I love fossil fuels T-shirt
I just saw this person wearing his "I love fossil fuels" T-shirt for Earth Day. I need to get one of these shirts.
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Advantage - they produce carbon dioxide which contrary to the alarmist movement propaganda, is beneficial to all life forms,
fossil fuels do not cause global warming or more hurricanes or storms or earthquakes. There is no evidence of any warming effect, the so-called theory linking CO2 to warming is shoddy.
A disadvantage is a possible very slight cooling effect on global temperatures, worth noting as the earth is entering a cooling phase, the effect is very small.
Where do you think the Uranium came from? It comes from expired stars.
Your hypothesis on the origin of Uranium is at best an hypothesis. It is more likely a result of the origin of the universe.
Your scientific ignorance is amazing. The energy comes for raising the water comes from the SUN. If you don't know that then perhaps you need to take basic physics.
No it is not a hypothesis, it is known to anyone who understands Nucleosynthesis
Trouble at the rig. Ellis might be away for a bit, keeping your lights on and your house warm, or cool, depending on where you are.
Remember, Jan 1st dozens of coal fired power plants will go offline due to new EPA carbon regs. Not sure whether or how quickly they can be converted to natgas, but I'm guessing around Jan 2nd you're all going to be knocking on my door with your empty bowls asking for "more hydrocarbons, sir", and I wouldn't want to disappoint you.
However, I will be disappointed if you haven't caused a great deal of social networking unrest before I get back.
If you have problems with the coal-fired power plants, I have been on just about every side of the energy equation. If worse comes to worse, I'll start a new waste-to-energy, fuels, and chemicals company back up like the one I sold to some across Florida. I know how to store up energy better than just about everyone else, too,
and could make a pretty penny doing it for Gulchers in a true emergency. Ahh, but then again, I'd probably get sued by moochers and looters from profiting off of others' calamity. There's a law against that in Florida because of the occasional hurricanes.
Of course, the feds would attempt to stop any production of power outside their control. Maybe it is time for you to revisit your abilities as an entrepreneur in energy. Just thinkin'.
That's why I come to the Gulch. I get "edjumacated", as a friend of mine would say.
I learned more about GW and oil production by reading through the comments than I have learned in all the research I have done on my own by searching the net.
I attribute that to the intelligence of the contributors and their ability to put most of their posts in plain language for everyday guys like me. I could understand what they were posting almost immediately.
Thank you, wanderer, jbrenner, et al. for increasing my knowledge base of the subject.
The title referred to a Forbes article about the plight of the Kentucky coal Miners.
Things change in life. People went from horse buggy carriages to cars. Oil lamps to electric lights.
Just Northeast of the Kentucky Coal Miners is the Marcellus Shale formation. Plenty of natgas drilling jobs up there.. The Coal Miners would not have to worry about Mine cave-ins like the one two years ago that cost 29 miner lives. They'd be working in sunshine and fresh air. What training for such jobs is Kentucky providing? Additionally they could be training for nuclear power and renewables manufacturing and power sources. Where is Kentucky on helping on that?
Think new trends. Think renewables energy sources.
Harry M
The problem is that the government has attempted to turn the market on its head by artificially driving the price of existing, plentiful fuels up, while subsidizing renewable sources. Such moves are a drain on the economy, and counterproductive, resisting market forces instead of taking advantage of them.
Even with government handouts, most of the significant renewable energy production efforts have failed entirely, or are unable to exist without taxpayer support. When these energy technologies are able to stand on their own in the market is when there will be a rapid and dependable move to renewables (wind and solar).
Battery storage costs also play a role, with a decent 6 kwh unit costing over $4K.
I recommend "Beyond Oil" by Deffeyes, an easy read by a smart guy who dispels the wacko theories about the end of civilization as we know it.
As regards the Marcellus, PA's rig count is down 65% from its peak because various state and Federal agencies made it so difficult, time consuming and expensive to get drilling permits that many of us gave up and moved to more friendly states, some to Ohio, but most to Texas, where drilling permits take weeks, not years. We like to train our own in the oil industry but anyone who's worked underground would have the mechanical knowledge to learn the job. However, I've yet to meet an underground miner in the oil industry. I wonder if union miners find the mostly nonunion oilfield disagreeable. We used to fly workers in from the western US because we found it impossible to recruit in PA.
With few rigs left in the Marcellus, the nearest hive of oilfield activity in which Kentuckians might participate would be Texas, a thousand mile drive. We don't recruit much because oilfield operations are far-flung. Your boss might be hundreds or thousands of miles away, so we look for people who are self-motivated. If you can't find us or can't make a thousand mile drive, you're probably not what we're looking for, but for those willing to make the effort, Texas is the place.
When my dad retired, he had become the chief field engineer for a major aerospace firm, even without any college degree. Persistence pays, but it's hard to convince today's labor force to make the effort, when it's easier to collect money from the taxpayer for not working.
The other thing is to put all the environmentalists up against the wall! They are the ones who stifle progress with there ignorance and anti-tech philosophies.
One last thought, the citizens of the US should say to the President and environmentalist if they believe in global warming "Go plant more trees!", that should keep them busy for a few years.
http://www.cafepress.com/mf/29813515/i-l...
-- j
The principal debt holder for Solyndra was a billionaire named George Kaiser, who inherited an oil fortune from his father and bought the Oklahoma legislature to turn his large oil fortune into an even larger banking fortune. (He bought Bank of Oklahoma and convinced the state legislature to ban branch banking, thus eliminating competition from any bank not based in the state.)
George is a big lefty do-gooder but, when he was about to lose $300 million the day before Solyndra's collapse he visited the White House and "poof" the US Treasury magically paid off the loan, putting George Kaiser, a private citizen ahead of the US Government in the line of creditors; strictly illegal, but hardly reported by the media. Did you guess, before you read this far, George Kaiser was a large bundler for the Obama campaign?
I went to another fund raiser event at someone's house ten years ago, and they couldn't tell someone the max we were allowed to contribute that cycle. Disorganized.
My favorite one is the race for WI governor. They're running someone from Madison, who is an executive at a large bike company she inherited a significant stake in. She may be great, but her life hits all the stereotypes about Madison. They need someone from Superior or something. It almost seems like they want to lose.
Bjørn Lomborg, economist and statistician, a believer in 'climate change', has done detailed net present value calculations of costs and benefits. He found that the costs of prevention vastly outweigh any benefits.
For not following the politically correct line, even tho' a believer, he has been soundly abused and denigrated.
See also the work of economist Richard Toll who until recently was an IPCC reviewer.
There are others.
More to the point, anthropomorphic climate change does not exist, there are thus no costs. What is staggering is the amount of money governments are spending on trying to stop something that does not exist, and whipping up the scare.
My gut feeling is that simply limiting emissions will cost more than the costs of climate change. There must be another approach. In the mean time, we're stuck with undesirable options. This is far outside my areas of expertise, but I think going back to a bronze-age level of burning stuff will never people possible. There has to be another solution.
It blows my mind how people are willing are either stupid enough or short-sighted enough to simply deny the problem.
Have you heard of Milutin Milankovitch (macro climate cycles) or Henry's Law (the temperature relation of gas solubility in water) or radiative forcing? The more I study Global Warming the less likely it seems to be anthropogenic.
However, whether Global Warming is anthropogenic or not, the end of the petroleum age will come. Years ago we drilled for $10 oil, now we're drilling for $100 oil. Sometime in the near future, when other energy sources compete with oil on a cost basis, people will change and the new environmental scare will be lithium ion pollution.
The end of the world will come, but it's billions of years away, and won't be man made.
I think if you adjust those prices for inflation, the cost of drilling has come down. Of course if environmentalist had not interfered we would of replaced coal with one of the versions of fission nuclear energy. And crude is being replaced by natural gas. Organic waste breaks down into methane very quickly, so I don't think that will go away for a very long time.
I agree, lay a solar cycle chart over Earth surface temperature chart and the correlation is impressive. The gas solubility issue arises in analysis of CO2 levels found in ice cores. There is a positive CO2/Earth temperature correlation but, since a higher Earth temperature would immediately result in release of CO2 from the oceans - which caused which? Did increased CO2 levels cause increased temperature, or vice versa?
No, drilling costs have gone up dramatically. In 1990 spread costs were $10,000/day. Today my spread costs are running $80,000/day. A well budget in 1990 might have been $900,000. Now we're breaking the $10 million barrier on land in the continental United States. I know we've had inflation, but not 800% or 1100% in 24 years. We are drilling more difficult wells to produce more difficult formations.
I agree, much of the expense of building nuclear power plants is related to regulations and environmental lawsuits caused by a science deprived public and nonstandardization of reactor design caused by the private, fragmented nature of our power generation system. It could have been done better and hopefully will be done better in future. (And with fuel recycling maybe we can put off that poison political decision - Yucca Flats - for a few more decades.)
The storage problem has held back vehicular use of natural gas (imagine a 4000psi tank the size of a hot water heater in your trunk) but several companies are getting promising results with methane adsorption, which means in the not too distant future we may be able to deal with methane the same way we do acetylene or propane, making it an attractive replacement for gasoline.
The correct correlation is between sunspots and Earth temperature.
If you look carefully at the correlations between Earth temperature and CO2
concentration, you will see that CO2 increases briefly trail the temperature
increases. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere goes up as a result
of the temperature increase, according to Henry's Law.
I think Milankovitch, solar cycles and Henry's Law can account for both climate change and atmospheric CO2 levels. I can't say that with certainty, but the data points in that direction. Al Gore and his followers interpret the ice core data to say CO2 preceded temperature, but I question: 1) their honesty, 2) their ability to ascertain the chronology of annual changes taking place hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of years ago when the only data available is compressed ice.
Yes, lay a solar activity chart over an Earth temperature chart and if you don't see the correlation you're ignoring your eyes.
All one has to do is an energy balance to realize that humanity is an insignificant set of specks, and that sunspots explain all of the variation. You are quite correct in what you say. Gore and his followers have the carts pulling the horses.
I saw an interesting paper on the changes in the Earth's orbit and precession of the axis as explaining the Ice Ages and Warming periods, along with Sun Spots. But other papers have suggested there is not enough variation in energy to have the observed effects. I am skeptical that any of the AGW prophets have enough knowledge of thermodynamics to accurately model what a 1% increase in solar radiation would do to the temperature on Earth. I am not sure I do and I know I do not have the time.
They're called Milankovitch Cycles, after Milutin Milankovitch, the Serbian mathematician. He died before we cored Greenland's ice cap and confirmed his theories, which afterward, were widely taught (I learned them in grade school) until AGW became fashionable.
Milankovitch accounts for 21,000, 41,000, 100,000 and 400,000 year cycles, but shorter, perhaps nonperiodic cycles, like the Little Ice Age and Maunder Minimum appear to confirm correlations between climate and solar activity levels (imagine that!). Milankovitch is why, at one time, people advocated increased burning of coal, to try to increase the atmospheric blanket around the earth and shelter us from the next ice age.
I'm with JBrenner, we're at the mercy of the universe. When our distance from the sun increases and our axis tilts, it'll get colder and whatever humans are around at that time will learn to deal with it, or die.
A great visual can be found at http://www.spaceweather.com and it's a good source for all observational data too.
We've been in a trend of declaciation for thousands of years, with exceptions due to "noise" like the little ice age. (Maybe it's not random noise. I am not knowledgeable.) I do not know what triggers an increase in glaciation. My understanding is we're far from that now. The notion that greenhouse gases could actually slow change if we go past a glacial minimum and start cooling again doesn't ring true to me, but I have no idea.
I am Ellis Wyatt. I drilled Niobrara Shale wells in Colorado in 1984, drilled the first Niobrara Shale horizontal in 1986, drilled my first Bakken Shale horizontal in 1988, have since drilled oil wells in multiple countries on 5 continents, only to come back and find Atlas Shrugged coming true. Wyatt was denied access to the railways. We are denied access to pipelines, instead being made to pay Warren Buffet an extra $19/bbl to transport our oil by rail. It's not just Keystone, Sandpiper is also being delayed by the same people.
And like Ellis Wyatt, I'm reaching the end of my patience with people who take from me and give to those who refuse to take the risks and make the sacrifices that have made my success possible. I am on the edge of shrugging, and letting this burden fall where it may.
The Bakken Shale - could Rand have known about this? It seems to match the AS story.
Ellis Wyatt- one of my fav characters in part I. Played better than written in the book.
No. We've been poking around the Bakken since the 1950's but Bakken geology and North Dakota topography are wrong for Atlas Shrugged. Rand's fictitious oilfield had to be in a mountainous area with restricted access, the reason for Hank Reardon's bridge. Western North Dakota is almost flat, with easy access. She may have known of Rangely, the biggest oilfield in Colorado, which was discovered in the '30s, but not produced until 1943 because of its remote location. Or, she might have been thinking of the San Juan Basin in southern Colorado.
The Bakken does, however, exemplify her story. It's a great resource, discovered and developed by entrepreneurs struggling against nonsensical government regulations which enrich the political supporters of those in power. Barack Obama's refusal to make a decision one way or the other on Keystone delays the alternate route across the Canadian Rockies and makes Buffett's BNSF Railroad billions of dollars while reducing the profits of the evil right wing oil tycoons in North Dakota. Barack Obama and Warren Buffett together add about $19 per barrel to the cost of Bakken crude, while reducing the efficiency and safety of the enterprise. Rand was right. We're living her nightmare.
I had been looking for Ellis Wyatt ever since arriving. I have worked on almost every side of the energy business except drilling, but without question, I am Quentin Daniels.
Welcome to the Gulch,
Jim Brenner
All good points. But my point is the cost of a barrel of crude is about the same, but this website disagrees with me http://inflationdata.com/inflation/infla... d
This chart shows less growth in the cost on an inflation adjusted basis, but still growth
http://fire.pppl.gov/fpa_annual05.html
and this chart is different than either of the others
http://www.wtrg.com/oil_graphs/oilprice1....
Makes you wonder if any of them are right.
No, I know they are mostly wrong. Precisely where they say the their Data means this "?". The exact, measured data can be completely correct and accurate, but at the point where they must take their data, develop it into a cohesive conclusion, and postulate an analysis, they ALL fail because they approach a problem looking for an answer they know in advance. Give me a scientist who when you ask him about global warming says "What?" and I'll be excited about reading his conclusions from the data. But if he already believes that GW is real and man caused, but has not studied the data, OR already believes that GW is hogwash, but has not already studied the data - the man would need to be King Salomon to not be trying to make the data match his convictions.
That is why when the MSM claims that "X" number of scientists already believe that GW is settled "science". (which is one lie to start with) You can know two things. 1. That they only asked scientists not working in this field (if they work in the field of climatology, they CAN'T say this) 2. That they attended school within the past 30 years and have been programmed with this being "Settled Science" from grade school up and are recounting what they have been told was true - by people who did not know the truth, who were recounting reports from others who did not know the truth from others who "decided" what "Settled Science" would be.
in answer to a questionnaire, 97% of scientists accepted anthropomorphic climate change.
Analysis of the numbers, who the questions were sent to, and the responses corrected the figure to 2.7%. The correction is not widely reported.
What's Li-Ion pollution? I take my Li-Ion cells to be recycled, and I hope they don't pollute. If you short them out, they fail spectacularly and stink up the place. I have no idea how toxic the fumes are, but I get out quick when someone smokes one!
I don't get the thing about the world coming to the end. I can't tell if that's a straw man or you're just stating a simple simple fact-- the world won't end until the sun starts turning into a red giant.
Re the sounding impossibility of CO2 being nonthreatening; what do you know of the history of the theory of relativity? Someday, if I gather enough of these points that appear next to my name (whatever they are) so I can post something, I'll post my lecture about the consequences of refusing to believe your data.
The control crowd will always need a cause, an emergency, the fear of which they can use to keep us herded in the direction they choose. Since we have given 80% of the earth's population a bye on carbon emissions we will learn whether anthropogenic global warming is real. I believe it is not. If it comes to pass that most people lose faith in AGW then the control crowd will need a new cause, a new deadly threat against which they can rally the herd. By then we'll be cranking out highly toxic chemical storage devices for electricity at a rate an order of magnitude higher than now. The pollution caused by that manufacture will become the next threat against which we will be rallied.
Mankind might be able to destroy itself, but it doesn't have the ability to destroy the earth.