Lecture 10 Summary and Notes

Some important topics for the day...

1. (continuing 5. from Friday) Natural gas and oil form in similar ways from similar materials in similar geologic settings but once they come out of the ground, there are some important differences:

d. oil and natural gas are consumed for different reasons- natural gas more for space heating and electricity generation and oil more for transportation; as a result, the consumption of natural gas exhibits heavy seasonal fluctuation (high use in winter)

2. At the country level, the decision to develop domestic petroleum reserves (as opposed to imported) is a win-win-win-lose (or a win-win-win-lose-win/lose).

Win 1: the American people win because they either overwhelmingly support domestic sources of energy (either explicitly or implicitly) or just don't give a (care)

Win 2: American companies win when they profit from exploiting domestic reserves make money by providing Americans with domestically produced energy

Win 3: American politicians of both major parities win when they are able to take credit for facilitating win 2

Lose: the extraction of any natural resources, even in a "best-case-scenario", damages the affected area in some way. These damages can be relatively small or catastrophic

Win/lose: those who inhabit areas with particularly intensive extractive activities can see both direct benefits and harm (economic, social, environmental)

3. Pollution can be thought of in terms of scheduled and unscheduled releases of toxic material into the environment. An unscheduled release is an accidental spill that is not part of the day-to-day routine and scheduled releases are (often) legal releases that are part of the day-to-day routine and are sometimes monitored at the local, state or federal level (as in the USEPA's TOXMAP). In order to effectively understand and describe the environmental consequences of activities with high potential for pollution, one must be able to distinguish between scheduled and unscheduled releases.

4. Why is fracking in the Marcellus shale so controversial? for one thing, it underlies a more densely populated portion of the USA than, say the Bakken Formation. For another thing, there is the very real concern that ground water resources could be (and are being) polluted by fracking. You should be able to discuss the various potential mechanisms for drinking water aquifer pollution (and other issues) including leakage of natural gas (NG) and fracking fluid (FF) where the borehole intersects the aquifer, induced fractures that propagate all of the way from the shale layer into the aquifer thereby allowing for the movement of NG and/or FF into the aquifer, induced fractures that propagate into areas of existing fractures that then extend into the aquifer allowing for the movement of NG and/or FF into the aquifer, disposal of FF (treatment or injection), spillage of FF, and earthquakes from fracking or from FF injection in terms of their relative potential, probability, and severity as well as the mechanisms for preventing or mitigating problems related to fracking.

Slides shown in lecture are available on Sakai. Wednesday, we will finish with our discussion of the fracking controversy and move on to a look at the homework. Your reading assignmhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifent for Wednesday is What the Frack? Is there really 100 years’ worth of natural gas beneath the United States? by Chris Nelder posted Thursday, Dec. 29, 2011 on Slate online magazine.

Lecture 9 Summary and Notes

Some important concepts for the day...

1. Fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing) is a technique that allows for the exploitation of petroleum reservoirs that would otherwise not be economically recoverable due to low permeability in the source or reservoir rock. Discussion of fracking in the MSM are usually associated with natural gas but is also used extensively in tight oil resources like the Bakken formation in ND.

2. Fracking generally involves the following steps:

a. drill to the depth of a horizontal or sub-horizontal, organic-rich source rock or tight (low-permeability) reservoir rock then drill horizontally (concordantly) through the middle of the source or reservoir rock layer.

b. seal the annulus of the well to prevent interaction between the relatively shallow water table and fluids in the relatively deep source rock layer.

c. use directed explosives to induce fracturing within the source rock

d. inject fracking fluid at extremely high pressures to expand the fractures in the source rock (enhanced permeability)

e. remove fracking fluid from the well leaving behind proppants (usually sand) to keep the cracks dilated once the pore fluid pressure returns to normal

f. collect natural gas as it flows out of the source rock and into the well pipe.

The link to the interactive animation, which I would encourage you to watch on your own can be found here.

2. The composition of fracking fluid is specific to the drilling company and, while the materials that are present are generally known there are laws that prevent companies from having to disclose the precise amounts of the chemicals present (trade secrets). The components of fracking fluid can be characterized as:

a. water (mostly),

b. proppants (sand is a good one),

c. lubricants, preservatives, and viscosity enhancers, and

d. anti-corrosive agents (because many of the lubricants, preservatives, and viscosity enhancers are corrosive.

3. Fracking fluid is not regulated as a hazardous waste at the federal level; this makes disposal much more convenient and inexpensive but also presents potential problems (more on this on Monday). Fracking fluid can be recycled (not reused) to some degree and is even re purposed as a road deicer in some areas. Recycling practices are on the rise in most areas and are largely (entirely?) voluntary.

4. According to the EIA AEO 2011 and the AEO 2012 Early Release Overview, natural gas production will increase substantially in in the next few decades and this increase will come from shale gas and tight gas- both of which require the fracking technique to be technical, energetic, and economic recoverable

5. Natural gas and oil form in similar ways from similar materials in similar geologic settings but once they come out of the ground, there are some important differences:

a. NG is cheap enough that, when it occurs in combination with an oil reserve, sometimes it is cheaper to dispose of the NG than to capture and sell it. The NG is disposed of through flaring. To my knowledge, no one burns waste oil on purpose.

b. NG is more difficult to transport by truck or boat (is has to be pressurized into a liquid) and so pipeline infrastructure is more important with NG than with oil

c. The difficulty of cheaply and practically transporting NG without pipeline infrastructure means that very little NG is imported to or exported from the USA; ~60% of oil consumed in the USA, on the other hand comes from imports.

Slides from lecture are on Sakai. I will be around this weekend to provide assistance with the homework assignment that is due on Monday. Your "reading" assignment for Monday is episode 440 (originally aired 07.08.2011) of the Public Radio International Documentary Show This American Life called "Game Changer" about fracking in PA. You can stream the program for free on any computer with an internet connection (or you can download it for $.99). If you would prefer to read instead of listening, the transcript cam be found here.

Lecture 8 Summary and Notes

Some important concepts for the day...

1. The term "resources" describes the entirety of some MSI (such as oil) in a defined area (such as an oil reservoir or a country) while the term "reserve" describes the fraction of the resources that are technically, energetically, and economically recoverable. The % of a resource that is designated as a reserve is fluid and can change with changes in price or available technology.

2. The EIA predicts that the share of liquid petroleum production from unconventional sources will at least double by 2035. The EIA is smoking crack if it thinks that crude oil will sell for $50/barrel in 2035.

3. Three factors are driving the increase in production from unconventional hydrocarbon resources:

a. declining availability of hydrocarbons from conventional sources

b. increasing price of petroleum

c. advancements in technology that allow for more effective and/or cheaper exploitation of unconventional petroleum reserves.

4. The cost of production for petroleum from unconventional sources is substantially higher than the cost of production for petroleum from conventional sources; this means that petroleum from many unconventional sources is uneconomic at moderate to low crude oil prices.

5. Some of the technological improvements that have allowed for the exploitation of unconventional sources of petroleum are:

a. enhanced recovery (steamflooding (injection of hot water) and CO2 injection)

b. directional drilling (aka horizontal drilling)

c. hydraulic fracturing

You should be able to describe how steamflooding and CO2 injection methods work, why they are used, as well as any potential problems. You should also be able to describe why directional drilling is an important technological advancement in the exploitation of certain types of petroleum reserves.

6. So far, we have discussed domestic sources of unconventional petroleum from Kern County, CA, the Bakken Formation in and around ND, and the oil shale of the Green River Formation (WY, UT, and CO). You should be able to describe the factors that have prevented these systems from being conventional petroleum reserves.

Slides from today's lecture are on Sakai. Tomorrow, we will continue our discussion of unconventional petroleum with a look and shale gas and fracking; the reading for tomorrow can be found here.

Reading assignment for Friday

Your reading assignment for Friday will be Wastewater Recycling No Cure-All in Gas Process, an article in the New York Time's "Drilling Down" series on fracking by Ian Urbina and Like Fracking? You'll Love 'Super Fracking': Oil service companies roll out new technologies to break up more earth more cheaply, an article in Bloomberg Businessweek by David Wethe.

I will have a lecture summary for Wednesday written by Thursday morning.

Google my maps for GEOL 197

I have started a google map (shown below) with some of the locations that we have discussed in in lecture and that are highlighted in the reading. I will keep this map updated throughout the semester and will (try to) refer to it in the lecture summaries each time that I add a new location.


View GEOL 197 Winter 2012 Map in a larger map

Lecture 7 Summary and Notes

Important concepts for the day...

1. Crude oil (mostly) contains the following groups of hydrocarbons (hydrocarbons are organic compounds that contain carbon and hydrogen):

a. alkanes: 15-60% (average30%)- simple or branched chains with all singe C-C bonds- aka parafins

b. cylcoalkanes: 30-60% (average 49%)-like alkanes where the rings are closed into rings- aka naphthenes

c. aromatic hydrocarbons: 3-30% (average 15%)- contain a benzene ring (6 carbon ring with three single bonds and three double bonds)- mostly BTEX compounds (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene)- aka aromatics

d. asphaltics: 0-10% (average 6%)- large (high molecular mass), complex, high-viscosity compounds

2. Most petroleum products are a mixture of several different hydrocarbons. For instance, gasoline (the stuff that you buy at the pump) is a mixture of ~500 compounds containing (mostly) 30-50% alkanes (mostly heptane and octane), 20-30% cyclcoalkanes (like cyclopentane), and 20-30% aromatics (BTEX compounds). Since gasoline is dominated by short chains and aromatics, it is a low-viscosity liquid at surface pressure and temperature

3. In general, as hydrocarbons get longer and/or more complex, their physical properties change (shorter chains have lower boiling points and lower viscosities and longer chains have higher boiling points and higher viscosities

4. Oil refineries use a fractional distillation column to fractionate crude oil into a variety of useful (ei strategically important) materials. The fractional distillation column takes advantage of the different boiling points for different compounds to separate compounds according to the length of the carbon chain.

5. After fractionation, modern refineries can alter the proportions of the different fractions in response market consumption patterns. Since natural gas (1-4 carbon chains), gasoline (7-11 carbon chains), and diesel/heating oil/jet fuel (8-21 carbon chains) are most widely consumed (and thus most valuable), longer hydrocarbons can be cracked (by a cracking unit) and shorter hydrocarbons can be unified (by a reformer unit) to produce more widely consumed compounds from less widely consumed ones.

6. The Energy Information Agency (EIA) is the office of the US federal government that is tasked with collecting and communicating data about energy production and consumption in the USA and (sometimes) abroad.

7. Unconventional petroleum reserves are petroleum reserves that, for some reason or another, are different than conventional petroleum reserves. Unconventional petroleum reserves can be broadly divided into two categories: high viscosity reserves ("heavy crude", "tar sands") and oil shale (or gas shale). In general, high viscosity reserves form like conventional petroleum reserves but are subsequently biodegraded when bacteria come in and preferentially eat the shorter hydrocarbon chains resulting in an increase in the viscosity of the remaining liquid.

8. Three of the ten most productive oilfields in the USA (using 2006 EIA data) are in the southern San Joaquin Basin (just north of Los Angeles). The petroleum reserves discussed in our reading for today (The Colonization of Kern County) are notably high in viscosity.

Slides shown in lecture today are available on Sakai. Wednesday, we will continue our discussion of unconventional petroleum reserves. Your reading assignment for Wednesday is North Dakota's Oil Boom is a Blessing and a Curse: The state's oil boom is bringing unmatched growth and unanticipated problems, an article in the August 2011 issue of Governing Magazine by Ryan Holeywell.

Lecture 6 Summary and Notes

Important concepts for the day:

1. Petroleum reserviors are so rare because:

a. out of all of the organisms that live (and die) most decompose

b. out of all of the sedimentary rocks that form, <1% are "organic rich" = >5% organic material

c. out of all of the organic rich potential source rock that forms, not all is going to "make it to the kitchen" be buried to the depths (and heat) required for the formation of oil and gas)

d. out of all of the oil and gas that forms, <10% is trapped in reservoirs

e. ...

2. Seismic imaging is the "workhorse" of petroleum exploration. Seismic imaging allows us to see layers and structures within the Earth. Layers are "visible" in seismic imaging when one layer propagates seismic waves at a different speed than another; the wave is reflected and refracted at this boundary and this is indicated by a darker line on the seismic image.
3. The history of the seismic profile for our homework assignment is as follows:

a. deposition of horizontal, laterally continuous sheets of sedimentary strata (limestone then layered organic-rich shale, then coarse-grained sandstone, then well-cemented mudstone, then massive sandstone, then layered sandstone)

b. differential stress from a tectonic event folded the existing layers into an anticline fold

c. the top of this fold was eroded.

d. deposition of horizontal, laterally continuous sheets of sedimentary strata (conglomerate, then layered sandstone, then layered siltstone) occurred over top of the eroded anticline.

4. Divisions within the oil industry are described as being "upstream" or "downstream" such that:

upstream (aka E&P sector) involves exploration (finding oil) and production (drilling and operating wells)

midstream involves getting the oil from the oilfield to the refinery and

downstream involves refining, selling, and distributing the oil

5. The term "crude oil" describes oil as it is after being pumped out of the ground; crude oil from different oil fields can have a different composition. "Average" crude oil composition is mostly C with some H and trace S, N ,O< metals and salts. Kerogen from different source material (algae vs. zoooplankton and phytoplankton vs. land plants) will have different compositions with regard to H, C, and O. As petroleum matures from kerogen to oil to gas to graphite, its carbon content increases.

6. Most refineries are big and the biggest are, um, really big.

Slides shown in lecture today are available on Sakai. Monday, we will continue with our discussion of oil refineries and the organic chemistry of petroleum and begin our discussion of unconventional petroleum reserves. Your reading assignment for Monday is The Colonization of Kern County by Jeremy Miller.

My Winter Schedule/Office Hours

Lecture 5 Summary and Notes

Important concepts/questions for the day...

1. Oil comes from organic rich source material - mostly marine phytoplankton. What area are best suited for the growth and preservation of the organic material?

2. How has biological evolution and the position of the continents throughout geologic history resulted in highly variable rates of coal organic-rich source material for oil?

3. In a conventional petroleum reservoir, what are the steps that are required after the deposition of the organic-rich source material?

3a. What happens during "maturation" and what the the physical conditions during which maturation occurs?

3b. What are the ideal properties of rocks that would serve as petroleum migration pathways, reservoirs, and cap rocks?

Lecture slides are on Sakai. Friday we will continue our discussion of petroleum reserves and spend some time with structural traps before moving on to petroleum refining.

Lecture 4 Summary and Notes

Important concepts for the day...

1. Metamorphic rocks rocks are, by definition, rocks in which mineralogical changes have occurred in response to changes in pressure, temperature, or transient fluids. Pressure and temperature increase together with increasing depth and the temperature range at which metamorphic rocks form varies from either 150 or 200 degrees Celsius (depending on the author) to between 700 and 1400 degrees Celsius (depending on the rock type present and the pressure). Below the arbitrary 150 or 200 degrees Celsius, reactions and their resultant minerals and rocks are considered to be sedimentary (diagenetic) and above 700 degrees, rocks start to melt. The amount (high vs. low) of pressure is important as is the nature of that pressure (lithostatic vs. differential) since rocks that are deformed in the presence of differential pressure (sigma 1 >> sigma 2 > sigma 3) develop foliation (a planar arrangement of the minerals in 3-D space).

2. Most of the time when metamorphic rocks are discussed, we envision a system that is closed at the handsample (sub-meter) scale. An important consideration for metamorphic processes that concentrate MSI is that water-rich (hydrothermal) fluids can import and export elements to or from a system in a process that is called metasomatism.

3. Continental drift is the concept that the Earth's continents have moved (and are moving) throughout Earth's history both with respect to one another and with respect to the underlying mantle asthenosphere.

4. This movement of continents is achieved through plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is commonly referred to as the "unifying theory of geology" because it is useful in explaining so many geologic phenomena.

5. Plate boundaries are defined by the relative motion between plates (convergent, divergent, or transform) and the "tectonic setting" of an area describes a location with respect to a plate and its boundaries.

6. In order to be able to predict the distribution of some types of MSI (particularly fossil fuels) at the global level, it is important to understand not only the present tectonic setting of an area and the modern processes that are affecting it but also how the tectonic setting and location of the area has changed throughout time.

Wednesday, we will begin our discussion with a look at how the position of the continents has changed through Earth's history before moving onto how hydrocarbon reservoirs form. Slides from lecture today are posted on the course Sakai site. The readings assignments for Wednesday can be found in Friday's lecture summary.

Lecture 3 Summary and Notes

Important concepts for the day...

1. Igneous rocks form when melted rocks cool and crystallize. This is simple enough except that, when rocks melt and crystallize, different chemical species within the rock melt or crystallize at different temperatures and so the very process of melting or crystallizing changes the residual liquid and subsequent crystallization/melting products.

2. On the melting end of things, almost all melt comes from the upper mantle where the pressure, temperature, or composition has deviated from "normal" as some given location. The upper mantle is composed of an ultramafic rock called a 4-phase lherzolite and when this melts, the result is not melted lherzolite- it is of a mafic (basaltic) composition.

3. On the crystallization side of things, a familiarly with the research of N. L. Bowen is particularly useful... In a basaltic melt at surface pressure, olivine is the first silicate mineral to crystallize and contains considerably more Mg and considerably less Si than the melt. As a result, the melt will become progressively depleted in Mg and relatively enriched in all of the other major elements (such as Si). The remaining melt will eventually evolve to the point that olivine is no longer the thermodynamically most stable mineral and orthopyroxene (OPX) will begin to crystallize instead. As a result of this compositional melt evolution, igneous rocks or any composition (ultrmafic, mafic, intermediate, and felsic) can form from basaltic melt.

4. Elements that tend to enter the solid (mineral phase) during crystallization are called "compatible" and those that tend to remain in the liquid are called "incompatible." The ratio of the abundance of an element in the melt vs. its abundance in the crystallizing mineral is called the partition coefficient. For instance, the element nickle (Ni) is highly compatible in the mineral olivine (the partition coefficient = 10) and the element aluminum is incompatible (partition coefficient = 0.01). This means that a melt with 0.1% Ni and 10% Al will crystallize with 1% Ni and 0.1% Al. We will revisit these concepts later when discussing ore body formation.

5. The igneous rock types that are important four our discussions include granite, pegmatite, basalt, and peridotite. You should be able to loosely describe these rocks based on their grain size, elemental, and mineralogical composition.

6. Sedimentary rocks can be divided into clastic, chemical, biochemical, and organic based on how they formed. Clastic rocks are classified based on their grain size and there is no systematic mechanism for classification of the other sedimentary rocks

7. The sedimentary rock types that are important four our discussions include sandstone (clastic), shale (clastic), limestone (chemical and geochemical), rocksalt (chemical), rock gypsum (chemical), and coal (organic). You should be able to loosely describe these rocks based on their grain size, elemental, and mineralogical composition.

Your next treading assignments will be for Wednesday:

1. is an excerpt from the chapter of Stephen Marshak's other introductory physical geology textbook, Earth: Portrait of a Planet, 3rd edition on the formation of oil and gas reservoirs that is available as a .pdf on our Sakai website and the and,

2. is an article from the website "Stuff You Should Know" called "How Oil Refining Works" by Craig Freudenrich.

Please have both read by the beginning of class on Wednesday.

Slides from today's lecture are on Sakai. Monday, we will finish up with the rock cycle and introduce plate tectonics and sedimentary basins.

Lecture 2 Summary and Notes

Some important concepts for the day...

I. The central themes of the course (continued from Monday) are:

1a. Geologic resources (materials of strategic interest (MSI)) form (or are concentrated) through natural geologic processes

1b. understanding these processes is essential to understanding their limitations, geospatial distribution, etc..

2. Geologic resources (MSI) are everywhere -not just where most people think about them

3a. Extraction, trade, & consumption (E/T/C) of MSI affects everything

3b. We are largely insulated from the complex web that drives and facilitates the E/T/C of MSI and provides us with energy and stuff

4. There is a need for balance between economic prosperity & sustainability
social responsibility
environmental responsibility
finite resources (consumptive use)

II. There is a strong correlation between human development (as measure by the HDI) and per capita energy consumption. You should be able to describe the apparent relationship between these to factors and how to identify nations that are using their energy more effectively vs. those that are squandering their energy use.

III. The Earth is made up of concentric layers that are com positionally distinct from one another. You should be able to describe the four compositional layers of the Earth in terms of their elemental, mineral, and lithologic (rock composition) composition. You should also be able to briefly describe the utility of exploiting potential MSI like Al, Fe, and Ni from each layer.

IV. There are three basic rock types (igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary); the classification between these rocks is genetic (based on how they formed).

We will discuss HW Assignment One, continue with the rock cycle, and move into a discussion of plate tectonics on Friday.

There are, as this is being written, two spots left in the Blood Diamond group.

Slides that were shown in lecture today and on Monday are now available on Sakai in .pdfs in the "resources" section.

There is no new reading assigned for Friday's lecture.

Some OLOs

Tuesday January 17, 2012 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM
"Watershed Immersion"
Outing Club Resource Room, Elrod Commons #114

Environmental Studies students, Liz George, Kelly Cossey, and Kerri Ann Laubach, will present their summer internships in the Connecticut River Valley, Oregon Natural Desert Association and the Chesapeake Bay. Opportunities for this summer will be discussed. Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to Lorie Holter (lholter at wlu dot edu)
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012 4:40pm Science Center A114 (refreshments at 4:15 in the Great Hall) "FlyAsh, "Green" Concrete, and the future of the U.S. Infrastructure" by Dr. Andrei Ramniceanu
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Monday January 30, 2012 11:15 AM - 12:10 PM
Andrew Danner - "Computer Science and GIS"
Parmly 307


Andrew Danner, Ph.D., of Swarthmore College will talk about his work on developing efficient techniques to process large GIS data sets–a topic of interest to both computer scientists and geologists. Monday, January 30 at 11:15 a.m. Parmly 307 in the Science Center “TerraStream: From Elevation Data to Watershed Hierarchies” Abstract: Modern remote sensing and mapping technologies generate Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that often exceed several Gigabytes or Terrabytes in size. Processing such huge data sets poses a number of computational challenges. Portions of the data must reside on large but slow hard disks, while computation can only occur in the smaller but faster internal memory of modern computers. In these cases the transfer of data between disk and main memory becomes the primary bottleneck rather than internal CPU computation. This talk will describe the I/O model of computation in which we can develop scalable algorithms for processing large data sets. I will also present TerraStream–an implementation of several I/O-efficient algorithms for processing large point clouds of elevation data, creating digital surface models, extracting river networks, and constructing watershed hierarchies. TerraStream performance scales efficiently to input data sets containing over 300 million points and over 20GB in size.
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Energy Conservation in Buildings
January 30, 2012
6:30 PM
Old Courthouse

The local chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council will hold a meeting to teach participants how to analyze thermal images of buildings for heat loss and ways to conserve that heat (and energy).
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Geology Department Seminar
Thursday February 2, 5:30pm
Room A228

How Unconventional are Unconventional Plays?

Bryant Fulk ‘08
Geologist from Chesapeake Energy

Ever wonder how unconventional plays are evaluated and discovered? The geology certainly hasn’t changed. So what has?

The economic climate, global energy supply/demand dynamics and most importantly the understanding of what’s possible at increasingly smaller scales in the reservoir is what has sparked this new supply of energy. This talk will focus on how the conventional Petroleum System Elements are still applicable to resource plays and how evaluation of these plays isn’t as unconventional as you might think.

There will also be a brief review of what makes these plays unique- the massive scale of development and what the most influential drivers of that development are.
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Monday, February 6: Geology Seminar Speaker. Denise Levitan, graduate student at Virginia Tech, will give a talk entitled "Baseline Environmental Characterization of Ore Deposits" at 5:30pm.
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Johnson Lecture Series Presents:
“The Global Energy Transition”
Dr. Scott Tinker
5:30 Wednesday February 15th Stackhouse Theater
Dr.  Tinker is the Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology, State Geologist of Texas, and Professor at the University of Texas, Austin

Synopsis: Energy is the most important commodity in the world and affects every aspect of our lives.  The energy industry is in vast transition from using oil and coal resources to new alternatives. But not much is known or understood by the public about what the alternative resources are or what it will take to make the transition.  To make smarter decisions about energy, about our global future, we must be better informed.

Dr. Scott Tinker explores the future of energy, showing segments from his soon-to-be-released documentary, "Switch."  Dr. Tinker goes inside the world’s premiere energy sites for all resources, most of them highly restricted, and talks to leaders in government, industry and academia, exploring the world of energy with a balanced, non-political perspective.

He also answers these vital questions: If coal is dirty, why do we keep using it? Can we really clean it up? Will oil get too expensive? Will it run out? How quickly will we adopt alternatives? Which ones? How risky is hydraulic fracturing? How dangerous is nuclear energy? What are the biggest challenges, and best solutions, to our energy transition? What can each of us do?

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Symposium 2012: Reclaiming Environmental Federalism
Moot Court Room, Sydney Lewis Hall (W&L School of Law)
Friday, February 17th

Panel 1 (9:15-11:30) Federalism Theory: Arguments for Enhancing State & Local Environmental Action
Theoretical bases for state & local experimentation in energy and environmental law
Topics include: climate adaptation, nuisance, siting electricity infrastructure, & more.

Panel 2  (12:00-2:15) Electric Utility Regulation: Environmental Benefits, Costs, and the Public Interest
Ratemaking & public-interest values
Least-Cost Planning (Integrated Resource Planning)
Valuation of environmental benefits, energy efficiency, and the public interest
Energy efficiency, demand-side management, and greenhouse gas emissions
Ratepayer Intervention
Judicial review of PUC decisions

Panel 3 (2:15-3:30) Production & Underground Injection of Gases
Overview of recent legislation on shale gas production (“fracking”) in West Virginia
Coal Bed Methane
Remedies for citizens under state and federal law

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Monday, February 27: Geology Seminar Speaker. Jim Reynolds of Brevard College will speak about paleomag.
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Engineers Without Borders in Pampoyo, Bolivia
Date: 2/28/2012
Time: 12:15 PM-1:15 PM
Location: Outing Club Resource Room, Elrod Commons #114

Alexandra Prather, a Sophomore Economics and Global Politics double major, and Dana Fredericks, a Senior Chemistry-Engineering major, are a part of the W&L Engineers Without Borders club established last February. Phase 1 of our project is to bypass water contaminated by mine waste to bring clean water to the community of Pampoyo, Bolivia. This clean water source will increase crop production by 400%, while also increasing the health of both the people and the animals of Pampoyo.
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"Fresh" documentary screening with panel discussion Wednesday, February 29, 2012 5-7pm Stackhouse

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Tuesday, March 6: 2012 W&L Sustainability Film Series: Flow.
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Thursday, March 8: Karen Lanning, geophysicist who lives in Lexington, at 12:20.
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WS2: Women Scientists and Women in Science Speaker Series Presents: Dr. Katherine Crowley
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Washington and Lee University and
AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the US Department of Energy

From MoonShot to SunShot: Making Solar Energy Cost Competitive by 2020

7:30 pm on Monday March 12 in Stackhouse

Katherine Crowley is a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow working for the SunShot Initiative at the Department of Energy. The SunShot Initiative goal is to make solar energy cost competitive with other forms of energy by 2020. Within SunShot, Katherine works on the Systems Integration team, which strives to overcome barriers to large-scale deployment of solar such as grid integration challenges and "soft costs" like as permitting and inspection. She also works on technology validation of photovoltaic modules, which is critical to increasing the bankability of solar projects.
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WGS luncheon discussion at 12:20 pm Monday March 12: Dr. Katherine Crowley

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Week of March 12: Professor Paul Low?
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Week of March 19: Geology Seminar Speaker. Karl Wegmann of North Carolina State University will speak about fluvial geomorph.
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Tuesday, March 20: 2012 W&L Sustainability Film Series: Green Fire.
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Friday, March 30: Geology Honors students of the Class of 2012 will defend their theses, 3:30 in A114.
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Monday, April 2: 2012 W&L Sustainability Film Series: Waste Land.
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Lecture 1 Summary and Notes

Important concepts for today...

0. This will not be like most "Economic Geology" courses in that it is an introductory survey course taught in a liberal arts environment that covers both the physical geology of mineral and energy resources and the social, political, and environmental factors that govern their use.

1. The central themes of the course will be:

a. Geologic resources (materials of strategic interest (MSI)) form (or are concentrated) through natural geologic processes and understanding these processes (at least superficially) is essential to understanding their limitations, geospatial distribution, etc..

b. Geologic resources (MSI) are everywhere- not just where most people think about them (precious metals, gems, gas, etc.)

On Wednesday, we will continue with the central themes of the course and move on to the foundations of physical geology. The reading assignment is available as two .pdfs on Sakai. Both are excerpts from "Essentials of Geology," an introductory physical geology textbook by Stephen Marshak. One covers the concept of plate tectonics and the other covers the rock cycle and different rock types. If you have taken GEOL 100 or 101, this material should be review for you; nevertheless, these concept are fundamental to understanding some of the large-scale geologic processes that are essential to the formation and concentration of MSI.

Introduction to the 'blog

This 'blog will serve as a mechanism of communication between the instructor and members of Prof. Low's Winter Term, 2012 Economic Geology Course (GEOL 197). It will include summaries of lectures, important (and not-so-important) announcements, homework, and links to reading assignments.