Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

ROCHELLE, ILLINOIS, AUGUST 2010: The Illinois River Energy biofuels plant in Rochelle releases plumes of steam at sunrise. The ethanol plant processes over 40 million bushels of corn into 115 million gallons of fuel grade ethanol annually. The plant is one of hundreds around the country transforming corn into ethanol. It takes nearly 1,000 gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol from irrigated corn: four gallons from unirrigated corn.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

A far-reaching federal program of research and analysis, funded by Congress and designed to help the nation anticipate and temper the mounting conflict between rising energy demand and diminishing supplies of fresh water, has been brought to a standstill by the Department of Energy, according to government researchers involved in the project.

More From The Series

Natural Gas
Deep Frack Dilemma

Coal Production
Coal Sucks Water

Tar Sands
Tar Sands’ Soiled Oil

Thermal Power
Thermopower Shift

The research program, known as the National Energy-Water Roadmap and ordered up by Congress as part of the 2005 Energy Security Act, was meant to provide lawmakers and the executive branch two studies of the impending collision between energy and water, and what to do about it.

The first, completed by a team of federal scientists in December 2006 and made public a month later, described the serious consequences the nation is already encountering as the United States encourages more energy production, the second largest user of water. But it gave scant consideration to water supplies, which are in retreat in most regions of the country.

Meanwhile the second and final report that Congress commissioned, a comprehensive research agenda to better understand the nation’s energy-water choke points and begin developing real world solutions, has been held out of public view for more than four years.

22 Rewrites
Michael Hightower, an energy systems analyst at Sandia National Laboratories and a co-author of the report, said the first draft of the study on research needs was delivered to the Energy Department in July 2006. Energy Department reviewers have since called for 22 rewrites, the last of which was delivered in May 2009, Hightower said.

Since then the five-member team that co-authored the study has not had any communication about the report with the two primary reviewers, Samuel F. Baldwin, chief technology officer in the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and Nicholas B. Woodward in the DOE Office of Science.

“I don’t know why they are holding up the report,” said Hightower in an interview with Circle of Blue. “I can only conclude we don’t know how to write or they don’t like the report. I think we have done a nice job in collecting the data. Maybe the quality is in question.”

Neither Baldwin nor Woodward responded to email messages from Circle of Blue. Ebony Meeks, an assistant press secretary, offered this explanation by email and did not respond to follow-up questions: “When developing a comprehensive technological road map it is imperative that all the data is thoroughly reviewed for accuracy and concurred upon by the multiple participating programs. We plan to release the road map as soon as possible.”

A National Water-Energy Conference Without Key Research
The report’s release couldn’t come soon enough for the agency, and the nation. Over the last five weeks, in its Choke Point: U.S. series, Circle of Blue has thoroughly explored the ever more fierce contest between the nation’s insatiable demand for energy, and the tightening supplies of fresh water.

Among the primary conclusions reached in Choke Point: U.S. is that the nation has not yet recognized the significance of the collision between energy demand and water supply to the economy or the environment. The Road Map report was intended to be a vital step toward closing that information gap.

The Energy Department’s decision to prevent the report’s public release could also prove embarrassing. September 26 is the start of the four-day Water/Energy Sustainability Symposium in Pittsburgh, the second annual national conference co-hosted by the Energy Department to “highlight proven and innovative solutions to complex water/energy challenges.” The Pittsburgh conference is the second in a row that could occur without the principal national study that outlines the research priorities. Last year’s conference took place in Salt Lake City.

It is not at all clear why the Energy Department has apparently iced the Road Map. Calls last week to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which played an important role in securing funding for the Road Map, received no response.

Photo © Ronnie Smith / Circle of Blue 2010

TAFT, CALIFORNIA, AUGUST 2010: Covering a stretch of the Central Valley as large as New Jersey, arid Kern County is one of the nation’s most important agricultural and oil producing regions. Oil producers inject 1.3 billion barrels of water into the ground to produce 162 million barrels of of oil a year. During a severe drought in the region, the oil industry received 8.4 billion gallons of water a year – as much as it needed – from the network of aqueducts and canals that carry water from Sierra Nevada rivers and reservoirs.

But a number of clues are contained in a March 2007 Sandia National Laboratories paper that summarized the Road Map’s contents. The paper, prepared by Hightower and three colleagues—Ron Pate, Chris Cameron, and Wayne Einfeld—makes clear that any number of executives in the coal, nuclear, oil, solar thermal, and biofuels industries, and their allies in Congress, could be unhappy about the report’s conclusions. The Sandia paper essentially asserts that the United States quickly needs to reconsider and realign much of its energy production policy and water management practices in order to avoid dire shortages of water and potential shortfalls in energy. None of the big energy production or large water use sectors will be left untouched, the paper indicated.

Few Energy and Water Use Sectors Untouched
“The U.S. energy infrastructure depends heavily on the availability of water, and there is cause for concern about the availability of that water as we look toward future demands on limited water resources,” the authors wrote. “As future demands for energy and water continue to increase, competition for water between the energy, domestic, agricultural, and industrial sectors could significantly impact the reliability and security of future energy production and electric power generation,” they added: “It may not be possible in many areas of the country to meet the country’s growing energy and water needs by following the current U.S. path of largely managing water and energy separately while making small improvements in freshwater supply and small changes in energy and water-use efficiency.”

For instance, the authors raised concerns about U.S. energy policy that is encouraging construction of more coal-fired and nuclear power plants, which use millions of gallons of water an hour, without consideration for where they would be built. The thermo-electric generating sector currently accounts for half of the 400 billion gallons of water withdrawn daily from the nation’s rivers and lakes, principally to cool the plants. The same power plants consume more than 3 billion gallons of water a day, principally through evaporation.

The Energy Information Administration, a unit of the Department of Energy, forecast a nearly 50 percent increase in the demand for electricity between 2005 and 2030. A portion will be filled with energy from the wind and solar photovoltaics, which use virtually no water. Most of the rest will come from new thermoelectric plants.

The Sandia authors noted that new technologies are needed to enable the plants to use coolants other than fresh water, including wastewater from municipal treatment systems, seawater, produced water from mining and drilling operations, and agricultural runoff. In addition, the authors said, U.S. policy encouraging the development of pollution control systems that capture climate-changing emissions and store it deep underground, so-called carbon capture and sequestration, increases water consumption at plants 40 percent to 90 percent.

Advanced Energy Initiative Did Not Consider Water Use
The paper recommends integrating into Congressional and federal policymaking for energy production new requirements for taking into account whether enough water is available for new thermoelectric plants. “The large growth in certain regions of the country of electric power demand and alternative transportation fuel feedstock and refining demands,” the Sandia authors wrote, “suggests that water availability regionally or locally may not be able to support the high growth rate in energy development expected without significant improvements in both energy and fresh water use efficiency.”

The Sandia authors raise similar concerns about rising demand for water to satisfy the nation’s appetite for transportation fuels. In January 2006, President George W. Bush introduced the Advanced Energy Initiative to reduce oil imports and increase national security. One facet of the initiative is to replace 30 percent of the nation’s current gasoline needs with domestically grown and refined biofuels by 2030. This will require production of about 60 billion gallons of ethanol per year by 2030, with over two-thirds needing to come from cellulosic-based feedstocks like switchgrass and wood wastes.

Photo © Brent Stirton/Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue

IMPERIAL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, AUGUST 2009: The All American Canal, the main water conduit from the Colorado River into the Imperial Dam, flows through the Imperial Valley, Calif. The desert area uses most of its allocated river water for agricultural purposes.

Another facet of the initiative is to encourage production of biodiesel and transportation fuels from tar sands and oil shales in the arid West.

Very clearly, the Sandia authors indicate, the Bush administration did not consider where the water would come from to produce these alternative fuels. “Virtually every alternative transportation fuel being considered will require more water than current petroleum refining,” said the Sandia paper. “A major national scale-up of production capacity and use of nonconventional alternative transportation fuels to meet future domestic fuel demands could significantly increase water demands and impacts.”

Producing a gallon of gasoline, said the authors, takes about 1.5 gallons of water. Every one of the alternatives promoted in the Advanced Energy Initiative takes more water, from two to six times as much water as petroleum production and refining needs to produce a gallon of fuel. Producing ethanol from irrigated corn fields takes 1,000 gallons of water to produce a gallon of fuel. Producing biodiesel from irrigated soybean fields takes 6,500 gallons to produce a gallon of fuel.

Very clearly, the national alternative fuels plan that relies heavily on producing ethanol raises significant issues about water supply. “Among the issues with the future expansion of biofuel production will be to assure that the availability, use, and sustainability of water and land resources is appropriately managed,” the Sandia paper counseled, “to avoid adverse impacts while not putting undue constraints on the transition toward more biomass-based energy and products industries.”

Planning Needed
Of all the research and policy recommendations summarized in the Sandia paper, and repeated in the Road Map report, perhaps the most significant is the call for linking energy policy and production with water supply and use. The Sandia paper concluded, “As these two resources see increasing demand and growing limitations on supply, energy and water must be recognized as highly interdependent critical resources that need to be managed together in a more integrated way to provide reliable energy and water supplies and sustain future national growth and economic development while maintaining the health of ecosystems and the environment.”

“We need to come up with strategies so we have a sustainable future,” said Hightower. “As it is now in the United States, water is managed by the water group and energy is managed by energy companies. We’ve got to look at the energy infrastructure and the water infrastructure together.

“That’s what we’ve identified as a need in the Road Map report. Hopefully we’ve done something good for the country. Although we’re in trouble with the DOE.”

Keith Schneider is the senior editor of Circle of Blue. Reach him at keith@circleofblue.org. Read more about energy-water connections in Circle of Blue’s Choke Point: U.S. series.

Photo © David Dodge / The Pembina Institute

The Syncrude Canada Ltd. oil sands mining operation in Alberta, Canada is the largest in the world. For every barrel of oil produced from tar sands mining operations, four to six barrels of fresh water are withdrawn from the Athabasca River, according to experts.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

Before July 16, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued its 18-page letter directing the State Department to more carefully assess the considerable risks of the $7 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expected to issue a presidential permit approving construction in the fall.

More Information

Scene of Midwest’s Worst Oil Spill – Sleepless Nights and Black Goo

A Midwest Pipeline Rupture Raises Questions about Tar Sands Risk

EPA and State Department Square Off on Tar Sands Pipeline

Tar Sands Oil Production, An Industrial Bonanza, Poses Major Water Use Challenges

Pipeline Ties Detroit Refinery to “Dirtiest Source of Fossil Fuels”

More From The Series

Natural Gas
Deep Frack Dilemma

Coal Production
Coal Sucks Water

Tar Sands
Tar Sands’ Soiled Oil

Thermal Power
Thermopower Shift

The EPA’s penetrating critique of the State Department’s permit review of the 1,702-mile pipeline, which the environmental agency called “inadequate,” puts that fall schedule on indefinite hold. The question for the oil industry, the governments of Canada and the activists in both countries desperate to tame oil sands development, is what other effects the EPA’s action could have.

The federal environmental agency has good reason to be vigilant. It has been busy since July 26 cleaning up a million-barrel tar sands oil spill from a ruptured pipeline in southern Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, to be built by TransCanada Corp., is the latest of three big oil pipeline construction projects that are at the vanguard of a new era in hydrocarbon development. Instead of drilling deep underground for pools of oil that are getting harder to find and more dangerous to punch open, energy developers are becoming miners, tapping what the energy industry calls “unconventional” reserves contained in oil-saturated sands and oil shales.

Near the northern end of the Keystone XL pipeline lies Alberta’s bitumen-saturated tar sands, a forested region as large as North Carolina that conservatively contains 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil: enough to satisfy U.S. demand at current rates of consumption until 2035. American, Canadian, Chinese, Korean and European oil companies are spending $15 billion a year to manage and expand immense open pit mines, processing plants, as well as toxic tailing ponds in order to boost production from 1.3 million barrels a day to more than three million barrels per day by 2025.

The investment in Alberta is the sharp tip of a long spear of unconventional oil development that reaches into the United States, the primary market. Energy and pipeline companies are spending $31 billion to ship oil in new pipelines from Alberta to U.S. refiners in the heartland, the Great Lakes and the Gulf coast. Refiners are spending more than $20 billion to expand refineries to produce fuels from tar sands oil. In all, the energy industry has said it wants to invest nearly $400 billion on tar sands oil production over the next 15 years.

Contrast that with annual investment in wind and solar energy, which reached $30 billion last year, according to the Department of Energy. Exxon Mobil Corp. paid more than that earlier this year—$41 billion—to purchase XTO Energy, which has big reserves in unconventional tar sands, oil shales, and deep shale natural gas reserves in the United States.

The bottom line is that the race between clean energy alternatives and much dirtier unconventional reserves is an economic mismatch. Last year total investment globally in clean energy was $140 billion, according to solar and wind producers. The fossil fuel industry is spending an estimated three times that amount on developing unconventional oil reserves, according to the International Energy Agency.

Photo © David Dodge / The Pembina Institute

Alberta’s longest river and one of North America’s longest undammed rivers, the Athabasca originates in the Wood Buffalo National Park. Water withdrawals for tar sands surface mining operations — 184.3 million cubic meters of water or 48.7 billion gallons — threaten the sustainability of fish populations in the Athabasca River and the sustainability of the Delta itself.

Number One Importer
The United States appears completely ready to buy every drop. According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the country imports 1.1 million barrels of tar sands oil a day. Alberta’s tar sands have quietly become the largest source of American oil imports and one of the largest new sources of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change.

Oil companies investing in tar sands production and distribution have been very confident that their steady expansion plan will prevail. The U.S. State Department had already approved two other presidential permits to allow big new tar sands oil pipelines to cross from Canada into the country. In April, Enbridge Inc. completed the $3 billion, 992-mile Alberta Clipper from Hardisty, Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin, which will eventually be capable of transporting 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day to refineries in the Great Lakes region. TransCanada’s has partially completed the $5 billion, 2,151-mile Keystone pipeline from Hardisty to Illinois and Oklahoma, which will transport nearly 600,000 barrels of tar sands oil to the Midwest. The first oil shipments began on June 30.

But with its letter to the State Department, the EPA became the first U.S. government agency to formally intervene in the rapidly developing and ecologically risky unconventional oil play. The environmental agency’s challenge requires the State Department to rework its first environmental review and develop new data on the pipeline’s effects on greenhouse gas emissions, safety, air quality, water resources, wetlands, wildlife and communities.

Division in the Obama Administration
The letter also revealed a significant schism in the Obama administration that pits energy security against climate action.

On the one hand, the president pledged last year at the Copenhagen Climate summit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050. The White House and the EPA are putting the federal Clean Air Act to work to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and heavy industry. In April, the EPA issued new vehicle emissions standards for cars and light trucks that the agency said would save 1.8 billion barrels of oil from 2012 to 2016, and reduce emissions by 900 million metric tons.

Both are significant. The annual fuel savings, nearly 400 million barrels, represent roughly 6 percent of all the oil used in America last year, according to the Energy Information Administration. The emissions reductions, roughly 180 million tons annually, represent 3 percent of all carbon emissions the United States produced in 2008, according to the EPA.

Producing and using tar sands oil, though, is blunting those reductions. The 1.3 million barrels of oil currently produced in Canada also produces 40 million metric tons of greenhouse gases annually, or 5 percent of all Canadian carbon emissions, according to the Pembina Institute, a respected environmental research center. According to various estimates by government agencies, non-profit environmental organizations and think tanks, every one million barrels of tar sands oil refined and consumed in the United States produces another 30 million to 40 million metric tons of greenhouse gases.

Energy companies are licensed by Energy Alberta, the provincial oversight agency, to withdraw up to the Alberta provincial government granted tar sands oil producers the license to withdraw 652 million cubic meters of water annually—equal to 172 billion gallons—from the Athabasca River, which runs through the mining district. That’s as much water as the entire American oil industry uses in five months.

Photo © David Dodge / The Pembina Institute

A Syncrude oil sands plant at night with old mining equipment. In response to tighter regulations, the company announced in April that it will spend millions of dollars to build facilities to reduce toxic waste.

Big Climate Emitter
The EPA says that greenhouse gas emissions from tars sands mining to finished gasoline and diesel are 82 percent higher than from conventional sources of oil. Every 900,000 barrels of oil carried by the Keystone XL pipeline would produce an extra 27 million metric tons annually of carbon emissions, said the agency.

“To provide some perspective on the potential scale of emissions,” said the authors of the EPA letter, “27 million metric tons is roughly equivalent to annual carbon dioxide emission of seven coal-fired power plants.”

But on the other hand, leaders in the Obama administration are equally concerned about the diplomatic and economic consequences of limiting tar sands development. Clinton and her aides are mindful of the close diplomatic relationship with Canada. The administration’s economic and commerce leaders are interested in securing America’s fuel supply and protecting the $600 billion annual trade between the two nations.

“We’re not going to solve these problems overnight,” said President Obama, who is well aware that the so-called carbon capture and sequestration technology is unproven and only now being sporadically tested by several American utilities.

Obama’s Middle Ground
In February 2009, during his first meeting in Ottawa with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, President Barack Obama discussed the tightening tar sands, climate and energy security knot. He suggested that the solution is to capture carbon during the mining and early processing of tar sands oil and inject the emissions deep underground.

“We’re not going to solve these problems overnight,” said President Obama, who is well aware that the carbon capture and storage technology is unproven and only now undergoing a handful of tests in the U.S. and in other nations.

The pragmatism expressed by the president is supported by a number of energy and climate authorities in Washington, among them Michael A. Levi, director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations. In a study last year that weighed tar sands development and climate emissions, Levi wrote that “oil sands production delivers both energy security benefits and climate change damages,” though he also argued both effects were overstated. “For the near future, the economic and security value of oil sands expansion will likely outweigh the climate damages that the oil sands create. But climate concerns cannot and must not be ignored, and will become more important over time.”

Infographic by Rebecca Stream

South of the Border: Tripling Tar Sands Oil Imports to U.S. CLICK to ENLARGE with full details.

But a number of prominent environmental advocates are more adamant. “The main set of concerns around this tar sands pipeline are not around how it is constructed, but about the type of oil it will transport. Bitumen or raw tar sands oil is the dirtiest oil on Earth,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, a tar sands specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, in an August 5 blog post. “The United States does not need the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The administration’s decision on the Keystone XL pipeline also is stirring concern among Democrats on Capitol. On June 23, 50 House Democrats signed a letter urging Secretary Clinton to not approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

On July 2, three days after the State Department held a public hearing in Washington on the pipeline, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent a letter to Secretary Clinton that raised serious concerns about the effect the pipeline would have on climate change and asking whether the project was “in the national interest.”

“The State Department’s decision on whether to permit this pipeline represents a critical choice about America’s energy future,” said Waxman. “This pipeline is a multi-billion dollar investment to expand our reliance on the dirtiest source of transportation fuel currently available. While I strongly support the president’s efforts to move America to a clean energy economy, I am concerned that the Keystone XL pipeline would be a step in the wrong direction.”

Keith Schneider is a senior editor for Circle of Blue. Reach Schneider at keith@circleofblue.org. Read more about tar sands development on Circle of Blue.

Photo © David Dodge / The Pembina Institute

The Athabasca River cuts through the heart of Alberta, Canada’s enormous tar sands oil deposit. Development in the region has raised major environmental concerns among residents.

By Keith Schneider and Sam Kean
Circle of Blue

From the air, the oil-bearing tar sands mines of northern Alberta, Canada, the largest industrial project on Earth, look flat. But that’s only because they lie in scattered cuts across a forested landscape that is more than 100 miles wide.

On the ground in Union County, South Dakota, more than 1,700 miles south of Alberta, the place where 400,000 barrels of that tar sand oil could be refined daily into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel is still a six-square-mile expanse of prairie and farm fields awaiting a $10 billion refinery, the first new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s.

More Information

Scene of Midwest’s Worst Oil Spill – Sleepless Nights and Black Goo

A Midwest Pipeline Rupture Raises Questions about Tar Sands Risk

EPA and State Department Square Off on Tar Sands Pipeline

Tar Sands Oil Production, An Industrial Bonanza, Poses Major Water Use Challenges

Pipeline Ties Detroit Refinery to “Dirtiest Source of Fossil Fuels”

More From The Series

Natural Gas
Deep Frack Dilemma

Coal Production
Coal Sucks Water

Tar Sands
Tar Sands’ Soiled Oil

Thermal Power
Thermopower Shift

Tying these two immense industrial installations together are lengthy steel pipelines, one nearing completion by Trans Canada, and another promoted by Canada’s prime minister and the American president. Both the tar sands and the proposed South Dakota refinery represent the vanguard of the economically promising and exceedingly ecologically risky opening of the next era of global petroleum development.

Unconventional Production
Instead of drilling wells deep underground energy developers are starting to dig up the vast reserves contained in oil-saturated sand and shale that are much closer to the surface. Propelling the development of so-called “unconventional fuels,” say Department of Energy authorities, is America’s rapacious appetite for oil— now almost 20 million barrels daily, 7 billion barrels annually. It’s also the increasing scarcity, risk, and expense of securing the last big conventional oil reserves, a trio of issues illustrated most graphically by the deep-sea BP Gulf explosion and blowout, which killed 11 men in April and poured nearly five million gallons of oil into coastal waters until the well was sealed in August.

Energy industry executives and federal energy specialists insist that tapping the tar sands and shale oil reserves ensures that Americans will continue to enjoy a lifestyle built on choice and mobility for decades more. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming hold oil shale reserves estimated to contain 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, according to the Energy Department, half of which is recoverable. Eastern Utah alone holds tar sands oil reserves estimated at 12 billion to 19 billion barrels. The Alberta tar sands region contains recoverable oil reserves conservatively estimated at 175 billion barrels.

“We can increase our output,” said Tim Markle, a spokesman for Alberta Energy, the provincial agency that oversees tar sands development. “We’ve only tapped the near surface of the oil sands. We estimate there could be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.7 trillion barrels of oil. Right now we don’t know how to get to it.”

Huge Investment, Big Water Choke Point
But as government agencies and energy companies pour billions into production and research, a handful of technical specialists and scientists are taking a hard look at the environmental risks, including the availability of fresh water: a choke point that seems all but certain to limit unconventional fuels development.

Existing oil production in the United States from conventional reserves withdraws one billion to two billion gallons a day from rivers, lakes, and aquifers, according to the United States Geological Survey. Turning conventional oil into fuels and other products consumes about the same amount, most of it to cool the nation’s 143 refineries.

Mining and processing tar sands and shale oil, though, requires much higher quantities of water. It takes four to six gallons of water to produce one barrel of tar sands oil, which is four times more water than it takes to produce oil from conventional reserves, according to a 2009 study by Argonne National Laboratory. Meanwhile producing one barrel of shale oil takes two to three times as much as conventional oil.

Much of the water to produce oil from tar sands comes from the Athabasca River, which runs through the northern Alberta mining district. The Alberta provincial government granted tar sands oil producers the license to withdraw 652 million cubic meters of river water annually—equal to 172 billion gallons—for mining and processing.

In 2008, according to Energy Alberta, tar sands mines actually used 184.3 million cubic meters of water — 48.7 billion gallons. That’s roughly the same amount of water that the entire American oil industry consumes in a month.

Photo © David Dodge / The Pembina Institute

Syncrude Canada Ltd. is a joint venture of oil and gas companies mining the Athabasca oil sands, which includes 8 leases covering 258,000 hectares, that can produce up to 350,000 barrels of oil per day.

Polluted Water, Limits on Water
Just 10 percent is returned to the river, which a number of independent studies say is visibly depleted and rapidly deteriorating. The balance is poured into toxic tailing ponds as big as lakes, containing more than 1 trillion gallons of waste water combined and so polluted that at least 1,600 ducks that inadvertently landed in them have died, drowned by the tarry water.

The Canadian government, in concert with big oil companies from the United States, Canada, China, Korea, and Europe say the tar sands region is capable of producing four million barrels of oil a day, or more. Much of it is meant for the United States.

But in an interview with Circle of Blue, Mike Hightower, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories and one of the top American experts on the competition between energy and water, said such levels of production may be impossible to achieve.

“Canada has a lot of fresh water,” said Hightower. “But we are beginning to see limits on development of the oil sands. You will see limits where production hits a plateau and won’t get above it. The point is that a couple of years ago they were talking about three million or four million barrels a day. The water resources won’t allow them to go there. They will cap out at 2.5 million.”

Similarly, water scarcity will limit oil shale development. Much of the oil shale in the United States occurs in the deserts of the Rocky Mountain West, where climate change, according to an analysis by the EPA earlier this year, is reducing snowmelt and rainfall resulting in less moisture in rivers and aquifers. Philip Smith, a professor of chemical engineering and director of the Institute for Clean and Secure Energy at the University of Utah, said his state’s shale oil can’t be tapped using water-intensive technologies.

“In Utah, we just do not have that kind of water,” Smith told researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Refineries on Dry Land
Moreover, building new American refineries that are closest to the shales and tar sands also means siting them on the water-scarce Great Plains, putting new pressure on surface and underground water supplies. The proposed Hyperion refinery in southeast South Dakota, which sits just across the Missouri River from Iowa, would use 12 million gallons of water a day for oil processing and cooling. The source of the water is an aquifer that the U.S.G.S. said is stressed from over pumping by farms. The plant’s wastewater will (after processing) be poured into the Missouri River.

Both phases of the plant’s water use have come under new scrutiny. Water managers in South Dakota have already told investigators with the General Accounting Office, a unit of Congress, that they anticipated shortages of water over the next decade. And last month Richard Leopold, director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, sent a letter to the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that called for a more thorough assessment of the plant’s risks to the environment, including from its water discharges.

Leopold said the plant’s wastewater could affect power plants, drinking water supplies, recreation, and farm operations in Iowa.

“It is always prudent to complete due diligence on a major project of this scale and significance,” Leopold wrote.

South Dakota has not responded to the request. Last year, though, the state environmental office ruled the refinery did not need to submit a full environmental impact statement.

Resistance and Delays Hamper Refinery
Water also is a source of deep local resistance to the Hyperion refinery plant. On January 28, 2010 the Clay Rural Water System board of directors unanimously denied Hyperion’s request for a long-term agreement to use up to 12 million gallons of water per day at the proposed refinery. Three months later, Hyperion executives announced that civic resistance, permit delays and the weakened economy was impeding the project timeline. The company postponed closing on land purchases for the project. Instead Hyperion has asked landowners to extend land lease options that are set to expire this month.

Attitudes about the proposed refinery are decidedly divided.

“My grandpa, he would have jumped at this,” said Don Abraham, a farmer and physics professor at the University of South Dakota. “Imagine leaving Norway, looking for a better life, looking for wealth, looking for opportunity—then something like this comes along? I really think he would have jumped at an opportunity for the area to develop.”

But when Union County voters approved a rezoning measure two years ago that made it possible for Hyperion to build the refinery on farmland, a sizable opposition movement also made its presence felt. Terse political signs began straddling barbed-wire fences, painted the reds, yellows, and blacks of venomous snakes: “Vote No Hyperion.” And beyond any environmental doomsday, opponents asserted that refinery workers, hordes of young men, would attract strip clubs and sow vice—moral Armageddon.

Soon, local churches were rent down the middle; pastors had to watch their tongues. Townhall meetings stretched six or more hours. Union County folk cried and prayed over whether to sell land rights to Hyperion. Sewing circles cracked apart while they awaited divine instruction. One signatory, a woman, still feels the wasp’s sting because an old friend called her “unchristian” for her lack of environmental rectitude. They have not spoken since.

At One End of the Pipeline: Developing Tar Sands, Wrecking The Water

A look at how to extract tar sands oil from the Earth.

By Sam Kean
Special to Circle of Blue

Photo © David Dodge / The Pembina Institute

The Syncrude Oil Sands Complex just north of Fort McMurray sits atop the Athabasca deposit, which is the largest reservoir of crude bitumen in the world.

Tar sands oil is contained in solid bitumen—sand grains jacketed by oil that must be mined. Pits are usually striated black and gray. The surrounding boreal forests are green but have diagonal roads scythed into them.

To liberate the oil from the sand, miners blast the bitumen with scalding water, then slurp it off. The leftover slurry of sand, water, and chemicals—“tailings”—fills vast lakes called tailings ponds. The “ponds” cover twice the surface area of Manhattan, and will swell larger through at least 2062. From the air, ponds have different colors, too—rainbow, aqua, wrinkled grey like the skin under a band-aid. In May 2008, 1,600 migrating ducks landed in one pond and drowned.

One old mine worker, Andrew Boucher, a Native American, helped build the first oil mine in the 1960s, then stayed to work for forty years. He piloted a motorboat down the Athabasca River to work in the summer. In the winter he drove a dogsled. He worked until a motor exploded in his face and blinded half his right eye.

On a serpentine trip downriver one freezing August morning, Boucher pointed out his uncles’ old cabins for trapping critters, now mine property. He showed a reporter Tar Island, an earthen dam adjacent to the river that once held back a tailings pond. Tar Island started a dozen yards tall in 1967 but leaked until its owner stanched it with more and more permeable soil. Today it stands ninety yards tall and stretches two miles—and still leaks.

For his job, Boucher sometimes dressed the scarecrows, the bitumen, in hardhats and orange ponchos. His crew also built earthen dikes, and used to find dead birds constantly. “What did you do?” he was asked.

A shrug. Normally they buried them, Jimmy-Hoffa style, in the dike walls.

Ecologists cite statistics about the Pyrrhic scale of tar sand development—the staggering effort needed to eke out oil—to discourage development of tar sands. Tour guides for the mines cite the same facts to delight tourists from Switzerland, Denmark, Germany—to inspire with how powerful modern man is. Some of these Janus facts include: It takes mining 4,400 lbs. of soil to recover about a barrel of crude. One tailings dam is 200 times larger than Hoover Dam. The mobile scoopers that chew back the pits are three-story houses with sideview mirrors as big as bathroom vanities.

Dump trucks reach 50 feet tall and have 10-foot, $70,000 tires and, when full, weigh as much as a Boeing 747. After a shower to shake loose the sticky black dirt, trucks weigh 14 tons less. One perky young guide says executives get their names inscribed on the helmets of bitu-men sometimes, an honor. Her company claims it can regrow original boreal forest on the petcoke waste Hyperion will burn for fuel.

A map of future operations around Ft. McMurray looks like a map of greater Chicago, with colored patches of claims stretching like suburbs for hundreds of miles.

What those eager Korean, Dutch and Japanese companies need are partners to process oil, outlets. No major refineries operate within hundreds of miles.

Crude escapes Ft. McMurray in 24-inch (or larger) pipes, sluicing along at 3 mph, walking speed. It takes 3.5 days to reach Edmonton 270 miles south. Petroleum insiders suspect that when the biggest pipes to America open, a temporary shortage of oil will ensue, because pipes take weeks to fill.

At Other End of Pipe: A Disputed Refinery Still To Take Shape

The American Petroleum Institute recently baptized South Dakota a primary battleground for ensuring access to Canadian tar sands

Photo © David Dodge / The Pembina Institute

The Syncrude Tailings is an artificial lake maintained by the world’s largest producer of synthetic crude oil, Syncrude Canada Ltd., while extracting oil from the Athabasca Oil Sands.

By Sam Kean
Special to Circle of Blue

From Alberta, it will take a 2,000-mile pipeline through farms and wilderness back to Union County, South Dakota and the proposed Hyperion refinery.

Whispers about the new refinery began in earnest in 2006. Finally, after front-page newspaper speculation started, Hyperion Resources, an embattled oil company in Dallas, stepped forward in June 2007 and announced plans to convert 10,000 acres of prairie into the first new domestic oil refinery built since 1976.

Union County sits in the southeast corner of the state near Nebraska and Iowa, bound on either side by the Missouri and the Big Sioux Rivers. The new refinery would snuggle in beside the loess hills nearby, though it’s near impossible to imagine something its size squatting down there, something that would exhale 19 million tons of CO2 each year, more than any existing U.S. refinery, and drink 12 million gallons of water each day.

Its 220-foot smokestacks would stand as some of the tallest structures in this three-story state, almost four times taller than the faces of George and Thomas and Abe and Teddy on Mt. Rushmore. The refinery would lie near the county seat, Elk Point, pop. 1,714, or four miles north to the now-all-but-ghost-town of Spink.

The company published a green charter, promising the refinery would not belch toxic gas at midnight or pour waste out back. It will monitor, and minimize, all sorts of esoteric pollution, such as light and noise pollution. Hyperion will recycle.

“At the end of the day this still is an industrial facility. But we’re taking lower-quality crude and converting it to clean transportation fuels in the most environmentally respons—well, in an environmentally responsible way,” said Preston Phillips, a company executive. “

“And then you talk about water reuse and water recycle strategies.” Phillips added, rising slightly in his chair. “We want to capture all the rainwater on site to supplement the water we need. We’re going to take the gray water from the cafeteria and office building and restrooms for feedwater into the refinery.”

If things go more smoothly than they have for Hyperion, the new refinery will flood the Heartland with 200,000 barrels of gas, 160,000 barrels of diesel, and 40,000 gallons of jet fuel—16.8 million gallons total—every 24 hours.

The plant’s products could add 350 million more pounds of greenhouse gases to Earth’s atmosphere every day, too. Moreover, mining the tar sands to produce the oil to be refined adds an equal amount of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

The American Petroleum Institute recently baptized South Dakota a primary battleground for ensuring access to Canadian tar sands. Trans Canada is nearing completion of one pipeline from Alberta through South Dakota to points south and east in the United States, at a cost of $5 billion. A second $7 billion pipeline is in the latter stages of permitting, but last month came under criticism from Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as well as from the Environmental Protection Agency. Both pipelines, when completed, will pump 1.6 million barrels of tar sands oil though the coyote state.

Keith Schneider is senior editor of Circle of Blue. Sam Kean, a Washington D.C.-based writer, is the author of The Disappearing Spoon (Little Brown and Company, 2010). Reach Schneider at keith@circleofblue.org and Kean at samkean@gmail.com. Read more about tar sands oil production on Circle of Blue.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

Detroit’s Marathon Oil refinery, which dates to the early 1930s and employs nearly 500 people, is investing $2 billion to expand to process tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada. Click image to launch slideshow.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

More Information

Scene of Midwest’s Worst Oil Spill – Sleepless Nights and Black Goo

A Midwest Pipeline Rupture Raises Questions about Tar Sands Risk

EPA and State Department Square Off on Tar Sands Pipeline

Tar Sands Oil Production, An Industrial Bonanza, Poses Major Water Use Challenges

Pipeline Ties Detroit Refinery to “Dirtiest Source of Fossil Fuels”

More From The Series

Natural Gas
Deep Frack Dilemma

Coal Production
Coal Sucks Water

Tar Sands
Tar Sands’ Soiled Oil

Thermal Power
Thermopower Shift

Even before Marathon Oil announced two years ago that it would spend $1.9 billion to expand its Detroit refinery, the giant oil processing plant had generated ample public scrutiny.

“Lead. Benzene. Arsenic. You name it, we’ve got it,” said Dolores Leonard, who’s lived on Bassett Street, in the shadow of the refinery, since 1957.

Now the Detroit refinery and its expansion, currently estimated to cost $2.2 billion, is attracting national and global attention. In two years Marathon is scheduled to complete construction that will increase the refinery’s capacity to 115,000 barrels per day in order to turn so-called “heavy oil” into transportation fuels.

In doing so, the Marathon refinery, which employs nearly 500 workers, will seek to secure its place at the vanguard of a new era in hydrocarbon production. Instead of drilling deep underground for pools of oil that are getting harder to find and more dangerous to tap, energy developers are becoming miners, tapping what the energy industry calls “unconventional” reserves contained in oil-saturated sands and shales. At the other end of the more than 2,000 miles of pipeline that supply oil to Marathon’s Detroit refinery are the most productive unconventional reserves on the continent, the tar sands of northern Alberta, Canada.

Need That Oil
Industry executives and the Department of Energy assert that the transition from conventional to unconventional sources of oil is essential for satisfying American demand for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels. “The increasing demand for crude oil in the United States cannot be entirely met by efforts to conserve use of refined petroleum products or the increased use of renewable energy. As crude oil demand increases, the overall domestic supplies of crude oil are declining,” said the State Department in an assessment, adding that without the tar sands, the United States “would remain dependent upon unstable foreign oil supplies from the Mideast, Africa, Mexico, and South America.”

But environmental advocates, many academics and some members of Congress say the consequences of unconventional oil production to water, land and air will be much higher than producing conventional oil reserves. According to published studies, producing a barrel of oil from tar sands requires four times more water than producing a barrel from conventional oil reserves. Producing tar sands oil, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, emits 40 percent more greenhouse gases than oil produced from conventional reserves. And the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental research organization, has documented the astonishing water pollution, wildlife kills and deeply damaging effects that mining operations have inflicted on the forests wetlands, and rivers of northern Alberta.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

Dolores Leonard, 75, lives in the shadow of the refinery: “When you think about air quality, when you think about the amount of water it takes, my concern is about land that is contaminated.”

Costs Are Exceedingly High
The warnings are producing the first influential push back from the federal government about tar sands development. For the moment, government opposition is focused on the proposed construction of the $7 billion, 1,702-mile Keystone XL pipeline that Trans Canada hopes to transport 510,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day from Hardisty, Alberta to Oklahoma and Texas.

On June 23, 50 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging the State Department to more vigorously review the environmental and greenhouse emissions risks of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have the effect of encouraging tar sands oil production to increase one million more barrels a day. The letter came six days before the State Department held a public hearing on the pipeline proposal that attracted vigorous opposition from environmental and climate action organizations.

On July 2, Representative Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent a letter to the State Department that also called for more rigorous review of the proposed pipeline.

“The problem is that oil can be extracted from the tar sands only by using three times the energy required to produce a barrel of conventional oil,” said Waxman. “Studies estimate that shifting to tar sands fuel increases lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by up to 37 percent compared to the baseline fuel supply.”

On July 9, citizen activists rallied outside the Detroit refinery to also call attention to the effects of tar sands development on water and air. “Tar sands are the dirtiest source of fossil fuels,” said Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit), who attended the protest.

And on July 16, the federal Environmental Protection Agency sent an 18-page letter to the State Department that cited numerous weaknesses in that department’s assessment of the pipeline’s risks and called for a full environmental impact statement.

Big Money, Huge Environmental Risks
Alberta’s tar sands are found beneath an expanse of boreal forest, wetlands, lakes, and rivers that is about the same size as North Carolina. Energy Alberta, the provincial oversight agency, conservatively estimates that the tar sands contain 175 billion barrels of recoverable reserves, and with new technology could reach almost 400 billion barrels. At current rates of consumption—seven billion barrels a year—the tar sands alone could fuel the United States until 2070.

This year, the American, Canadian, Chinese, Korean, and European energy companies, which are spending $15 billion annually to develop the tar sands, will send 1.1 million of the 1.3 million barrels they produce daily to the United States. The tar sands are now the largest source of American oil imports, according to an analysis by Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Meanwhile pipeline companies, including Enbridge, which owns the pipeline that already supplies tar sands oil to the Detroit refinery and several more along the Great Lakes, are spending $31 billion to expand the pipeline network so that three million barrels a day of tar sands oil can reach American refineries as far away as Texas. Enbridge just opened its $3 billion, 992-mile Alberta Clipper from Hardistry to Superior, Wisconsin to carry tar sands oil into the Great Lakes region and Midwest. It was an Enbridge pipeline, by the way, that ruptured last month and poured 1 million gallons of oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

Theresa Landrum, 56, grew up in Detroit and lives an ear-shot from the Marathon Oil refinery. The company should buy her house and property, she says, because the neighborhood is a “virtual island” surrounded by industry.

The boom in tar sands oil has yielded the largest industrial project in the world in Alberta, and the largest energy infrastructure expansion project in the United States to serve it. Along with the $31 billion in planned pipeline construction, refiners are expanding their capacity at a cost of tens of billions more. The the owners of 17 refineries in the upper Midwest alone, five located along the Great Lakes, have started or are considering expansions to process Alberta’s unconventional reserves, according to a study by the Alliance for the Great Lakes, an environmental organization.

Chris Fox, a Marathon spokeswoman, told the Detroit News after the July rally that the Detroit refinery takes advantage of new market opportunities opened by the tar sands reserves. She indicated that refinery executives are mindful of their environmental responsibilities. Fox said the refinery has reduced its emissions by 76 percent since 1999. The Detroit refinery, which does not dump into the Detroit River, pumps its wastewater to the city’s treatment plant to clear away pollutants. The company also has taken a number of steps, she said, to reduce risks from the expansion, including daily street sweepings in and near the refinery; retrofitting 180 school buses with special air filters; and installing four air monitoring stations, including one in an elementary school.

Still, some neighbors aren’t happy about the refinery or its expansion. “I don’t agree with the tar sands,” said Therese Landrum. “I don’t agree with them coming into a community. Put them in the desert somewhere, but not here in a residential community. This community is already inundated with industry.”

She added: “I am willing to go if someone is willing to pay for my house and property. I think they should buy this community out.”

Keith Schneider is senior editor for Circle of Blue. Reach Schneider at keith@circleofblue.org. Read more about tar sands oil development on Circle of Blue.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

One of the last wells drilled into Michigan’s Antrim Shale was completed early last week in Benzie County. A new and deeper natural gas play appears to be unfolding as developers pay record amounts for oil and gas leases and a lone Missaukee well turned out to be a prodigious gas producer. Click image to launch slideshow.

By Keith Schneider and Molly Ramsey
Circle of Blue

The aptly named Pioneer natural gas well, near Lake City in Missaukee County’s Pioneer Township, is a stack of gauges and metal piping that rises about 7 feet from a bed of crushed stone at the center of a five-acre clearing surrounded by Michigan hardwoods.

More Information

Deep Frack Dilemma

Michigan Says It’s Ready For Next Drilling Boom

Infographic: Michigan Mineral Rights

More From The Series

Tar Sands
Tar Sands Oil Production, Poses Major Water Use Challenges

Natural Gas
Deep Frack Dilemma

Coal
Coal Confronts Water Scarcity

The only sound in the clearing is of songbirds hidden in the trees. The sole scent from the straight-as-a-gun-barrel well–drilled and tested last year–is the smell of money, and potentially of trouble.

Earlier this year the Pioneer well’s Canadian owner, the Calgary-based Encana Corporation, announced that during its first 30 days the well, drilled nearly two miles deep into a rock formation known as the Collingwood Shale, produced an average of 2.5 million cubic feet of gas a day. That made it, for a time, the most prolific single source of natural gas in Michigan. Production has since dropped back to 800,000 cubic feet per day, said state officials, though that is still a prodigious amount for a Michigan gas well.

“The industry’s response to the first well drilled to test this formation has been overwhelming,” said Tom Wellman, Manager of the Mineral and Land Management Section of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

A Gas Frenzy
How overwhelming? In early May the natural gas industry saluted the import of those numbers by spending $178 million at a lease sale of nearly 120,000 acres of state-owned minerals in 22 Michigan counties. That was more than seven times the previous record for a state lease sale, and nearly equal to the $190 million Michigan has earned, in total, since it began auctioning oil and gas leases in 1929. In October, Michigan is poised to auction mineral leases on 500,000 more acres, and the natural gas industry is poised, say executives, to spend a lot of money again.

Michigan’s leasing frenzy, touched off by the promising results from a single Missaukee County well, is part of a global rush to tap the Earth’s deep gas-bearing shales for a fuel that burns much cleaner than coal or oil. Spurred by advancing technology, developers penetrate geologic layers miles beneath the surface, and then pump water mixed with chemicals into the space at such high pressure that the rock fractures, releasing the gas.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

Arnie Workman and Mike Rudolph were among the 400 people who jammed Reed City’s Church of the Nazarene for a meeting on oil and gas leasing on Friday, July 23, 2010. At the top of the list of concerns: how to lease their minerals effective and learning more about the potential environmental risks of developing Michigan’s Collingwood Shale.

Natural gas production in the United States is climbing as producers develop the deep shales in the Northeast, Texas, the Rocky Mountain states and now in Michigan. A two-year study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that shale gas reserves in the United States can provide 92 years of energy based on current natural gas consumption rates in the country.

Water Needed Big Time
But production practices, particularly the use of millions of gallons of water, and thousands of pounds of chemicals used in the “hydrofracking” process, have stirred concerns about water contamination and supply.

Encana Corporation, which said in May that it had gained mineral leases to 250,000 acres in Michigan, was fined $370,000 in 2006 by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for flawed drilling practices that residents say caused methane and benzene contamination of Divide Creek in Colorado. Alan Boras, the company’s spokesman, said in an interview with Circle of Blue that the leak was “a rare circumstance” caused by flaws in the cement that holds the well casing in place.

“Within less than a week of being alerted, the problem was rectified,” Boras said.

Meanwhile New York has instituted a moratorium on shale gas development pending research by state authorities on the risk to water resources and public health. Communities in Wyoming and Pennsylvania have reported incidences of water contamination and methane mixed with drinking water in regions where shale gas development is occurring. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is completing a study of the risks of fracking.

Two years ago, in a study that has been criticized for political interference by the energy industry, the EPA conducted its first assessment of fracking, calling it safe and exempting drillers from water quality standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Authorities in Michigan said in interviews that they are aware of the reports of problems involved in hydrofracking the deep shales. They said that the state is well-prepared to deal with the Collingwood development and the potential consequences it will have on the land, public health and Michigan’s fresh water reserves. Hal Fitch, the director of the Geological Survey Office, a unit of the state Department of Natural Resources and Environment, explained in an interview that Michigan has some of the toughest regulations in the country for overseeing oil and gas development, and that his office is well-staffed to enforce them.

Michigan Prepares
Fitch said the state is close to issuing new permit conditions that space the Collingwood wells at least a mile apart, which will reduce the number of well pads cut into the forest. But he acknowledged that each of the well pads will encompass five acres or more–five times larger than the typical natural gas and oil well pad.

He also acknowledged that because completing each of the Collingwood wells involves using millions of gallons of water to fracture the shale and open spaces for the gas to flow, the state may need to better understand the risks.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

The Pioneer well in Missaukee County reaches down 9,685 feet to tap what may be a motherlode of natural gas. Developing the well took 5.5 million gallons of water and thousands of pounds of chemicals pumped at high pressure to fracture the Collingwood Shale and release a torrent of gas.

“There is a concern about the volume of water used,” said Fitch. ”While drilling and use of water is a one time deal for each site, it requires a lot of water. DNRE looks at the effect of water withdrawal on immediate surroundings, if it’s near a wetland or lake or adjacent public water supplies.”

Fitch added that state regulators make sure the activity is not depleting the aquifer at that site. But they do not look at cumulative effects of water withdrawals, the watershed-scale effects of withdrawals.

Big Play State
Northern Michigan is no stranger to big plays in oil and gas development. In the 1970s energy producers drilled thousands of wells into the Niagaran formation 5,000 feet below the surface along a narrow band that extended from Manistee County along the coast of Lake Michigan inland through Montmorency County. It was the largest oil and gas drilling zone on the continent until development opened on Alaska’s North Slope. In the 1990s, developers drilled thousands more wells in the Antrim Shale formation that were about 1,000 to 1,200 feet deep. The companies built an infrastructure of 9,700 well pads, thousands of miles of pipeline and roads, hundreds of compressing stations, and a number of big processing plants that produced considerable damage to streams and forests, but also yielded billions of dollars worth of natural gas.

Pioneer, the township where the well is located, is part of a rural farmland landscape known for its corn, dairy livestock, and Christmas tree farms, as well as a recreational inland lake popular with fishers and boaters in Lake City. The massive hydraulic fracturing of the Pioneer well required 5.5 million gallons of water. Some of the water was supplied by a freshwater aquifer at the site, while another portion was hauled to the site by trucks, said Joel Fox, a representative for Petoskey Exploration, Inc., the company that organized the drilling of the well for Encana, which they evenutally contracted out to Superior Gas.

The Collingwood Shale could be the source of Michigan’s third major hydrocarbon development era of the last 40 years, according to Encana. The company, Canada’s largest natural gas producer, spent an estimated $7 million to $9 million to drill and hydrofrack the well, making it among the most expensive wells ever developed in the state. It bored a hole nearly 10,000 feet deep into the Earth: one of the deepest ever drilled in Michigan.

“It’s too early to know the economic potential of this new Collingwood Shale play, but we plan to drill additional exploration wells this year that will help determine the play’s ultimate potential,” said Randy Eresman, Encana’s president and chief executive in a statement.

Keith Schneider is senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue. Molly Ramsey is a Circle of Blue reporter. Reach them at keith@circleofblue.org and mollyr@circleofblue.org. Read more about hydrofracking on Circle of Blue.

Photo © Aaron Jaffe / Circle of Blue

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

In January, when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged that it was wrong in predicting that the glaciers of the Himalayas could be gone by 2035, skeptics of global warming used the error to assert that much of climate science was a fraud.

Next month, though, the Asia Society Museum opens a month long exhibition in New York of alpine photographs by David Breashears that are the strongest visual proof ever compiled that climate scientists may have been aggressive in predicting the rate of glacial melting at the top of the world, but not by much.

Breashears’ work, collected by the museum in “Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalayas,” documents the rapid retreat of one of the world’s thickest and most important sheets of ice. A mountaineer, Breashears has scaled the world’s tallest mountains to take photographs of dozens of glaciers from the same perches that great photographers of the early and mid-20th century used to shoot the highest, and some of the longest glaciers in the world.

In “Rivers of Ice,” the Asia Society Museum presents Breashears’ 21st century pictures alongside those archival photographs. The message, say the museum’s curators, is unmistakable: “The comparison starkly reveals the catastrophic glacier loss sustained during the intervening years.”

The Breashears exhibition coincides with a new scientific reckoning of the pace of Himalayan melting, and the consequences to watersheds, rivers, communities and nearly 3 billion people that rely on what some scientists have come to call “the water towers of Asia.” Two years ago, Circle of Blue documented the risks to Asia’s ten major rivers--the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim–as well as to hundreds of lesser streams that rely for water on snow, and glacial melt from the Tibetan Plateau and its young, heaven-scraping Himalayan range.

The mistake by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s preeminent climate research group, has only heaped more attention on the region. Three years ago the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Prize for its work to document the causes and effects of climate change, and for predicting an ecological calamity if emissions of carbon were not controlled. But in a too-hasty assessment of conditions in the Himalayas, the IPCC predicted wrongly that the region’s glaciers would be gone within 28 years.

Though the IPCC was embarrassed by its error on glacial melting, the panel’s substantive conclusion, that “more than one-sixth of the world’s population live in glacier-or snowmelt-fed river basins and will be affected by the seasonal shifts in stream flow,” was not jeopardized.

More recent studies conclude that without sharp changes in global policy to curtail carbon emissions the Himalayan glaciers–and there are more than 40,000 of them spread across the peaks and valleys of the Tibetan Plateau–could be mostly gone by 2070. The underlying and inescapable fact reached by scientists who study ice and the Himalayas is that atmospheric conditions are changing fast and dramatically.

A year ago Ravinder Kumar Chaujar, a scientist with India’s Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, published an important paper in Current Science on the increasing temperatures, diminishing accumulation of snow, and rapid retreat of the Chorabari glacier in northern India’s Himalayan territory. Surface temperatures around the glacier since 1980, said Chaujar, have increased 0.8 degrees Centigrade (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Average snow accumulation, Chaujar reported, has dropped from more than 2,000 kilograms per square meter in the decades of the 20th century to just over 1,500 kilograms per meter in 2006, the lowest snowfall in the 50 years of record-keeping.

Photo © Aaron Jaffe / Circle of Blue

Because glaciers provide regular pulses of freshwater that farmers in agricultural zones depend on in the spring and summer growing season, some agronomists worry that Asia’s already tenuous ability to feed itself could be at risk. This weekend, at the G20 economic summit in Toronto, heads of state briefly considered climate change and its effects on the global environment and food production. The leaders, in a statement that closed the two-day meeting, said the warming planet “remains top of the mind,” and that food security was an urgent global development challenge, which was being exacerbated by climate change.

“We want a comprehensive, ambitious, fair, effective, binding, post-2012 agreement involving all countries, and including the respective responsibilities of all major economies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” the leaders said.

It’s too bad that they weren’t shown David Brashear’s telling photographs, which explain why the IPCC scientists in 2007 were so pessimistic.

The blue glacial ice of such famed fields as Tibet’s Main Rongbuk Glacier below Mount Everest today are thin, black with soot, and shrinking. Climate scientists and geologists from China and India warn that the range of ice on the Tibet plateau and in the mountains could shrink by 43 percent by 2070. Between 1950 and 1980, about half of the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau were in recession, according to a number of studies. By the first decade of the 21st century, 95 percent were retreating.

Ya Tandong, a Chinese glaciologist, recently described in a UN report the condition of Himalayan glaciers this way: “Studies indicate that by 2030 another 30 percent will disappear. By 2050, 40 percent. By the end of the century 70 percent. The full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.”

Keith Schneider is a senior editor at Circle of Blue. Reach Schneider at keith@circleofblue.org. Read more about glacial melt in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) region and China-Tibet water issues on Circle of Blue.

Photo courtesy of Greenpeace

In the Komi Republic of northern Russia, eight months of oil spills during 1994 have transformed the tundra into a barren wasteland. Click image to enlarge photo gallery.

By Aubrey Ann Parker
Circle of Blue

Day 63. The unending torrent into the Gulf of Mexico–measuring 125 million gallons and growing–is the latest evidence that the planet’s devotion to oil is producing a new era of colossal environmental and economic damage. The deepwater blowout is fouling marshes and beaches in four states and laying waste to fisheries that employ thousands. The disaster also is confounding the U.S. government’s technical capacity to plug the leak, and setting new measures for calculating and collecting monetary damages.

Most importantly for the global environment, though, is that the BP PLC spill is just one of a growing number of environmental oil-related calamities that are scarring the earth, polluting the water, and threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Almost every continent is affected:

War on Water: Oil, Power and Poverty in the Niger Delta
After almost one year of a relative ceasefire, a clash between an aggressive guerrilla militia and the military has resumed this month in the Niger Delta over control of Nigeria’s oil revenues, thought to be hoarded by the wealthy and the southern region’s government.

Royal Shell Co., the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and Chevron all have stakes in the region’s lucrative resource, which as recently as 2008 produced 2.1 million barrels per day.

Photo © Ed Kashi

Members of the militant group MEND patrol the water of the Niger Delta. The river and streams serve as the primary fighting ground for control of Nigerian oil reserves, estimated at 36.22 billion barrels. Click image to enlarge photo gallery.

Rebels are blowing up pipelines, destroying equipment and ransoming oil workers as a way of protesting the corruption. The attacks have unleashed a new torrent of leaking oil, adding to the accumulation of oil-related environmental damage over the years. The series of canals and tributaries that cross the Niger Delta have been completely devastated by petroleum pollution since oil was discovered in 1956.

The Nigerian Federal Ministry of the Environment says that anywhere from 9 million to 13 million barrels (380-550 million gallons) have spilled each year during the history of oil production in the Niger Delta—the equivalent in size of the U.S. Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, but occurring annually for the last five decades. Meanwhile the United Nations estimates that nearly 7000 spills occurred between 1976 and 2001–half of which were due to corrosion of pipelines and storage tanks, while 28 percent were caused by sabotage.

Tens of thousands of residents were forced to evacuate the region last year, left to wade through the world’s third largest wetland in search of safer homes. Their lives are endangered not only by the fighting, but also by the toxins, industrial wastes and oil-slicks that are poisoning their drinking water as well as contaminating their fish.

Photo © Ed Kashi

Oil pipelines create a pathway for this young woman to walk through the village of Okrika Town, Nigeria. Click image to enlarge photo gallery.

“There are no heroes in this fight,” Ed Kashi, photographer of Curse of the Black Gold: 50 years of Oil in the Niger Delta, told Circle of Blue in May 2009. “It is the equivalent of gang warfare over turf and control, and instead of crack cocaine it’s oil, and instead of being on the main streets of a city, it’s out on rivers and creeks on small boats.”

Water Pollution in Ecuador’s Amazon Rainforest Drilling Zone
After 17 years of waiting for a court decision, more than 30,000 rainforest dwellers in Ecuador continue to hang in limbo. The community has taken on one of the largest companies in the world, Chevron, for allegedly having polluted nearly 2000 square miles of the Ecuadorian Amazon—an area the size of Rhode Island—turning the lush vegetation into a cancer death-zone.

Photo © Lou Dematteis

Chevron claims that these sites are not health hazards, but in the U.S. it wouldn’t even be a question,” Lou Dematteis, photographer of Crude Reflections: Oil, Ruin and Resistance in the Amazon Rainforest, told Circle of Blue. “There is standing oil, oil a foot under the ground—that would automatically become a Superfund site. The people living there wouldn’t have to go to court to prove that. You don’t have to do that in the States anymore, but you used to.”

Photo © Lou Dematteis/Redux

Modesta Briones, who used to bathe and wash clothes just downstream from an oil well, had her leg amputated to remove a cancerous tumor. Five years after her surgery, Briones died when the cancer spread through her body. Click image to enlarge photo gallery. Book link

The indigenous community asserts that 50 years of negligent drilling practices and the creation of hundreds of open-air, unlined pits have let toxic oilfield waste and crude oil seep into the ground and streams. The river water is used by the people for laundry, bathing, cooking and drinking and has caused higher rates of cancer than are found in the rest of the country, assert plaintiffs, who are seeking $US27 billion in damages. Records obtained by the plaintiffs indicate that 19 billion gallons of toxic wastewater and 17 million gallons of raw crude oil have been discharged into the rainforest, wrecking an indigenous way of life and an ecosystem.

Chevron insists that these inflated illness rates are caused by poor sanitation in the region. The oil giant, which inherited the lawsuit when it bought Texaco in 2001, says that Texaco cleaned up its share of the mess, and that the remainder is the responsibility of PetroEcuador, the local corporation.

“Back in 1993, there were mostly just digestive problems and skin rashes,” Dematteis said. “But a doctor with the Ecuadorian Ministry of Public Health told me there was so much pollution that there was going to be a plague of all different types of cancer. When I went back in 2003, that was exactly what had happened—in those ten years, there were so many people who had already died.”

Cutting Crude Corners in Northern Russia Causes Flood of Petroleum Pollution
A legacy of oil spills and dilapidated infrastructure linger in the far north Komi region of Russia, an oil development zone once known for its abundant fisheries and pristine waterways. After a series of major oil spills in 1994 totaling 730,000 barrels (30.6 million gallons), the fragile tundra is now a barren wasteland.

Photo courtesy of Greenpeace

International environmentalist group Greenpeace has been documenting the legacy of oil spills in the Komi region of Siberian Russia. Click image to enlarge photo gallery.

Rather than replacing 70 kilometers of antiquated infrastructure that had been leaking for months, Komineft, the local business opted to patch the holes. And while the company was fined $US600,000, it couldn’t pay for the majority of the cleanup because it was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Since there were not sufficient funds to cleanup the damage, more than 350 lakes in the Arctic region remain polluted with petroleum from leaking pipelines that have served the region since the first Soviet oil rig was built in 1974, according to a 2006 report by the International Science and Technology Center, an organization of former Soviet Union republics and Russia that facilitates external scientific exchanges.

The international community paid scant attention to the region’s ongoing spills until heavy rainfall in October of 1994 knocked out an earthen dam that had contained 20 percent of the region’s motherlode of contaminated water and crude. Oil raced through tributaries of the salmon-rich Pechora River, which drains into the Arctic Ocean. Komineft was accused of cutting corners and not making timely repairs.

Before the spill, communities downstream of the Komineft installation used the region’s rivers for domestic and commercial needs. One month after the October catastrophe, however, dangerous levels of contaminants were found in water samples, according to a World Bank report.

Photo courtesy of Greenpeace

According to one regional expert, the oil companies in the Komi region of Russia are willing to build new pipelines but not correct the dilapidated, existing systems. Click image to enlarge photo gallery.

Sixteen years after the Komineft petroleum spills devastated the Siberian landscape, archaic infrastructure remains a liability for Russia’s oil industry. In West Siberia, poorly constructed and maintained pipelines cause an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 accidents each year, with much of the spilled oil pouring into waterways, according to a report by IWACO BV Consultants for Water and Environment that was that was commissioned by Greenpeace.

“They are willing to spend money to build new pipelines but are reluctant to modernize the existing system,” said Robert Ebel, senior adviser of the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in an interview with Circle of Blue. “It can break anytime. I don’t know when, but it is inevitable.”

Scraping the Life From Alberta’s Tar Sands
Sometime later this year, according to Cambridge Energy Associates, a research group, the tar sands of Alberta, Canada will become the single largest source of imported oil to the United States. In order to reach the bitumen-saturated sands, huge strip mining equipment scrapes the boreal forest and the underlying soil and sediment away. Processing every barrel of oil demands four barrels of freshwater.

Toxic wastewater is stored in immense tailings ponds and lagoons so poisonous that waterfowl perish if they land on the surface, according to government reports. The lagoons, held back by earthen berms, are leaking into wetlands and the Athabasca River, which flows through northern Alberta, where the tar sands cover an area as large as North Carolina.

Tar sands development, which has produced a huge scar on the land that is easily visible from space, is the most environmentally damaging and polluting industrial enterprise of the 21st century, according to a number of studies by scientists and environmental advocates. Moreover, the feverish work to turn saturated sand into oil is just in its initial stages, with no end in sight.

Financial disclosure forms and other economic reports show that Exxon, Shell, BP and other oil companies are spending $US12 billion per year to accelerate the pace of production, which has quickly reached 1.3 million barrels per day and is climbing. The tar sands contain 1.7 trillion barrels of oil, according to the Canadian government, and a reserve of recoverable oil conservatively estimated at 173 billion barrels–second only to Saudi Arabia.

The governments of Canada and the U.S. are quietly negotiating agreements that will enable the oil industry to build pipelines from northern Alberta to America, where new refineries are proposed for Michigan, Maine and South Dakota.

View Catastrophic Oil Spills in a larger interactive map. Click on a number to read specific statistics about each of the Top 10 Global Oil Spills. Click on a blue circle to read specific statistics about each oil spill highlighted in this Circle of Blue special report.

Aubrey Ann Parker is a reporter for Circle of Blue where she specializes in data visualization. Reach her at aubrey@circleofblue.org.

Brett Walton, Molly Walton and Keith Schneider contributed reporting. Reach them at brett@circleofblue.org, mollyw@circleofblue.org, and keith@circleofblue.org.

Jordan Bates created the data visualization map. Reach him at jordan@circleofblue.org.

Photo © 2009 Brent Stirton/Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue.

By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Population growth, urban development, farm production, and climate change is increasing competition for fresh water and producing shortages so acute that virtually every industry in the world anticipates sweeping systemic transformation over the next decade in their strategic planning, production practices, and business models.

That is the conclusion of a global opinion poll of more than 1,200 sustainability experts conducted and made public today by GlobeScan, an international public and stakeholder opinion research firm, and SustainAbility, a think tank and business strategy consultancy.

Play “Q&A: SustainAbility Survey Finds Water Shortages Are Most Urgent Issue”

powered by Vertio.net

Jeff Erikson, senior vice president at SustainAbility, told Circle of Blue that the decisions executives make to respond to freshwater scarcity will penetrate almost every aspect of their business operations. For instance, executives who consider locating plants in China are likely to more carefully consider the consequences of rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau that feed some of China’s most important rivers. In the United States, manufacturers may shift new plants from the increasingly dry Southwest back to the water-rich Great Lakes region.

“Over the last 20 years water shortage has not been a lens that has been heavily considered in plant siting,” said Erikson. “That will change.”

Poll Results
The Sustainability Survey Poll on Water was conducted in more than 80 countries. Some 1,200 influential thought leaders from companies, governments, NGOs, and academia said that multi-faceted engagement with water will be required for companies and governments to effectively manage businesses and communities. The new SustainAbility and GlobeScan survey comes six months after a Circle of Blue/GlobeScan survey of 15,000 people in 15 countries found that water scarcity and water pollution are the top environmental concerns in the world. (See Sustainability Survey Poll on Water Infographics below.)

Along with return on investment, capital requirements, and quarterly returns companies that want to stay in business will need to add expertise to their staffs to manage the new market signals in the era of water scarcity. New business practices will stress water conservation and efficiency, ecosystem protection, public education and engagement. Companies also will need to anticipate market pressure to appropriately price water.

“Our panel of experts has been very good at predicting implications for companies in the sustainability agenda,” said Chris Coulter, senior vice president at GlobeScan. “These findings should sound the alarm for companies that haven’t yet established robust water strategies. This is about literally retaining license to operate in many parts of the world.”

Shortages Produce Systemic Change
The experts who were surveyed said water scarcity will deeply influence virtually every major company that wants to stay in business in the 21st century. Water shortages will shift public perception of the value of water, prompting governments and companies to view clean water not as a commodity to exploit but as a precious resource.

That in turn, for instance, will prompt food companies and farmers — who use 70 percent of the world’s fresh water — to develop much more effective water-conserving irrigation and production practices.

Water scarcity will change products and how they are marketed. For example, household appliance manufacturers are already touting water savings right alongside energy savings in their product advertising. And apparel manufacturers and retailers are exploring how to help consumers reduce water consumption by developing clothing fabrics that require less frequent washing.

Industrial companies, said Erikson, will add a new “layer of consideration” in how they operate to anticipate the consequence of fresh water shortages in their markets. They no longer will have the luxury of producing water-intensive products — cars, steel, chemicals, energy to name a few — in water stressed areas just because labor, land, and electricity costs are low. The availability of water in a water-scarce world will become a much higher priority in business decisions.

Communities that operate sewage treatment plants are likely to pursue partnerships with clean energy producers to fertilize algae and other biofuel crops with wastewater. Such crops also simultaneously soak up nutrients and purify wastewater, significantly reducing sewage pumping and treatment costs.

Reduce Demand, Increase Efficiency, “Footprint”
The experts polled by SustainAbility and GlobeScan strongly favored measures that reduce demand over those that increase supply. And rather than anticipating that new technology will solve the world’s water crisis, experts said that they expected better use of existing technologies coupled with more effective government policies and public education as offering more promise. Experts also cited strong links between water and energy in developing effective public policy.

Public and Expert Opinion on Global Water Issues
WaterViews || US Slideshow
Infographics || Visualize
World Water Week Video

“Private sector actions to reduce water use in supply chains, to cut pollution and to conserve are vital, welcome, and should be talked about,” said Maggie Catley-Carlson, former UN executive and chair of the Global Water Partnership, and a world-renowned expert on fresh water. “Companies should also be prepared to enter the public forum to expand knowledge and awareness – and to make public authorities feel that they will be supported in moving to better water policies. It is more and more evident that there is a growing, intuitive and widespread appreciation of the fact that access to water can no longer be taken for granted and that something must be done. We have to make it the right ‘something’.”

The poll’s experts said that companies will need to develop programs in “water footprinting” — understanding the full life-cycle impacts of a company’s operations and products — which they viewed as being as important or more important than carbon footprinting. In addition, corporations are expected to establish water management goals at the corporate-level as well as for specific facilities. When asked to identify corporate leaders in sustainable water management, Coca-Cola was cited most frequently followed by Nestlé, GE, SAB Miller, Pepsi, and Unilever.

“Stresses on water supply will continue to grow over the next couple of decades, causing increasingly difficult challenges for communities, regional and national governments and operating facilities across the corporate value chain,” said Erikson. “Companies that are planning now for the changes in their operations, supply chains and markets due to water shortages — rather than focusing only on reducing their direct water consumption — will be much better positioned to capture opportunities and minimize risks and disruptions.”

Keith Schneider, a journalist and producer, is senior editor of Circle of Blue. Reach him at keith@circleofblue.org.

Sustainability Survey Poll on Water

“Please rate the degree to which the following sectors will need to change their operations or business models as a result of water shortages over the next 10 years.”*

“Please rate the potential of each of the following policy measures to sustainably alleviate water shortages, both in the short- and long-term.”*

“Please rate the significance of each of the following barriers to the sustainable and equitable management of fresh water globally.”*

“Please rate the importance of each of the following issues in the transition to the sustainable and equitable management of fresh water globally.”*

*On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 represents “Not need to change at all” and 5 represents “Significant need to change.” The white space in this chart represents neutral ratings (3) and “DK/NA.”

Managing Director
J. Carl Ganter

Project Producers
J. Carl Ganter
Andrea Hart
Andrew Maddocks

Senior Editor
Keith Schneider

Interactive Editor
Eric Daigh

Web Production
Eric Daigh
Jordan Bates

“Divining Destiny” 2006

Field Reporting
Brent Stirton, Getty Images
J. Carl Ganter, Circle of Blue
Joseph Contreras
Scott Whiteford, director of Latin American Studies, University of Arizona
Brian Robertshaw

Original Project Design
Shane Iseminger, Ethos Media

Production
Wendy Desautels
Eileen Ganter

Picture Editing
Aaron Schindler
Karen Mullarkey

Production Staff
Nick Cain
Kyna Getsinger
Aaron Jaffe
Aric Kuester
Rich Odell
Lillie Wolff
Silvia Cortes-López

Pacific Institute
Peter Gleick
Pat Brenner

Getty Images
April Jenkins
Patie McNab

Acknowledgments
Magda Akle, Mario Bronfman, Jeffry Corbin, Pablo Farías, Barbara Goodbody, Dana Goodwin, Margie Araquistain, Raúl Hernández, Pablo Hernández, Brian Jaffe, Jennifer Jaffe, Lary lasusa, Jorge López, David Myhre, Soren Nielsen, Tonya Pole, Jonathan Wege, Alternativas, Broadleaf Foundation, Cherry Republic, Computer Haus, Nielsen Design Group, Symbiocycles Inc., Village Press

Primary funding for “Divining Destiny” was provided by the Ford Foundation.

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
China Environment Forum
Dr. Jennifer Turner, director
Peter Marsters, program assistant

Western Kentucky University Hoffman Institute
Dr. Chris Groves, director

Circle of Blue
J. Carl Ganter, managing director

Project Producers
Aaron Jaffe
Nadya Ivanova

Senior Editor
Keith Schneider

Reporter
Christina Larson

Interactive Editor
Eric Daigh

Text and Research
J. Carl Ganter, Chris Groves, Zhang Gui, Andrea Hart, Christina Larson, Andrew Maddocks, Keith Schneider, Jennifer Turner, Yue Ada Wu, Jiang Yongjun

Photography
J. Carl Ganter

Video Field Production
Brian Robertshaw
Aaron Jaffe
J. Carl Ganter

Video Script and Narration
Eileen E Ganter

Video Editing
Aaron Jaffe
Nadya Ivanova
Eileen E Ganter
Eric Daigh

Maps and Graphics
Hannah Nester
Eric Daigh

Additional Video
Tim Broekema and James Kenney, Western Kentucky University

Web Production
Eric Daigh
Jordan Bates

Photo Imaging
Eric Daigh

Acknowledgments
Orestes Anastasia, Priscilla Baker, Lee Anne Bledsoe, Amelia Chung, Yuan Daoxian, Geoff Dabelko, Linden Ellis, Maria-Stella Gatzoulis, Luo Hui, Pat Kambesis, John Pasch, Yue Ada Wu, Jun Yan

Southwest University, Chongqing
UNESCO International Research Center on Karst, Guilin,
Canon Professional Services
Fine Art Solutions
West Coast Imaging

Support

USAID
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Environmental Change and Security Project and China Environment Forum
The ENVIRON Foundation
Western Kentucky University
Hoffman Environmental Research Institute