portraits / vulpes
The crucial role cities can play in protecting the honeybee | Rosie Boycott | Environment | guardian.co.uk
a year of continued and frightening environmental degradation and the looming prospect of severe food shortages in years to come. It is the image of workers in the Maoxian county of Sichuan, China, an area that has lost its pollinators through the indiscriminate use of pesticides and the over-harvesting of its honey. These workers aren’t picking fruit, or digging, or planting. They’re pollinating pear and apple trees by hand. In this part of China, the honeybee has been replaced by the human bee.
I learned about this startling practice this year, but in fact its been going on for the past two decades. Every spring, thousands of villagers climb through fruit trees hand-pollinating blossoms by dipping “pollination sticks” (brushes made of chicken feathers and cigarette filters) into plastic bottles of pollen and then touching them against each of the tree’s billions of blossoms.
One-third of all our food staples only grow after pollination. In the United States alone, the cost of replacing this “free service” which nature has provided for hundreds of thousands of years, is put at anything between £14bn and £92bn. And that’s in one country alone. If we don’t wake up to the global crisis facing our pollinators, the banking crisis is going to look relatively trivial as the world runs out of food. China can, for the time being, afford to hurl this level of human labour at the problem: but short of the prospect of actual starvation, it is wholly unrealistic to imagine this happening in, say, California, where bees still pollinate orange, apple, pear and plum trees.
sinkhole.gif GIF Image, 320×240 pixels
Midland College / PPDC Courses fall 2010
CO2 SCHOOL (Jointly sponsored by APTA and Midland College’s PPDC) Register Now
(PTRT 1091) – Class will be held January 2011!
January 24 – 27, 2011
Course# G094 102Q
Monday – Thursday
Location: Midland College PPDC Building, 105 W. Illinois Ave. (Midland, Texas)
Fee: $1,895; Out of State $1,920 (The fee covers the following: Course Instruction, Course Materials and One-Day Field Trip).
8:00 am – 5:00 pm
3.2 CEU’s
Instructors: Stephen Melzer; Robert Trentham, Ph.D.; Robert D. Kiker
Day One: Overview of the Elements of CO2 Flooding
- The History and Current Status of CO2 Flooding
- CO2 Sources, Natural and Anthropogenic (Man-Made), and the Properties of CO2
- The Convergence of Carbon Management and CO2 EOR
- CO2 Transportation and Injection – Pipelines, Trucking, Metering
- Reservoir Response – Miscible, Immiscible, Gravity Stable, Processing Rates, Examples
- CO2 Recycling, Plants & Processing – Dehydration, Sulfur/NGL Separation, Compression
- Downhole and Wellsite Equipment Needs
- Key Elements of Reservoir Geology
- Overview: The Business of CO2
Day Two: Evaluating a Candidate Flood, Reservoir Response and Flood Operations
- Flood Prospects: The Initial Evaluation and the Concept of Screening
- Flow Units and Reservoir Compartmentalization
- Modeling the Reservoir and Waterflood Response – Sweep Efficiency Concepts and Rules of Thumb
- Geophysical Techniques
- Normalizing Flood Response – Actual Examples
- CO2 Flood Response Modeling Techniques
- Economic Modeling
- Key Features of CO2 Flood Operations
- Downhole Considerations
- Operational Features Peculiar to CO2 – Beyond Waterflooding
- Surveillance and Flood Monitoring
Day Three: CO2 Facilities and Field Trip
- Dehydration Processes
- Compression Facilities
- Sulfur Removal
- Natural Gas Liquids Removal
- Integrated Plants
- Full Stream (Gas) Reinjection
- Field Visit to a CO2 Flood and Facility
- Tour of CO2 Production and Injection Facilities
- Tour of Recycle/Processing Facilities
Day Four: CO2 Production and The Business of CO2 Flooding
- Land/Mineral Considerations
- Longevity of Example Floods
- Reservoir Processing Rates and Rates of Return
- Major Elements of Costs/Revenue
- Parametric Sensitivities
- Fundamentals of CO2 Supply Contracts
- Course Discussion and Evaluations
West Texas Historical Association home page
“The West Texas Historical Association has always been an organization committed to people who are interested in the history of West Texas. Because of our open-membership policy our association has been filled by a healthy cross-section of lay and professional historians. These include teachers, students, business people, farmers, ranchers, and engineers who have contributed to the growth of the organization. In addition, our membership has had solid institutional support from colleges, universities, libraries, museums, county historical groups, and corporations throughout the region and across the nation.”
