What exactly is the science? I know green house gasses heat us up but in layman’s terms what happened, and why did it happen? I live in a rural area, and work a blue collar job. My coworkers all think it’s fake, even though I point out current world events. I don’t exactly understand it myself exactly but I know it’s real. Explain like I’m five please
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Ok, I am a petroleum engineer,my dad has been in oil and gas for 30 years and I am in oil and gas for 10 years now. So I’ll speak about oil and gas only, for an idea about coal mining multiply that by x10.
Here’s my 2 cents
Most people think that oil is only used for fueling cars and planes, but Oil is basically in everything around you from your plastic straw to the airplanes. Roughly 80% of the world energy is from fossil fuels ( Including coal). All the wishy woshy statistics try to make it look greener, but renewables are actually responsible for less than 5% of the energy generated world wide. Statistics focous on Europe,United States of America and maybe Australia (because data are easliy obtained), what about Africa, Asia and Russia ?
So now, that doesn’t look so bad so why fossil fuels are actually screwing the planet at every turn? From the drilling to consumption fossil fuels are causing all sort of environmental damage that is beyoned repair.
Drilling for oil and gas is done by literally breaking the underground layers to thousands of meters. That means that you dug a whole in earth so deep you destabilized that area for good ( you can’t build on it). We use mud in drilling (to cool the drill bit and lubricate the ground and other reasons), where do you think that mud is thrown ? yup you’re right buried beside the site. some minor damages including but not limited to, Any animals or sea creatures within the area of operations are either killed or moved if they are lucky. The pollution of the area is a given, once the area is explored , the camp remains is left there if it’s less economical to retrieve items.
Is that the worst ?
Noooo, that’s the best case scnario, that’s if you didn’t have an accident. look up deep water horizon oil spill environmental impact.
So we did all that damage, is that it ?
not even close, let’s transport the oil and gas. Well , oil is easy to transport, gas however cost a lot to transfer and to treat sometimes. If transfering the gas isn’t economical it’s BURNED on platform. Yes, you read correctly 24 hours of gas burning on the platform because it’s not an profitable to transfer it. It varies from one country to an other how much gas you can burn, but it’s roughly in Million Square Cubic Feets.
So the gas is burned if it’s not a huge amount (which is 70% of the cases), the oil is transferred to GOSP (Gas Oil Separation Plant). It’s treated and gets desalinated by injecting fresh water into it to decrease salinity, so fresh water is injected to decrease salinity (wasted tons of water). Then, guess where that water is disposed of ? yup, either in the sea killing all the sea life in the area and normally it contains residue of oil (there is a limit in PPM to be fair which is committed to while there is any environmental inspection in some countries, any other time it’s a luck game).
Is that’s it ?
almost there, so we’re lucky enough and we got gas, the high pressure gas is treated and still the low pressure gas is burned 24/7. Most of the time it contains Hydrogen sulfide ( Poisionus explosive gas) and other lovely gases to get rid of.
That’s only the environmental impact of extracting the fossil fuel, not transporting and consuming it.
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