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Drumbeat: July 24, 2010
Posted by Leanan on July 24, 2010 - 10:15am
E.P.A. Considers Risks of Gas Extraction
CANONSBURG, Pa. — The streams of people came to the public meeting here armed with stories of yellowed and foul-smelling well water, deformed livestock, poisoned fish and itchy skin. One resident invoked the 1968 zombie thriller “Night of the Living Dead,” which, as it happens, was filmed just an hour away from this southwestern corner of Pennsylvania.The culprit, these people argued, was hydraulic fracturing, a method of extracting natural gas that involves blasting underground rock with a cocktail of water, sand and chemicals.
Gas companies countered that the horror stories described in Pennsylvania and at other meetings held recently in Texas and Colorado are either fictions or not the companies’ fault. More regulation, the industry warned, would kill jobs and stifle production of gas, which the companies consider a clean-burning fuel the nation desperately needs.
Just as the Gulf of Mexico is the battleground for the future of offshore oil drilling, Pennsylvania is at the center of the battle over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which promises to open up huge swaths of land for natural gas extraction, but whose environmental risks are still uncertain. Natural gas accounts for roughly a quarter of all energy used in the United States, and that fraction is expected to grow as the nation weans itself from dirtier sources like coal and oil.
Bonnie breaking apart in Gulf of Mexico
MIAMI (AP) — Bonnie is breaking apart in the Gulf of Mexico and the tropical depression with winds near 30 mph could soon weaken to an area of low pressure.Forecasters with the U.S. National Hurricane Center said Saturday that it was less likely that Bonnie would strengthen as the storm heads toward the site of the blown-out oil well in the Gulf.
TEHERAN - IRAN warned on Saturday it would stop trading with countries that impose restrictions on its assets abroad in the face of tightening international sanctions over the Islamic state's disputed nuclear activities.
Mexico Gets Aggressive On Oil And Gas
Mexico is aggressively developing the country's oil resources in an attempt to keep its production of crude oil from declining over the next few years as the country's largest field continues to decline. Mexico has also turned to foreign and private oil companies for the first time as part of this plan.
Beyond Carbon Legislation: Energy Transition
The energy business moves at glacial speed. It's the biggest business in the world and has the most powerful lobby in Washington, and it generally gets what it wants. Add in the agriculture and automobile lobbies, and it's essentially an unstoppable force. Comparatively, the lobby for alternative energy, permaculture, rail, and other solutions is a tiny speck. Call me cynical, but a few decades of watching reform fail in energy, transportation, and the environment will knock a lot of magical thinking out of your head.
It's time to end the excessive subsidies for corn ethanol
WHEN WASHINGTON starts handing out cash, it can be hard to stop. See, for example, the decades of subsidies the government has showered on the corn ethanol industry. The fuel was supposed to free America from its dependence on foreign oil and produce fewer carbon emissions in the process. It's doing some of the former and little of the latter. But corn ethanol certainly doesn't need the level of taxpayer support it's been getting. Lawmakers are considering whether to renew these expensive subsidies; they shouldn't.
Living for a week with an electric car
One of the biggest concerns with purely electric vehicles is “range anxiety,” a term meant to portray drivers’ fear of running out of electricity and becoming stranded in their cars.While automakers incorporating gasoline engines and batteries in their hybrid cars – think Toyota Prius, Honda Insight, Chevy Volt – give consumers the ability to travel hundreds of miles before plugging into either an electrical outlet or gasoline pump, cars using solely battery power at the present time are limited to maybe 100 miles at best before they must be recharged. Thus, these cars are not meant to long hauls just yet.
Deep Underground, Miles of Hidden Wildfires Rage
Three blistering fires are blazing through Wyoming's scenic Powder River Basin, but firefighters aren't paying any attention. Other than a faint hint of acrid odors and a single ribbon of smoke rising from a tiny crack beyond the nearby Tongue River, a long look across the region's serene grassland shows no sign of trouble.That's what makes the three infernos, and the toxins they spew, so sinister. Their flames are concealed deep underground, in coal seams and oxygen-rich fissures, which makes containment near impossible. Shielded from fire hoses and aerial assaults, the flames are chewing through coal seams 20 feet thick, spanning 22 acres. They're also belching greenhouse gases and contaminants, contributing to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind environmental hazard that extends far beyond Wyoming's borders. "Every coal basin in the world has fires sending up organic compounds that are not good for you," says Mark Engle, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who studies the Powder River Basin, "but unless you live close to them you probably never see them."
Architecture students find no buyers for green homes
Dan Rockhill's architecture students build award-winning green homes, including a new ultra-efficient one in Kansas City, Kansas, but they can't sell the last two.
Gillard copies Obama's clunkers plan
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has copied Barack Obama's cash-for-clunkers scheme to shore up Labor's climate change credentials ahead of the election.The government promises to give motorists a $2000 rebate if they trade in a car built before 1995 for a low-emission, fuel-efficient model.
U.S. funds efforts to turn CO2 emissions into products
Can industrial CO2 emissions come in handy? The Department of Energy is betting these carbon dioxide emissions, a culprit of climate change, can be turned into useful products such as fuel, plastics, cement and fertilizers.
Goldman Sachs-Backed Green Exchange Wins U.S. Contract-Market Approval
The Green Exchange LLC, an emissions trading platform that operated within CME Group Inc.’s New York Mercantile Exchange and counts Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. among its members, has won the approval of U.S. regulators to operate independently.
US Senate deals blow to global climate talks
WASHINGTON (AFP) – A year and a half after President Barack Obama breathed new life into global talks on a climate treaty, the United States is back in a familiar role -- the holdout.The Senate's decision Thursday to shelve legislation on climate change is certain to cast a long shadow over December's meeting in Cancun, Mexico that will work on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
Carbon Emission Reductions Depend on U.S. Agencies, States, Group Says
Federal agencies and state governments can get the U.S. close to President Barack Obama’s goal for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions after the “apparent collapse” of congressional efforts to pass new pollution laws, according to the World Resources Institute.The agencies and states might achieve a 14 percent cut in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 from 2005 levels if they act with “high ambition,” the Washington-based institute said in a report today. Obama said last year the U.S. should aim for a 17 percent carbon cut by 2020.
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NB Power plans smart grid research project
Technology could lead to lower rates, more usage of renewable power
See: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2010/07/23/nb-nbpower-smart...
Related:
Energy project looks to tweak usage when wind power is low
See: http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/cityregion/article/1148243
Best hopes for integrating more renewable energy into our electricity grid.
Cheers,
Paul
Attended a Smart Grid seminar in Vancouver at BCIT on Friday. I'm sounding like an old curmudgeon, but its hard to sit in the room and listen to academics and utility bureaucrats go on and on about "We need to research this further", and "We should put a team of MBA's on this", yada, yada.
Look folks, the answer is simple. First, Sudbury Hydro (Ontario) built the infrastructure to support the smart grid technologies in 1997. Go there and test bed it, I'm sure there would be plenty of willing guinea pigs. Second: Utilities get off yer arse and put fibre into every substation and reasonable node point in your system if you haven't already. Stop worrying over the beads and get to it!!
Next rule, there are is no perfect one network fits all. There are going to be two or three network structures suited for their purposes. Protection and Control will remain separate and inviolate, period. Smart Grid for metering and related data systems is a separate network at the local level due to regulatory issues. All the networks will probably ride on a large SONET WAN.
So now the communications infrastructure is in place and its time to start playing with the means of control optimization. As stated before, the Maritimes should build a region-wide virtual firm power source wind system. Some large scale active power electronic systems will be required, or at least power flow control equipment in the AC system.
But all I see now is paralysis by analysis. Its out there, its been done, go do it. Mostly it looks like people are spending time trying figure out what a smart grid is. That too is easy, use the OSI Seven Layer model and fit your application/function/purpose into the appropriate layer and that is the Smart Grid to you. Like the Internet, it is everything and multi-faceted, but on the personal or local level it is usually something very specific.
Final beef is the use of Ethernet in the communications technologies. They started using Ethernet because it was perceived as relatively simple and inexpensive. Now, with IEC 61850 they are trying to make Ethernet do things that it was never intended to to and are piling on onerous and complicated protocols complete with wrappers (similar to MPLS). Ok, know-it-all time again, the technology exists but has been left by the curb because it was too difficult and expensive to implement which is ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). What we need to do is take ATM and strip out all the feature-adds that made it "heavy" and difficult to operate inter-Vendor on anything other than UNI interfaces, and tune it to the IEC 61850 and Smart Grid communication technology purposes. I'll be initiating and sponsoring some research projects along these lines.
If anyone is wondering can ATM (lite) work effectively and cheaply, are you using an ADSL modem? That is an ATM device.
Hi BC_EE,
A little less talk and a little more action is always appreciated. However, I don't believe the primary focus is on network/communication protocols, but rather determining the potential to which utilities can dynamically control various residential loads such as water heaters, ETS storage devices and other smart-grid enabled appliances, using seven hundred and fifty households as a test group.
Cheers,
Paul
Paul, let me be a little more succinct. Typically the part that befuddles or creates disconnects is getting the horse before the cart. That is, what does the underlying infrastructure look like? I just laid that out and if some could operate with a little more vision and a whole lot less politics they could get it built. The rest flows from there.
This is analogous to building roadways and interstates. One can't envision a new neighborhood or commercial centre until the roadways are in. Although I'm not keen on using this analogy given the suburban sprawl and strip malls that it has led to, there are quite a few positive take-aways.
The dynamic control and data exchanges don't exist without the hardware and protocols. I used IEC 61850 as an example. This is the substation interconnection communications for automation of devices using Ethernet as the primary medium. The almost real-time control of the power system operator and the grid is dependent on this system within the substation and generating station.
As we go through the iterations of developing and deploying, the infrastructure enables the business case, and the business case drives the infrastructure. The trick is figuring out the chicken and the egg, and my experience is one has a vision for the business case and start building out the infrastructure. "The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one's feet" - Lao-tzu is most appropriate here.
But if I may be ungracious, you have made my point Paul. Its very difficult to be the technocrat and explain in identifiable terms to lay people what is required. I had the opportunity at Sudbury Hydro and the system got built. It is still there today with 100 Mbit/s (native Ethernet LAN speed) to the curb. The radio systems now exist that make connection to the residential meter and information gateway cost effective.
Cisco Systems has if figured out and wrapped up in a nice package. Git 'er dun!
Thanks, BC_EE, for expanding upon your initial comments. Speaking only through my hat, in addition to the actual nuts and bolts of cobbling together a workable system it's a question of whether or not this option would be of practical benefit given our particular mix of generation resources, loads and load patterns. Certainly the hardware side of things is a critical consideration, but so is determining whether investments of this kind are cost-effectiveness and I think these field trials will help us better determine the latter.
Cheers,
Paul
Fracking. What a name.
All you have to do is change two letters to define its meaning. I think this should go in the 'Energy Dictionary'.
Paulo
I caught part of the documentary called Gasland...pretty shoddy camera work, but certainly caught my attention - didn't realize just how bad those Nat Gas wells could be.
http://gaslandthemovie.com/
P.S. In the "re-imagined" (aka "new") Battlestar Gallactica series they used "Frakkin'" in place of the other word which you refer to.
"Frak" was actually heard in the original, much funnier Battlestar. By Your Command.
The BG usage was preceded by Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead, where "fug" stood in for, you know. Publishers weren't ready for that kind of profanity in 1948. Later on a very funny 60s band adopted this - The Fugs.
"Galaxy!"--Foundation and Empire
Also used as a curse-placeholder in Babylon5
It's pretty shoddy documenting, too. Fracturing deep formations to improve oil and gas flow has been routine in the oil and gas industry for half a century. It's an established technology and well understood.
I guess it's new to people in New York State, though.
Speaking as someone who has been in the oil industry for decades, I can say that the decrepit old oil refineries and petrochemical plants of New York and New Jersey scared the wits out of me. I know what they've been leaking into the water and soil. OTOH, fracturing deep formations doesn't bother me much at all. You're never going to see the results at the surface.
It's pretty shoddy documenting, too.
Translation: A guy who makes money from gas plays and wants more gas finds film that shows gas production as having problems 'shoddy'.
Fracturing deep formations to improve oil and gas flow has been routine in the oil and gas industry for half a century. It's an established technology and well understood. I guess it's new to people in New York State, though.
So is having their drinking water become flammable after the fracking.
A sane and rational person should find flaming drinking water a problem.
OTOH, fracturing deep formations doesn't bother me much at all.
Translation - Guy who lives not near New York/New Jersey finds their concerns about flaming drinking water to be a non-problem.
No, I make my money from power utilities, bus companies, and liquor stores. When you're retired, gas plays are a bit too uncertain.
And where I grew up, flaming drinking water is not that unusual. If you drill a well in a shallow gas region, you're very likely to get methane in your water. So, you vent the gas off and drink the water. Some farmers I know didn't find any water at all, so they just hooked their well up to their furnace and trucked in water.
Methane is the least of their worries. It's manure seepage from the cattle operations that is the usual problem, and then there's the arsenic and uranium that show up from time to time in the water.
As I said, this is something new for people in New York and New Jersey, but not other places. And as I said, they should worry more about contamination from the old petrochemical plants and oil refineries. As for methane, human beings emit methane, and it doesn't do more than annoy the people next to them.
Perhaps you don't understand the language well enoung to understand.
They are NOT getting flaming drinking water from frac jobs.
The supposed documentary is just BS.
It is about as much nonsense as the Matt Simmons claims about the Macondo well.
They are NOT getting flaming drinking water from frac jobs.
The supposed documentary is just BS.
*pat* *pat*
That's nice.
Got links to prove the statements are wrong?
It is about as much nonsense as the Matt Simmons claims about the Macondo well.
Which ones? Matt was making statements from the beginning.
Internal BP Document Confirms Matt Simmons' Worst Case Prediction Of Spill Rate Of 100,000+ Barrels Per Day
I saw it on HBO. They got way too carried away with that special effects bit of the shaking, stammering pics. A special effect from time to time is ok, but in Gasland I started to get Gas from an upset stomach, and had to look away and just listen to what was being said.
Thought it was the height of corporate greed (with the help of Bush/Cheney) that allowed the use of fracking chemicals to be exempt from the clean water act. Although it is real, it somehow seemed like a B movie, as regular folk were subjected to disease causing impurities in their drinking water, including gas that could be lit while the water came out of the faucet. Sometimes you'll see stuff like this documented in undeveloped countries because the people have no power, but it was really sick to see the same type of exploitation occur in the land of stars & stripes, the so called bastian of 'Freedom'. Free in this case to get sick and maybe even die for corporate profits.
Guess the govt. is so busy spending 700+ billion a year defending the people with a massive defense dept., they lost track of protecting the populace in their own backyard.
The incentive for governments is the billions of dollars of revenues and hundreds of thousands of jobs involved in producing shale gas. The Marcellus shale alone might contain a trillion dollars worth of natural gas.
The hydraulic fracturing itself probably doesn't have much effect on groundwater. The Marcellus shale is more than a mile underground and the ground water formations are much shallower. A more likely source of contamination is the actual drilling of the wells themselves as they go through the shallower ground water formations. They would have to drill thousands and thousands of wells, and not all of them would be perfect.
However, given the amount of money involved (and governments would be capturing a lot of it in the form of taxes) well owners would have to prove the source of the contamination in a court of law. Since natural contamination is very common, that would be a difficult thing to do.
The drilling companies and governments would probably prefer to put in methane venting systems on their water supply rather than stopping drilling.
Friday night failures:
Bleak milestone: Bank failures this year surpass 100
100 bank failures!
Hmm, Calculated Risk: FDIC Bank Failures by Week has a chart showing much different results - the S&L crisis is much more drastic. Must be counting thrifts as well.
U.S. bank failures - Google Image Search. Google has souped up this feature lately - you get a big open ended page instead of discrete pages of X amount of hits, much more easy to browse through results; also they give you a minor preview when you mouseover the thumbnails.
No doubt someone has made a graph of failures weighted by assets of the institutions in question, which would be more insightful than a simple headcount.
It looks to me like some important lessons were learned ~1934 and banking rules were changed, then a new generations of greedy know-nothings changed these new banking rules around 1980 ... am I correct?
Something like that. Bank deregulation was implicated as a factor in the early 80s recessions, too. You'd think people would think twice about this stuff, we have centuries of evidence to point to that markets can't just run willy nilly, quite like children in fact.
I've been reading stuff over at /., aka Slashdot, a lot - they even had a piece on the TOD modular nukes article. Lots of fervent free marketers among the commentors - others throw everything in the book at them them, to absolutely no avail. You want private fire brigades? Yes, the people should be free to choose the most efficient company, and the dross will go out of business!
In the 19th century that meant that they'd often stand there and watch the building burn down, because it wasn't on the payroll. But now it will be different!
Close. Bank failures ticked up in the early 1980s due to the Fed's (Volcker's) determination to kill inflation. Srsly -- if you're a bank or S&L on the edge, it's a tough job competing with 30-year Treasury bonds paying 13%. Some of us here recall mortgage rates at 17%. In that sort of financial environment, it's easy to get in serious trouble if you're even a bit over-extended.
The big jump in the late 1980s was the S&L deregulation kicking in, when we "discovered" that a portion of S&L management that had been living in a very limited (and sheltered) low-profit environment will do really stupid things when turned loose (Reagan and a Democratic Congress doing the turning loose). And that an environment that allows semi-fraud to go on for a while will attract people interested in committing semi-fraud.
And of course, at least from a hack-economist perspective, the message of the last 2-3 years is that commercial banks will make equally stupid decisions when turned loose (Clinton and a Republican Congress doing the turning, and it took a while to get there). Given the late 1980s and the late 2000s, I admit to a certain amount of surprise that there are ANY macro-economists left who are willing to say that basing policy on models that don't include a greedy/fraudulent finance sector are even worth looking at.
I am always reminded of what my Great-Plains Great-Depression grandmother used to say -- bankers are NEVER your friends.
Link up top: Mexico Gets Aggressive On Oil And Gas
That works out to be a reserves to production ratio of less than 15. If that is truly the case then regardless of how aggressive they get their production is going to decline. True, you can use infield drilling with lots of horizontal wells and slow the decline rate, just like most nations have done in the last decade or so.
But if 14 billion barrels are all the reserves you have then you are just sucking your meager reserves out a lot faster. And when the decline does hit then the decline will be catastrophic.
Catastrophic decline... that is what I expect to see happening in a lot of countries in the next few years... including Saudi Arabia. Mitigating the decline by sucking the oil out a lot faster only means the cliff will hit suddenly in a few years rather than gradually starting now.
Ron P.
Ron, this information coupled with the data from the latest Oil Watch tells me that we are inching toward the edge of the plateau we have"enjoyed" since 2005 and are nearing the wild ride down.
Indeed we are, but your would never know it from the MSM such as the article "It's time to end the excessive subsidies for corn ethanol" up top.
What world do ethanol opponents live in? It certainly is different from the world I live in. The first paragraph of the article should read:
Oil companies have a monopoly on liquid fuel distribution. The blenders credit was incentive for them to let ethanol be distributed in their facilities. It has worked.
Mandates alone may be enough now, but we do not know for sure. There is big money behind oil and oil distribution. It is politically powerful. The liquid fuel market is not the economic textbook example of a free market.
There are a limited numbers of players and distribution is mostly by monopoly pipelines with trucks taking the gasoline out to service stations. These stations can simple price ethanol blends above regular gasoline if they want to.
Who then will choose E-10 or whatever over regular gas without ethanol? I suspect few will.
After the blender's credit is removed, gas distributors will of course still blend the mandated amount into E10 but it will be priced such that the market for it will decline.
Consumers will choose the cheaper unblended gasoline thus driving its price up even further. Just what oil companies want.
Only a few states have mandated that all gasoline must be blended with ethanol. Gasoline without ethanol is still available. If it is cheaper than ethanol blended gasoline it will take over some of the market now enjoyed by ethanol blended.
The blenders credit is the means for guaranteeing that ethanol blended is cheaper than regular gas and guaranteeing the cooperation of the gasoline production and distribution monopoly/oligopoly.
Until a hefty gasoline tax like Brazil's 54% and an increase in the blend rate to 25%, the blenders credit should stay in place. It is hard to understand why oil subsidies are not attacked as persistently as ethanol subsidies. It must be that they are so ingrained in the system that they are not even recognized for what they are.
It helps that they are permanent and not up for renewal every few years too.
Yes, it must be an absolute nightmare dodging all those sneak assaults by "anti-ethanol jihadists" you referred to a couple of days ago so that you can get the time to do your 1984-style job of rewriting documents to reflect the "authorised world-view". (In your world, are these jihadists obliged to wear Islamic dress so they're easily visible, or are they even more sneaky?)
According to EIA, Mexico's reserves to production ratio for crude oil and natural gas are 11 and 6, respectively (2009).
Their production is already in steep decline. Realistically their R/P ratio is much worse than 15 because much of the oil they are counting as reserves is in tight, technologically difficult, capital intensive oil fields that they have neither the technology nor the capital to develop.
The US oil companies do have the technology and the money to develop it, but in Mexico, oil is a state monopoly.
Mexico had one really big oil field, Cantarell, that accounted for most of their production. It's only producing at a fraction of its former rate. The production decline was spectacular, but highly predictable. They just didn't want to believe it was going to crash, so they ignored the warning signs.
For Mexico, it's now a choice between a rock and a hard place. Sell out to the Yanquis or not make any money from oil. Their choice.
"Architecture students find no buyers for green homes"
I had a lengthy exchange with an architectural student on one of the green home forums a while back.
I think part of the reason these homes don't sell is that they are too edgy and "out there" visually, for most buyers, and, probably, most realtors, whose first thoughts are "curb appeal" and "resale value".
The one home pictured is all angles - not a soft line to be seen anywhere. Very masculine, actually, if I can put it that way. Even uncomfortable. Which is the opposite of what one should feel.
Since my personal taste runs more to the Victorian in design, I wonder why all these green features can't be accommodated in a more "traditional"-looking house ?
I understand passive solar homes need certain roof pitches, window-angles and interior heat-managing capabilities, like concrete or stone walls, but not everyone wants to be the "stand out" on the block, even if it is LEED Certified.
I think they do a better job of envisioning the house of the future, rather than understanding that it needs to be sold today.
I love that clean, modern look myself. Not least because it's easier to maintain.
I'm sure you could do a Victorian-style green home as well. But I think the trend now is more modern.
My apartment used to be country-style. They recently re-did the whole complex to have that clean, modern look. Granite countertops, white floors, lots of steel, and blond wood rather than dark.
I love how it looks, but if I'd had my druthers, I'd have asked for updated, energy-efficient appliances rather than granite countertops.
The problem I have with "modern" is that it ends up being "this season" - i.e. a fad. Look how 60's and 70's homes with their low ceilings have become so unpopular, especially "popcorn" ceilings.
Since homes should be built for longevity - at least, in my mind they should - the trendish nature of some designs concerns me. I see more of the disposable mindset at work. I mean, it's only hip and cool until the next new design comes along, isn't it ?
Maybe that will turn out to be the way of the future - cheap, disposable, recyclable homes. Somehow, though, given our resource constraints, I can't visualise that.
Perhaps I find more security in the idea that since my house has already stood for 100 years, it will likely stand for another 100.
I don't really care if it's trendy or not. I like it, and I always have. Ever since I was a kid, I loved clean, modern lines.
And I think it's as classic a look as any other. Think Japanese, or Shaker.
Many of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs lend themselves very well to passive solar. Once considered too modern for many folks, most designs have stood the test of time and are considered desirable classics now. Some of the best examples:
http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view?back=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.yaho...
Wright inspired many of the features I incorporated into our home. It has worked out well from an energy/livability standpoint.
IMO, his concept of the "Usonian House" makes more sense now than it did when he was designing them.
http://architecture.about.com/od/franklloydwright/g/usonian.htm
http://www.matttaylor.com/public/PostUsonian.htm
One has to include adaptation to local conditions - I'm not sure I see that in usonian homes.
After all, the reason most homes in the Northern hemisphere are built in "Alpine" style is because of winter conditions - peaked roofs instead of flat, for example, to allow snow to slide off.
The "Ranch" or "bungalow" with a lower roof but larger footprint is better suited to hotter climates.
I definitely think passive solar should be a requirement in all new construction, but there has to be variation to take local conditions into account. For example, one might pay more attention to rain water harvesting in a drier climate.
Many of Wright's designs were built in the snow belt, places like Syracuse and Buffalo. Some examples:
http://www.wrightnowinbuffalo.com/whattodo/wright_legacy.asp#heath
The "Davidson House" and the "Heath House" both have low pitched roofs, in an area that measures its annual snowfall in the tens of feet. They seem to have held up pretty well. The majority of my home's roof is essentially flat, designed to carry the weight of a green roof and several feet of wet snow. Good design and proper use of materials (see stressed skin joists) can make a roof system both robust and inexpensive).
One of Wright's fundamentals was to adapt the building to the location rather than changing the sight to suit the building; "the home should be 'of the hill', not on the hill". Using local materials and design to fit the landscape were his mantra. He detested the idea of importing materials from far away to build in a style that didn't fit. Putting a Victorian style home in the Prairie was architectural sacrilege.
In our area there are many folks that come to the mountains and build "Florida" homes or homes that look like they belong in the suburbs of Atlanta. They scream a lack of imagination.
'Usonian' is an idea, a philosopy, and 'passive solar' can be a broad brush. Many Victorian homes were essentialy passive designs. Southern orientation, high ceilings, tall windows (that actually opened on top), seasonal vegetation for shade (wysteria and jasmine vines, etc), massive stone fireplaces throughout, all were design elements to promote heat gain/retention in winter and passive cooling in summer. Most modern home styles I see today are just a facade. Form no longer follows function.
Spring-
I have a ranch house and the last few winters have been very snowy. Lets just say i have had to snow rake a lot. The only answer? Metal roof. If i had to replace the shingles, i'd go metal. They shed snow very nicely.
i think they should outlaw any plans to build new houses without a basement in tornado ally..
Wright actually had an idea to build semi underground houses in the prairies and tornado prone areas, a take on the early pioneer dugouts.
3 sides of my house are built into the hill, with the closets, bathrooms, mudroom and root cellar all below grade. All would qualify as "safe rooms". It is a single story house. It always amazed me how few houses in tornado alley have safe rooms or storm cellars. When I was a builder, adding a basement to most homes only increased costs about 10%-15%.
There's a bit of a disconnect though: the house is on sale for $190,000, but
So buyers should be unflinchngly willing to pay a premium of over 35 per cent for "sustainability"? The article implies most of the energy efficiency comes from doing things like "superior insulation" that can be done to "tweaked" conventional designs but aren't because of cost reasons, but I suspect it would increase the costs by at most 10 percent. The rest of the increase looks to be due to adding "look what cool architectural ideas I've put in here" elements.
Incidentally, I once moved into a flat that had a contract with a "green" energy supplier that I cancelled and moved to the bog-standard supplier. My reasoning was that the green supplier appeared to be doing a tiny bit about sustainability and a great deal about presenting themselves as green [bill's and information packs printed on incredibly thick, high quality paper, etc]. My basic reasoning was that I'd do more environmental good by actually only having lights on in rooms in use, being minimal with the heating, etc, with the bog-standard supplier than I would being more liberal but using the "green" supplier, and have lower bills to boot. If there'd been an electricity supplier in the area who I'd genuinely thought was doing a lot about green issues without trying to add "boutique" features I'd have gone to them, but there wasn't.
These looks like the standard "I've got a good basic idea that's low margin, but if I add extra boutique elements I can hike up my margins much further and the customers won't mind" problem that afflicts lots of wannabe businessmen. So before "green" businesses complain people don't want to pay more to be green, they should make darn sure that it's actually greeness rather than "bling" that they're asking people to pay for.
Yes, I think that's the main reason the house isn't selling. (That, and the mortgage crisis.) It costs a lot more than a regular house, even though it's much cheaper than it would be if you build it yourself.
It's also very small by US standards. 1700 square feet is a starter townhouse around here.
However, it sounds to me like you might save a lot of money over the years if you had a house like this. U.S. Green Building Council platinum-certified, Passive House certified.
That doesn't sound like something that can easily be done by "tweaking."
But what if 'tweaking' is all you can afford to do?
Tweaking, doing a very small, totally inadequate, part of what is required is current UK Government policy - which I am happy to take advantage of - they paid half the price of my solar panels and they are going to fill my cavity walls with insulation for just £99 (~$150), if I were over 70 all the insulation work would be done for free!
Sadly, even new houses are not being built to the standard that will be required in maybe as little as 10 years or so. In my road several of the houses are more than 500 years old, so the turnover of renewing houses is very slow.
If we can't afford to build/upgrade our houses to the required standard I see a very uncomfortable future not too far ahead.
FWIW, by "tweaking" I meant that architectural designs/plans being used by new builders might need minor revisiosn to incorporate thicker walls, different windows, etc. The biggest change would be something "global" like the energy recovery ventilator. Obviously it still has to be done before the plot layouts and houses begin being constructed.
Agreed..it still comes down to the numbers if we want to see big movements toward whatever our particular desired end goal is.
Until energy gets expensive, there simply isn't enough incentive to spend the extra money. It's the same thing in every area one looks.
I mentioned the other day that obesity rates won't go down until we've finished gorging ourselves on this fossil fuel feast.
If one looks for a cause to the obesity problem, you'll find something like this:
http://www.win.niddk.nih.gov/statistics/#causes
At best you'll find a nod to globalization or lack of vigorous activity:
Those are fine as far as they go but they are far from the root cause.
For a hint, any force that can produce this kind of astonishing increase in population will simultaneously make the population fatter:
There are some views that the whole weight gain question is more complicated than the nih quote suggests. In particular, there are some views that humans have evolved to have "best" biochemical function to support a heavily active lifestyle (3000-3500 kcalories per day), working best with both that calorie intake and energy expenditure. It's claimed that living outside of this range (even eating fewer calories but also reducing physical movement accordingly) for extended periods results in some of the diseases of civilisation, along with difficulty maintaining low weight.
As with most medical stuff, it's difficult to get compelling empirical evidence for this point of view, but I find the reasoning plausible. As such, obesity may be caused by the lack of necessary physical activity for most of the population as population grows (given the fuel/technology level determining how large an area one individual can farm, doubling the population doesn't halve that amount but half the population end up doing things like running shops, banking, insurance, etc).
I would say the weight gain question is definitely more complicated. I believe the kind of calories is important since different foods are metabolized differently. I highly recommend Gary Taubes' 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' for anyone interested in nutrition questions. It's definitely a controversial book since it is questioning the dominant paradigm of the 'low fat, high fiber' diet, but I think it is a well-researched and well-written piece.
most american calories come from fat
as opposed to carbohydrates and protein
And yet...after fat became the enemy ca. 1980, Americans started eating less fat and more carbs. And that was when the obesity rates spiked.
I second the recommendation for Good Calories, Bad Calories. It's a fascinating book. Even if you're not interested in nutrition. It's basically about how science can go wrong.
Sounds pretty tweaky to me. You can take a standard-built home and use spray foam in place of the fiberglass insulation to provide the vapor barrier and infiltration seal. If you want, you can just "butter" the walls for that effect and fill the rest in with standard insulation. Also a slight tweak of how the walls are hung can provide for a thermal break along the studs. Pile insulation in the roof and add an active air exchange and poof...a standard house is tweaked to be much more efficient.
I think Americans are very rapidly getting to the point where they are going to have to downsize their expectations. Realistically, they can't afford such big houses any more. They may think they can, but they have been delusional for some years now, and the mortgage meltdown should be a strong hint that they need to rethink their expectations.
If you can't afford it, don't borrow the money to buy it.
No doubt, but then you can't expect them to pay extra for "green" features, can you?
Yes, you can. Any 'green' feature, for example, insulation, which reduces heating/cooling costs makes room for higher mortgage payments.
Well, that depends. My house is 1900 square feet, four bedrooms and two baths. It has R-30 in the roof, R-twentysomething (24, I think) in the walls, and two layers of R-30 under the floor. It has numerous, large windows on the south side; and very few, small windows on the north side. Our heating bills are minimal; and we need no cooling system at all- just open and close the windows at the right times.
It came with all that wonderful insulation right from the factory. Factory? Yes- it's a doublewide mobilehome. To borrow from an old car commercial, this isn't your father's mobilehome. Real wood clapboard siding, double pane windows, 30 year roof...not at all those awful tin-sided things they made 40 years ago.
Compared to a stick-built, it was cheap as chips, too. Affordable, roomy, and energy-efficient. It's too bad there's such a prejudice against them in America, not just by the people but by the lenders, too. For people of modest means, they can be just the right answer.
"So buyers should be unflinchngly willing to pay a premium of over 35 per cent for "sustainability"?"
The 20-year window of opportunity for preparation is rapidly closing. Too bad we waited so long. Maybe this is one example of The Window slamming shut on one of our former options.
-----------
"green homes" - bargaining stage.
"Mother Nature ?, Yes, Okay, here's the deal. I will live in a "green home" if you will let me keep my job and ... hello ???
Mother ???
Mother, Are You there???"
Americans need to learn to like smaller houses...
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/ecomii_healthy_living/74/the-shrinking-ameri...
There are definitely some interesting designs there !
I can see how trends have affected the house I currently live in.
Originally, it was a 1000 sq ft home with an attic and a basement. Wood frame construction. Two bedrooms on the first floor, living room, dining room, kitchen, one bathroom.
Then, there was a 70's addition on the back (typical low ceiling, blocky structure) which added 200 sq ft.
Then, the attic was finished into a master suite with a small bathroom, and another living room, which added another 600 sq ft.
I think it may have been an unofficial two-flat for a while, since there are two staircases up from the first floor.
So, all in all, I have about 1800 sq ft now. I don't include the basement space that I had finished to accommodate power outages (cooler in summer, warmer in winter).
I definitely don't use all the living space on a regular basis - I probably have twice what I actually need, including the fact that I run my business out of my house. However, I'm ever hopeful that my sister and/or brother will come from South Africa.
http://www.solardecathlon.gov/
Probably always happen if there is just one house converted in a street filled with conventional housing.
Simply means that the effort might be more successful if entire blocks of houses, both sides of the street, are all built together. Perhaps some vacant areas of Detroit might be a good pilot project, but unfortunately may have even higher financial risk.
I'm an architect. I see what you are saying. Those projects aren't great but they're not awful either.
Part of the problem is people confuse design, style, and ornamentation.
Design is about the way a house functions; the layout, the relationship to the site and context, engaging and pleasing spaces. Proportions (interior spaces as well as exterior massing and composition) are key.
Style arises from decisions made about how a house is constructed, different materials and the way they come together; the details.
Ornamentation is a signifier, like advertising. It plays on memory, nostalgia and image. People see arched-top windows and think, 'Oh I like that.' Nevermind that they are the cheapest drafty vinyl windows the builder could find.
There's a developer in my neighborhood building gigantic 2-story houses right up to the lot-lines amid 1920's bungalows with front and back yards. Totally out of scale and poorly designed and constructed. Then he sticks on a bunch of 'historic' looking plastic and styrofoam moldings and columns and goo-gads with no regard to actual historic style. I guess people like them, because he keeps building more.
Any style house can be well-designed, and incorporate enough 'green' features to be 100% better than a typical tract house. The single biggest 'green' feature a house can have is durability: being well constructed out of quality materials. My house was built in 1920. I wonder if that developer's houses will be around in the year 2100?
"There's a developer in my neighborhood building gigantic 2-story houses right up to the lot-lines amid 1920's bungalows with front and back yards."
I know - I gnash my teeth over a beautiful, 2400 sq ft, 1900's house on a 5000 sq ft lot, that was recently remodeled to a 4000 sq ft house with an enormous 3 car garage and about 500 sq ft of concrete driveway.
It is now stuck on the market at a price of $995K in a neighborhood of $300K - $400K homes.
I see you understand what I was referring to - if inexactly expressed - the fact that "green" elements could be incorporated into any style house. I have huge south facing windows in my 1904 Victorian, not original to the house, but they overlook my neighbor's house - I'm in the city - so to imagine that passive solar gain is going to work for me doesn't make a lot of sense.
One would need a particular lot size with the appropriate orientation to make it work effectively.
However, we do have wonderful street trees that cool the houses in summer. I do get some solar gain from west-facing windows in winter. I use my south-facing roof space for solar heat/hot water. No room left for PV.
Mostly, in the city, one has to work with what is already there. One has to be pretty lucky to come across an empty, south-facing lot, or find a tear-down in order to build from scratch.
A true Passive House in the upper half of the US does need a good south exposure with a lot of triple pane glass to be certified.
Without the passive solar aspect a passive house would represent a 80% energy reduction over a standard detached house versus a 90% reduction with a 'certified Passive House'.
As far as the appearance issue, you can make Passive Houses look quite uncool and conventional with tack-on eaves and porches.
These objections to Passive House are trival.
Even the expense is only slightly more than stock housing at $120 per square foot.
Why is TOD filled with so many unimaginative conservatives who
spend the days dreaming up excuses for not doing anything about energy depletion?
Home energy usage is a non issue, the issue is a lack of liquid fuels for transportation.
Since there is the tiniest of probabilities that anything more than minimal amounts of liquid fuels will be available for transportation, or any other usage, in the none to distant future, building energy usage is a key issue because buildings will be in direct competition with the electrified forms of transport which are most likely going to be predominate. An issue made all the more important because buildings, when properly constructed, can last centuries.
If it takes a lot of energy to heat or cool your home, it will take a lot of money to do so. If the economy keeps getting hit with 'whatever this is' that has us reeling right now, people will be in homes that are increasingly upside-down and/or that they cannot afford to keep within livable temperatures. We still have folks trying to pay for fuel debts from the last few winters, and try not to lose their Electric Services.
It's about much more than Transp. Fuels.
Why is TOD filled with so many unimaginative conservatives who
spend the days dreaming up excuses for not doing anything about energy depletion?
Energy depletion? What...you think only conservatives are stumped by how to get more hydrogen to the sun?
These objections are not trivial. When people buy homes, they buy what they like. And most people like Traditional or Victorian. In all my life, the only people I've met who liked that- IMO, horrible- Cubist looking stuff were in the top 5% of income. That is to say, only 2% of the population. The other 98% of the population wants the solid, serene old style home.
I have never ever in my life seen one of these super-eco-designers make a Victorian eco-home. That means they are purposely designing to the tastes of only 2% of potential customers. The other 98% take one look, go "yuck!" and head off to look at drafty, energy-wasting homes that look like a real house.
The goal is to get energy-efficient homes to the (vast) majority. Yes? I think that's what the goal is. Correct me if the real goal is to win Cubist design awards. And if the goal is to get most of our housing stock energy-efficient, then the architect has to design to the tastes of the majority. Or they simply won't buy them.
Oh, and being 35% above the going market price won't work either. Even if they make a beautiful Victorian ecohome and the buyer wants it real bad, no bank is going to loan 35% above market.
Some conservative passivehouses
Oh, that upper one is very nice! I love the old-timey big wraparound porches. Add shutters around the windows, replace the porch columns with turned posts and rails, add a couple curvy wood gewgaws in the corners...beautiful!
Yup. Amoung the things I have is a poly urethane foam machine. Offered its use to super insulate a local effort to rebuild houses for a cut of the action.
Was told to pound sand because the additional cost would not able to be recooped in the home price.
Up till the mortgage crises, people bought homes as a hedge against inflation and to make a little (or a lot of) profit. I believe the average were looking at a home (investment) for a rather short time use and then move on. Among other things is the mobile society where their next job may be a 1000 miles away. Trying to amortise a $50,000 difference in price over a few years will not work so they do not buy those higher priced houses.
The price of houses were often quoted as $xxx per square foot. A 5000 sq ft house @ $100/ft2 was considered a lot better deal than a 3000 sq ft house @ $125/ft2. Heating and other utilities were considered secondary and the contractors took advantage of this. Especially since money was cheap one could afford the larger house.
Now there is a general financial squeeze, fear of losing a job, and higher financing requirements which put the more expensive house out of reach.
IMHO the financials had more to do with where we are today than the design, quality or efficiency of the house in question. The question; "Can we sell this house in three years and make a profit?" was more important than anything else.
My wife and I rode this bubble up till 2002 and stepped off for our retirement home. It is a nice house with some land that we may be sharing with family in the future. Since we have been PO and bubble aware for a very long time each house move was more scary than the last. Now we have a 50 foot comute to the woodworking shop and we build high end furniture, dabble with solar, and have a serious garden.
http://solarag.info/bhc/bauprinzip/bauprinzip.html
start the video to see the house. Soalr glass house. Edgy and unsellably expensive. Video in english.
"but whose environmental risks are still uncertain"? What kind of B.S. is this? Watch the show on HBO about fracking and ask yourself about this stupid remark this author posed. What a load of DUNG, stupid propaganda for stupid people.
I do believe that climate change is real- but I have consistently believed that the answer to it was not emission control treaties, Not because reduced CO2 emissions would not help but because you would never get a treaty with teeth that could result in lower emissions. With the Senate killing the idea we can finally move onto (a) geo engineering that can help alleviate the worst or more realistic (b) set into motion a series of policies that will help the United States survive the worst of climate change.
As people with more knowledge than I have remarked- the planet will survive what we do to it- civilization may not.
Eventually the Earth will enter into another glacial period. Climate Change is not an immediate issue, Peak Oil has far more immediate consequences.
The climate problem isn't as simple as a slow warming of a few degrees on average. While true that the evidence points toward an eventual return to Ice Age conditions, have you considered that Climate Change includes the start of the nest Ice Age? Or, that there is a possibility that the effects include the release of much more methane, which would tend to amplify the warming, perhaps so much so that humanity can not survive?
E. Swanson
The catastrophic methane release stuff is nothing more than the work of mega-doomers, it is doom for the sake of doom.
link please
Yes mega-doomers are obviously responsible for all that methane release. They are causing those hydrates to release their methane as the ocean warms and as the tundra warms. Decaying organic material releases methane but we could stop that also if we could just silence those damn mega-doomers. If they could be silenced... by whatever means... then the methane release would stop immediately. Stop the methane release by silencing the mega-doomers. Write your congressman!
Ron P.
No, it's the work of scientists. One survey showed that 97% of scientists who are working in the climate field agree that AGW is a problem. It's not political. Even Sarah Palin knows the permafrost is melting in the Alaska, messing up roads and buildings. The problem of permafrost melting is the reason the Alaska pipeline was built above ground more than 30 years ago...
E. Swanson
Please do not confuse the grazing herds (of caribou and humans) with facts.
Move along here; nothing to see folks.
Why yes Bristol, the bubbling lake is pretty and not wholly uncurious. But if the good Lord had meant for us not to drill, oh baby, drill, it would be in the Bible right after the part about being fruitful and exponentiating.
I used to agree that Peak Oil has more immediate consequences, but I'm not so sure anymore.
If we start experiencing dramatic swings in climate like we did during the Dust Bowl years, or much worse, like 14th century Europe, limits to world oil production might not matter.
Like this ?
"(CNN) -- A dam on an eastern Iowa lake suffered a "catastrophic" failure Saturday, sending a massive amount of water into nearby communities and forcing residents to flee, officials said.
The Lake Delhi dam, about 45 miles north of Cedar Rapids, failed as a result of "massive rain -- a very unusually high amount this season," according to Jim Flansburg, communications director for Gov. Chet Culver."
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/24/iowa.dam.breach/index.html?hpt=T2
Or this ? (here we go again....)
"Chicago, Illinois (CNN) -- Severe overnight storms in the Chicago area caused power outages, flight cancellations and flooded homes and roadways.
About 50,000 ComEd customers were without electricity Saturday morning after lightning and heavy downpours pummeled the city overnight, said Laura Micheli, a spokeswoman for the utility."
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/24/illinois.chicago.flooding/index.html?hp...
"CHICAGO (Reuters) - Powerful storms spawned by intense heat and humidity produced flooding and tornadoes in the Midwest Saturday, disrupting travel and cutting power to thousands of homes.
The front appeared to be stalled over Chicago, raising the possibility of more drenching rains tonight."
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Tornadoes+flooding+Midwest+storms+conti...
Wait a minute! Drought episodes like the Dust Bowl years are NORMAL in North America. They probably occur once or twice in an average century. They can be a lot drier than the 1930s. If you're not ready for one, better start planning.
If you look back in the geological record record, it's even scarier. The average temperature would suddenly rise or fall by 6 degrees C (10 degrees F) in less than a decade, and then stay there for a thousand years or more before suddenly changing again.
Yes, the occurrence of major droughts (roughly) west of the 100 meridian were common, according to the geological record. Some of those drought events were much worse than any seen in recent centuries and a recurrence would likely cut the flow in the Colorado River substantially, presenting great difficulties for the urban areas in the Southwest.
However, the larger temperature changes you point to have not been seen since the Younger-Dryas, although there was a brief period around 8200 years BP which appears in the record as a cold period of about a hundred years. The likely causes of such rapid changes were changes in the Thermohaline Circulation (THC) in the Nordic Seas and North Atlantic and one likely result of increasing greenhouse gases seen in modeling experiments is a weakening or shutdown of the THC. That would be the result of a freshening of the surface waters in the area, a process which appears to be presently underway.
There is evidence that the THC has recently weakened in the Greenland Sea. A similar event was found from tracer measurements taken in the 1980's, which should give one considerable pause regarding the continuation of our BAU dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If you think those larger temperature changes are "scary", wouldn't you also want to do everything possible to minimize the possibility of their return???
E. Swanson
Geoengineering?
What do you have in mind?
Filling the air with particulates and sulfur dioxide crystals? Or calcining billions of tons of limestone to dump in the oceans?
What policies do you propose to help the US survive a 2-6 degree increase in temperatures that will happen because the Senate rejects CC legislation?
the Senate rejects CC legislation?
How about actually dealing with climate change VS making the bill a wealth transfer to a politically connected class?
http://www.environmentalleader.com/2009/12/08/uk-report-just-30-of-carbo...
Yup - for every $1 spent on the actual effort, $1 goes to the connected like Goldman Sachs.
Given the effort is only 30% effective - let the planet burn. And be sure to point out the greed of the monied classes is why the world burns.
Sometimes even Tom Tom of NY Toms "gets it".
Denninger has some really dire predictions today in a two part video.
Bill Still Interview (Two Parts)
Ron P.
If Denninger is right, it seems a collapse due to peak oil may be delayed by many years, since energy demand will be reduced significantly from a purely economic collapse.
It's a system. Energy costs played a big role in creating the economic bubble, and in popping the economic bubble.
I think the current and ongoing economic collapse will cement the 2005-2010 period as The Peak in world oil production.
Going forward a lot of hypothetical reserves will likely be shut-in permanently due to geological/technological limitations and due to geopolitical and economic instability. And any future economic recoveries, or growth, will be limited by the on-going collapse of the petroleum industry.
...and declining EROEI.
... yes, and rust. "Rust never sleeps", said matt and neil. Rust... always gaining on us... it's hell getting old ;)
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10810406/1/summer-reading-oil-is-running-...
100-150 years?!! Let's not scare the little people now...
US Minerals Databrowser - 2010 update
I have just finished updating the US Minerals Databrowser with the 2010 release of USGS DS140 -- Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material Commodities. This update includes annual data through the end of 2008 for 64 different commodities and we can finally see some of the effects of the 2008 speculative overshoot and crash on minerals production and prices. As usual, I think there are some good stories to tell with this important dataset.
Interestingly, the effect is very different depending on the commodity. Some examples are included below. The graphs on the left cover the period from 1900 to 2008 and show US production in dark gray, world production in light gray and an adjusted price trend in green.
The graphs on the right show what I like to call "the economist's view" with price plotted against production for the period 1950 to 2008. When the line trends toward the upper right it signifies increases in both production and price; moves toward the lower right indicate increased production at lower cost; moves straight up or down signify speculative booms or busts; a trend to the upper left may mean we are reaching geologic limitations.
More interpretation available from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summary for Copper.
More interpretation available from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summary for Gold.
More interpretation available from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summary for Iron Ore.
More interpretation available from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summary for Potash.
The interface of economics and geology is endlessly fascinating.
Happy Exploring!
Jon
Many thanks for your hard work, Jon!
Your databrowser is one of my cornerstones when I'm debating those who are reluctant to accept limits to growth and the relationship between economics and hard commodities.
I don't recall if this was mentioned in a previous Drumbeat...
BP admits it 'Photoshopped' official images as oil spill 'cut and paste' row escalates
BP has ordered staff to stop manipulating photographs of its Gulf of Mexico oil spill response, as the row over its public relations campaign intensifies.
See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/oil/7904221/BP-admits-it-Photosh...
In any event, it doesn't paint a pretty picture.
Cheers,
Paul
I saw that one on CNN, it must have been done by a rank amateur! They didn't even manage to match the color and texture of the area of water they used to cover up the heliport from the original. My first reaction was, What?! They can't even do really basic image retouching or Tony Hayward has a new desk job with a huge learning curve ahead of him...
Hi Fred,
Perhaps Tony should stick to paint by numbers, like Charles Nelson Reilly (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDCCfuA3DG8). Word is that he may be retiring from BP on Tuesday. so now would be a good time to pick up a hobby.
Cheers,
Paul