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Drumbeat: July 2, 2010
Posted by Leanan on July 2, 2010 - 10:01am
Gas taxes give us a break at the pump
When drivers hit the road in large numbers for the Fourth of July holiday, they will have something extra to celebrate — the lowest gasoline taxes since the early days of the automobile.Holiday drivers will pay less than ever at the pump for upkeep of the nation's roads — just $19 in gas taxes for every 1,000 miles driven, a USA TODAY analysis finds. That's a new low in inflation-adjusted dollars, half what drivers paid in 1975.
Another measure of the trend: Americans spent just 46 cents on gas taxes for every $100 of income in the first quarter of 2010. That's the lowest rate since the government began keeping track in 1929. By comparison, Americans spent $1.18 in 1970 on gas taxes out of every $100 earned.
Although the federal gas tax — 18.4 cents per gallon — hasn't changed since 1993, tax collections are down because today's vehicles go farther on a gallon of gas, cutting tax collections while increasing wear and tear on highways. Inflation since 1993 has eroded the value of the tax to maintain roads.
The postponements and cancellations, after the BP blowout, are going to reduce the world production of oil and gas. Production from older oil fields is declining. From July 2008 to January 2010, OPEC production has dropped by about 2 million barrels per day. The big unknown is whether the two million barrels per day is a temporary reduction by OPEC to support the oil price, or whether it is a normal decline in production capacity. Whichever it is, we are likely to see oil-price volatility—rapid price swings—over the next five years. There are ways of using volatility to make money in the oil futures market. I don't understand the strategies at all, but one tactic to make money from volatility is called the "long bull straddle." Great name, but I'm not about to invest in it.
Special Report: Should BP nuke its leaking well?
MOSCOW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – His face wracked by age and his voice rasping after decades of chain-smoking coarse tobacco, the former long-time Russian Minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist Viktor Mikhailov knows just how to fix BP's oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico."A nuclear explosion over the leak," he says nonchalantly puffing a cigarette as he sits in a conference room at the Institute of Strategic Stability, where he is a director. "I don't know what BP is waiting for, they are wasting their time. Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and the problem is solved."
Total sees tougher rules as storm spreads Gulf slick
HOUSTON/PARIS (Reuters) – The head of oil major Total warned of tougher safety rules that could push up crude prices as the first storm of the Atlantic hurricane season compounded the impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
BP’s Gulf Well Ahead of Schedule to Intercept Leak
(Bloomberg) -- BP Plc’s first relief well aimed at plugging its Gulf of Mexico gusher is ahead of schedule and about 600 feet (182 meters) from intercepting the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.The drilling is “slightly” ahead of schedule, U.S. National Incident Commander Thad Allen said yesterday. The target for intercepting the leaking well and pumping in mud and cement to permanent seal it is still mid-August, he said.
Storm Continues to Hinder Work on Oil Spill
Hurricane Alex, was downgraded Thursday morning to a tropical storm, but it continued to halt progress on containment work in the Gulf of Mexico and threatened to disperse oil farther into the marshes along the Mississippi Delta.
US House votes to help BP rig families
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed a bill aimed at broadening corporations' legal liability for the deaths of workers at sea, in the wake of the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill.Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed the measure, which expands the ability of surviving family members to seek damages, as a step "to ensure appropriate remedies when corporations negligently cause maritime disasters."
Severed Pipe, Hard Hats Seized by U.S. in BP Well Probe
The U.S. Coast Guard seized a section of pipe from BP Plc’s leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico as part of a federal investigation into the catastrophe that killed 11 rig workers and triggered the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Life on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico
As workers fret about their future, CNNMoney.com got a rare look at how an oil rig drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, after the BP oil spill disaster, works.
Petrobras Expects Insurance Costs to Rise After BP Oil Spill, Awad Says
Petroleo Brasileiro SA expects insurance costs for offshore oil exploration to rise after BP Plc’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, said Samir Passos Awad, the company’s head in the Netherlands.
Hurricane could suspend oil capping for two weeks
(CNN) -- Oil could flow unrestricted for two weeks into the Gulf of Mexico if a hurricane moved toward the BP oil spill, according to a timeline from Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who's managing the federal government's response to the disaster.Allen said a plan has been hashed out to deal with this year's hurricane season, which ends November 30. Predicted to be one of the most turbulent on record, the season could bring 14 to 23 named storms, of which eight to 14 could become hurricanes, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.
BP: Production Back Online after Alex
BP said Thursday that production from its western operations in the Gulf of Mexico that had been shut in due to Hurricane Alex is back online.
Scientific Alliance newsletter 2nd July 2010
This week, we look at the thorny issue of Peak Oil. Will we have to deal with the potentially disastrous consequences of demand oustripping supply, or will reserves and output continue to increase?
Has peak oil theory passed its peak?
Opinions vary as to when oil production will peak. But a series of big finds, along with increased efficiency following the recession, may buy us some time.
At this point in history it is almost impossible to find a place "beyond" petroleum. It's not just the scale of the task but its nature. Energy-dense liquids are valuable, and oil is uniquely valuable in its combination of density, ease of storage and transport, and, believe it or not, safety. Every alternative is worse on all metrics, including cost, even at twice today's oil price. If liquid hydrocarbons didn't exist, we would have to invent them.
In case you hadn’t heard, things are still going rather poorly for Planet Earth. The latest batch of evidence is collected in Fuel, a cluttered but still informative and valuable documentary that illustrates the many perils created by our addiction to oil and pushes hard for the development of green energy alternatives.
Crude Oil Trades Around $73, Heads for Weekly Loss Before U.S. Jobs Report
Crude oil traded around $73 a barrel in New York, heading for its first weekly decline in four, before a U.S. report that may show the world’s biggest economy lost jobs for the first time this year.
Hedge Funds Shutting in Europe as Energy Slide Accelerates Investor Exodus
Energy hedge funds in Europe are collapsing after investor withdrawals forced managers to scale back bets amid sliding prices for oil, coal and electricity.
Oil May Fall as Home Sales, Jobs Signal Faltering Recovery, Survey Shows
Crude oil may fall next week as data on manufacturing, jobless claims and home sales bolster concern the U.S. economic recovery is faltering, a Bloomberg News survey showed.Twenty of 38 analysts, or 53 percent, forecast crude oil will decline through July 9. Ten respondents, or 26 percent, predicted that futures will be little changed and eight saw an increase. Last week an equal number of analysts forecast a gain or drop.
Travel surge expected for July 4 weekend
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- A surge in Fourth of July travel is expected this weekend compared to last year's slump, driven by signs of life in the economy, according to the motorist group AAA. But the impact of the Gulf oil spill on coastal tourism in the region is unclear.
Saudi Aramco May Cut Asia August Heavy Oil Price as Refiner Profits Drop
Saudi Arabian Oil Co., the world’s biggest crude exporter, may cut the official selling price of its August-loading Heavy grade to Asia as processing profits for refiners producing fuel oil have declined.Arab Heavy, the country’s densest grade, may drop by 35 cents a barrel from the July price, according to the median estimate of a survey of nine refiners from Japan, Taiwan, India, China and South Korea. The company, known as Saudi Aramco, is expected to issue prices next week. Arab Light, Aramco’s largest export type, may drop by 10 cents a barrel, said the refiners, who asked to remain unidentified, citing company policy.
Russia June oil output hits record high, gas falls
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia boosted its oil production to a new record high in June and kept output above 10 million barrels per day for the 10th month in a row, allowing it to remain the world's top oil producer.Energy Ministry data showed on Friday that Russia's June oil output rose to 10.13 million barrels per day (bpd), up from 10.08 million bpd in May and the previous record high of 10.12 million bpd in March.
Daqing, China's largest oilfield, produced 809,450 barrels per day of crude in the first half of this year.The level was about 1.2% higher than the 799,876 bpd in 2009, the Xinhua news agency reported.
Mexico's declining oil output worries planners
MEXICO CITY (UPI) -- Mexico's declining oil output is a potential major challenge for the country and its neighbors, including the United States, because of its inevitable fallout in all sectors of the economy.Already, because of uneven distribution of oil wealth and other factors, Mexico is riven by crime, drug trafficking and poverty-related issues that remained unsolved when the country produced more oil than it does now, figures made public this week showed.
The seventh-largest oil producer in the world -- the third-largest in the Western Hemisphere -- faces urgent tasks ahead to reverse the decline in production from the giant Cantarell field.
Gulf Coast to Dominate Future Shale Gas Production
The Gulf Coast region will produce most of the shale gas in the U.S. in 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)'s Annual Energy Outlook 2010. The Gulf Coast, which contains the Barnett, Haynesville, Cotton Valley, Bossier and Eagle Ford shale plays, will supply 1.5 Tcf of shale gas production in 2020 and 2.3 Tcf in 2035.
Russia and Belarus put gas war behind them with additional contract
Moscow/Minsk - Russia and Belarus have ended their gas dispute by signing an additional contract on the transport of gas to the West, the Belarus gas company Beltrangas said Friday.Beltrangas has signed an agreement raising the price that Russian state company Gazprom will pay for the transport of its gas, Beltrangas director Vladimir Mayorov told the news agency Interfax.
Shell Says Changed Australian Resources Profit Tax `Strikes Right Balance'
Royal Dutch Shell Plc, among companies planning more than $40 billion of investment in Queensland gas projects, said Australia’s revised resources tax offers the appropriate benefits for the public and companies.Prime Minister Julia Gillard, 48, reached a pact with mining companies on the tax proposals, ending a dispute that cost her predecessor Kevin Rudd his job. As part of the change, the 26-year-old Petroleum Resource Rent Tax will be extended to cover onshore as well as offshore oil and gas projects.
A robust offshore sector requires responsible corporate behavior combined with a responsible and firm regulator.
4 killed in Taliban attack on U.S. aid agency compound in Afghanistan
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Taliban militants attacked the compound of a U.S. aid agency subcontractor in northern Afghanistan early Friday, killing at least four people and wounding 20 others, government officials said.
Hyundai powers up its hybrid strategy
Seoul — There’s an ongoing debate in business over whether it's best to strive for "first mover advantage," the idea being that the pioneer in a certain market will grab huge market share before the latecomers pile in.In the burgeoning market for automotive hybrids, Hyundai is betting it's better to come late to the party than never.
Chevy Volt bound for Texas, New York area
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- General Motors is adding four more states -Texas and the Northeast states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut - to the list of those where the Chevrolet Volt electric car will be available during its initial rollout in late fall, the company said Thursday.The Volt is now slated to be available in a total of seven markets initially. The others are California, Washington, D.C., and GM's home state of Michigan.
Carry on cruising - but watch the oil price
I'd suggest that if Carnival and its peers can't pass all of that volatility on to customers, it must come up with a cunning plan to either reduce oil's impact on the bottom line by increasing overall prices, engage in some massive and risky hedging or think about new technologies and energy sources.I don't subscribe to the idea that oil prices will continue to rocket as we approach peak oil, but I do think oil will continue to trade in a $50 to $110 range. If the big airline guys are seriously considering the idea of an all biofuel plane, surely we must be only years away from the first cruise ship powered entirely by biowaste.
Where do commuters hurt the most?
IBM's latest "Commuter Pain" index indicates that the traffic in Beijing and Mexico City is way worse than it is in Los Angeles or New York. Big-city traffic is never pleasant - but there's hope as well as hassle, thanks to some high-tech traffic strategies currently under construction. That's the reason why IBM started measuring the pain in the first place.
‘Sketchy Future’ Forecast at DMEA/CRES Energy Conference
MONTROSE – From the time of Ronald Reagan through the early 21st century, the belief that the future would resemble the present, only more so, generally held true. No matter who was in the White House or the governor’s mansion, the prices of real estate rose and those of computers declined. And everything got bigger.But speaker after speaker at a recent conference about energy challenged whether that maxim will hold true going forward. Instead of big coal-fired power plants, such as is proposed in the Four Corners area, they described many smaller sources of efforts, such as harnessing the power of falling water in mountain streams or even agriculture irrigation ditches.
There is a dawning recognition that the growth model adopted by the industrialised countries over the past half-century no longer works. Our model of growth has simply become uneconomic, with more stuff not only failing to bring additional wellbeing in the so-called rich world, but also storing up impending environmental shocks, most notably peak oil and runaway climate change.
How plants get by when pollinators vanish
Pity the birds and the bees: disease, climate change and the human urge to pillage our environment mean they are in decline around the world.So what about the plants that rely on them to spread their seed? A rare "live" study looking at what happens when you deprive plants of pollinators shows that evolution can step in to help them cope. But don't get the champagne out just yet.
Great Beach Reading for a Hot Planet
Just in time for summer, a slew of new books about climate change are hot off the press. These new works by some of the leading climate change reporters and thinkers are not what you’d call beach reading–if the worst that these authors fear comes to pass, our present day beaches will be submerged by the end of the century.
'Losing Our Cool' asks to turn down the air conditioning
Research scientist Stan Cox's book addresses the damage A/C does and offers alternative ways to deal with heat.
Obama May Back Down on Carbon Regulation Deadline to Court Republicans
How much is President Obama willing to compromise with Republicans in order to produce an energy bill this month? A GOP senator present at Obama’s Cabinet Room meeting to discuss energy on Tuesday said that Obama appeared prepared to postpone one of his most serious threats to the country’s top emitters of greenhouse gases in order to bring a handful of Republicans on board.
Climate Scientist Cleared of Altering Data
An American scientist accused of manipulating research findings on climate science was cleared of that charge by his university on Thursday, the latest in a string of reports to find little substance in the allegations known as Climategate.An investigative panel at Pennsylvania State University, weighing the question of whether the scientist, Michael E. Mann, had “seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities,” declared that he had not.
Monbiot: The IPCC messed up over 'Amazongate' – the threat to the Amazon is far worse
Well this becomes more entertaining by the moment. Those who staked so much on the "Amazongate" story, only to see it turn round and bite them, are now digging a hole so deep that they will soon be able to witness a possible climate change scenario at first hand, as they emerge, shovels in hand, in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert.
Kyoto may push factories to pollute more-UN report
LONDON (Reuters) - A Kyoto Protocol scheme may be encouraging projects to emit more greenhouse gases because of incentives to earn carbon offsets from subsequently destroying these, a U.N. report said. The projects under investigation are the most lucrative under Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and account for more than half carbon offsets sold under the scheme. Limiting their output could impact carbon prices.
Britain Curbing Airport Growth to Aid Climate
In a bold if lonely environmental stand, Britain’s coalition government has set out to curb the growth of what has been called “binge flying” by refusing to build new runways around London to accommodate more planes.
Per-Capita Emissions Rising in China
A growth in emissions in China and India "completely nullified" reductions made in the developed world in 2009.
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I did some analysis based on Berman's post from a few days ago:
(Estimated Oil Flow Rates From the BP Mississippi Canyon Block 252 “Macondo” Well)
I think he messed up the statistics because of his use of a truncated data set from the MMS and the log-normal distribution he used.
I wasn't sure exactly how he got his data but I essentially had to screen scrape the data off of about 18 PDF files giving the Maximum Production Rate (MPR) going back to 1975: http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/pubinfo/repcat/product/MPR.html
I plotted the results histogram against a model of dispersive aggregation for reservoir sizes. The maximum rate is then a simple proportional draw-down from the reservoir size. Bigger reservoirs have a higher rate and smaller reservoirs have a smaller rate -- nothing to argue about here as it is a pretty safe approximation. The way you read this histogram is that the flat regions have the highest frequency.
The integrated underneath the two curves is equal and about 16.5 million barrels per day peak. Don't confuse this with any rate attainable from the GOM; it is high because it sums up the peaks from a span of years. The median value is 200 barrels per day.
The interesting point in the curve is that the model predicts a higher peak rate for the largest reservoirs, the curve goes off the graph to above 400,000 barrels per day. Now, I would think that the operators would never try to have that throughput from a single well. So what do they do? Of course they split it into several wells to extract the maximum amount from that reservoir and essentially throttle that from an individual well.
Since the total amount is conserved between the two curves, the bulge that you see in the data is the extra wells drilled to make up for the excess. My model is totally based on the principle of Maximum Entropy applied to reservoir sizing, and the reordering of the rank histogram is caused by artificial constraints set by human intervention. Notice that all the small reservoirs effectively require no throttling.
The point of this comment is that working wells are likely throttled but the Macondo could conceivably be higher than the maximum of 50,000 barrels per day that Berman suggested. The operators have no way of throttling it until the relief wells are put in place. Of course this kind of throughput is very rare, as at the most a couple of dozen out of 10,000 reservoirs will get this big and generate this potential, but this is the way that nature operates, a big fat-tail effect.
Web, could you extrapolate that reservoir size assumption of yours up to the scale of the Orinoco, say, 1.3 trillion barrels of reservoir size, and let us know what the flowrate would be? Undoubtedly from more than one well of course, but many claim that the amount of flow matters more than the size of the reservoir, so I am interested in what flowrate your technique here would claim for the worlds largest oilfield might be?
Most of my analysis I can also apply to Relative Species Abundance which I posted to TOD
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6685#comment-666171
The key point on doing this kind of analysis is that you have to treat entities that are somewhat "alike". For living organisms it means that you look at species of coral. Or compare species of trees in some basin. But you don't compare species abundance of moths against trees against coral because it doesn't apply as well.
Orinoco is quite unlike the reservoirs that we are looking at so I would not look at that in particular. Neither would I look at tar sands or oil shale deposits.
But back to your point. The amount of flow may matter more than the size of the reservoir but on average bigger reservoirs will generate more flow and smaller reservoirs will generate less flow. I would look at Cantarell though and that would definitely have to be split up into many wells, because the flow rate would punch it through the roof. That is why I point out the bulge in the curve as it is a statistical result of this subdivision of flows.
This is a variation of the principle of least action that you can't really argue with. And we are trying to do the best we can from a forensic perspective. It is a sad state of affairs that no one seems to want to do this rather obvious kind of analysis. The ecologists are way more advanced in the mathematics of bean counting than the geologists certainly are.
I'm not sure how to interpret your results.
On one hand, flow rates depend on porosity and viscosity, which are presumably independent of well size.
Then they depend on the length of production casing immersed in oil, which would be longer for bigger fields, if all fields were the same shape, so there is some relationship there.
But most of all they depend on the decisions of the well operators, which in turn depend on finances and technology, which are again independent of well size. Maybe the bigger fields justify more expensive and therefore productive technology? I don't know.
It seems to be a bit like predicting how much zebra will graze, depending on whether they are in bigger or smaller patches of savannah. I can't see that the size of the patch makes a significant difference, unless one can come up with a plausible theory of why size might influence consumption.
Would you agree that an average flow rate must exist?
Again averages of these values must exist. The principle of maximum entropy can fill in the rest.
On average, an operator will extract more out of a bigger reservoir which is straightforward reasoning.
A bigger herd of zebra will consume a larger proportional amount of grass. Larger herds will congregate on larger savannahs.
Could you estimate the size of the savannah by how many zebra you observe?
Obviously these are all indirect proxy measurements, as it is the best we can do -- all because the powers that be don't want to release any information.
To interpret the results, the probability is the count divided the total count for finding a flow rate of that size. A flow of 50,000 or more is very rare when we consider all reservoirs extracted so far.
Rhetorical question games? Of course averages exist...the average American has one breast and one testicle....seeing as how they are average, they must be all over the place! Ever seen one?
Oh please. Get your checkbook. Go here:
http://www.ihs.com/Contact/directions.htm
Ask them how much they want. Write that number on the check. Give them the check. They will give you the data. It is not the job of the TPTB to provide you with data.
Of course it is their job to give us the data free of charge.
There is a huge double-standard going on here. A few academic climate scientists make a few jokes and lose track of some data and half the political spectrum gets all huffy about them intentionally "hiding" their data. They make the claim that serious accusations need serious substantiation. The reactionaries state that we cannot make changes to our society based on potentially faulty climate science.
Yet, it is perfectly OK for the US government to bury data in some vault or give it to some commercial company so they can make money off of it. Yet our BAU society depends on us having good data to base policy decisions on. Like I said, a huge double standard going on here and no one in the media picks up on this.
I suppose I could have purchased the data that I used for my plot from MMS, as they were selling it for $80 on a disk. Or I suppose I could drive down to MMS.
Publicly available is not the same as "give us the data for free".
Policy decisions are based on the work of those who have the data. You usually aren't complimentary of their results though.
It has to be free, just like certain groups demanded that the climate scientists give up their data on demand for free. After all, they were paid with "tax dollars". This is a no-brainer decision.
Free is not a requirement of "publicly available" when it comes to oil and gas information. If you want oil and gas data, go buy it.
Somebody will but it and store it on a public archive. And then the lawyers will come out of the woodwork. The only reason that I would buy it would be to turn around and open source it.
You are going to ruin all the fun! Web loves to spin these "math explains all" routines which absolutely come unglued when confronted with the actual operational requirements, industry behavior and even the basic science involved. He's great fun to watch, and a good sport about it as well.
You forgot to include permeability by the way, differential pressure, cross sectional area, but you are certainly thinking about it better than a "one distribution fits all" approach.
No the real fun is that I am absolutely right. And to top that off, I am so right that this has opened up a whole new area of analysis that I have applied to a bunch of other topics.
Excellent! And when might we see it in Mathematical Geology? Or does this new analysis fall under your open science theory?
Doesn't have to go in a journal. It falls under the painfully obvious category.
Did you ever look at the distribution of earthquake magnitudes?
Do you think a journal would actually publish something this obvious? It would make all the geologists look like idiots. Its essentially maximum entropy randomness applied to structural breakdown. Only one possible power-law is possible and that power is exactly 1.
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/02/quaking.html
Mainstream science is replete with scientists wanting to make things overtly complicated.
No. Can you demonstrate to me how a best fit distribution to earthquake magnitudes will teach me something of value? Anywhere? Most interested in something oily or gassy of course, but can an earthquake person predict better using your favorite scheme?
I have as much a fascination as learning stuff as you do Web, but I am as interested in what was known about oil depletion in Federal regulations in 1918 as I am whether or not some made up on the fly distribution fits this data some infinitesimal fraction of a degree better than that one.
Obvious isn't the problem. Of what value is another curve fitting exercise?
That would depend on the added value which hopefully comes with the complication. Is there a single thing related to all this curve fitting which adds value, somewhere, somehow? It improves someones mousetrap or fine tunes a previously hazy prediction?
Certainly I have watched with fascination as you apply your wizardry to oil and gas topics, but haven't seen anything yet of value. Matter of fact, I have occasionally completed some wizardry of my own, and when it saw the light of day it was like someone chopped off my arms with a chainsaw. Learned this ol' engineer it did.
Something of value? You were the one that pointed to Orinoco. Earthquake magnitudes are pure fat-tail effects. I want to know the likelihood of a magnitude 10 earthquake, and to see how it fits in with the rest of the measured earthquakes. Orinoco is like a magnitude 10 of reservoirs if you want to stay rooted in reality.
As always, something stated as having "no value" is only of no value if it has been written down elsewhere. I would still like to know where all this prior-art resides that you keep on referring to.
I did point to the Orinoco. Its size has been established for more than a couple of decades now, of what additional value is your "fat tail" hypothesis in that regard? The world already knows its the largest oil accumulation already found (well, the regular, non peaker world anyway) and the means used to determine its size were quite a bit more scientifically based than throwing a dart at your fat tail distribution, somewhere above Ghawar, and below infinity.
What is "prior-art"?
The science and math behind power-law distributions is a fascinating topic by itself.
Orinoco fitting on the dispersion power law, cumulative order of 1/x, makes it mighty unlikely, but that is one single data point. Compare that to 30,000 reservoirs that fit perfectly on the power-law curve. I don't know what to make of it but to say this is not like the others. Its like finding the coelacanth or black swan.
Prior-art is from the intellectual property field, saying something has been invented before.
Did you try Phys rev, Geophysical Researhc, Icarus. This is the kind of stuff that would be accepted. Just title it: A new model based on ....
If you realy dont want to publish in a real scientific journal elsewhere just send it to Xarchiv. AT least, scientist, will read it.
Flowing oil, defined reasonably as long chain hydrocarbons which can flow to a wellbore, contained within traps and structures by seals, saturated with natural gas to the point of it being a drive mechanism and derivative economic product, subject to Darcys Law for flow characteristics, propelled by differential pressure happily created by a wellbore, isn't enough "alike" for you? Certainly steaming sand and cooking oil shale are not even really flowing oil at all, but that is not the case of the Orinoco. What basis do you use to exclude oil from your oil flowrate concept? Because one reservoir is under water, and another is not? Certainly that doesn't bother the reservoir much. One is certainly under more natural pressure than another, but that applies to all the reservoirs randomly contained within your sample distribution as well.
Oh, I rarely argue with whatever your favorite "principle" is, I generally just dispute its applicability.
Part of this I might agree with. I've got 2 of Evelyn Pielou's books on my desk. But your standard assumption that no one does this analysis is incorrect.
OK, I stand corrected. They do this analysis, but they do it completely wrong. Thanks for clearing that misconception up.
If you want to include Orinoco, fine. It is one part in 10,0000 which won't make a difference.
The characteristic (median) reservoir size is 0.3 million barrels and the characteristic flow rate is 200 barrels per day. That encompasses about 10,000 GOM reservoirs tabulated.
So the mean proportional draw-down per day is 200 barrels/day / 300,000 barrels * 365 days/year = 0.24/year. Which defines the average GOM depletion rate of 24% per year.
For the USA, the top end is likely Thunderhorse at 1 billion barrels, but the maximum output that Berman found was about 50,000 barrels per day.
so 50,000/1,000,000,000 * X = 200/300,000
which means Thunderhorse would need about X=13 wells to meet the average depletion rate, assuming they were using the highest-throughput wells.
If Orinoco is 1.3 trillion, that makes it 1300 times as big as Thunderhorse, so you would need 17,000 wells to get the 24% average depletion rate.
OK, Orinoco is big. I do all my analysis with fat-tail statistics and it does not preclude something this big from occurring. I get a probability of 300,000/(300,000+1.3e12)=0.0000002 or an odds of 1 out of 4 million wells found using the statistics from the GOM. The odds are against it because we might be 10 to 100x below this value in number of reservoirs exploited worldwide so far.
Just the fact that we can talk about it in these terms makes the model very useful, wouldn't you think?
Not in the least.
As long-time commenter Pitt the Elder said the other day, TOD used to engage in lots of spirited data-driven technical discussions, but it has drained away the last few years.
Its pretty sad that given the fact that we all acknowledge that oil is a finite resource, no one cares ("Not in the least") about correctly quantifying what "finite" equates to.
The question I highlighted, and answered, was not one requiring a numeric answer. It was related to the value of a thing.
Organizations have quantified large chunks of what "finite" is, using the data you wish was free, and presented their results.
I have no objection in sticking with those sources until better ones come along. Curve fitting to an answer, while easy, and similar to Colins work in the 1998 Scientific America article, is not a substitute for the geology involved. "Not in the least" summarized that idea.
You keep on mentioning that the secret to oil depletion lies in the Federal Regulations of 1918.
One time I had a run-in with the Cold-Fusion fool Martin Fleischman who proclaimed that my results were old news and already demonstrated back in 1928. This was during a presentation so I was taken aback slightly. Afterward I realized that the guy was just bluffing and picking on a poor grad student. Several years later I just blew chunks when I found out that the same Martin Fleischmann was involved in the biggest scientific scam of the last century -- room temperature fusion. Trust me, I know bluffing when I see it.
Please don't insult me by pretending you don't understand where that comment originates. You once claimed that oil depletion had been hidden by the world, implying mysterious conspiracies and secret information, unearthed only through super-human efforts of modern peakers and places like this website. I simply used historical information to contradict a ridiculous claim. Knowledge of oil depletion in reservoirs and its effects on the value of ones holdings had already moved into the legal arena by 1918. Anyone with 3 neurons and a decent library could have found out about this stuff prior to your birth.
I'll remember that if you ever invite me to play poker.
No one had any notions of stochastic arguments on 1918. Google "superstatistics" and you will see what I am talking about.
I asked you when we started this conversation if you really wanted to start in on a topic upon which you appeared fundamentally confused.
Stochastic arguments are not in any way required to understand the basics of oil depletion. This obviously follows if the chronological order you have stated is true.
No but required to understand how it plays out.
I'm not sure of that in the least. I don't think the basic uncertainty is within "understanding" how it plays out in the least. We all know the answer to the strawman of infinite growth in a finite system.
Link up top: Russia June oil output hits record high, gas falls
Another report says, Russia Holds Oil Output at Record in June, same as in May. However exports drop 4.2 percent from June of last year despite production increasing 2.4 percent over the same period. ELM in action?
However even Russians admit that their production has reached a plateau, perhaps a peak plateau.
The usually oil supply bullish EIA says Russian oil production will be down in the second half of this year and will continue to fall next year. Highly unlike the EIA to be so bearish on oil production but they are predicting the same fate for US production. But I expect both Russian and US production to fall slightly further than the EIA is predicting.
Table 3b. Non-OPEC Crude Oil and Liquid Fuels Supply
Ron P.
"Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and the problem is solved."
Sure ! ... Energy waves travel much further through water than through air. On top of that, they are being reflected by layers of water and underwater mountains.
In other words, you can not control energy waves, and they might burst pipe-lines hundreds of miles away.
Way to go ! Let's try it.
yep , wear your mushroom with pride!
What you really need a Quark Bomb ......
wikki link warning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whoops_Apocalypse
Forbin
The jobs report was even worse than expected
Anybody know where the time and a half for hours over forty per week came from? Did companies decide to pay people 1.5 times their hourly rate after 40 hours out of the goodness of their hearts?
How many hours per week were being worked on the Deepwater Horizon rig prior to the blowout?
You'd have to ask someone with actual experience like Rockman, but my guess is that the folks on oil rigs are considered live-in employees.
It is cheaper for an employer to pay overtime rates to an existing employee than it is to hire a new worker to do those hours. Unfortunately, medical benefits, social security and medicare contributions, and other expenses provide a high barrier to creating new jobs. Another point is that existing employees know the job, and as much as possible, overtime is given to the best and most productive workers.
A new hire is always a gamble.
Finally, employees love overtime pay more than they hate the extra work.
Not me. When i worked for these Nazis at a warehouse a few years ago, forced overtime was always in play. I wanted to stab my eyes out because the work was so pointless (we were putting small boxes in big boxes) and on top of that we were timed, checked for accuracy and brainwashed. My boss was Bill Lumbergh only worse and evil. I ended up dropping to part time because i wanted to drive into oncoming traffic on the commute home. I find most work today pointless unless it involves growing things (and porn wouldn't be bad either).
I have a brother who works in a factory (rare now) and they canned all kinds of people this past fall/winter. Now they can hardly keep up and work overtime constantly. They won't hire anyone.
It's great you have goals in mind for future work, that's a good first step. And I too like the idea of working in those fields.
You could just start doing it on your own and maybe something will come of it...
Thanks for sharing!
@mymomIshot
Well, now we know where the Soylent Green is made.
Is it impolite to ask why you killed your mom?
(my apologies, but thanks. The inadvertant mordant entendres made me smile.)
A soylent flavor for everyone. Yummm.
In the late 90's I had a job that was able to forego the payment of time and a half by listing themselves as a Trucking firm, even though most of us drove vans and cars or pickups. In 2000 I got a job working for a company that had a six to nine month training cycle for each new employee, and most of them had to pass a top secret clearence investigation to advance. When 2001 rolled around, we were working 70 hour weeks, or rather 10 hours a day for 3 months straight. Once I worked 40 hours in 3 days. The job was easy, to a point, but only after you had learned a few thousand pages of information and knew a lot about things you might not ever be able to tell people about.
I loved maps before I got the job, in fact it was likely the reason I did get the job, but I can say I know more about the world than I care to think about now.
Lucky for us they paid time and a half, unlike the other employer which was able to game the system.
That is where a person on a set salary can get taken advantage of real fast by employers, when he/she has to work long hours and not get anything extra. Lots of food service jobs and small shops sometimes pull those tricks. Labor laws do vary state to state and nation to nation. But I won't go into the labor of other countries, mainly that is a whole new can of worms.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world,
Hugs From Arkansas.
CEO-
Sounds like fun :) *puts gun to the head*
Did your boss ever come around to every person with a shiny gold coin (a $1 Sacajawea coin) because accuracy for that day was %100 (no errors) and make it seem like you were getting a Kruggerand!???
My "Triple Crown" blackberries are just turning red/purple... yet some are still flowering. They somehow make it up here because of our deep snow.
During the days of the Mapping job, there was a section of time where we got little handmade pins for each section of a project we were involved in, trophies of a sort. Then later the work had to be prefect, making no more than 3 errors in the collection of up to, 50,000 datapoints. The intense prefection needed has it's breaking point for most people. Morale in the company took a nosedive for a while, it did not help when a bottom line corporate boss came in and fired 10% across the board, in a once family owned company where no one was fired just because a dollar needed to be saved. 2005 was a bad year all around for a lot of people, some of us even before katrina.
On the garden side of things, I harvested a baseball sized cantaloupe today, ripe and sweet tasting, odd that it has cousins that are normal sized on plants from the same seed pack. We canned some tomatoes yesterday, had some fresh with dinner and have given away about 10 pounds as well. Though the heat is not going doing the vines any good. I will at least not have to worry about where to plant the fall crops, the tomatoes will be long gone by Sept. Nice to eat fresh tomatoes again, We don't buy them very often when we don't have them growing.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world,
Hugs From Arkansas.
how is that ? fica is constant up to the maximum, matched by the employer. overtime, unless the amount is above the maximum, is subject to the same rate as a new hire would be.
hourly employees making more than the fica maximum are probably rare.
Talk to any employer. New hires are expensive gambles. Just look at the cost of covering medical insurance for an extra employee as a $5,000 to $12,000 hurdle. You don't have to pay extra medical plan costs when you work an existing employee an extra thirty or even forty hours of overtime. Thus the cost of hiring new full-time employees is often prohibitive, and some medical insurance usually has to be provided (at employer's cost) for part-timers who work more than a few hours a week.
By its laws, the U.S. government and state governments and county and municipal governments (not to mention labor union contracts) have made it increasingly expensive to hire new workers. Thus it is cheaper--and hence more profitable--to get as much overtime out of existing workers as possible.
Even in Canada where health insurance comes essentially from the government, the same logic apply. Overtime is cheaper because it is much easier for the management.
Add back in the 650,000 who dropped out of the work force last month, a huge number of folks who can't find work, which I guess they don't call unemployed anymore, and the #'s look even worse.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm
Found this interesting. China's Impending Collapse
I don't know what effect a Chinese total economic collapse will have on the world economy but I doubt it will be pretty. But the world economy is built on a house of cards anyway and what trigger will cause a world collapse could be anything from peak oil to China to.... you name it.
I know, just more doomer porn from a consummate doomer.
Ron P.
Note that China's impending financial and economic collapse is built into the economic predictions I made on yesterday's drumbeat. Less Chinese demand for oil=>falling oil prices.
With China's economy collapsing I don't expect U.S. GDP could rise. And note what I wrote yesterday what happens with future oilproduction when oil prices drop a lot.
Our exports to China, such as corn, are unlikely to be affected much by financial collapse in China; in any case we don't export nearly as much to China as we import from them. Hence there will be little or no effect on U.S. real GDP when China's economy contracts into a recession or depression.
It is hard to imagine that financial collapse including the wiping out of all the big banks in China would do anything to weaken the dollar; on the contrary, hot money is likely to flow into dollars as prospects in China worsen.
Don, I am left speechless. A Chinese collapse would have little effect on the US dollar? The US economy and the Chinese economy are tied together to an extent that many economist refer to them as simply "Chimerica", one single economy. If China started dumping dollars on the secondary market, this could cause a panic leading to collapse. China owns $800 billion in U.S. Treasuries. And you can bet that if the Chinese economy started to collapse the very first thing they would would be to try to raise cash by selling all their US debt.
That would lead to a near total collapse of the dollar.
Ron P.
"raise cash by selling all their US debt"
Meaning they would exchange their dollars for .... for what?
Doom, if you own stock and it starts to crash... what do you do? You sell of course. And what do you get? Dollars of course, but not as much as you would have gotten if you had sold earlier. And the longer you wait, the less you get.
It would be the dumping of the debt instruments that would cause the dollar to collapse. So they would get top dollar for the first they sold, and less as they dumped more and more.
Doom, did you really need to ask a question with such an obvious answer? Did you assume that the dollar would go to zero overnight? No Doom, it does not work that way. It never works that way. But some collapses happen much faster than others.
It doesn't matter what currency they get for the bonds they sell, they can exchange that currency for any currency they desire on the Forex. As long as there is a Forex of course. If the world economy collapses then the Forex will likely collapse with it. But that will not happen overnight either. It may take years.... or months.... or weeks. I doubt seriously it will happen in only days however. ;-)
Ron P.
See TechGuy below. And I think it does matter what currency they could potentially sell dollars (dollar securities -- almost same thing) for. The Euro?
Probably not as big deal as you think. Fed would just buy it all, Consider that the Fed bought 1.25 Trillion in MBS, and I think between 300 and 400 Billion in US Treasuries before the shutdown thier Quantative Easing programs. The Fed also probably owns several hundred more Billions in Security that the used to prop up US Banks (ie Maden lane 1, 2 and 3). Banks gave the Fed worthless paper investments in exchange for cash. Between 2008 and 2010, the Fed printed or gaurenteed $23 Trillion (most of it in gaurentees). The Fed will gladly convert US treasuries into Dollars, so that china can spend them and help prevent Deflation. I have no doubt that the Fed is already working on QE version 2.0
Although a shutdown in China might have some doomerish issues. There are lots and lots of companies that depend on Chinese Exports, as China has out prices with ridiculous Cheap labor a lot of US manufacturing. Many US Factories closed up and shipped the equipment to China. I suspect there are some crucial finished and non-finished goods that only come from China, that has the potential to criple the US economy. A Civil war could also happen causing havoc over global trade. A Civil war in a Nuclear power could be a very dangerous event.
I could see big riots in China that shutdown or even destroy factories and equipment if China's economy does implode. If China does collapse soon, the US dollar would probably strengthen again as it reasonly did with the European sovergn crisis, (as well as back in 1997-1998 with the asian economic crisis).
Eventually the US will have a series debt problem. We are going to become like Greece, Argentina or Zimbabwe. It will happen when investors and businesses and consumers loose confidence in the US dollar. I don't know when this will happen, definately not this year, and probably not next year. Most certainly before the decade is done. Looks like we are about to fall into another recession, which will continue to get worse until the gov't starts spending again and pumping in money into the economy. The US economy never recovered, it was just that the Federal gov't spend Trillions making it seem like there was a real recovery. Now that all of the stimulous dollars have been spend, its falling back down. The US will never recover, but it might limp along for a while as long as the gov't can pump in trillions.
Considering that Mid-term elections are coming up, the Republicans are going to do there best to block any more stimulous bills until after the election. If the economy is in bad shape in November, many Democrats will lose there seats. its possible that deflation might get pretty ugly if they are able to block spending bills.
Ron,
The Chinese economy depends on the U.S. economy, but the U.S. Financial Institutions and major exports and real GDP do not depend on China.
If China stops buying our bonds or starts selling them, no big deal, because the Fed can buy up any amount it wants to by writing checks based on thin air.
China's collapse will be bad for the Chinese, but it won't hurt the U.S., though stocks might go down a bit just from general nervousness. The dollar is likely to strengthen from any Chinese collapse.
Be happy, don't worry.
How can China's economy collapse when they make all those products for Walmart? I bought a piece of luggage with Swiss symbols on it, only to find out later it was made in China.
Sure, maybe their real estate is levelling off, but collapse - China? After all these years of double digit growth? I guess it's possible, but these stories have been circulating for about two years now. Maybe the article is just a ploy by Motley Fool to get people back into their stock picks.
Strangely, China is starting to tax exports. You tell me why... I don't have a clue.
Craig
Civilian noninstitutional population increased by 191,000
Civilian labor force decreased by 652,000
Employed decreased by 301,000
Unemployed increased by 350,000
People Not in the labor force increased by 842,000
In spite of all that Unemployment rate was down from 9.7 to 9.5
The bottom line is we needed 842,000 new jobs to maintain the status quo of a month earlier.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm
How has Macondo effected the stats?
I don't exactly know, but the employment survey is usually taken around the 12th of the month, so things may be worse now. Also those unemployed for example, in the fishing industry, may have been quickly re-employed as oil clean up workers.
My guess is that it did not significantly affect June numbers, but that could change in the future.
Unemployment rate is down because of that labor force decrease.
652,000 people gave up looking for jobs, and that means they are no longer counted as unemployed.
Right:
I posted this to show how corrupt the BLS unemployment rate actually is.
If you don't like the standard BLS method of computing unemployment, there is an alternative method of calculating unemployment, which shows unemployment hovering around 17%:
Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
I read all the tables each month (links bottom of the page)
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
What constitutes giving up? I never understood how they arrived at that conclusion. Is it because the person is no longer receiving unemployment checks? Who actually gives up? "Oh that's it, I just won't work anymore or even look for work." Do people really give up?
Yes, people do give up.
My dad says they are aiming to high. He is telling me how in 1958 he was out of work for 6 months looking for a job, staying with his sister's family. He found a job working on a farm, 6 days a week, getting 25 dollars a week, a gallon of milk or two a day, plus eggs and sometimes produce, feeding his sister's family, whose husband worked for Missouri Pacific at the time.
He went into the Air Force after a while at the farm job, even though he was well liked and had even been offered a place on the farm to live at, instead of his sister's.
I have worked at some pretty odd jobs in my days of working, you take what you can get and sometimes you work way below your educational level, to put food on the table. And I have taken food stamps, way back when they were bill like paper money and when they were on a plastic debit card device.
Find a few people that will let you mow their lawn, it is hard work, dusty and might get you bee stung, but 20 bucks or more is better than nothing. Sell the extra things you have in your house, cut out your cable, get a land line, and cut your more expensive cellphone out, turn off more lights, run your heat lower, and AC higher. Move in with someone, or rent out a room.
Though not all these little things will solve the employment problem, if you set your goals to high you aren't going to get them met. If you set them a bit lower, maybe you can stave off being homeless.
Two of the people I am helping right now, He finally got a job as an Auto mechanic, Though they don't have enough funds, nor do I, to get their electric turned back on, They should have a roof over their heads soon. I set them up with odd jobs for family and friends that pay enough to get some food on the table. They were staying with friends, till he got the Job recently.
Most of the people I know get by on less than 12k a year, some on less than 9k a year, and some are just plain homeless and living off the soup kitchens and sometimes food stamps, others times not. Some homeless people you can help some you can't but be a friend to, as they kinda like where they are at in life. You have to get to know most of them before you can judge where they are at. Trust is not something that comes easy to a lot of them, but again, you have to get to know them to know where they are at on a lot of the issues that most of us take for granted.
I know several people over the age of 75, living close to the bone, getting by, not complaining much, hanging on to homes, and places to live, but doing so in a very frugal manner. Some have cars, while others don't, but most of them worked for most of their lives at jobs various and asundery.
Maybe the unemployed need to form a union and see about doing something with their voices, get a new polictical party started and fight for their rights to be gainfully employed at something useful to society. They are all of voting age, I wonder if their would be enough to make a difference if they all stood up and made a loud enough noise about it.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world,
Hugs From Arkansas.
What a lot of people are running into, especially older workers (over age 45 or 50) is that they are "overqualified." They are willing to work entry-level jobs, but nobody wants to hire them because it's assumed that when the economy turns around, they will leave for better-paying jobs.
Quite a few go back to school, or start collecting retirement income.
I did a double take on that news this AM as well. Must be some fancy number crunching by the Federal Govt.
Is salt more valuable than gold? oil?
I found this link which talks about the investment importance of salt.
I hardly find salt as more critical given its global reserves and a relatively easy way to extract it. I could be wrong...what are your views?
The value of a product is based on supply and demand. Supply of salt is endless and demand is steady. Supply of gold is very limited and demand very high. Oil supply is high, but demand is just as high and its indispensible. I'll let you do the math.
At one time in the history of the world salt was very valuable in some regions, and in others it was plentiful. Inland areas away from the sea was salt poor, until mining salt came into practice. All of this long before Oil was more than a tarpit out in the backwaters of the world.
In the times ahead, salt will be as valuable as it once was, as it extends the life of food storage, and is good for more things than that as well.
The US has some rather big salt mines, as does other coutries.
Salary has it's roots in people being paid with Salt in Rome.
Here is just one to look at.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khewra_Salt_Mines
There are others in the list on salt mines. Mining has been around for a long time, and will be around after we are getting by on a lot less oil.
Though I'd be wary of salt out of the Gulf Of Mexico for a while.
I can't see where investing in it is going to get you anywhere though. But if you lay up supplies for the end of the world, I'd put in a few five gallon buckets full, there is more than one use for salt, and it will come in handy for anyone away from a salt water coast.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world, Hugs from Arkansas
Sustainability: Will We Recognize It When We See It?
As subjective as the term 'Sustainability' has become.. A little further etymology is in order here, to reveal some of the themes that are buried in such value judgements above..
"Virtuous or Vulgar?" -
'Vulgar' actually derives from (or is a Cognate to) 'Volk', or the common people, which isn't even contradicted when something is clarified then as 'Base' or 'Demeaned' ..
Virtue - 'The Latin word virtus literally means "manliness," from vir, "man" in the masculine sense; and referred originally to masculine, warlike virtues such as courage. In one of the many ironies of etymology, in English the word virtue is often used to refer to a women's chastity.' http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Virtue
.. So when it gets to the final comment, "Are we concerned for nature because nature is intrinsically valuable, or only because of what nature can do for us." .. it creates yet another false dichotomy. We ARE merely a piece of the Natural system, and yet as we have eyes and an imagination that can stand apart and create a 'virtually objective view' of the thing, it ought to be clear enough that the health of the system bears a direct and unapologetically selfish relationship on our own fitness.
No less than taking good care of yourself so you can be a productive member of your whole family.. it's quite possible and even NECESSARY to be selfish and benevolent at the exact same time. Part of our 'Sin' culture has made such 'enlightened self-interest' into a crushingly shameful role.
I and thou. Tat tvam asi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tat_Tvam_Asi
"The meaning of this saying is that the Self - in its original, pure, primordial state - is wholly or partially identifiable or identical with the Ultimate Reality that is the ground and origin of all phenomena."
EDIT; And it occurs to me that my mentioning of 'False Dichotomy' is probably kin to the very alienation between Me and US, or between Man and Nature.. part of the despair of our use of Logic and reason is that it works by drawing lines between things -that others then treat as actual divisions.. and isolation creeps in.
As Michael Pollan said about industrial MonoCulture farming.. 'We took the classic farm, a set of solutions, and divided it into separate problems.'
Nice points.
The other thing about "sustainability" is that it is a false non-negative. For a comparison, consider "tolerance." This is considered a positive, but really, it is not a very high value--who wants to be merely "tolerated"? We get here because it is seen as better than "intolerance" (at least of a certain kind).
Similarly, if a practice is UN-sustainable, it is undermining the basis of its own survival. But if a practice is inherently harmful, making it "sustainable" is not really a good thing. And even if it is a relatively benign practice, just barely being able to "sustain" something is not a very high goal.
We are gang of guys abusing a child. Some are pointing out that the child will die soon unless we reduce our rate of abuse to a level that is "sustainable."
Most would recognize that this is not a very high standard.
Sustainability ...
Pre Fossil Fuel Life .. assuming you don't destroy too many Plants
Too many times people just hear the words and don't even know what they really mean, or know what they meant a long time ago when they were first coined. (another one of those phrases that mean something, if you know when to look).
Thanks for reminding us that things are not as they seem, when you read a lot of papers that seem to say good things, or at least things that seem logical on the outside.
I wouldn't have used those words, but they were after the shock value of them, the coinage of a turn of phrase so to speak. Authors do that a lot, and have to fall on their swords when they get a post like yours explaining where they went wrong in their choice of words.
Whenever I use Sustainable, I mean that we can live in such a way as to be subtle as a soft breeze on the landscape, but not as violent as a wind storm. We can live within the means of the ecosystem around us to the point that we can live there thousands of years without trashing the place. The biggest problem is that we haven't got a fresh untouched ecosystem to try our sustainable practices on, we have what we have spent decades if not thousands of years of trashing to live on.
We have fished our seas to the point that most species of fish are crashing, species that we don't want are places they harm their new ecosystems. We have wasted landscapes the world over to desert and have stressed the systems that sustain us to the point that some of them are breaking. Water tables are at their lowest levels ever, and groundwater is being polluted in places that used to have clean water, but now don't. We have ripped up forests left and right to get at one tree out of 10, for those nice teak desks, only to have the other trees not grow back to replace them.
We will be pushing the limits of population growth to the max only to see it come crashing down sooner or later, when water and food get so limited that only the rich and well armed will have good water and food.
So while I push for sustainable living, I have to work within the confines of a world that is already trashed and have to wonder at how long I will have before someone tries to take what has been gained for selfish reasons, instead of the more noble ones.
Though it is not a gloomy day here, we got 4 55gallon barrels and 2 30gallon barrels for free today. And I planted some sprouting red potatoes in two tubs with the hope of getting a few potatoes out of some store boughts that were getting long in the tooth. And we picked most of the last blackberries, about 5 cups worth, having had to leave twice that because we just couldn't reach them all. Maybe more later in the week, there are loads still red, some even green.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world, as sustainable as possible.
Hugs from Arkansas
Bob, you never did answer that one email.
There's a certain value in ambiguity, though. Politically it's much more feasible to rally diverse interests around a general principle like "sustainability" or even "peace", if we agree "enough" to enable us to move forward and act on the basis of a shared discourse. It's a balancing act, alright - the meaning of a word needs to be precise enough to be understood by most but ambiguous enough to allow for buy-in by most. Most words are that way if you think about it.
So I tend to look for context when people use the S-word; what other meanings are they trotting out (or hiding)?
The Falls Church News-Press has a blurb about Sen. Whipple and her peak oil columnist hubby Tom celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. There's a photo of them with their family.
From link above:
And:
I'm starting to like this new British government. Are they starting a new trend? I sure hope so.
On 'Peak Oil Theory Past it's Peak:
Incentives cannot create oil underground. The 3 trillion barrel resource is a number pulled out of a hat.
Incentives are distortions in the credit regime; the high prices destroy demand faster than they encourage new production.
The use of oil is unproductive waste. There is little to show for the production that has taken place already. The absence of return makes use unprofitable. This is another distortion of the credit regime. Eventually credit fails as it is now; little new credit is extended as there are few remunerative uses for it.
On a credit for credit (dollar for dollar) basis peak oil took place in 1998. The consequence has been the steadily increasing world- wide credit crisis that operates today the same as it did when it manifested itself in 2004. Six years of bubbles, crashes, credit freezes and unemployment; wash, rinse and repeat.
It doesn't matter how much hypothetical oil exists under the soil if it costs too much to extract and there is no substantive returns from its use.
We debunked this a few days ago. Boyce's paper shows increases in "proven reserves", not discoveries. Discoveries peaked in the mid 60s and have been declining ever since. There has been only one peak but there has been three distinct "jumps" in so-called proven reserves. The first was legitimate. It showed the increase in proven reserves after the peak in discoveries in the 60s. The second of Boyce's peaks was when OPEC nations, in competition for increased quotas, increased their proven reserves in the mid 80s. Boyce's last jump in proven reserves was when some agencies decided to start counting Canada's Tar Sands as oil reserves.
There was no discovery of new oil when OPEC increased their reserves. That was a political move pure and simple. And the Canadian Tar Sands had been discovered decades ago. There was no new discovery there either.
I am astonished that these "peak oil debunkers" seem to have no clue about real oil discoveries or OPEC reserve exaggerations or anything else that really matters. To confuse pencil inserted upgrades to proven reserves with actual discoveries is the height of ignorance.
Actually those "proven reserves" are not proven at all, they are really "stated reserves". How can proven reserves increase without a corresponding increase in discoveries. It would be ludicrous to claim that "crude oil discoveries have doubled every 15 years since 1850!" Obviously they have not, they have declined since peaking in about 1965.
I have said it before but it bears repeating, when the world finally realizes that all those OPEC proven reserves are largely bogus it will be the shock felt around the world.
Ron P.
In the meantime we don't want to confuse anyone with the facts ...
... do we?
Yet Boyce did a good job showing what is wrong with Hubbert Linearization.
Unfortunately his own model had some flaws in it.
Interesting that an ecological economist took this topic on.
"little to show for the production that has taken place already"---
Dissipative structures (such as cities) don`t have a goal of creating something with long-term value. The goal is just to dissipate some resource, such as the energy of oil, as long as its available. That`s it. It isn`t necessarily pretty. Huge cement overpasses and skyscrapers have at least accomplished something along dissipative lines if nothing else, certainly without them---and their attendant technologies--- humans couldn`t have managed to dissipate this energy and while that would have been fine with many, it would not have been fine with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. I don`t defend it BTW! Let`s face it: a he!# of a row to hoe and all that....
On another topic entirely: Has anyone noticed the Obama Admin. ramping up the stakes vis a vis Iran? 2 more foreign oil companies pulled out from Iran yesterday (Total and one other)....Obama issued a statement, the usual stuff about how Iran cannot be allowed to develop nuclear technology, blah blah blah........
Car fuel made from sunlight?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/green-motoring/7867960/Car-fuel-made...
Would anyone like to comment on this idea? Would it be net-energy negative? Does this have any scalable potential?
Sure it can work, if your solar panels are big enough, and you can afford the chemical processing plant.
The question is , can you make it cost effective relative to say, biofuels or solar PV charging an electric vehicle?
It is energy positive because sunlight is energy positive. Add enough sunlight and you can make rocket fuel or even high explosives. Just not very much.
Thanks Ralph,
my point about the net-energy issue is that it sounds as if there are to be two 'spinning' containers, so what provides the power to make them spin...
If I take a square block of wood on a stick and cut off the corners I get an 8 sided block of wood, If I cut those corners off I get a 16 sided block of wood and it makes a nice wheel, though it is a bit bumpy at times.
They are reinventing the wheel by another method, looks great on paper, but it is easier to let plants do the process and use the liquids from that as a fuel, rather than invent the process with all that complexity. They are better off using those processes for making other things, like maybe cheaper titanium, or other materials, elements, than making Oil, or oil like products.
Anything to keep motoring, it seems. I am sure there are a lot of other applications they could be pushing for rather than fuel for cars.
I'll let someone else tear the science apart. Then again If only the LHC could smash some heavier elements together, we could get the other elements up above 107 on up to 126, they are possible in theory, so why not try for them, we might have a great element to solve all our worries, just waiting for us to bring it into being.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world, with designs and materials already handy.
Hugs from Arkansas.
Just to be pedantic, car fuel is already made from sunlight.
Re: Bee story-How plants get by when pollinators vanish -- up top.
I wonder if bee pollination is all its cracked up to be. Nothing scientifically valid, just musing, but I have noticed a larger disease problem in our orchard since switching to commercial hive pollination several years back. Bees seem the ideal vector for transmission-alot of multi individual contact to young fragile sexual tissues. Makes our STD transmissions often pale in comparison. Haven't read it is much of a documented problem, but I wonder.
"I wonder if bee pollination is all its cracked up to be. "
In the above article, one plant species is tested over 5 plant generations. I hardly think that represents ecosystem behavior as a whole.
I don't think we should be relinquishing pollinators any time soon.
As far as commercial pollination goes, time to start reducing monocrop plantings to encourage more native pollinators, rather than trucking in hives of honeybees. Better for the orchard, and better for both native bees and honeybees.
But the orchard exists because the orchardist wants it to-and in order to make a go of selling fruit, he is compelled to go with a monoculture operation on a fairly large scale as a general thing.
Of course a few growers are so situated that they can sell directly to relatively affluent customers and they can thus deal with the higher operating costs incurred when pursueing more environmentally benign production practices.
One of the things that makes honey bees particularly valuable as pollinators of certain crops is that they tend to pollinate true to type. That is, the field bees in a honey bee colony seem to "specialize" in pollinating one kind of flower (alfalfa, bird's-trefoil, or one of the clovers, all of which may be blooming at the same time fairly close to one another) rather than--as, for example, bumblebees do--flitting about from one type of flower to another. This has obvious advantages for the flowers, since the pollen transmitted by the honey bees tends to be of one sort.
Field honey bees working one type of flower will not immediately switch to another type if the nectar flow of "their" flower stops (as sometimes, for example, it does in the afternoons). Instead, they will stay in the hive, apparently resting.
I'm speaking here from personal experience as a very small beekeeper (most colonies at one time = 10), but you can easily find details in most texts on honey bees and beekeeping. Still particularly good are a number of books by Roger Morse, longtime beekeeper and entomologist at Cornell University. See his BEES AND BEEKEEPING or his COMPLETE GUIDE TO BEEKEEPING.
The bee keeper who works our orchard tells me much the same, which would support fears of disease transmission in that infections are efficiently spread to susceptible hosts of the same species. He also relates of finder bees, whose work is only locating and describing by dance new nectar sources to the hive. Adjacent trees just coming into blossom must be located and described first. The warm, humid environment of the hive would seem an ideal resting spot for the disease, tho that is all my speculation.
That should be bird'sfoot-trefoil. Sorry.
My 1984 Diseases of Tree Fruits does list bees as one of several vectors in maintaining infections of fireblight, one of the more deadly apples and pear diseases. No quantification though. I like honey as much as the next guy, since knocking out HFCS's on general principles, probably a 4 or 5 gallon per year consumption for the family. Yet I recall before using commercial hives, the orchard produced ok, tho we certainly never had fruit thinning work or the present orchard size.
Be nice to see some controlled studies of bee transmission, but the present problems with CCD, and the interests of commercial orchardists and bee keepers all would tend to grab available funding. I'm sure there's a wealth of sexual innuendos here, but I don't yet have the nerve to give up the demonstrated increased and complete production for a possible reduction in tree disease.
As PO bites deeper, tho, we'll find out. Price of honey sure doesn't support the fuel, and bee rental rates are squeezed from both the grower and the bee keeper ends. Peak honey? Not to mention beeswax. The latter is a phenomenal product. Beats paraffin hands down. For a shoe grease base, there's none better.
There is an old Judy Collins song that often runs through my mind. Both Sides Now. With so many things, looking at both sides leaves you scratching your head, thinking "I really don't know life at all."
Here we go again... bee vomit is ok to eat (aka honey), but HFCS is not? Both have basically the same fructose to glucose ratio, roughly 55% Fructose to 45$ Glucose (HFCS 55). If HCFS is bad for you, then honey is equally bad for you. If honey is ok, then HFCS is as well. Other than the fact that honey also often contains botulinum spores, they are both sugar for all instents and purposes and have equal effects on the body health wise. This honey good/HFCS bad thing drives me nuts... in the end they are both sugars, and sugar is inherently unhealthy in and of itself.
Yep, basic sugar ratios same between the two. Won't argue spores for now. Quantified, side by side tests have yet to show differences on one's health.
Big reason for health-it's hard to consume the amount of honey in a drink that they load in a HFCS drink. Sugar/honey is not necessarily unhealthy, it's our consumption amount and lack of exercise. The latter is a misnomer, many don't get any save their autonomic functions.
Wrong - sugar is not inherently unhealthy in itself. Sugar in the quantities that modern humans consume it, is unhealthy, and processed food, especially that containing HFCS, is generally unhealthy, due to the high absorbability of the fructose fraction.
Honey requires absolutely no mechanical processing other than dehydrating nectar by bees. It's a fossil-free solution to getting sweet. By the way, honey also contains many beneficial enzymes, while HFCS is empty calories. Calling it "bee vomit" is a tactic used by vegans who eschew eating honey, and use emotion to get the "eeeeewwww" response. If you are vegan, just say so.
Honey has antibacterial properties, and can be used as an antiseptic and wound dressing. People with pollen allergies take local honey as it, anecdotally, helps to reduce allergies.
The only issue with botulinum spores is that you can't feed honey to a child under 1 year, since their immune systems cannot handle it. Older children and adults have no trouble handling any of the living elements of honey.
Addendum : vegans consider raising bees exploitation of animals, which is why they do not eat it. They will talk extensively about how bees are being mistreated, and, in many instances, I'd agree with that.
Personally, I don't exploit my bees - I leave them as much honey as they need for their own survival, including overwintering, and only remove surplus for myself. If they need help building up for winter, I feed them honey back, rather than sugar water. They get a protected place to live, and I take some honey in return, as well as being the beneficiary of pollination services - that, to me, is symbiosis, not exploitation.
Eliminating HFCS is a good strategy for food shopping because you cut out all the hidden sugar in your diet. The stuff is loaded into everything from peanut butter to pasta sauce.
I forgot to mention, also, that honey stores perfectly, almost indefinitely, at room temperature, as long as it has had a sufficient amount of water removed - the bees cap the honey cells when this point has been reached.
So, for anyone thinking about what to do in a powerdown situation, honey is a perfect way to store winter calories.
Sugar syrups cannot be stored due to mold and bacterial growth.
Spring_
I caught the inflammatory vomit comment, but usually will look the other way. I've a number of friends and relatives who are veggies and it does get tiring after a while. For those that needle, I will reply: What's for dinner-raw, baby carrots? Or how about grinding a bunch of new embryos to dust, adding your favorite fungus, and baking for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
We need to remember that as animals, we kill to live. I don't see the moral high ground with killing plants over animals. To me, they are just as alive as animals. Their communication and information processing abilities within an individual, within a species, and between species is amazing, and only recently being illuminated. A quick skim of Science Daily even will show a number of such studies each week. Without getting mystical or such about it, there needs to be a reverence for all life, and that its life enabled ours.
Doug
Yeah...sigh...
I agree completely about a reverence for all life.
I saw a tv program a while back about certain tribes in the Amazon, or New Guinea (I can't recall exactly) that worship - or perhaps revere is the better word - tarantulas, but do still hunt and eat them.
They thank them for the gift of life.
Nicely put dougfir. It would be great if the next consiousness paradigm shift involved a transition to that understanding at a deep level. However, I doubt it can happen the way things are set up. It will probably require collapse (economic or environmental or both in unison), forcing the population through a tight bottleneck that will collectively humble those remaining into a realization that our long term existence is dependent on all life thriving in balance.
From CNN just yesterday:
Sugar, not just salt, linked to high blood pressure
Remember that HFCS 55 and Honey have essentially the same composition of sugars.
I'm far from vegan personally... milk on cereal every morning, I love chicken, eat fish, steak, etc. I even ate a very small amount of honey this morning, as I had "honey nut" Cheerios. I called it bee vomit because thats what honey is and yet many people have no idea of how its actually formed. They know its "natural", from bees, but they don't know that(to quote wikipedia)
What irks me is not honey, its people who pretend that honey is superior to HFCS because its "all natural". Well, what comes out of the rear end of a "grass fed" cow is all natural, does that make cow patties a superior food as well? Honey=HFCS=Sugar. They are all a different twist on the same thing. None are superior, or more "healthy" then the rest.
Honey contains trace amounts of some vitamins, less than 3% of the RDA for anything. I've never seen or heard of a study showing any health benefits for the average person from the long term consumption of honey, regardless of the presence of trace vitamins, enzymes, etc.
I'm not anti-beekeeping, or even anti-honey. I hope your hives produce well for you and that science finds and eliminates colony collapse disorder. In fact, the only thing that irritates me about it is the smugness of folks who pretend that honey is somehow magically superior to HFCS, when in fact, for health and nutrition purposes, they are the same freaking thing. Sugar cane sweetened Coke is as bad for you as HFCS sweetened Coke, and if they found a way to sweeten Coke with honey instead, it would still be unhealthy.
Perhaps you should read this :-
From Nutritiondata.com :-
Honey not only contains sugars, 93%, but calcium, amino acids, minerals and vitamins too - including B-group and C.
http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/sweets/5568/2
HFCS :-
Only sugars, 79%, with sodium and a tiny percentage of iron.
http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/sweets/5600/2
On how bees "make" honey, it is more accurate to say they collect nectar in a special honey-sac (stomach, if it makes you happy), separate from the main stomach (in other words, it never touches "digestive juices" in the way you suggest). Then the foragers pass it to hive-workers with their tongues and hive-workers, where there is some enzymatic breakdown in the mouth and honey-sac, put the simplified nectar into clean honey cells in the hive. They then fan it with their wings until it reaches a low humidity, and then they cap off the cell with wax.
http://www.beeswaxco.com/howbeesMakeHoney.htm
If you think this is unsanitary (beehives are the most sterile environments known to science) I can't imagine how you eat all the other things you claim to eat.
In one study with rats, the rats could have got more nutrition from the cereal boxes than from the unfortified processed cereals. I won't mention the brand name of the cereal.
Rats fed just the cereal with water died of malnutrition.
Addendum : Watch "Food, Inc" the movie and then come back and tell me if you think honey is unsanitary.
Addendum II : If one examines mouth-to-mouth contact in H. sapiens, you will find that pretty unsanitary compared with honey-sac enzymatic action in bees.
I'm not a nutritionist but I do have a few relevant courses under my belt;sugar in it's various forms is most assuredly not an inherently unhealthy food-any more than any other food.
Sugar is indeed not good for you if you consume it in excessive amounts.
Unfortunately we do tend to consume it in grossly excessive quantities.
High Fruitose Corn Syrup contains Mercury. In order to process Corn into HFCS they need Sodium Hydroxide (caustic Soda). Much of it is produced using a low cost mecury cell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castner-Kellner_process). I don't consume anything that has HFCS.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/26/AR200901...
About 30 years ago I stopped eating refined sugar (including honey which is refined by bees). Guess what, there is lots of sugar in fruit. In fact fruit began to taste sweeter to me than before, apparently because my palate was no longer used to high concentrations of sugar. Fruit sugars are far more interesting than cane sugar, much less HFCS. Americans drown them out by dosing them with extra sugar of uniform taste.
HFCS is a man made product that will die along with a lot of the Fossil Fuel laden other things in our world. Honey might die, but if it does so does the bees that make it and then other things will happen, which might be worse than having no fossil fuels around, or less of them anyway.
Most breads have sugar or HFCS in them, almost all candies are sugar or HFCS, Or CS in them. Foods that are labeled fat free, boost sugar content, to mask the loss of fat taste.
We just use so much more Sugar and HFCS than honey it is almost scary to think about how much the average american eats of the stuff. Upwards of 70 pounds per year of sugar and HFCS, That is a lot of sweets for most people.
Then there is always salt, I wonder what the salt intake of someone from 500 years ago was, or 1,000 years ago even. We have been loading our bodies on things that most people in the past never did eat much of, and we wonder why we have become in such bad health, or do we blaim it all on TV, and Video games, and Couches.
Honey was a rare treat ages ago for some people, now we get it mixed in bulk from several different coutries if we buy it from the big box stores. If we buy it locally sourced we pay a lot more and would rarely use it again. HFCS was pushed by the Corn farmers, because Cane sugar was being shipped in from overseas places and had a high tariff on it. Oh the joys of Gov't and protectionisms.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world,
Hugs from Arkansas, where the local bees seem to be doing just about okay.
Doug Fir-
Up where i live in Wisconsin, I rarely see honeybees and everything of mine gets pollinated... For what i see, its mostly bumblee bees of various types. I sometimes see very small bees, but not sure if they pollinate anything (i always see them around all the white clover i have in the yard). I think bumblee bees are very good pollinators with the ability to operate at very low temps and early in the season.
Aren't honeybees invasive species? Aren't they native to Europe? Why are we up in arms over them. I'm more worried about our native animals then some illegal trying to escape over the border for free healthcare and subsidized cheese.
You're right about the bumblebees, and esp the fact they work at lower temps. We had some colder temps this spring, and while the honey bees went dormant, the bumble bees kept right on moving. But there's never enough to get it all done. Yes, honeybees aren't native, but then, neither are apples.
LOOK OUT, BP'S DOING IT AGAIN!
"the British oil giant has been quietly and quickly drilling another risky offshore well three miles off of Alaska's north coast. Dubbed "Liberty," this project requires a technique called "extended reach," which is even more prone to explosions than the Gulf process. First, BP is drilling down two miles under the Beaufort Sea, then going sideways for up to eight miles to tap into one of our national oil reserves.
But wait – didn't Obama impose a moratorium on such offshore drilling? Yes... BUT: When Liberty was planned in the Bush years, it was magically declared by his devil-may-care regulators to be an "onshore project." How can that be? Because the rig sits on a tiny artificial island that BP built, so – voila! – it's "onshore" even though it's three miles offshore."
http://www.jimhightower.com/node/7185
fyi jmy -- The MMS has authority to suspend any drilling permit, regardless of what president was in office when it was issued, whenever they chose. Don't even need a court order or moratorium. It's referred to as administrative suspension of operations. If BP drills that well it's with the approval of the current administration. If that bothers you then you might want to send an email to the White House.
Swimming in oil:
http://www.businessinsider.com/surfers-swimming-oil-spill-beaches#note-t...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/jul/02/ipcc-ama...
'The IPCC messed up over 'Amazongate' – the threat to the Amazon is far worse'
So deniers ripped this guy's projections in what became known as 'Amazongate', only to find out it was far worse than he suggested - the Amazon rain forest turns mostly into desert by 2100!
I found this quote today on CNN interesting:
This guy is from some group called the Economic Cycle Research Institute. Doomer economics? :)
http://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_wants_to_grow_energy.html
I just found this TED talk and was wondering what other people think about it.
I am sure there are lots of those TED talks that could be used for helping us get from where we are today to a better future, just getting the ideas out there in a more than select few has been good thing.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world
Hugs from Arkansas.
Nice.
Thanks for the link.
(Frightening: We don't even know where oil/coal comes from. --at 7:59 into the tape)
http://www.ted.com/talks/ueli_gegenschatz_extreme_wingsuit_jumping.html
One more TED talk that gives you an idea of what climbing is like, but with the twist of jumping with a chute.
So humans can do things that seem impossible, if we put our minds to it, and don't let dreams only be those things we have when we sleep.
RIP Ueli.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world,
Hot Air Balloon hugs to all.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100630162353.htm
'Human-Made Global Warming Started With Ancient Hunters'
Interesting article worth a read through.
This is my question: What if the two relief wells don't work? Then what?