New Oil and Sea Turtles

(from the October Editor's Note in AsphaltPro Magazine)

My name is Sandy Lender and I’m an environmentalist. It’s good to see I’m among friends here in the asphalt industry. Truly, if you’re a member of the asphalt industry, you’re an environmentalist. You’re a conservationist.

I could harp on this industry’s care of the land we mine for aggregates, our caution keeping dust out of the air, our excellent track record keeping contaminants out of the ground, or our successes protecting workers from what minimal fume our end product emits, but people reading this column already know these things. Instead I’m going to tell you something that might surprise you a little bit.

I’m what you would call a “raving” environmentalist. Yes, I abhor the plastic water bottles. I carry cloth bags with me to the grocery store. In fact, when my first novel was published, I had cloth bags with my book cover printed on them made up to hand out as promotional items to help with that whole “Down With Plastic Bags!” movement. I participate in coastal cleanup days and I volunteer with a sea turtle conservation project called Turtle Time.

That brings us around to the Gulf of Mexico, the large body of water near which I live. I moved here from the Midwest for one reason, but stayed for the conservationist opportunities available to me here. I’m not saying you can’t find worthy and rewarding causes to aid in the upper states—and I encourage everyone to get involved in a cause that brings you a sense of accomplishment and joy—but my heart is at home with the marine issues.

Recently, some workers for BP drilling way out by the Keathly Canyon in the Gulf found an incredibly deep, and incredibly flush, reserve of oil. When I say incredibly deep, I mean that they sunk the drill to the depth of the height of Mount Everest (or a little further). That’s how far into the planet the workers probed to extract the blood we need.

This looks like it’s going to bring in about 3 billion barrels of domestic oil once it’s producing. Now, that’s not going to happen until about 2015, give or take, but it’s supposed to make life nicer around these parts.

Some might say the Tiber Project has really come through.

I stopped to consider what I thought of that. Are the folks at BP putting responsible practices in place for pulling that much product up and getting it to shore? We’ve got a declining loggerhead sea turtle population along the Gulf shores of Florida right now. Will increased activity a few years from now worry those turtles right away from one of their few ideal nesting grounds? Maybe the canyon is far enough away, being about 250 miles southeast of Houston, that the turtles will just gracefully glide on by. Maybe the officers at BP care about marine life management enough to take such things into consideration while they plan for increased profits and increased traffic. I’ll be one of the members of the environmentalist asphalt industry watching to see how they handle it.

Stay Safe
Editor, Sandy Lender (sandy at theasphaltpro dot com)

Tags: AsphaltPro Magazine, Asphalt Pro Magazine, oil, loggerhead sea turtle

Alternative Fuels Lead to Alternative Funding

(from the October Editor's Note of AsphaltPro Magazine)

During my first sojourn into the asphalt industry, I worked for an entrepreneur named Bill Neeley. Bill would often come flying into my office, pull a chair up close to my desk, and say in a half-whisper, half-yawp, "Lady, I've got an idea!" Somehow, that half-whisper filled the room with electricity. No matter what the idea, something exciting was about to happen. Or…maybe something that would have to be handled delicately to bring Bill back down to reality. It depended on the idea, you know. One day Bill introduced me to a book called Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew S. Grove.

That sounded about my speed.

The principle I came away with from the book was this: pay attention to what could be coming down the pike. Now, I want to put a different spin on it. I like to think of it as only the prepared survive. You never know when a great idea is going to affect your industry or your company or your little neck of the woods. In the case of the transportation industry, right now, these next few years, this election season, there's a lot to pay attention to. Bill's little book is stirring in the back of my mind as we watch the various factors that impact highway transportation funding.

Think about the marketplace. Drivers are sick of paying high prices at the gas pump, so they're driving less. Carpooling is back in vogue and family vacations lean closer to home. The less consumers put in their gas tanks, the less they put in the highway funding coffers.

Consider also the alternative fuels that keep new engines running cleanly and efficiently. With less taxable parts going in, there's less funding coming out.

Where do we make up the difference to keep highways and byways safe for the traveling public? Where do we make up the difference to keep American infrastructure strong and the workers building that infrastructure a part of the American economy? And when was the last time we defined "infrastructure" for the taxpayers who are casting their votes next month? One person's idea of infrastructure can encapsulate museums and schools. Let's get our terminology straight with some taxpayer and legislator education while we get our alternative funding ideas set as well. Already, contractors and DOT officials are coming together in places like Colorado and out east where forward thinkers are considering the ramifications of losing highway funding to the alternative fuels revolution. This strategic planning needs to take hold at our state and national meetings this winter. Now is a great time to take advantage of downtime and plan ahead for what's coming down the pike.

My friend Bill passed away a few months ago, and it broke my heart to hear of it. I'd like to think that if he's paying attention now, he'd be pleased to see this industry he was so involved in planning on surviving. I wouldn't say we're being paranoid, but being prepared. And that's survival of the fit.

Stay Safe,
Sandy Lender

Tags: AsphaltPro, Asphalt Pro, alternative fuels, alternative funding