URSABLOG: Gorging On Virtue

A few years ago, around this time of year, my brother and I had a strategy meeting in the Zagoria area of Epirus, in north west Greece. This annual strategy meeting – recently interrupted by COVID and other life restrictions – is basically a way for us both to catch up and share with each other what’s on our minds. It always takes place in Greece, and on our travels we have been to Dimitsana, Volos, Crete and Thessaloniki, as well as Zagoria, and invariably involves food and drink – more than is probably good for us - unique to the place where we are. But Zagoria, in particular the epic Vikos Gorge, remains a special place for me.

Maybe because it was spring, or because the river was rushing through, boosted by snow melt, or because we had to tackle it first one way (from upstream) and then another (from downstream, because the river was too full and too dangerous to ford) and then from above (at Beloi, with snow still on the ground), or maybe because it was just so massive and impressive, whatever the reason I still think of Vikos Gorge often. Geologically speaking alone, it is an impressive record of millions of years of calm sedimentary rocks being laid down when life forms were so basic, where oxygen was in short supply, where everything in the atmosphere was methane, carbon dioxide or nitrogen, and where the early processes of taking carbon out of the atmosphere, making steadily increasingly more complicated life forms. It is like a book of many pages, pressed together, and only made readable when the Vikos river tore through it and made the gorge, sometime around the end of the last ice age. Thinking about it makes me think how small we are, and how our self-centred, self-important species is not even worth a page or two in that geological book.

Carbon based life forms revolve around oxygen and nitrogen (the latter making up most of our atmosphere, and making sure we don’t blow up when we light a cigarette). Animals and fish need it to breathe in, plants and bacterial growths need to breathe it out. The first life forms were tiny, but they then evolved into slimes and growths (especially in the marginal areas of where land meets the sea). Some of these earliest growths are over 3.2 bill years old, and show up in the oldest, pre-Cambrian, pre-anything in fact, rocks that survive today. These were the less attractive ancestors of the cyanobacteria that eventually flooded the atmosphere with oxygen 800 million years later, and made the world more inhabitable for more complicated carbon-based life forms. It was these later life forms that then, on dying and decaying, became fossilised and the fossil fuels that we are using today and that are causing so many problems.

When you start to see carbon in geological terms, in terms not just of climate change but as part of the chemistry of the planet, you see that we are all little carbon footprints chomping our way through our resources. But we also have to remember that it is not just energy that upsets the balance, and recycling is not the perfect solution to our current problems.

Where I used to live – in the historical centre of Athens – there were two waste bins around the corner, one for household waste, one for recycling. For whatever reason – maybe the streets were too narrow – the city council sent only one waste truck around to empty both, at the same time. So the recycling waste, which had been meticulously sorted by myself and my neighbours, was just being lumped together and then dumped together into a landfill somewhere. One of my neighbours, infuriated by being woken at between one and two o’clock every morning – which is when the binmen came to collect the rubbish, daily – and further infuriated by seeing our good work being undone, complained long and hard to the city council. Their solution? In the end they replaced the recycling bin with a general one, so either we had to walk further to dispose of our recycling waste, or we could just dump it as we did before, and mix it up before the council did.

However, before you smile knowingly about the inefficiency of the city council, bear in mind that less than 10% of the 370 mill tonnes of plastic produced annually is recyclable. By 2050 – dread date for shipping – petrochemical production, including plastics, will account for nearly half the growth in global oil demand. The petrochemical industry therefore needs solutions that will not scale back plastic production to meet the requirements of an historic UN agreement to deal with plastics.

One solution is chemical or “advanced” recycling, the most common form being pyrolysis, that turns plastic waste back into raw materials, or oil and gases, that are then fed back into petrochemical production. Pyrolysis uses intense heat to break down hard to recycle plastics, like polyolefins (cling film, bottle caps, liquid containers, and many other household items). But the problem with using intense heat is that it is energy intensive. BASF, the world’s largest chemicals group, found that pyrolysis of polyethene plastic produces 3.34 kg of carbon dioxide per kg, the equivalent to burning a litre of home heating oil. However putting the same amount of plastic into landfill emits only 0.06kg of carbon dioxide. I appreciate that landfills are not great for soil or groundwater pollution, and can affect the purity of waterways and water supply. But when you consider that the energy required to reprocess plastic is higher than the energy to make the plastic to start off with, you are faced with two realistic options: bury the stuff or don’t make it in the first place. Not making the stuff is not a solution for the petrochemical industry.

There are comparisons of course with the debate surrounding the next generation of marine fuels. LNG is a hydrocarbon, and whilst called a transition fuel, it is hardly better than fuel oil, and is more dangerous to store on ships, as well as being more expensive, and taking up more space. Ammonia is not a hydrocarbon, but is also dangerous, and has similar issues with supply and storage on ships. Most industrial production of ammonia uses LNG as a raw material these days until we wait for enough sustainable energy production to be available to make green ammonia. There is no real point in using ammonia therefore, for now at least, over LNG. Hydrogen has even more problems in production, storage and transportation, and basically consumes more energy to make it than it generates as an end product. The plastic problem remains. Other technologies, like molten salt reactors, are not yet proven, but could eventually prove promising.

But it seems to me that by concentrating on emissions only we are missing the most important point. Emissions are not the only issues. Without the emissions of cyanobacteria – oxygen – we would not be here today. The problem is the chemical balance of our world, and how we are altering it. By taking so much carbon out of the ground and putting it in both the atmosphere and the oceans, and so quickly in geological terms we are in danger of changing the delicate balance of the biosphere. Carbon capture, carbon trapping, carbon burying is perhaps a way of maintaining some sense of chemical equilibrium, and if we must have plastic and as it does contain so much carbon, perhaps we can find a use for old mines, whether underground or open cast, once safely processed.

Whenever I think about Vikos Gorge, and the massive geological timescales involved – as opposed to our own short and destructive time on the planet – I get philosophical. We are carbon-based life forms, and we rely on carbon to feed ourselves and grow. We also however need oxygen, water, and all the other minerals and compounds that make up our world. This is why we exist. We are the product of evolution based on the scarce materials around us, and have come to this point in geological history because of our environment.

Shipping, as has been especially proven over the last two years, is a benefit to the human race and helps spread limited resources more evenly through trade. Pointing the finger at shipping at being a heavy GHG emitter whilst we ignore the other idiosyncrasies of our modern life is lazy thinking, but easy virtue signalling. Any solution needs to bear in mind that mankind came from carbon, and will return to carbon when it’s all over at the end of our time on earth, either as a person or as a species. Carbon may be the problem, but it is also the solution. In the meantime, we must all live, including my brother and I, and our plans for our next strategy meeting, wherever that will be.?

Simon Ward

www.ursashipbrokers.gr