Modeshift

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

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are climbing, in large measure because of China’s production and combustion of more than 3 billion metric tons of coal annually, or nearly four times as much coal as the United States produces and burns. One of the solutions — though it is attracting rigorous opposition in the U.S. — is replacing coal with cleaner-burning natural gas.

Even with protests over fracking, natural gas is replacing coal in the U.S., where technical advances in drilling and production technology are yielding a motherlode of oil and gas from the country’s deep shale reserves.

With technical assistance from the Obama administration, China is busy probing its deep shale natural gas reserves, too. Last year I investigated how well Chinese shale gas development was proceeding, spending more than a week in Sichuan Province, where much of the new development is occurring. My conclusion: China’s hope to replace some of its climate-changing coal production with natural gas is just that, a big hope. Impediments abound. My report is part of Circle of Blue’s path-breaking Choke Point: China project.

XINCHANGZHEN, China— Liu Zhongqi’s mud and brick home is set in a cluster of hillside houses in the village of Lao Chang, a serene half-circle of settlement on the west side of this misty Sichuan Province valley.

A few steps away is a flooded paddy, about half the size of an American front lawn, where Liu raises rice. Next to that is a slightly larger and deeper pond where he produces fish. And just beyond Liu’s fishpond is something very new here and potentially momentous: Wei-201H3, one of China’s first horizontally drilled and hydro-fracked deep shale natural gas well.

The completion of Wei-201H3 in January 2012 — and the earlier development of two other deep shale wells, drilled within a half-kilometer of Liu’s home — introduced more than the sounds of diesel engines and other industrial dissonance. The new wells, Lao Chang residents told Circle of Blue, have wrecked the pastoral iconography of this valley, a place where repetition and water wove together a centuries-old rural mosaic of green fields and dark ponds.

“They came here one day,” Liu said. “It’s been hard. Very hard.”

The same can be said for China’s nascent shale gas industry. In November 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao signed a bilateral agreement to deploy U.S. expertise to develop China’s deep shale gas reserves and Chinese capital to finance the much more mature American shale gas sector. The bilateral pact, formalized in a Beijing ceremony that attracted global media attention, also spurred Chinese and Western energy companies to develop partnerships and dispatch crews and rigs to drill experimental deep shale natural gas wells in bucolic and densely populated Sichuan valleys like this one.

The goal here — and in half a dozen other energy-rich provinces — is two fold:

1. Reach a national production target of 6.5 billion cubic meters (229 billion cubic feet) of shale gas by 2015.

2. Duplicate the American shale gas boom.

The hope is that by increasing shale gas production, China can begin to wean itself off of coal, as the United States has begun to do. Since 2005, tens of thousands of U.S. deep shale gas wells, drilled in a dozen states, have driven U.S. energy costs down, fueled manufacturing job growth, reduced reliance on coal as a fuel source for generating electricity, and helped U.S. climate-changing carbon emissions to drop to the lowest levels in a generation.

“We’re just starting to understand what we need to develop shale gas,” said Zhang Mi, chairman and president of the HongHua Group, a manufacturer of drilling rigs based in Chengdu, a city of 14 million residents about 140 kilometers (90 miles) north of Lao Chang . “Exploration is in the experimental stage. From my perspective, Sichuan is China’s Texas for shale gas development.”

But many of Sichuan’s field engineers, analysts, industry executive, and resource managers say there is convincing evidence that China’s shale gas industry is developing at a much slower rate than either Chinese or American leadership had anticipated — in other words, it is hard to see how China expects to even come close to meeting its 2015 production goal. China’s shale gas sector is buffeted by uncertainty about the quality of China’s shale reserves, concerns about scarce freshwater supplies, competition from other energy sources, the potential safety threats posed by a byproduct poison gas, and emerging civic distrust. As a result shale gas development has yet to move any faster than a very slow crawl.

See the entire article here at Circle of Blue.

– Keith Schneider

TRAVERSE CITY, MI — As we’ve known for years now, the diminishment of the mainstream American media is opening fresh opportunities for more nimble and skilled newsrooms to produce first-rate reporting. Nowhere is that more true than at Circle of Blue, where I serve as senior editor, reporting from across the U.S. and overseas, and helping to guide an extraordinarily talented and committed stable of young journalists, producers, and graphic artists.

My colleague, Circle of Blue’s news desk editor Aubrey Parker, collected all of our online work from 2012. Take a look at the links below. They describe a remarkable story of a 21st century online multi-media newsroom of the future — based in Traverse City and collaborating with prominent think tanks, universities, media partners, and government agencies around the world.

In the realm of global journalism from the frontlines of the confrontation over rising demand for energy and food, and diminishing supplies of fresh water, no news and science organization is producing a stronger, more learned, more probing report. Last summer, Circle of Blue won the $100,000 Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Award for our distinctive and collaborative international operating system, which produced Circle of Blue’s influential Choke Point: U.S. and Choke Point: China reports.

(more…)

SHENYANG, China — The rice paddies start immediately beyond the borders of Liaoning’s provincial capital, a growing city of 8.1 million residents. Like a whirling turbine, the city flings 10-lane boulevards and 30-story apartment towers ever farther into the countryside. I’m out tracking down new irrigation systems, part of my research on Chinese grain production for Circle of Blue. Finding the rice and evidence of China’s new investment in modern irrigation infrastructure is a 50-minute cab ride from center city.

Water supply and water quality are two of the big impediments to farm production in this northeast China province. A year ago, provincial farm authorities completed construction of a concrete branch irrigation canal, replacing a mud-banked canal, that supplies farmers with water from the Lioahe River. But as we rode out to Fahaniu Village, where the canal was installed, I also learned that over the past two decades the township we were visiting had lost half its cropland to urban development.

My guide this day is Li Qinglu, a retired chemical engineer and former professor who at 68 has spent the last eight years becoming expert in agriculture, water, and in cultivation practices to prevent northeast China’s extensive grasslands from literally turning to dust. He’s also become one of Shenyang’s prominent environmentalists.

Li and his wife, Huang Jingli, are partners in a 50-mu farm (a bit more than three acres) in Fahaniu Village that produces vegetables, rice, and fish. Much of the work is done with hand implements. Their friend and farm manager, Li Jiazhen, is busy when we arrive planting in one of the small gardens. I see Jiazhen slowly stepping backwards, hoe in hand, scooping out softball-size holes in the soil. His wife, Qu LiJuan, is in front, clutching to her belly a small aluminum bowl filled with bean seeds. She steps forward, one foot, then another, dropping a single pea-size seed into the hole, and then pushing soil to cover it with her toe. The choreography of their line dance, and the sound of soil being dug and moved, is simple and in rhythm — the pull of the hoe, step, the drop of the seed, step, the toe-swipe of the soil cover, step. I have the clear sense that this same duet of spring (see pix below) has occurred on this land for centuries.

The sound of modern agriculture — water surging in concrete canals — is close by. The Chinese Central government has called for grain production to rise over 50 million metric tons – a roughly 10 percent increase — from 2010 to 2020. The government is counting on the farmers of Liaoning and three other northeast China provinces to supply most of the new grain. One of the central tools to assure that more rice, corn, soybeans, and other basic field crops are produced is to supply plant roots with adequate water through irrigation. China is now spending $1.2 billion annually in the four provinces to build hundreds of kilometers of new concrete canals, and change thousands of kilometers of existing mud-lined canals into concrete waterways.

One of the irrigation rebuilding projects concluded here a year ago. We learn this from Liu Caiyun, a 32-year-old rice farmer, (see pix above) who’s kneeling and using a hand trowel to plant beans on the top of the mud walls that line her 6-mu rice paddy. I ask her about the concrete canal that supplies the water from the Liaohe River that floods her paddy. “We get a steady supply,” she tells me. “And the water is much cleaner.”

On the other side of the canal, 25 feet away, Wang Chunyun is listening to our conversation. She explains the economics of her 6-mu operation. Water costs 130 RMB per mu ($123 for six mu). Fertilzer, seed, and herbicide cost about the same for each input. She rents the land, too. In all, says Wang, who is 45 and a mother of one son, her production costs run 600 to 700 RMB per mu, $96 to $111, or $576 to $666 for the entire paddie. She produces, she says, about 3,500 kilograms of rice annually, keeping 250 kg for her family to eat, and selling the balance at 2.8 RMB per kg. Do the math and that’s 9,100 RMB in total sales or $1,444. She farms part-time and works part-time in the nearby furniture and elevator factories.

It is a beautiful morning with a cooling breeze strong enough to sway the green rice shoots. There is no sound of traffic. A white crane takes flight in the distance. Wang and Li are laughing and look years younger than their ages. To me it seems like a pretty good day. No, no, no, Wang says.

“Farming is the toughest job in the world,” she tells me. “We do the hard work but we don’t make much money.”

– Keith Schneider

My interest in the Ohio River Valley, as readers of ModeShift well know, is keen. Today, the New York Times published my latest piece about the billions being invested in mineral leasing for oil and gas drilling.

Tomorrow, in the NYT Business section, is another piece I did on Cincinnati’s improved economy and surging riverfront development.

You may recall this article on Owensboro Kentucky’s improved prospects for the NYT late last year.

I did this piece in April on Ohio’s soaring steel industry in the NYT:

And I laid out some of my basic thoughts about what’s happening in the six-state, 981-mile river valley here on ModeShift a few weeks ago:

My clear sense and reporting shows a region critical to the American nation and U.S. economy for 250 years that is recovering fast from two generations of disinvestment and decay. The entire river valley is emerging with a 21st economy that is based on:

1. Out of the box municipal tax increases and other urban investment policies that are improving the region’s biggest downtowns, all of which are growing again with new residents and businesses.

2. Striking gains in the fortunes of the higher education and medical sectors that have turned out to be the largest, or among the largest employers in the big and small cities.

3. Environmental protection and conservation gains that have improved air and water quality and conserved urban riverfronts and wildlands. The Ohio River Valley is impressively beautiful.

4. Global trade in farm commodity and fossil energy markets that have fostered regional booms in agriculture and oil and gas development that look to endure for years because of Asia’s (read China here) steadily rising demand.

I’ll be looking at China’s influence on the Ohio River Valley later this week.

– Keith Schneider

HONGXINGLONG, China — When she was a very young woman Liang Jun was one of the tens of thousands of durable adults dispatched by China’s new Communist Central Government in the early 1950s with orders to break open the prairie of this cold and formidable northeast province. Until agronomists and engineers from the Soviet Union offered their assistance, and their steel-tracked grey tractors, the work of cutting open land that was bound together by the uncut roots of centuries of tall prairie grasses was done by hand, one chop and heave at a time.

Workers lived in crude grass and sod and wooden huts. Winter temperatures can plunge here to 35 degrees below Fahrenheit. Summers are hot. Women worked alongside men, their hands protected by thick cotton gloves. They wrapped white scarves around their hair and faces, the long tails streaming in the wind.

Liang Jun is in her 80s now and lives in Harbin, a provincial capital city of 10.6 million people 700 kilometers west of this modern prairie city of 40,000. She doesn’t grant interviews, farm officials told me. Her place in Chinese history, though, needs no further explanation from a western writer. She is the first woman to drive a tractor in Chinese agriculture, the first female credited with participating in the mechanization campaign that turned this province into the largest grain producer in a nation that harvests more grain than any other country on Earth, including the United States.

For a time Jun’s image graced the 1 RMB notes that today are worth a little more than 16 cents. A more permanent honor, a bronze statue of Jun driving a 1950s Soviet-era tractor, is at the center of a handsome ultramodern glass and aluminum museum that honors the machines and productive prairie agriculture the Chinese developed here and on 113 other state-owned farms in Heilongjiang Province.

More than a year ago, as a researcher and writer at Circle of Blue, I reported on the urgent water shortage developing in the Yellow River Basin, which lies west of Heilongjiang. The provinces of the Yellow River Basin produce 20 percent of the country’s grain and 70 percent of its coal, China’s number one source of energy.

Both sectors are the region’s largest water users. Both also are at significant risk of collapse because climate change is steadily reducing levels of rain and snowfall and draining freshwater reserves. By 2020, without significant water conservation initiatives, and as China’s demand for energy and food increases, we concluded there would be a damaging gap in the basin’s available fresh water supply amounting to 20 billion cubic meters. In other words, farmers and energy producers will be 20 billion cubic meters short of the water they need to operate.

We presented this finding to scientists and engineers at the Ministry of Water Resources in Beijing in April 2011. When I asked what they were doing in response, they told us about developing policies to significantly modernize and expand irrigation networks and water conserving technologies and practices in Heilongjiang (pronounced hail-long-jong) and three other northeastern provinces — Liaoning, Jilin, and eastern Inner Mongolia. I replied that we’d be back.

Here we are, accompanied by Wu Jing Yang, our accomplished and indefatigable researcher and translator. It’s our fourth day in northeast China, a region visited by few foreigners and even fewer Americans. The complete findings will be available online later this summer.

I learned that this region, a land now of rice paddies full of growing green shoots and enormous fields of just plowed and planted corn and soybeans, is in the third great chapter of its farm development. Over the next five years, the Central government will spend almost 8 billion RMB ($1.3 billion) in Heilongjang to build new concrete canals, end the leaks in old ones, buy drip irrigation equipment, install state-of-the-art low-flow sprinklers, and take other measures to bring water to plant roots while also not testing the boundaries of the province’s water supply, which is generally plentiful but can also be unstable.

The goal is to increase yields at least 20 percent over the next half-decade, a goal that has domestic food security significance here, and global market importance in the United States, where farmers are enjoying the highest commodity prices of their lives.

It’s interesting stuff. A lot of what the Chinese government wants to do with water conservation and new irrigation practices on small farms has been developed and proven out on some of the world’s biggest farms, including the 264,000-acre YouYi Farm here, the largest in China. Yields on the mechanized and irrigated farm, about the size of a small American county, are equal to and often exceed the top American farms. More than 80 percent of its 1-million-ton harvest of rice and corn, and 150,000-ton sugar beet crop, is exported to other provinces, said the farm executives I met.

The YouYI Farm is owned and managed by the Central government in a state farm system unique to this province, and now the world with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its state farms. More than 120,000 people work on the YouYi farm and its related production and processing enterprises that form, quite literally, a world of their own. The 3,300 acres of sugar beets raised in immense irrigated fields are processed in the town’s sugar mill. Same for rice and corn. Layers upon layers of farm managers provide employment for top technical graduates, some of them the grandsons and granddaughters of the first generation farmers that include Liang Jun.

The schools, hospital, equipment repair shops, housing, community center, hotels, and other public institutions are managed by the regional farm oversight office here, housed in a grand granite and glass building. The city of wide concrete boulevards, bright street lights, magnificent parks, brand new high rises and shopping centers rises unexpectedly after a trip through dusty villages over cracked and crowded roads, past fields of new rice and corn where weeding is still done by hand.

In one way or another everybody connected to the YouYi Farm is descended from Liang Jun.

– Keith Schneider

The drilling boom on the northern Great Plains, especially in North Dakota, rivals Texas and the U.S. Gulf as the largest oil producing region in the U.S. Photo/Keith Schneider

Sunday evening, December 2011, Amtrak’s eastbound Empire Builder pulls into Williston, North Dakota, a fast-growing northern Great Plains city riding the lashing tail of an oil-drilling dragon. A crowd gathers on the station platform. Men coming. Men going. Big pickups rumble in the parking lot.

Four years into a drilling frenzy that has pushed North Dakota to the top of the nation’s oil-producing states, the sound of Williston is diesel engines. The scent is diesel fuel. It is below zero, windless for a change, and exhaust vapors hang in the air. The swirl of men, talking loud and walking fast to warmed pickup cabs, is like a swift eddy in a strong stream. The currents of purpose and planning, assignments and destinations, are so keen it feels like a military campaign.

A lot is at stake here — for this state, for the 35,000 men who’ve come from every corner of America to find work in the 18,000-square-mile oilfield, and for the nation. Williston — the population of which now measures an estimated 18,000, up 40 percent from a decade ago — is one of the epicenters of a national oil and gas drilling boom that is engulfing eight Great Plains states (as well as California and four states in the mid-Atlantic and South).

A convergence of new exploration and drilling techniques, rising global demand and prices, and suspect governing oversight is producing what looks to be the most powerful surge in fossil fuel production in U.S. history, say state officials and energy industry executives here and elsewhere. From every vantage, the consequences are momentous.

The Department of Energy recently reported that crude oil production in the United States has climbed to 5.88 million barrels per day, the most since 1998. After nearly three decades of steady declines, U.S. oil production has increased for three straight years, the first time that has happened since the 1970s. Oil imports are decreasing. And last year, refined petroleum products — gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuel — were the top American exports. The last time the U.S. exported more refined fuel than it imported was 1949.

The fossil fuel sector’s swift and extravagant growth also has produced a host of new jobs. A new analysis of federal labor data, completed by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. (EMSI), a labor market research group in Moscow, Idaho, finds that the oil and gas production sector employed 807,000 people in 2011 — an addition of 187,000 over 2005.

EMSI also found that every new oil and gas production job generated two more energy-related positions in manufacturing, services, transport, and in other industries: 374,000 more jobs. In other words, the oil and gas boom accounted for 561,000 new jobs — or more than 20 percent of the nation’s new jobs since 2005. In a down economy, such numbers are impossible to ignore.

“It’s certainly stunning and noteworthy. Something big is going on,” said M. Henry Robison, the chief economist and founder of EMSI. “I don’t think the public is aware of thjs.”

Indeed, the energy sector’s advance across the Great Plains and other regions came with such speed and force that it surprised residents and regulators alike. Now environmental leaders and academics, along with a select group of state agencies and a number of federal units — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — have raised the alarm about the consequences of the drilling frenzy.

***

A pad of ice four inches thick greeted Ron Ivory on a clear and cold December morning at the busy water depot south of Williston. Ivory is 47-years-old, a stocky and bearded truck driver from Vernal, Utah, with 23 years in the business. He’d been in North Dakota two weeks, working 14-hour days hauling fresh water, 130 barrels a load, to oil production sites.

One of the reasons that North Dakota and the other big U.S. shale energy fields have generated so many new jobs is because drawing gas and oil from the Bakken formation — a thin but widespread shale layer roughly two miles beneath much of the state’s northwest corner — is as close as man has gotten to drawing blood from a stone.

It takes a lot of water, millions of gallons per well, to perform the operation known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The typical well receives 300 to 400 tanker loads of heated fresh water that is mixed with sand, solvents, and other chemicals and then pumped down 10,000-foot well bores at pressures eclipsing 7,000 pounds per square inch. Coupled with explosives and other evolving production practices, the water cannon-shot pulverizes the shale, opening spaces in the rock through which oil and gas flows.

Thirty-five fracking crews work day and night in North Dakota now, and there are likely to be ten more before the end of 2012. Some 70 to 100 jobs are connected to a frack crew, according to the state Oil and Gas Commission. A few of those jobs involve operating the powerful fracking pumps. The rest are connected with transporting water from pumping stations like this one. There are dozens of water depots scattered across the territory, and the roads of western North Dakota are jammed with thousands of water tanker trucks.

“Everybody is up here to make money,” said Ivory. But those profits come at a tremendous cost.

In December, the EPA, which is preparing a study on the risks of fracking to drinking water, found persuasive evidence that the high-pressure, water- and chemical-intensive production practice had contaminated groundwater in Wyoming. The USFWS, in court documents filed in Bismarck, estimated that up to 1 million migratory birds drown or are poisoned each year after landing in the toxic soup of chemicals, drill cuttings, and drilling muds held in waste pits that accompany almost every drill site across the Great Plains.

And it’s not just water contamination. A study conducted last spring by researchers at Cornell University determined that fracking releases large quantities of methane as “fugitive emissions.” Emmissions of methane, a much more powerful climate change gas than carbon dioxide, amount to approximately 2 percent of the natural gas released by a fracked well — 1,000 times higher than similar emissions of methane from conventional wells, said the researchers.

For the time being, North Dakota officials and residents consider the economic riches worth the risks. “People say it’s generally a good thing,” said Mary Massad, chief executive and manager of the Southwest Water Authority, which supplies fracking crews with water. North Dakota’s energy companies are producing 500,000 barrels of oil a day from more than 6,000 wells. The resource is worth $45 million a day, at current market prices, and generates $4.5 million a day in state tax revenue, according to state officials. Production could top 1 million barrels per day sometime next year — placing North Dakota just behind Texas as the number two oil-producing state. But a number of economists and environmentalists assert that the big American oil and gas surge amounts to surrendering our economic and environmental future.

“It’s the last gasp of the old industrial revolution,” said Jeremy Rifkin, a Wharton-trained economist and author of the Third Industrial Revolution. “The oil companies and related industries are trying to resurrect the energy sources of an era that is sun-setting. The costs are immense for the economy, the environment — for this society and others around the world. We’re at the endgame of the second industrial revolution.”

***

After dark, beyond Williston’s last lit living room and heading east on state highway 1804, North Dakota’s landscape turns alien. Steel towers of active oil drilling rigs, flooded by lights as bright as a sports stadium’s, flank every steep rise. Bright orange flare gas fires, like flames on 20-foot birthday candles, break the pitch dark of every deep valley. The sound of ceaseless prairie winds and big trucks hauling water and drilling wastes and metal pipes is the background music of an energy industry that attracts thousands of workers — young workers — to a state that for decades shed jobs and its young adults.

Last August, Jon Moore and Rick Harding migrated here from their hometown in Sandpoint, a small resort city in northern Idaho. They are both 26-years-old, unmarried, and have partners back home with young children. They also are ambitious.

Within days of landing in Williston, they secured good jobs paying $60,000 to manage nine freshwater pumping stations for tanker trucks hauling water to drilling sites. Moore and Harding plan to bring their families to the mobile homes they rent, perched side by side at the top of a big hill overlooking the highway and drilling site on the floor of the Red Mike Valley

Moore is a big-shouldered man, earnest and hard-muscled from his days as a landscape contractor in Idaho. Harding is lean, compact, edgy, and with his tight goatee looks a lot like a young Sean Penn. They are western guys, at ease with the land and their new careers. Managing the water depots, handling the pumps and gauges, learning how to fix stuff came easily. During the long rides in the company truck between the depots, they plot out their futures in North Dakota and in business.

“I think I’m here for awhile,” Moore told me, adding that he and Harding have a plan to become investors in the development. “Back home there was just nothing going on. We heard about North Dakota and came over to get jobs. It’s working out real well.

But Moore and Harding aren’t blind to the cultural fissures opening, as the unrelenting pace of exploration and production creates environmental challenges and population growth overwhelms the region’s cities and towns. The state has counted over 1,000 oilfield-related spills of fuel, oil, saltwater, and waste — five times higher than the number of spills in 2004. Traffic deaths in western North Dakota in 2011 were double what they were in 2010, and injuries are 40 percent higher, according to the state police. A bad drilling rig explosion and fire in September killed two young workers and burned two others. Emergency medical and ambulance crews describe in published reports how picking up the pieces on the drill sites, highways, and man camps that have sprung up everywhere is like treating the wounded in a war zone.

That, of course, is not the view of oil and gas industry leaders or most residents in North Dakota. In 2010, the North Dakota Petroleum Council, the leading state trade organization, sponsored a public opinion survey conducted by Westwood Research and Statistical Services, a Bismarck firm, and Minot State University. Of the 632 adults questioned by phone and in a written survey, 87 percent agreed or strongly agreed that the “oil industry provides positive benefits to our state’s citizens,” and 72 percent agreed or strongly agreed that “the oil industry in North Dakota takes appropriate steps to protect the environment.”

“North Dakota is our home, too,” said Ron Ness, the petroleum council’s president. “It’s critical that people feel we’re being a good neighbor.”

Just how long the favorable sentiments will persist is anybody’s guess. For now, young men keep coming — because there are good jobs that pay very well and because workers have the sense that their labor is helping the American economy to recover. “This is energy that we produce here,” said Harding. “We’re not sending dollars out of the country.”

***

The Saturday morning that Scott Terrell and I had breakfast at Gramma Sharon’s Family Restaurant in Williston, every seat was taken by roughnecks and drivers fueling up on eggs and chicken-fried steaks before heading out to work.

Terrell, a 58-year-old underemployed painter and carpenter from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, joined the army of oilfield mercenaries last August. He quickly landed a job driving a Volvo haul truck on a heavy equipment construction crew that builds the flat-as-a-table, laser-graded oil drilling pads.

There is plenty of work. Enbridge, the Canadian transport company, is building a $145 million expansion to its oil pipeline network in North Dakota. Burlington Northern is building prairie depots to load oil aboard unit trains that transport 100,000 barrels a day to the Gulf Coast. There are two proposals for new refineries. Last year alone, drilling companies punched 2,000 new wells into the North Dakota prairie. During the long light of summer, Terrell said, he spent 14 hours a day behind the wheel breathing dust. In the fierce cold, wind, and dark of the Dakota winter, he works 12-hour days. He earns roughly $7,000 a month.

But the pace is relentless and dangerous — and it leads to accidents, like the explosion on the drilling rig in September.

“I could see the smoke on the horizon,” he said.

Terrell, who is tall and more fit than the average guy his age, described his time in North Dakota with a kind of burdened sigh, Just driving to and from work is hazardous, he said. During the first year of operation every drill site is served by an average of 2,000 round trips by big trucks hauling equipment, chemicals, men, water, and other materials. With 2,000 wells drilled in 2011, that’s nearly 110,000 round-trips to well sites every day. In short, the highways in western North Dakota are packed with big trucks moving fast — the principal cause for the increase in highway fatalities.

Terrell said he’d been around long enough to contend with other risks, too. In early December, his crew discovered that diesel oil and chemicals had been illegally dumped into a waste pit they were reclaiming at a drilling site. The crew dug out tons of contaminated soils, loaded the toxic mess aboard trucks, and shipped it to a regulated disposal site. But such incidents are on the climb as more and more workers come from outside the region, with no longtime connection to the land and no plans to stay, and limited oversight produces little in the way of consequences.

“It happens and nobody knows who’s doing it,” Terrell said.

When we finished breakfast, the line of customers waiting to pay their bills was so long that I simply left cash on the table and slipped out. I felt a little guilty doing it, like I was violating the ethos expressed on the hand-lettered sign next to the cash register.

Please be patient, it said in plaintive neat cursive. We are short-staffed every day.

***

Lynn D. Helms — bearded, lean, and genial — looks nothing like the rock star he’s become in the American oil industry. Helms spent 20 years earlier in his career as a roughneck and petroleum engineer. Now he is the director of the state Department of Mineral Resources, the agency charged with both promoting and regulating oil and gas production. In 2011, the condition of the waste pits used by drillers was at the top of his list of concerns — and for good reason.

During the winter of 2010–2011, his agency counted roughly five hundred open waste pits full of drilling muds, chemicals, diesel fuel, and brine-saturated water. Such pits were allowed by state law to be kept open and full of liquid for a year. During a run of heavy snowmelt and flooding in North Dakota in the spring, though, 40 pits overflowed. Twenty were severe enough to contaminate land and some surface water beyond the drill sites. Helms said his agency issued $3 million in fines.

“This year we count 867 open pits,” he said. “We can’t allow that to continue.”

North Dakota is set to implement new regulations in April to require companies to build much smaller pits that contain only dry materials and no liquids. State rules also require the pits to be covered by nets to prevent wildlife from drowning or being poisoned. A number of companies didn’t comply. Last summer, the Justice Department, with help from the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, filed cases against eight companies under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for deaths of waterfowl at drilling sites. Three companies pled guilty and paid small fines; three others are contesting the charges. The case against a seventh company was dismissed, and one case is under seal. The growing number of prosecutions is worrisome, said state regulators; it suggests that fines for environmental regulations are regarded as a standard business expense.

Helms is sensitive to this charge — especially in light of the built-in conflict in his own agency. The dual charge of promoting oil and gas development and enforcing all regulations governing drilling and production is essentially the same operating system as the old federal Minerals Management Service, a unit of the Department of Interior that promoted and regulated offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico before it was disbanded following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.

Helms promises that his $3 million-a-year state agency in North Dakota will do better. The department is adding 17 new people to its staff, which will number 75. Sixteen of the positions will be on the regulatory side. “We’ve built in a system of checks and balances,” Helms said. “We act as two separate agencies under the same head, which is me. I have to straddle the fence.”

***

Despite Helms’s assurances, the phalanx of industrial equipment required to wrest oil and gas from the deep shale is utterly rearranging the big sky landscape.

Buck Hill is one of the tallest points in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which spreads across more than 70,000 acres of grass and tight canyons south of Williston, where North Dakota meets South Dakota and Montana. Several weeks ago Valerie Naylor, the park superintendent, hiked to the summit and counted six oil-drilling platforms.

In the next few months more rigs will surround the park’s boundaries. With them will come open waste pits full of toxic drilling muds and liquids lifted out of the two-mile-long bore holes. There are roads and drill pads scraped from the grasslands, diesel trucks by the hundreds, and plenty of men. Naylor diplomatically described the new steel towers, bright lights, gas flares, and guttural sounds of the oil boom gathering at the park’s perimeter as “an intrusion in the national park experience.”

Fortunately, drilling will not occur inside the park. U.S. National Park Service policy forbids oil and gas exploration in any national park, so all production activities are occurring beyond the park’s boundaries. The same can’t be said for the Dakota Prairie National Grasslands, a 1.259 million-acre stretch of wildlands in southwest North Dakota and northern South Dakota. The grasslands are administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is busy leasing federal minerals and preparing permits for at least 90 drill sites.

Landmen, the advance guard of the industry, swarm county clerk offices, too, hoping to lock up private mineral leases. Drilling rigs are poised to advance into South Dakota in the spring. The Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana — and its related Three Forks and Tyler shales in North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming — are said by geologists to contain nearly 30 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The boom, far from abating, may be just getting started.

To understand how powerful the energy rush is in North Dakota, just stand for a few minutes at any place alongside U.S. route 85 north or south of Williston. Semis hauling heavy equipment, pipe, water, fuel, oil, rigging, and any number of other loads roll past, an unyielding train of oil field gear and supplies and products. And in the spaces where there aren’t semis, there are pickups hauling men back and forth to the drill sites.

Five years ago, say townies, U.S. 85 in early December was as quiet as a dance floor on Tuesday morning, and the small towns of western North Dakota were drying up like shallow lakes in the desert. Now people are predicting that Williston, where fewer than 13,000 people lived a decade ago could reach 35,000 by 2020, maybe 100,000 after that.

“I think we have to plan for a North Dakota with a million people, believe it or not,” said Lynn Helms. “We’ll also be producing a million barrels a day.”

As you know, if you’re a regular reader of ModeShift, my interest for over a year has focused on energy demand and water supply in the United States and China. I study the trends and don’t see how advancing the fossil fuel agenda in both countries really helps provide long-term security. It just looks like we’re determined to make the energy industry richer and more influential,  while we do our best as ordinary citizens to hold on to what we have. At least in China, the last generation’s economic growth lifted 450 million people out of poverty and into the middle class. But the foundations of China’s long-term economic strategy are as shaky as ours.

One of the top U.S. scholars on energy demand trends in the world’s two largest economies agrees. In the final article in Circle of Blue’s year-long Choke Point project, David Fridley told me today that rising fossil fuel prices — caused, in part, by competition for scarce freshwater supplies — is challenging the economic stability of China and the United States.

“To what degree is China taking into account the rising cost of energy as a factor in rising overall prices in their economy?” said Fridley, who is a staff scientist in the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “What level of aggregate energy cost increases can China sustain before they tip over?”

“That’s where China’s next decade is heading — accommodating rising energy costs,” Fridley added. “We’re already there in the United States. When energy costs reach 8 to 9 percent of the GDP, as they have in 2011, the economy is pushed into recession within a year.”

The Choke Point project, published in two series of articles – Choke Point: China and Choke Point: U.S. — found clear evidence that both nations view energy production as the top national priority and that declining fresh water reserves impede energy development. The reports found that the water needs of Chinese and American coal, oil and gas producers take precedence over any other economic sector.

Moreover, by insisting on developing new sources of carbon-based fuels, drawn from the desert in China, and from the dry Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain West in the United States, both nations are testing the limits of their national water reserves. They also challenge the capacity of other important economic sectors — agriculture, large metropolitan regions, major manufacturers — to use much less water.

The Choke Point project prompted scientists and water managers in China to expand their research priorities. And it alerted U.S. policymakers and media to the enormous hydrocarbon development occurring at the center of the North American continent.

“China’s continued growth and stability hinge on it finding a more sustainable strategy to cope with its water and energy demand,” Parag Khanna, an author, global strategist, and senior research fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based New America Foundation, told me in an interview. “There would be no better way for China to demonstrate its global leadership than by heeding the important lessons of the Choke Point report.”

“We shined a light on China’s greatest challenge,” added Jennifer Turner, the director of the China Environment Forum, a friend who helped immensely with scholarship and her network of contacts in China. “China has to be better than any other country in dealing with the energy-water choke points because as our reporting showed, they have no wiggle room.”

Read more here at Circle of Blue.

– Keith Schneider

Jay Letto, a friend who oversees the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, wrote to me last week asking for my ideas and participation on a panel in October that looks at U.S. and China clean energy and environmental technology development.

Here’s my response:

The last year of reporting on energy and environment issues globally has been just about as interesting and engaging as any I’ve done — the China experience in particular. I took three long reporting trips there over six months from October to April, covering the Tianjin climate conference last year and doing the research for Circle of Blue’s Choke Point: China project, which we finish with our last piece on Tuesday. Tremendous story occurring there and it’s been a privilege to interview the people putting in place the tools and equipment that are building a nation at a scale and speed that is just off the hook. One of the early chapters in our report was about China’s non-fossil fuel sector, which is now well ahead of such development in the U.S.

I’m happy to help you frame the panel and would enjoy participating if 1) I’m here and 2) can find some dough to defray expenses. I may be in China at that time. I’ve been working with some DC-based people to line up a teaching/writing gig in Guandong in the fall. I’ll know more by summer’s end.

On the general idea,  a few thoughts:

1. China is investing almost $80 billion annually over the next decade to develop its wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, and biomass electrical generation sectors. By the end of the decade it will generate about  700 gigawatts of power from these technologies, up from about 266 gigs at the end of 2010. If that kind of development occurred in the U.S. it would amount to 60 to 70 percent of our electrical generating capacity by 2020. So China is outpacing the US in every non-fossil fuel sector except nuclear when it comes to electrical generating capacity.

2. China, though, is not nearly as much of a clean energy hero as some would want to believe. Reason. It’s growing so fast, and its top cultural and economic priority is to continue to grow at breakneck speed and gargantuan scale. Result: Coal production has tripled since 2000 to 3.15 billion metric tons in 2010 (more than three times US coal production and use) and is expected to increase by 1 billion more metric tons annually  by 2020. Coal supplies over 70 percent of national energy needs and will continue to linger at that level for at least the next decade, even with all the non-fossil development. Reason in part: Electrical generation in China, now about 960 gigs, is anticipated to at least double to 1,900 gigs by 2020. The U.S. also produces about 960 gigs annually. So China over the next ten years will add the equivalent of all the electrical generating capacity that it took the US 100 years to build. The environmental consequences of China’s coal-based electrical production sector is enormous for water, air, and land resources.

3. China plans to double its hydro-generating capacity to 400 gigs annually by 2020 from 213 gigs at the end of 2010. The environmental consequences to the river basins in southern China, where most of the dams are either under construction or planned, are high. The tradeoff — less coal and climate-changing emissions vs. damage to natural areas, fisheries, and human communities — is one that China has chosen to make but is producing civil unrest as well.

Last year Circle of Blue produced Choke Point: U.S. which looked closely at the contest over energy demand and water supply here. We concluded that the U.S., is devoting itself to perpetuating the fossil fuel economy in order to hold off the damage that rising energy prices is doing to our way of life. In order to produce the energy we need at current rates of demand, and to prepare for generating more as demand grows, the U.S. is quite literally going after energy resources that lie in much more difficult forms and places to tap.

The country, afraid of rising gasoline prices and unwilling to pursue cleaner alternatives at any kind of scale, appears  clearly ready to tear itself asunder and produce environmental damage that is an order of magnitude higher than we’ve sustained in previous decades. The Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West are targets of deep shale oil, gas, and tar sands development. Northern Alberta is  now the biggest mining district in the world. The Gulf Coast deepwater exploration — well we know that story now.

The point I’m making here is that the two largest economies aren’t in any competition over technology or practices to advance environmental safety. Nor are they in competition to foster fossil fuel development. In fact I found tremendous cooperation between U.S. and Chinese companies and the two governments to assist China and the U.S. in strengthening conventional energy security — Westinghouse is building China’s nuclear reactors, Peabody is financing advanced coal gasification technololgy in Tianjin (see pix above), the U.S. is assisting China’s shale gas development with technical support, and China has billions invested in North American tar sands, gas, oil, and pipeline developments.

What China and the U.S. are doing is perpetuating the fossil fuel economies of both nations, and the environmental costs of the expansion in gas, oil, coal, and tar sands developments is serious and growing. So maybe a panel that looks closely at these troubling trends in the world’s two largest economies could be something you’d also find interesting. I realize that this suggestion may take you off course and SEJ may have already done such a panel, but the big global environmental story is what’s happening with new fossil fuel development in both countries. Even with China’s new clean tech sector development, it’s a small piece of that nation’s overall energy plan for at least the next decade.

– Keith Schneider

XI’AN, China—Last November, as government leaders considered energy goals for China’s upcoming 12th Five-Year Plan—which was adopted last month—60-year-old geographer Huo Youguang took the podium at an academic meeting about water scarcity and coal production in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, one of the driest inhabited areas on the planet.

Over the next half-hour or so, Huo described a first-of-its-kind transcontinental pipeline that he believed could be a breakthrough in developing more fossil energy from Xinjiang and China’s other northern coal-rich provinces, while conserving the region’s scarce freshwater reserves.

His proposal: drop a pipe into the Bohai Sea in China’s east, draw more than 340,000 cubic meters (90 million gallons) of seawater a day into a complex of coastal desalination plants, and then pump this water 1,400 meters uphill for more than 600 kilometers (nearly 400 miles) to Xilinhot, where it will be used for coal mining operations.

The Bohai Pipeline reflects the urgency of China’s confrontation with its diminishing freshwater resources.  It also represents the country’s daring and tenacity in solving big problems, a quality that is weak in the U.S. I know. Human rights, environmental degradation, over population, lousy toilets, slow Internet. These also describe China. But there’s no mistaking  China’s resolve to succeed, and the fact that it’s produced rising incomes and opportunity for 400 million citizens. In the U.S., the middle class is under seige and incomes for almost everybody but the wealthiest have been falling for over a decade.

Xilinhot, an Inner Mongolia city of 177,000, is the destination for the Bohai Pipeline. It lies atop a mammoth and, so far, untouchable coal reserve. Chinese authorities estimate Xilinhot’s proven and unproven coal reserves to contain 1.4 trillion metric tons. At China’s current rate of coal consumption—more than 3 billion metric tons annually—the Xilinhot reserves alone could power the country for the next 425 years.

If the first $US 6 billion stretch of the Bohai Pipeline were to perform as Huo anticipates, it could be expanded and sent an additional 2,800 kilometers (1,850 miles) from Xilinhot—crossing the rest of Inner Mongolia and through northern Gansu Province—all the way to the western province of Xinjiang, where Chinese geologists say even larger coal reserves exist. Leaders are pressing the region to double current coal production capacity to 200 million metric tons of coal per year by 2015.

By the time had Huo finished his presentation, he had ignited a national engineering debate surrounding the cost, practicality, and feasibility of using vast amounts of purified seawater to produce more coal for China’s modernization, while simultaneously easing northern China’s water shortage. By suggesting a giant project that some authorities considered daffy, Huo also confirmed just how vulnerable China’s powerful engine of growth is to deepening water scarcity, particularly in the energy-rich northern and western provinces, now the primary focus of China’s development and modernization.

Collision Approaches
As China rushes deeper into the second decade of the 21st century, the nation’s energy production and consumption trend is a steep, increasing line. It is that vector— fast-rising energy demand confronting water scarcity—that is proving so difficult to resolve.

Huo Youguang, a professor in the Center for Environment and Modern Agriculture Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Shanxi Province, is convinced a transcontinental pipeline will help.

Back in December, while I was reporting in China for Circle of Blue, Huo told me that the transformation of the growing and modern desert cities of Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Xinjiang, Ningxia, and Shanxi provinces are endangered by their diminishing freshwater reserves.

These regions contain the nation’s largest proven and unproven coal reserves. But developing coal reserves, along with the power and processing infrastructure to consume coal, uses tens of billions of gallons of water each year—water that isn’t available in a region that receives just a few inches of rain annually and where climate change is reducing snow pack.

We need water, and the sea can provide it,” Huo said, noting that he had first proposed an across-the-north route for a pipeline from the Bohai Sea back in 1997.

In 2002, a separate academic team from Beijing University proposed a similar route, but further to the north. However, both pipelines—which would transport water more than 3,400 kilometers (2,100 miles) to Xinjiang—are seen by a number of Chinese engineers as impractical.

And even if the pipeline were built, say critics, would it really be capable of slaking the big thirst of northern China’s coal sector?

Evading Water-Energy Choke Point, For Now
Of all the threats over the next decade to China’s rapid modernization, arguably none is more significant than assuring adequate supplies of coal, which accounts for 70 percent of the nation’s total energy production and consumption. In the previous chapters of Choke Point: China, Circle of Blue has reported the essential outlines of a potentially ruinous and fast-approaching confrontation between rising demand for coal and steadily diminishing freshwater reserves.

Read more here.

– Keith Schneider