The Future of U. S. Energy: More like Texas or Germany?

 

In an article in the August issue of National Review, Mario Loyola warns of a looming energy crisis in the U. S. that would be largely self-inflicted.  Stated simply, it's a case of increasing demand and decreasing supply of reliable power.

 

First, the increasing demand.  For many years, it looked like the future of electric power in the U. S. was one of slow growth, mainly because the increased efficiency of traditional power-hungry industries such as manufacturing was combining with the overall transition to a service economy to create a situation in which we were doing more every year with only slight increases in power consumption. 

 

That is no longer the case.  And one of the big reasons is a new type of industry:  server farms.  The explosion in demand for computing power for novel applications such as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining is now one of the biggest growth sectors for electric power.  Loyola says electricity demand will grow by at least 15% by 2032, only eight years from now. 

 

How are we going to meet that demand?  Right now, nobody knows.  From an economic point of view, building new power plants is a long-term process.  Investors want to be sure that the billions they put into new plants are going to pay off profitably during the lifetime of the equipment.  That requires, among other things, a stable regulatory environment.  But electric power is one of the most heavily regulated and perversely subsidized industries around.

 

The perverse subsidies right now are all in favor of renewable energy such as solar and wind power.  The reason for this is not economic as much as it is ideological.  A substantial and powerful political sector would like nothing better than to see all fossil-fuel facilities tossed into the ocean (except for the pollution that would cause) or otherwise banished from the planet.  We won't go into the well-known reasons for the hatred of fossil fuels here, but the fact of the matter is that if all fossil-fuel facilities vanished tomorrow, most of us in the U. S. would die in a matter of weeks. 

 

The result of all these incentives is that the "interconnection queue," which is kind of a waiting list that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission keeps for prospective generating facilities, is currently 95% solar power, and hardly anyone seems to be planning new natural-gas or nuclear plants. 

 

No matter what politicians say, you get no power from solar or wind on a windless night, of which there are many during the year.  And it is still largely true that we can't store large amounts of energy in batteries, although about 4 GW of battery capacity is now on the grid.  For comparison, the total generating capacity available in the U. S. in 2022 was over 1,600 GW.  That's 0.25% of our total capacity.  To get it up to even 10% would require 40 times as much storage as we have now, and we won't get there for years, even if we could afford it.

 

For the foreseeable future (which feels like it's shorter all the time), a reliable, dispatchable power grid will need to have at least a majority of its power coming from sources you can turn on and off whenever you want.  Right now that means nuclear, gas, and (pardon the expression) coal-fired plants.  But for various mainly ideological reasons, coal-fired plants are getting as scarce as DVD rental stores, and nuclear is under both a political cloud and subject to extremely encumbering regulations, as are most types of power infrastructure, even renewable-energy ones. 

 

In a separate article in the same issue, author Dominic Pino points out that the only U. S. industry largely free of any kind of regulation is the tech sector, meaning software-websites-social-media stuff.  Any activity that needs large numbers of people working for it, large amounts of stuff on land, or large amounts of imports runs into a forest of regulatory trees that requires years of bushwhacking to get through—except for tech.  And what industry is doing famously well compared to all the others?  Don't ask.

 

Even tech needs power, though, and if we keep going the way we're going, we will end up like Germany, which made the politically favored but empirically stupid decision a few years ago to shutter all its perfectly good nuclear plants.  So now Germany depends for its energy largely on natural-gas plants running off Russian gas, which is like chickens buying chicken feed from the fox.  Experts at the Harvard International Review attribute Germany's lackluster economic performance the last few years to its extremely high energy prices, which in turn result from slow growth even in the renewables sector and bureaucratic barnacles on the ship of state.

 

On the other hand, Texas, with its famously independent electrical grid, is going ahead with plans to add a lot of dispatchable power in the forms of natural gas and possibly even nuclear energy.  Texas A&M (still fondly known as Aggies despite the fact that the agricultural school is dwarfed by high-tech engineering these days) is planning to build not one, but several small nuclear power plants right on their campus in West Bryan.  Governor Abbott likes to do news releases every time a generating firm announces plans to build new power plants, whether it's natural gas, nuclear, or something else.  Just one recent announcement from his office stated that 42 new gigawatts of power was being planned by one firm, which goes a long way toward getting us to the 150 GW or so that Loyola says Texas will need by 2030.

 

And while I chilled out along with everyone else during the February 2021 Texas cold-weather grid failure, which might not have been as bad if Texas's grid wasn't independent of the rest of the country, that same independence makes it easier to plan new capacity in Texas than anywhere else in the country, where the Environmental Protection Agency and other bureaucratic blockades slow the process. 

 

So which shall it be?  A stagnant, energy-starved, but green economy?  Or energy enough to power all those electric cars that people allegedly want to drive, and the AI server farms, and maybe even some old-fashioned hands-on factories that we've almost forgotten how to build?  The choice is pretty clear, although energy policy doesn't rank very high on this year's political agenda.  But it's something that affects the lives of everyone in these United States, which makes it inevitably political.  And I only hope that the political process can handle it in a way that at least doesn't do a lot of harm.

 

Sources:  Mario Loyola's article "Our Coming Energy Famine" appeared on pp. 23-25 of the August 2024 issue of National Review.  I also referred to the websites https://www.utilitydive.com/news/entergy-proposes-gas-fired-power-plants-1200-MW/718036/, https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leading-economy-is-falling-behind/, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php, and https://wtaw.com/small-nuclear-power-plants-to-be-built-on-the-rellis-campus/.

California’s Zero-Emission Train Regulations: End of the Line for Trains?

 

As polluters go, diesel-electric trains could be a lot worse.  A post on the website of the Institute for Energy Research says that it takes only a gallon of diesel fuel to move a ton of freight 500 miles by train, whereas if you put the same load in your one-ton pickup that gets 15 miles per gallon, or even a semi-trailer that does somewhat better, you will be making a lot more greenhouse gas with the trucks than with the train. 

 

But that hasn’t deterred the California Air Resources Board (hereinafter CARB) from issuing a set of proposed regulations that would effectively shut down diesel-locomotive-pulled trains, not only in California, but quite possibly everywhere else in the U. S. as well.  How would it do this?

 

First off, the regulations are not completely out of touch with reality.  The creative types who came up with them recognize that there are not yet any full-scale zero-emission locomotives anywhere in the world, not even in secret labs owned by Elon Musk.  So starting in 2026, all train companies will start having to pay into escrow almost a billion dollars each in order to save up to buy these zero-emission (presumably battery-powered) trains that don’t exist today, and may not exist for decades to come, either. 

 

Besides bankrupting small train lines, this will create an economic burden that will raise prices nationwide and put rail transport at a disadvantage that may force more shipments onto truck lines, where they will end up causing more pollution than if the CARB had just sat on its hands and done nothing.

 

And not all train traffic happens inside California, either.  A lot of it carries goods between that state and the rest of the country, and no one thinks that huge switchyards will spring up on the border of the state to change out nasty polluting diesel engines for electric ones to run inside the state.  In fact, due to a kink in the original Clean Air Act of 1972, California has a unique privilege to see that its own internal CARB regulations automatically trump any federal regulations, unless someone shows (typically through costly and lengthy litigation) that the CARB regulations are unreasonable.  And because California is such a large market, a regulation that is in force there typically has to be accepted by default elsewhere.  This is exactly how California automobile pollution standards, which were much stricter than either existing Federal or other state standards, became the de-facto U. S. standard. 

 

And now California is trying to do the same thing with their rail-transportation rules.

According to a report in National Review, during a public-comment period that ended Apr. 22 a huge variety of organizations protested the proposed regulations.  These range from the expected (train companies, state and local legislators) to the unexpected (railway labor unions) and downright surprising (two Federal agencies opposed it). 

 

As written, starting in 2030 the regulations require that all locomotives operating in the state must be less than 23 years old, obsoleting many perfectly good engines that can last for 40 years or more.  By that same year, only six years from now, half of all new locomotives must be zero-emission, and by 2035, all new locomotives must be electric (or nuclear, or “Back to the Future” flux capacitors, or whatever). 

 

In 1958, during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, that dictator decided that China had to become the world’s largest producer of steel, within five years.  The only sensible way to achieve that goal was to study the current large-scale steel industry, figure out what factories and people and training and expertise would be needed, and spend the money it would take to buy the equipment and build the steel mills and blast furnaces to do the job.

 

But that is not what Mao decided to do.  Instead, he called on his citizenry to build “backyard furnaces,” typically a few yards (or meters) in diameter, made of mud bricks and fueled by wood or charcoal.  In essence, he asked billions of people to take up steelmaking as a hobby, only a deadly-serious one.  So many people were compelled to abandon useful pursuits like farming in order to make backyard furnaces that some authorities think it contributed significantly to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961, in which an estimated tens of millions of people died.  And the pig iron that the peasants managed to make was so poor in quality and small in quantity that the whole thing was abandoned a few years later.

 

The backyard-furnace fiasco is a good example of what happens when a person or organization without the ordinary common sense that (as my grandmother would say) God gave a soda cracker, is endowed with dictatorial powers.  The looming disaster awaiting U. S. railways if the CARB railway regulations about zero-emission trains are enacted bears more than a family resemblance to Mao Zedong’s ill-fated backyard foundries. 

 

At least people knew how to make steel, and it was a proven technology.  It just wasn’t practical for millions of Chinese peasants to make it on an absurdly small scale with no modern equipment, quality controls, or modern transportation. 

 

It is provably impractical—presently impossible—to make a free-standing electric locomotive that runs on batteries and does what a modern diesel-electric unit does.  But that hasn’t stopped the dictators at CARB from cooking up a regulation which, in the best case, will cost U. S. rail companies millions of dollars to fight in court, and billions to comply with in escrow funds in the meantime even if a zero-emission locomotive never comes to pass. 

 

With the proposed CARB railway regulations, we have arrived at the dictatorship of the administrative state.  It is no longer merely a future threat—it is here, right now, standing with a battle-ax poised over the neck of the U. S. railway industry.  It passed through my mind to encourage the railways to simply refuse to service California once the regulations are in place.  See how they like it without trains.  This would probably provoke a Federal takeover of the industry, as it did during the Wilson administration in World War I, and the only advantage then would be that the dictatorship would be out in the open for all to see.

 

But it is already, and I only hope that this ends better than Mao’s backyard furnaces.  Right now, I’m not optimistic. 

 

Sources:  The Institute for Energy Research article “California Proposes to Ban Diesel Trains and Has Asked EPA For a Waiver” appeared on Mar. 29, 2024 at https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/regulation/california-proposes-to-ban-diesel-trains-and-has-asked-epa-for-a-waiver/.  The National Review article “California vs. the World on Zero-Emission Trains” by Dominic Pino appeared at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/california-vs-the-world-on-zero-emissions-trains/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles “Backyard furnace” and “Great Chinese famine.”

Magic Two-Thirds: The Proposed EPA Electric-Car Mandate

 

On Apr. 12, the Biden administration announced a new set of proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rulings that would require by 2032 two-thirds (67%) of passenger vehicles sold in the U. S. to be "zero-tailpipe emission" types.  In practice, that means electric cars.  Lower fractions of service and transport trucks would also have to be electric by then.  As reported in National Review, both automakers and consumer advocates criticized the move, saying that the industry is not ready for such a radical shift, and that the result will be higher prices for consumers and shortages of largely foreign-produced materials such as lithium and cobalt. 

 

These proposed rules would be in addition to the Department of Transportation's so-called CAFE standards, a set of fuel-economy requirements that have had the unintended consequence of making U. S. automakers rely mainly on production of larger vehicles (e. g. pickups and SUVs), because of the perverse incentives put in place by the standards.  Unintended consequences always follow mandates like this, and unless the EPA changes its collective mind, there are sure to be problems we can only dream of now caused by such an extreme requirement.

 

For one thing, we are already seeing stresses on the electric grid caused by the rather exotic requirements of rapid-charge stations for electric cars.  The most powerful stations, the "direct-current fast charging" (DCFC) ones, can draw up to 350 kW and charge an all-electric (battery-only) passenger car in as little as 20 minutes.  In doing so, however, it uses as much energy as an average household uses in three days.  Multiply this high-peaking intermittent demand by several million, and you can understand why Californians have already had requests from their state leaders to restrict charging of EVs on hot days when the grid is stressed already.  Mandating that two-thirds of new car sales must be electric will only make this problem worse.

 

More generally, this proposed ruling is a good example of the kind of thing that I mentioned in last week's blog:  the tendency of government leaders to propose progressive-sounding climate-change-prevention measures to go into effect long after they are out of office.  By doing this kind of thing, they try to have their political cake and eat it too.  They get kudos from their supporters for being on the right side of history, but avoid the all-too-real negative and unintended consequences of their proposals, which may never see the light of day in any case.

 

The public is not stupid, on average, and there are signs that outside of Washington and certain elite enclaves, anyway, the constant hyperventilating about climate change is losing its luster for the average voter.  In Vaclav Smil's book How the World Really Works, Smil points out the huge gaps between the aspirational goals set by international meetings such as the Paris Climate Accords and the realities on the ground of how the world's economy relies on giant systems that must use fossil fuels both now and in the immediately foreseeable future. 

 

No one to my knowledge has proposed a battery-electric cargo ship, for example.  The reason is that so much space and weight would have to be occupied by the batteries that the negligible amount of freight transported would be unprofitable.  The only non-fossil-fuel power that is practical for large ocean-going vessels is nuclear energy.  There are only about 160 nuclear-powered ocean vessels in the world, and the majority of those are nuclear submarines operated by the military.  While nuclear energy is a viable option for ships, many ports prohibit nuclear-powered vessels from entering out of safety concerns, and so a sea change (so to speak) would have to occur for nuclear energy to make a dent in shipping.

 

And nuclear energy is simply not an option for air transport, so until much better battery technology is developed, airliners are going to be burning fossil fuels.

 

None of this is to deny that the emission of carbon dioxide by human activity contributes to changes in the climate.  But the uncertainty and variation in how climate is going to change, and how much our burning of fossil fuels will affect that change, make it unreasonable to impose mandates that produce undue burdens on the majority of a population.

 

Suppose that tomorrow, all new internal-combustion-engine passenger vehicle sales in the u. S. were banned.  In a few years, our transportation infrastructure would go a long way toward resembling that of Cuba, where a very few favored individuals can buy new cars, but everyone else gets by with ancient patched-up vehicles that are many decades old.  As my wife and I have learned, today's well-made cars (most of which tend to be Japanese) with care can last twelve or fifteen years, so as long as we could buy gasoline we could deal with such a mandate.  But I can easily imagine the government leveraging the self-driving capability of new electric vehicles to ban older non-self-driving types from certain areas, beginning with urban regions and spreading gradually to the suburbs.  So you would have an even greater divide between rural and urban than we do now:  urbanites zooming around drinking their lattés and reading their smart phones in their self-driving cars, and impoverished rural citizens driving their gas-guzzlers and hunting down bootleg gas stations in small towns in the countryside.

 

It is a weird and unsatisfactory picture, to say the least.  But something like this would result if the Biden administration had the courage of its convictions and imposed rules soon enough to deal with some of the adverse consequences they generate.  And putting off the rules won't make them any better.  It will simply delay the inevitable disruptions that unreasonable government mandates cause, without visiting the consequences on those whose bad idea it was.

 

Perhaps sanity will prevail, and the outcries over the proposed EPA rulings will persuade the unelected bureaucrats in that agency to modify their demands.  That already seems to be happening with previous climate-change commitments that are "honored more in the breach than in the observance."  But sometimes that's a good thing.

 

Sources:  I referred to these articles on the National Review website:  https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-unveils-strictest-ever-emissions-standards-in-bid-to-remake-auto-industry/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/bidens-draconian-electric-car-mandate/.  I also referred to the websites https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-powered-ships.aspx and https://www.statista.com/statistics/198227/forecast-for-global-number-of-containerships-from-2011 for shipping statistics. 

West's Unsatisfying Legacy

When some half-million pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded in the small Texas town of West on Apr. 17, 2013, it not only killed fifteen first responders and other people, injured 160, and damaged or destroyed dozens of buildings.  It showed what can happen when critical information about explosive-material storage is not shared with local authorities.  The West fire department did not know what they were dealing with, and if they had, many or all of the fatalities could have been averted.

Largely as a result of this accident, in the last days of the Obama administration the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued what became known as its "Chemical Disaster Rule."  According to a recent report in the Texas Tribune, this rule required that companies storing large quantities of potentially explosive chemicals make the fact known to local first responders and the public, and called for companies to make specific emergency plans and conduct meetings on a regular basis about emergency planning.

The rule was delayed until President Trump took office, and now the EPA is saying it's going to roll back many of its provisions.  After the rule was proposed, affected industries complained about it loudly, and so the modified rule eliminates the requirement for public access to information on dangerous chemical inventories.  Corporations claimed, with some justification, that making their inventory quantities public is an invasion of privacy, and could lead to increased threats by terrorist groups wanting to target locations where large quantities of explosive materials are kept.

One reason that news reports mentioned for the rollback was the finding of the accident's cause by the U. S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), which was made public to a limited extent in May of 2016.  The ATF concluded that the accident was caused by arson, but the way they concluded that is curious, to say the least. 

According to a 2017 Houston Chronicle article, the agency reportedly spent about $2 million on the investigation and interviewed hundreds of witnesses .  In this way, the ATF says it systematically eliminated any natural and accidental fire scenarios.  Having eliminated all natural and accidental causes, the agency's conclusion was that the fire was deliberately set by a person or persons unknown.  However, there is not a smidgen of direct evidence that indicates the fire was actually arson.

In science, there is an adage that goes, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."  Logically speaking, the ATF is justified in concluding that arson was the cause if and only if they have actually eliminated absolutely every other conceivable possible cause of the fire.  For example, I suspect they did not consider any possible supernatural causes, as those are outside the purview of modern science.  However, since a supernatural cause is still a cause, it counts in the list of other causes they should have considered and actively eliminated, and they didn't.

Apparently, this sort of thing is so common in arson investigations it has a nice Latin legal name:  "negative corpus."  Meaning, I suppose, the body wasn't there, so you can draw some conclusions from its absence.  The Chronicle article says that negative corpus findings are no longer recommended by standards published by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) adopted in 2011.  But local and even federal arson investigators still use it.

The convenient thing about the conclusion that arson was at fault is that it absolves the facility operator from a large burden of responsibility.  It's one thing if your own faulty practices cause an accident, but legally it's quite a different thing if somebody sneaks in and sets your place on fire deliberately. 

To be fair, I would not have the slightest clue of how to investigate an explosion so violent that it left a large crater where the plant used to be and scattered it over a good part of a square mile.  It's quite possible that some tiny critical piece of evidence—a frayed extension cord, for example—would be entirely obliterated in the blast, making a successful investigation of the cause impossible.  But I would also not want to spend two million dollars on an investigation and end up saying, "We dunno." 

The West explosion revealed serious deficiencies in how ammonium nitrate and other explosive materials are stored and how such information is shared, or not shared.  Although I do not have direct access to the revised EPA rule, I can only hope by reading between the lines of the summaries that it still has some provision for informing local first responders about the presence of dangerous chemicals.  That was the most harmful missing factor in what led up to the tragedy at West. 

And as the NFPA now recommends, investigators should be able to say, "Look, we tried, but there's just no way to figure out what caused this," instead of defaulting to a spurious conclusion of arson simply because it's legally convenient and lets companies off the hook.  While arson is also one of the logical possibilities, it shouldn't be shoved to the front of the line simply because it alleviates liability problems.

The town of West was forever changed by the explosion in 2013, and I expressed the hope at the time that something good would come of the tragedy in the form of tightened regulation of facilities that were potential bombs, such as the West Fertilizer Company plant.  It's entirely possible that the original EPA regulations were excessively burdensome to companies that are already doing more or less what they should do because their private insurers keep them in line.  But I hope the newly revised regulations still make sure that the local first responders, whose lives will be on the line if anything goes wrong, at least have the information they need to take suitable precautions for their own safety and the safety of others.

Sources:   I referred to articles in the Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2019/11/21/west-texas-fertilizer-explosion-spurred-safety-rules-trump-rescinding/ and https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/11/west-fertilizer-plant-explosion-was-intentional-of/, and in the Houston Chronicle at https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Experts-cast-doubt-on-ATF-s-arson-finding-in-West-11725989.php, as well as the Wikipedia article on the West Fertilizer Company explosion.

Bipartisanship Isn't Dead, At Least About PFAS

Anyone who pays attention to U. S. news these days cannot be blamed for assuming that bipartisanship—specifically, the joint sponsorship of bills by both Democrats and Republicans—is ancient history, maybe even to the extent that they've installed separate Democratic and Republican bathrooms at the Capitol.  But a small glimmer of bipartisanship came last Friday when seven Democratic senators and an equal number of Republicans introduced a bill to classify a group of chemicals known as PFAS as toxic and worthy of Superfund cleanup efforts.  And the newly named chief of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, says he's going to do something about PFAS, and has received both grudging approval on the part of opponents of the current administration and criticism that what he's proposing doesn't go nearly far enough. 

Maybe you already know all about PFAS, but I didn't, so here's a brief summary of what they are and why they're in the news.

Fluorine is the most chemically reactive of the halogens, a group of elements in the periodic table that includes chlorine, iodine, and bromine.  Fluorine is the faithful-forever element:  whatever fluorine bonds to tends to stay bonded to it.  So chemicals made with fluorine substituted for chlorine, for instance, tend to be very stable and last forever unless you put them in high-temperature incinerators, for example. 

One of the most familiar chemicals that use fluorine is polytetrafluoroethylene, known more widely under the trade name Teflon.  Shortly after the discovery of Teflon and related fluorinated compounds after World War II, they were hailed for their stability and apparent lack of toxicity.  Besides Teflon, chemists found that they could make effective and long-lasting surfactants with a group of fluorinated chemicals that are known by the general name of PFAS (perfluorinated alkylated substances). 

Surfactants are used in detergents to dissolve grease in water solutions and also to change the way surfaces react to water.  Typically, a surfactant will be a longish molecule with a hydrophobic end that likes to be in oil, and a hydrophilic end that likes to be in water.  You may have seen an experiment in which you put a few drops of oil on the surface of water in a clean pan.  The oil forms round bubble-like globules with sharp boundaries.  Then putting just a tiny amount of dish soap in the middle of the pan will cause the oil droplets to run away toward the edge of the pan like pigeons when a cat shows up.  PFAS compounds form long-lasting foams and have been used in firefighting foam for years.

Trouble is, owing to their persistent chemical nature, these compounds don't biodegrade.  And because they are easily dissolved and travel in water, they are found in drinking water in many states and have been detected in the blood of newborn babies.  And that isn't good, because the U. S. Centers for Disease Control says that PFAS chemicals are implicated in a number of adverse human health effects, such as increased levels of cholesterol and cancer, lowered fertility in women, and interference with physiological development in children. 

The U. S. military was one of the biggest users of PFAS, as the military specification for fire-fighting foam used for petroleum fires virtually required the use of PFAS in it.  Over the years, manufacturers have discovered that the stuff accumulates in humans and have begun phasing it out voluntarily, but that does nothing about the tons of it that is still lying around wherever firefighting teams have practiced using foam, which means hundreds of both civilian and military locations all across the U. S. 

So what's to be done?  Well, recognizing the problem is the first step, and that seems to be happening now.  The hazards of PFAS to humans are not as clearly defined as we'd like them to be, but they're sufficiently serious that major steps to remediate PFAS contamination are justified.  And that's just what the PFAS Action Act of 2019 would do.  Designation of a place as a Superfund site means federal dollars are available to clean it up, even if it means digging up tons of soil and running it through an incinerator or equally extreme and costly measures.  The fact that an equal number of Republican and Democratic senators have joined forces on this measure is a rare sign that there are still a few things that the parties can still agree on. 

Practically speaking, the chemicals have lost whatever commercial sponsorship they may have had, as their U. S. manufacturers have abandoned them, hopefully for chemicals that are of comparable effectiveness while being less toxic.  I don't know what happens when you try to fight a fire with Dawn dish soap instead of PFAS foam, but things probably don't go as well.  Nevertheless, it's the nature of technologists to learn from their mistakes and make improvements, not only in the direct performance of the product, but in what happens to it after it's used and what it does in its so-called afterlife. 

A particularly sad aspect of this story is that while firefighters know they are going into a risky business, running into burning buildings while everyone else is fleeing, they may not have been fully apprised of a more subtle hazard associated with their calling:  the hazards of being exposed to all kinds of nasty chemicals that are present in both fires and in firefighting chemicals.  Many burning plastics give off very carcinogenic chemicals, and that is one reason why cancer has been the leading cause of death among U. S. firefighters since 2005, according to a 2017 report.  Not only do they deal with carcinogens in fires, they've been unwittingly spreading toxic chemicals around every time they use foam to put one out, too. 

This is probably more about PFAS chemicals than you perhaps wanted to find out.  But every now and then it's good to see that the system—science, technology, government—does still work.  Maybe not as well as it could or as fast as it could, but we've identified a problem in PFAS chemicals.  U. S. companies have quit making them, lawmakers are agreeing to do something about them, and the rest of us can go on about our business knowing that at least one matter of concern is getting some kind of coordinated attention. 

Sources:  I consulted the following sources:  the website of the Environmental Working Group, which carried a press release on the Superfund-naming bill at https://www.ewg.org/release/bipartisan-senate-bill-introduced-classify-pfas-chemicals-superfund-toxics; the CDC, which lists PFAS health effects at

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects.html; the website The Hill, which criticizes Wheeler for not being fast or active enough at https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-environment/431914-andrew-wheelers-pfas-action-plan-is-all-plan-no-action; and information about PFAS and aviation at https://www.limno.com/aviation-and-pfas-whats-the-connection/.  I thank my sister for her hospitality during my recent stay in Ft. Worth, where I followed her past a nearby fire station as she walked her dog and told me about the connection between firefighters and cancer, which is documented at https://www.healthline.com/health-news/cancer-is-number-one-killer-of-firefighters#1.

Arkema's Crosby Nightmare: The Price of Ignorance

If you lived within three miles of a chemical plant where dangerous substances were being made or handled, maybe you wouldn't want to know all the details.  But I bet you'd like first responders in the area to know what was there so they could take appropriate actions if anything went wrong. 

Well, Texas is a good place to live in many ways, but about 3,800 people living within a 3-mile radius of the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas probably wish they lived somewhere else right now, that is, if they haven't already evacuated because of the record-breaking floods from Hurricane Harvey.  Because several refrigerated trailers parked at the plant are full of chemicals that must be refrigerated to keep them from exploding.  And as the plant flooded shortly after Harvey hit, the power went out, the trailers started warming up, and one of them has gone up in flames already, sending noxious smoke into the neighborhood and forcing 18 first responders to seek medical attention.  And beyond a few general statements from the plant owners about organic peroxides, the public still doesn't know what is in those trailers.

Here's what apparently happened, as I have gathered from news reports. 

Arkema is a multinational chemical-manufacturing conglomerate based in France.  Its Crosby plant is a few miles northeast of the center of town on U. S. 90, and Crosby is northeast of Houston.  The setting is suburban, not really rural, as the 3,800 people within a 3-mile radius can attest. 

Texans are used to chemical plants.  They provide jobs and tax revenues, and while the smells and other hazards associated with chemical plants are drawbacks, the extreme safety precautions taken by most plant operators mean that millions of dollars' worth of chemicals are produced every day in the state without incident, under normal circumstances.  But Hurricane Harvey was anything but normal.

Organic peroxides are extremely reactive chemicals that are used in the polymerization of plastics, among other processes.  While I am no chemist and don't know any more about them than any other random resident of Crosby, I can well believe that some of them are so reactive that you have to keep them cooler than room temperature or else they will decompose violently, leading to an explosion.  Handling such stuff is a challenge, naturally, sort of like shipping frozen fish around, except instead of spoiling if it warms up, it blows up in your face.  So the plant no doubt has a lot of refrigeration machinery to keep its processes cold enough to preserve the nasty stuff, and refrigerated semi-trailers to take it where it needs to go—namely, other chemical plants that are equipped to keep the chemicals cold until they are used. 

All this has gone on up to now without any major incidents, although Arkema has reportedly been cited by regulators several times in the past for safety infractions.  Then last week came forecasts that Harvey, which was only a tropical depression as late as the Tuesday before it struck, was heading toward the Houston area.

The Arkema operators apparently decided that they ought to shut down the plant and move the existing stock of explosive chemicals off site in trailers.  So at some point before the hurricane hit, they loaded nine refrigerated semi-trailers with volatile chemicals that needed to be kept cool, and connected the refrigeration machinery to the local power utility, which was backed up by emergency power onsite. 

A skeleton crew of 11 stayed through the storm, making sure the power was still on to the trailers and switching to emergency power generators when the local utility power failed.  Then the water started to rise, and on Tuesday Aug. 29, the crew was ordered to evacuate, leaving the trailers behind.  As of today (Sunday, Sept. 3) one trailer has exploded, and the others are expected to go at any time.

At that point, one can question why they didn't take the trailers with them.  A number of reasons come to mind:  (1) they didn't have enough tractors (trucks) to haul them out, (2) the flood waters were so high that it might not have been possible to drive away from the plant in such heavy vehicles, (3) the prospect of dragging potentially explosive stuff all over flooded Houston was worse than leaving it there.  For whatever reason, the crew left the chemicals behind, and shortly thereafter Arkema officials announced that within a few days, the chemicals would of a certainty explode and make quite a mess.

An article in the Austin American-Statesman raises the question of why the contents of the plant have not been made public.  Every such plant has to file what's called a Tier II report detailing the chemicals made or used with the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency.  But under current law, it's not easy to gain access to that report.  You have to go to special reading rooms in Federal buildings and you can't photocopy them.  After the 2013 ammonium-nitrate explosion in West, Texas that killed more than a dozen people, the Obama administration proposed requiring the Tier II reports to be in a user-friendly format more widely available to the public.  But manufacturers and Texas regulators opposed this proposal, saying that such information could be used by potential terrorists.  And the new EPA administrator under the Trump administration, Scott Pruitt, has agreed to delay the change by at least two years. 

I said it after West and I'll say it again.  It is stupid that a Tier II report, or something like it, is not made available to first responders near any plant which they might reasonably be expected to respond to.  If you can't trust your local firemen to keep a secret, who can you trust?  And to me, the terrorist excuse sounds phony.  The more likely reason companies don't want Tier II reports released to the public is either out of concerns that competitors will use it, or that environmental protest groups will use the presence of certain chemicals to bring pressure to bear to shut the plant down. 

These concerns are legitimate, but they do not outweigh the needs of those sworn to protect the public from harm, to know what they are up against. 

So far, nobody has died as a result of the Arkema plant explosions.  But there are more trailers waiting to go off, and we still don't know what's in them.

Sources:  I referred to reports on the Arkema explosions and hazards that were carried by Houston TV stations at http://abc13.com/arkema-plant-explodes-after-power-loss/2366889/ and https://www.cbsnews.com/news/flames-erupt-at-arkema-chemical-plant-flooded-by-harvey-in-crosby-texas/.  The Sept. 2 print edition of the Austin American-Statesman carried an article by Jeffrey Schwartz entitled "Information scarce on chemical plant blasts," on p. A11.

Dereliction of Duty: The Flint Water Crisis

When a city operates a public water-supply system, it enters into an implied agreement with its customers, most of whom have no realistic second choice as to where to get domestic water.  Customers buy water from the city, and the city guarantees that the water is safe to drink. 

Starting in April of 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan began to violate its part of the bargain.  In 2011, the impoverished tax base of Flint, long past its glory days when the U. S. automotive industry was king, forced the city into receivership.  A dispute with the city of Detroit, from which Flint had purchased its water for the past several years, led to an attempt by the state-appointed emergency manager of Flint to save money by switching to a backup source of water, the Flint River.

The Flint River's water itself was safe to drink, but it was more acidic and had more salinity than the treated Detroit water did.  During the spring and summer of 2014, residents of Flint, especially those in older homes, began to notice that the water had an odd taste.  Up to about 1920, most service connections to the water mains were made with lead pipes.  While lead is a well-known toxin that is especially hazardous to pregnant women's babies and children under 6, the Detroit water previously supplied by Flint before April 2014 had coated the inside of the pipes with an inert phosphate or oxide layer that usually kept the levels of lead small enough not to cause problems.

However, the acidic and saline Flint water began etching away the mineral coating in the lead pipes to expose bare lead to the water going through the pipes, and levels of lead in water supplied to Flint homes began to rise.  In March of 2015, a private water-infrastructure firm called Veolia issued a report saying that lead in Flint water was in violation of EPA regulations.  While it was tragic that increased levels of lead got to Flint's citizens at all, something worse was about to happen.

In response to the Veolia report, the state-appointed financial manager of Flint, Jerry Ambrose, said that the city water was in compliance with all EPA and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality standards, and "the city is working daily to improve its quality."  This statement may have been technically true in the sense that the water Flint was putting into the mains was safe by itself.  But once it passed through resident-owned lead pipes, the combination was dangerous.  In September of 2015, a study by a Virginia Tech professor revealed that the levels of lead in tap water was higher than federal regulations allowed in about a quarter of Flint's households, and was up to 800 times the limit in some locations. 

Finally, in October of 2015, under pressure from state and local groups, Flint switched back to buying water from Detroit.  But the damage had already been done:  the mineral coatings that had built up over many decades in lead pipes was now mostly gone, and just going back to water with less acidity and salinity wasn't going to fix the problem. 

The story since then has been one of complex political wrangling that has tainted Michigan Governor Richard Snyder, who has approved over $30 million of state aid for the crisis, and is still ongoing in the form of lawsuits, emergency orders, water testing, and questions from residents about what harm has befallen their children and what they should do next.

As so often happens, the people most affected by this crisis are the ones least able to do something about it:  babies of pregnant women who drank lead-laced water and children who may still be ingesting lead from a place that ought to be safe to drink from, namely, the water faucets in your own house. 

When lawsuits come into play it isn't always easy to get to the bottom of a situation and find out exactly who knew what when.  To my knowledge, regular tap-water tests inside resident's homes are not routinely done by municipal water departments, but testing for lead in one's drinking water is not something that it is reasonable to expect private individuals to do—especially not those below the poverty line, which describes many of Flint's residents.  Engineers in the Flint water department should have known (and may well have known) that the combination of acidic Flint River water and lead pipes in old infrastructure was going to lead to problems.  But even after the trouble was widely known by the public and verified by independent tests, the financial manager of Flint apparently remained in denial.  Admittedly, being in bankruptcy makes things more complicated for a municipality, but the physical safety of citizens should override fiscal considerations. 

The Flint water crisis is an object lesson in how not to handle a public-health problem, especially one that was caused, at least indirectly, by actions of the city itself.  Despite abundant evidence that there was a problem, city officials delayed remedial action for another six to nine months.  This will probably dig the city even deeper into its financial hole after lawsuit judgments come due, and shows how important prompt, definitive action can be, and how much trouble can result if it is delayed.

Ideally, every bit of lead pipe in the city of Flint should be dug up and replaced with non-toxic service pipes.  But that would cost several thousand dollars per household in a city that is already reeling from decades of economic decline.  The United Way and other charitable organizations have gotten involved, but their efforts are limited to checking on current lead levels and alleviating possible medical consequences of ingesting lead during the worst of the crisis.  The fallout from this incident will haunt Flint for years, and I can only hope that the awareness of lead-contaminated drinking water brought into prominence by this situation will lead other cities with similar problems to get their own lead-in-water issues in order.  Sometimes a blunt colloquialism is the best way to express things:  "Get the lead out!"

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia article "Flint water crisis," an article in the Detroit Free Press online edition of Jan. 30, 2016 at http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2016/01/29/epa-high-lead-levels-flint-exceed-filters-ability/79540740/ entitled, "EPA:  High lead levels in Flint exceed filters' rating," and a Massachusetts Water Resources Authority online report's executive summary about the effects of acidic water on lead pipes at http://www.waterrf.org/ExecutiveSummaryLibrary/4064_Executive_Summary.pdf.  I also referred to an Associated Press article, "$28 million added to address water crisis in Flint," by Jeff Karoub and David Eggert carried in the Austin American-Statesman print edition of Jan. 30, 2016.

EPA Accuses VW of Software Cheat in Diesel Autos

Last Friday, Sept. 18, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it had discovered a "defeat device" installed in nearly half a million diesel vehicles made by Volkswagen (VW) and sold in the U. S. from 2009 to 2015.  Specifically, EPA claims that VW engineers have admitted to designing and installing software that implements full emissions controls on their diesel engines only when the software detects that the car is undergoing emissions testing.  The rest of the time, some of the emissions controls are disabled, allowing the vehicle to produce as much as forty times the maximum allowed levels of NOx, a type of pollutant that can lead to respiratory problems and smog.  When queried about the accusations, VW spokespersons declined comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

Until VW has their day in court, or wherever this case ends up, fairness dictates that we give them the benefit of the doubt.  But when both the EPA and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) issue notices that VW is in violation of clean-air ordinances, citing admissions made by VW personnel, it's a fairly safe bet that something is amiss.

In 2014, some researchers at West Virginia University who were working for the International Council on Clean Transportation discovered that certain VW diesels emitted far more pollutants when operating under actual road conditions than one would expect from the fact that they are certified by the EPA for sale in the U. S.  When the researchers notified the EPA about this, EPA asked VW about it, and VW said they would issue a recall to recalibrate the systems involved, which they did in December of 2014.  However, the California Air Resources Board checked some of the supposedly fixed VWs in May of 2015, and found that some of them were still out of compliance—hence, more meetings with VW.  According to a letter from the CARB, its staff and EPA staff held a technical meeting with VW personnel on Sept. 3, 2015.  Reading between the lines, we can surmise that the question they asked was along the lines of, "Okay, guys, what's really going on here?"  Faced with the inevitable, VW admitted that they had deliberately designed the vehicle's software to detect an official emissions test, and to turn on all the pollution controls only during testing.  The rest of the time, some of the controls were inactive. 

Faced with this smoking gun (so to speak), EPA and CARB had no choice but to declare the affected vehicles in violation and to order VW to issue a recall to remove the defeat-device software. 

As it turns out, if the allegations prove true this isn't the first time that regulators have found diesel-engine defeat devices deployed on a massive scale.  Back in 1998, diesels in trucks and construction machinery made by Caterpillar, Renault, and Volvo were found to have two different sets of software.  One set was used when the EPA was running emissions tests on the engines, and adjusted the injection timing for low NOx emissions.  The second set of software used a different injection timing that delivered better fuel economy, but also caused more NOx emissions.  The manufacturers ended up paying about a billion-dollar fine for that infraction. 

There seems to be something about software that tempts engineers to bend the rules.  With hardware, it's relatively easy to dig into the machinery and find the gizmo that's doing its nefarious work—that's the kind of thing that the term "defeat device" brings to mind.  It reminds me of a scene from the autobiography of Vannevar Bush, who was in charge of the U. S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II.  In the 1920s, he was a professor at MIT and got involved with a startup company named Raytheon.  At the time, Raytheon's hot product was a type of rectifier tube that was useful in the rapidly growing production of radios that operated from power-line current (earlier radios used messy and expensive batteries).  In a dispute with rival radio manufacturer Westinghouse, Bush claimed that Westinghouse was using Raytheon's patented tube structure.  The patent attorney for the rival firm rival denied it.  In response, Bush told Westinghouse's patent attorney to pick up a Westinghouse tube (which had an opaque coating on the glass) and crack it over a trash can.  He did so, and there was Raytheon's patented tube structure.  As Bush put it, the patent attorney agreed to advise his client Westinghouse to "keep off the grass."

You can't do that sort of dramatic stunt with software so easily.  If the accessible form of the software involved is in the form of machine code (which it usually is in production systems), often nobody other than the people who wrote it can really tell what it does.  So sneaky evasions such as the one VW engineers are accused of doing with the defeat-device software are hard to pin down, which means that indirect evidence such as performance measurements have to be used instead.  And it's not often that regulatory agencies go to such trouble to track down violations.  Further investigation may reveal exactly who at VW was responsible for the defeat-device software, and how high in the firm the decision was made.  And then, if the charges are proven, VW will have to pay—at least with a recall fixing the problem, and perhaps with fines or other penalties. 

The contrast between the way cars used to pollute before environmental regulations and what comes out the tailpipe today was brought home to me recently when we started working on a 1955 Oldsmobile owned by my late father-in-law.  It now starts up pretty reliably without help, but whenever it does, a blue cloud appears behind it and the sharp tang of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) fills the air.  Exhaust just doesn't smell like that any more, by and large, and that's thanks to catalytic converters, selective catalytic reduction for diesels that uses urea to reduce NOx emissions, and many other measures that make the air cleaner than it would otherwise be.

If the charges against VW prove to be true, that firm will have the opportunity to make the air behind its cars even cleaner.  And we will all be thankful for that.

Sources:  Numerous news outlets carried reports of the EPA's press release of Sept. 18, which can be found on the EPA website at yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/21b8983ffa5d0e4685257dd4006b85e2/dfc8e33b5ab162b985257ec40057813b!OpenDocument.  I referred to reports on the issue by the Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/18/epa-volkswagen-used-defeat-device-to-circumvent-air-pollution-controls/ and a letter from the CARB at http://www.arb.ca.gov/newsrel/in_use_compliance_letter.htm.  I also referred to an article on the 1998 defeat-device actions in the Los Angeles Times for Oct. 23, 1998 at http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/23/news/mn-35220.  The patent dispute between Raytheon and Westinghouse is described on p. 198 of Vannevar Bush, Pieces of the Action (William Morrow, 1970).