Digging for Energy in Distant Lands
Research Penn State: Digging for Energy in Distant Lands
Istanbul — Today I arrived, feeling jetlagged after eight hours in the air but with my adrenaline pumping. I am staying for a day at a friend’s house on the Strait of Bosphorus. Sitting on the expansive marble balcony, I hear the chugging tankers and freighters maneuvering up the narrow passage of water, the putt-putt of small watercraft, the upbeat music from passing tour boats, and the smooth, steady splash of ferry boats pushing their way from landing to landing. Across the way on the European side, fish restaurants, boat landings, and homes surround the remnants of a massive Byzantine fortress.
This vast and ancient city of 15 million people is the gateway between Europe and Asia. Here the world’s trade passes from the Atlantic through the Mediterranean, then the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, and then to the Black Sea north of Turkey to Georgia and the other former Soviet republics. Some of the tankers and freighters I see churning slowly up and down the Bosphorus will stop to unload some of their stores – agricultural goods, textiles, and other products Turkey needs.
While in Turkey, I will visit with Esra Eren, a Turkish citizen and a graduate student in Penn State’s department of energy and geo-environmental engineering. Eren is studying ways to extract energy-rich compounds from asphaltite, a bituminous rock formed from the breakdown of petroleum. While Eren works with Penn State professor Semih Eser, her research is supported by the Turkish Petroleum Corporation as part of Turkey’s search for new energy sources.
Asphaltite — found in large deposits in the southeastern part of Turkey — contains a complex mixture of organic compounds: hydrocarbons, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen. Other countries have successfully extracted hydrocarbons from asphaltite to use as fuel, but the cost of that technology is very high, so Turkey continues to burn asphaltite like coal – an inefficient use of a potentially high-yielding energy source.
The country continues to search for oil, coal, and natural gas, and it is developing alternative energy sources, like hydropower and geothermal energy. Oil now makes up 40 percent of Turkey’s energy supply, coal 28 percent, and natural gas about 19 percent. Hydroelectric power supplies 2.9 percent of the total (but 36 percent of the electricity), while geothermal, solar, and wind still only account for less than two percent combined.
In State College, Eren had told me of the problem her country faces. “One day the oil will stop because the consumption rate is bigger than the production rate,” she said. “People are trying to find new ways, but the efficiency is lower. Petroleum and conventional resources are still better than geothermal, hydrogen, and other things,” she said. While Turkey generates 63,000 barrels of oil per day, it consumes ten times that amount. Its ratio of natural gas production to consumption is comparable. Turkey has become increasingly dependent on its neighbors in the Caspian region and Central Asia, with whom it has strong economic and historical ties, for oil and gas, according to a business group that monitors the infrastructure of Middle Eastern countries.
Over the next couple of weeks I will check in with Eren as she reconnects with family and former colleagues and collects samples of asphaltite for her research. But for now, I am getting reacquainted with the skyline – the familiar domes and minarets of the Sultanahmet, the Yeni (New) Mosques, and the Aya Sofia, which has seen 1,500 years as a church and a mosque, and is now a museum. Along the banks of the Bosphorous, prosperous merchants maintain antique homes with jutting bay windows, intricate wood-carved ornamentation, and towering balconies that overflow with greenery of tropical proportions. The surrounding hills are planted with more modest homes, small white and off-white boxes packed upon each other and cushioned by patches of trees in a spectacular feat of geometry and physics.
I haven’t been back to Istanbul since this region suffered a devastating earthquake more than five years ago – a cataclysm that killed 18,000 people and injured 49,000. Economic losses were estimated to have been between $10 billion and $40 billion. Paper mills, car manufacturers, metal works, sugar processors, and power plants were damaged or destroyed, and Turkey lost one of its national treasures, the carpet-making village of Hereke, where almost all of Turkey’s most highly-acclaimed carpet-makers, young women and girls, died. While the center of Istanbul was spared, Turkey’s overall economy, already suffering an inflation rate of more 50 percent, was dealt a severe blow, all the more reason why economic resources for ventures such as energy exploration are scarce.
Yet growth and modernization are evident. Driving through Istanbul and later walking down the streets my first day back in four years, I pass a new intercity bus station that would rival some mid-sized airports in the US. I notice more new road construction. The constant din of traffic and horns across the bridges that connect Turkey’s European and Asian sides is rivaled only by the occasional sounding of a tanker or freighter’s monstrous fog horn warning small boat traffic to get out of the way. And morning ‘til night, the ever-present tour boats and ferries crisscross the Bosphorus, as if stitching the two continents together with their wakes.
Find more of these dispatches at http://www.rps.psu.edu/turkey/