Drill, Baby, Drill
Future Defossilization
An uncomfortable subject that gets little press is the fact that under President Biden domestic oil and gas production, turbocharged by the advance of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has rocketed. No country in history has extracted as much oil as the US has in each of the past six years, with a fifth of all oil drilled in 2023 being American flavored. US gas production also tops the global charts, having surged 50% in the past decade. Every hour of every day, on average, around 1m barrels of oil and 2m tons of gas are sucked up from oil and gas fields from Texas to Appalachia to Alaska.
David Dismukes, an energy expert at Louisiana State University, said “To go from zero to billions of barrels is just stunning. It can be hard to comprehend. I bet if you asked 10 people in the US which country was the world’s biggest oil producer, most would say Saudi Arabia. That narrative is so imprinted now. I’m not sure many would even mention the US.”
We all use petroleum products; the list, besides gas for your car, is staggering. Everything from shoes, tape, paint, footballs, life jackets to golf bags, fishing lures, soap, mops, tires, and the clothes you’re wearing.
In California, the Golden State has the most ambitious climate goals in the country but can’t meet its targets, experts say, without making a plan to phase out harmful, climate-polluting oil refineries. Alicia Rivera, an organizer with the nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment who works in Wilmington, a Los Angeles neighborhood dominated by oil wells and refineries, said “All the other major fossil fuel sectors—electricity, transportation and oil drilling—have some form of phaseout requirements and plan to lower emissions. Refineries have none.”
Nikki Haley has said, when she was a possible contender for the hot seat, that her administration would “get EPA out of the way” to help make America “energy dominant,” and Fuckleroy has uttered "We will drill, baby, drill.” These idiots have no idea what’s going on.
The World Resources Institute writes this comes with serious consequences for people and the planet. In the United States alone, chemical production directly emits 180 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (MTCO2e) per year — equivalent to the annual emissions from nearly 49 million gas-powered vehicles. The U.S. chemical sector also released 176,000 tonnes of toxic pollutants in 2021, exposing communities to water and air pollution as well as health risks like acute respiratory symptoms, skin and eye irritation and cancer. One of the most important steps the industry can take to reduce these impacts is to replace fossil fuels used as ingredients in chemical products with non-fossil alternatives. This is known as “defossilization.”
Digging down in the WRI article linked above there are some hopeful alternatives being discussed: Defossilizing ammonia in the Midwest may need both demand and supply side solutions. To avoid using up to 11% of the region’s renewable energy, one option would be to transition just half of the Midwest’s ammonia production to hydrogen made with renewable electricity. This would reduce around 7.5 MT of CO2 emissions annually, equal to taking about 1.5 million gas-powered cars off the road for a year. It is also possible that this ammonia demand could fall if corn crops grown for ethanol fuel production decrease as ground transportation electrifies, lowering the size of the challenge.
Defossilizing all U.S. chemical production will be a multi-decade undertaking. It will require massive effort and investment from both the government and private sector as well as measures to uplift communities impacted by chemical plants.
Perhaps President Harris can be persuaded to get the ball rolling in this direction once in the big seat.
And now…
