Kate Wing's Blog: Solving Global Warming

The wave energy of the future, Part I

2007-12-21T22:06:07Z

The Energy Bill touches all of us, even the fish, as wave and tidal power struggle to move from experiment to reliable source. The bill authorizes funding for R&D, including the creation of national demonstration centers. Whether or not that funding comes through is another story and the renewable power industry did not get the tax breaks it was looking for. All of which means money will be tight for these expensive pilot projects, which have yet to produce a commercially viable system.

Part of that is that it's early days and there are many folks running around with ideas for turning wave energy into electricity. The farthest along on the west coast is Finavera Energy, whose Aqua BuOY recently sank at the end of its test run near Reedsport, OR [1]. In New York, Verdant Energy called it quits after blades kept snapping off its turbines in the East River. The ocean is a harsh environment -- corrosion from salt water, tiny animals fouling your moving parts, and the strong tidal currents and waves you're trying to harness all place enormous stress on a hydrokinetic device. No one's built the mousetrap yet, but people are beating a path to the ocean all the same, just in case.

Which puts us in the world of uncertainty we're in today. No one can definitively say what these things in the sea will look like; they could be big snakes, or overtopping wave dragons, or a field of buoys, or something else altogether. Without knowing the details of the technology it's difficult to narrow down the potential impacts. I participated in a meeting in October to outline the ecological effects of wave energy where we had a lot of conversations like this:

"How many cables will you need to connect it to the seafloor?"
"Could be three per device, or maybe five, plus the transmission line."
"Okay, how thick will they be and how far apart from each other?"
"We don't know."

This is understandable from an experimentation standpoint, where the developers want to try different ideas until they find one that works best. From the standpoint of the engineers, we're asking Edison how big a light bulb will be before it's invented. From the standpoint of a grey whale, those details matter very much and it would be nice to know what to expect before anything goes in the water. Add FERC to this soup of uncertainty over what will be put where and you have a recipe for unease, panic, and, some would say, outright disaster.

FERC recently closed its comment period for a new fast-track permit approval process for hydrokinetic energy and many state and federal agencies were not pleased [2]. But California has committed to green power and that power will need to come from somewhere. PG&E is betting on the ocean, and even fishermen who fear losing key fishing grounds to power plants appreciate the real dangers of ocean acidification and rising sea levels. Can we all agree on what it means to get clean power from the sea? If not, we're taking the risk of poorly designed and monitoring projects, or relying on dirty power elsewhere. I'll explore more of the pros and cons in Part II.

[1] You can catch Finavera's inspirational Aqua Buoy video on YouTube.

[2] If you want to see the letters themselves, you'll need to search the FERC dockets for Docket PL08-1 and Docket AD07-14

Thanks to Nathanael for gently pestering me to write about this part of my work.

There's so much more to dump!

2007-11-09T16:14:28Z

It's not just iron anymore, oh no, now it's urea. You may know urea from it's role in helping sharks avoid dehydration, or possibly because it's in industrial fertilizers. Yes, we know urea can make plants grow and this is exactly the kind of fertilizer that we've seen problems with in the ocean already, as I've mentioned before. Harmful algal blooms, or HABs, have been on the rise over the last few decades (you can keep up by subscribing to Harmful Algae News). One would think you could study whether or not these blooms are sequestering carbon, rather than having to manufacture new ones. I guess I'll have to discard my notion of Australia as a country of wobbegongs, innovative community fisheries management programmes, and Tim Tams and picture it as the land of urea factories.

Fe fi ho hum

2007-11-05T17:03:08Z

Hooray, hooray, it's another Carnival of the Blue today, hosted by the merry duke of Cephalopodcast. I'm particularly pleased that today's Carnival introduces me to the Oyster's Garter, where Miriam Goldstein has already written much of the post I keeping putting off on the grand plans for iron fertilization. With two companies already running around proposing large scale dumping plans on the high seas it's a fair time to consider if John Martin's words will indeed be prophetic:

"Give me a half tanker of iron and I will give you the next ice age."

It's hard to know how to shop for both global warming and an ice age, but monkeying around with the great pumps that drive the ocean's circulation could certainly send us from bikinis to parkas. Out in international waters, free from the laws of nations and far from view, one would hope any large-scale iron fertilization would proceed cautiously and not with the reckless abandon of an early dotcom start-up. At least Climos is proposing a voluntary code of conduct, which seems only polite. And the folks at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute are taking a good, hard look at the issue, since, as Dr. Ken Buessler says, "It's a delicate balance."

But talking about iron fertilization as "gardening in the ocean" is a poor metaphor at best. In your garden, you're controlling almost all the variables: shade, water, soil nutrients and pH, and every single plant you grow. You visit your garden regularly so you see the effects of your labor, year after year. Dumping iron in the ocean is gardening like me buying a bare plot of land in Iowa, pouring a truck of fertilizer on it, and then heading home to wait for the corn to roll in.

Do we need to think creatively to solve greenhouse gas emissions? Yes. Do we need to treat every "underutilized" patch of the sea as a place to fill in with growth? Maybe not. There's a good reason I can't grow a rainforest in my Zone 11 front yard. After all, wanton fertilization is part of the reason the oceans are in trouble today.

Invisible Ships

2007-10-17T18:07:04Z

Talking about global warming can gin up the finger-pointing faster than you can say "tar sands." Who's really to blame, and if the finger points at you, well, isn't there someone out there who's worse than you? Let's go find them and make them fix the problem!

We in the ocean world are used to being a low priority. No, no, don't worry about us, we're used to it. After all, no one actually lives on seamounts (yet) so people don't wake up every morning face to face with broken corals or sick fish or piles of discarded fishing gear. If you go to the beach and look at the sea and it looks blue and wavy, it must be fine, right? So, we understand when you forget that there's a lot going on in that 70% of the world.

And with the holiday season just around the corner in the U.S., a lot of what's going on is shipping. 90,000 container ships and tankers and RoRo ships steam around the globe, bringing us cute party clothes and cars and buffalo wing dispensers. The Independent reports that new estimates put greenhouse gas emissions by shipping at 1 billion tons per year. That's about 2/3 more than the aviation industry. Cheap shipping allows companies to provide more products faster from more places and reduce their inventory costs. It's cheaper to put things on a ship than drive them from Point A to Point B. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of quick and easy fixes for re-engineering large ships to run on biofuels, but we can't afford to forget about ships when we're looking for emissions to reduce.

Congratulations, IPCC!

2007-10-12T19:27:56Z

Let's raise a glass to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shares today's Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Not to slight Al in any way, but I wanted to give a special thanks to the thousands of scientists who have worked hard over the last two decades to research, report, aggregate, synthesize, and present to the world in calm, reasoned language what is really happening with global warming. Those of us who work with scientists and rely on them know that they're conservative by nature. They're not going out on a limb unless they've determined that limb exists and will persist over time through repeated, BACI experiments. Every single word in those IPCC reports is highly negotiated, and for the most part, scientists get no real rewards for participating on policy panels like these. It won't give you tenure, it won't necessarily help you bring in money, and you have to get other people to cover your classes when you're travelling (okay, for some scientists, less teaching is a bonus).