Heat (25 page)

Alaskans keep a fraction of their oil. From my home in Anchorage, I drive to Nikiski, the site of an Alaskan refinery. The three-hour drive, propelled by burning gasoline, is responsible for 176 pounds of carbon emissions.

Captain Cook, with his sailing master William Bligh and their crew of about one hundred men, sailed the converted coal carrier HMS
Resolution
past here around May 25, 1778. Going into the inlet, Cook and Bligh would have seen the site of this refinery off their starboard bow. It would have looked much like the rest of the coast, blanketed in black spruce trees.

Two centuries passed. The refinery was built in 1969. Originally it was a topping plant, not much more complicated than the stills used by Kier and his contemporaries and built mainly to turn Cook Inlet crude oil and Swanson River crude oil into diesel fuel. When flows of Cook Inlet and Swanson River crude slowed, the plant was converted to handle North Slope crude, transported here in tankers from Valdez three hundred thousand barrels at a time, the sea voyage from the end of the pipeline to the refinery’s front door requiring less than a day.

I meet a refinery engineer. He exudes enthusiasm for this refinery. It is more than just a collection of pipes and pumps and tanks and valves. It has a personality. It has character. It changes over time, in some cases because of the refinery engineer’s ideas, because of his initiatives. If it becomes upset because someone sends it a bad batch of crude, he takes it personally.

Others before him have taken their relationship with the refining process even further. There was, for example, Jesse Dubbs of western Pennsylvania, who worked during the time when gasoline went from a waste product to a valuable commodity. Jesse named his son Carbon. The young Carbon Dubbs, like his father, was enthralled by the refining process. He gave himself a middle name, Petroleum. Mr. Carbon Petroleum Dubbs had two daughters. He named them Methyl and Ethyl.

Here in Nikiski, the crude moves first into a vertical metal distilling column. The crude, like all crudes, is a mixture of petroleum compounds. It is a mixture of tar and diesel and gasoline and light oil and heavy oil and natural gas. The heavier stuff—the tar and the heavy oils, the stuff that becomes asphalt and Vaseline—has longer molecules, longer chains of carbon and hydrogen. The longer the chain, the higher the boiling point. A very long hydrocarbon molecule will become a vapor at a high temperature and return to a liquid state when that temperature drops. A shorter hydrocarbon molecule will become a vapor at a lower temperature and remain a vapor at lower temperatures.

Dark crude oil enters the column. Flames from natural gas heat the bottom of the column to 740 degrees. The crude boils, and its vapors move upward and cool. As the vapors cool, they return to a liquid state. Not too far up the column, light oils return to a liquid state and are captured on trays. The captured liquid flows out of the column. A little higher in the column, kerosene vapors return to a liquid state and flow out of the column. Closer to the top, gasoline vapors return to a liquid state and flow out of the column. All the way at the top, butane and methane and ethane leave the column.

We drive through the refinery. We look at columns. We look at pipes. We look at valves. We do not see oil. All the oil is inside the columns, the pipes, the valves.

So far nothing we have seen here is different, in principle, from what we might have seen in Kier’s refinery. Kier heated oil to produce distillate, and that is all that happens in the column. There are nuances—temperature and pressure settings, boiling the oil in a vacuum—but the basic principle is the same. So far, it is physics, changing from liquids to vapors and back to liquids, with no chemistry involved. It is physics that separates the petroleum compounds.

We move on to another column, a kind of column called a cracker. It looks like a distilling column, but it is not. Here long molecules are cracked into shorter molecules. The process uses heat. Heat crude oil to a temperature of about a thousand degrees, and the large molecules break up. They become smaller molecules. This is not a matter of separating one kind of molecule from another. It is not mere distillation. Tar cracks into light oil, kerosene, gasoline, and butane. And now, with smaller molecules, the volume increases. The forty-two-gallon barrel becomes forty-three gallons and forty-four gallons and forty-five gallons.

To make cracking profitable, it cannot be done with heat alone. Heat alone would change the crude into lighter products, but there would be no control. There would be no efficiency. The cracker we look at is a hydrocracker. At 1,800 pounds per square inch—something like the pressure in a reasonably full scuba tank—certain products from low in the distilling column are mixed with hydrogen. The mix is heated to something like eight hundred degrees. Long molecules break apart. Jet fuel and gasoline are born.

In Nikiski the desired end product is mainly aviation fuel. Alaskans burn more aviation fuel than gasoline, so the refinery engineer pushes his towers and pipes and flames to yield more aviation fuel than gasoline. Gasoline, for Alaskans, remains a by-product. In terms of value, in comparison to aviation fuel, gasoline is almost a waste product.

There is more. Contaminants must be removed. Water needs treatment. Pipes must be warmed. Runaway reactions must be avoided. There is the making of hydrogen by heating natural gas and water to 1,680 degrees in the presence of a catalyst. There is the combining of small molecules to make larger molecules—the creation of gasoline from natural gas. Molecules must be reshaped. The plant was built at a time when natural gas was cheap, and now, when Alaskans are running short on accessible natural gas, there are tricks to conserving the stuff, to saving it. Efficiencies must be engineered in and inefficiencies must be engineered out.

Back in the engineer’s office, we talk about the process. He writes on a whiteboard, assuming that I know more about chemistry than I do.

The amazing thing to me, I tell him, is that refineries do not explode with great regularity. “What kind of a lunatic,” I ask him, “heats thousands of gallons of diesel, gasoline, butane, propane, and kerosene to hundreds of degrees?”

“Refining,” he says, “is more complicated than rocket science. It is harder than nuclear science.”

On the wall near his desk hangs a photograph of a nuclear submarine. On this submarine, he once served as a reactor engineer.

Lighter fluid, a mixture of petroleum distillates, is sometimes used as an accelerant by firewalkers. The wood is stacked in a crisscross pattern that allows airflow. The lighter fluid is sprayed across the top of the wood and halfway down the sides. A match or a lighter or a flare might be used to ignite the fluid and the wood. The top of the woodpile burns quickly, creating hot coals and embers. The bottom of the pile, without the accelerant, burns slower, leaving a lasting flame. Fire tenders move the hot coals from the top of the fire onto the ground. They create a sidewalk next to the flames, a promenade of red-hot embers, a thousand-degree footpath.

From Proverbs 6:28: “Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?”

For centuries before Tolly Burkan launched the American firewalking movement, feet were not being burned in Argentina, in Australia, in Brazil, in Bulgaria, in Burma and China, in Egypt and Greece and Spain, in Malaysia and Singapore and the Philippines and Thailand, in South Africa. Since Tolly Burkan, hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, have walked on hot coals with feet not burned.

Burkan himself walked across hot coals for the first time in 1977, the same year that
Scientific American
published an article explaining, in the author’s view, exactly how firewalking worked. By the early 1980s, Burkan talked of the Global Firewalking Movement. It was not a trend. It was not a fad. It was a movement. With the businessman Charles Horton, Burkan launched the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education. In the 1990s, corporations noticed firewalking. American Express and Microsoft and Met-Life set up firewalking seminars for employees.

KFC in Australia discovered firewalking. Reportedly, 180 employees of the chicken-cooking franchise took part in a motivational firewalking exercise. Eleven ambulances responded. Thirty firewalkers were injured. But for the most part, firewalkers walked without injury. They walked across motivational and spiritual flames.

The firewalking movement, to some degree, broke into two schools, one focused on instilling confidence, on motivating walkers from the corporate world, and the other focused on spiritual growth, on personal fulfillment. Both schools burned cedar.

In the background, naysayers proliferated. Scientists dismissed the mystical component. Your mind, they said, has little to do with safely walking across coals. It is all about physics.

From an article by Emily Edwards in 1998, published by New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “An awkward craving for transformation produces an exploitable market for spiritual experiences outside orthodox religious establishments, an ‘exotification’ and appropriation of sacred knowledge.” And this: “The mechanism that helps white, middle-class Americans breach logical convention and participate in firewalking and related rituals is a form of mutual pretense, a social ritual engaged to shield people from bleak realities and graceless moments.”

I believe in the science, but I want few things more than to be shielded from bleak realities and graceless moments. I want to be motivated. I like feeling empowered. With oil and coal and peat behind me, along with forest fires and cooking and deserts, I long to feel burning coals crunching under the soles of my feet, and I want to feel the hot lick of fire between my toes. But first there is the matter of volcanoes, and nuclear weapons, and the sun. It is not yet time to walk on fire.

Chapter 6

Steaming Mountains

I
n Hawaii, in a rented bungalow perched high on a volcanic slope, I sweat with fever. The bungalow stands on lava that flowed in 1926, when Mauna Loa was active. The landscape remains wasted. Everywhere, black rock covers the surface. The origin of the rock: pahoehoe flows that moved through as hot tongues of magma, burning ferns and grass and trees as they advanced, their surfaces quickly hardening to a plastic skin and then slowly cooling, steaming for months, becoming this black rock decorated with ripples and odd designs that look like piles of rope or strings of intestine or dark, hard pillows. Elsewhere the flows moved more quickly and tripped over themselves, piling up when they encountered obstacles and fracturing into jagged, sharp, boot-eating edges, ‘a‘a flows. To fall on ‘a‘a lava is to rip through denim and lacerate skin. ‘A‘a flows, even when cool, are best avoided.

I am avoiding them now, too weak with fever to explore, moving in and out of sleep with no sense of time, fighting a virus that appeared out of nowhere. I share the fever and the bed with my companion, her body as feverish as mine. At 4,500 feet our bungalow requires heat, and the heat comes from wood that burns in a small iron woodstove—a Franklin stove. The fuel comes from trees killed by lava and ash and the drought that came here over the last few decades.

Occasionally my companion and I talk or, impatient for recovery, walk around the bungalow, opening curtains to look at the mist, adding a log to the woodstove. The mist is part moisture, part volcanic fumes, gray and vaguely sulfurous. It blankets the hardened lava that flowed from Mauna Loa, along its southwest rift zone, the rift that sent out lava in 1926 and also in 1868, 1887, 1907, 1919, and 1950. Most of the southwest rift flows reached all the way to the sea, falling into the Pacific to steam and pop and add more land, making the Big Island that much bigger.

“The recent lavas of Mauna Loa,” wrote Henry Washington in 1923, “include aphyric andesine basalt, chrysophyric oligoclase basalt, and picrite-basalt. The ancient lavas include aphyric labradorite basalt, ophitic olivine basalt, feldspar phyric basalt, and picrite-basalt.”

More commonly, to the point of cliché, people wrote of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes.

From Mark Twain in 1866: “We left the lookout house at ten o’clock in a half cooked condition because of the heat from Pele’s furnaces.”

From Edward Smith in 1885, written in the guest register of the renowned Volcano House hotel: “Pele revealed herself in robes of awful majesty. O Goddess of Hawaiian Lore, enshrouded in the mysteries of eternity, who may know the secrets of thy heart? What scientist may wrest from thy creation or know from whence thou art?”

From George C. Patterson in 1920, also written in the guest register of the Volcano House: “Madame Pele—truly, a most fascinating dame, warm and glowing in disposition, yet fiery in temper, ruddy of cheek and eyes of dancing flames. Quite the most interesting lady I have yet had the fortune to meet.”

And from
Time
magazine in 1940: “Pele, goddess of volcanoes, was on a house-hunting expedition when she hovered one day over the Hawaiian archipelago.”

Most of the world’s volcanoes occur where tectonic plates collide. One plate rides over the other, squeezing magma from between the colliding plates to the surface. Mount St. Helens sits above the collision of the Juan de Fuca and North American plates. Krakatau sits above the collision of the Eurasian and Indo-Australian plates. Vesuvius sits above the collision of the African and Eurasian plates.

Hawaii’s volcanoes do not sit above colliding plates, but this in no way lessens their status. They tend to be bigger than the volcanoes of colliding plates. The Big Island’s Mauna Kea rises thirty thousand feet from its base on the seafloor to its peak, all lava piled upon itself, flow layered over flow, far taller than the tallest of the colliding-plate volcanoes, taller even than Everest, from base to peak, although its base is underwater. Mauna Loa, also on the Big Island, stands only one hundred feet lower than Mauna Kea, making it, too, taller than Everest.

And Hawaii’s volcanoes tend to be hotter than the volcanoes arising from colliding plates. Their heat comes from deeper in the earth.

Somewhere beneath me, beneath this mountain of hardened lava, beneath the earth’s crust, convection currents move the very stuff of the planet’s inner self upward and downward in spiraling loops. The crust on which we live, seemingly stable, is nothing more than an onion skin, a shell around the convection currents that underlie all the earth’s surface. It is convection that has gone on for billions of years in material with a consistency far removed from daily human experience. The currents move molten rock under extreme pressure, a slow-moving fluid, hotter than the hottest ovens, hotter than the hottest smelter, hotter than a blast furnace, but extremely dense, with large quantities of iron, untouchable, something like a very hot and very thick syrup but far more viscous and far less translucent. The roots of the convection lie three thousand miles down, near the earth’s solid inner core—rendered solid not because it is somehow magically cooler than the surrounding molten syrup but because of the weight of the thousands of miles of earth above.

The syrup above that solid core—the thick fluid stuff that makes up the entire outer core and mantle—behaves something like the earth’s atmosphere. But the heat that powers movement in the atmosphere comes from the sun, while the heat that powers movement in the outer core and the mantle comes from the energy of collisions that occurred at the time of the earth’s creation, at a time when space junk collided with space junk to form a cohesive mass that fed on more space junk to become a planet, with each collision adding a bit more heat, each collision like a hammer blow that heats the head of a nail, creating movement in its molecules, movement that is nothing more and nothing less than heat. That heat has been escaping for four billion years, leaking slowly.

The heat comes, too, from radioactive rocks. Radioactive elements are heavy elements. Because of their weight, they settled in the core during the formation and aging of the earth. In the core, these heavy elements break down, their nuclei splitting to form lighter elements, smaller atoms. And in breaking down, they release heat.

Just as air circulates in the atmosphere, so viscous liquid rock circulates in giant spiraling convection cells, and the tectonic plates float on top of these cells, moving at the speed of a growing fingernail, riding the currents created by heat. And within one of those circulating cells, the Hawaii hot spot behaves something like a thunderstorm, sending a column of heat upward, right through the middle of a plate, where it cools and then falls back downward, a local phenomenon, but intense. It is a storm with a diameter of forty-five miles, a storm that stays in place as the earth’s crust drifts past. It is a stationary storm that pokes through the moving tectonic plate to create a chain of islands, the newest, the Big Island, to the east, the oldest, Kauai and Niihau, to the northeast, eroded and no longer active. Further along, beyond what is thought of as the Hawaiian Islands, stretching to the west and north, more islands exist, even more eroded than Kauai and Niihau, some now barely above the water, like Midway and Kure Atoll, or underwater altogether, forming a chain that stretches toward the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka, toward the edge of the tectonic plate. The line formed by these eroded mountain islands traces the movement of the tectonic plate above the stylus of the stationary hot spot, the stylus of the stalled storm that originates near the core and sends its heat upward to penetrate and scar the crust.

The hot spot’s heat rises from somewhere well above the core but well below the earth’s surface. As the molten current reaches upward, it finds the bottom of the lithosphere, the hardened outer part of the mantle just below the crust, the bottom layer of the onion skin. The heat that originated near the core, that sent updrafts of molten rock, melts the lithosphere at a depth of fifty miles. That melted rock collects in a magma chamber beneath the earth’s crust. A vast reservoir forms. And that magma chamber flows through a conduit that stretches twenty miles, from the top of the magma chamber to the surface, right through the floating tectonic plate and the thin-skinned crust, seeking a way out, an opening, a vent.

My companion and I drift in and out of fever dreams. When awake at the same time, we drink tea and talk of lava and history and heat. Next to our bed, amid a heap of half-read books, I find my infrared thermometer. I point it at the bare skin of my thigh. “One hundred and two,” I tell my companion. Her own skin comes in at 101.

We talk of fever in the islands. The Hawaiians suffered almost as badly as the Alaskans. In 1778, when Captain Cook showed up in his converted collier, something like a half million islanders lived in a highly structured agricultural society. But Cook’s collier carried disease instead of coal. By 1854 a census counted seventy-three thousand people, including two thousand foreigners. By 1890 fewer than forty thousand native Hawaiians remained.

The Hawaiians, before Cook, learned about the sacred living force, which they called
mana
. They learned about harmony or righteousness, which they called
pono.
They learned about unity with the universe, which they called
lokahi.
They learned that
mana,
pono,
and
lokahi
together formed the triad of health.

From Cook’s men, they learned about syphilis and gonorrhea. They learned about morbidity, mortality, and infertility. In 1804 Hawaiians learned that cholera or typhoid could kill fifteen thousand people in a single epidemic. In 1839 it was mumps. In 1840, leprosy. In 1845 they began a four-year lesson in influenza. In 1853 and 1854, it was smallpox. In 1896 the imported Asian tiger mosquito began offering classes in dengue fever. In 1899 school was in session for bubonic plague.

As a matter of public health, officials established quarantines. They torched infected buildings in Honolulu. On January 20, 1900, they lost control of the fire on Beretania Street and burned down Honolulu’s Chinatown.

The fevers in our rented bungalow suddenly seem irrelevant, our complaints self-indulgent. Dehydrated and shaky, we venture outside, picking our way across the lava landscape of our three-acre compound. Plants grow in scattered patches. Small ferns grow from cracks in the lava, bits of shade that might capture moisture, and there are red-flowered ‘ōhi‘a lehua trees and shrubs, known for their tolerance of heat and their ability to recolonize after fires. The larger trees do not bear leaves. They are long dead, dried and bleached in the sun, their light gray wood striking against the black lava. It is these trees that fall and become firewood for our stove. Scattered dead tree ferns speak of wetter times, rain forest wet, dripping. I find a tree mold, the cast of a tree formed by hardened lava, like a hollow log but made from rock. I find another and then another, and another, a small thicket of tree molds where hot lava flowed around trees and hardened before the trees themselves ignited and burned away. Each mold stands two or three feet above the surface. I can peer down into their hollow cores, into the darkness well below the surface. It is like looking back in time, to 1926, seeing down to the ground’s old surface. It is a reminder that the ground here is not what it seems. The ground on which I stand is neither old nor predictably permanent. A few years before my father was born, this rock emerged from the earth and flowed, heated by the flames of a furnace three thousand miles below.