Monthly Archives: May 2015

To save the world’s large herbivores, we too must make them welcome

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Until relatively recently, lots of different massive mammals roamed across our planet.

Mastodons, mammoths, giant elk, rhinoceros-sized marsupials, sabre-toothed cats, marsupial lions, dire wolves, American cheetahs … the list goes on and on.

Then modern humans spread throughout the world and the vast majority of those large species disappeared. Our planet’s large mammal biodiversity is a shade of what it once was.

Sadly, research we’ve carried out shows that the large mammal extinctions of the past 2.5m years are continuing today – and smaller species are now also threatened.

Our new study, published in Science Advances, reviewed the threats, status and ecosystem services provided by the 74 largest terrestrial herbivores (exceeding 100kg in body mass), and the conservation effort required to save them from extinction.

Extinction threatens 60% of large herbivore species

Our results are highly concerning. The vast majority of these large herbivores are declining in distribution and abundance, such that 60% are now threatened with extinction.

These include well-known and iconic species such as elephants, hippos, all species of rhino, European bison and Indian water buffalo – but also less well-known species such as takin, kouprey, mountain and lowland anoa, and tamaraw.

The situation is likely to get worse and we risk leaving empty landscapes unless urgent and drastic action is undertaken.

Hunting, habitat loss and competition for food with livestock are the major threats to the world’s large herbivores. Simply identifying these threats is perhaps the most optimistic result of our study, as these are all issues that can be managed and reduced, provided there is sufficient human will to do so.

While Africa supports the greatest number of large herbivore species, south-east Asia retains the most that are threatened. The region’s woodlands are facing empty forest syndrome – where they seem intact, but there are few large animals left within them.

Overwhelmingly, it is developing countries that host the remaining megafauna – they are largely gone from the developed world. Consequently, these poorer nations bear the costs of protecting large herbivores, as well as the missed opportunity costs of setting aside large areas of land for conservation rather than food production. The developed world offers paltry support.

Research efforts also suffer from this same disparity. Data deficiency is the bane of conservation management, yet the most-studied large herbivores are the common game species. We know next to nothing about large and highly threatened wild pigs such as Oliver’s warty pig or the Palawan bearded pig, for instance.

Without adequate and targeted funding, it is hard to see this research occurring before it is too late for many of the developing world’s big herbivores.

Life without big beasts

A world without elephants, tapirs, hippos, giraffes or gorillas would be a much poorer place. Large herbivores are inspirational, and huge numbers of tourists travel the world to observe them.

Yet these species also perform fundamental roles in the ecosystems they inhabit and their loss would substantially alter the natural world.

African elephants knock over trees enabling shrubland to develop, for example. This shrubland benefits browsing species such as impalas and black rhinos. Elephants also make great seed dispersers and there are concerns that this ecosystem service is being lost in parts of Asia and Africa where they are becoming scarce.

Other large herbivores have also been shown to have a disproportionate impact on their environment, such that their decline is likely to have repercussions right along the food chain.

The return of bears and wolves to Europe illustrates that developed countries can succeed in conserving wildlife. These large carnivores can also play fundamental roles in their ecosystems, often by limiting numbers of common herbivores such as rabbit or deer, yet globally carnivores are also still in decline.

There are plans to reintroduce beavers, lynx and wild boar in the UK, as wolves have been returned to Yellowstone National Park in the US. But what about the mega-herbivores? Why don’t we bring back herds of wild cattle – the ecological equivalent and modern variant of the extinct aurochs – to the UK?

Governments are inherently risk averse when it comes to conservation initiatives, but they must start acting before it is too late for these majestic creatures.

 

 

Matt Hayward is Senior Lecturer in Conservation at Bangor University.

William Ripple is Distinguished Professor and Director, Trophic Cascades Program at Oregon State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 






‘Beyond petroleum’ – fracking’s collapse heralds the arrival of peak oil

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A few weeks ago tremors rocked the world of ‘fracking’ in the USA – though few heard them. The US Energy Information Agency (USEIA) had issued its latest Monthly Drilling Report and the news was not good.

It wasn’t simply the economic failure of fracking (covered in The Ecologist last December) and the subsequent collapse in drilling (covered in January). The news from the USEIA was far more grim for those who understood its deeper meaning. Their press release was very matter-of-fact:

“EIA’s most recent Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) indicates a change in the crude oil production growth patterns in three key oil producing regions… The DPR estimates include the first projected declines in crude oil production in these regions since publication of the DPR began in October 2013.”

In the shale oil producing areas of Eagle Ford, Niobrara, and the Bakken, production had reached a peak and was beginning to decline. What the USEIA is not clear about is whether this is the result of recent economics, or some longer-term trend.

This message was echoed a few weeks later in the Post Carbon Institutes’s new analysis of Marcellus shale production, along with a warning about the future prospects:

“Industry invariably drills its best prospects first, hence the cheapest gas is being exploited now. Infinite faith in technology cannot make up for the realities of geology. These realities are showing up now in the most productive counties.”

In Britain, emulating the USA, we’ve been told that we have to go all out to realise the ‘US shale energy revolution’. It has been sold to the public as a new economic Renaissance … what went wrong?

I have to begin a decade ago …

Ten years ago this month, in May 2005, I published my first book – Energy Beyond Oil (copies are still available from a few bookshops).

Long before $147 oil and the resultant economic crash that followed, the book analysed the evidence for the peaking of various energy resources, and the economic problems which might result from the practical reality of these phenomena.

‘Peak oil’ – or the peaks of other resources such as copper or rare metals – is not equivalent to ‘running out’. The ‘peak’ is the point in time when half the available non-renewable reserve has been extracted – somewhere between a half and two-fifths through the lifetime of the resource.

From that point on it gets progressively harder to maintain production. Supply begins to fall, and both the energy and resources expended to produce a given quantity of the resource begins to increase exponentially over time.

This effect is the result of the interaction of geology and economics:

  • Geology gives a natural distribution of resources – with a few large high-quality deposits, a slightly larger number of middling-quality deposits, and a lot of very small low-quality deposits.
  • Economics dictates we use the easiest to exploit and cheapest first, which means we use the biggest, easiest to access ones. Over time what’s left gets progressively harder and more expensive to produce as we work through the ‘stock’ of the resource.

The difficulty is that when we’re talking about essential industrial minerals and energy resources, tight supply and rising prices – like the trends operating across the decade of the 2000s – can destabilise the economy.

That’s very bad for business and our resource-consuming lifestyles.

In 2008 the crash came. What was worse, the warning signs related to the problems of finite energy supplies, ecological limits and debt were ignored; their message smothered beneath billions of pounds and trillions of dollars of quantitative easing.

As billions poured into the banks, all the bankers could do in the midst of a recession was to lend to the few large industrial investment projects which were under-way – such as ‘fracking’ in the USA, or the housing market in Britain.

By 2009 I found that people no longer wanted to talk about peak oil and its effects. They could experience that reality every day! As a result, in mid-2009, I shifted my work away from ecological limits into unconventional gas and oil production – aka ‘fracking’ – in Britain.

As with my shift into peak oil back around 2002, it was to become a fortuitous choice.

‘The death of peak oil’

The high oil prices of the 2000s led, by the end of the decade, to a concern about ‘peak oil’ and geopolitics. Once more people were researching and talking about the ecological ‘limits to growth’.

For neoliberal economists the offence of ecological limits is not that it seeks to describe physical trends with reference to historical statistics. The offence is that it attacks the philosophical heart of neoliberalism – because if energy supply cannot grow inexorably then neither can the global economy.

For the economic lobby fracking was a human-made miracle. It answered the criticisms of peak oil theory by alluding to a vast untapped resource of oil and gas that could be brought to the market by new technology and human ingenuity.

From 2011 the pro-fracking lobby began to spin a story of ‘the death of peak oil’. It was promoted by senior oil economists such as Daniel Yergin, and repeated uncritically in the media. When The Oil Drum, a peak oil analysts’ web site, closed in 2013, the pro-fracking economic lobby were ecstatic:

” … today, it is probably safe to say we have slayed ‘peak oil’ once and for all, thanks to the combination new shale oil and gas production techniques and declining fuel use.”

Peak oil defined by the existence of a web site? How absurd!

Peak oil’s not dead, it’s very much alive!

The deeper meaning of the USEIA’s announcement about the downturn in shale oil production is that – for the pro-fracking economic lobby – it represents the return of the monster they thought they’d slain.

In late 2014 – when the first signs of an impending collapse in fracking, and the exaggeration of the available resources came to light – the arguments over the ‘death of peak oil’, which had been quiet for a year, were dragged from the economic lobby’s closet.

Stories of the continued demise of peak oil were spread by the economic media and pro-fracking lobbyist sites.

Around this time I began watching the statistics on oil and gas production closely once more. And with the USEIA’s recent announcement, the reality has become clearer.

The quiet reality of North American oil

Canada produces a lot of conventional and unconventional oil – a large proportion of which gets sent to the USA. This fact is used as a positive message by the tar sands lobby to promote their industry.

What that message misses is that the whole of the continent of North American acts as a single market – in part due to NAFTA.

Mexico used to supply a lot of oil to the USA too, but production in the Cantarell field peaked in 2003 and is now in decline. For the last few years all that those increases in Canadian production have done is to roughly keep pace with the decline of Mexico’s production.

In the USA, yes they’ve produced a lot of new oil and gas from shale. What’s equally significant is that, as a result of the economic downturn, they’re also consuming 10% less oil than they were before the crash.

Within the North American energy system, the impacts of the US economic recession on consumption is every bit as important as all those fracking rigs. In the global context too, the recent Chinese economic slowdown is a major factor in OPEC having the ability to floor the price of oil, thereby curtailing unconventional sources of oil.

The figures are clear – we’ve peaked!

If we take the data from the BP Annual Statistical Review for 2014, global oil supply was higher than in any other previous year. Peak oil averted? – arguably not.

BP’s figures include fracked shale oil, Canadian tar sands, and natural gas liquids from unconventional gas production. As outlined recently by the USEIA and Post Carbon Institute, shale oil is beginning to hit the limits of production. In Canada too, production is being constrained by a lack of new investment due to currently low prices.

The other major factor is that, even amongst conventional producers, all is not rosy. Six nations produce half the worlds oil, three of which have peaked conventional production; 14 produce 75%, six of which are arguably past their conventional oil peak.

For the last decade fracking and tar sands have produced enough oil to influence the global figure – but only by a few percent. Strip out that few percent of unconventional oil (let’s ignore the gas liquids for now) and that small buffer evaporates.

Once shale production falls significantly, or Mexico or another key producer begins to hit the steeper part of their depletion curve, or just a few more oil producers reach their peak, production will fall more steeply – portending yet another global energy, then economic crisis.

Without the small contribution from unconventional oil, global oil production peaked in 2005, and has been on a very gradual downward trajectory ever since. This is the cleft stick within today’s global energy supply: too little ‘cheap energy’ to enable economic growth, too low a return on capital to allow investment in higher production.

In terms of a definition of ‘peak oil’ which encompasses both its economic and geophysical nature – this is a situation which demonstrates the reality of oil’s ecological limits.

Today, doubts over the future of unconventional oil make peak oil a reality.

If prices rise, won’t fracking and tar sands make a comeback?

If supply falls, and prices rise, won’t we just start the whole bandwagon over again? That depends upon the economic conditions the other side of the crisis.

During the early 2000s ‘gas fracking’ in the US arose under the lax credit arrangements which existed in the USA before the 2007/8 economic crash. After the 2008/9 crash most of those gas rigs were withdrawn and re-directed to oil production. What has fuelled ‘oil fracking’ since 2009 has been near-zero interest rates and the ‘cheap’ money created by quantitative easing.

Also, given what we know about unconventional fossil fuels today – their impacts upon the climate, and human health, and their unwholesome relationship with political power and academia – the public are in a far better position to resist any attempt to resurrect the industry.

More significantly, any meaningful climate deal in Paris in December will have to put limits on global fossil fuel production. As the dirtiest fossil fuels, fracking and tar sands would have to be on the list of what we must ‘keep in the ground’.

The Age of Oil is winding down – it has been doing so since 2005. In a greenhouse gas constrained world, where the swift adaptation of our food system to climate change is arguably a higher priority than fuelling private cars or passenger air travel, there is no room for unconventional fossil fuels.

Of course the neoliberal economists who chuckled at the ‘death of peak oil’ will scream with rage! Peak oil hasn’t just refused to die; it’s alive and well and perturbing their economic models once more.

That’s their own ideological problem. They will have to adapt their theories in the face of peak oil’s statistical reality, or stand aside and allow ecological economists – who do internalise these factors – to begin guiding society on a new path.

That’s the real implication of peak oil.

The data on this and other ecological issues indicates that the core of neoliberal theory – of continual growth, technological progress and monetary wealth creation – is fatally flawed.

Just as energy and industrial planners will inevitably need to find solutions beyond oil, governments will need to go back to the drawing board and find new model for the political economy.

 

 

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental consultant, investigator, author and lecturer, and maintains the Free Range Activism Website (FRAW).

A new study on the downturn in ‘fracking’, Ecolonomics 16, is available from Paul Mobbs’ web site, FRAW.

A referenced version of this article, with graphics illustrating the USEIA’s recent statistics, is also available on FRAW.

 

 






In Nepal’s next big quake, hydropower dams threaten catastrophe

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After the 25th April earthquake in Nepal, China sent in large teams to rescue quake victims. But it was also intent on rescuing its own people.

A delicate operation got under way to reach 280 Chinese construction workers trapped at a dam construction site around 40 miles from the earthquake epicentre.

Two workers were killed by the quake, and others were injured. The 110-MW Rasuwagadhi Dam was being built on the upper Trishuli River in a very remote corner of Nepal near the Tibetan border.

China imports its own construction workers to build these megadams, though locals are used for manual labour tasks. This is one of three megadams currently being built in Nepal by Chinese state-run Three Gorges Corporation, with a dozen more on the horizon for a dam cascade on the Trishuli River.

Three Gorges Corporation has mastered the technology for building behemoth dams, and the projects in Nepal are growing larger: West Seti Dam is slated to generate 750 MW of power.

And underlining the risks it will create, the dam’s reservoir is to stretch back 16 miles (25km), holding back 1,200,000 acre-feet (1.5 cubic kilometres) of water. Just imagine the devastation that would cause if an earthquake let it all go at once!

Three Gorges Corporation has projects around the world, particularly in third-world nations – many of them highly controversial because of environmental concerns. The company itself has been implicated in scandals in China involving corruption and shady practices.

At Rasuwagadhi Dam site, huge rockslides and falling debris hampered rescue attempts: Chinese engineers and construction workers were eventually helicoptered out across the border into Tibet, with assistance from the People’s Liberation Army. A handful of Chinese engineers remained to supervise the damaged site.

Nepalese workers were left to fend for themselves, and trek out.

How long before Nepal’s ‘Fukushima Moment’?

Here’s a statistic: the gigantic Three Gorges Dam in China was built to withstand the forces of a 7-magnitude earthquake, and is able to withstand an 8-magnitude earthquake for a short time, according to the company. That is where the engineering problems lie: the quake in Nepal was 7.9 magnitude.

Rasuwagadhi Dam was described as severely damaged by the quake. And that brings up a nightmare scenario. What if that dam were up and running, with a huge reservoir sitting behind it?

If an earthquake topples such a dam, that would unleash a massive torrent of water and rubble, taking out scores of villages downstream. It would be a Fukushima moment – earthquake followed by tsunami.

Only in this case, an inland tsunami would be unleashed on a river. The megadam becomes a lethal hydro-bomb, piling horror upon horror.

Increasingly, as more dams are built on Himalayan rivers, this nightmare scenario is given more chance of playing out. With the highest mountains in the world on its northern borders, Nepal is particularly rich in hydropower potential.

All over the Himalayas, a dam-building frenzy

Few of Nepal’s rivers have been tapped for large dams. But that is rapidly changing. Dozens of dams are in the works there, under construction particularly by China and India.

Across the Himalayas, in Tibet, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Nepal, hundreds of large dams are on the drawing board, in an unprecedented wave of dam-building.

Very little impact assessment is done for these dams. And there is a high risk that they will be located in a seismic zone. In 2012, researchers at Canadian NGO Probe International examined locations for dams on a number of Himalayan rivers including the Yarlung Tsangpo, Salween, Mekong and Yangtse.

Their report, ‘Earthquake Hazards and Large Dams in Western China‘, found that 48.2% of them would be sites in zones of high seismic activity, while 50.4% would be in zones of moderate seismic activity. That would leave only 1.4% found in zones of low seismic activity.

The report concluded that China is embarking on a major experiment with potentially disastrous consequences by building over 100 megadams in regions of known high seismicity.

That’s one good reason why mega-dams should not be built on Himalayan rivers. Another reason is that dam-building has been connected to actually triggering an earthquake, in a phenomenon known as ‘reservoir-induced seismicity’.

For example the building of Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan Province in China has been implicated in the disastrous quake of 2008 that killed over 85,000 people and left millions homeless: the dam was just 4 miles from the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake.

The quake cracked Zipingpu Dam and caused damage to 60 other smaller dams in the region. Dam personnel and miliary rushed to empty water from scores of dam reservoirs, causing considerable flooding downstream.

Ecological destruction, loss of land, fish and livelihoods

But the fundamental reason that megadams should not be built in Nepal is that they destroy ecosystems. Rivers are lifelines for the communities along their banks, supplying water for irrigation: megadams impact entire ecosystems by blocking nutrient-rich silt, essential for agriculture, and by blocking fish migration.

In Nepal, it’s clear that the government has woefully inadequate resources to deal with an emergency situation on the scale of the recent earthquake, let alone a disaster involving a megadam. Yet when it comes to signing lucrative contracts for megadams with nations like China and India, the Nepalese government is quick to act.

Two months ago, I was rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi river, north of Kathmandu. Paddling down the river we passed a small group of buildings, with signs displayed in Chinese. It was part of a Chinese operation for building a 100 MW dam further upstream near the Tibetan border.

The Chinese construction crew all came out to wave at us as we drifted by. Our captain did not wave back: he said they might as well be waving the river goodbye.

The owner of the rafting company told me that once the dam starts operation, that would be the end of rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi, and villagers along the river would suffer dire consequences.

All his efforts failed – until nature stepped in

He tried everything to stop construction of the dam – taking the dambuilders to court, involving Nepalese celebrities in a campaign, petitioning Nepalese leaders and politicians, and garnering community support to try and block the dam and save the ecosystem on which their livelihoods depend for growing crops.

All to no avail. The dam is going ahead.

Once the dam is completed, the villagers will probably have to relocate. It’s a sad but familiar refrain: power, greed and corruption in Nepal trump the need to preserve the environment. In Nepal, the cost of rampant megadam building could be catastrophic.

In this case, Mother Nature appears to have stepped in: the dam on the upper Bhote Kosi lies in an area that was devastated by the recent earthquake, most likely setting the dam-builders back a few years on their schedule.

 

 

Michael Buckley is an adventure travel writer, environmental investigator, author of ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘, and filmmaker for three short documentaries about environmental issues in Tibet.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Damming Tibet: China’s destruction of Tibet’s rivers, environment and people‘ by Michael Buckley.

The book: ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘ by Michael Buckley is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

The films: See www.WildYakFilms.com. The most recent short documentary is ‘Plundering Tibet‘, about the devastating impact of mining in Tibet. See also the Facebook page: facebook.com/MeltdowninTibet/.

 

 






To save the world’s large herbivores, we too must make them welcome

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Until relatively recently, lots of different massive mammals roamed across our planet.

Mastodons, mammoths, giant elk, rhinoceros-sized marsupials, sabre-toothed cats, marsupial lions, dire wolves, American cheetahs … the list goes on and on.

Then modern humans spread throughout the world and the vast majority of those large species disappeared. Our planet’s large mammal biodiversity is a shade of what it once was.

Sadly, research we’ve carried out shows that the large mammal extinctions of the past 2.5m years are continuing today – and smaller species are now also threatened.

Our new study, published in Science Advances, reviewed the threats, status and ecosystem services provided by the 74 largest terrestrial herbivores (exceeding 100kg in body mass), and the conservation effort required to save them from extinction.

Extinction threatens 60% of large herbivore species

Our results are highly concerning. The vast majority of these large herbivores are declining in distribution and abundance, such that 60% are now threatened with extinction.

These include well-known and iconic species such as elephants, hippos, all species of rhino, European bison and Indian water buffalo – but also less well-known species such as takin, kouprey, mountain and lowland anoa, and tamaraw.

The situation is likely to get worse and we risk leaving empty landscapes unless urgent and drastic action is undertaken.

Hunting, habitat loss and competition for food with livestock are the major threats to the world’s large herbivores. Simply identifying these threats is perhaps the most optimistic result of our study, as these are all issues that can be managed and reduced, provided there is sufficient human will to do so.

While Africa supports the greatest number of large herbivore species, south-east Asia retains the most that are threatened. The region’s woodlands are facing empty forest syndrome – where they seem intact, but there are few large animals left within them.

Overwhelmingly, it is developing countries that host the remaining megafauna – they are largely gone from the developed world. Consequently, these poorer nations bear the costs of protecting large herbivores, as well as the missed opportunity costs of setting aside large areas of land for conservation rather than food production. The developed world offers paltry support.

Research efforts also suffer from this same disparity. Data deficiency is the bane of conservation management, yet the most-studied large herbivores are the common game species. We know next to nothing about large and highly threatened wild pigs such as Oliver’s warty pig or the Palawan bearded pig, for instance.

Without adequate and targeted funding, it is hard to see this research occurring before it is too late for many of the developing world’s big herbivores.

Life without big beasts

A world without elephants, tapirs, hippos, giraffes or gorillas would be a much poorer place. Large herbivores are inspirational, and huge numbers of tourists travel the world to observe them.

Yet these species also perform fundamental roles in the ecosystems they inhabit and their loss would substantially alter the natural world.

African elephants knock over trees enabling shrubland to develop, for example. This shrubland benefits browsing species such as impalas and black rhinos. Elephants also make great seed dispersers and there are concerns that this ecosystem service is being lost in parts of Asia and Africa where they are becoming scarce.

Other large herbivores have also been shown to have a disproportionate impact on their environment, such that their decline is likely to have repercussions right along the food chain.

The return of bears and wolves to Europe illustrates that developed countries can succeed in conserving wildlife. These large carnivores can also play fundamental roles in their ecosystems, often by limiting numbers of common herbivores such as rabbit or deer, yet globally carnivores are also still in decline.

There are plans to reintroduce beavers, lynx and wild boar in the UK, as wolves have been returned to Yellowstone National Park in the US. But what about the mega-herbivores? Why don’t we bring back herds of wild cattle – the ecological equivalent and modern variant of the extinct aurochs – to the UK?

Governments are inherently risk averse when it comes to conservation initiatives, but they must start acting before it is too late for these majestic creatures.

 

 

Matt Hayward is Senior Lecturer in Conservation at Bangor University.

William Ripple is Distinguished Professor and Director, Trophic Cascades Program at Oregon State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 






‘Beyond petroleum’ – fracking’s collapse heralds the arrival of peak oil

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A few weeks ago tremors rocked the world of ‘fracking’ in the USA – though few heard them. The US Energy Information Agency (USEIA) had issued its latest Monthly Drilling Report and the news was not good.

It wasn’t simply the economic failure of fracking (covered in The Ecologist last December) and the subsequent collapse in drilling (covered in January). The news from the USEIA was far more grim for those who understood its deeper meaning. Their press release was very matter-of-fact:

“EIA’s most recent Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) indicates a change in the crude oil production growth patterns in three key oil producing regions… The DPR estimates include the first projected declines in crude oil production in these regions since publication of the DPR began in October 2013.”

In the shale oil producing areas of Eagle Ford, Niobrara, and the Bakken, production had reached a peak and was beginning to decline. What the USEIA is not clear about is whether this is the result of recent economics, or some longer-term trend.

This message was echoed a few weeks later in the Post Carbon Institutes’s new analysis of Marcellus shale production, along with a warning about the future prospects:

“Industry invariably drills its best prospects first, hence the cheapest gas is being exploited now. Infinite faith in technology cannot make up for the realities of geology. These realities are showing up now in the most productive counties.”

In Britain, emulating the USA, we’ve been told that we have to go all out to realise the ‘US shale energy revolution’. It has been sold to the public as a new economic Renaissance … what went wrong?

I have to begin a decade ago …

Ten years ago this month, in May 2005, I published my first book – Energy Beyond Oil (copies are still available from a few bookshops).

Long before $147 oil and the resultant economic crash that followed, the book analysed the evidence for the peaking of various energy resources, and the economic problems which might result from the practical reality of these phenomena.

‘Peak oil’ – or the peaks of other resources such as copper or rare metals – is not equivalent to ‘running out’. The ‘peak’ is the point in time when half the available non-renewable reserve has been extracted – somewhere between a half and two-fifths through the lifetime of the resource.

From that point on it gets progressively harder to maintain production. Supply begins to fall, and both the energy and resources expended to produce a given quantity of the resource begins to increase exponentially over time.

This effect is the result of the interaction of geology and economics:

  • Geology gives a natural distribution of resources – with a few large high-quality deposits, a slightly larger number of middling-quality deposits, and a lot of very small low-quality deposits.
  • Economics dictates we use the easiest to exploit and cheapest first, which means we use the biggest, easiest to access ones. Over time what’s left gets progressively harder and more expensive to produce as we work through the ‘stock’ of the resource.

The difficulty is that when we’re talking about essential industrial minerals and energy resources, tight supply and rising prices – like the trends operating across the decade of the 2000s – can destabilise the economy.

That’s very bad for business and our resource-consuming lifestyles.

In 2008 the crash came. What was worse, the warning signs related to the problems of finite energy supplies, ecological limits and debt were ignored; their message smothered beneath billions of pounds and trillions of dollars of quantitative easing.

As billions poured into the banks, all the bankers could do in the midst of a recession was to lend to the few large industrial investment projects which were under-way – such as ‘fracking’ in the USA, or the housing market in Britain.

By 2009 I found that people no longer wanted to talk about peak oil and its effects. They could experience that reality every day! As a result, in mid-2009, I shifted my work away from ecological limits into unconventional gas and oil production – aka ‘fracking’ – in Britain.

As with my shift into peak oil back around 2002, it was to become a fortuitous choice.

‘The death of peak oil’

The high oil prices of the 2000s led, by the end of the decade, to a concern about ‘peak oil’ and geopolitics. Once more people were researching and talking about the ecological ‘limits to growth’.

For neoliberal economists the offence of ecological limits is not that it seeks to describe physical trends with reference to historical statistics. The offence is that it attacks the philosophical heart of neoliberalism – because if energy supply cannot grow inexorably then neither can the global economy.

For the economic lobby fracking was a human-made miracle. It answered the criticisms of peak oil theory by alluding to a vast untapped resource of oil and gas that could be brought to the market by new technology and human ingenuity.

From 2011 the pro-fracking lobby began to spin a story of ‘the death of peak oil’. It was promoted by senior oil economists such as Daniel Yergin, and repeated uncritically in the media. When The Oil Drum, a peak oil analysts’ web site, closed in 2013, the pro-fracking economic lobby were ecstatic:

” … today, it is probably safe to say we have slayed ‘peak oil’ once and for all, thanks to the combination new shale oil and gas production techniques and declining fuel use.”

Peak oil defined by the existence of a web site? How absurd!

Peak oil’s not dead, it’s very much alive!

The deeper meaning of the USEIA’s announcement about the downturn in shale oil production is that – for the pro-fracking economic lobby – it represents the return of the monster they thought they’d slain.

In late 2014 – when the first signs of an impending collapse in fracking, and the exaggeration of the available resources came to light – the arguments over the ‘death of peak oil’, which had been quiet for a year, were dragged from the economic lobby’s closet.

Stories of the continued demise of peak oil were spread by the economic media and pro-fracking lobbyist sites.

Around this time I began watching the statistics on oil and gas production closely once more. And with the USEIA’s recent announcement, the reality has become clearer.

The quiet reality of North American oil

Canada produces a lot of conventional and unconventional oil – a large proportion of which gets sent to the USA. This fact is used as a positive message by the tar sands lobby to promote their industry.

What that message misses is that the whole of the continent of North American acts as a single market – in part due to NAFTA.

Mexico used to supply a lot of oil to the USA too, but production in the Cantarell field peaked in 2003 and is now in decline. For the last few years all that those increases in Canadian production have done is to roughly keep pace with the decline of Mexico’s production.

In the USA, yes they’ve produced a lot of new oil and gas from shale. What’s equally significant is that, as a result of the economic downturn, they’re also consuming 10% less oil than they were before the crash.

Within the North American energy system, the impacts of the US economic recession on consumption is every bit as important as all those fracking rigs. In the global context too, the recent Chinese economic slowdown is a major factor in OPEC having the ability to floor the price of oil, thereby curtailing unconventional sources of oil.

The figures are clear – we’ve peaked!

If we take the data from the BP Annual Statistical Review for 2014, global oil supply was higher than in any other previous year. Peak oil averted? – arguably not.

BP’s figures include fracked shale oil, Canadian tar sands, and natural gas liquids from unconventional gas production. As outlined recently by the USEIA and Post Carbon Institute, shale oil is beginning to hit the limits of production. In Canada too, production is being constrained by a lack of new investment due to currently low prices.

The other major factor is that, even amongst conventional producers, all is not rosy. Six nations produce half the worlds oil, three of which have peaked conventional production; 14 produce 75%, six of which are arguably past their conventional oil peak.

For the last decade fracking and tar sands have produced enough oil to influence the global figure – but only by a few percent. Strip out that few percent of unconventional oil (let’s ignore the gas liquids for now) and that small buffer evaporates.

Once shale production falls significantly, or Mexico or another key producer begins to hit the steeper part of their depletion curve, or just a few more oil producers reach their peak, production will fall more steeply – portending yet another global energy, then economic crisis.

Without the small contribution from unconventional oil, global oil production peaked in 2005, and has been on a very gradual downward trajectory ever since. This is the cleft stick within today’s global energy supply: too little ‘cheap energy’ to enable economic growth, too low a return on capital to allow investment in higher production.

In terms of a definition of ‘peak oil’ which encompasses both its economic and geophysical nature – this is a situation which demonstrates the reality of oil’s ecological limits.

Today, doubts over the future of unconventional oil make peak oil a reality.

If prices rise, won’t fracking and tar sands make a comeback?

If supply falls, and prices rise, won’t we just start the whole bandwagon over again? That depends upon the economic conditions the other side of the crisis.

During the early 2000s ‘gas fracking’ in the US arose under the lax credit arrangements which existed in the USA before the 2007/8 economic crash. After the 2008/9 crash most of those gas rigs were withdrawn and re-directed to oil production. What has fuelled ‘oil fracking’ since 2009 has been near-zero interest rates and the ‘cheap’ money created by quantitative easing.

Also, given what we know about unconventional fossil fuels today – their impacts upon the climate, and human health, and their unwholesome relationship with political power and academia – the public are in a far better position to resist any attempt to resurrect the industry.

More significantly, any meaningful climate deal in Paris in December will have to put limits on global fossil fuel production. As the dirtiest fossil fuels, fracking and tar sands would have to be on the list of what we must ‘keep in the ground’.

The Age of Oil is winding down – it has been doing so since 2005. In a greenhouse gas constrained world, where the swift adaptation of our food system to climate change is arguably a higher priority than fuelling private cars or passenger air travel, there is no room for unconventional fossil fuels.

Of course the neoliberal economists who chuckled at the ‘death of peak oil’ will scream with rage! Peak oil hasn’t just refused to die; it’s alive and well and perturbing their economic models once more.

That’s their own ideological problem. They will have to adapt their theories in the face of peak oil’s statistical reality, or stand aside and allow ecological economists – who do internalise these factors – to begin guiding society on a new path.

That’s the real implication of peak oil.

The data on this and other ecological issues indicates that the core of neoliberal theory – of continual growth, technological progress and monetary wealth creation – is fatally flawed.

Just as energy and industrial planners will inevitably need to find solutions beyond oil, governments will need to go back to the drawing board and find new model for the political economy.

 

 

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental consultant, investigator, author and lecturer, and maintains the Free Range Activism Website (FRAW).

A new study on the downturn in ‘fracking’, Ecolonomics 16, is available from Paul Mobbs’ web site, FRAW.

A referenced version of this article, with graphics illustrating the USEIA’s recent statistics, is also available on FRAW.

 

 






In Nepal’s next big quake, hydropower dams threaten catastrophe

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After the 25th April earthquake in Nepal, China sent in large teams to rescue quake victims. But it was also intent on rescuing its own people.

A delicate operation got under way to reach 280 Chinese construction workers trapped at a dam construction site around 40 miles from the earthquake epicentre.

Two workers were killed by the quake, and others were injured. The 110-MW Rasuwagadhi Dam was being built on the upper Trishuli River in a very remote corner of Nepal near the Tibetan border.

China imports its own construction workers to build these megadams, though locals are used for manual labour tasks. This is one of three megadams currently being built in Nepal by Chinese state-run Three Gorges Corporation, with a dozen more on the horizon for a dam cascade on the Trishuli River.

Three Gorges Corporation has mastered the technology for building behemoth dams, and the projects in Nepal are growing larger: West Seti Dam is slated to generate 750 MW of power.

And underlining the risks it will create, the dam’s reservoir is to stretch back 16 miles (25km), holding back 1,200,000 acre-feet (1.5 cubic kilometres) of water. Just imagine the devastation that would cause if an earthquake let it all go at once!

Three Gorges Corporation has projects around the world, particularly in third-world nations – many of them highly controversial because of environmental concerns. The company itself has been implicated in scandals in China involving corruption and shady practices.

At Rasuwagadhi Dam site, huge rockslides and falling debris hampered rescue attempts: Chinese engineers and construction workers were eventually helicoptered out across the border into Tibet, with assistance from the People’s Liberation Army. A handful of Chinese engineers remained to supervise the damaged site.

Nepalese workers were left to fend for themselves, and trek out.

How long before Nepal’s ‘Fukushima Moment’?

Here’s a statistic: the gigantic Three Gorges Dam in China was built to withstand the forces of a 7-magnitude earthquake, and is able to withstand an 8-magnitude earthquake for a short time, according to the company. That is where the engineering problems lie: the quake in Nepal was 7.9 magnitude.

Rasuwagadhi Dam was described as severely damaged by the quake. And that brings up a nightmare scenario. What if that dam were up and running, with a huge reservoir sitting behind it?

If an earthquake topples such a dam, that would unleash a massive torrent of water and rubble, taking out scores of villages downstream. It would be a Fukushima moment – earthquake followed by tsunami.

Only in this case, an inland tsunami would be unleashed on a river. The megadam becomes a lethal hydro-bomb, piling horror upon horror.

Increasingly, as more dams are built on Himalayan rivers, this nightmare scenario is given more chance of playing out. With the highest mountains in the world on its northern borders, Nepal is particularly rich in hydropower potential.

All over the Himalayas, a dam-building frenzy

Few of Nepal’s rivers have been tapped for large dams. But that is rapidly changing. Dozens of dams are in the works there, under construction particularly by China and India.

Across the Himalayas, in Tibet, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Nepal, hundreds of large dams are on the drawing board, in an unprecedented wave of dam-building.

Very little impact assessment is done for these dams. And there is a high risk that they will be located in a seismic zone. In 2012, researchers at Canadian NGO Probe International examined locations for dams on a number of Himalayan rivers including the Yarlung Tsangpo, Salween, Mekong and Yangtse.

Their report, ‘Earthquake Hazards and Large Dams in Western China‘, found that 48.2% of them would be sites in zones of high seismic activity, while 50.4% would be in zones of moderate seismic activity. That would leave only 1.4% found in zones of low seismic activity.

The report concluded that China is embarking on a major experiment with potentially disastrous consequences by building over 100 megadams in regions of known high seismicity.

That’s one good reason why mega-dams should not be built on Himalayan rivers. Another reason is that dam-building has been connected to actually triggering an earthquake, in a phenomenon known as ‘reservoir-induced seismicity’.

For example the building of Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan Province in China has been implicated in the disastrous quake of 2008 that killed over 85,000 people and left millions homeless: the dam was just 4 miles from the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake.

The quake cracked Zipingpu Dam and caused damage to 60 other smaller dams in the region. Dam personnel and miliary rushed to empty water from scores of dam reservoirs, causing considerable flooding downstream.

Ecological destruction, loss of land, fish and livelihoods

But the fundamental reason that megadams should not be built in Nepal is that they destroy ecosystems. Rivers are lifelines for the communities along their banks, supplying water for irrigation: megadams impact entire ecosystems by blocking nutrient-rich silt, essential for agriculture, and by blocking fish migration.

In Nepal, it’s clear that the government has woefully inadequate resources to deal with an emergency situation on the scale of the recent earthquake, let alone a disaster involving a megadam. Yet when it comes to signing lucrative contracts for megadams with nations like China and India, the Nepalese government is quick to act.

Two months ago, I was rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi river, north of Kathmandu. Paddling down the river we passed a small group of buildings, with signs displayed in Chinese. It was part of a Chinese operation for building a 100 MW dam further upstream near the Tibetan border.

The Chinese construction crew all came out to wave at us as we drifted by. Our captain did not wave back: he said they might as well be waving the river goodbye.

The owner of the rafting company told me that once the dam starts operation, that would be the end of rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi, and villagers along the river would suffer dire consequences.

All his efforts failed – until nature stepped in

He tried everything to stop construction of the dam – taking the dambuilders to court, involving Nepalese celebrities in a campaign, petitioning Nepalese leaders and politicians, and garnering community support to try and block the dam and save the ecosystem on which their livelihoods depend for growing crops.

All to no avail. The dam is going ahead.

Once the dam is completed, the villagers will probably have to relocate. It’s a sad but familiar refrain: power, greed and corruption in Nepal trump the need to preserve the environment. In Nepal, the cost of rampant megadam building could be catastrophic.

In this case, Mother Nature appears to have stepped in: the dam on the upper Bhote Kosi lies in an area that was devastated by the recent earthquake, most likely setting the dam-builders back a few years on their schedule.

 

 

Michael Buckley is an adventure travel writer, environmental investigator, author of ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘, and filmmaker for three short documentaries about environmental issues in Tibet.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Damming Tibet: China’s destruction of Tibet’s rivers, environment and people‘ by Michael Buckley.

The book: ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘ by Michael Buckley is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

The films: See www.WildYakFilms.com. The most recent short documentary is ‘Plundering Tibet‘, about the devastating impact of mining in Tibet. See also the Facebook page: facebook.com/MeltdowninTibet/.

 

 






In Nepal’s next big quake, hydropower dams threaten catastrophe

Leave a reply




After the 25th April earthquake in Nepal, China sent in large teams to rescue quake victims. But it was also intent on rescuing its own people.

A delicate operation got under way to reach 280 Chinese construction workers trapped at a dam construction site around 40 miles from the earthquake epicentre.

Two workers were killed by the quake, and others were injured. The 110-MW Rasuwagadhi Dam was being built on the upper Trishuli River in a very remote corner of Nepal near the Tibetan border.

China imports its own construction workers to build these megadams, though locals are used for manual labour tasks. This is one of three megadams currently being built in Nepal by Chinese state-run Three Gorges Corporation, with a dozen more on the horizon for a dam cascade on the Trishuli River.

Three Gorges Corporation has mastered the technology for building behemoth dams, and the projects in Nepal are growing larger: West Seti Dam is slated to generate 750 MW of power.

And underlining the risks it will create, the dam’s reservoir is to stretch back 16 miles (25km), holding back 1,200,000 acre-feet (1.5 cubic kilometres) of water. Just imagine the devastation that would cause if an earthquake let it all go at once!

Three Gorges Corporation has projects around the world, particularly in third-world nations – many of them highly controversial because of environmental concerns. The company itself has been implicated in scandals in China involving corruption and shady practices.

At Rasuwagadhi Dam site, huge rockslides and falling debris hampered rescue attempts: Chinese engineers and construction workers were eventually helicoptered out across the border into Tibet, with assistance from the People’s Liberation Army. A handful of Chinese engineers remained to supervise the damaged site.

Nepalese workers were left to fend for themselves, and trek out.

How long before Nepal’s ‘Fukushima Moment’?

Here’s a statistic: the gigantic Three Gorges Dam in China was built to withstand the forces of a 7-magnitude earthquake, and is able to withstand an 8-magnitude earthquake for a short time, according to the company. That is where the engineering problems lie: the quake in Nepal was 7.9 magnitude.

Rasuwagadhi Dam was described as severely damaged by the quake. And that brings up a nightmare scenario. What if that dam were up and running, with a huge reservoir sitting behind it?

If an earthquake topples such a dam, that would unleash a massive torrent of water and rubble, taking out scores of villages downstream. It would be a Fukushima moment – earthquake followed by tsunami.

Only in this case, an inland tsunami would be unleashed on a river. The megadam becomes a lethal hydro-bomb, piling horror upon horror.

Increasingly, as more dams are built on Himalayan rivers, this nightmare scenario is given more chance of playing out. With the highest mountains in the world on its northern borders, Nepal is particularly rich in hydropower potential.

All over the Himalayas, a dam-building frenzy

Few of Nepal’s rivers have been tapped for large dams. But that is rapidly changing. Dozens of dams are in the works there, under construction particularly by China and India.

Across the Himalayas, in Tibet, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Nepal, hundreds of large dams are on the drawing board, in an unprecedented wave of dam-building.

Very little impact assessment is done for these dams. And there is a high risk that they will be located in a seismic zone. In 2012, researchers at Canadian NGO Probe International examined locations for dams on a number of Himalayan rivers including the Yarlung Tsangpo, Salween, Mekong and Yangtse.

Their report, ‘Earthquake Hazards and Large Dams in Western China‘, found that 48.2% of them would be sites in zones of high seismic activity, while 50.4% would be in zones of moderate seismic activity. That would leave only 1.4% found in zones of low seismic activity.

The report concluded that China is embarking on a major experiment with potentially disastrous consequences by building over 100 megadams in regions of known high seismicity.

That’s one good reason why mega-dams should not be built on Himalayan rivers. Another reason is that dam-building has been connected to actually triggering an earthquake, in a phenomenon known as ‘reservoir-induced seismicity’.

For example the building of Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan Province in China has been implicated in the disastrous quake of 2008 that killed over 85,000 people and left millions homeless: the dam was just 4 miles from the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake.

The quake cracked Zipingpu Dam and caused damage to 60 other smaller dams in the region. Dam personnel and miliary rushed to empty water from scores of dam reservoirs, causing considerable flooding downstream.

Ecological destruction, loss of land, fish and livelihoods

But the fundamental reason that megadams should not be built in Nepal is that they destroy ecosystems. Rivers are lifelines for the communities along their banks, supplying water for irrigation: megadams impact entire ecosystems by blocking nutrient-rich silt, essential for agriculture, and by blocking fish migration.

In Nepal, it’s clear that the government has woefully inadequate resources to deal with an emergency situation on the scale of the recent earthquake, let alone a disaster involving a megadam. Yet when it comes to signing lucrative contracts for megadams with nations like China and India, the Nepalese government is quick to act.

Two months ago, I was rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi river, north of Kathmandu. Paddling down the river we passed a small group of buildings, with signs displayed in Chinese. It was part of a Chinese operation for building a 100 MW dam further upstream near the Tibetan border.

The Chinese construction crew all came out to wave at us as we drifted by. Our captain did not wave back: he said they might as well be waving the river goodbye.

The owner of the rafting company told me that once the dam starts operation, that would be the end of rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi, and villagers along the river would suffer dire consequences.

All his efforts failed – until nature stepped in

He tried everything to stop construction of the dam – taking the dambuilders to court, involving Nepalese celebrities in a campaign, petitioning Nepalese leaders and politicians, and garnering community support to try and block the dam and save the ecosystem on which their livelihoods depend for growing crops.

All to no avail. The dam is going ahead.

Once the dam is completed, the villagers will probably have to relocate. It’s a sad but familiar refrain: power, greed and corruption in Nepal trump the need to preserve the environment. In Nepal, the cost of rampant megadam building could be catastrophic.

In this case, Mother Nature appears to have stepped in: the dam on the upper Bhote Kosi lies in an area that was devastated by the recent earthquake, most likely setting the dam-builders back a few years on their schedule.

 

 

Michael Buckley is an adventure travel writer, environmental investigator, author of ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘, and filmmaker for three short documentaries about environmental issues in Tibet.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Damming Tibet: China’s destruction of Tibet’s rivers, environment and people‘ by Michael Buckley.

The book: ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘ by Michael Buckley is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

The films: See www.WildYakFilms.com. The most recent short documentary is ‘Plundering Tibet‘, about the devastating impact of mining in Tibet. See also the Facebook page: facebook.com/MeltdowninTibet/.

 

 






In Nepal’s next big quake, hydropower dams threaten catastrophe

Leave a reply




After the 25th April earthquake in Nepal, China sent in large teams to rescue quake victims. But it was also intent on rescuing its own people.

A delicate operation got under way to reach 280 Chinese construction workers trapped at a dam construction site around 40 miles from the earthquake epicentre.

Two workers were killed by the quake, and others were injured. The 110-MW Rasuwagadhi Dam was being built on the upper Trishuli River in a very remote corner of Nepal near the Tibetan border.

China imports its own construction workers to build these megadams, though locals are used for manual labour tasks. This is one of three megadams currently being built in Nepal by Chinese state-run Three Gorges Corporation, with a dozen more on the horizon for a dam cascade on the Trishuli River.

Three Gorges Corporation has mastered the technology for building behemoth dams, and the projects in Nepal are growing larger: West Seti Dam is slated to generate 750 MW of power.

And underlining the risks it will create, the dam’s reservoir is to stretch back 16 miles (25km), holding back 1,200,000 acre-feet (1.5 cubic kilometres) of water. Just imagine the devastation that would cause if an earthquake let it all go at once!

Three Gorges Corporation has projects around the world, particularly in third-world nations – many of them highly controversial because of environmental concerns. The company itself has been implicated in scandals in China involving corruption and shady practices.

At Rasuwagadhi Dam site, huge rockslides and falling debris hampered rescue attempts: Chinese engineers and construction workers were eventually helicoptered out across the border into Tibet, with assistance from the People’s Liberation Army. A handful of Chinese engineers remained to supervise the damaged site.

Nepalese workers were left to fend for themselves, and trek out.

How long before Nepal’s ‘Fukushima Moment’?

Here’s a statistic: the gigantic Three Gorges Dam in China was built to withstand the forces of a 7-magnitude earthquake, and is able to withstand an 8-magnitude earthquake for a short time, according to the company. That is where the engineering problems lie: the quake in Nepal was 7.9 magnitude.

Rasuwagadhi Dam was described as severely damaged by the quake. And that brings up a nightmare scenario. What if that dam were up and running, with a huge reservoir sitting behind it?

If an earthquake topples such a dam, that would unleash a massive torrent of water and rubble, taking out scores of villages downstream. It would be a Fukushima moment – earthquake followed by tsunami.

Only in this case, an inland tsunami would be unleashed on a river. The megadam becomes a lethal hydro-bomb, piling horror upon horror.

Increasingly, as more dams are built on Himalayan rivers, this nightmare scenario is given more chance of playing out. With the highest mountains in the world on its northern borders, Nepal is particularly rich in hydropower potential.

All over the Himalayas, a dam-building frenzy

Few of Nepal’s rivers have been tapped for large dams. But that is rapidly changing. Dozens of dams are in the works there, under construction particularly by China and India.

Across the Himalayas, in Tibet, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Nepal, hundreds of large dams are on the drawing board, in an unprecedented wave of dam-building.

Very little impact assessment is done for these dams. And there is a high risk that they will be located in a seismic zone. In 2012, researchers at Canadian NGO Probe International examined locations for dams on a number of Himalayan rivers including the Yarlung Tsangpo, Salween, Mekong and Yangtse.

Their report, ‘Earthquake Hazards and Large Dams in Western China‘, found that 48.2% of them would be sites in zones of high seismic activity, while 50.4% would be in zones of moderate seismic activity. That would leave only 1.4% found in zones of low seismic activity.

The report concluded that China is embarking on a major experiment with potentially disastrous consequences by building over 100 megadams in regions of known high seismicity.

That’s one good reason why mega-dams should not be built on Himalayan rivers. Another reason is that dam-building has been connected to actually triggering an earthquake, in a phenomenon known as ‘reservoir-induced seismicity’.

For example the building of Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan Province in China has been implicated in the disastrous quake of 2008 that killed over 85,000 people and left millions homeless: the dam was just 4 miles from the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake.

The quake cracked Zipingpu Dam and caused damage to 60 other smaller dams in the region. Dam personnel and miliary rushed to empty water from scores of dam reservoirs, causing considerable flooding downstream.

Ecological destruction, loss of land, fish and livelihoods

But the fundamental reason that megadams should not be built in Nepal is that they destroy ecosystems. Rivers are lifelines for the communities along their banks, supplying water for irrigation: megadams impact entire ecosystems by blocking nutrient-rich silt, essential for agriculture, and by blocking fish migration.

In Nepal, it’s clear that the government has woefully inadequate resources to deal with an emergency situation on the scale of the recent earthquake, let alone a disaster involving a megadam. Yet when it comes to signing lucrative contracts for megadams with nations like China and India, the Nepalese government is quick to act.

Two months ago, I was rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi river, north of Kathmandu. Paddling down the river we passed a small group of buildings, with signs displayed in Chinese. It was part of a Chinese operation for building a 100 MW dam further upstream near the Tibetan border.

The Chinese construction crew all came out to wave at us as we drifted by. Our captain did not wave back: he said they might as well be waving the river goodbye.

The owner of the rafting company told me that once the dam starts operation, that would be the end of rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi, and villagers along the river would suffer dire consequences.

All his efforts failed – until nature stepped in

He tried everything to stop construction of the dam – taking the dambuilders to court, involving Nepalese celebrities in a campaign, petitioning Nepalese leaders and politicians, and garnering community support to try and block the dam and save the ecosystem on which their livelihoods depend for growing crops.

All to no avail. The dam is going ahead.

Once the dam is completed, the villagers will probably have to relocate. It’s a sad but familiar refrain: power, greed and corruption in Nepal trump the need to preserve the environment. In Nepal, the cost of rampant megadam building could be catastrophic.

In this case, Mother Nature appears to have stepped in: the dam on the upper Bhote Kosi lies in an area that was devastated by the recent earthquake, most likely setting the dam-builders back a few years on their schedule.

 

 

Michael Buckley is an adventure travel writer, environmental investigator, author of ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘, and filmmaker for three short documentaries about environmental issues in Tibet.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Damming Tibet: China’s destruction of Tibet’s rivers, environment and people‘ by Michael Buckley.

The book: ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘ by Michael Buckley is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

The films: See www.WildYakFilms.com. The most recent short documentary is ‘Plundering Tibet‘, about the devastating impact of mining in Tibet. See also the Facebook page: facebook.com/MeltdowninTibet/.

 

 






In Nepal’s next big quake, hydropower dams threaten catastrophe

Leave a reply




After the 25th April earthquake in Nepal, China sent in large teams to rescue quake victims. But it was also intent on rescuing its own people.

A delicate operation got under way to reach 280 Chinese construction workers trapped at a dam construction site around 40 miles from the earthquake epicentre.

Two workers were killed by the quake, and others were injured. The 110-MW Rasuwagadhi Dam was being built on the upper Trishuli River in a very remote corner of Nepal near the Tibetan border.

China imports its own construction workers to build these megadams, though locals are used for manual labour tasks. This is one of three megadams currently being built in Nepal by Chinese state-run Three Gorges Corporation, with a dozen more on the horizon for a dam cascade on the Trishuli River.

Three Gorges Corporation has mastered the technology for building behemoth dams, and the projects in Nepal are growing larger: West Seti Dam is slated to generate 750 MW of power.

And underlining the risks it will create, the dam’s reservoir is to stretch back 16 miles (25km), holding back 1,200,000 acre-feet (1.5 cubic kilometres) of water. Just imagine the devastation that would cause if an earthquake let it all go at once!

Three Gorges Corporation has projects around the world, particularly in third-world nations – many of them highly controversial because of environmental concerns. The company itself has been implicated in scandals in China involving corruption and shady practices.

At Rasuwagadhi Dam site, huge rockslides and falling debris hampered rescue attempts: Chinese engineers and construction workers were eventually helicoptered out across the border into Tibet, with assistance from the People’s Liberation Army. A handful of Chinese engineers remained to supervise the damaged site.

Nepalese workers were left to fend for themselves, and trek out.

How long before Nepal’s ‘Fukushima Moment’?

Here’s a statistic: the gigantic Three Gorges Dam in China was built to withstand the forces of a 7-magnitude earthquake, and is able to withstand an 8-magnitude earthquake for a short time, according to the company. That is where the engineering problems lie: the quake in Nepal was 7.9 magnitude.

Rasuwagadhi Dam was described as severely damaged by the quake. And that brings up a nightmare scenario. What if that dam were up and running, with a huge reservoir sitting behind it?

If an earthquake topples such a dam, that would unleash a massive torrent of water and rubble, taking out scores of villages downstream. It would be a Fukushima moment – earthquake followed by tsunami.

Only in this case, an inland tsunami would be unleashed on a river. The megadam becomes a lethal hydro-bomb, piling horror upon horror.

Increasingly, as more dams are built on Himalayan rivers, this nightmare scenario is given more chance of playing out. With the highest mountains in the world on its northern borders, Nepal is particularly rich in hydropower potential.

All over the Himalayas, a dam-building frenzy

Few of Nepal’s rivers have been tapped for large dams. But that is rapidly changing. Dozens of dams are in the works there, under construction particularly by China and India.

Across the Himalayas, in Tibet, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Nepal, hundreds of large dams are on the drawing board, in an unprecedented wave of dam-building.

Very little impact assessment is done for these dams. And there is a high risk that they will be located in a seismic zone. In 2012, researchers at Canadian NGO Probe International examined locations for dams on a number of Himalayan rivers including the Yarlung Tsangpo, Salween, Mekong and Yangtse.

Their report, ‘Earthquake Hazards and Large Dams in Western China‘, found that 48.2% of them would be sites in zones of high seismic activity, while 50.4% would be in zones of moderate seismic activity. That would leave only 1.4% found in zones of low seismic activity.

The report concluded that China is embarking on a major experiment with potentially disastrous consequences by building over 100 megadams in regions of known high seismicity.

That’s one good reason why mega-dams should not be built on Himalayan rivers. Another reason is that dam-building has been connected to actually triggering an earthquake, in a phenomenon known as ‘reservoir-induced seismicity’.

For example the building of Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan Province in China has been implicated in the disastrous quake of 2008 that killed over 85,000 people and left millions homeless: the dam was just 4 miles from the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake.

The quake cracked Zipingpu Dam and caused damage to 60 other smaller dams in the region. Dam personnel and miliary rushed to empty water from scores of dam reservoirs, causing considerable flooding downstream.

Ecological destruction, loss of land, fish and livelihoods

But the fundamental reason that megadams should not be built in Nepal is that they destroy ecosystems. Rivers are lifelines for the communities along their banks, supplying water for irrigation: megadams impact entire ecosystems by blocking nutrient-rich silt, essential for agriculture, and by blocking fish migration.

In Nepal, it’s clear that the government has woefully inadequate resources to deal with an emergency situation on the scale of the recent earthquake, let alone a disaster involving a megadam. Yet when it comes to signing lucrative contracts for megadams with nations like China and India, the Nepalese government is quick to act.

Two months ago, I was rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi river, north of Kathmandu. Paddling down the river we passed a small group of buildings, with signs displayed in Chinese. It was part of a Chinese operation for building a 100 MW dam further upstream near the Tibetan border.

The Chinese construction crew all came out to wave at us as we drifted by. Our captain did not wave back: he said they might as well be waving the river goodbye.

The owner of the rafting company told me that once the dam starts operation, that would be the end of rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi, and villagers along the river would suffer dire consequences.

All his efforts failed – until nature stepped in

He tried everything to stop construction of the dam – taking the dambuilders to court, involving Nepalese celebrities in a campaign, petitioning Nepalese leaders and politicians, and garnering community support to try and block the dam and save the ecosystem on which their livelihoods depend for growing crops.

All to no avail. The dam is going ahead.

Once the dam is completed, the villagers will probably have to relocate. It’s a sad but familiar refrain: power, greed and corruption in Nepal trump the need to preserve the environment. In Nepal, the cost of rampant megadam building could be catastrophic.

In this case, Mother Nature appears to have stepped in: the dam on the upper Bhote Kosi lies in an area that was devastated by the recent earthquake, most likely setting the dam-builders back a few years on their schedule.

 

 

Michael Buckley is an adventure travel writer, environmental investigator, author of ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘, and filmmaker for three short documentaries about environmental issues in Tibet.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Damming Tibet: China’s destruction of Tibet’s rivers, environment and people‘ by Michael Buckley.

The book: ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘ by Michael Buckley is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

The films: See www.WildYakFilms.com. The most recent short documentary is ‘Plundering Tibet‘, about the devastating impact of mining in Tibet. See also the Facebook page: facebook.com/MeltdowninTibet/.

 

 






In Nepal’s next big quake, hydropower dams threaten catastrophe

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After the 25th April earthquake in Nepal, China sent in large teams to rescue quake victims. But it was also intent on rescuing its own people.

A delicate operation got under way to reach 280 Chinese construction workers trapped at a dam construction site around 40 miles from the earthquake epicentre.

Two workers were killed by the quake, and others were injured. The 110-MW Rasuwagadhi Dam was being built on the upper Trishuli River in a very remote corner of Nepal near the Tibetan border.

China imports its own construction workers to build these megadams, though locals are used for manual labour tasks. This is one of three megadams currently being built in Nepal by Chinese state-run Three Gorges Corporation, with a dozen more on the horizon for a dam cascade on the Trishuli River.

Three Gorges Corporation has mastered the technology for building behemoth dams, and the projects in Nepal are growing larger: West Seti Dam is slated to generate 750 MW of power.

Three Gorges Corporation has projects around the world, particularly in third-world nations – many of them highly controversial because of environmental concerns. The company itself has been implicated in scandals in China involving corruption and shady practices.

At Rasuwagadhi Dam site, huge rockslides and falling debris hampered rescue attempts: Chinese engineers and construction workers were eventually helicoptered out across the border into Tibet, with assistance from the People’s Liberation Army. A handful of Chinese engineers remained to supervise the damaged site.

Nepalese workers were left to fend for themselves, and trek out.

How long before Nepal’s ‘Fukushima Moment’?

Here’s a statistic: the gigantic Three Gorges Dam in China was built to withstand the forces of a 7-magnitude earthquake, and is able to withstand an 8-magnitude earthquake for a short time, according to the company. That is where the engineering problems lie: the quake in Nepal was 7.9 magnitude.

Rasuwagadhi Dam was described as severely damaged by the quake. And that brings up a nightmare scenario. What if that dam were up and running, with a huge reservoir sitting behind it?

If an earthquake topples such a dam, that would unleash a massive torrent of water and rubble, taking out scores of villages downstream. It would be a Fukushima moment – earthquake followed by tsunami.

Only in this case, an inland tsunami would be unleashed on a river. The megadam becomes a lethal hydro-bomb, piling horror upon horror.

Increasingly, as more dams are built on Himalayan rivers, this nightmare scenario is given more chance of playing out. With the highest mountains in the world on its northern borders, Nepal is particularly rich in hydropower potential.

All over the Himalayas, a dam-building frenzy

Few of Nepal’s rivers have been tapped for large dams. But that is rapidly changing. Dozens of dams are in the works there, under construction particularly by China and India.

Across the Himalayas, in Tibet, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Nepal, hundreds of large dams are on the drawing board, in an unprecedented wave of dam-building.

Very little impact assessment is done for these dams. And there is a high risk that they will be located in a seismic zone. In 2012, researchers at Canadian NGO Probe International examined locations for dams on a number of Himalayan rivers including the Yarlung Tsangpo, Salween, Mekong and Yangtse.

Their report, ‘Earthquake Hazards and Large Dams in Western China‘, found that 48.2% of them would be sites in zones of high seismic activity, while 50.4% would be in zones of moderate seismic activity. That would leave only 1.4% found in zones of low seismic activity.

The report concluded that China is embarking on a major experiment with potentially disastrous consequences by building over 100 megadams in regions of known high seismicity.

That’s one good reason why mega-dams should not be built on Himalayan rivers. Another reason is that dam-building has been connected to actually triggering an earthquake, in a phenomenon known as ‘reservoir-induced seismicity’.

For example the building of Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan Province in China has been implicated in the disastrous quake of 2008 that killed over 85,000 people and left millions homeless: the dam was just 4 miles from the epicentre of the 7.9-magnitude quake.

The quake cracked Zipingpu Dam and caused damage to 60 other smaller dams in the region. Dam personnel and miliary rushed to empty water from scores of dam reservoirs, causing considerable flooding downstream.

Ecological destruction, loss of land, fish and livelihoods

But the fundamental reason that megadams should not be built in Nepal is that they destroy ecosystems. Rivers are lifelines for the communities along their banks, supplying water for irrigation: megadams impact entire ecosystems by blocking nutrient-rich silt, essential for agriculture, and by blocking fish migration.

In Nepal, it’s clear that the government has woefully inadequate resources to deal with an emergency situation on the scale of the recent earthquake, let alone a disaster involving a megadam. Yet when it comes to signing lucrative contracts for megadams with nations like China and India, the Nepalese government is quick to act.

Two months ago, I was rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi river, north of Kathmandu. Paddling down the river we passed a small group of buildings, with signs displayed in Chinese. It was part of a Chinese operation for building a 100 MW dam further upstream near the Tibetan border.

The Chinese construction crew all came out to wave at us as we drifted by. Our captain did not wave back: he said they might as well be waving the river goodbye.

The owner of the rafting company told me that once the dam starts operation, that would be the end of rafting on the upper Bhote Kosi, and villagers along the river would suffer dire consequences.

All his efforts failed – until nature stepped in

He tried everything to stop construction of the dam – taking the dambuilders to court, involving Nepalese celebrities in a campaign, petitioning Nepalese leaders and politicians, and garnering community support to try and block the dam and save the ecosystem on which their livelihoods depend for growing crops.

All to no avail. The dam is going ahead.

Once the dam is completed, the villagers will probably have to relocate. It’s a sad but familiar refrain: power, greed and corruption in Nepal trump the need to preserve the environment. In Nepal, the cost of rampant megadam building could be catastrophic.

In this case, Mother Nature appears to have stepped in: the dam on the upper Bhote Kosi lies in an area that was devastated by the recent earthquake, most likely setting the dam-builders back a few years on their schedule.

 

 

Michael Buckley is an adventure travel writer, environmental investigator, author of ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘, and filmmaker for three short documentaries about environmental issues in Tibet.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Damming Tibet: China’s destruction of Tibet’s rivers, environment and people‘ by Michael Buckley.

The book: ‘Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia‘ by Michael Buckley is published by Palgrave MacMillan.

The films: See www.WildYakFilms.com. The most recent short documentary is ‘Plundering Tibet‘, about the devastating impact of mining in Tibet. See also the Facebook page: facebook.com/MeltdowninTibet/.