ICIS Chemical Business | Endpoint

China's weather manipulation is the perfect set up for a special effects laden, all-star disaster movie

EARLY-NOVEMBER blizzards in and around Beijing caused roughly $650m (€434.7m) in damages, and have been called China's worst snowstorm in five decades. Snows essentially crippled the area, and even shut down the airports.

And China's recent activity in weather modification is being blamed for the storms.

Although the Chinese government has been proactive with its weather-changing program since 1995, the globe first took notice when China proclaimed that there would be no rain on the 2008 Summer Olympics.

And there wasn't, although who should take the credit for that has been up for debate.

The Beijing Weather Modification Office (love the name!) is in charge of these operations, employing 50,000, many in the field working at other jobs like farming, and when given the order, firing artillery shells loaded with silver iodide into the skies.

The Chinese method of cloud control is to essentially drain the clouds before the important ceremony. Not that the drought stricken areas of China, including those near the capital, don't need the water.

The Chinese government especially loves clear skies over Beijing on important days, whether historical or political.

And the weather in Beijing during President Obama's visit has been clear skies--although November cold, about 20º F/-5º C.

[So if someone really wanted to, they could even blame the early November Beijing snowstorms on Obama! (Cover mouth, and snicker like a little kid.)]

Residents of the blizzard-blighted areas of China are angry that they haven't been given enough warning, pointing to the snowstorms' destruction and disruptiveness, wondering about the wisdom of tinkering with nature.

While the US-based Weather Modification Association (an organization I simply must join!) tells The Wall Street Journal, "Chinese weather modification... is a really closed program." personally, though, I'm very disappointed that the Chinese are using tried-and-true methods like cloud seeding, as opposed to something out of the SPECTRE playbook:
a hypersonic beam fired from a satellite in orbit to vibrate the clouds,
or the Zen-like methodology of using a butterfly flapping its wings in, say, Montreal causing a thunderstorm in Xiajin?

Then there's the old fave, sharks with lasers on their heads.

Cloud seeding first came to my attention when I was a kid: it was July 5 (for our non-US readers, that is the day after Independence Day), and my stepfather (the same one that taught me how to make my own gunpowder) told me that there would be a huge rainstorm in a few days. "All the gunpowder from the fireworks will seed the clouds," he said.

And despite the propensity for at least the occasional summer shower, there usually was a huge rainstorm a few days after July 4th in the New York City region--at least until the city cracked down on the citizens' right to blow stuff up on The Fourth of July.

Another form of cloud control, I suppose.

So a gazillionaire fulfills a childhood dream and a railroad has a new owner; what does that really mean for the chemical industry?


ONE OF the best movies I've ever seen was out the window of the Tokyo to Kyoto shinkansen, the "bullet train," when I gazed out the window semi-exhausted after four days vacationing in Tokyo, with my iPod set on random. I like rail travel, when it's done right, much like the Japanese and much of Europe have achieved: not opulence, but decent service both on the train and in scheduling. I am one of many who heap scorn on Amtrak.

So when I heard that super-investor Warren Buffett was buying a railroad, I got really excited, thinking he was investing in commercial travel rather than freight hauling - but I was wrong:

Buffett's conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway (BH), is paying roughly $26bn (€17.3bn) for the 77.4% of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) it doesn't already own, says The New York Times.

But Fox Business Network says BH is paying a premium of 31.5% over BNSF's November 2 closing stock price, valuing the railroad at $34bn, 18 times estimated 2010 earnings.

Buffett says he's always wanted to have a railroad: "This is all happening because my father didn't buy me a train set as a kid," the billionaire told The New York Times.

While this means nothing, zilch, bupkiss, for my future travel and sightseeing plans, what will this mean for the chemical industry?

In 2008, rail moved roughly 170m tonnes of chemicals and chemical-related products, the second-largest railroad commodity in terms of volume after coal, says the American Chemistry Council (ACC).

BNSF is one of the handful of railroads that control about 90% of the freight shipped by rail in North America, and in November 2008, Chris Jahn, president of the National Association of Chemical Distributors (NACD), told ICIS Chemical Business: "Basically, two-thirds of the chemical industry is a captive shipper - when a chemical manufacturer or distributor has only one railroad serving its facility, that's a monopoly."

In a survey of 2003-2007, the ACC found that several of the largest railroads overcharged chemical industry customers by $6.4bn (€5.12bn).

The Railroad Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2009 is supposed to help change that, by empowering the Federal Trade Commission to regulate and engage in rail antitrust enforcement regarding collective rate agreements.

But as of the first week in November, the website govtrack.us says, "sometimes the text of one bill is incorporated into another bill, and in those cases the original bill, as it would appear here, would seem to be abandoned."

Will Buffett's ownership change things? Probably not, but with this very well known, quite public figure as the face of a railroad, it may become easier to bring grievances to BNSF that it was before.

Perhaps it is a symptom of the times, but it seems like nobody tries to save their cash anymore

THE KINGDOM of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly made statements to the effect that the nation should be financially compensated if it loses oil revenues because of reduced petroleum consumption that results from climate-change programs.

Some experts believe that this is a stalling tactic by the Saudis, in an effort to confound the upcoming December climate talks in Copenhagen.

"Oil exporters have always, in my view, far overblown the near-term effects of carbon limits on demand for their products," David Victor, professor, School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, told The New York Times in early October.

"For the Saudis this may be a deal-breaker, but the Saudis are not essential players [in the upcoming climate summit]... One sign that a climate agreement is effective is that big hydrocarbon exporters hate it," Victor said.

Be that as it may, most entries in the media have been covering this story as if they had trouble deciding whether to file it in the business section of the newspaper or the "Weird But True" column.
Not that you can really blame them - it is a story that leads to a level of outrageousness.

The introductory paragraph from this Associated Content item certainly sets a tone:
"If the world community actually comes to a climate change agreement that involves cutting dependence on oil, one country intends to demand a bailout. That country is not an impoverished, third world nation."

Then, the author editorializes in a way that would make most journalists jealous:
"The idea of the Saudis demanding a financial bailout seems to be brazen beyond belief."

Stories from Reuters and The New York Times were more sober in tone - no editorializing, plenty of quotes - and that's when a lot of this story sounds bonkers:

"We are among the most vulnerable countries, economically," Saudi negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban told Reuters in April.

In October, he said in The New York Times, "Assisting us as oil-exporting countries in achieving economic diversification is very crucial for us."

In 2008, Saudi oil revenue increased by 37% from 2007 to $281bn, (€189bn) says Saudi Arabia-based Jadwa Investment.

Without a "Vroom," will those new silent electric cars still make drivers want to "Zoom"?

WHETHER THEY wind up powered by lithium - but not necessarily Bolivian lithium - or by some small lizards running on gerbil wheels hooked up to dynamos, or by some new, as yet uncommercialized method of generating electricity, like by siphoning the glowing fluids from fireflies, electric vehicles (EV) will be upon us soon enough.

EVs are nearly silent when compared to the average car's internal combustion engine. A 2008 study by the University of California, Riverside, showed that test subjects could hear a gasoline-powered auto when it was 28 feet away, but that EVs were only heard by the time they were seven feet away.

In an effort to prevent a person in the near-future from become a statistic, safety experts are encouraging manufacturers of EVs and hybrid EVs (HEV) to install speakers in the bumpers to emit a sound to warn pedestrians.

This is supported the US Congress' introduction of the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, which requires a federal standard to protect pedestrians from super-quiet cars.

It would be great to say that this is a silly idea - enough people use their car's horn as it is, you'd think they'd leap at the chance to use it more - although a good way to add on to an EV's price tag,
and while I agree with advocacy groups like Plug In America that say drivers be more responsible with their new vehicles, I think these bumper-speakers might be a fairly good idea.

Because in the world where these bumper-speakers do not exist, the first person to get hit by an EV will probably some adult moron who didn't "cross at the green/not in between," as the public service announcement jingle from the 1970s warned children at the time.

And then, that same knucklehead will go and sue everybody he and his ambulance-chasing lawyer could sue but most assuredly the automaker, and any of their suppliers.

So while initially developed to prevent accidents with children, animals and the vision-impaired, these front-attached noisemakers may wind up preventing lawsuits, as well.

Of course, there are those who say that the problem isn't that the new cars are too quiet, it's that we have gotten used to having our ears routinely overwhelmed with the sounds of autos.

By the way, these new bumper-speakers are going to need some sort of cute nickname: BS'ers? Hmmm... That may become a very popular nomenclature for these devices, but not one that any corporate entity would respond to, I think - but what do I know? I thought the term "Hummer" would never make it as a name for the SUV.

Somehow it's better to think of a town being wrecked by local boys instead of feds


Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, like most locals, I've known of the toxicity of the Gowanus Canal since I was a kid.

But I'm still not sure if I want it to be turned into an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site.

It is always for the best if companies are responsible enough to clean up their own messes before they become a problem, but lawsuits and massive class actions are a good way to coerce responsible parties to clean up their messes - but I just don't know if I want the feds to muck about the 'hood.

With Superfund status, an area is then "toxic" in more ways than one: any investment will leave; and private, public, city and state efforts towards restoring this waterfront will have to cease.

Then the search for "potentially responsible parties" for the EPA to sue will begin among the 1,500 previous property owners in the Gowanus area. Nothing will get done for a long time.

It is much different when you know the neighborhood where it's going to happen: this isn't Chicken's Knuckle, Nowheresville! To my knowledge, there are several quaint establishments for the quenching of a thirst near the Gowanus, and an old roommate's band use to record near there.

Don't get me wrong, the Canal is gross, absolutely disgusting - but it used to be much worse.

An industrial and transportation hub since the 1860s, the Gowanus Canal had a pump installed to clear it in 1911, and that kept the channel relatively clear. Enough so, that in 1952 a shark swam up the Gowanus - until the NYPD shot it. No lie.

In 1961, the pump was broken, supposedly by a manhole cover dropped on it by an angry city employee, and was not repaired until - dig this - 1999.

While industry in the area eventually died out, years of run-off from smelters, coal dumps, ink plants, foundries, gashouses and paint factories had done their work.

The wooden pilings and bulkheads along the creek have absorbed so much weirdness that it may be too complicated to remove them.

The situation is exacerbated when the rain is heavy: the sewers flood, then sewage overflow into the Canal.

But progress is happening, and if the EPA puts the Gowanus on its National Priorities List in March, that might end.

Crime pays for readers as a new mystery novel uses chemistry to help its protagonists find stolen jewels

It may not do much for its overall image, but it was very nice to see chemistry used so significantly in the new crime thriller novel Blood's a Rover.

Published in September by Alfred A. Knopf, the novel is the latest crime epic from author James Ellroy, also the creator of the bestselling L.A. Confidential.

Blood's a Rover is a massive and complicated tale set in the late-1960s and early-1970s involving crooked cops, somewhat honest thieves and all the strange and passionate people who surround them (with cameos by Howard Hughes, J. Egdar Hoover and Richard Nixon, to name but a few), with a truckload of stolen emeralds spurring them all on. It's an often lurid and sordid tale, sparing no punches, but absolutely a page-turner, one of those books that make you stay up very late.

Readers of ICIS Chemical Business may find great enjoyment in how empirical chemical knowledge winds up in play: One of the main characters, Wayne, is a chemistry whiz, and when he's not cooking narcotics for his organized crime buddies, he's trying all sorts of formula to decipher heavily redacted government documents - I warned you it was a complicated book.

Later, one of Wayne's accomplices/sidekicks/rivals, Crutch, hits the Bunsen burners, trying to finish Wayne's work.

What's fabulous about Wayne and Crutch's scenes in their respective home labs is that they aren't throwaways, like you might see on a TV cop show, where some sexy technician hits a few buttons, a pop song starts on the soundtrack and a montage begins, reducing a complicated technical process to the equivalent of a brainless music video.

Ellroy, on the other hand, puts the reader into the heads of the characters as they are trying out solution after solution, trying A, then B, then C, and so on.

We sample their frustration and confusion at experiments that should work but don't, and their joy when finally the scientific method helps crack the code. We read their internal voices turning over their methodologies, materials and supplies. When Crutch is flummoxed at one point, he hits the library to scope out the chemistry section. Now when was the last time a crime novel did that?

Blood's a Rover is an often a nasty and mean-spirited book, certainly not for the squeamish, but if you're looking for a book where chemists take on the mob, the police, revolutionaries and voodoo practitioners- I warned you it was complicated! - then this is it.

The massive Gorgon LNG project may give both Australia and Greek mythology a shot in the arm

It was very disappointing for my inner nerd to find out that the Gorgon liquid natural gas (LNG) project in Western Australia was not named after the mythological beast.

Gorgons can, according to Greek legend, turn a person to stone simply by looking at them; the snake-haired Medusa is probably the most notorious of the gorgons. Most remember Medusa as one of the stop-motion animated monsters that actor Harry Hamlin must fight in the 1981 camp/fantasy classic Clash of the Titans (see image above).

The LNG project got its name, however, from the Greater Gorgon gas fields about 200 kilometers off the coast of Australia. These fields are reported to contain roughly 40 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and may have a lifespan of 60 years. At current market prices, the gas in these fields is estimated to be worth around $445bn (€302bn).

The size and scope of the Gorgon LNG project taking place now in Australia is amazing; really exciting and impressive stuff by all accounts. When completed, Gorgon is expected to provide 8% of current global LNG capacity, about 15m tonnes/year.

The project is a joint venture (JV) between petroleum giants Chevron (who is a 50% owner), ExxonMobil (25%) and Royal Dutch Shell (25%), and work on its first phase has already begun, and is expected to cost Australian $43bn ($38.2bn). At its phase of greatest construction, the project is expected to be hiring approximately 10,000.

Australia's minister of energy, Martin Ferguson, said at a press conference in mid-September that Gorgon would make his country "an energy superpower." Ferguson went on to say that LNG could bring in almost A$100bn in investments over the next 18 months.

Meanwhile, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association estimates that Gorgon and other LNG projects there represent A$220bn in investments, which could contributed A$10bn/year in taxes and government revenue.

But honestly what really got me interested in this incredible project was not its size or scope. It was its name: Gorgon.

Against logic and reason, I was really hoping that the project had been given that name because it sounded so darn cool, and that someone somewhere in the Chevron-ExxonMobil-Shell JV thought the same way, too. Oh well....

But since global energy needs are growing, there will be more LNG projects to come, so I will not give up hope.

I do not foresee petchem facilities turning away from being named by geographic designations, but I am counting on new gas and oil fields being labeled classically:
The Cyclopes Cracker
Minotaur Oil Range
The Hydra NatGas Field
And so on....

Discounting the environmental concerns that demand this--and there may be some valid ones--it might actually be good if Americans did not use such soft toilet paper

ALTHOUGH IT only accounts for 5% of the US forest-products industry, environmentalists have been raising a stink about the US toilet paper (TP) industry for quite a while.

According to an article in a late-September edition of The Washington Post, environmental groups have been, for several years, protesting the cutting and grinding of sometimes centuries-old trees for something they consider frivolous at best.

"They want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper goods," writes article author David Fahrenthold.

Extra-soft and plush TPs are "like the Hummer product for the paper industry," Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council told The Washington Post. "We don't need old-growth forests... to wipe our behinds."

Generally, however, TPs for the "away from home," or "no-choice" market, like in restaurants, offices and schools, use about 75% recycled fiber.
Softer, "plusher" TP brands must be made from virgin wood--new wood has the longer fiber strands needed to make a "more comfortable" TP, while recycled paper does not.

But on the whole, consumers won't budge.
And I, for one, can't blame them.
You can have my plush TP when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!

Revolutionary fervor

It was the typical polyglot gaggle of anarcho-whateverists parading through the US city of Pittsburgh during the latest G-20 Summit in late September that brought TP to mind.

While I have always enjoyed unguided mobs wrecking a place as a televised spectator sport, it has always bugged me how protests in the US seemed so unfocused.

A gazillion agendas, a lot of noise, but for what? A lot of overtime for the police, and a bigger heap of bad press for whatever the initial cause had been.

Whatever your cause, how is it helped by a man wearing a rainbow Afro wig holding up a "John 3:16" sign?
Not that that sentiment isn't appreciated, though.

It was the early 1980s, and in response to a then-recent Central Park protest for some now-forgotten cause, my junior year of high school English teacher told our class how to have an effective protest:
Get everyone attending to dress neatly all in black, like they were at a funeral; have a few signs and a banner so people know why you're there; and then stand outside the dean's office or wherever in stone silence.

If a notorious busybody and nanny-state proponent like New York's hypocritical Mayor Mike Bloomberg decided that it would be for everyone's best interests to ban "too soft" TP, it would get a protest like that, I'm sure.

Little hellions screaming, "Eat my shorts!" may no longer be speaking metaphorically if researchers are successful

Milo Minderbinder would be proud: Researchers at Texas A&M University have figured out a way to make cotton edible.

Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder, one of the main characters of Joseph Heller's acclaimed 1961 novel Catch-22, is ostensibly the mess officer for the Mediterranean island air base where the World War II-era story takes place.

But the always optimistic Milo, a parody of the "what's good for business is good for the country" type of thinking very prevalent in the late-1950s--the novel is as much a satire of American business in the post-war era as it is a black comedy about combat--has established "The Syndicate" and M&M Enterprises. These outfits buy and trade various products throughout the region, with shares for everyone involved convincing his commanding officers to allow Milo to use the Army Air Corps' bombers as cargo carriers.

Because he's always making a profit through some inexplicable form of economic logic that resembles a more complicated Ponzi scheme, consequently making everyone rich, Milo is made mayor to caliph in a range of cities and countries in the region, becoming as great a force in the war as either the Allies or Axis powers.

Milo finally stumbles when he tries to corner the Egyptian cotton market and is stuck with a surplus no one wants. Until he comes up with the scheme to sell the cotton to the Germans in exchange for bombing his own air base, Milo tries to convince everyone to eat the cotton, now coated in chocolate. Despite being reminded that they are shareholders in M&M, the airmen refuse to consume the cotton.

Yossarian, Catch-22's everyman anti-hero, is the only person whose opinion Milo will trust since Yossarian's the only person on the base not swayed by greed and Milo's offers of financial remuneration through the M&M share program.

The chocolate-coated cotton tastes awful, the honest Yossarian tells Milo, further depressing the young entrepreneur.

What neither Yossarian or Milo Minderbinder knew, we can suppose, is that cotton tastes bad because of gossypol, a chemical the plant produces to protect it from pests and bugs. But once you remove the gossypol, it has a great nutritional value.

According to Time magazine, cottonseed is 23% protein and "the current cotton crop produces enough seeds to meet the daily requirements of half a billion people a year."

Using RNA interference (RNAi) technology--yes, genetic modification--which will probably open up another can of worms later on, but let's cross that bridge when we get there, although there really should not be arguments like this when you're trying to solve starvation, but what can you do? --Texas A&M researcher Keerti Rathore, says New Scientist magazine, has removed "gossypol from cotton seed without affecting the toxin load in the rest of the plant, meaning the plant will contain edible seed but not be destroyed by crop pests."

Another researcher told the magazine the development would "allow cottonseed to be used more widely as an animal feed...and extend its uses as a substitute for other high-value oils, like canola (rapeseed) oil."

"It's not bad," Rathore told Time. "Tastes like chickpeas."

And you don't even have to coat it with chocolate!

If compact fluorescent lights actually delivered on their claims of superiority to incandescent bulbs, we'd be singing a different tune

These infernal new compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) that are being shoved down our collective throat are awful.
If I may use the vernacular, they suck!

But the European Union has already institutionalized the changeover from incandescent bulbs--still very similar to the one Thomas Edison perfected more than 100 years ago--to CFLs, and in the US, the clock is ticking towards a 2014 deadline.

There are many reasons to dislike CFLs, but my initial--and therefore to me, most important--reason for hating these government-imposed light bulbs is because they do not give off enough light.

Is this some massive plot to blind me?

"Will some energy be saved? Probably. The problem is this benefit will be more than offset by rampant dissatisfaction with lighting," writes Howard Brandston, lighting consultant, in The Wall Street Journal. "We are not talking about giving up a small luxury for the greater good. We are talking about compromising light. Light is fundamental. And light is obviously for people, not buildings. The primary objective in the design of any space is to make it comfortable and habitable. This is most critical in homes, where this law will impact our lives the most. And yet while energy conservation, a worthy cause, has strong advocacy in public policy, good lighting has very little."

Why couldn't have Uncle Sam made the law that only lights in public places needed the new bulbs--that citizens could still install the lights they prefer? Of course, tax or energy incentives could be made to encourage consumer purchases of CFLs, and legislation could (would?) of course increase taxation on incandescent bulbs to push the agenda--but it would still be a consumer's choice.

The light bulb replacement mandate also strikes me as a stunt of sorts--in that it's a very public, if not ostentatious display that something is being done. But is it really accomplishing what it claims?

"Such legislation imposes substantial costs on both consumers and the economy, but hides them so that legislators avoid blame," writes Martin Hutchinson, in Fortune.

The new light bulb rules could also be regarded--by those of you more conspiracy-minded readers--as a distraction:
By forcing everyone to bend to the will of Our Protectors, one thing is done right: it makes the public mad, and even more annoyed at "green" programs and their often inexplicable restrictions and/or requirements.

When a poll is taken on the public's approval ratings of the incandescent-for-CFLs scheme, the marks will be low.

And why not? Everyone is angry with these expensive bulbs that make you feel like you're in a sickly cave. Meanwhile, everyone is distracted from the perhaps more important environmental issues.

By the way, by using mercury vapor to provide its so-called illumination, CFLs also prove to be a disposal hazard--pop quiz: how do you dispose of household mercury?
As most of the readers of ICIS know, it is not the easiest of cleanup processes....

Then there's this: According to Walt McGinnis at the In These New Times website, "CFLs are energy hogs to produce, operate and dispose of."

McGinnis asks, "What is the real energy cost of a CFL? What does it cost to mine, manufacture, package, ship, sell, operate [and] dispose of CFLs on the environment? These are questions ignored by CFL promoters."

He says that CFLs should be thought of as "toxic technology."

My eyes certainly think so.