October 2009 Archives

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.