You think "my ilk" is responsible for your failures? LOL You don't even know me. I suspect you became what you are through your own failures, but I really have no idea unless you contact me in person.

Dear Wanderer,

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

Welcome to Atlantis, Wanderer (I mean Ellis.)!

J;

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.

Three basic sources of energy on this planet are solar, radioactivity and geothermal. All other forms are derived from them.

Should we nominate you for the position of Ellis Wyatt, Wanderer?

Back in the 1990s, my boss and I were in charge of a Petroleum Seminar Series. Several experts said then that we had about a 200 year supply of oil at the time. The long term volatility in oil prices has largely been due to non-technical factors. The short term (within year) volatility (Gasoline prices go up between Feb. and Memorial Day and down in the fall.) is so predictable that I made the start of my nest egg betting on it back in the mid-1990s.

Wanderer's statements about Milankovitch cycles are accurate. There is a cycle that is somewhere between 10-20 years as well that dbhalling is accurately remembering. I forget the exact number of years, but El Nino and La Nina are portions of the 10-20 year cycle that dbhalling remembers. I think there is another cycle around every 55-60 years, too (Think Dust Bowl and 1988 for the hot part vs. the global cooling scare in the 1970s).

Thanks - got it

DB;

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.

I agree that solar forcing seems the most likely answer, but isn't the Sun spot cycle somewhere around 10-20 years? That does not explain the Ice Ages or Little Ice Age or the Roman Warming period.

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.

Dear Wanderer,

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.

That's pretty accurate because the people wanting such environmentally friendly fuels vote Democrat, and the Democrats change what they want every so often (solar, H2, biofuels, back to solar, etc.).

Wanderer,

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.

J;

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.

I am in the security guard business. I have done business with several of these "Green" technology businesses. They all start with a bunch of hoopla and within 2 years they are belly up. This is about the amount if time it takes for the government grant money to get used up. If you are lucky and stay in touch with the operations folks, often someone else writes a new grant application and some nitwit in the government gives them more money and you can get the job back for another 18 months to 2 years. You have to be extremely careful to watch the aging on your financials with a customer like this. Most of the companies I have seen have been in the ethanol fuels business. I have seen 2 plants get built and go belly up right as the construction finishes, before they actually produce anything.

The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere issue is not as clear as many think.
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.

DB;

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.

There is some progress being made. One firm that sells American-made solar panels is getting close to a capital cost of under $1/watt installed.

Battery storage costs also play a role, with a decent 6 kwh unit costing over $4K.

The last couple of generations of American workers aren't accustomed to self-motivated, hard-scrabble labor. I learned about initiative from watching my father. As a machinist by education (Norfolk, VA Apprentice school during WW II), he trained himself to also be a good welder, model maker, sheet metal worker, and mechanic, so he could market his skills more broadly. If jobs weren't to be found where we lived, we had to be ready to move to where they could be found, even if it meant moving from one coast to the other.

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.

Actually we already have figured out the environmentally friendly alternatives. They are just too expensive. The green technology isn't as green as most people think either.

Solar energy just has too high a capital cost. The ROI on the solar panels for my pool is 50-100 years.

As someone who sold a biofuels company, I can tell you that the cost of natural gas is so close to an historic low that biofuels will not make sense for a long time (at least until the cost of natural gas doubles).