History > 2006 > USA > Environnement (IV-VI)

The Energy Challenge

It’s Free, Plentiful and Fickle

December 28, 2006
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD

Wind, almost everybody’s best hope for big supplies of clean, affordable electricity, is turning out to have complications.

Engineers have cut the price of electricity derived from wind by about 80 percent in the last 20 years, setting up this renewable technology for a major share of the electricity market. But for all its promise, wind also generates a big problem: because it is unpredictable and often fails to blow when electricity is most needed, wind is not reliable enough to assure supplies for an electric grid that must be prepared to deliver power to everybody who wants it — even when it is in greatest demand.

In Texas, as in many other parts of the country, power companies are scrambling to build generating stations to meet growing peak demands, generally driven by air-conditioning for new homes and businesses. But power plants that run on coal or gas must “be built along with every megawatt of wind capacity,” said William Bojorquez, director of system planning at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

The reason is that in Texas, and most of the United States, the hottest days are the least windy. As a result, wind turns out to be a good way to save fuel, but not a good way to avoid building plants that burn coal. A wind machine is a bit like a bicycle that a commuter keeps in the garage for sunny days. It saves gasoline, but the commuter has to own a car anyway.

Xcel Energy, which serves eight states from North Dakota to Texas and says it is the nation’s largest retailer of wind energy, is eager to have more. Wind is “abundant and popular,” said Richard C. Kelly, the chairman, president and chief executive, speaking at a recent conference on renewable energy.

But Frank P. Prager, managing director of environmental policy at the company, said that the higher the reliance on wind, the more an electricity transmission grid would need to keep conventional generators on standby — generally low-efficiency plants that run on natural gas and can be started and stopped quickly.

He said that in one of the states the company serves, Colorado, planners calculate that if wind machines reach 20 percent of total generating capacity, the cost of standby generators will reach $8 a megawatt-hour of wind. That is on top of a generating cost of $50 or $60 a megawatt-hour, after including a federal tax credit of $18 a megawatt-hour.

By contrast, electricity from a new coal plant currently costs in the range of $33 to $41 a megawatt-hour, according to experts. That price, however, would rise if the carbon dioxide produced in burning coal were taxed, a distinct possibility over the life of a new coal plant. (A megawatt-hour is the amount of power that a large hospital or a Super Wal-Mart would use in an hour.)

Without major advances in ways to store large quantities of electricity or big changes in the way regional power grids are organized, wind may run up against its practical limits sooner than expected.

At a recent discussion of clean energy technologies held at General Electric’s research center in Niskayuna, N.Y, Dan W. Reicher, a former assistant secretary of energy for conservation and renewable energy, predicted that renewables, led by wind, could reach 20 percent of demand in the next decade or two. President Bush has also said that wind could supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity.

But Mr. Reicher drew a quick response from James E. Rogers, chief executive of Cinergy, one of the nation’s largest utilities, and chairman of the Edison Electric Institute, the industry’s trade association. “I love his optimism,” Mr. Rogers said. “But unfortunately, I have to deliver electricity every day.”

Mr. Rogers said that wind and another big renewable source that is available only when nature cooperates, solar power, will be necessary because the government would eventually regulate carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. He later said that his reply to Mr. Reicher had been a “cheap shot,” but he and others are still wondering how much wind the nation can absorb.

General Electric, a major maker of wind machines, says that along with lowering the price for a megawatt-hour, engineers have made other improvements in wind machines. With better electronic controls, many of them now help stabilize voltage on the grid, and have been cured of their tendency to shut off when detecting a voltage fluctuation, a problem that can escalate into a blackout.

Juan de Bedout, manager of the electric power and propulsion systems lab at G.E., said this was more important now because wind machines had grown from a few hundred kilowatts to 1.5 gigawatts, and his company was exploring machines four times bigger than that. “That’s ginormous,” he said.

In many places, wind tends to blow best on winter nights, when demand is low. When it is available, power from wind always displaces the most expensive power plant in use at that moment. If wind blew in summer, it would displace expensive natural gas. But in periods of low demand, it is displacing cheap coal.

And in places where suppliers enter bids each day to supply power on the next day, on an hour-by-hour basis, wind is at a disadvantage. Wider use of wind requires the invention of a new kind of weather forecasting, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit consortium based in Palo Alto, Calif., sponsored by the utility industry and its suppliers. Rather than forecasting from temperature or rainfall, what is needed is a focus on almost minute-by-minute predictions of wind in small areas where the turbines are.

The economics of wind would change radically if the carbon dioxide emitted by coal were assigned a cash value, but in the United States it has none. Coal plants produce about a ton of carbon dioxide each megawatt hour, on average, so a price of $10 a ton would have a major impact on utility economics.

Another possibility is energy storage, although this presents other difficulties.

In May, Xcel and the Energy Department announced a research program to use surplus, off-peak electricity from wind to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen could be burned or run through a fuel cell to make electricity when it was needed most. Xcel plans to invest $1.25 million, and the government $750,000. But storage imposes a high cost: about half the energy put into the system is lost.

The Electric Power Research Institute said that existing hydroelectric dams could be used as storage; they can increase and decrease their generation quickly, and each watt generated in a wind machine means water need not be run through the dam’s turbines; it can be kept in storage, ready for use later, when it is most needed.

The institute listed another possibility, still in the exploratory stage: using surplus electricity made from wind to pump air, under pressure, into underground caverns. At peak hours, the compressed air could be withdrawn and injected into generators fired by natural gas. Natural-gas turbines usually compress their own air; compression from wind would cut gas consumption by 40 percent, the institute said.

That would help with an important goal, reducing consumption of natural gas, which is increasingly scarce and costly in North America. But not everyone is so sanguine that wind will do that.

Paul Wilkinson, vice president for policy analysis at the American Gas Association, the trade group for the utilities that deliver natural gas, said that wind, while helpful in making more gas available for home heating and industrial use, would still need a gas generator to back it up. And the units used as backup are generally chosen for low purchase price, not efficient use of fuel.

At the American Wind Energy Association, Robert E. Gramlich, the policy director, said that one solution would be to organize control of the electric grid into bigger geographic areas, so that a drop-off in wind in one place would be balanced by an increase somewhere else, reducing the need for conventional backup. That is among several changes the wind industry would like in the electric system; another is easier construction of new power lines, because many of the best wind sites are in prairies or mountain ranges far from where the electricity is needed.

A problem for new power lines is that they would be fully loaded for only some of the year, since the amount of energy that the average wind turbine produces over 12 months is equal to just 30 to 40 percent of the amount that would result from year-round operation at capacity. That number runs closer to 90 percent at a nuclear or coal plant.

Thus a 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant will produce nearly three times as much electricity as 1,000 megawatts of wind turbines. But operating costs at the wind farm are lower, and the fuel is, of course, free.

    It’s Free, Plentiful and Fickle, NYT, 28.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/business/28wind.html

Earthquakes Shakes Central Oklahoma

December 21, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:38 a.m. ET
The New York Times

MIDWEST CITY, Okla. (AP) -- Two minor earthquakes shook central Oklahoma, rattling nerves but causing no serious damage or injuries, authorities said.

The quakes were centered in the Del City-Midwest City area east of Oklahoma City. The first struck at 8:41 p.m. Wednesday with a preliminary magnitude of 2.6. The second, at 12:14 a.m. Thursday, had a preliminary reading of 2.7, according to the Oklahoma Geological Survey.

''The quake scared a lot of people,'' Midwest City Police Chief Brandon Clabes said. ''We had multiple calls about shaking homes. They thought it was some kind of explosion.''

Central Oklahoma sits over a subsurface geologic structure called the Nemaha Ridge and experiences up to a dozen earthquakes each year, said Charles Mankin, director of the Survey.

''These are fairly small earthquakes,'' he said. ''They're mostly adjustments.''

On the Net:

Oklahoma Geological Survey at http://www.okgeosurvey1.gov

    Earthquakes Shakes Central Oklahoma, NYT, 21.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-BRF-Oklahoma-Earthquake.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Poachers in West Hunt Big Antlers to Feed Big Egos

December 9, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

ELY, Nev., Dec. 3 — A bighorn sheep lay in a field not far from here, its head missing. In nearby Elko, three elk and five deer died from gunshot wounds, their carcasses rotting in the hills. And in the distant mountains, game wardens searched for another elk that a tipster said had been killed by illegal hunters apparently just for the thrill of it.

The reports keep coming in — elk, deer, antelope, bighorn sheep and other big-game animals — killed in a wave of poaching that has alarmed state and federal wildlife officials in Nevada and several other Western states.

The authorities said they are seeing more organized rings of poachers and unlicensed guides chasing the biggest elk and mule deer, with the largest antler array, sometimes trading them on Internet auction sites or submitting pictures to glossy hunting magazines that prominently feature big kills.

“There is almost a fixation on possessing or obtaining trophy-class animals,” said Jim Kropp, the wildlife law enforcement chief for Montana, which this fall began a new public awareness campaign about poaching called Enough is Enough. “People,” he added, “will go to any length to have these things in their possession. It’s big antlers and big egos.”

The federal government does not keep national statistics on poaching incidents, but wildlife law enforcement officials in several states, mainly those with large populations of elk, mule deer and other animals prized for their impressive antlers or girth, have raised concerns about the rash of complaints and the big money that seems increasingly a factor in the cases they investigate.

The officials said tight regulations on where and what can be hunted at various times of year, part of an effort to manage the size of big-game herds, had motivated some shooting out of season or on restricted land.

The National Park Service wrote in a budget statement last year that poaching had contributed to the decline of 29 species of wildlife in the 390 parks and other sites it oversees.

An interstate compact set up 15 years ago in a few Western states to track and punish violators of hunting laws across state lines has grown to 24 states nationally, including New York this year. Big-game crimes, mostly related to poaching, accounted for 42 percent of the violations to the compact last year.

“We treat these as essentially homicides,” said Lt. Jerry Smith, a Nevada supervising game warden. “But it is such a secretive crime. We have no witnesses to work with, just the bodies, when we find them.”

A decade ago, Nevada tallied 50 or so animals poached or killed out of season and by hunters without permits. Last year, 70 such animals were found, the highest number ever; so far this year the tally is 65, and with a few weeks of the biggest hunting left, Nevada officials said the number could surpass last year’s.

And game wardens here suggest that far more animals may have been killed than they have found; they calculate that they find 1 percent to 5 percent of poached animals.

Poaching is not Nevada’s problem alone.

This year, Montana and federal investigators seized 30 elk heads and prosecuted 22 people in a poaching ring who drew fines and the ring leader, Danny McDonald of Gardiner, Mont., a year in federal prison.

They had illegally led out-of-state hunters to trophy bull elks leaving Yellowstone National Park.

In Idaho, Ed Mitchell, a spokesman for the Department of Fish and Game, said poaching cases in the state had remained steady in recent years, but the crimes increasingly are carried out by people in the black market for antlers and heads, which can fetch tens of thousands of dollars.

“Legitimate hunters don’t find it entirely understandable, but some people will pay to have some critter on their wall they can claim they have shot,” Mr. Mitchell said. “Hunters find that completely out of the realm of understanding.”

In part to better understand the scope of the problem, the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies is developing a database that will include closer tracking of the number and nature of poaching incidents nationwide.

In Nevada, officials said they suspect the strict regulation that has allowed the elk and deer population to flourish may also be driving up poaching. People who covet antlers as decorations or to sell on the market do not want to wait the decade or more it can take to get a tag, or permit, to hunt a single big elk or deer.

This year, 25,893 people requested an elk tag, but only 2,254 were issued, to the dismay of some hunter groups that have pushed for more tags. On average, the department receives 15 applicants for every bull elk tag.

Like other states, Nevada has a sparse staff of field game wardens who cover vast swaths of territory, making it easier for poachers to get away with their crimes. Often, poached animals are not found until hunters deep in the backcountry come across something suspicious, said Rob Buonamici, the law enforcement chief for the Nevada Department of Wildlife.

But several of the finds in the past couple of years have been close to growing, populated areas, leading him to suspect the culprits may have been newcomers taking advantage of easy targets close to home.

The rise in poaching here has come as Nevada has managed to increase its elk and mule deer population greatly in recent years, and officials fear poaching will set back those efforts.

“Wildlife belongs to everybody,” said Mr. Buonamici of the Nevada Wildlife Department. “If not for what the departments of fish and wildlife do and the sportsmen support through the fees they pay, the little old lady in L.A. would never be able to see a wildlife documentary because there would be no wildlife left.”

Poaching also angers licensed hunters because it depletes the pool of animals they can potentially bag; by law they must carry away all the edible portions of their kill, which typically fill a freezer and provide steaks, burgers, jerky and the like for more than a year.

“I don’t understand why they just go out there, kill it and leave it,” said Lazo Pavlakis, 76, shaking his head as he stood triumphant over a bull elk he legally killed on the first day of an elk hunt here, 200 miles north of Las Vegas. He had waited 18 years for a permit, issued by annual lottery, to shoot a single elk, which he planned to consume with his grandsons.

“This is about once in a lifetime for me, so no, I don’t appreciate hearing about elks killed and left out there,” he said.

Up against the poachers are wardens like Joe Maslach, a 17-year veteran of the Nevada Wildlife Department and a devoted hunter himself.

On one recent tour, Mr. Maslach put 300 miles on his department-issued pickup truck, checking the documentation of hunters, making sure that legally set traps complied with regulations and responding to a call from a tipster of poached chukars, a popular game bird.

Discovering 26 of the birds shot dead and tucked into bushes, Mr. Weslach grew disgusted as he worked what in effect was a crime scene, photographing the position of the birds, measuring tracks and taking the birds’ internal temperature to estimate when they were killed.

“These are the kind of guys you would like to take to jail,” he said, stuffing the birds, frozen stiff in the 20-degree chill, into a bag.

But it was also clear hunters were not accustomed to seeing Mr. Maslach or other wardens. Several said they had never had their hunting documents checked or not for years.

In 35 years of hunting in Nevada, Fred Perdomo, who was legally tracking an elk this weekend, said he had encountered a game warden only twice — 12 years ago and on this trip.

“I heard about the poachings and could not believe it,” he said. “It just doesn’t make much sense.”

Mr. Maslach checked his papers, and then Mr. Perdomo set off toward a stand of trees where an elk waited.

    Poachers in West Hunt Big Antlers to Feed Big Egos, NYT, 9.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/us/09poach.html?hp&ex=1165726800&en=6dcb9e2d27e646a1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Editorial

Taming King Coal

November 25, 2006
The New York Times
 

The front page of this newspaper’s business section recently featured two articles about the world’s most plentiful fuel, coal. Written from different parts of the globe, they framed the magnitude of the task confronting international negotiators and the newly empowered Democrats in Congress who want to put the brakes on emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas.

One article pointed out that China will surpass the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide by 2009, a decade ahead of previous predictions. A big reason is the explosion in the number of automobiles, but the main reason is China’s ravenous appetite for coal, the dirtiest of all the fuels used to produce electricity. Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China, with enough capacity to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

What’s frightening about this for those worried about the long-term consequences of warming is that nearly all of these plants are being built along traditional lines, burning pulverized coal to make electricity. And what’s sad about it is that there’s a much cleaner coal-burning technology available. Known as I.G.C.C. — for integrated gasification combined cycle — this cleaner technology coverts coal into a gas before it is burned.

These plants produce fewer of the pollutants that cause smog and acid rain than conventional power plants do. More important, from a global warming perspective, they also have the potential to capture and sequester greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide before they enter the atmosphere.

This new technology is not readily available in China, but it is available to utilities in the United States. Which brings us to the second article — an announcement by TXU, a giant Texas energy company, that it intends to build 11 new coal-fired power plants in Texas, plus another dozen or so coal-fired monsters elsewhere in the country. All told, this would be the nation’s largest single coal-oriented construction campaign in years.

Is TXU availing itself of the cleaner technology? No. TXU will use the old pulverized coal model. The company says the older models are more reliable. But the real reason it likes the older models is that they are easier to build, cheaper to run and, ultimately, much more profitable. So, like the Chinese, TXU is locking itself (and the country) into at least 50 more years of the most carbon-intensive technology around.

Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who will shortly assume command of the Senate environment committee, believes that we should impose a price on carbon emissions (as Europe has done) so that companies like TXU will begin to think about investing in cleaner technologies — technologies that China could then use in its power plants. The message from both Texas and China is that Ms. Boxer should get cracking.

    Taming King Coal, NYT, 25.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/opinion/25sat1.html

After More Than a Century of Soaking, Washington Town Mulls Move to Higher Ground

November 12, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

HAMILTON, Wash., Nov. 9 — To move this tiny town to higher ground is not such a stretch for the short term. Residents here have done it for years when the big rains have come.

Roll up the rugs. Empty the kitchen cabinets. Put the good furniture on the second floor and hope the river does not rise that high. Then load up the RV and head north of Highway 20 to the church.

“They’re actually getting a little better at this, unfortunately,” said the Rev. Ron Edwards, the pastor of the First Baptist Church and a foul-weather host to many of Hamilton’s refugees.

Most of the about 300 residents of Hamilton repeated their weary routine this week, when an immense band of moisture, known as the Pineapple Express for its origins in tropical waters near Hawaii, dumped record rain and drove rivers to new heights across western Washington and Oregon. The storm killed three people, breached levees, flooded farms, washed out roads and forced hundreds of evacuations.

And here in Hamilton, 80 miles northeast of Seattle, where the Skagit River once again ignored its ostensible banks, where mud now slicks the ramp that Dave Thompson uses to roll his wheelchair to his front door, where “flood line” signs mark the head-high reach of the river in 2003, this last storm has renewed attention, and momentum, to the idea of moving Hamilton to higher ground for good.

“The only problem we have with it is that we don’t have a program that buys new town sites,” said Carl Cook, the mitigation director for the regional office of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington State.

And so the Hamilton Public Development Authority was born in 2004. The group, an agency created by the town with a board that includes representatives of local Indian tribes and the Nature Conservancy, wants to move Hamilton, minus the mud, across Highway 20 to about 200 acres of private land on a dry hillside.

Supporters of the move say it would serve dual purposes: improving the lives of Hamilton residents, many of whom cannot afford to move on their own, and improving the Skagit, home to one of the largest wintering colonies of bald eagles in the country and a spawning site for six species of salmon.

The greatest challenge now is buying the new land. Board members say it would cost about $4 million, which they hope to raise from the federal and state government. But another challenge would be actually moving the people, not all of whom say they want to go.

“We’re too old to start over,” said Kathy Lipsey, 59, who moved to Hamilton with her husband, Ed, 64, a hay farmer, about 15 years ago. The couple knew about Hamilton’s history of flooding when they moved into a double-wide mobile home there. But the price was right.

This year they raised their house three feet, using hydraulic jacks and concrete blocks. “You always can convince yourself that you’re going to be a little better prepared than you are,” Mr. Lipsey said. “But the floods come differently each time.”

It has been a soggy century for Hamilton, which once thrived on coal mining and logging but fell into depression after the timber industry declined in the 1980s. Library archives have images of floods from the 1890s. On skagitriverhistory.com, there are links to newspaper articles about floods published as far back as 1896, when Hamilton was “totally inundated” by flooding.

The floods never stopped, but people stayed, rebuilding after floods as recent as 1990, 1995, 1996 and 2003.

FEMA estimates that it has spent at least $10 million helping Hamilton recover over the years, but supporters of the move say the actual figure could be $20 million or more. While Hamilton would not be the first river town in the nation to move, its plan for doing so is distinctive.

Over the course of 20 years, Hamilton’s riverfront lots would slowly slip from the map through a kind of land swap that is part environmentalism, part social engineering. The new town could have up to 400 lots.

No one would be forced to relocate, but the new development authority would buy property and help people move. The authority, said Patrick M. Hayden, a lawyer who is the part-time town attorney, would raise some money by selling land on the new town site and then use that money to buy property in the old part of town, preventing it from being developed again.

Residents of Hamilton and other parts of the Skagit River floodway could buy or rent in the new town site at discounted rates.

At the same time, the river, which twists 163 miles from British Columbia to the Puget Sound, would offer that much more undisturbed habitat along its banks.

Gayle Poole, a cook at Joy’s Bakery in Sedro-Woolley, about 12 miles west, said she moved from Hamilton after the floods of 1995 and 1996. Ms. Poole said she knew some people had stayed in Hamilton solely to file claims with FEMA after each flood.

“To me it’s stupid to keep pouring out the taxpayers’ money when the solution’s right there on that hill,” she said, referring to the proposed new town site.

Mr. Cook, the FEMA official, acknowledged there was room for abuse but said, “There’s an obligation on FEMA to make sure claims are paid.”

Mr. Edwards, the pastor, said he believed few people were exploiting FEMA.

“By and large, they’re the exceptions,” he said. “The norm is that people don’t have the money to move.” As for residents who say they like life in Hamilton as it is and would not want to move to the new town, “I think that’s kind of a smokescreen,” Mr. Edwards said. “I think they would get out, if they knew they really could.”

    After More Than a Century of Soaking, Washington Town Mulls Move to Higher Ground, NYT, 12.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/us/12flood.html?hp&ex=1163394000&en=ba10e236fd44e9ea&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Drilling Deep in the Gulf of Mexico

November 8, 2006
The New York Times
By JAD MOUAWAD

ABOARD THE WESTERN NEPTUNE, Gulf of Mexico — Every 17 seconds, a small armada of ships trawling 130 miles from the Louisiana coast fire powerful air guns toward the bottom of the sea in a hunt for the next big oil discovery.

The Neptune and three other ships are on a three-month mission to map one of the most remote regions of the United States. The data they collect from the vibrations set off by the guns in the gulf’s deepest waters will help engineers form a picture of some of the world’s newest petroleum prospects.

As oil consumption grows and access to most oil-rich regions becomes increasingly restricted, companies are venturing farther out to sea, drilling deeper than ever in their quest for energy. The next oil frontier — and the next great challenge for oil explorers — lies below 10,000 feet of water, through five miles of hard rock, thick salt and tightly packed sands.

“It’s not a place for the timid,” said Paul K. Siegele, the vice president for deepwater exploration at Chevron, which commissioned a survey by the Neptune. “It’s a place where a lot of people have lost their shirts.”

To picture the challenge, imagine flying above New York City at 30,000 feet and aiming a drill tip the size of a coffee can at the pitcher’s mound in Yankee Stadium. Then imagine doing it in the dark, at $100 million a go.

Even after hitting pay dirt, it will take another decade and billions of dollars to transform oil from these ultra-deep reserves into gasoline. Some of the technology to pump the sludge from these depths, at these pressures and temperatures, has not yet been developed; only about a dozen ships can drill wells that deep, and no one knows for sure how much oil is down there.

While most people regard affordable and abundant supplies as an essential element of the nation’s prosperity, few realize how complex and costly the quest has become, even in the nation’s own backyard. At the same time, some experts argue that the industry is nearing the limits of what it can do to maintain a growing supply of fossil fuels.

But for the geologists, scientists and explorers who work here in the Gulf of Mexico, the history of the deep water holds another lesson: technological breakthroughs have always breathed new life into the energy industry.

“This is as close as we get to the space age on earth,” said Kenny Lang, BP’s vice president for gulf production.

Thanks to advances in offshore technology, and tremendous leaps in supercomputers and three-dimensional imaging, this region’s deepest waters have become the hottest exploration prospects in the nation.

Barely more than a decade ago, the area was called the Dead Sea and was nearly abandoned as the major energy companies left for better prospects in Russia and the Caspian Sea basin.

In fact, the region’s output would have peaked and started slipping long ago without the leaps that have driven the search for offshore oil and natural gas. While production from the Gulf’s shallow waters is declining, deepwater production is on an upswing. Altogether, the Gulf of Mexico accounts for more than 25 percent of the nation’s oil production and 20 percent of its natural gas output.

According to the most optimistic estimates, there could be 40 billion barrels of undiscovered reserves in the deep water, which starts at about 1,500 feet, enough to satisfy American consumption for more than five years.

These reserves might lift the offshore output to 2.2 million barrels a day by 2012, up from 1.5 million barrels today.

Still, that’s a drop in the bucket. Even as the deepwater resources are developed, the nation is expected to continue to import more than two-thirds of the 20 million barrels of oil it consumes each day.

Since 2001, there have been 12 discoveries in waters 5,000 feet deep, drilling into older rock formations known as the Lower Tertiary. Those point to the presence of a region that might hold as much as 15 billion barrels of reserves.

The latest and largest find in the Lower Tertiary, about 250 miles south of New Orleans, was announced in August by BP. The find is a layer of 800 feet of oil-bearing sands, more than five miles under the ocean floor.

“The deep water in the Gulf of Mexico is a textbook application of where technology drove opportunity,” said Barney Issen, a geologist with Chevron. “It’s been known for quite some time that there were huge resources out there but we didn’t have the seismic data to have the nerve to drill. And even if we did, we didn’t have the drilling tools until recently.”

Last month, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it would develop three ultradeep discoveries 200 miles south of the Texas coastline. The project, called Perdido, will tie together fields called Great White, Tobago and Silvertip, and is projected to have a daily capacity of the equivalent of 130,000 barrels of oil by the turn of the decade.

Some of the earlier doubts about production in the Lower Tertiary were recently lifted when Chevron successfully tested its Jack field. The test proved that oil could flow in commercial quantities from sediments deposited as long as 65 million years ago.

“The geology has been proven, the oil is present,” said Renato Bertani, the chief executive of the American unit of Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company. His company plans to produce from Lower Tertiary discoveries in 2009.

“The result really encouraged us tremendously,” he said. “There is nevertheless some level of uncertainty.”

Part of the problem for deep exploration in the Gulf of Mexico is a thick layer of salt — 15,000 feet deep in some places — that extends unevenly under the Gulf’s waters. The salt acts like frosted glass when geologists try to see through it, blurring their view of untapped oil reserves thought to lie below.

A clear image of the subsea salt can make the difference between a successful discovery and a dry well.

“This is an industry that has to manage risk,” said Rocco Detomo Jr., a senior geophysicist at Shell. “And it’s much too risky and too expensive to look for oil the old-fashioned way.”

At BP’s sprawling campus in a Houston suburb, geologists take many years looking for oil before drilling a single well. They are counting on huge leaps in processing power from computer networks that allow scientists to make sense of the complex seismic data acquired by ships like the Neptune.

The more sophisticated data is necessary because drilling costs have soared in recent years and can now reach as much as $800,000 a day, or up to $100 million for a single well. Those costs raise the risks when, on average, only one in every three to five wells turns up oil.

Chevron, for example, expects to spend $3.5 billion on its Tahiti project, which should start production in 2008. BP invests more than $2 billion a year in the Gulf and devotes 40 percent of its global exploration budget here.

“When you’re living in that place where you’re constantly on the edge, occasionally you’re going to stub your toe,” Mr. Lang of BP said.

That recently happened at BP’s Thunder Horse, the world’s largest offshore platform, with a planned oil capacity of 250,000 barrels a day. The platform, dwarfing anything else in the Gulf, was supposed to start production last year, but ran into problems, including being left listing after Hurricane Dennis passed in 2005. The latest mishap involves replacing critical pieces of equipment at the bottom of the ocean, a lengthy process that will delay production until 2008.

Thunder Horse has been more than a decade in the making, according to Cindy A. Yeilding, the company’s chief geologist in Houston. Back in the early 1990s, Ms. Yeilding and other BP scientists used better technology, including the new three-dimensional seismic mapping, and more powerful computers to focus on big fields, which are referred to as “elephants” in the industry.

“We went on an elephant hunt,” she said. “To test a new play, we needed to find a huge accumulation of hydrocarbons and we needed a rig that could drill in 5,000 or 6,000 feet of water. It was a combination of geology and technology.”

From 1992 to 1997, the company acquired dozens of new leases from the government, spurred by a new royalty relief program that provided extra incentives to encourage deepwater exploration.

On the first day of 1999, the company finally began drilling a well in the Mississippi Canyon’s Block 778, a lease in the northeast region of the Gulf, about 125 miles from New Orleans. The drilling team, led by Ms. Yeilding, was confident it had found the giant field it was looking for but was nervous at the prospect of drilling through salt in deep waters.

“We were petrified,” Ms. Yeilding recalled. “We were so afraid of salt, we wanted to go around it.”

But the efforts paid off. On July 4 that year, the BP well reached its final depth of 29,000 feet, after having gone through 6,000 feet of water and 2,500 feet of salt. There, BP made the biggest discovery in the Gulf of Mexico. The field, holding one billion barrels of reserves, became known as Thunder Horse.

The wider hunt has been on ever since. On the Neptune’s deck, the repetitive beat of the air guns can barely be heard. But below the sea, the vibrations travel deep inside the earth’s crust. Then they bounce back and are picked up by streamers of densely packed electronic sensors, stretching four miles behind the ship.

Inside, working in cool temperature-controlled rooms, dozens of engineers control the ship’s position, collect the seismic data and begin forming a picture of the earth’s geological layers.

“The easy oil is running out because it has already been found,” said Ezio Plenizio, an Italian geophysicist aboard the Neptune, which belongs to the oil services company Schlumberger. “But 20 years ago, when I started in the business, people were already saying that oil is going to run out soon.”

    Drilling Deep in the Gulf of Mexico, NYT, 8.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/business/worldbusiness/08gulf.html?hp&ex=1163048400&en=6d5e79177c843992&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Taking On a Coal Mining Practice as a Matter of Faith

October 28, 2006
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

HALE GAP, Va. — The windswept ridge that Sharman Chapman-Crane hiked to on a recent fall afternoon is the kind of place, she said, that she normally would avoid. From there, she could see what she loved about Appalachia and what it had lost, and she wanted her visitors to see it, too.

The old rounded peaks of the mountains encircled the ridge, dense with trees smudged red and gold. But in the middle of the peaks, several stood stripped bare and chopped up, a result of an increasingly common and controversial coal mining practice called mountaintop removal.

“Doesn’t it say in Scripture, ‘Who can weigh a mountain, measure a basket of earth?’ ” Ms. Chapman-Crane said, recalling descriptions of God’s omnipotence in Isaiah 40:12. “Well, only God can. But now, the coal companies seem to be able to do it, too.”

Ms. Chapman-Crane, her colleagues at the Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia and other Appalachian Christians are trying to halt mountaintop removal, and at the heart of their work, they say, is their faith.

They are part of an awakening among religious people to environmental issues, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an interreligious alliance. Increasingly, religious people across denominations are organizing around local issues, like preventing a landfill, preserving wetlands and changing mining.

“People of faith are thinking afresh about human place and purpose in the greater web of life,” Mr. Gorman said. “They are asking, What does it mean to be present in a crisis of God’s creation made by God’s children?”

Although Christian environmental activists speak out against mountaintop removal at different levels of government, many believe that showing the practice’s toll will persuade others to join them in seeking stricter regulation of it, if not an outright ban.

A new group, Christians for the Mountains, urges religious people to take up mountaintop removal “as a spiritual issue,” and it has made a DVD that it is distributing to churches and individuals, said Allen Johnson, an evangelical Christian and a founder of the group.

The Rev. John Rausch, director of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia, has led tours of mountaintop removal sites since 1994. Mr. Rausch estimates that 400 people have taken his tour. They learn of the tours by word of mouth or from their churches, pay a few hundred dollars to stay in simple accommodations, hike several miles through forests and mined lands and talk to people whose lives have been affected by mountaintop removal.

The Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia, based in Whitesburg, Ky., gave its first tour in October, focusing on a corner of southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia rich in coal and diverse forests.

On the second morning of the four-day tour, the trip’s leaders, Ms. Chapman-Crane and the Rev. Duane Beachey, marched their three-member group up the mile-long trail to Bad Branch Falls. Poplars, beeches, hemlocks and magnolias thatched together a canopy above the trail, and the rain of their leaves made a soft ticking sound. Wild ginseng and wintergreen lined the path. Cottage-size boulders leaned forward over a rushing stream below the trail.

“Not every place on the mountains has waterfalls like Bad Branch,” Ms. Chapman-Crane said. “But this is pretty much what it’s like on the mountains here. The forests of the Appalachian range are like a northern rain forest.”

Mary Yoder, who had volunteered to come on the trip for her congregation, Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio, asked, “So this is the kind of place that gets blown up in mountaintop removal?”

Mr. Chapman-Crane replied, “This is what would be lost, is lost, when they blast a mountaintop.”

The United States is rich with coal, and mountaintop removal has begun to replace underground mining in Appalachia as the preferred method of extraction because of its efficiency and lower cost. Mountaintop removal involves leveling mountains with explosives to reach seams of coal. The debris that had once been the mountain is usually dumped by bulldozers and huge trucks into neighboring valleys, burying streams.

The coal industry asserts that mountaintop removal is a safer way to remove coal than sending miners underground and that without it, companies would have to close mines and lay off workers.

Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, a coal lobbying group, said that by fighting mountaintop removal religious groups might find their priorities colliding.

“They find themselves in a difficult position,” Mr. Popovich said, “because they’re expressing support for those who purport to protect nature, and, at the same time, that activism carries implications for the human side of the natural equation. Human welfare depends on the rational exploitation of nature.”

Christianity runs wide and deep in Appalachia. At the Courthouse Cafe in Whitesburg, Mr. Beachey explained that as a Christian concern for his neighbors drove his desire to rein in mountaintop removal. But as in much of Appalachia, pastors and churchgoers here are reluctant to stir up trouble: many work for coal companies, or the people next to them in the pew do. Others believe stopping mountaintop removal would eliminate the few jobs that remain.

Many understand their faith differently than Christian environmentalists do. One night, Darrell Caudill and several friends gathered to play their guitars for the environmental tour and sing traditional songs and hymns. Mr. Caudill, 57, works for a coal company and believes in being a good steward of the earth. But to him, he said, being a Christian means being saved and spreading the Gospel. There is no tension between being committed to his faith and supporting mountaintop removal.

“Why did God produce coal then and put it underground?” said Mr. Caudill, who attends a nondenominational evangelical church. “He produced things that we need on this earth. Without coal, you wouldn’t have the warmth and light you have right now.”

Late in the trip, the tour group drove Lucious Thompson, 63, a former coal miner, to the horseshoe of peaks above McRoberts, where he lives. The peaks have been leveled. The woods where he had hunted are gone. The new grass on the new plateaus barely clings to the soil, which means that McRoberts often floods now after hard rains, he said.

“I’ve been flooded three times since they started working on the mountaintop,” Mr. Thompson said.

He talked of neighbors whose house foundations had been cracked because of the daily blasting, of a pond lost to sludge and of respiratory ailments because of the coal dust flying from the coal trucks.

“The coal company says it’s God’s will,” he said. “Well, God ain’t ever run no bulldozer.”

People like Mr. Thompson and the woods and mountains of Appalachia seemed to make the point the tour’s organizers hoped for. After the tour, Ms. Yoder returned to Columbus to tell her congregation of about 200 what she had learned.

“My comment to the church was that I would do the tour with an open mind,” she said, “and my conclusion is there is no room for mountaintop removal in our country.”

    Taking On a Coal Mining Practice as a Matter of Faith, NYT, 28.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/28/us/28mountains.html?hp&ex=1162094400&en=08c7ce06e6fb8d86&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A Bet on Ethanol, With a Convert at the Helm

October 8, 2006
The New York Times
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
DECATUR, Ill.

BACK in 1999, when she was the head of refining at Chevron, Patricia A. Woertz told a group of energy officials that it was “time to stop mixing agricultural policy with fuels policy.”

In that same speech, at a fuels conference in Washington, Ms. Woertz also publicly expressed worry about the “unintended consequences” of a federal mandate requiring the use of corn-based ethanol in gasoline.

Today Ms. Woertz is standing on the other side of the gasoline debate, wholeheartedly supporting the growth of ethanol, the fuel the oil industry loves to hate but has had to learn to live with. In May, she took over as the chief executive of Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agricultural company that also happens to be the biggest ethanol producer in the country.

A.D.M. spent nearly three decades pushing relentlessly for the use of ethanol in gasoline, lobbying Congress and the White House and rousing farmers. But only in the last few years, amid record-high oil prices and government mandates to use ethanol, has this clear, colorless fuel — a form of ethyl alcohol — finally begun to catch on, transforming it from a dream into almost a religion in the Midwestern states that produce corn.

Ethanol has been a boon to A.D.M.’s fortunes, helping it to achieve record earnings last year of $1.3 billion on sales of $36.6 billion. While the company does not break down the sources of its profit, analysts say ethanol could make up 40 percent of A.D.M.’s net income in fiscal 2007, about double what it meant to the company last year.

With that bigger profit potential has come greater volatility in A.D.M.’s stock, which lately has mirrored more closely the rise and fall of energy prices. That has caused some analysts to caution its investors to go slow on the company.

“For the bulk of the company’s history, the vast majority of their profits came from crushing products like corn to feed the world,” said Eric Katzman, an analyst at Deutsche Bank. But a greater proportion of A.D.M.’s earnings will come from biofuels in the future, he said, as a large portion of the $2.4 billion the company plans to invest in the next two years is energy related.

So far, that capital is devoted to sustaining corn as the preferred crop for producing ethanol. While ethanol can be made more cheaply from sugar cane, as it is in Brazil, lobbying by A.D.M. and farm-state politicians has helped corn win out as the crop of choice for ethanol in the United States. It did not hurt that the powerful American sugar lobby helped to erect trade barriers keeping out cheaper imported sugar and cheaper imported ethanol.

MOST politicians originally saw ethanol as a way to help farmers to make more money from their corn crop. Now it is being seen by policy makers, including President Bush, as a partial antidote to the nation’s reliance on foreign oil. To achieve that vision of energy independence will require much more ethanol, and many agricultural experts have begun to worry about the food-for-fuel trade-off of using so much corn — more than 60 percent of which is used to feed livestock, an important American export — to produce fuel. And corn is one of the most energy-intensive and water-intensive crops to grow anywhere.

But A.D.M. has been slow thus far to be a party to research that might sway ethanol production away from corn and into crops that require less water and fossil-fuel based fertilizers; one such crop is switchgrass, a tall prairie grass that is highly drought resistant. Some outside experts call A.D.M.’s strategy shortsighted.

“I am sure A.D.M. shareholders want the company to be economically viable for the next 20 to 25 years, not just for the next 5 to 10,” said Clayton K. Yeutter, a former secretary of agriculture and United States trade representative. “If ethanol is going to be a significant part of A.D.M.’s profits, they should have as much interest in finding the lower-cost inputs as anyone would.”

Sitting in a conference room in A.D.M.’s global headquarters, Ms. Woertz, 53, did not dwell on the risks of A.D.M.’s focus on corn as the primary source of ethanol. She promoted ethanol’s growth potential, saying she sees the fuel making up 10 percent of the country’s gasoline supply, by sometime next decade, up from about 4 percent this year.

The idea that ethanol could one day replace more than half of gasoline is not out of the realm of possibility, either, she said, but will require successful development of ethanol from agricultural waste like corn stalks, or hardy grasses like switchgrass. The technology to efficiently produce this so-called “cellulosic” ethanol is most likely many years away. In any event, “We will be there when it’s there,” she said. “We want to intersect the future and still be a big player in the bio-energy world.”

She said she saw little contradiction in her previous concern about the fuel — a worry that she said was tied to federal clean air standards for tailpipe emissions and the debate over how to meet them. Refiners, she said, wanted to be told what the emissions standards were and to allow their scientists to find a way to meet them, rather than to have a specific gasoline formulation dictated by regulators.

“Things have evolved,” she said, and the oil industry and ethanol producers “have come to work much more closely on the fuel supplies for this country.”

Many analysts saw the hiring of Ms. Woertz as a signal that A.D.M. wanted to become the Exxon Mobil of ethanol. Indeed, her energy experience helped win her the job, A.D.M. officials said. But they added that she was also selected because her background as a strategic planner at Chevron gave A.D.M.’s board members the confidence that she could chart a vision for the company’s future.

“We needed someone that was a proven and capable strategist,” said Kelvin R. Westbrook, the board member who led the search process. Her energy experience “was a valued part of her background but by no means was it a determining factor.”

Ms. Woertz arrives at a favorable time in the company’s 104-year history. A.D.M. paid $400 million last year to settle the last of a pile of lawsuits stemming from a price-fixing scandal in the mid-1990’s involving lysine, an animal feed additive. Three top executives were sent to prison over the scandal, including Michael D. Andreas, A.D.M.’s former executive vice president and the son of Dwayne O. Andreas, the chief executive who led the company for 27 years.

At the same time, prices are rising for high-fructose corn syrup and other products that A.D.M. processes from corn, soybeans and wheat. And the demand for ethanol is forecast to soar as federally mandated fuel formulations take effect. Congress passed a law last year requiring refiners to increase their use of ethanol to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012, from 4 billion this year.

The future looks even better, if that is possible. While the federal government has mandated greater ethanol use in the United States, European governments are pushing for higher use of soybean-based biodiesel in the fuel supply. A.D.M. is one of the world’s biggest producers of both of those fuels.

A.D.M. is also the world’s largest producer of food and animal feed. The company, which adopted the slogan “Supermarket to the World” in the 1990’s, says it makes enough to feed 300 million people, as well as many millions of cows, chickens and pigs.

WHEN Ms. Woertz looks to the future, she sees the twin trends of a growing population that needs additional food — with a diet that increasingly demands protein — and the quest for alternative sources of energy to oil.

She said A.D.M. was “uniquely positioned” to benefit from growing global demand for both food and fuel. “We have the technologies, we have the assets and we have the infrastructure,” she said.

That optimism is apparent in A.D.M.’s latest annual report, the first to feature Ms. Woertz. Its title is “We See Opportunity.”

How exactly A.D.M. will go about capitalizing on its opportunities remains to be seen. Ms. Woertz says senior managers are working on a plan, to be unveiled to analysts in November, that will outline the company’s biofuels strategy over the next decade.

While the plan is still being drafted, Ms. Woertz said that it clearly would involve a stronger push by A.D.M. to develop ways to make ethanol from grasses and agricultural waste — cellulosic ethanol. She hinted that the plan might involve partnerships with venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla, the founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems, who is investing in companies working on cellulosic ethanol and other alternative fuels, and stumping for ethanol all over the country.

In August, Ms. Woertz invited Mr. Khosla to sit in on a meeting in Chicago of A.D.M.’s strategic planning committee, where he briefed the executives on cellulosic ethanol opportunities.

“We have discussed opportunities we could pursue together,” Ms. Woertz said of Mr. Khosla. “All of this question about the longer term is something we absolutely have under way and there will be more to come.”

In Decatur, Ms. Woertz and two other top executives at the company made it clear that A.D.M.’s plans, for the moment, revolved mostly around getting ethanol from corn. The company has little concern about the amount of corn being harvested for biofuels, even as it is set to commercialize a promising new technology to produce biodegradable plastics that will use even more corn.

Ms. Woertz and the other A.D.M. executives said they believed that the genetic modification of corn seed, which has led to a 75 percent increase in corn yields since 1980, would continue to keep pace with growing demand for nonfood products like ethanol. That stands in stark contrast to the concern of some agriculture executives — notably Warren R. Staley, chief executive of Cargill, an A.D.M. rival — that if the ethanol boom were left unchecked, it would eventually raise food prices and hurt America’s grain exports.

At A.D.M.’s main research center, a converted high school here in Decatur, two company executives seemed unfazed by that concern. Mark G. Matlock, senior vice president for research and development, said A.D.M. was trying to wring more ethanol out of unused parts of the corn crop. He said he was less optimistic about the near-term economics of producing ethanol from switchgrass, an idea promoted by President Bush in his State of the Union address this year. While switchgrass is cheaper to grow than corn, it would be more costly to convert to ethanol, partly because the country lacks the machines to harvest and transport switchgrass efficiently as a crop.

“From a strategy standpoint it made the most sense to look at the existing corn streams that we are handling through our network of everything from country elevators to processing facilities,” said Edward A. Harjehausen, the senior vice president for food and feed ingredients. The company is involved in a research project with the Energy Department to take the corn fiber stream and convert as much of the cellulose as possible to additional ethanol.

The way the A.D.M. executives see it, by focusing on waste streams already coming out of its corn-processing plants, the company can avoid the “chicken and egg” problems that other companies may face in trying to make cellulosic ethanol from new crops like switchgrass: farmers may be hesitant to grow the grass until there is a market for the crop, but companies will be reluctant to create a market and build separate processing plants until they see a ready supply of raw material.

“Everyone has this vision in the end of a billion tons of biomass generating all of our fuel needs,” Mr. Matlock said. “That is the far vision. So we focus on those intermediate steps to get to the vision.”

Ms. Woertz is a fresh start for a company that had been run by four families for a century. The families once controlled more than half its board seats and still control some 10 percent of A.D.M.’s stock, analysts said. That insular grip on power allowed the company to make long-term bets, which paid off handily. In the 1970’s, for example, A.D.M. invested heavily in factories to make high-fructose corn syrup, a low-cost corn-based sweetener that later replaced sugar in Coke and Pepsi and hundreds of other foods.

A.D.M. fell into the biofuels business later in the decade, when the company tried to solve a problem with seasonal overcapacity in its corn syrup plants by producing something else from abundant corn supplies: ethanol. That set off a two-decade-long lobbying and public-relations effort by the elder Mr. Andreas to win broader acceptance for ethanol as a fuel.

CRITICS, noting ethanol’s shortcomings like its lower energy content versus gasoline and the fact that it receives a 51-cent-a-gallon subsidy, say that while the marketing campaign has been good for the company, it has been bad for the country. “A.D.M.’s role in the ethanol debate has largely been to provide the narrative that the politicians need to justify the handouts they want to give to farmers anyway,” said Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who has been critical of ethanol.

The ethanol promotion campaign was hurt when the lysine price-fixing scandal torpedoed A.D.M.’s reputation. Secret audio tapes made by a former executive, Mark E. Whitacre, in the early-1990’s revealed a scheme by top A.D.M. executives to fix the global price for lysine with executives from Japanese, French and Korean competitors. Michael Andreas and Terrance S. Wilson, the head of corn processing, were both sentenced to two years in prison for their roles in the scandal. Mr. Whitacre was sentenced to nine years for embezzling $9.5 million at the same time he was helping the government to investigate his bosses.

Since the scandals shook public confidence in A.D.M., the board has been overhauled with independent outsiders like Mr. Westbrook, who joined in 2003 and is chief executive of Millennium Digital Media, a broadband services company. Ms. Woertz’s hiring continues the trend.

“The board was cognizant of the fact that A.D.M.’s image had approached a Mafioso level over the last few decades with all the scandals,” said John M. McMillin, a longtime analyst for the Prudential Equity Group. “I am not sure she understands the difference between a soybean and a rapeseed, but she knows people and has identified the people within the company to trust.”

Ms. Woertz’s energy background, especially in refining, has helped her grasp quickly the basics of A.D.M.’s agricultural business. Oil refiners take a barrel of crude oil and process it into a slate of products like gasoline and jet fuel. A.D.M. takes a bushel of corn or soybeans and spits out dozens of food products on the other side.

Mr. Westbrook and analysts agree that she also brings a human touch that was lacking at A.D.M. in the past. A divorced mother of three grown children, she quickly embraced the idea of moving to Decatur, a sleepy city of 78,000. Other candidates hoped to commute to work from Chicago, some 180 miles away, Mr. Westbrook said.

SHE is also comfortable with bold initiatives. A.D.M. once controlled more than 60 percent of ethanol production, but today it controls less than 25 percent after the building of a number of farmer-owned ethanol plants in recent years. A.D.M. is planning to recapture some market share by adding 550 million gallons of ethanol capacity over the next two years, pushing up its total by 50 percent, to 1.65 billion gallons.

Ms. Woertz is also fascinated by aspects of A.D.M. that have nothing to do with biofuels, especially the company’s push to commercialize technology that uses corn starch to make plastics that, theoretically, at least, are biodegradable.

At one point, she reached behind her chair and pulled a clear plastic bag from her purse containing several green plastic items, including golf tees. “This is made from corn, so it is a corn and starch stream, and you can dial up or dial down the biodegradability,” she said, showing off a tee. “People throw their spoons out the window from McDonald’s. Ours will biodegrade.”

But for now, it is ethanol, the fuel she once questioned, that is giving Ms. Woertz the spotlight. She is set to make her first public speech since becoming C.E.O. at a conference promoting biofuels on Wednesday in St. Louis, where she will be joined by Mike Johanns, the secretary of agriculture; Samuel W. Bodman, the energy secretary; and Charles O. Holliday Jr., the chief executive of DuPont. President Bush has been invited and may speak on Thursday.

One person who has reviewed Ms. Woertz’s speech said it would focus on the “innovation, investment, partnership and vision” needed to ensure that biofuels “fulfill their promise in meeting global needs for sustainable supply, energy security and environmental improvement.”

    A Bet on Ethanol, With a Convert at the Helm, NYT, 8.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/business/yourmoney/08adm.html?hp&ex=1160366400&en=9a40a738b5a6de5c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Woman Pleads Guilty in UW Ecoterrorism

October 4, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:37 p.m. ET

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) -- A woman pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiracy and arson in the 2001 firebombing of the University of Washington's horticulture center, one of the Northwest's most notorious acts of ecoterrorism.

Under Jennifer Kolar's plea agreement, federal prosecutors will ask U.S. District Judge Franklin Burgess to sentence her to five to seven years.

Kolar, 33, did not comment after entering the plea. Her sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 5.

The fire on May 21, 2001, severely damaged the building, which was rebuilt at a cost of about $7 million. The center had done work on fast-growing hybrid poplars in hopes of limiting the amount of natural forests that timber companies log.

The Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy collection of environmental activists, claimed responsibility five days after the fire and issued a statement saying the poplars pose ''an ecological nightmare'' for the diversity of native forests.

    Woman Pleads Guilty in UW Ecoterrorism, NYT, 4.10.2006,  http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ecoterrorism-Plea.html