David R. Montgomery
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 American fertilizet production exploded in the 1950s when new natural gas feedstock plants in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma wete connected to pipelines to carry liquid ammonia north to the corn belt. Europe's bombed-out plants were rebuilt and converted to fertilizer production. Expansion of Russian ammonia production was based on central Asian and Siberian natural gas fields. Global production of ammonia more than doubled in the 1960s and doubled again in the 1970s. |
| By 1998 the world's chemical industry produced more than 150 million metric tons of ammonia a year; the Habet-Bosch process supplied more than 99 percent of production. natural gas remains the principal feedstock for about 80 percent of global ammonia production.
The agricultural output of industrialized countries roughly doubled in the second half of the twentieth century. Much of this newfound productivity came from increasing reliance on manufactured fertilizers. |
| Because Germany lacked narural gas fields, the more efficient process was not commercialized until 1929 when Shell Chemical Company opened a plant at Pittsburg, California to convert cheap natural gas into cheap fertilizer. The technology for making ammonia synthesis the dominant means of fixing atmospheric nitrogen arrived just in time for the industrial stagnation of the Depression.
Ammonia plant construction began again in earnest in the run-up to the Second World War. |
| As supplies dwindle, oil and natural gas will become too valuable to use for fertilizer production. Petroleum-based industtial agriculture will end sometime later this century.
Not surprisingly, agribusiness portrays pesticide and fertilizer intensive agriculrure as necessary to feed the world's poor. Even though almost a billion people go hungry each day, industrial agriculture may not be the answer. Over the past five thousand years population kept pace with the ability to feed people. Simply increasing food production has not worked so far, and it won't if population growth keeps up. |
Mark Lynas
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 Massive investments are already being made to tap into this economically valuable resource: the Norwegian government is spending billions of dollars building a liquefied natural gas terminal at the far northern port of Hammerfest, whilst a massive gas find in Russian Arctic waters - estimated to contain double Canada's entire reserves - has sparked an unseemly scramble amongst oil majors to partner with Russia's giant Gazprom corporation to exploit it. According to one energy analyst quoted in the New York Times, this new Arctic rush is 'the Great Game in a cold climate'. |
| Dickens was not at the time trying to explain the past: he was trying to help oil companies discover whether methane hydrates - which could potentially double the world's energy reserves - could be drilled to produce natural gas. It was occasionally an exciting venture: on one expedition, his drilling tube dramatically exploded due to the pressure of methane within, firing mud fifty metres into the air. Luckily nobody was injured.
As Dickens would later explain, the important thing about methane hydrate is that it is only stable when kept very cold or under high pressure. |
| Other 'unconventional oil' sources are similarly polluting - the extraction of oil from the tar sand deposits in the Canadian province of Alberta uses vast quantities of steam and natural gas, meaning that the 'energy returned on energy invested' ratio is dangerously low and emissions dangerously high. Global gas supplies will last longer than oil, but not indefinitely - estimates of the date for 'peak gas' vary from one to eight decades away from now. |
| Instead, we turn fossil fuels into food, through mechanised agriculture and long-distance transport. natural gas is used to make nitrogen fertilisers, whilst oil powers the tractors and combine harvesters that carry out most of the labour. It would take hundreds of cider-drinking human harvesters using muscle power to do the work of one oil-drinking combine harvester using mechanical power (cider was surely the ultimate sustainable biofuel!).
Still more oil is used in processing raw materials into edible foodstuffs, packaging them, and trucking the finished products to market. |
David Steinman
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 Russia joins the EU and provides energy resources as Siberian permafrost lifts and natural gas reserves are tapped. Late in the decade, China intervenes in Kazakhstan to protect pipelines regularly disrupted by rebels and criminals.
Second Decade
?Migration occurs from northern countries such as Holland and Germany toward Spain and Italy. Persistent conflict emerges in Southeast Asia among Burma, Laos, Vietnam, India, and China.
?Due to drought and inability to grow enough food to feed its people, internal conditions in China deteriorate dramatically, leading to civil war and border wars.
? |
| That's frightening because without Canada, the United States will be even more dependent on Middle Eastern sources for natural gas. That can't be a positive prognosis for any nation, much less one as addicted to oil as America.
Reducing consumption does not mean reducing our quality of life. To shift to a sustainable economy, we need to focus on generating genuine asset-based wealth rather than continuing to measure progress exclusively in extraction terms as in how much gas or oil we take from the Earth. |
| An attack on the chlorine plant or one handling liquefied natural gas could cause a chain reaction that would kill tens of thousands locally, and the crippling of the Northeast would be a million times worse than inflicted by the hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Mitchell took us over the Pulaski Skyway. It looked familiar, and Serrao told me it was in the opening credits for The Sopranos. The original span was constructed in 1932, but it had become a succession of interconnected bridges and roadways that soared over the Hackensack and Passaic rivers and the town of Kearny. |
| Burnside I am grooving on through petrochemical headphones; my very ability to have been flying three thousand miles at timewarp speed to reach the East Coast; and then my long drive into West Trenton in my fossil-fuel rental car—these were all the result of our ingenious exploitation of oil, coal, and natural gas.
I love what we have, and I'd be stupid to want to go back in time. But I have to tell you something: I do want to get on with our future.
We have to be wise and progressive. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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 She smells natural gas, or smells that perfume across the room, or she can smell food cooking before anybody else. She can smell disinfectants. If these odors bother your child and she can perceive them faster than anybody else, it means that she is probably becoming sensitized to the abundance of chemicals that we have now managed to put in our food, air, water, clothing, homes, schools and workplaces.
"What else do you notice if a child is sensitive to something in school? The child may get an A one day, and an F the next day in the same subject. |
David Steinman
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| But more to the point for being a green patriot, an equally important factor is that when manufacturers start with plant-based raw materials for their products, they reduce the country's need for oil and natural gas. The net result is that making carbon-neutral purchases can have a truly beneficial effect on greenhouse emissions, as well as reducing the country's oil dependency.
On the other hand, most products still use petrochemical-based chemicals, and most of us are adding greenhouse gases to the environment. |
| Inside the car was highly pressurized liquid hydrogen, extracted from natural gas, a fossil fuel.
First, hydrogen fuel flowed into one electrode. The electrode was coated with a catalyst that strips the hydrogen into electrons and protons. The movement of the electrons generated electricity to power the motor, and the protons passed through a proton-exchange membrane into another electrode. In flowed oxygen; it came in contact with hydrogen. Hydrogen plus oxygen produced water vapors, which were emitted from the vehicle. |
Alex Steffen
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 The process can turn gasified coal, natural gas, methane from landfills, and gas derived from biomass into synthetic diesel, gasoline, and aviation fuels. The resulting F-T fuels are high performing and clean burning, and can be used in blends or neat. |
| The gas is then pushed through a pipe into a modified natural gas engine, and electricity generated by burning the gas is fed into the CVPS system. The digester also produces a low-odor slurry that makes a fertilizer that is safer than raw manure.
Cow Power is a gracefully circular way for cattle to give a bit of energy back to the systems that support them. Participating dairy farmers get an additional source of income, almost literally turning waste into gold. |
James Howard Kunstler
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 The United States was in a quandary. Both natural gas and oil were in depletion domestically. All the major hydroelectric sites were already in use. Coal was dirty. Nuclear fuel was politically untouchable. We were importing nearly half our liquid petroleum by then and didn't want to go through another foreign energy blackmail crisis. Though the United States was producing less gas than it had years earlier, we were using less, too, and future capacity could come from Canada, our friendly neighbor. |
Alex Steffen
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| Celsius) during the past century, according to a recent NASA report on global warming, and the connection linking this heating trend to the release of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide from human activities that burn coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas, is beyond dispute. Nature recently reported that the concentration of C02 is higher now than it has been at any time in the past 650,000 years—a substantial share of Homo sapiens' tenure on earth. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Think about how you're going to live, potentially without electricity or natural gas, for some period of time. Think about preparing for a big storm or hurricane, but one that could last several months. Think about stored food, and what you need to do in terms of basic medical supplies and basic personal hygiene. Because if you are prepared, you will not be a victim of this.
Of course, if the best case unfolds and this doesn't become a human pandemic, then guess what? |
Mike Adams
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 As Debra Dadd says in Home Safe Home, "As a food, refined white sugar is highly contaminated, having been sprayed with multiple pesticides, processed over a natural gas flame, and chemically bleached."
Author Elson Hass adds:
"In addition, the pesticides and chemicals sprayed on cane and beet sugar and the chemical bleaching process used to make "white" sugar are potentially hazardous; we are not advised about this on sugar packages or food labels.... |
Alex Steffen
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| Wind power has historically been more expensive than power from coal, oil, or natural gas. But wind power is growing (from 4,800 megawatts generated in 1995 to 59,322 megawatts in 2005, according to the Worldwatch Institute), and as more people build wind farms, the price of wind power drops. In fact, some recent wind projects are cranking out electricity that is priced competitively with coal and oil, and far cheaper than nuclear power, with none of the radioactivity or greenhouse-gas pollution. |
Linda Mason Hunter
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 Natural Gas Though the price of natural gas has shot up more than the price of any other fuel in the last 10 years, gas is still less expensive than the competition. All things considered, natural gas shapes up as the homeowner's most economical bet for the future. Many a homeowner who heats with gas can save a lot of money by updating the furnace and boiler, a retrofit that can achieve more than 90 percent efficiency.
Technology in gas appliances has improved greatly in recent years. |
James Howard Kunstler
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| In a world short of diesel fuel and natural gas, people will have to find other ways to make crops, whatever they believe in. The models are there and the knowledge is there, but it is not in general circulation the way a knowledge of auto mechanics is today. |
Alex Steffen
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| The Home Energy Station uses regular natural gas to create hydrogen to fuel the FCX at home. But the same system can also supply electricity to homes—the heat produced from refueling can even provide hot water. If it works as claimed, the FCX/Home Energy Station combo will not only slash carbon emissions by 40 percent, it will also cut combined electricity, gas, and fuel costs in half.
A car that doubles as a home generator—that's more than an advanced form of transportation. |
James Howard Kunstler
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| One weak spot in the theory was that the fuel cells would run on natural gas, a commodity now in depletion. Another weak spot was that research and development by several companies, led by General Electric, had so far failed to engineer an affordable home generation unit. So distributed generation has come to naught so far. The upshot has been that the giant regional grids, with their long ranks of towers and power lines and substations, are not being maintained because the utility companies are still betting that they will be obsolete sooner rather than later. |
Bryan Hanson, PhD
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 As a simple example, however, consider the molecule CH4 (methane, a component of natural gas). Where is the C? On the end or in the middle? Are the Hs in a line, connected to one another?
If you remember our little mnemonic device that 1-2-3-4 bonds are made by the elements H-O-N-C, that helps. Because hydrogen makes only one bond, you cannot have a chain of hydrogen atoms. As soon as you connect one hydrogen to another, you have a complete molecule—the hydrogen molecule H2—and that is the end of any further bonding. Thus the "H4" in CH4 is misleading without the rules of bonding. |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
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 The relationship between the storage form of vitamin D and the supercharged 1,25 D is like having a large tank of natural gas buried in our yard (storage vitamin D) but carefully using only a very tiny amount of gas to light the burner at our stovetop. It is critical that the amount and timing of gas (1,25 D) coming to our stovetop be carefully
CHART C.I: THE VITAMIN D NETWORK
Warehouse' Vitamin D
(in llnr)
Normal Cells
¦V
Supercharged 125 D
(in kidney) regulated, regardless of how much there may be in the tank, whether it is low or whether it is full. |
Phyllis A. Balch, CNC
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 To reduce your exposure to natural gas, pesticides, radon, smoke, and other chemicals in the household, ventilate your home well. Replace particleboard subflooring with exterior-grade plywood that does not contain formaldehyde. The wood should then be sealed with a nontoxic sealant.
Q Have your home and workplace tested for radon. Radon is a radioactive gas that occurs naturally and seeps from the ground. It is believed to be the second leading cause of lung cancer. Simple test kits are available at most hardware stores. |
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