With heat waves all over the world, are we on the edge of catastrophe? Renowned Swedish scientist Johan Rockström answers in a short TED presentation August 15, 2024. Chevron just announced a “new frontier” for oil: drilling deep below the sea. Alex checks similarities to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout – America’s worst marine disaster. A new article in the journal Nature asks: “What is the hottest temperature humans can survive?” We covered that with the lead scientist Ollie Jay in 2019.
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WHERE ARE WE WITH CLIMATE DISRUPTION?
NEW ASSESSMENT FROM JOHAN ROCKSTROM
What is happening with all this heat and crazy flash floods? We can’t find a better short big-picture summary than Swedish scientist Johan Rockström delivered at a TED Countdown event August 15, 2024. Rockstrom is the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and chief scientist at Conservation International. He is a Professor at both University of Potsdam and Stockholm University. Rockström is a pioneer in the work on “planetary boundaries” – the limits humanity and life on Earth must not pass.
The YouTube video text says: “We’re nearly halfway through the 2020s, dubbed the most decisive decade for action on climate change. Where exactly do things stand? Climate impact scholar Johan Rockström offers the most up-to-date scientific assessment of the state of the planet and explains what must be done to preserve Earth’s resilience to human pressure.”
It’s 19 minutes. I’ll add my comments after the recording. Here we go.
The Tipping Points of Climate Change — and Where We Stand | Johan Rockström | TED
ALEX AFTERWORDS: ROCKSTROM’S TED PRESENTATION
That was Swedish scientist and Potsdam Institute co-Director Johan Rockstrom speaking at a TED Countdown event August 15, 2023. This is the best, most trustworthy assessment of where we now stand with climate risk, in the big global picture.
But I have doubts about Rockstrom’s “we can still do it” conclusions – in two ways. First: yes humans COULD still avert an absolutely Hellish world that eventually destroys this civilization and drives many species to extinction. We can’t avoid a much hotter destabilized world, but we can leave a survivable climate still enjoyably livable in some places. That “window” is still open.
But Rockstrom fails to point out this is exactly what we are NOT doing. Fossil fuel burning is not decreasing. It is setting historic records. Major fossil fuel producing corporations and countries are actively building for still more production. The public, still seeking cheap gas, or any gas at all, is not even close to revolting against this model. They believe they will starve if the “drill, drill, drill” model is not the accepted plan. Everyone is content to put small bandages on a gaping wound and talk endlessly about emissions reductions decades away. We swallow green lies like bedtime stories for children.
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CHEVRON’S NEW FRONTIER: DRILL DEEPER
Investigating with Alex Smith
I’m going to focus on just one prime example of hair-raising suicidal schizophrenia. Chevron proudly announces they have developed a whole “new frontier” for more fossil fuels, drilling deep into the sea for oil and gas under enormous pressure. It’s expensive and very risky, with many similarities to the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 – the largest single marine pollution event in American history (and that is saying a lot! bigger than Exxon Valdez…)
To avoid deadly increases in heat – and destabilization of planetary weather systems – humans need to slash greenhouse gas emission between 7 and 10 percent every year, immediately. Instead we are increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The rate of carbon dioxide, the longest lasting greenhouse gas, has increased from a rise of 2 parts per million annually, to well over 3 parts per million. Consequently we already passed 420 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So the LAST thing living things need is a happy announcement that a whole “new frontier” of carbon is now coming onstream.
The ugly truth: there is plenty of coal, oil, and gas left to fry us all, and our descendants. New fracking reserves have been discovered all over the world. Fracking blows up the underground to release tiny amounts of gas and oil trapped in bubbles in the rock. We have already gone that far.
Some countries and multinational oil companies already announced a “new frontier” for fossil fuels in the Arctic. Shell tried to go for it – but withdrew amid a storm of criticism from environmentalists and actual storms in the Arctic. Greenpeace hung protesters on another drilling rig off Greenland. We don’t know what the Russians are doing off the coast of Siberia. So far, the drill the Arctic play has been mostly stalled off, keeping billions and billions of tons of oil and gas under the Arctic Sea.
But it’s like the game whack-a-mole. Just recently, we got another report that Antarctica has vast amounts of fossil fuels hidden below the ice. That’s another “new frontier” that has not yet been conquered.
FORGETTING THE LAST DEEP WATER DISASTER…
Of course the usual suspects like BP and Shell want to drill deeper and deeper into the sea bed for more profits. We all remember the utter disaster when this went wrong for BP in 2010. The Deepwater Horizon drill rig exploded, burned and sank, killing eleven, and leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. It was America’s worst single marine disaster.
The cause of that deep-sea blowout involved sloppy safety management, unexpected circumstances, rushed work to save money – and high pressure gases in the sea bed. Now Chevron is going even deeper. This time, the company says it developed technology to safely handle very high pressure pockets of gas and oil. It’s an all electric dream drilling rig, better for the environment, they say. What could possibly go wrong?
On August 12, 2024, Chevron put out it’s Press Release titled: “energy everywhere: a new frontier in deepwater development.” They call their new drilling rig “Anchor”. It is expected to produce 75,000 barrels of oil per day and 28 million gross cubic feet of natural gas every day.
The rig is 25 stories high, taller than the Statue of Liberty. It is connected to seven subsea wells, about 5,000 feet below the surface. Some estimate this one field could produce up toe 440 million barrels of oil equivalent, counting both oil and gas. That means approximately 189 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. This one rig alone could heat the planet by about 0.095°C. Industry experts suggest another five billion tons of fossil fuels may lie under the Gulf of Mexico alone. That would add almost 16 billions tons of CO2, leading to an increase of 2 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In other words, deep sea drilling in the American part of the Gulf of Mexico alone could produce additional greenhouse gases equal to about two thirds the total world increase of CO2 in 2022. This is a climate blow-out which cannot be allowed to happen.
Anchor is expected to produce for the next 30 years – well beyond true Net Zero requirements, well beyond the two degrees C. safety line, and during decades of ever-worsening climate-driven disasters, including in the Gulf of Mexico. Another similar rig from another company. Beacon Offshore Energy, in the Gulf of Mexico is already in the works opening mid-2025. This deep water high-pressure technology could spread around the world. Everyone with untapped oil and gas below the sea bed is watching. Are you listening Australia?
Big environmental groups should react quickly with public campaigns and protests. As with the Arctic, this “new frontier” of roasting the planet needs to be shut down and closed off. It can only accelerate destruction by a destabilized climate and hot-house world.
IS THIS THE NEXT DEEPWATER DISASTER?
Is this “new” technology really different from the disastrous Deepwater Horizon rig? Chevron says it is, while claiming the new rig is better for the environment.
There are entire web sites with pages and pages devoted to debunking “greenwash” from Chevron corporation. According to the The Climate Action 100+ Net Zero Company Benchmark, Chevron has not published any ambition to meet net zero or even reduce it’s greenhouse gas emissions. Chevron invests practically nothing of it’s vast income on renewable energy. They spend billions to find and produce more and more oil and gas, no matter what happens to the climate.
Meanwhile their executives say, quote “Like you, we at Chevron are committed to helping achieve a lower-carbon future”. Chevron says what they do is good, they do it “the right way” and they accept science.
So point one: this company is not a reliable source of information, may be misleading, and keeps all kinds of public costs and risks confidential.
Second: this “new technology” is not really all that new, compared to the destroyed Deepwater Horizon rig. These floating fuel collectors and like industrial cities loaded with explosive flows. There are over 100 workers onboard a platform this size, but Chevron has not detailed the amount of automation in their electronic control system. This rig was built by the same company that produced the Deepwater Horizon for BP: Transocean. Chevron called for the design and is the operator.
Let’s do some comparisons. Chevron says it’s rig can go up to 34,000 feet below sea level. The Deepwater Horizon (let’s call it DH) also claimed to drill up to 30,000 feet or 9,100 meters. Not much difference. The DH was drilling at a depth of about 20,000 feet when the explosion occurred, leading to the largest accidental marine oil spill in the world.
Chevron also makes a big deal about their advances in “all electric operation”. This supposedly reduces risk of mechanical failures routine with older hydraulic control systems. Sometimes a human turning a mechanical valve saved disasters. Electronic systems can fail due to lack of electricity, circuit failures, flooding, computer breakdown and hacking. Could the safety measures be turned off by a hostile government? The electricity comes from onboard big diesel generators, not green power.
Chevron says it has increased the amount of pressure their machinery can withstand, from 15,000 per square inch on the Deepwater Horizon to 20,000 psi for the new Chevron anchor. The company claims to have redesigned the crucial “blow-out preventer” that failed on the DH in 2010. Back then, nobody had submersibles with technology to fix a deep sea blowout. Are they ready now for the next accident?
It’s only a matter of time before the next big rig blows. And if these new frontier deep rigs work out as planned, the disaster for world climate and all of us is much worse. As Johan Rockstrom warned, we are already outside some planetary boundaries, and rapidly heading to irreversible tipping points. To survive over coming generations, humans need to make the deep sea bed into a protected area. No more fossil fuels.
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HOW HOW CAN HUMANS SURVIVE?
“What is the hottest temperature humans can survive?” That is the question in a new article in the top scientific journal “Nature”. On August 14, 2024, Carissa Wong finds “labs are redefining the limit’. We talked to the lead scientist at that Australian Lab, Ollie Jay. This was when the research first came out, in 2019,. Now that extreme heat is smashing records on every continent (including Antarctica) it is time to listen to Ollie Jay again.
Beat the Soaring Heat
Posted on December 20, 2023
Research into heat and the limits of human health with Dr. Ollie Jay, Director of the Heat and Health Research Incubator at the University of Sydney.
SEE ALSO: RADIO ECOSHOCK WITH DANIEL VECELLIO
Vecellio, D., Kong, Q., Kenney, L. & Huber, M. Greatly enhanced risk to humans as a consequence of empirically determined lower moist heat stress tolerance. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 120, e2305427120 (2023).
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WRAP IT ALL UP
This was supposed to be my summer vacation. Instead, we nervously watched wildfire news while struggling to keep our food garden alive in extreme heat.
In past summers, scientific publishing went sort of quiet. This summer, as scientists admit they don’t know what brought the jump in heat in 2023 and ’24, papers, new science, talks, and articles keep gushing out like an emergency fire hose. I’ve spoken with two field-leading scientists this week, with more coming, all for the new Radio Ecoshock season. Full new shows begin September 11th. That sounds ominous – and it is.
I’m Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, check out ecoshock.org, and stay tuned!