"The energy industry is under attack"... By who?

Going over to the American Petroleum Institute's (API) website this morning to try and see if I could dig up some obscure reports, I ran across this opening message on their main page:

My first reaction was something like this "attack... nothing new there... WAIT."

The picture above of the digital skull of computer doom refers to a real issue that people across energy production sectors in the United States are worried about: cyber security. Cyber security, the newest addition to our "energy security" concerns is a problem all companies deal with, and given how much of our key infrastructure is tied up in energy production it is no surprise that API would paint this as an attack on all of the energy industry.

But let's think for a minute... when you hear "the energy industry is under attack", do you really think about cyber security? If you are like me wrapped up in research on energy security the first thing your mind goes to is physical attacks on energy facilities, such as you have seen and will continue to see in Iraq.

While I imagine most Americans are familiar with the images of burning oilfields and refineries, especially in the context of the Gulf War (the first one), I do not think it usually equates to "American Energy Security" in the sense that we are personally under attack.

What most of us are used to hearing about, especially within the last 10 years or so, is this war on traditional fossil fuels sources - oil and coal. From oil companies being under attack for their actions related to environmental damage (think BP in the Gulf of Mexico) to the American coal industry being under attack by federal environmental regulators most of the time "attack on American energy" means political attack.

API is not helping themselves in this respect, as just to the right of the digital skull image is a list of the group's primary policy issues: Taxes, LNG Exports, and the Keystone XL pipeline. The first two are primarily about leveraging our natural gas boom. The Keystone XL pipeline, however, is at the center of a ongoing political battle (yes, it is still ongoing in some circles despite the supposed victory on the part of anti-Keystone activists) over whether to build a transcontinental pipeline connecting Canadian tar sands oil fields in western Canada with the American refineries near the Gulf of Mexico.

Energy rhetoric, language such as "wars" and "attacks" all draw from these political battles over what types of energy we should use as a country and can sometimes, like in the case of API, take on a life of their own. "The energy industry is under attack" is one of those "slippery-slope" sorts of catchphrases - it fits the problem at hand (cyber security), but brings with it a ton of baggage related to the political issues around fossil fuels and future energy sources.

#Winning the Future, or "Victory in the Specifics"

During my work on a side project unassociated with my dissertation (because that's what grad students do, okay?), I ran across the Obama Administration's line from 2011 on how the United States can become energy secure - specifically from foreign powers which we import our oil from:


"With an ultimate goal of reducing our dependence on oil, in the near term we must responsibly develop and produce oil and gas at home, while at the same time leveraging cleaner, alternative fuels and increasing efficiency.  And beyond our efforts to reduce our dependence on oil, we must focus on expanding cleaner sources of electricity – keeping America on the cutting edge of clean energy technology so that we can build a 21^st century clean energy economy and win the future."

For reference, I added the emphasis on that last bit. 

Win the future? What does "winning" mean in this context? Are we talking about Charlie Sheen #winning here? Who are we beating? Ourselves? The past? The future? Oil exporting countries in the Middle East? The Russians? The Chinese? Betty White???

Okay, probably not the first and last ones.

The point is, how do you win something you do not yet know? Winning implies there is some sort of "thing" we are competing over, but the future is not a thing. Not yet at least. Turning the world of energy into some sort of game of "The Settlers of Catan" is not particularly advisable. Losing in Settlers, even when it happens three times in a row to your best friend who has never played in her life and basks in the victories, still does not meany anything in the grander scheme. 

Losing in a "energy game" could mean finding yourself on the short end of the stick, left behind in a world of glossy cities.

A literal "District 12" for your energy secure Panem.

 

Energy With Scouts!

Energy organizations love bringing in Boy and Girl Scouts and showing them about the cool things they can do with energy. I have to admit, I loved this kind of stuff as a kid too. The Ann Arbor Michigan Hands-On Museum was probably one of my favorite places growing up, if only because they made science and technology so interesting.

So, I don't fault power companies, large energy corporations (like Westinghouse), environmental groups, or federal agencies for doing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) outreach. Even if you could care less about technology, it is still useful to understand how the things people hand you and tell you that you need (like a smartphone) work.

It's just sometimes, please, PLEASE outreach groups, think about what you have kids do.

Case in Point: last weekend, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) hosted a day of events about energy action for a group of Scouts from the D.C. area. The major topics scouts could learn about were electricity, energy, or nuclear science, each of which would go towards a specific merit badge/patch.

The top two are merit badges Boy Scouts could earn in either Nuclear Science (top) or Energy (middle). The Girl Scout below is holding the Nuclear Science patch (which is a lot sweeter than the Boy Scout's one) she earned at the event.

The Good: The event had a number of interesting ways to get kids to think about energy from the universally-fun static electricity balloon example (something I have seen adults engage in well into later life) and a sweet example of how a nuclear chain reaction works using ping pong balls and mousetraps:

I wish they would have shown me that when I was starting nuclear engineering...would've explained things so much better.

The Not-So-Good: I understand from working with nuclear scientists and engineers, as well as being a Vice President of a student chapter of their primary society, the American Nuclear Society, that explaining radiation is one of the most difficult things to do. Its odorless, tasteless, around you all the time, and was/is a favorite in T.V. for explaining random health issues (at least until House came about, then it was Lupus). But seriously folks, this?

The caption reads: "A Boy Scout uses a radiation survey meter".

Talking about energy and energy technologies does not always mean talking about it, sometimes it can come across in more visual representations. For reference, that is a Geiger counter. Yes, you use a Geiger counter for a number of things, not all of them out of B-movie stories of radiation creating mutant creatures that terrorize the world (think Them!). Problem is, Geiger counters and other radiation detection gear hold a certain sway on the human imagination. 

When people think radiation, then tend to think this:

So, when you plan STEM projects, please first think about what the parents will think, and then focus on what you actually want to teach the kids. Context is everything, and as the old adage goes "a picture is worth a thousand words".

Talking Energy

Before the inevitable rush of questions as to the choice in title begins, I would like to point out how this homely little blog is following a long and storied tradition of using acronyms (and faux acronyms) in energy circles.

Any of these familiar? The top one should be to almost every American, given how much of a stir its former CEO caused during the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. So should the bottom one, if only because it's a good bet you have some of their light bulbs in your house. The middle one is well known to most southeastern Michigan residents because, well, DTE is their power utility.

Here are some other energy companies whose names look like (or are) acronyms:

SCANA (utility)
AGL Resources (utility)
EQT Corporation (natural gas extraction)
REC (solar panels)
XTO Energy (oil and natural gas extraction)
OCI Company (solar panels)
NRG Energy (utility)
APS (Arizona Public Service) (utility)
SRP (Salt River Project) (utility)
UGI Corporation (utility)

So on and so forth...

As you can see, energy people like acronyms. Not just for company names, but for technologies too. Energy agencies, such as the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission love these sorts of acronyms. If acronyms for technical terms were a sea they would swim in them everyday. Acronyms are so common that the State of California's Energy Commission has an entire webpage devoted to acronyms. You can go there and search every acronym from A (ampere) to ZDMH ("mechanically scribed, deep-domain refined core steel").

I worked in a metallurgical engineering department for a year and have no idea what that last one means.

So, if my blog title seems a little crass, or just too cheeky, remember it's not meant to be an insult, just a slight jab at a very strange love affair.



Correction (5:54PM Pacific Standard Time): The year of the BP oil spill was corrected to 2010.

Energy is "good to think with"

When is the last time you can remember cursing out a piece of technology? A microwave, or an oven? In my case, anger usually involves my "Wilson" from the movie Castaway - a little smart meter which, aside from sitting there blinking the time at me, reminds me all too often (1) how hot it is in Phoenix, and (2) how much of my stipend goes towards paying for electricity.

So you could say we humans (at least those of us in the developed world) have a weird relationship with technology. On one hand we get annoyed when it does not work, but on the other it awes us when it does. We give our cars names (mine is Ally, something my best friend Allison does not appreciate), and then swear at them when they do not work right.

Why though? Is it something about technologies themselves?

Maybe it is something deeper than technology. Maybe it has something to do with what makes technologies work.

Work is a funny word, we use it all the time but really never think about what the word means. When you turn on your smartphone after dropping it, you do not say it is functioning... you say its working. We like when things work for us, and get angry at them when they don't.

Work, though, is not just about things doing what we want them to do, its about things utilizing energy to do what we want them to do.

So, when you curse out your toaster for burning your everything bagel and not working right, you are cursing out the fact the technology did not use energy the way you wanted it to.

The famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once said that sex was "good to think with". Sandra Harding said the same thing about science, oddly enough, in relation to sex. So when I say energy is"good to think with" I mean that looking at how we talk about energy tells us a lot about who we are.

Now, this page is nowhere near as heady an endeavor. Just a fun exploration of the weird ways we talk about energy. From giving kids tours of nuclear power plants and letting them put on radiation suits to commercials about net metering that belong with Leave it to Beaver and President Eisenhower, some of the things people say about energy are so bizarre they have to be seen next to each other. 

A word of caution: if you are expecting this to be a space where I criticize the past in favor of some energy future full of technologies that will free the world from [insert crisis here], I am sorry to say you will be disappointed. The funny thing about energy technologies is that while the designs may change, the fact people built them does not.

Anyways, people are much more interesting than toasters.