched trees can be legally culled and sold.

Posted in Deforestation | Tagged china, deforestation, Russia | Comments Off

Going 100% renewable power means a lot of dirty mining

Posted on August 4, 2019 by energyskeptic

Preface. Everyone talks about oil spills, but what about the dirty mining that will have a huge polluting footprint on the earth of mercury, arsenic, and other toxic heavy metals. The Pebble mine is canceled for now, but if the authoritarians get back in power, it could be permitted again, and destroy the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery. Gold mining is destroying fish and river ecology in 173 rivers in 49 countries (see Voosen 2023 below).

Renewables aren’t cleaner and greener than fossils, and require a hell of a lot of fossils to mine the ore, deliver it to a crusher, blast furnace, and fabrication. More like creating Hell on Earth.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Voosen P (2023) llegal mining has muddied tropical rivers worldwide. Silt overload and mercury pollution endanger river ecosystems—and the people who depend on them. Science

https://www.science.org/content/article/illegal-mining-has-muddied-tropical-rivers-worldwide

Year after year, its waters erode and sluice rock away from mountains, liberating precious metals and whisking them to lowlands, where they are deposited among sediments in riverbeds and floodplains. No need to move mountains; the mountain moves to you.

But the process also draws human miners, especially in the tropics, where homespun operations to extract gold and other riches from river sediments are poisoning waters and drowning aquatic life in sediment. The destruction wrought in places such as Peru, Ghana, and Sumatra has captured headlines.

Gold mining is now the world’s top source of mercury pollution, emitting more than coal-fired power stations.

But the true global extent of the crisis has been obscured by verdant forest canopies, venal companies, and indifferent governments. Miners who once used shovels and pans are now wielding backhoes and dredgers supplied by shady mining concerns, from China and elsewhere.

Now, a comprehensive satellite survey spanning 4 decades shows river mining has surged over the past 20 years and today affects 173 large rivers in 49 countries. Almost 7% of all large tropical river stretches are now cloudy with mining debris.

miners use small-scale techniques not unlike those in 19th century gold rushes. They dredge sediments from the beds and banks of the Amazon tributaries, then add mercury, a cheap and toxic liquid metal, to the watery slurry. It selectively binds to several precious metals, including gold, creating heavier nuggets that fall out of the slurry. After the nuggets are collected, the sediment “tailings” are dumped back into the river.

Researchers have typically focused on the dangers of the mercury, which is burned off as a vapor. It settles in the surrounding ecosystem and can poison the miners themselves. But Dethier was shocked to see how muddy the mining had made the rivers. Some was due to oil palm plantations, but mining was by far the dominant cause.

Sediment clouds the water, interfering with fish spawning since they can’t see or breathe well. It also pollutes drinking water as far as 1000 kilometers downstream.

Bruggers J (2022) ‘Out of control’: Sinking coal industry swamps Kentucky with ‘zombie’ mine violations. Inside Climate News.

As the coal industry collapses in Kentucky, companies have racked up a rising number of violations at surface mines with little enforcement since 2013, no doubt also lax in West Virginia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania due to pressures on the industry and regulators. Zombie mines are those idled for years without any reclamation work. In Kentucky there are over 810 noncompliant surface mining operations. And with so many companies bankrupt, remediation won’t happen until another mine operator takes over. Nor is the state of Kentucky doing enough to negotiate with companies holding bonds meant to cover the cost of reclamation in mining companies that have gone bankrupt. Though even if insurance companies forked over the money it wouldn’t be enough. The bonds are worth about $888 million while costs to clean the sites up will cost up to $2.4 billion.

Sadasivam, N. 2019. Report: Going 100% renewable power means a lot of dirty mining. Grist.org

For more than a decade, indigenous communities in Alaska have been fighting to prevent the mining of copper and gold at Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and a crucial source of sustenance. The proposed mine, blocked under the Obama administration but inching forward under the Trump administration, has been billed by proponents as necessary to meet the growing demand for copper, which is used in wind turbines, batteries, and solar panels. Similar stories are playing out in Norway, where the Sámi community is fighting a copper mine, and in Papua New Guinea, where a company has been mining the seabed for gold and copper.

Weighing those trade-offs — between supporting mining in environmentally sensitive areas and sourcing metals needed to power renewables — is likely to become more common if countries continue generating more renewable energy. That’s according to a report out Wednesday from researchers at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. The report, commissioned by the environmental organization Earthworks, finds that demand for metals such as copper, lithium and cobalt would skyrocket if countries around the world try to get their electric grids and transportation systems fully powered by renewable energy by 2050. Consequently, a rush to meet that demand could lead to more mining in countries with lax environmental and safety regulations and weak protections for workers.

The list of metals used in the production of renewable energy is long. It includes the well-known — copper, silver and aluminum — as well as rare earths such as neodymium and dysprosium, used to make magnets for wind turbines. Mining for these metals is currently concentrated in just a handful of countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Chile, and India, among them.

Take cobalt. Each electric vehicle needs between five to ten kilograms of the bluish-white metal for its lithium-ion batteries. The authors consider cobalt a “metal of most concern for supply risks,” because nearly 60 percent of its production takes place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country with a dismal record of child labor and human rights abuses. Should the world’s transportation and electricity sectors ever switch to running entirely on renewables, demand for the metal would soar to more than four times the amount available in reserves, according to the researchers.

Posted in Groundwater, Manufacturing & Industrial Heat, Pollution | Tagged manufacturing, mineral depletion, mines, mining, pollution, renewables | Comments Off

Automated vehicles: more driving, energy wasted, & congestion

Posted on August 1, 2019 by energyskeptic

Preface. My main post on this is: “Why self-driving cars may not be in your future“.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Taiebat, M., et al. 2019. Forecasting the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Energy Use: A Microeconomic Study of Induced Travel and Energy Rebound. Applied Energy247: 297

The benefits of self-driving cars will likely induce vehicle owners to drive more, and those extra miles could partially or completely offset the potential energy-saving benefits that automation may provide, according to a new University of Michigan study.

Greater fuel efficiency induces some people to travel extra miles, and those added miles can partially offset fuel savings. It’s a behavioral change known as the rebound effect. In addition, the ability to use in-vehicle time productively in a self-driving car — people can work, sleep, watch a movie, read a book — will likely induce even more travel.

Taken together, those two sources of added mileage could partially or completely offset the energy savings provided by autonomous vehicles. In fact, the added miles could even result in a net increase in energy consumption, a phenomenon known as backfire.

Traditionally, time spent driving has been viewed as a cost to the driver. But the ability to pursue other activities in an autonomous vehicle is expected to lower this “perceived travel time cost” considerably, which will likely spur additional travel.

The U-M researchers estimated that the induced travel resulting from a 38% reduction in perceived travel time cost would completely eliminate the fuel savings associated with self-driving cars.

“Backfire — a net rise in energy consumption — is a distinct possibility.

Mervis, J. December 15, 2017. Not so fast. We can’t even agree on what autonomous, much less how they will affect our lives. Science.

Joan Walker, a transportation engineer at UC Berkeley, designed a clever experiment. Using an automated vehicle (AV) is like having your own chauffeur. So she gave 13 car owners in the San Francisco Bay area the use of a chauffeur-driven car for up to 60 hours over 1 week, and then tracked their travel habits. There were 4 millennials, 4 families, and 5 retirees.

The driver was free. The study looked at how they drove their own cars for a week, and how that changed when they had a driver.

They could send the car on ghost trips (errands), such as picking up their children from school, and they didn’t have to worry about driving or parking.

The results suggest that a world with AVs will have more traffic:

the 13 subjects logged 76% more miles
22% were ghost errand trips
There was a 94% increase in the number of trips over 20 miles and an 80% increase after 6 PM, with retirees increasing the most.
During the chauffeur week, there was no biking, mass transit, or use of ride services like Uber and Lyft.

Three-fourths of the supposedly car-shunning millennials clocked more miles. In contrast to conventional wisdom that older people would be slower to embrace the new technology, Walker says, “The retirees were really excited about AVs. They see their declining mobility and they are like, ‘I want this to be available now.’”

Due to the small sample size she will repeat this experiment on a larger scale next summer.

Posted in Automobiles, Efficiency | Tagged automated vehicle, AV, cars, efficiency, self-driving | 8 Comments

So you want to start a vertical farm?

Posted on July 26, 2019 by energyskeptic

Preface. Vertical farms sound even more impossible than rooftop farms, which at least can use free sunshine. And they use massive amounts of energy to heat, cool, ventilate, light, and so on, not a good direction to go given energy decline beginning in the near future.

In the news:

You sure don’t want to work at one of these farms! (2023) A celebrated startup promised Kentuckians green jobs. It gave them a ‘grueling hell on earth.’ The inside story of how AppHarvest’s indoor farming scheme imploded—and took its blue-collar workforce down with it.

Turns out VP candidate Vance worked at and helped fund AppHarvest, looks like Trump picked a fellow grifter to be his running mate: 2024 Workers allege ‘nightmare’ conditions at Kentucky startup JD Vance helped fund.

Elon Musk hates Paul “the Population Bomb” Erlich who dares to challenge endless growth forever and wants us to all vote Republican (Elon Musk Reveals the Person He Despises). He has an equally stupid brother (and fellow grifter?) who started vertical farms in 2016 that are now failing Square Roots, a tech farming startup that was cofounded by Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal, shut down the majority of its remaining locations

Kay (2023) Elon Musk’s brother’s ‘smart farm’ startup is shutting down most of its locations and gutting its workforce The “smart farm” company had over $90 million in total funding as of April 2022

Peters A (2023) The vertical farming bubble is finally popping Climate change might make growing produce indoors a necessity. But despite taking in more than a billion dollars in venture capital investment, most companies in the industry seem to be withering, unable to turn a profit on lettuce. Fastcompany. This article lists several large companies with many facilities going under or laying off most staff. As of December 2022, $1.7 billion has been invested in indoor growers, more than any other part of agricultural tech. Nearly 20 years after the first vertical farm opened, we need to ask: Is it even possible to compete with the economics of outdoor farming? And how did investors think that they could find Silicon Valley-style returns in . . . lettuce? Then a long list of how expensive they are, such as “a small, 10,000-square-foot farm might have a lighting bill over $100,000 or even $200,000 a year”.

putting a few solar panels on the roof can’t cover the total amount of electricity needed. “In a typical cold climate, you would need about five acres of solar panels to grow one acre of lettuce,” says Kale Harbick, a USDA researcher who studies controlled-environment agriculture. A hypothetical skyscraper filled with lettuce would require solar panels covering an area the size of Manhattan.

Many startups tout that they’ve built their own complex technology to operate the farms, including software that uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to monitor the plants and tweak lights, temperature, humidity, and other factors to optimize growth to lower costs. Their custom robotic systems can plant seeds, move trays of plants, and harvest crops. But when companies each build their own technology, expenses balloon. But they do this because Silicon Valley investors won’t invest in a farm, but they’ll invest in a tech company.

And much more, read the longish article

Reynolds M (2022) Vertical Farming Has Found Its Fatal Flaw. Europe’s energy crisis is forcing companies to switch strategies or close down. The industry’s future hangs in the balance. Wired. the industry is extremely vulnerable to increases in electricity prices, which uses a lot of electricity, about 25% of operational costs, but prices have risen 58% so electricity now eats up about 40% of the costs. Vertical farms are expensive to build compared with conventional outdoor farms. AppHarvest—a US-based firm that builds high-tech greenhouses—has struggled to find enough cash to fund its ongoing operations despite going public in 2021. In its latest quarterly report the company said there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue into the future. Most vertical farms grow herbs, shoots, and other leafy salad vegetables. Leafy greens are the industry’s go-to produce because they grow quickly under LEDs and have a short shelf life and premium price point. But with inflation high, consumers might prefer to forgo expensive vertically farmed herbs for something a little more budget-friendly. That’s particularly true for European vertical farms.

Nor has the technology transformed agriculture in the way early proponents promised. For a long time the industry has touted itself as a more sustainable way to grow vegetables, but all the energy needed to light up those LED bulbs means that vegetables grown on vertical farms can end up having higher CO₂ emissionsthan those grown in open fields and trucked hundreds of miles to their final destination. In a world where all electricity is generated by renewables, those emissions would be much lower, but that’s not the world we’re living in.

***

I have a vegetable garden, and after pressing seeds into the soil, with almost no effort I can come back and harvest whatever I planted six weeks later. All of this bounty came from free soil, free sunshine, and free rain, though we do use drip irrigation half the year.

Your proposal of a vertical farm is a laudable goal for increasing food security, helping to feed the 3 billion more people expected by 2050, and reducing the energy and emissions caused by the production and transportation of food long distances.

From what I could find in commercial real estate listings, that’ll set you back about $10 million dollars.

Or you can lease space for $22 to $40 per square foot, at $22 to $40,000 a month for 10,000 square feet in New York city, or better yet lease in the Bronx or Queens where prices are lower (Goodman 2019).

New York City has 193,689 acres, but just a few are indoors or in shipping containers. At best New York could support 1,864 acres of such farms, nearly all of them rooftop (Goodman 2019). But 162,000 to 232,000 acres required to provide residents the 40,760,000,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables they consume every year.

So you found a place. The first thing you’ve got to do is buy lots of lights. Outdoors, all the leaves of a plant need to be directly illuminated by the sun to activate photosynthesis. But indoors, even in a glass-walled room, there’s not enough light. So you’ll need huge amounts of artificial lighting to match what the sun delivers, about 100 times the lighting seen in a typical office building (SA 2019).

And you’ll need a lot of electricity to light all these bulbs. Crops like potatoes or tomatoes need about 1,200 kilowatt hours of electricity for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) of edible fruit produced. If half of America’s vegetable crops were to be grown in vertical farms, just the lighting alone would require over half of all the electricity generated in the U.S. (Cox 2016).

Mills (2012) used the low estimates of how much Cannabis is grown indoors in the U.S. and deduced this consumes about 1% of U.S. electricity (3% of California’s electricity) at a cost of $6 billion a year. That’s equal to the energy used by about 2 million homes. But then they can afford to do so, marijuana commands a price of about $210 to $320 (Statista.com 2018) per ounce whereas fresh vegetables are just pennies per ounce.

You’ll need to pump water up to all the floors. I can’t say how much energy or what it will cost, but water is heavy. The state of California uses a tremendous amount of energy to move water around — 19% of California’s electricity, 30% of its natural gas, and 88 billion gallons of diesel fuel every year, and this demand is growing (Klein 2005).

Although you won’t need pesticides, your crops are still vulnerable to pests and diseases such as black mold (FT 2020)

And that’s just the start, you’ll need haul acres of dirt and fertilizer to every floor, buy shelving to put the plants on, purchase nutrient monitoring systems, machinery to harvest plants, heating and cooling systems, ventilation, shading, dehumidifiers, fans, computers, robotics perhaps, and vans to truck your produce to markets.

There’s only a limited range of crops that can be grown. It only makes sense to grow leafy greens or herbs since most of the plant can be eaten. Other crops have too many inedible leaves, stems, and roots.

You’re not exactly going to be feeding the neighborhood either. A cup of butterhead lettuce weights 55 grams (2 ounces) and contains 7.2 calories, so customers will need to eat 280 cups of greens weighing 15,400 grams (34 pounds) to get their daily required 2,000 calories (SelfND 2018).

If you don’t find any of this daunting and go ahead with the project, congratulations, you’ll be the only vertical skyscraper farm in the U.S. and the rest of the world, except for Japan (Takada 2018). It will be interesting to see if Japanese, and a new vertical farm being built in Dubai, enterprises can compete with farms on the ground in cities or near them, and nearby massive greenhouse operations that can use natural sunshine.

References

Cox, S. 2016. Why growing vegetables in high-rises is wrong on so many levels. Alternet.org

FT. 2020. Vertical farming: hope or hype? Financial Times.

Goodman, W., et al. 2019. Will the Urban Agricultural Revolution Be Vertical and Soilless? A Case Study of Controlled Environment Agriculture in New York City. Land Use Policy 82.

Klein, G., et al. 2005. California’s water-energy relationship. California Energy Commission.

Mills, E. 2012. The carbon footprint of indoor Cannabis production. Energy Policy 46: 58-67.

SA. 2019. Growing up: skyscraper farms seen as a way to produce food locally–and cut greenhouse emissions. Scientific American.

SelfND. 2018. Lettuce, butterhead (includes boston and bibb types) raw nutrition facts & calories. Nutritiondata.self.com

Takada, A. 2018. As high-rise farms go global, Japan’s Spread leads the way. Japantimes.

Posted in Farming & Ranching | Tagged agriculture, vertical farm | 6 Comments

Antibiotic Resistance

Posted on July 23, 2019 by energyskeptic

Source: Antibiotic Resistance project, pewtrusts.org

Preface. Just a few of the many articles in the media on antibiotic resistance, which like climate change, will make matters worse for whoever survives Peak Oil. And it won’t be just bacterial resistance, fungi are now growing resistant to drugs as well, probably because of excessive use of fungicides in agriculture.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

2019-4-6. A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy. New York Times.

My summary: Lately there has been an explosion of resistant fungi such as Candida auris, which preys on people with weakened immune systems. It is spreading around the world — to Venezuela, Spain, Britain, India, Pakistan, South Africa and recently New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.

C. auris is tenacious because it is impervious to major anti-fungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world’s most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections. C. auris infections are resistant to at least one drug, and 30% are resistant to two or more drugs. Nearly half of patients who contract C. auris die within 90 days.

In the U.S. 2 million people get resistant infections every year, and 162,000 die from them.

Some scientists cite evidence that heavy use of fungicides on crops is contributing to the surge in drug-resistant fungi infecting humans.

2017-3-3 WHO’S dirty dozen microbes. Science 355:890

You may never have heard of Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, or the Enterobacteriaceae—but these three killers top a new list, drawn up by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, of bacteria for which new drugs are desperately needed. Unveiled today, the list contains 12 bacteria and bacterial families, with the top three making up the category “critical”.

WHO hopes that pharmaceutical companies will give these bugs priority in developing antibiotics, but these drugs are not an attractive investment because they’re only taken a short time and usage restricted. Far more profitable are the drugs for chronic diseases.

Doctors, researchers, and health officials have been sounding the alarm for years about the rise of antibiotic resistance. The list took into account the level of resistance each class of pathogen has already acquired, how deadly it can be, how widespread, and the burden it causes to health systems.

The top three are all gram-negative bacteria that are resistant to multiple drugs. They aren’t widespread yet, but they do cause severe, frequently deadly infections in hospitals, especially in people who are already immune compromised—including transplant recipients, chemotherapy patients, and elderly people. These bacteria can cause deadly infections if they take up residence in the respiratory system or bloodstream. The most dangerous strains have recently acquired resistance to a class of antibiotics called carbapenems, the only group that still killed them effectively.

Nine more pathogens round out the agency’s dirty dozen: Six are listed as high priority, including drug-resistant strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes gonorrhea, and food-borne agents like Salmonella and Campylobacter. Bacteria in this category cause infections that are less deadly than those caused by the three critical-level bugs, but they are much more widespread. Three “medium” priority organisms all are susceptible to some drugs, but are increasingly becoming resistant.

**2016-9-30. Antibiotic-resistant bugs in British supermarket chicken reach record levels.**

A food poisoning bug found in three-quarters of British supermarket chicken is showing drastically increased resistance to antibiotics, which may mean it will become harder for doctors to treat. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) tested campylobacter bacteria found in poultry. It said resistance to certain antibiotics, including a commonly used drug to treat the bug, ciprofloxacin, had more than doubled in some strains. It also found a big increase in resistance to the antibiotic nalidixic acid, with more than half of two common strains, C.jejuni and C.Coli, found to be resistant to the drug. Both antibiotics are classed as “critically important,” which means a drug is the only option or one of very few alternatives for treating human illnesses. Across the 283 samples tested by the FSA, 5% had developed resistance to multiple drugs. The FSA noted that 900 million chickens are produced in the UK every year, which means millions could be carrying multi-resistant-bacteria. According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), campylobacter is responsible for half a million infections, 100 deaths and 80,000 GP consultations every year, costing a total of £900 million (US$1.17 billion).

Melissa Healy. July 2016. A ‘slow catastrophe’ unfolds as the golden age of antibiotics comes to an end. Los Angeles Times.

Important antibiotics for which resistance has developed: Penicillin, The golden age of antibiotics appears to be coming to an end. Now, common ailments are regaining the power to kill.

More than 100 antibiotic compounds have been introduced since penicillin, and many important ones have developed resistance, such as: Tetracycline, Erythromycin, Methicillin, Gentamicin, Vancomycin, Imipenem, ceftazidime, Levofloxacin, Linezolid, Daptomycin, Ceftaroline.

Researchers haven’t identified a new class of antibiotic medication since 1987.

But almost as soon as they were given to patients, scientists began finding evidence that disease-causing bacteria were developing resistance to these new wonder drugs.

Bacteria meet, mate, compete and evolve inside living bodies. When an antibiotic is added to the mix, only the strongest survive. Yet only 30% of Americans believe that antibiotic resistance is a significant problem for public health.

Humans have accelerated this natural process by indiscriminately prescribing antibiotics and by routinely feeding the drugs to livestock, scientists say. Multiply the number of humans and animals taking these drugs, and you multiply the opportunities for antibiotic-resistant strains to emerge.

Each year, more than 2 million people in the U.S. are infected with a bacterium that has become resistant to one or more antibiotic medication designed to kill it, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 23,000 people die as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant infections, and many more die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection, the agency says.

The problem goes beyond treating infections. As bacterial resistance grows, Lesho said, “we’re all at risk of losing our access” to medical miracles we’ve come to take for granted: elective surgeries, joint replacements, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapies. These treatments give bacteria an opportunity to hitch a ride on a catheter or an unwashed hand and invade an already vulnerable patient.

**May 24, 2014. Four Bacteria of the Apocalypse. NewScientist.**

Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is growing. Existing drugs for TB cure only about half of those treated for MDR-TB. Only one new drug has been introduced in 40 years, despite global efforts.

MRSA – or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus – has been joined by a staph that resists another last-resort drug, vancomycin. Livestock reared using antibiotics can develop MRSA infections. Such strains can spread among humans, as shown by recent human cases in Denmark even though it has banned antibiotic growth-promoters in livestock.

CRE – or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae – is a group of gut bacteria that resists carbapenems – antibiotics of last resort. One set of CRE genes was first seen in India in 2009 and has since been found around the world. The bacteria can cause urinary tract infections, and the resistant strain is making this widespread ailment untreatable.

Gonorrhoea – a sexual infection also known as “the clap” – is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Untreatable cases have emerged.

Jones, Tamera. 21 July 2014. Sewage treatment contributes to antibiotic resistance

Amos, G. C. A. Amos, et al. May 5, 2014. Waste water effluent contributes to the dissemination of CTX-M-15 in the natural environment, Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy2014; 69: 1785 – 1791.

Wastewater treatment plants could be unwittingly helping to spread antibiotic resistance, say scientists. Their research suggests that processing human, farm and industrial waste all together in one place might be making it easier for bacteria to become resistant to a wide range of even the most clinically-effective antibiotics. With so many different types of bacteria coming together in sewage plants we could be giving them a perfect opportunity to swap genes that confer resistance, helping them live. This means antibiotic-resistant bacteria may be evolving much faster than they would in isolation.

The research, published in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, shows that there are now reservoirs of highly resistant gut bacteria in the environment, threatening human and animal health.

We urgently need to find new ways to process waste more effectively so we don’t inadvertently contribute to the problem of drug-resistant bacteria.

Earlier studies have suggested that farming and waste processing methods contribute to reservoirs of resistant bacteria in the environment. But, until now, very few studies had looked at whether or not wastewater effluent contributes to the problem.

‘We’re on the brink of Armageddon and this is just contributing to it. Antibiotics could just stop working and we could all be colonized by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.’ Professor Elizabeth Wellington of the University of Warwick.

Mackenzie, D. June 16, 2012. WHO demands action on drug-resistant gonorrhoea. NewScientist.

Gonorrhoea, a sexually transmitted infection also known as “the clap”, is making a comeback – and this time it may be incurable. New strains have emerged that resist the last few antibiotics that still worked against the disease. In a rare public alert last week, the World Health Organization warned that highly resistant cases of gonorrhoea have now been detected in Japan, Europe and Australia. It is calling for a worldwide effort to track the superbug – and to develop new gonorrhoea drugs and vaccines.

That’s a slim hope. Between the limited profits to be made from drugs that cure infections and the previous success of antibiotics against gonorrhoea, there has been little investment in the disease. “There are no new therapeutic drugs in development,” says Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan of the WHO’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research.

Yet epidemiological models show that the current official policies for managing gonorrhoea are virtually guaranteed to lead to a rebound in cases, and to antibiotic resistance.

Neisseria gonorrhoeae, also known as Gonococcus, infect an estimated 106 million people a year worldwide. The infection causes painful urination in men and can be symptomless in women, but left untreated it may cause painful pelvic inflammation and potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy. It can cause blindness in babies, and makes it easier to contract HIV.

N. gonorrhoeae is now resistant to penicillin, and the subsequent families of antibiotics used to treat it. Now only a couple of third-generation cephalosporin antibiotics are left. But resistance to these has been creeping up, and last year N. gonorrhoeae resistant enough to be dubbed a “superbug” was reported in Japan. Worse, the models show that relying on one drug until resistance builds up, then switching to another – precisely what health agencies have done – causes resistance fastest.

But people who change partners such as sex workers and promiscuous communities of men who have sex with men, are likely to pass on the infection. Targeting such groups for treatment caused gonorrhoea infection rates to drop steeply in industrialized countries since the 1970s – but now they are climbing again.

Posted in Antibiotics | Tagged antibiotic, gonorrhoeae, resistance, wastewater | 1 Comment