Gippsland Climate News

 

Letter in the LVE 12.9.16

An extensive Parliamentary Inquiry into unconventional gas received over 1600 submissions, interviewed numerous witnesses, and 75 Victorian farming communities declared themselves to be against CSG, as did several councils.   Many independent community consultations were held; open to all.  

Farmers travelled from interstate and the USA to warn Victorians of devalued properties and disrupted farming practices, of methane gas bubbling up in rivers and water polluted by fracking chemicals including BTEX.  They had endured dust from frequent trucks, 24 hour lighting and regular blasting. Families and the local community suffered from respiratory problems, eye irritation, nose bleeding, severe headaches, skin rashes, fatigue and sleep disturbance. Psychological problems ensued.

Yet it is now suggested that the well-considered and informed decision of the Andrews government to ban unconventional gas should be overturned to create thousands of jobs in the Latrobe Valley; skilled jobs often done by fly in/fly out workers.  Our clean green agricultural industry is worth $111.6 billion, employing over 190,000 people. Perhaps those looking for work should consider agriculture which is becoming increasingly reliant on backpackers and overseas workers. 

A little research would have revealed that usable quantities of CSG are not normally found in brown coal. Maybe ExxonMobil had an inkling about the prospects of finding commercial quantities of unconventional gas in Gippsland when they exited their onshore exploration connections in December 2014.  The Victorian Farmers Federation has welcomed the permanent ban as did over 55% of Victorians polled in August.

(Eds. Note: we are opposed to any fossil fuel development as a source of extra greenhouse gas.)

Recently I ran a blog on black wattles being my favourite tree species. The fact that given the right conditions they can grow large and fast means they may be an ideal species for capturing carbon. The problem is in the storing.

If my tree dies after 15 years having captured one ton of carbon and then is burnt a large part of the carbon reverts back to carbon dioxide in the combustion process. Even if all the tree was burnt, for cooking say or heating, the process would still be carbon neutral as I have grown the tree from seed. This then applies to all plantation or purpose grown trees. Estimates of how much carbon a tree stores in the ground are approximately 50% so if the root system below the surface is left undisturbed then approximately half a ton of carbon is being stored. How long it will be stored though is another matter. Substantial parts of sub surface trunk and roots will eventually rot and an unknown quantity of carbon dioxide will return to the atmosphere. It would seem that a lot of detailed study on this matter is required.

If a plantation wattle could be harvested above ground and converted to biochar and electricity this would be a win/win situation. Biochar is basically charcoal and thought to be stable for hundreds of years. It is seen as one of the great hopes of ‘carbon drawdown’ to help return the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back to ‘holocene’ levels – 350ppm or less. The ideal is a ‘pyrolysis generator’ that produces both biochar and electricity from carbon waste products so that it is carbon negative.

But charcoal making is an age old process. I have experimented using the dead branches of a black wattle as a fuel. This mess was a fire hazard and had to be cleaned anyway. A five gallon drum was packed with small branches and then placed upside down inside half an old 44 gallon drum. The remainder of the waste was then burned in the 44 gallon drum around and on top of the inverted drum. The next day ‘Bob’s yer uncle’. (see above)

There are examples of mobile farm biochar producers that theoretically are used to reduce weeds the problem being the definition of what is a weed. Farmers around here for instance place my favourite tree species in that category. Under no circumstances should this process be used to justify the continuation of logging our native forests or for clearing bush for farmland.  The best place for super-efficient pyrolysis generators – where the energy is used to produce biochar and generate electricity – are shire waste depots. Just a bit more sophisticated than my backyard job.

           

Upon purchasing my first diesel van in 2007, my intention was to collect vegetable oil to manufacture into biodiesel. The construction of the biodiesel conversion plant took several days. So little more than a tank full of fossil diesel was used before I became fully independent of the multinationals and their polluting diesel fuel. I have not returned!

The use of vegetable oil is by no means a solution to the impending global fuel shortage. Turning food production areas into fuel production will lead to global food shortage. I am simply using a deep fry oil waste product, and intercepting it before it is collected and refined into biodiesel. The refining process requires the use of methanol at the rate of 20% of the oil volume. My currant biodiesel production and use is minimal, as I will explain.

I found myself making a fresh 350L batch of biodiesel every couple of months. This process occurs over 4 days and takes about eight hours to complete. On day 1, I fill the reactor vessel, course screen and dry the oil, day 2, I heat the oil and reacted it with the methanol, potassium hydroxide mixture, to chemically split the methyl esters (biodiesel) from the glycerine. Then on day 3, the glycerine is drained off and the biodiesel is mist spray washed with water, day 4, it is dried with an aquarium bubbler, and dry air is bubbled up through the oil container. This entire process, although cheap (30c per treated litre), still requires the use of a fossil fuel based additive, methanol at 20% of treated oil, and a caustic additive.

After around a year of biodiesel making, I researched the option of running the motor on straight veggie oil (SVO). This change was a positive forward step. Since the vehicle has been changed to a two-tank system (original 60 L tank with biodiesel and extra 120L tank for SVO) my oil processing has been reduced in both time and cost. I now only make a batch of biodiesel every 6 months, as I use 90% of fuel oil as SVO, which only requires course straining and bubble drying.

The Biodiesel production process requires the use of highly volatile, fossil methanol (20%), and highly corrosive Potassium Hydroxide (KOH @ approx. 20 g/L).  So any conversion plant needs to be safely located away from residences and children, preferably, simply a lean to, on a farm shed. 

*John is a regular contributor to RENEW magazine and president of the Gippsland Environment Group.

 

I no longer reply to the climate change deniers that regularly contribute their falsehoods to the letters column of the Bairnsdale Advertiser. It would be a complete waste of time. After all they are in a way representative of a highly conservative and scientifically illiterate local population. Their letters follow a well-worn path and have been appearing in this column for many years. The crucial facts they repeat ad nauseum are invariably cherry picked. One tell-tale sign is the use of the year 1998 (where they use limited HadCRUT temperature figures) as the ‘holy-grail’ to prove the earth’s climate has not got any warmer since, or even better, cooled. The fact that every year this century, except one, has been warmer is ignored or denied.

The denialists also ignore or disregard information from leading scientific bodies around the world such as NASA and the Royal Society, and in Australia such as the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO. They ignore the overwhelming evidence from a variety of sources that support the statement made by more than 97% of the earth’s climate scientists that the earth is warming at an alarming rate and that the humans are the cause of that warming. I suspect that 97% is a conservative number and the real figure much closer to 99%. Who but the deluded would choose to back this miniscule minority with their aggressive letters to the editor.

The denialists instead choose supporting evidence from obscure websites and repeat various standard arguments, all refutable and some contradictory, and flirt with the most outrageous and absurd conspiracy theories. Their failure to critically evaluate their sources of information is legend. This plethora of misinformation and lies on climate abounds on the internet and is encouraged by similar attitudes and ignorance in both the mainstream media and reactionary and conservative politicians. It is fuelled and funded by some of the wealthiest companies on earth whose defence of their vested interests is Machiavellian and almost certainly criminally negligent.

Finally their failure to understand basic physics, or ignorance thereof, is evident. The greenhouse effect, and the identity of the greenhouse gases, has been established for 150 years. The physics clearly indicates that as greenhouse gases are increased the earth’s temperature will rise. The amount of the main greenhouse gas – carbon dioxide – in the atmosphere has been accurately measured for 60 years and has been increasing steadily all that time. The predictions of CSIRO scientists in the 1980s including warming oceans, retreating ice, longer fire seasons and more severe extreme weather events such as heatwaves, are all being realised now.

For many years I have repeated the Nortonian adage “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”  It is more relevant now than ever and with every year of inaction, or insufficient action on climate, the ‘worst case scenarios’ – that threaten the survival of humanity itself – loom large.

Some fellow Bairnsdale U3A students recently visited Iceland and gave a talk on their trip that featured the wonderful geothermal resource that this country utilises. I’ve previously done a blog on the potential of geothermal energy in Gippsland and utilising the geothermal energy under the brown coal was my main platform standing in Morwell in the 2010 State election. More recently whilst campaigning in the Federal election visiting the launch of Gippsland Solar’s electric car changing station I came across AusGeothermal  a local company in Traralgon.

The AusGeothermal brochure states that it “is an alternative energy company manufacturing Australian made geothermal heating and cooling products” and “geothermal is an alternative energy source that takes heat from the earth, where the temperature is a constant 15 degrees, and uses that energy to heat and cool your home or business.” The company claims up to 70% reduction in home energy costs and once the system is installed it is free. These systems would appear economically attractive to large homes and buildings, and those with significant heating or cooling components.

On a wider scale nothing much appears to have changed across Gippsland. Disappointingly, no further positive news has emerged on the possible geothermal resource below the coal. Most of Gippsland is still covered by geothermal prospecting licences which are best described as ‘inactive’. In East Gippsland Petratherm still holds the licence. This company, a ‘penny dreadful’, lingers at the bottom of the market and is obviously starved of capital.  In 2008 they noted that “preliminary economic analysis indicates that the [East Gippsland geothermal] project is capable of producing commercially viable, large scale base load, power generation.” But East Gippsland has been, and is still, well down their list of priorities. In general Petratherm has sat on their East Gippsland Exploration licence for 8 years producing nothing tangible in that time.

Whilst generating electricity using closed circuit heat exchangers should be the main priority there are many other practical applications of geothermal energy. In Iceland the first uses were bath houses and swimming pools. In Metung for many years there was a small heated pool taking water from an oil bore. Perhaps local use of geothermal can be commenced in this way utilising the resource for things like tourist attractions and growing vegetables.  

I am a fan of the black wattle (acacia mearnsii) tree and have been propagating and growing them for many years. This species is a fast growing acacia and has many advantages. In the right conditions it can grow quite large very quickly. On my 20 acres at Ensay I have planted them for more than 30 years and in some places third generation trees were growing quite strongly when the property was sold.

They are leguminous (fixing nitrogen in the soil), provide a small amount of shade and shelter and attracted a number of species of birds. When flowering they add colour to paddocks and attracted honey eaters. They generally produce abundant crops of seed and I have sometimes harvested small amounts for propagation. As long as the area around the trees is not grazed they will self-sow in abundance. Where areas in the bush have been burnt the germination of black wattles is sometimes very thick. After the 2007 fires in the Tambo valley the wattles regenerated at Wattle Circle were so close together – a matter of 10cm or so – as to make these parts of the country impenetrable.

The dried timber is a hot, but relatively fast, burning fuel and was the fuel of choice when the Swifts Creek bakery used their wood fired oven. After harvesting a large amount of windfall timber in the 1990s this dried wood became the main (carbon neutral) fuel in our heater and was occasionally used in our slow combustion stove. Dry and dead limbs off living trees were handy to the house providing an inexhaustible supply of kindling. When harvesting the dead and fallen timber for firewood I made sure that the stump remained and was left to rot – hopefully leaving a substantial amount of the carbon in the root system to remain in the soil. (It has been estimated that up to half the carbon of some trees is in their root system.) I have even experimented with making charcoal, or agrichar as I prefer to call it, but that is another story.

Counting the carbon in the root systems mature black wattles generally store about half a ton of carbon each. I have had trees growing fast and large where the household waste water was fed into the paddock. These I estimated stored about one ton of carbon each. Farmers generally consider them a weed. Perhaps if they could crop them, and be paid for the carbon that is stored in the trees and soil and removed from the atmosphere this could change. For the tree is the only CCS system we have at the moment that actually works.

Many people have difficulty grasping the idea of a gradual warming across the planet. They also continue to confuse weather and climate as most of our weather still falls within the extremes of hot and cold. But gradually the earth’s climate is warming around the globe as the illustration of the normal curve above depicts.

You still get cold weather, but mostly it is warmer, and with much more extreme weather events that are on the hot side rather than the cold. The new curve – the shaded red area – is flatter than the curve of last century. This means less moderate or normal weather and far more extreme weather. This extreme weather is overwhelmingly on the hot side which includes heatwaves and the fact that generally speaking, at least 6 new heat records are set for every cold one. This information is not new and was clearly predicted by CSIRO climate scientists in the late 1980s.

The weather in Gippsland is becoming milder although we still get occasional cold snaps and light frosts. Because we are becoming used to the milder weather we tend to notice the colder snaps more and can be deceived. But personal accounts or anecdotes of cold spells do not translate into climate. For climate is the aggregate of weather across large areas of earth over a considerable period of time. It may come as a shock to many of us that not only has the climate of the earth been gradually warming over our own lifetimes, it has also been warming over our parents, grandparents and great grandparent’s as well.

Studies using data from coral, tree rings, cave decorations and ice cores have indicated that parts of the earth started to warm in the 1830s. This was, more or less, just 50 years after the start of the industrial revolution in England when mining and manufacturing began consuming large amounts of coal and spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Amazingly this was just a few years after French mathematician Joseph Fourier postulated the presence of the greenhouse effect, thirty years before Tyndall discovered that carbon dioxide and methane were the main greenhouse gases and nearly 70 years before Svante Arrhenius made his first calculations about increasing greenhouse gases and a warming earth.

With hindsight, and much scientific endeavour, this is exactly what the laws of physics, as founded by Fourier et al predicted – that after a given certain, but unknown, time lag (of about 50 years?) the warming of the earth would commence.

On 15 July the Bass Coast Shire Council passed the following motion: “In recognition of Council’s commitment to minimise support for fossil fuel developments, the Funds Investment Policy be modified to reflect: a. That Council officers will prioritise investments in environmentally and socially responsible financial institutions if the investment is compliant with investment policy objectives and parameters and the rate of return is favourable in comparison to other investments available at the time; b. The mechanism for reporting on Council’s term investments is through the Quarterly Financial Report 3. The community be informed of the changes to the Funds Investment Policy. ”

The Bass Coast Shire divestment plan has been some time in the making and as such is a work in progress. At an ordinary shire meeting 9 December last year a question was asked from the public gallery by Bernie McComb on whether the shire would divest from financial institutions that supported fossil fuel development. The immediate reply was that a list of Council investments was published quarterly by Bass Coast and were available for public scrutiny. In June 2016 the Bass Coast Shire produced a ‘Strategy for Ethical Investing’ with particular reference to divesting or removing financial support for the fossil fuel industry. As on other matters Bass Coast seems to be leading the way.

The conflict between each council’s (and any other investor) financial aims becomes apparent. Do they maximise their returns by depositing their funds in high interest earning deposits or do they accept a much lower earning rate with a secure institution? But the choice may not even be as clear as that. Many councils lost money invested in what was thought were secure and recommended investments during the global financial crisis (GFC). Gosford Council (NSW) recently announced a loss of over $19 million in Collateralized Debt Obligations – part of the subprime mortgage fiasco during the GFC in the US. These investments were promoted by some leading investment advisers as secure.

The problem today of climate change and investment in the fossil fuel industry is overwhelming. Our banks (and other large Investment institutions) and our politicians are invariably slow to react to these threats. All our major banks have considerable to large investments in the fossil fuel industry. And yet coal mines once valued in the hundreds of million dollars have recently changed hands for a single dollar. That is an example of a ‘stranded asset’ – where the value of the investment plunges so quickly the investor is unable to remove it quickly enough and thus loses all or a major part of their money.

The risk to these ‘safe investments’ is enormous and the political implications are diabolical. Investments should not only be safe but also sustainable. What is your shire doing on this matter?

Recently over 70 people, concerned about the threat of onshore gas extraction, met at the Mirboo North Shire Hall to hear from NSW MP Jeremy Buckingham and Gunnedah anti-fracking activist farmer, David Quince. Ellen Sandell, (MP Greens Melbourne) facilitated the meeting. It was an opportunity for locals to hear about the NSW and Qld experience – a timely reminder of the difficulties communities suffer in areas where the gas industry is already well entrenched, highlighting Victoria’s unique position in having the power to make an informed decision on the future of the industry here.

David Quince pointed out the serious problems Qld communities have had with this industry as it’s sprung up unchecked in their midst; aquifers ruined, contaminated water, families forced to sell out to mining companies with no legal protection. The Liverpool Plains in NSW is a perpetual battle ground with the community versus CSG proponent, Santos. He reiterated the fallacy of a gas shortage (most onshore unconventional gas is for export to Asia), the huge donations by gas companies to political parties and the lucrative job offers to politicians taken up by members of both major parties.  David went on to tell us that Bass Strait has an unlimited supply of offshore conventional gas and can be used for all our gas requirements.

This caused consternation in the audience as we know Victoria has no more than 30 years of offshore gas left (a good window to develop alternate energy sources). The implications of David’s assertion provoked an intense reaction from those living along the east coast near Seaspray; their despair and frustration was almost palpable as they’ve been subject not only to onshore unconventional gas wells, (immediately operational if the onshore gas moratorium is lifted), but also by the offshore conventional gas industry, with its inherent, often invisible problems – coastal subsidence, salinity and aquifer depletion being major issues that our NSW guests seemed unaware of. Toongabbie activist and farmer, Tracey Anton has warned that, “If we allow decades more of offshore conventional gas extraction, we will have wiped off half the Gippsland Coast and destroyed an agricultural future.”

To compound the problem, Mr Quince was heard the next day on ABC radio asserting, again, that there is an “unlimited” conventional gas supply offshore…The tone of this narrative demands change as, in Victoria, a big push by mining lobbyists to not only have government lift the moratorium on unconventional gas, but also to allow conventional onshore gas, a process that uses horizontal drilling without fracking, is underway. This push is endorsed federally by the Minister for Energy and Resources, Josh Frydenberg.

The Gippsland community were most appreciative of Jeremy Buckingham and Ellen Sandell bringing the “Ban Onshore Gas Victorian Tour” to our region, and reminding us of the dangers of this toxic industry. The warning that co-existence is impossible and social licence should never be given to this industry came through loud and clear. Ursula Alquier, Lock the Gate Victoria campaign manager pointed out that the success of the Victorian campaign was relative to a non-partisan ethos which brought together people of all political persuasions working together to bring about a total ban on the onshore gas industry.