Apr 04 2009
Energy from the Wrong Places
This is about where not to get energy. Look at this photo — it was once beautiful green mountains. Appalachia mountaintop explosions still happen, caused by coal mining by large coal companies . Huge amounts of TNT are used to blow the tops off the mountains in a few southeastern states. Boulders and dirt roll down the rolling green mountains of Tennessee and West Virginia, and North Carolina. This type of coal mining literally removes the tops of mountains. The results are moonscapes — miles and miles of vegetation free, flattened hills where mountains once graced the landscape. These beautiful natural landscapes are now literally ruined forever because of coal mining, and the irresponsibility of coal mining companies.
This is environmental devastation in so many ways. The toxic runoff from the procedure kills wildlife and poisons drinking water. This is nothing less than a crime. Why do people allow this to happen? I Love Mountains is one activist group and website trying to change these practices. I like promoting their site because it’s a good portal to more information on this terribly damaging coal mining in an area of the U.S. that not too many people know about. The coal plant nearest to me, in South Dakota, uses coal from this area of the U.S.
Last Christmas millions of tons of coal fly ash from a holding pond in Tennessee broke through its levees and devastated the area around the holding pond for miles and miles. This created a disaster the scope of which is still being discovered. The sheer volume of this coal slurry itself was 48 times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of about 20 years ago. At least two rivers, and the groundwater, were contaminated with many different pollutants, including radioactivity, and arsenic and barium. This spill was a major catastrophe, and yet when is the last time you heard the mainstream media in the U.S. write about this spill in terms of catastrophe, or in any way at all? It’s not yet been cleaned up. Not even close. When is the last time you heard the mainstream media talk about coal waste as radioactive, or about mountain top removal, or about how damaging coal mining is? Oil shale mining is nearly as bad.
Areas of the country where oil shale and coal are mined will never be the same, and they are full of chemicals and byproducts of the blasting and mining too.
It’s interesting that the very corporation-obsessed politicians who protect the rights of these companies over the rights of people to live in a cleaner, pollution-free world (and we do have the right) are the same ones planning more destruction of our country. Where do they think everyone will or should some day live, if not in these polluted areas?
They want to get every last drop of oil out of “oil shale” or what is otherwise known as rock. That’s right, they are planning to not only drill for oil offshore, in every available spot they can find, but also extract oil from shale, especially in Colorado. Do we want Colorado to look like the Appalachia Mountains? No, we don’t. There are people in Congress (known as Republicans) who are planning this destruction right now. Their plans are their “budget” document, on page 11, and that document (Republican “road to recovery”) clearly spells out their intentions to drill and mine and blast their way to get at every last bit of coal and oil in the U.S., no matter what it does to the environment. And then, when it’s all gone — then what? There is no plan for the day we run out of all this finite fuel in their “budget”. Just a lot of whining about how the “Democrats” won’t let them destroy Colorado or the other states that they want to rip up to get at the last few drops of oil, in rock and elsewhere.
Oil in rock is not easy to get at or use. Oil in rock is known as “shale oil”. The process of getting at it is difficult and uses a lot of energy itself. You have to mine the oil shale first (this is the most common method) and then you have to treat it. Then you have to heat it with a variety of methods, and then it’s extracted. The process uses lots of energy, lots of water, and produces more toxic waste. It’s much more complicated than this, of course, and you can read about it here.
This is what the Republicans (and a few Democrats) would rather invest in, rather than new, clean renewable energy that is ours for the taking, if we would just get on it!
Look at the Republican Road to Recovery Ruin — read page 11. (Find it at the GOP website .) Be appalled.
This is a picture of oil shale. Do you see any oil in there? I don’t either. Now imagine the process it would take, and the high amount of energy, just to get oil out of this rock. There are more photos of oil shale here.
This picture is of “Large weathered oil shale sample showing bedding planes and fissures. Uinta Basin, Utah. Source: Argonne National Laboratory”
It’s crazy of anyone to use enormous amounts of energy to get oil out of that. Can’t we just move on and get energy from good sources like solar, wind and geothermal, even biofuels? This oil shale and drilling stuff is so 20th century.
