Crude - The incredible journey of oil

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If you've ever stood at the petrol pump wondering what you were putting into your car, you're not alone. Scientist and filmmaker Dr Richard Smith was doing likewise just over a year ago when he had a Eureka moment. "I thought, 'Oil!' Here's this stuff that powers our cars and drives our economy; it plays a huge part in so many areas of our lives and is largely responsible for our environmental problems. But if you ask most people, they don't actually know what it is or where it comes from."

Smith set out to remedy this with a feature-length documentary, a remarkably clear-eyed and ambitious film that spans 160 million years of Earth's history to tell the story of oil.

And what a story it is. Simply put, crude oil is a sludgy soup of ancient algae - microscopic plankton that died, fell to the sea floor and were squashed together, layer upon layer over millions of years. Compacted into carbon-rich beds of shale and clay, they were then cooked underground into what the oil executives like to call "light sweet crude".

"What is really amazing is how the prehistoric remains of these tiny brainless creatures have come back to exert such a sway over the most intelligent life form on the planet," Smith says.

As an energy source, oil has no equal: the power stored in the bonds between its carbon and hydrogen atoms can release 100 times more energy than it takes to get it out of the ground. And it has incredible energy density: as Lord Ron Oxburgh, former chairman of Shell UK, points out, a teacup of petroleum can transport a one-tonne car one kilometre up a mountainside.

Not surprisingly, humans quickly became addicted to oil, and have gobbled up half of all available supplies since the start of commercial exploitation, in 1859, in Pennsylvania. Oil now underpins virtually everything in society, powering transport and the economy, with petrochemical derivatives such as plastic, paints, fertiliser and toothpaste playing indispensable roles in our daily lives. "We're born in a sterile room, caught by someone wearing plastic gloves and are swaddled in a polyester blanket," investigative journalist Sonia Shah says. "We spend our lives bathed in oil."

But as Crude makes clear, there's a price to pay. Carbon dioxide, the gas released when oil is burned, acts as Earth's thermostat. Too little in the atmosphere and the planet will freeze; too much, and it will cook. Levels of carbon dioxide have always fluctuated, most notably during the Jurassic period, 160 million years ago, when today's oil fields started forming.

Back then, the levels grew steadily with volcanic activity over thousands of years, until the planet became super-heated, with anoxic, or stagnant, oceans (hence all that dead plankton) and acid rains. Our consumption of oil is replicating this process, only far more quickly - we are expected to reach carbon levels that are double the pre-industrial levels by the middle of the century, pushing us toward a greenhouse future and climate chaos.

"The worrying thing is that all the evidence points to the fact that the change will come suddenly," Smith says. "The atmosphere becomes saturated with carbon dioxide, and suddenly the climate flips into an uncontrollable cycle of super-heating and oceanic anoxia."

Smith's triumph is in making the science so accessible, telling the tale of oil through computer-generated graphics, expert testimony and a roving camera. From Oman to Oklahoma, Greenland to Saudi Arabia, Smith travels the world to see how crude has shaped us, politically and socially. And always there is the sense of Earth's impossibly long climate cycles, played out over millions of years, in which carbon is the central player, and with which man has been absently tinkering.

"At first I thought, 'how am I going make this interesting?' Then I realised that it wasn't that hard. Oil sweeps throughout human history, with consequences for everyone. When you look at the future and what's going on, everyone has a stake in it."

So is he an optimist? "Put it this way: I don't think it helps to throw your hands in the air in despair. I think there is a popular groundswell of support for change but the politics lags behind. To be forewarned is to be forearmed and hopefully this program will be forewarning people."

Energy

peak oil

media

Alternative Energy

oceanic anoxia

oceanic anoxic event

OAE

MCC World Cricket committee - The game's new conscience

If you were asked for one idea to improve international cricket, you probably wouldn't say: "Form a committee!" But that is what MCC have done, and it could turn out to be exactly what the game needs.

This isn't just any committee. It is the MCC World Cricket committee. Its members are all cricketers, present (Rahul Dravid) or past (the rest). They are all, apart from Dravid and now Andy Flower, currently detached from playing, coaching or, as far as I know, administration. In Britain, the sort of people who get asked on to committees tend to be referred to, a little wearily, as "the great and the good". Well, this lot are great and good.

Among them are great Test captains (Steve Waugh, Mike Brearley), leading commentators (Mike Atherton, Geoff Boycott), a well-loved umpire (David Shepherd, desperately hoping the committee-room clock won't reach 1.11), major figures in the English game (Atherton, Mike Gatting, Alec Stewart), and several men who are all-time greats from their respective countries (Dravid, Barry Richards, Courtney Walsh, Martin Crowe, Majid Khan, Andy Flower). The chairman is Tony Lewis, less of a star and more of an MCC insider than the rest, but eminently decent and wise. Around the table were many races, many varieties of cricketer, and a range of different ages. The only obvious omission was a woman: the dear old MCC are still not fully aware of the existence of half the human race.

The committee met for the third time in mid-May and issued two statements. The first one was all about Zimbabwe, the country Flower represented with great distinction, never more so than when he put on a black armband. The committee called for Zimbabwe to be "permanently suspended" from international cricket "until such time as the cricket infrastructure is rebuilt". The reason they gave is that the standard of cricket played by Zimbabwe has deteriorated. They were not asking ICC to make a political judgment, something Malcolm Speed purports to avoid. They were asking them to concede that Zimbabwe's cricket just isn't up to scratch.

So far, so wise - although the decision to devote one statement to Zimbabwe did backfire a bit, as the committee's other pronouncements, published six days later, attracted less coverage than they would have if they had all come out together. If you read them anyway, skip a paragraph. If you missed them, here they are, reduced to bullet points:

1. Bowling actions should be monitored in matches, not just in science labs.

2. There are too many international matches, especially one-dayers.

3. There should be a standard format for international tours - a Twenty20 "competition" (a rare moment of vagueness), three one-dayers and a Test series of three to five matches.

4. The World Cup should last no longer than a month, with fewer teams and "fewer one-sided matches".

5. Boundaries should go out again, to within two metres of the perimeter fence.

6. Groundsmen should stop using glue to hold pitches together.

Are they right? Let's go point by point again.

1. Probably. Monitoring during matches will be tricky, but if it can be done, it will have far more credibility.

2. Absolutely. Over-scheduling has done damage to everything from the World Cup's rarity value to a whole generation of fast bowlers.

3. Probably. The standard format is ingenious and appealing, although there should still be some two-Test series - England v West Indies, perhaps.

4. Absolutely. This World Cup had the whole cricket world crying out for less, to borrow the title of Christopher Martin-Jenkins' excellent piece on over-scheduling in the 2003 Wisden.

5. Probably, though I have a soft spot for the six-hitting you see today. There aren't THAT many of them, and this is the one place where the committee gives off a whiff of old fart. One or two of their members hit fewer sixes in their whole international careers than Shahid Afridi does in an hour.

6. Absolutely. Glueing pitches is a hideous practice. Cricket is essentially a game played with natural materials - leather, cork, willow, muscles, and brain. It ought to be a whole lot greener than it is, and glueing pitches should be barred for environmental reasons alone.

So: seven pronouncements, five of them spot-on, and two pretty close. They even show their independence by pointing out that the culprits with the glue include MCC itself. Whether anyone will listen remains to be seen, but the game has found a new conscience.

Tim de Lisle is a former editor of Wisden. His website is http://www.timdelisle.com

Burnt coal from the age of dinosaurs sheds light on today's global warming

Studying climate change is incredibly complex, yet retracing climate change and the causes behind those changes is the only way to understand the effects of burning massive amounts of fossil fuels today.

Over the course of geological time, the amount of carbon trapped in land and the oceans has waxed and waned. So has the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These fluctuations correlate closely with changes in global temperatures. Therefore, studying the flow of carbon between land, water and atmosphere through geological ages can shed light on issues surrounding today's global warming.

New research described in the May 26 issue of Nature provides some missing pieces in the puzzle depicting the global carbon cycle over geological time. During what geologists call "oceanic anoxic events," it has long been suggested that a large amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere by millions of microscopic organisms that dwell in the oceans. They do this by trapping carbon in their bodies. When they die, their bodies rain down to the ocean depths and are buried by sediment, locking away the trapped carbon from the atmosphere for million of years.

Scientists believe that during oceanic anoxic events the biological activity or "productivity" of these oceanic organisms is for some reason enhanced. On the other hand, perhaps the number of these oceanic organisms is somehow much greater during OAEs than during normal times.

Oceanic anoxic events are extremely unusual in other ways, too. They are often associated with mass extinction among many marine organisms and coincide with periods of intense global warming.

Scientists have long debated what causes OAEs. The prevailing theory is that a release of massive amounts of methane into the ocean is the root cause. The methane, in turn, oxidizes creating colossal amounts of carbon dioxide in the ocean and atmosphere, which depletes the oceans of oxygen, warms the planet, and kills off plants and animal species.

Now, a new theory holds that OAEs – in particular the Toarcian OAE, which occurred about 183 million years ago during the age of dinosaurs – are triggered by the burning of vast underground coalfields. These coalfields were set ablaze by the intrusion of molten rock from the Earth's crust.

"The burnt coalfields are hundreds of feet thick and cover vast areas of the Transantarctic Mountains of Antarctica, as well as South Africa," said Jennifer McElwain, PhD, Associate Curator of Paleobotany at Chicago's Field Museum and lead author of the research. "Huge quantities of methane and carbon dioxide would have been released from these coals as they were heated to high temperatures by the molten rock."

Although OAEs are not universally accepted as models upon which an understanding of modern climate change can be based, this new research sheds light on the possible consequences of the current level of consumption of carbon-based fuels. "If the incredibly high global temperatures that occurred during the Toarcian oceanic anoxic event were caused by burning a significant amount of the Earth's coal deposits within one hundred thousand years, it doesn't take much imagination to realize what will happen if we burn most of the Earth's remaining fossil fuels over the coming century, which is what we are in the process of doing," McElwain said.

The scientists, who worked on this research for more than four years, also turned up a totally unexpected result: they identified a 200,000-year interval when atmospheric carbon dioxide dropped to surprisingly low levels at the start of the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event. This was probably due to the great number and activity of marine organisms at this time that effectively sucked carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere like a sponge. This drop cooled the Earth, maybe even enough to have enabled ice sheets to form and grow in the polar regions of the Arctic and Antarctic.

The idea of ice sheets during the age of dinosaurs has always been a controversial topic. Nevertheless, McElwain and coauthors Steve Hesselbo, from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford in England, and Jessica Wade Murphy, who was an undergraduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago at the time of this study, believe they have tantalizing evidence that the global temperatures were not as uniformly warm and ice free during the age of dinosaurs, as once assumed. In this study, which was funded by the Comer Foundation of Science and Education, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were determined by counting the stomata in small fossil leaves collected from Båga Formation, Denmark, of which 126 specimens were used. Stomata are minute pores in the surface of leaves through which water vapor and gases, including carbon dioxide, pass. The fewer the stomata, the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and vice versa.

"We were certainly surprised to find that our tiny fossil leaves from Denmark led us half way across the world to coalfields of the Transantarctic Mountains in Antarctica to form a new theory on how natural geological processes in the past have caused extreme global warming," McElwain said. "It's very sobering to realize that humans are currently causing global warming by similar processes, that is, by burning fossil fuels like coal and oil. The difference today is that we are causing the atmosphere and climate to change at a greatly faster rate than has ever been observed in the Earth's history."