“Nothing is perfect,” Mason, a chemist and environmentalist from State University of New York (SUNY) Fredonia, emphasized as one of her main points of her lecture.
She spoke at Edinboro University in response to the proposed tire-to-energy plant that will be located in Crawford County. She also addressed the current drilling for natural gas in northwestern Pa.
Currently in the United States, 40 percent of our energy use is to generate electricity, she said, and this is done through a process called combustion.
“Ideally,” Mason pointed out, “you want nothing except carbon dioxide and water” as a result of complete combustion. But, that’s not always the case.
Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs, are a huge group of completely unoxidized compounds that are released during any combustion process. “Whether you’re talking about what’s coming out of the tail end of your car, or a cigarette, or a campfire,” Mason said. “You’re going to have a significant amount of VOCs being released.”
Comparing the results of burning tires to burning coal, you find that tires produce less air pollutants and they contain a lot more carbon than coal does, Mason explained. Carbon is what helps to produce the energy for our electricity and an abundance of carbon means a higher energy level.
Yet, tires also contain a large amount of fixed carbon, or soot. “It’s the part that can’t be burned,” Mason said. The affect that fixed carbon has on us is that it’s been found to be mutagenic (relating to DNA mutations), carcinogenic (cancerous) and teratogenic (relating to birth defects).
One argument is that the plants aren’t going to release very many toxic particles. “The key to pollution is dilution,” Mason joked. “But it’s not about the quantity… It’s about the toxicity of the quantity… That’s why they’re labeled ‘hazardous air pollutants.’ If they weren’t toxic, we would probably call them something nicer.”
So, Mason said, the other solution would be natural gas, which is considered to be one of the cleanest of the fossil fuels. Located in the Marcellus Shale, which can be found in northwestern Pa, there is about 1,500 trillion cubic feet of gas underground, according to Mason.
In order to get the gas out of the shale, gas corporations use a method called “hydrofracking,” Mason said. They mix water with sand and synthetic chemicals in order to crack the shale and bring the gas out, called “fracking fluid.”
“The fracking fluid contains chemicals that would be considered illegal in warfare,” Mason pointed out. Now, that’s about several millions of gallons of water that no one can use for anything else.
Major change is needed and, according to Mason, investing in renewable energy sources wouldn’t cost us any more than what we are already paying. “The barriers to a 100 percent conversion to [solar and wind power] worldwide are primarily social and political. Not economical and not technological. We can afford to do this. What’s stopping us is us,” Mason emphasized.
We have the resources and the money to make the change. According toMason, the only thing that we have to do to start the changeover is to get our politicians on board.
“In the end, they have to listen to us if we speak loudly enough,” she said. “But we have to change the social aspect, we have to communicate.”
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