Water Vapor: The Major Greenhouse Gas

Abstract

Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas. The amount of water vapor in the air depends on temperature. Its saturation level doubles with every 10 °C increase in temperature. Its concentration also depends on availability of sources such as water surfaces and vegetation. Because of its strong temperature dependence its role as a greenhouse gas is limited to the equatorial region and the tropics diminishing to nil in the polar regions.

Intermezzo XIX. An Unexpected Detour

‘Jimmy’ Carter won the Presidential election in 1976, just after I had become Dean. At that time the world was entering a period of ‘stagflation’, with stagnant economies, inflation, and rising interest rates. He is perhaps our only President to have ever had a serious background in science. He had been commander of a nuclear submarine and knew a lot of the physics you have read about here. He was also a good systems analyst, and very early on he figured out that our country’s dependence on oil and coal as its primary energy sources was leading us toward a crisis.

On April 17, 1977 he gave a televised “fireside chat” declaring that the U.S. energy situation during the 1970s was the moral equivalent of war. He recalled the effect of the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973–1974, when gasoline was in short supply, there were lines at the gas pumps, and the price of fuel skyrocketed. He urged the citizenry to conserve energy, installed solar panels on the White House, and wore sweaters while turning down the heat. This earned him the intense dislike of the petroleum industry. He was a prophet before his time.

Carter’s Head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was Frank Press. Frank was an eminent Geologist/Geophysicist from MIT. He had gotten his doctorate under Maurice Ewing. The OSTP developed two initiatives: (1) explore the US continental margins as a new source of petroleum; (2) require the US automobile industry to develop 48mpg cars by 1995.

On July 15, 1979. Carter gave his “Crisis of Confidence” speech, outlining a program for achieving energy independence: “On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny”. As nearly as I can determine, that speech was the only event that actually resulted in a reduction of petroleum use, and that occurred several years later, after many Americans had bought smaller cars.

At the same time the idea of exploring our continental margins was being developed, the end of the Deep Sea Drilling Program was in sight. It had already gone on for a decade, and was scheduled to end at the latest in 1983. Frank Press thought that we might be able to have a successor program to conduct exploration of our continental margins. It would be called the Ocean Margin Drilling Program, OMD. He envisioned a joint US Academic—Industry program of more sophisticated drilling, with funding to come half from the US Government and half from industry.

To understand what ‘more sophisticated drilling’ means, you need to recall how the scientific drilling from GLOMAR Challenger was carried out. The ship lowered a drill string with a bit on the end down to the sea floor, and drilled a hole. The bit had a hole in the center. To flush the drill cuttings out of the hole, seawater was continuously pumped down the drill pipe, through the hole and carried the cuttings up through the space that formed between the rotating drill pipe and the surrounding sediment or rock. Cores were recovered by dropping a core barrel down inside the pipe. On impact the core barrel attached itself to the bit. The bit then drilled ahead and sediment passed upward through the hole into the core barrel. After the core barrel was thought to be full, a retrieval device was dropped down on a wire line. On impact it latched onto the top of the core barrel and at the same time caused the core barrel to be released from the bit. That is, if all gone well; and almost always it did. It was a very elegant technique, but not copied by industry because a bit with a large hole in the center does not drill as fast as one with many small holes.

Our DSDP drilling technique had one significant flaw. There would be no way to control a blow-out of gas or oil if we should encounter it. After the discovery of petroleum at Sigsbee Knoll on Leg 1, JOIDES established a Pollution Prevention and Safety Panel (PPSP) to insure that we did not drill anywhere that there might be a chance of encountering petroleum.

While I was Chairman of the JOIDES Planning Committee I was also on the PPSP. Hollis Hedberg, the Panel’s Chair and a very highly respected petroleum geologist, would always start the meeting by passing around a photograph. It was an aerial shot of a shallow water drilling vessel entirely enclosed in a ball of flame. “Gentlemen, this is what we are here to prevent”.

To drill where gas or petroleum is expected the operation must have well control. On land this control is achieved by pumping ‘drilling mud’ down the pipe. The drilling mud is heavier than the rock through which the hole is being drilled. The mud is heavier because it contains minerals like barite which are denser than those making up most rock. It passes through the bit and returns up the annulus between the drill pipe and the rock. The pressure on the pore fluids in the rock, the ‘lithostatic pressure’, is proportional to the weight of the overlying rock. The pore fluids, whether salt water, petroleum or gas cannot escape into the drill hole because the ‘hydrostatic’ pressure of the drilling fluid is greater. The upper part of the hole where the sediments or rock are not as solid and might fail because of the pressure of the drilling mud is usually cased with concrete pipe so the drilling mud cannot penetrate into it. If an ‘over pressured zone’ is encountered, where the pore fluids in the rock are higher than expected from the weight of the rock itself, the well can be controlled by increasing the weight of the drilling mud.

Drilling such a hole from a ship is a much more complicated process. Drilling mud must be used both to control conditions in the hole and to prevent a possible blowout, and to bring the drill cuttings out of the hole. In the DSDP operation, the drill cuttings simply accumulated on the sea floor around the hole. Drilling mud is very expensive because of the special minerals that give it its weight. It must be recycled, and this means that there must be return circulation, so that the mud pumped down the pipe returns to the ship where the cuttings can be filtered out and the mud reused.

Return circulation requires that there be a second pipe, actually a tube, from the sea floor back up to the ship. The drill pipe is inside this larger tube, which is known as a ‘riser’. The drilling mud is pumped down the drill pipe and the mud and its contained cuttings return through the annulus, the space between the drill pipe and the riser. You might begin to guess that this is all going to get very complicated (and expensive) in a hurry. In 1979 almost none of the necessary engineering had been carried out. But this is exactly what would be needed to make an exploration for petroleum on the continental margins.

I was now serving on the Executive Committee of JOIDES, overseeing the very successful International Phase of the Deep Sea Drilling Program from a distance. Frank Press wanted to introduce us to the responsible executives of the US Petroleum Industry. I was invited to Chair this adventure. I have no idea why I was chosen, but it was probably because I was thought to have close ties to the industry. I had taught regularly in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ “Petroleum Exploration Schools”. At that time there were about 35 large petroleum companies in the US, and many of my students were working in the industry.

I explained that I would rather see a continuation of the DSDP, with international partners. We had made a lot of progress in understanding the history of the Earth, and were recognized as the most successful international science program in history. The argument was that for the future we needed to do something really new. A simple continuation of DSDP-type drilling would not be sent forward for approval by the congress. It was essentially ‘take it or leave it’.

After a Welcome by Frank Press and Introduction by Phil Smith of the OSTP, I chaired the Scientific Presentations at the first meeting of potential academic participants and industry representatives at Rice University in Houston in early 1979. The review of what had been learned from the DSDP was an eye opener for many of the industry officials. Although their research staff were aware of the program, and some of them served on JOIDES Panels, the executives were just becoming aware of the impact the theory of Plate Tectonics was having on exploration. Of all the industry contacts made at that meeting, George Pichel of Union Oil was especially helpful. He told me that our presentations were good, but needed to be improved. I would need to go around to each company and make a presentation—a really professional presentation—‘at a level oil company executives could understand’. Most of them were not geologists. He put me onto a company, Green Mountain Photo, on the west side of Denver that made slide presentations for petroleum industry personnel giving talks at national meetings. Remember, there were no personal computers, much less ‘PowerPoint’ at the time.

Accordingly I visited Green Mountain outside Denver. Its head, Lev Ropes, not only designed beautiful graphics, but he explained to me how people learn. It was a simple rule. First, tell the audience what you are going to tell them. Second, tell them. Third, tell them what you told them. An interesting human limitation is that we are very poor at remembering more than seven things at a time. So a presentation should never try to make more than seven points. All of this was new to me. The presentation slides were beautiful and got widely distributed.

Over the next months I visited over 20companies giving my pitch. In the middle of this exercise, we had an additional request from Frank Press. He told us that the academic community needed a high-level person to be available in Washington not only to coordinate activities on selling this program to industry but to make sure the National Science Foundation was fully on board, and that the Congress was being brought along.

JOI, Inc.’s first president was Robert White. He had been Administrator of NOAA and had taken on the job part time when he left NOAA. He was an atmospheric scientist and was resigning to pursue other interests. Since I was the one making overtures to industry, I was on the spot. At first I volunteered to become another part time President of JOI while continuing to be Dean in Miami. I didn’t want to leave Miami, there was so much still to be done. So, for the better part of a year I commuted two or three days a week from Miami to Washington. I would catch a very early morning flight from Miami to National Airport, and be in the JOI Office in the Watergate Complex by 9 AM, and take the 7 PM flight back to Miami; it was a routine not to be envied.

In 1980, with many election year activities under way, we were informed by the OSTP that the President of JOI needed to be full time, reside in Washington, and be willing to travel a lot. JOI’s Board of Governors offered me the job. There really was no alternative; so much of my life had been devoted to promoting scientific ocean drilling I felt I had to continue even if the proposed new program was not entirely to my liking. Somehow we had to devise a way to keep our international partnerships going.

On the late afternoon of May 16, 1980, I called JOI’s Board Chairman, John Knauss, Dean of the University of Rhode Island’s School of Oceanography, and told him I would accept the job and move to Washington. The next day a jury in Miami acquitted white Miami police officers who had been indicted for manslaughter in the death of a black man, Arthur McDuffie. The Miami Riot of 1980 began a few hours later. A pall of smoke hung over the city.