Editorial comment

	Vol. 229 No.7
PERRY A. FISCHER, EDITOR

The fire down below

We hear a lot about the causes of global warming, made political by opportunists on both sides of the CO₂ equation who prefer to cast it either as an urgent problem with dire consequences or as “problem, what problem?-let’s do nothing.” There’s a huge middle ground, which is where political structures usually take us; in other words, the truth lies between the extremes. But until climate change becomes a near-dead, boring issue, political operatives will ensure that opposing ideologies will rule the day-the science be damned.

The “urgent problem” crowd has been offering cash prizes for solutions. The biggest is Richard Branson’s (of Virgin Airways fame) $25 million for an engineering design that removes at least 1 billion tons a year of man-made CO₂ from the atmosphere for 10 years. If you think about it, that is impossible, because once it’s in the atmosphere, it’s impossible to remove only man-made CO₂. Reading the fine print doesn’t help, so I assume that they mean preventing man-made CO₂ that otherwise would end up in the atmosphere. But how, exactly, man-made CO₂ affects climate differently from natural CO₂, I cannot fathom.

Thus, this appears to be a prize aimed at the fossil fuel industries, with a side benefit that it helps mitigate greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere, albeit only man-made greenhouse gas. While this appears dumb at face value, upon closer inspection-there’s no help; it stays dumb. Sitting on the judging panel are some well-respected scientists and, not surprisingly, Al Gore, who is there, I suppose, for color commentary, PR or other reasons, since he certainly is not a scientist.

ConocoPhillips has joined in with its own prize-a mere $300,000-which can be won by simply offering any idea that contributes to a solution. Submission time was only for 60 days, which will have expired by the time you read this.

So what does any of this have to do with the above title? Well, as we all know, coal is also a fossil fuel. Setting aside clean coal technologies-which, incidentally, already exist and are proven to work, but have taken decades, and will take even more decades to fully implement due to a lack of will-there’s the coal that is still in the ground to consider. And a staggering amount of it is burning. The last time I even thought about these fires, it was in the context of THAI (air injection) technology for Canadian oil sands production. The technique heats and lowers the viscosity of bitumen in situ. There was-and perhaps still is-concern that the subsurface would start burning in an uncontrolled way, like hundreds of coal seams all over the world are doing today.

The number of these fires is poorly inventoried, but they may number as many as 1,000. They exist on every continent except Antarctica, with the most famous and prolific being the coal seams of India, Indonesia, the US and especially China, where some have been burning for more than a million years. They produce an incredible amount of CO₂, some 500 million metric tons a year. For context, that’s about 4% of the total CO₂ reduction in terms of the now virtually defunct Kyoto Protocol.

According to Glen Stracher of East Georgia College, who’s a bit of a guru on the subject, China’s coal fires alone burn 360 million metric tons a year, which is equal to the emissions of all automobiles and light trucks in the US. However, if you include peat, the numbers increase dramatically. For example, in 1997, Indonesia’s burning peat, coal and associated fires released 13-40% of the amount of CO₂ emitted globally by fossil fuel burning of all types.

Some of these were fires started at outcrops by brush fires, or by lightning strikes, or even occurred spontaneously, but most of them occurred in association with mining operations, and thus can be considered man-made. While they are slow spreading, the smoldering wave front covers more and more surface area each year as these fires burn, until the entire coal or peat deposit is depleted. We only receive the destructive aspects of these fires without the benefits of the fuel.

The damaging effects are mind-boggling: thousands of surface fires sparked (whole towns in the US have had to be relocated; see Centralia and Laurel Run, Pennsylvania); release of arsenic, mercury, uranium and other organo-metallics, carbon monoxide, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen; human health problems; wildlife habitat destruction; and the annual loss of an estimated $9 trillion worth of this fossil fuel resource.

I’m not a big fan of CO₂ cap and trade; the premise that it’s OK to pay for the right to “pollute” seems odd. It creates a huge amount of gaseous calculations, as well as requiring an auditing/oversight bureaucracy. And since it will be bought and sold on regulated exchanges, it requires additional oversight on the trading end. And yes, there will be CO₂ billionaires.

But let’s face reality; since both US presidential candidates endorse greenhouse gas cap-and-trade markets, it’s a fait accompli. And in any event, oil companies like Anadarko are already actively trading carbon credits in private markets, so we might as well get used to it. Maybe the US can learn from the EU’s considerable mistakes with their system, not the least of which is figuring out how to prevent exaggerating initial claims of CO₂ emissions, to get CO₂ credits to trade, thus flooding the market.

If putting out these underground fires gets CO₂ credits-and it’s hard to see how it would not considering the benefits-then the Law of Unintended Consequences comes into play: It will only be a matter of time until someone sets a coal seam on fire for the purpose of cashing in on the CO₂ credits when it’s put out. It’ll be too easy to do, and the evidence of the matchstick will be buried. Such is life.

A Drilling Engineering Association Workshop was held this June in Galveston, Texas, which prompted this writing. DEA163 is a special project to assess whether oilfield technology can be brought to bear on these fires down below. The answer is: It can. These highly fractured formations can be plugged with gel; directional, CT drilling and other technologies can all help to suffocate these fires.

Given the combined benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation, while stopping the wasted burning of a significant chunk of the planet’s stored carbon reserves, putting out these fires would seem a win-win situation for all. And it wouldn’t cost nearly as much as one preemptive war. But would it be man-made enough to claim even part of the prize for Richard Branson and Al Gore?