Modeshift

Camels are still raised for milk and meat in Qatar, and for camel racing. But they no longer serve as beasts of burden or for transportation. Photo/Keith Schneider

DOHA, Qatar –Mohamed Ali Darwish, a principal investigator at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute, and one of the Gulf region’s leading experts on desalination, is a mechanical engineer assigned to help this dry nation of nearly two million residents develop a more efficient and ecologically safer means for securing its freshwater supply. Since 1959, when a Scottish engineer developed what is called “multi-stage flash evaporation,” or MSFE, Gulf coast nations have ardently pursued the extraordinarily reliable but hyper energy-consuming technology to produce their drinking water.

Qatar, which operates eight major desalination plants, is so confident about the technology, regardless of the energy consumption, that it is preparing to build a ninth MSFE installation at the Ras Abu Fontas water plant on the Gulf shore south of Doha.

As I noted in an earlier post, risks to the Gulf’s ecology and energy security are tightly wrapped up in the program pursued by Qatar and its neighbors to produce desalinated water. Qatar’s production, 1.5 million cubic meters daily, is said by authorities here to represent five percent of the Gulf’s total production of desalinated water.

The new plant will increase production by roughly 10 percent annually when it opens in the spring of 2015. Plant managers, who led us in a discussion and tour of Ras Abu Fontas, declined to disclose the cost of construction. But they did note that of the 1.5 million cubic meters of desalinated water produced in Qatar, half by the Ras Abu Fontas Plant, about a third is wasted once it leaves the plant boundaries. Leaking pipes managed by a separate state-owned utility have not been repaired or replaced, and precious water is draining away, they said.

In an interview, Dr. Darvish noted that more than 10 percent of the nation’s domestic natural gas consumption and a fifth of its electricity is devoted to producing desalinated water. I mentioned what we’d been told earlier in the day, that a third of the water produced never makes it to domestic taps and toilets. Given the energy demands and cost of building a new plant to produce more water, I asked whether it would be more efficient and less expensive to upgrade the water transport infrastructure?

Darvish immediately arched his eyes and shifted in his chair. “You see,” he said. “This is Qatar.”

Since December 2008, when I joined colleagues at Circle of Blue to report on the drought-driven collapse of farm production in Australia’s Murray Darling River Basin, I’ve journeyed across the United States and the world to better understand the implications of the contest between rising demand for energy and food, and diminishing reserves of fresh water. The privilege of spending weeks in China, and in India, also produced events, generated new friendships, and yielded insights about how nations managed under the stress of providing enough water, food, and energy, even as they contended with the powerful collision between economic, ecological, civic, and governmental interests. Very clearly, the Earth is pushing back and human systems are being forced to adjust.

Qatar, small as it is, occupies a place at the table of nations that are part of the problem and at work on the solutions. Since 2008, when food grain supplies plummeted and prices jumped sharply around the world, in part because of the collapse of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin rice industry, Qatar launched a new national project to develop a formula for making itself less vulnerable by pursuing an ecologically and economically sustainable way to produce energy, secure food, and yield a safer quality of life.

The basic ingredient fueling the new formula, though, is Qatar’s own treasure trove of oil and natural gas. While such alchemy is intensely significant, whether it’s possible to yield a golden future from an oil-rich present is not at all assured. But the process of exposing the basic ingredients to new substances and new ways to mix them also produces distinctive narratives that I call TIQ. This is Qatar: Read the rest of this entry »

Qatari women are cloaked in black robes, their faces hidden by veils. The nation, one of the more progressive in the Gulf, encourages women to assume leadership in academic, professional, technical and government positions. But their lives in public are conducted at a purposeful distance from men and emigres. Photo/Keith Schneider

DOHA, Qatar — Early next week Qatar hosts its third career fair in a year to “empower Qatari women in the nation’s workforce.” This is an Islamic Arab nation that thinks of itself as a relative haven of fairness for women, some of whom hold significant posts in philanthropy, education, and human resources.

The event’s organizers note in their promotional materials that Qatar ranks ahead of its Gulf coast neighbors in encouraging women to embrace work in the public realm.

Yet compared to the overall size of Qatar’s labor force, which government statistics put at just under 1.6 million workers, Qatar’s 87,000 native working age women hold just 27,500 jobs. Qatar’s 84,600 men of working age, for that matter, hold just under 57,000 jobs. Taken together, men and women, Qatar’s native born working age adults hold about two percent of all the jobs in this nation.

Still there is no disguising the purposeful distance that Qatar culture builds into the lives of its women. The workforce career fair will be held at the ladies campus of Qatar’s Community College, and is open solely to women.

During the week I’ve spent in Qatar, my first visit to the Gulf region, the questions I’ve been nervous to ask are those that concern culture, especially the patriarchal system and traditions that describe the roles of men, and the presence of women in public. What I learned is far from the complete story, but it’s a start.

Qatar women cloak themselves in black in public, honoring the traditions of their Islamic culture, and the constraints and norms defined by a society that treats men in public as clearly the superior gender. The black robes and dark veils also serve to bind the culture together, forming a distinct tribal identity that authoritatively declares Qatari women as separate and apart from the emigre women here, who dress in Western clothing and are much more numerous. It is illegal for a non-Qatari woman to wear the black robes except if they come from other Gulf nations where the robes are part of their daily dress. The black robes also form a protective barrier for women, I was told, to fend off the advances of rapacious adult males. Read the rest of this entry »

Doha’s intriguing and impressive skyline includes buildings shaped like a sea cucumber, crowned by Batman-like ears, buildings with shoulders pushed out and stomachs held in. Photo/Keith Schneider

DOHA, Qatar — A decade ago Sheraton’s pyramid shaped hotel was just about the only modern building along this city’s Arabian (Persian) Gulf shoreline. Today the hotel is dwarfed by 21st-century skyscrapers designed by architects who seem to have been inspired by the shapes contained in a boy’s toybox.

Yet along with the playful shapes comes an accompanying narrative of the rising concern about how development affects the Gulf’s ecological and economic security.

We are learning quite alot about the damaged ecology of the Gulf. Referred to as “Arabian” here, not “Persian,” as its known in the West, the Gulf is quite a sizable sea. But it is bottled up by the Strait of Hormuz, which at its narrowest point is 20 miles from shore to shore. Water flow is so slow that scientists here refer to it as a big bathtub.

That bathtub is stirred by the fierce turbulence of the region’s oil and gas industry, much of which operates offshore, and nearly all of which is served by constant ship traffic.

In addition, the bathtub is getting saltier and warmer. There are three primary reasons. Increased evaporation is linked to higher temperatures and climate change. Gulf nations are slowing or diverting the flow of rivers that drain into the sea. And a rising tide of concentrated brine pours from the dozens of desalination plants that supply the region’s drinking water, and from the natural-gas fired power plants that supply their energy.

Qatar’s desalination plants produce 1.5 million cubic meters of water daily, almost 600 million cubic meters annually. A third or more leaks from old pipes, which means about 1 million cubic meters daily actually is used by humans, which comprises 99 percent of the water that the country drinks and uses for industrial practices. But for every one gallon of fresh water produced in Qatar’s desalination plants, we are told, nine to ten gallons of warm and concentrated salt water is discharged back into the Gulf.

Qatar’s production represents just five percent of the total amount of freshwater produced by desal plants in the Gulf, and five percent of the salty discharge. By my calculation, confirmed by researchers at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute, our hosts here, roughly nine to ten billion cubic meters of desalted water are produced in the Gulf region annually, and 900 billion cubic meters of brine is released back into the sea each year. That’s a torrent. To give an idea of the amount, China uses 600 billion cubic meters of fresh water annually. Read the rest of this entry »

The centerpiece of Doha’s Education City is a plaza that reveres water, a vital resource in short supply across Qatar. Photo/Keith Schneider

DOHA, Qatar — Seventy-five years ago all of Qatar, a nation of sand and Arabian (Persian) Gulf shoreline roughly the size of Connecticut, was home to 25,000 residents. Fishing was an economic mainstay. So was spending weeks at sea diving for pearls. Doha, the capital city, was a seaside village.

Qatar today is a nation of nearly 2 million people and Doha, its capital and a city swelled by hydrocarbon wealth and Arab ambition, is where almost 80 percent of them live. In 1940, oil was discovered in the country’s north. In 1971, the world’s largest natural gas field was found offshore.

The sizable fuel reserves makes Qatar a significant player in the global economy and international security. Qatar, the world’s fifth largest producer of natural gas and 19th largest oil producer, exports most of its gas and oil. The revenue, over $100 billion annually, built an impressive skyline, constructed miles of highways, and coaxed five American universities to dispatch faculty and staff to an impressive collection of architecturally distinguished university buildings here known as Education City.

Still, underlying the dust and traffic and frenzy of new construction is a distinctive compact between the desert ecology and the high octane economy. In almost every way conceivable Qatar and its largest city are testing the durability of a resource-limited civilization that has plenty of fossil fuel and wealth, a storehouse of ingenuity, ample sun and sand, but not much else.

At the top of the list of resources that don’t exist in Qatar, or are in short supply, is fresh water. Average annual rainfall measures around 74 millimeters. That’s less than three inches. There are no lakes, no streams, no rivers in the entire country. What little shallow groundwater is available was exhausted decades ago in many regions, and is close to doing so in the rest. The deeper groundwater, so called “fossil” groundwater, is being depleted at a rate four to five times higher than  available rainfall can recharge the aquifers.

Qatar’s fresh water is supplied by desalination plants, which require a significant share — one fifth according to the latest analysis — of the country’s electrical generating capacity. And demand for water, which is supplied free to the country’s native-born Qataris and at significantly subsidized low cost to everybody else, is rising. A number of recent studies of water use here found that Qatar’s per capita water consumption is among the world’s highest.

Other resources in short supply in Qatar are good soil, minerals, timber, and people. With the exception of its storehouse of oil and natural gas, Qatar imports almost all of the basic materials of its growing civilization. Ninety percent of its food comes from outside Qatar’s borders. All of the country’s transportation network was built with imported materials or moves on imported equipment.

There are 300,000 native Qataris, a community that has gained the distinction of having the highest per capita incomes in the world. There are 1.6 million emigre laborers, office workers, drivers, tradesmen, professional staffers, researchers, scientists, and technical specialists imported from every corner of the world. They work here under fixed contracts that typically call for two years of service.

Qatar is clearly satisfied with the arrangement. Citizenship is reserved for native Qataris. In effect, Qatar is building its modern desert civilization with itinerant laborers and talent who churn through the country without laying down roots.

Carl Ganter and I are traveling in Qatar this week to learn more about this nation rich in oil and gas, but poor in water and other resources. In the global confrontation between rising demand for energy and food, and diminishing freshwater reserves, Qatar’s challenge is more apparent than almost anywhere else, and profoundly significant.

– Keith Schneider

The most beautiful country in the world, the United States, presents spectacular scenes of nature in every state, like the Cape Cod shoreline on Earth Day in Chatham, Mass. Photo/Keith Schneider

CHATHAM, Mass. — The tides here lay down a walkway of shells — horseshoe crabs, scallops, palm-size crabs — where the water meets dry sand. On Earth Day 2013 a nearly full moon is perched, like a round plate on a pedestal, amid an expanse of cloudless blue sky. Gulls soar and dive in a stout breeze, and in the nearby mudflats men and women with long-handled metal rakes in hand and collars turned up to the wind probe for sweet clams.

Had it not been for the principles of conservation and the values of pollution prevention that defined the first Earth Day in 1970, it’s almost certain that this stretch of Cape Cod beach would be sickened by now by any number of symptoms of environmental disease — sewage, chemical pollution, unsightly development, plastic litter, algae, and smog. The fact that shells mark the beach here, not garbage, and that the air is as clear as fresh-wiped crystal is testament to a streak in the American character that most citizens do not take for granted.

We cherish our beautiful places, and we are a nation rich in them. We’ve actively approved statutes to safeguard that beauty. And despite decades of effort by one faction or another to weaken those protections, our citizens and their allies in government and the courts time and again have insisted that they be enforced.

Gulls at work on a scallop. Photo/Keith Schneider

To do otherwise is to capitulate to the same tide of neglect and dysfunction that has consumed cities, the land, and the water in so many other countries. In Beijing the air is so thick with coal dust and toxic chemicals it’s dangerous to breathe. The Yamuna River is so choked with the raw sewage and chemical effluent of Delhi that it stinks like an open sewer and produces giant bubbles of methane. Old wells in Azerbaijan provide a pathway for streams of crude oil to rise to the surface and pour into earthen impoundments, forming sizable and unguarded ponds of fuel so aromatic they sting the nose, and so flammable they could explode into fire at any time. Read the rest of this entry »

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Hours after the teenage white hat bomber was taken into custody, the rain started. It was a warm rain, a renewing rain. This morning dogwoods were in white bloom. Puddles on the sidewalks were like mirrors, reflecting the grey sky and the long strides of runners along the Charles. It felt like the world had changed.

This metropolitan region, close to where the Pilgrims landed, where Revere rode to alert the Concord and Lexington settlers, where Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, knows a thing or two about making history and influencing a nation. The four days of shock and outrage that started on Monday with the Boston marathon bombings on Boylston Street, and climaxed on Friday in Watertown with a flurry of bullets, was history-making in a much different dimension.

On Friday morning I arrived to a nearly empty Boston Logan Airport and joined one million residents in this region in an utterly unique experience in America. It was 9:15 a.m., normally a period of high passenger traffic. But airline personnel, detailed to counters two-by-two, outnumbered passengers at most of Delta’s gate areas. I already knew that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick had ordered a region-wide “lockdown.” I knew public transit was shut and that taxis were barred from the airport. I followed Twitter feeds since Monday — #Boston, #marathon, #bombing — that had expanded since Thursday when the FBI released the photographs of black hat and white hat – #suspects — and then added #Watertown after midnight, when the suspects were cornered by the police.

My destination was Cambridge where I’d been invited to attend the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s forum for journalists who report on land and the built environment. I learned from a passenger coming into the airport that there was no restriction on private vehicles arriving at the airport. I learned from another passenger that car rental agencies were providing vehicles, so I knew that was an option for driving out of Logan. Outside the terminal’s departure area I noticed that taxis were dropping passengers. The obvious response to the transport choice was to flag one of them down and ask for a ride.

It was a fast trip to Harvard Square – 20 minutes max. In lockdown city, America’s newest version of urban crisis management, there’s no traffic. Storrow Drive, which runs along the south bank of the Charles River, was empty. Every lane was open, absolutely no vehicles like rural northern Michigan route 115 at a February dawn. As we made our way through the streets of Cambridge, there were no cars, no pedestrians. Stores were shuttered in Harvard Square. Residents voluntarily complied with lockdown city. They had to. A colleague who lives in Cambridge told me he watched police officers stop and question people, especially male students walking in front of his home.

The Lincoln Institute cancelled Friday’s program because some speakers were unable to reach Boston. Others were unable to reach the conference center. Some of the journalists attending were dispatched to cover the manhunt in Watertown, which is two miles away.

I retreated to the Sheraton Commander to follow the news and tweet. And that leads me to the three primary findings I made from Friday’s events, and a principal question:

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This has been a lousy week of murder in America. It’s also been another intolerable and telling week of cultural contrast best described by what President Obama today called “shameful” politics.

When a terrorist bomb killed three and injured nearly 180 people in Boston two days ago, we reacted with sorrow and agitation and anger. We express a national resolve to study the weapon, hunt down the suspects, renew our collective spirit, and take necessary action to make the country safer.

But we’ve chosen to continue to do nothing about the more serious threat: Gun violence. Since the Newtown shooting on December 24 — during which 20 students, six teachers and staff, the shooter, and the shooter’s mother were killed — almost 3,500 American men, women, and children have died in gun-related violence.

Just since Sunday — four days ago — two children, five women, and 28 men died from gunshots. A miserably revealing compendium of gun deaths since Newtown is posted daily by Salon.com and should be regularly visited by Americans interested in reducing actual risks to our lives.

Today the U.S. Senate blocked proposed legislation that would have required background checks for gun buyers who purchased weapons from gun shows and from other unregulated markets. That represents about 40 percent of gun sales. The proposal is a baby step, but a step nevertheless. Enacting that tiny change would signal that the U.S. could actually act to limit a public health hazard so serious that it threatened, as we’ve seen over the last generation, students in grade school and college, adults in a movie theater, innocent bystanders on ordinary streets, adults killed by children, and children killed by adults.

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Two bombs. Three dead. Almost 180 wounded. Patriots Day in Boston, the day that everybody who lives there celebrates as a time to run and share, turns to mayhem. Photo/Ninian Reid

The week leading up to April 19 is turning out to be a gruesome one for the United States. On April 19, 1995 Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, and injuring 680. That attack, McVeigh said, was justified by the FBI assault two years earlier, April 19, 1993, on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Seventy-six people died.

Waco and Oklahoma City crystalized menace in several new dimensions in the United States. The scale of the deaths in Texas, and the mortal focus on the calendar and commemoration in Oklahoma, illustrated a joining of wickedness and fanaticism rarely encountered in the country.

Yesterday’s Boston Marathon bombing unveiled another facet of evil. The idea that someone planned to maim and kill the innocent, perhaps even purposely aiming to blow off bystanders’ legs on a day focused on a long run, displays a vicious cunning designed to formalize the “at any moment” nature of big public gatherings in the United States that have steadily become more nervous.

You have to wonder whether the April 15 date was a factor. Over the last generation the third week of April has become a stage for escalating mayhem in the United States.

On April 20, 1999 two students at Columbine High School in Colorado murdered 12 classmates, a teacher, and killed themselves. Twenty-four people were injured.

On April 16, 2007 a student at Virginia Tech killed 32 people, wounded 17, and killed himself.

The Boston Marathon bombing occurred on the day race organizers honored and remembered the 20 children and six adults who were killed in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. That day the shooter also killed his mother and himself. And no accounting of the recent list of horribles should omit the 12 people killed and 58 injured last July in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting. Or, for that matter, 9/11.

The pathology of violence, the determination to disrupt, the focus on turning the public space into a gallery of blood; that all seems plainly evident. But why have these killings occurred over the last generation, a period when other statistics show America is getting safer? Deaths from traffic accidents are way down. Rates of violent crime have declined dramatically since the peak years of the 1970s and early 1980s. Rates of murder are the lowest they’ve been since the 1960s. See the charts below, which are based on FBI Uniform Crime Statistics.

The gunners and bombers are testing America’s mettle. Our purpose is to be strong, and not let this kind of random bloodletting succeed in convincing Americans that big public gatherings are dangerous, especially during an era of improved personal safety.

– Keith Schneider

The Ohio Valley barge industry wants to transport fracking wastewater, an addition to the mix of minerals, steel, coal, grain, oil and other bulk materials transported on the Ohio River. Here, a barge moves downriver near Wellsville, Ohio. Photo/Keith Schneider

Last month, while nosing around the new Utica shale gas fields of eastern Ohio, I learned that the Obama administration was preparing to consider a proposal from the U.S. Coast Guard that would allow barge operators to transport wastewater from shale gas fracking operations on inland waterways. Earlier this month the Coast Guard delivered the proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget. Sometime later this year the agency is likely to make the transport plan available for public review.

Regardless of the specifics, the idea that fracking wastewater ought to be considered a bulk commodity — like coal, gasoline, oil, cement, grain, chemicals and steel — reflects the expanding dimensions of the nation’s shale fields and the growing quantity of the contaminated water that the development produces. The river that very plainly will receive most of the attention in frackwater transport is the Ohio and its upriver tributaries, which drain nearly half of Pennsylvania’s watersheds, and most of eastern Ohio’s.

Thousands of deep shale gas wells are being drilled in both regions. Producing natural gas, and more valuable natural gas liquids, involves blasting the shale with millions of gallons of water mixed with chemicals and sand under extremely high pressure. Some three million to 10 million gallons go down the well. About 20 percent, according to industry technical reports, comes back up. And it’s nasty stuff — saturated with salts and metals and solids.

Water is the shale gas and shale oil industry’s soft underbelly. The companies knew that well before the fracking revolution started. During the early George W. Bush administration Vice President Dick Cheney convened meetings with industry executives who identified the federal Safe Drinking Water Act as an impediment to a swift start to horizontal drilling/fracking technology they believed would alter the nation’s energy outlook. The administration proposed and Congress quietly enacted waivers to the law that allowed the industry to keep the identities of the fracking chemicals secret and bypass permit requirements.

Citizens, though, took notice all over the country. Reports of leaks, groundwater contamination, and health consequences as a result of exposure to wastewater and drilling operations have become numerous. States have been roused to fill some of the safety gaps that the federal government avoided. Wyoming, Texas, and other states require companies to disclose the ingredients in their fracking fluid. Ohio and Pennsylvania issued tougher standards for constructing wells in an effort to prevent damage to drinking water.

The next big area of water concern is the sheer volume of wastewater. A new wing of the oilfield service industry, spurred by public concern, generated tougher standards that are leading to water recycling in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The competition for water during the deep 2011 and 2012 droughts in the interior prompted similar interest in Texas and Colorado for wastewater recycling. Halliburton, the big oilfield service company, is a leader in developing mobile recycling systems that clean up dirty water to a standard that makes it reusable for new frack jobs.

I crossed the path of a mobile recycling plant that Tervita operates for Chesapeake’s frack jobs in eastern Ohio. The plants save water, and reduce truck traffic. Solids separated from the wastes are said to be transported to local licensed dumps, though the Ohio Department of Natural Resources says it doesn’t track such shipments.

Most fracking wastewater is pumped down the hazardous waste injection wells that operate around the country. As to where fracking wastewater might be heading on barges? Probably not upriver on the Ohio. Two years ago Pennsylvania outlawed treating frack wastewater in public water treatment plants.

– Keith Schneider

Last month an 11-member collaborative – two foundations, five state and national environmental organizations, four energy companies — announced they had formed the Center for Sustainable Shale Development. The mission: to develop and implement drilling and production standards for shale gas that are environmentally safe and can be certified by an independent third party.

In essence, the new Pittsburgh-based center is seeking to do for the unconventional fuels sector what the U.S. Green Building Council did to significantly improve design, land use practices, and energy and water efficiency when it established the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for building construction. LEED standards changed how commercial buildings are designed and constructed. They did so by establishing a market for innovation that is encouraged, expanded, and even enforced not by regulation but by buyers.

It’s too early to know whether the collaborative — which includes Shell and Chevron, the Environmental Defense Fund and Penn Future — will produce meaningful advances in production practices. But there’s no question, at least in my mind, that the center’s formation is a significant step toward much-needed political and social pragmatism in developing the nation’s ample shale energy reserves.

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