The EIA has recently published their International Energy Statistics. Their stats include all liquids such as NGLs, biofuels and even refinery process gain. But I only track actual oil. The EIA does not track “Crude Only” so we are forced to track what they do track which is Crude + Condensate.
The EIA is about four months behind with their world petroleum data. All data in this report has data through August, 2014 and is in thousand barrels per day.
World C+C production was down 124,000 barrels per day in August. But according to the IEA it will be up considerably more in September.
Non OPEC production shot up in November, 2013 but has made no progress since. Though US production has continued to climb, declines in the rest of the world have kept it from increasing.
Since that date, November 2013, US production is up 655,000 barrels per day through August.
But since that same date last November the rest of non-OPEC has is down 920,000 barrels per day. Non OPEC less USA is down 1,665,000 barrels per day since peaking in November, 2010.
The North Sea, the combined production of Denmark, Norway and the UK, halted its decline in late 2012 but it now looks like it has started to decline again.
Mexico is always interesting. They halted their decline in 2009 and held that plateau for about three and one half years. But production has dropped 200,000 bpd since they fell off that plateau.
Russia is the world’s largest producer of Crude + Condensate.
Here the EIA and JODI data is through August while the CDU TEK data is through Septmber. The CDU TEK numbers were in tons. I used 7.2 barrels per ton to convert to tons to barrels.
In order to get a better idea of what is happening in Russia I show only the last 20 months of production numbers. I have only January through September of the CDU TEK numbers, Russia’s official web site. They show only daily production so I have to average it to get monthly numbers. But I stopped collecting after September because I find the data worthless.
Everyone agrees July was a bad month for Russia. Wildfires closed down some pipelines. But Russia says they more than recovered in August. They have the August numbers 10,000 bpd above June. The EIA has Russian August numbers about 40,000 bpd be below June and JODI has them 64,000 bpd above their June production.
I don’t think much of the JODI numbers and even less of the CDU TEK numbers. Some may complain about the EIA numbers but they are the best we have regardless of their shortcomings.
Crude oil production in other nations of interest:
I believe China, the world’s fourth largest producer, has peaked. Any increase in consumption in China will have to come from imports.
C+C production in Canada, the world’s fifth largest producer, has slowed. Canada’s peak depends entirely on the price of oil. If the price of oil goes up then Canada’s production will likely continue, though at a slow pace. But if prices stay low I expect Canada’s production to begin to decline.
Colombia had a surge beginning in late 2007 but production seems to have peaked there also.
India seems to be having production problems as of late. With India’s population and economic problems they can ill afford a drop in oil production.
I have updated the pages Non-OPEC Charts and World Crude Oil Production by Geographical Area with the August production numbers.
Note: I send an email notice when I publish a new post. If you would like to receive that notice then email me at DarwinianOne at Gmail.com.
Pending 2015:
A few hundred K bpd from Kashagan. Due next year. No point in projecting it to grow, given their history.
Mexico’s magical change of tax law that will bring in magical expertise and turn it all around.
China and Russian shale, to be damn hard to do at $65/b, not credible in 2015.
A few hundred K bpd more from Iraq. Possible. At least credible.
Loss of 800K-1.5 mbpd from US next year.
Loss of maybe 250K bpd from Canada next year.
At these prices, loss of another 250K bpd next year from Brazil.
Here’s a wild card — loss of 350K bpd next year from Kuwait as infield saturates.
In regard to Mexico, we are probably seeing the impact of KMZ following the same kind of production decline that Cantarell experienced.
Mexico’s net exports (total petroleum liquids + other liquids) were down to 0.78 mbpd in 2013, versus 1.76 mbpd in 2004.
Based on the 2004 to 2013 rate of decline in their ECI Ratio (ratio of production to consumption), I put Mexico’s estimated post-2004 CNE (Cumulative Net Exports) at about 5.6 Gb. They shipped 3.5 Gb from 2005 to 2013 inclusive, putting estimated remaining post-2004 CNE at about 2.1 Gb (about 63% depleted), at the end of 2013. I estimate that they shipped about 12% of remaining post-2004 CNE in 2013.
Of course, if their production decline accelerates, this post-2004 CNE estimate would be too optimistic.
mazama’s black consumption line for Mex is flat. I have been in Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas both over the past year or two and they are towns damn near empty of tourists. The allegedly booming US economy isn’t filling them how it used to.
Hmmm, I’m gonna declare that tourism affects country oil consumption. If it’s down, so is consumption. Less stuff ships in. Fewer taxis hailed etc.
Given an ongoing production decline, unless a net oil exporting country cuts their oil consumption at the same rate as the rate of decline in production, or at a faster rate, the resulting net export decline rate will exceed the production decline rate, and the net export decline rate will accelerate with time.
For example, assume production of 2.0 mbpd and consumption of 1.0 mbpd at a production peak, with a steady 5%/year production decline, and no increase in consumption:
The Year One net export decline rate (relative to peak rate) would be 10.3%/year, versus the 5%/year production decline rate.
The Year Ten net export decline rate (relative to peak rate) would be 15.6%/year, versus the 5%/year production decline rate.
Soon the only economy left in Mexico will be the drug trade.
PV is having a bumper year for touristas. When were you there, low season?.
NAOM
hmmm Oct last year, and Aug.
Low Season for PV, especially Aug.
NAOM
What is this pv?
Expat speak for Puerto Vallarta. We tend to short foreign city names, Kuala Lumpur is KL, Buenos Aires is BA…
Are there any new fields waiting to be developed in Mexico or is this all very speculative? Does more lie out in deep water waiting to be tapped?
NAOM
Why would Mexico turn around that fast? Do they have all the bid round and operations regulations in place? I’m familiar with several “openings” for foreign investors, including the one in Venezuela, and it didn’t happen that fast. I also noticed local companies seemed to do better. But that may have been caused by corrupt deals?
Do you have any idea what the effective royalty will be for foreign investors in Mexico?
And of course, one burned, twice shy, i.e., Mexico did nationalize once already.
My guess? 100% of all costs for 50% of the revenue, max. Imagine swimming the river to drill stinkin’ Eagle Ford shale wells in N. Mexico on those kind of terms, at 65 dollar oil. Ain’t gonna happen.
Exploiting their share of the Eagle Ford doesn’t seem to be on Pemex’s radar at all: Mexico’s Pemex Lowers Expected Oil Output for 2014 – WSJ Nothing but talk about offshore there or in other articles I perused. It’s news enough that foreign companies are going to be allowed to work in Mexico at all, ceding ownership of subsurface mineral rights to landowners, hey, that’s crazy talk, amigo. Assuming that’s why they aren’t drilling like gangbusters already.
They lose ca. 30 kb/d to theft these days: HUIMANGUILLO, Mexico: Mexico thieves stealing billions in oil, gasoline from country’s pipelines | World | SanLuisObispo
According to that article Nigeria loses 400 kb/d to theft, which is, I’d reckon, a larger factor in global supply/demand balance than EVs. Had no idea things were that bad – I remember reading years ago that it was something more reasonable, “only” 100 kb/d, say.
How do you move 400K bpd of illegal oil? What refinery is buying this?
I saw pics of some of the refineries a while back in National Geographic iIrc..They made my own er ,um alternative farm fuel manufacturing system look like rocket science.
As near as I could tell these refineries consist mostly soil embankments, some old steel drums, a few feet of pipe salvaged from Sky Daddy alone knows where and a few feet of old garden hoses.
I wouldn’t want to be very close to one of them when it is running- the risk of getting incinerated in a hurry is obviously high.
It seems there are thousands of these crude oil stills anyplace in Africa the locals can steal BACK some of the oil leaving their country.
Details were scarce but the product seems to be a usable diesel fuel with the rest of the crude being burned or evaporated away or simply dumped on the ground.
Maybe some of the more sophisticated independent operators in such places manage to produce a little gasoline as well but how they could keep it from igniting given their awesomely primitive equipment would be a mystery.
How much such people can ” steal ” in a day is an open question but there are a LOT of them.
But we should not forget that even in a country such as the US people manage to steal large sums of money successfully on a regular basis thru semi legal loopholes.
It is in the interests of governments to look the other way lots of times. Consider the Mexican situation- the drug cartels generally pay the cops better to take the day off than the government pays them to work- on the same day. Talk about double dipping , Mexican cops understand THAT game well!!
In places such as LA and Frisco I read about the conversion of garages into apartments by the tens of thousands- strictly against the law but ignored to the extent possible by the these city governments unwilling to force the issue and piss of all the landlords and put all their tenants on the street.
I have no doubt a lot of proper refineries are operating on stolen crude to the extent that they can put their hands on it while the local governments involved look very hard the other way given the desperate economic situation in so many places.
If I were an official in a third world country I wouldn’t ask too many questions about the source of the diesel that keeps the tractor and the fire truck moving and the grocery delivery truck rolling.I might insinuate however that I would ask a lot of questions unless I get a really good price on a few barrels every week to distribute to my friends and family.
One Podcast from NPR about how to steel oil.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/29/359624435/episode-578-how-to-steal-a-million-barrels-of-oil
Watcher,
Check Alibaba dot com. I remember seeing loads of Nigerian oil for sale a few years ago. Also at the same time Venezuela was selling a lot of oil on the black market. I believe east European refineries were a market for this oil.
I lived near nigeria back in the 1990’s and would hear local sories all the time. I remember in particular a product pipeline where someone punched a hole in it and people collected gasoline with buckets.
It lasted at least 2-3 days with pools of gasoline all around, before someone screwed up with a cigarette.
Sounds stupid, but then if you’ve never been that poor risk and reward feel different
If the question was for me:
Here’s a reference for Mexico’s new hydrocarbon law:
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6de32d0b-0289-4661-b765-b7be861384b5
These terms aren’t acceptable unless Pemex signs agreements to repay income lost due to state takings (nationalizations, etc). This requires working under PSA terms with Pemex as an intermediary. If they don’t agree I wouldn’t touch any Mexican properties with a ten foot pole. They got bad juju.
My guess is we will see bid rounds, with the more desperate (and usually incompetent) companies bidding under winner’s curse terms. The solid operators will probably lay off, or limit themselves to single block exploration in deep water, using several multinationals in a consortium.
The legal structure, the lack of company exposure to the environment, union hassles, and the type of properties up for bids tells me Mexico’s production will keep declining for several years. I have experience in this process, and I assure you, companies which enter this type of play usually lose their shirts. They tend to be very naive.
Watcher,
Don’t hold your breath over Kashagan. The last I looked, production was expected to begin in 2017.
Kashagan is a tragedy, isn’t it? I looked over Kashagan around 1992? When they were offering the deal for the original seismic shoot. It looked like a lousy deal. I noticed many companies failed to understand kazak minds, and didn’t realize the ice, high pressure and h2s would be crippling.
I remember reading that Kashagan wasn’t very hard to find – all the indicators were there that a supergiant field would be in the region, they just had to actually try and look for one – akin to the North Slope and Prudhoe Bay? Or Mukluk, to cite an example where that didn’t happen.
The soviets had sufficient 2D coverage over the Caspian to allow tying a giant structure at Kashagan on the Tengiz trend. From what I recall the structure itself, the source rocks, the seal, and other issues were slam dunks. But we also had Tengiz as an analogue, and Tengiz is a very dangerous field. Couple that to the Kazak environment, the oil export hassles, and the winter ice, and I felt Kashagan was like one of those sticky paper fly traps. So I argued we should stay out of that deal.
Having worked on the North Slope at one time I follow Alaska closely. I suspect the following tends to the optimistic though I’m not a great fan of predictions, my own or others – especially a decade away.
DESPITE OIL TAX CUT, ALASKA PROJECTS STEADY PRODUCTION DECLINE FOR NEXT DECADE
http://www.adn.com/article/20140123/despite-oil-tax-cut-alaska-projects-steady-production-decline-next-decade
“In 10 years, the state is projecting 312,000 barrels of oil per day, compared to 2013’s average of 531,000 barrels per day.”
Whatever happened to that minimum functional pipeline flow thingy?
It’s still there and, as far as I know, the TAP wouldn’t function at 312,000 barrels of oil per day. Of course given Global Warming perhaps they plan on sailing oil tankers up there.
At 312000 bopd they’ll fix that line. Whatever happened to the Heavy Oil? I read they were trying to test it. Who bought out BP?
“At 312000 bopd they’ll fix that line.” Of course they would, that’s still a lot of oil. But first changes will have to be made in the system, expensive changes. There have been so many studies on this it’d make your head spin but as far as I can tell a lot of the dialogue is part of a subsidy lobby. Is that English? How about: lobbying for a subsidy.
BP sold their interest in four oilfields to Hilcorp, including Endicott and Northstar and a 50 percent interest in each of the Liberty and the Milne Point fields. Nothing that I know of affects BP’s position as operator and co-owner of Prudhoe Bay. And as far as I know they shelved their heavy oil production test project, or threatened to subject to tax relief. But, there are a lot of behind-closed-door discussions going on in Alaska these days; perhaps ’twas always thus.
haha SUBSIDY LOBBY. That will be a new department at CLR and EOG next year. VPs will be defeated Dem senators from this past election.
The BP heavy oil project was interesting. I’m familiar with heavy oil production, and they sure had a pretty revolutionary approach. I take it didn’t work.
A few options for Alaska:
1) Find new production to add to production. Not likely in current political climate/timeline.
2) Pump seawater with the oil to get an appropriate volume to continue flow. Possible?
3) Stop use of pipeline and use tankers to ship oil to California and the east. Also possible.
Watcher, What do you base your 800,000 to 1.5 mbpd guess on? Geology or finances or both? I very much respect your opinion and an curious as to how you are making this call.
Both. And that’s US, not just shale. Erosion in Cali and Alaska contribute. I have secret sources I won’t reveal. haha
BTW all bets are off if the decision comes in that shale is TBTF.
Too big to fail gets bailed out.
Worth a mention.
The crackdown on high cost shale . . . not gonna be evenly distributed. If you say chop Bakken 20-30%, you’re saying chop SCOOP 90%, Kansas 100%, New Mexico 50%, Eagle Ford 15%, Colorado 70%.
The non Bakken non Eagle Ford rises since 2009 look about like this:
Colorado 150K bpd
Okla 200K bpd
Kansas 30K bpd
New Mex 150K bpd
Sums to about 500K bpd, and that’s the expensive projects. That stuff is going down fast at $60/b. It’s not trivial amounts.
Watcher, Thanks for the info!
Yo Mike, here’s an anecdote of how fast it happened for this guy, and that wasn’t even shale:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-07/we-forget-all-too-fast-just-how-quickly-it-can-hit-fan#comments
Watcher, Mike here:
The story of untold human tragedy occurred as a result of the Austin Chalk boom that went bust in the mid 80’s. Chalk is a fractured carbonate above the Eagle Ford shale and was actually a much worse economic play than shale, believe it or not. Yes, it went bad very quickly, in part because of falling oil prices. There were actually 4 chapters to Austin Chalk development in Texas, a 5th one is underway as we speak. Long horizontal laterals that cut natural fracture systems and don’t need to be frac’ed; much lower well costs than shale wells; fair economics.
The first round of the Austin Chalk play in the early 1980’s was developed almost entirely by small, independent operators who raised money mostly by private placement. Not a whole lot of borrowed money went into this play. I don’t know what your point is exactly but it seems that you believe because LTO development in the Bakken and EF are being led by LLC’s (absolutely not true) that the end of shale plays will be sudden and ugly. Its interesting to me how you come to these conclusions; for instance, you read that Continental budgets 350 wells in 2015, and there USE to be 200 wells a month drilled in ND, therefore the rest of the wells must be drilled by LLC’s? Or if Marcellus water is hauled to Ohio at 15 dollars a barrel then all water costs that much to haul. I don’t know. I think sometimes you would rather read about it on the internet than hear what reality is on the ground. So be it.
Shale oil development is a big boys game, done on a big scale. Big boys don’t go down as fast as little ones do when hit.
Mike
Well, Ohio is a long way. If you lose $16/barrel hauling oil from NoDak to the coast, you’d expect water to cost more if you haul a long way.
The big lake in NoDak is local water. It won’t be $15. It won’t be free.
And a fast, sudden cataclysmic fall can’t happen. We’ve covered this. With those extra states vulnerable and Colorado having a brand spanking new GOP senator, intervention to save the day is more and more credible.
As for LLCs, haven’t taken a count. Probably should. I did go thru Ron’s IP stuff some weeks ago and noticed that on whatever the data was the drilling company was listed. Some were EOG and CLR sort of big companies, but there were a ton of blahblah LLC holes being drilled. 350 a year is 30 a month, and that CLR quote included Oklahoma, so a couple of those are not Bakken. Call it 25. Perhaps EOG a similar number. And so, who are the big companies drilling the other 110 each month (160, low for recent months) and why don’t they get media? If those two are drilling the most . . . . . .
Watcher, I don’t want to be argumentative, I am here to help. To yak about peak oil matters it helps to know something about the oil business, IMO. I don’t see a lot of other oil operators posting on this site. I am a believer.
It takes 10-12 dollars to get half the oil being produced out of the Bakken on rail cars, to market, yes. Produced water is a waste, however, and not the same thing. Big public companies developing shale rely on sweet spots with high well density and enormous infrastructure to make a profit, including their own, on-lease water disposal systems. What you might read about in the Marcellus has little to do with Woodford, or Bakken, or Niobrara.
I don’t have time to debate this LLC thing with you; I have already told you that my observation is that 80% of the shale wells drilled in the EF are by big public companies and who those companies are. There are not a “ton” of LLC holes being drilled in either play, that is a fallacy. At the moment neither the shale industry, nor the American tax payer, or in jeopardy because of 65 dollar oil. Statoil, Kodiak, Hess, Oxy, Whiting, CHK, EOG drill lots of wells up there in the Bakken. Very few shale wells are drilled by junk yard dogs like me; again, its a very big game played by very big boys. Just because you don’t read about it on the internet, or DO read about it on the internet, does not make it so.
Mike
Watcher, some public corporations drilling in the shale fields have their wells and other assets organized into an LLC. Hess and Oasis are two notable examples of companies drilling in the Bakken that do this.
Speaking of Oasis, do you think they’re about doomed at this point? They faced a real burden coping at $80/bbl oil and, in the last conference call, they indicated that $60/bbl oil would likely force the company to halt all drilling. If that did come to pass, the Williston Basin rig count would immediately drop by 18 or so.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your input. I always learn stuff from your comments and really appreciate learning from a pro.
Thanks, Dennis. I don’t understand all there is to know about peak oil so I come here, to this blog, to learn from people like yourself and Ron and others that push the envelope. I can then go “yak” about it to people who don’t believe in peak oil but absolutely must begin to.
I am no expert on anything, by the way; just an ‘ol oilfield hand who has been around the block. MBP is exactly right, below; when things start to go south in the oil business we generally always get smarter, and more efficient, and muddle thru it. Its conventional hydrocarbon resources that America was built on, that the world was built on, not unconventional stinkin’ shale.
Mike
PS: I found out the other day that stinkin’shale was actually 2 words. Imagine that!
As Mike said, these booms and busts happen constantly. My grandfather (the Spraberry bust was his first), my father (the 80’s was his first), and now myself have seen the cycles. The slow times don’t end everything, it generally is just the time that the majors get bigger. Exxon and Mobile, Chevron and Gulf, Chevron and Texaco, BP and Amoco, BP and Arco; all happened when prices were soft(er). The the phrase I was taught was “the busts force efficiency,” and I think that is largely true. The little guys will be bullied out or bought up of the shale game now and the big boys will take over.
This shake down isn’t nearly as bad as the one we had in late 85 and early 86. In those days we had the price crash PLUS many of us had been forced to grow up too fast. We had managers who froze, used dope, or were completely unable to function. I think this is much shorter lived, milder, and the industry has a ton of us retiring anyway.
“We had managers who froze, used dope, or were completely unable to function.” What caused me to retire relatively early was arriving on a job in a very remote area and meeting a crew who were continually doped up: Guy in charge was the dealer. The character who was supposed the be my “technical assistant” wore his “i-music” 24 hours per day so you couldn’t even talk to him but so did every other soul on the crew including the drillers. No for me.
Hi ManBearPig,
I appreciate the knowledge you share as well.
Both you and Mike off great real world insight into the oil patch. The other day you brought up reduced well costs as the bust proceeds (and this makes perfect sense to me), Mike estimated that in the shale plays (Bakken and Eagle Ford) we might see completion costs fall around 10 to 12%, does that seem like a reasonable ball park figure to you? (It does to me, but I have not lived these boom bust cycles the way you and your family have.)
Thanks Dennis, I do my best (like Mike) to provide an insiders view on the industry. As to your question, that is probably a reasonable ballpark change, but there is not a one size fits all answer to how prices are reduced. How much have prices run up since the start of the boom? I’m not familiar with the pricing structure of the Bakken or Eagle Ford but I would assume they are slightly different. Somewhere like the Permian, which has a high percentage of conventional production, probably did not run up as much as a purely unconventional area. Therefore, it would be logical that the Permian would not decrease as much as somewhere like the Bakken with a price drop. Also, prices will not drop the same for each producer. What is their relationship/relative volume of business with the service company? The larger volume of work a producer gets, the more likely a service company will significantly drop their costs to attempt to avoid losing a large volume customer. There are other things that also influence this, but I’m sure you get the point. But with a 35% drop in oil price, a drop in service costs by at least 10% would make sense.
Hi ManBearPig,
Thanks again for your insight.
Colorado was a major political battleground before the last election over support or lack of it for fracking in areas that didn’t want it. Cities wanted their own control. The state wanted to have uniform laws across the state.
These numbers should slow development down a bit.
Re Ron’s excellent India graph above. Stuff:
A guy was talking about wages being sticky costs in business in the last Ronpost threads. Well, there’s another sticky parameter in the world and that’s refinery capacity. Nobody wants ’em. They stink. India has 4.1% of the entire world’s oil refinery capacity. That would be about 3.7 mbpd.
The biggest refinery is a big boy, 1.2 million bpd. It’s on the northwest coast, positioned just as close to the Middle East as possible.
India burns 4 mbpd and are growing strongly. Imported about 3 mbpd of that (and that’s up from 2008).
Dood named Ambesh is Indian and the richest energy business person in the world at $21 B.
Well sooner or later BAU is going to be in the crapper when it runs out of resources and then the shit will probably hit the fan… all puns intended.
Ron I think you made a mistake on the graph of Qatar it shows Qatar is producing less then 725.000 but on EIA site it show they are producing more then 2.000.000 can you explain whats up with that?
The Graph is here
http://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-crude-oil-production-charts/
No mistake Zirbat. You are looking at the EIA’s Total Liquids, the chart is Crude Only.
Qatar produces mostly gas. Therefore they have a lot of NGLs and Condensate. OPEC only reports Crude Only. Quotas are based only on Crude Only.
The chart below is clipped directly from OPEC’s Monthly Oil Market Report. OPEC’s secondary sources said Qatar produced 708,000 barrels per day of Crude Only in October but when they picked up the phone and called Qatar they said they only produced 680,000 barrels per day in October.
Thank you for clearing that up
Zirbat, I don’t know if this is relevant to your question to Ron?
QATAR REDUCES OIL OUTPUT ON OVERSUPPLY
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/NewsDetails.aspx?storyid=389879
“Opec member Qatar expects to lower oil output to about 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) by the end of November from 650,000 at the end of last month and from 800,000 bpd a month earlier, an industry source said…… The reduction to 650,000 bpd was decided because of market oversupply, with the second reduction to 500,000 made necessary by refinery maintenance. Qatar’s maximum production capacity is 800,000 bpd.”
Doug Thank you it is relevant to my question.
Did you take note that OPEC non oil keeps increasing? This point is usually being ignored.
Oh worse than that. The definition of oil is changing.
Did you take note that OPEC non oil keeps increasing? This point is usually being ignored.
I haven’t ignored it. OPEC non-crude liquids have hardly moved in four years.
The Data for the chart below is in million barrels per day and is from the EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook.
Ron, I guess I don’t keep track as closely as you do. I recall a time, say 20 years ago, when this was a lot lower, and then I checked an OPEC report and saw it had jumped a lot (from a very long term perspective).
However, I suppose they are close to being maxed out on condensate? And the gas to liquids economics must be looking grim?
I suspect that part of the reason why OPEC is (generally) able to move their output – both up and down – somewhat has to do with the difference in how their operations are financed vs non-opec.
When you’re a company which uses (a lot of) debt to finance operations you have payments to make. Don’t make the payments and you are in bankruptcy court. If you don’t use (a lot of) debt and don’t have that bogie to make every quarter you may have annoyed shareholders but you can still produce.
Leverage is a tricky beast and Modigliani-Miller does not properly account for the cost of bankruptcy risk although CDS does to some extend. Then again, if a lot of your debt is private and not really traded it too may not reflect bankruptcy costs correctly.
rgds
WP
Bigoil slashing jobs and costs:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/dec/07/bp-slash-hundreds-uk-jobs-global-cutbacks
‘Rivals such as Shell, Chevron and Statoil have already announced significant job losses as the industry retrenches in the face of lower oil prices and shareholder demands for lower capital expending and higher dividends.’
This will of course add greatly to the amount of new oil coming onto the market a few years hence…..
Jobs in oil in the UK are taking a big hit all over the place at the moment. Not pretty over here at all.
It has always been my assumption that C+C is what comes from Oil wells and has nothing to do with gas wells. Is this correct? What I find interesting is that the weekly Crude numbers posted by the EIA on Wednesdays are very close to the monthly numbers posted 3 to 4 months later.
For instance below are the 4 full week numbers posted by the EIA for August and they average 8,599 kb/d. It is very close to the EIA US August data just posted, 8,648 kb/d.
From this I assume the weekly numbers are reasonably accurate.
Does anyone know how the EIA gets it weekly data so quickly and at the same time is reasonably accurate. As an aside, the four wk average for Nov is 9,057 kb/d.
EIA Weekly data ending
Aug 8 8,556
Aug 15 8,557
Aug 22 8,631
Aug 29 8,630
Avge 8,599
Aug EIA 8,648
It has always been my assumption that C+C is what comes from Oil wells and has nothing to do with gas wells. Is this correct?
No that is not correct. Condensate comes primarily from gas wells. Some wells in the Eagle Ford produce primarily condensate.
The weekly data is not always that accurate. You just happened to pick a particular month when it was fairly accurate. The EIA just guesses at weekly production. You should notice that the weekly numbers are never revised but the monthly numbers are always revised, up or down as the true data comes in from the states.
You will notice sometimes that the weekly data shows a decline in production even when production from shale fields are showing an increase every month. That is just the EIA making adjustments in their data. When they think they guessed too high one week they will just adjust it back down the following week without editing the previous months data.
Adding to the previous comment:
Condensate is found as a gas phase hydrocarbon at reservoir conditions. When the natural gas holding these “to be condensate” molecules is taken to the surface facilities the change in temperature and pressures causes them to turn into liquids (thus the term condensate). Condensate may require stabilizing (removal of methane, ethane, propane and partial butane) to make it marketable. Other liquids are recovered, usually by cooling the gas, and the stream known as Natural Gas Liquids is the result. Thus NGL has both the product recovered by cooling the gas as well as stabilizing the condensate. A full product slate in a large field complex becomes the crude oil plus condensate, stabilized to meet transport conditions, NGL which is kept under pressure and refrigerated, and natural gas treated to be marketable. All of these streams have water removed. And if required the crude is desalted, sulfur taken from the gas, etc.
World production is decreasing, the oil stocks are at high inventories and the prices are low due to demand issues. Wuzzupwiddat?
http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/drilling/pdf/bakken.pdf
The Bakken once again increases its production.
Unless the EIA is making stuff up, which I doubt they are, but it could be, you just never know, you know, the Bakken is on the rise, rising to the occasion, solving the oil maze by adding a million barrels per day because it can, and yet, it can’t overcome peak oil.
The Bakken is the oft-beat red-headed step child doing the best it can and never is appreciated.
Why should all of the other oil producers in other parts of the world try so hard to produce more oil when the Bakken can do it at a loss? Beat it into submission, the only answer to the question. The solution to the problem, kill the competition. Let’s drive the price into oblivion so nobody knows what is what. The ends justify the means.
The EIA is trying to see the light when everybody else wants to keep them in the dark?
The EIA is not the Judas Goat, only those too eager to point an accusing finger?
If it weren’t for that Bakken oil, which there seems to be plenty of buyers of that highly volatile liquid which just might be oil, we’d be making money hand over fist, but no, they have to stick their noses into the oil dealing business and everybody loses money and that’s not good for the govs who profit at high oil prices and now they’re dern near broke because the red-headed step child wants a place at the table.
It’s just not fair!
What a bunch of babies. har
I think i is reasonable to expect Bakken to continue going up for a few months at least based on the momentum they have built. There are many wells where the investments have already been made and the beginning production at a small additional cost makes sense even at much lower prices. It will take months for the prices to work through the system.
Unless the EIA is making stuff up, which I doubt they are, but it could be, you just never know, you know, the Bakken is on the rise, rising to the occasion, solving the oil maze by adding a million barrels per day because it can, and yet, it can’t overcome peak oil.
Ronald, I have great faith in the EIA’s production numbers but not in their “Drilling Productivity Report” who’s link you posted. The page that link leads to was posted early in November. And they gave the November and December production numbers long before the oil was produced. Now I ask you: Do you think they made up those November and December numbers? I don’t just think they did, I know they just made them up. And if you will notice the previous four months do not match the actual numbers published by the states.
Going back past six months or so, the Drilling Productivity Report numbers are pretty close. But the last six months of their data, July through December, their numbers are just guesses. That is numbers they just made up.
Ron,
Quick question on one of your previous posts. On the subject of CHOKE MANAGEMENT, could this also be the bankers way of wrapping their hands around the necks of the Shale Oil Players?
steve
The local regional banks want to be paid. What we don’t know is how the bond contract reads. THAT would be informative. Surprising some angry LLC hasn’t gone public with whatever ugly clauses are in it.
Unless these local banks have some remedy coning from farther up the food chain they will be forced regardless of any good will to squeeze the operators to remain solvent themselves. I would say that there are allot of small operators who are compulsively checking oil prices and who are not sleeping until completely exhausted….or intoxicated. Perhaps there will be a bail out of sorts should the banks face too much pressure. I would doubt that the operators would see any sort of direct bail out as there is too much in the way of public animosity toward oil co.s to make this very palatable to average Joe.
Heard an interview the other day with a local bank CEO in NoDak. He said he had been so smart his total loan portfolio was only 15% shale. Maybe they gave him a raise.
Hopefully the other 85% wasn’t in shale dependent businesses or local real estate!
Smart is lending short term, while imposing terms to limit leverage to 50 % (this forces equity to take up 50 %). The bank’s tend to screw up because they allow too much leverage.
The US Congress handed the big banks 700 billion dollars in 2008. The big banks have a piggy bank called the taxpayer to bilk to keep them from failing.
The too big to fail oil bidness will be handed money from the US gov, with some persuasive words, like we need more money because the demand is lower than it should be and we like one hundred dollar oil so we want 800 billion dollars. The big banks shuffle paper, not a big deal, type words in legalese, the oil companies can do that, what they can’t do is command the price and guarantee themselves a profit, so the Senate can vote, hand them money, as much as they need to cover some costs and distribute bonuses.
The US gov can handle the shortfall and increased costs due to the low price of oil.
Call me naive, but I think the give-away of taxpayer funds to banks is over. I think protests would ramp up and tear the country apart. As for giving bailouts to oil companies, people hate oil companies more than banks. Business will just have to fail all on their own.
People are quiet these days about finance, and this is just a guess on my part, but I think further giveaways would spark protest much like cops shooting minorities. How do you justify bailouts when the economy is improving so much? (Talk about being painted into a corner). Can’t have it both ways.
Paulo,
Yes…. I believe you may be naive. The FED continues to buy US Treauries via Japan. People have no clue how corrupt the system has become.
Thus.. there will be massive protests when Americans finaaly wake up.
Steve
Hi Steve,
I know about the treasuries purchase program. I am talking about a TARP, with all the headlines and fanfare.
I still think folks will go ballistic if they try it out loud.
regards
Steve, no I do not think so. I don’t think bankers know a damn thing about the actual drilling and oil field management. I don’t believe they tell the oil companies how much to choke off their wells. I just can’t imagine them doing that.
Anyway, I don’t think the drillers are gradually increasing their choke as the well numbers increase. That suggestion just seems absurd.
I can see why one would open up a choke as a well depletes. The well produces less, there’s less risk if the well starts producing solids, and the completion may need the higher velocity to flow. I would only keep a well on choke if it helps control gas to oil ratio, or slows down incoming water.
On the other hand, if I have the staying power I would choke a well down. They key is gas management.
Mr. Leanme, I enjoy your articulate insights into reservoir matters, thanks. I am not an engineer but must play one in real life every day; forgive me, however, if I sound dumb. I am in occasional contact with Rune Likvern regarding work he is currently doing regarding what appears to be increasing produced water rates in sweet spots in the Bakken. I want to be as helpful to him as I can and as time allows.
In the Eagle Ford the best shale oil wells are along what appears to be a gas/liquids contact that corresponds to regional strike. Slightly updip of that contact is what the shale guys call, the “condensate window, or, liquids rich window.” Oil saturations are high, waters are low, liquids gravity is high and GOR is very high. Wells in the condensate window do not make water, yet, and the EURs of these wells are a legitimate 600-800K BOE or more. Updip from this is the “oil window” and things change with regard to all the endearing traits one would want to have in a shale well. GOR’s and oil saturations are lower, I think. Water cuts are higher. EUR’s are lower.
The Bakken is different from a deposition standpoint and I don’t know much about the geology of the trend. It is clear to me, however, that sweet spots in the Bakken are also related to high oil saturations, low waters, gravity and GOR. In the Bakken, it appears that the best of the sweet spots are slightly over pressured.
I agree with you 120%, by the way, in all reservoir management, even shale, its about pressure maintenance.
What I am trying to understand is what happens in dense shale when pressure declines and water cuts go up. Where is the water is coming from, is it interstitial, is it moving into sweet spots from areas of higher water saturations? I have suggested it is not connate-like but perhaps that is exactly what it is. I wish to understand shale decline dynamics and whether increases in produced water is a pre-cursor to depletion in sweet spots. Your thoughts on that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Mike
I have suggested it is not connate-like but perhaps that is exactly what it is.
Mike, I am not a geologist but I have read extensively on the subject. I would suggest that all water at those depths is connate, that is it was deposited at the same time the sediment was deposited.
But I don’t think that is your point of contention. And I would have the same question. That is if the source rock is so dense that the oil cannot escape, then how does water enter the reservoir rock to replace the oil when it leaves?
The water molecule is extremely small. It is many times smaller than even the smallest liquid hydrocarbon molecule. So I would suggest that the water migrates there, from below, as the oil is pumped out.
Ron, I am pretty sure you are right, yes; certainly you are right about water being bound in the rock at deposition. I am simply puzzled by how the conductivity of the water to the wellbore increases over time.
Forgive my simplistic analogy but I think of these little shale “reservoirs” as being only as big as the frac radius around the lateral and produced water the well makes is limited to drainage within the frac radius…like sticking a perforated straw down the middle of a soup can and you can only drain what’s in the soup can. I may be wrong. I am sure I just made an engineer or two cringe, for sure.
Mike
Another possibility: You guys seem to think of frac radius as something defined, as a fixed number or a set distance. Why wouldn’t fractures feather out, gradually decrease (or change) in intensity and character with distance and direction depending on grain/layering, etc in a host rock. To my mind there’d be macro to micro fractures each with different porosity- permeability characteristics depending on fluid characteristics – obviously differences between gas/oil/water. Stress wave propagation is highly dependent on subtle rock-fluid factors, why would water movement, post fracking, be any different? I suspect that rather than a straw in a can it’s like a straw in a melange.
Thank you, Doug. I don’t understand the nature of the rock well enough, clearly. Some, most of the best EF is in 300 gross feet of shale. It is a good point, however, that post-frac water movement would simply follow natural stress related fracturing. This shale stuff may be more reservoir-like than I think.
Mike
Reading over the above I realize I’ve been less that articulate. Another coffee might help. Maybe I should review some fracture propagation is solids stuff then try to comment more intelligently. The trouble is we need some references to how mixed immiscible fluids behave in fracture labyrinths otherwise I think we’re engaging in guess work.
The diagrams in the CLR quarterly briefing was/is our source of frac radius. They had a chart showing the number and its impact on adjacent well drainage.
600 feet, as I recall. 1200 total left to right, and presumably up and down. They hyped their instrumentation and had quite a pretty graph showing the fractures extent and exactly which direction they went.
Ya, that was one well with one rock type, and Mike already made the point of changed rock nature porosity and water/oil mix along the horizontal length, but no reason that same change can’t be over the 600 foot length too.
One thing I have seen NOTHING discussed concerning is the hole configuration in the pipe carrying the frack pressure. There was a single photo of a pipe with holes drilled along its length as an example of what’s done in the Marcellus, but surely someone obsessed over the design of the holes in that pipe.
Watcher, with respect, pictures in QRs are mostly cartoons and stress fractures don’t just stop at 600 feet: Peter out perhaps. And even homogenous granite has “grain” (a preferred cleavage direction) and that’s nothing compared to shale (which is just a slate wannabe). My point is, who is willing to stand up and predict water movement within the confines of a multiphase fluid in a recently fractured shale formation? Not me.
Well, I don’t know the 3db down equivalent of a fracture length so that you have a definition for when it “stopped”, but the CLR ppl were hyping their instrumentation. I don’t think they were predicting it. They felt like they measured it.
Shrug. What we’re really talking about is where the hell is the water coming from, and I don’t know.
A water molecule is about three angstroms wide, methane is about four.
Ilambiquated, you must have misread my post. What I said was:
The water molecule is extremely small. It is many times smaller than even the smallest liquid hydrocarbon molecule.
That would be pentane.
you mean pentane
Oops missed that. Pentane is probably 3-4 times as long as methane. Branched versions are more compact.
Mike, water can be sourced by the same pores which hold the oil. It can also head towards the wells via the (natural or induced) fracture system. The system is losing pressure, the water is compressible, and therefore it expands and flows even if it’s connate. I also suspect in many cases the rock isn’t really shale. I’ve seen reservoirs with very thin interbedded very fine silts, tight sands, thin carbonates. Also, consider the trap geometry. These are usually stratigraphic traps, the rocks holding the oil have very low permeability. But there’s bound to be more permeable zones somewhere in the section. And those will have moveable water. This explains why wells produce more than frac return water (I assume they use tracers?). What l learned is that it can be a real puzzle. But choking the well when it’s knew really helps. It helps reduce solids, scale, pipe erosion, keeps water cut down, and helps manage gas. If I were in charge I would put on a tiny choke and forget about trying to impress management, then use choke management later when tubing pressure is down. What size tubing do these wells have?
Fernando, thanks. I guess I am inclined to believe that it may be both bound water, and compressible water moving into pressure depleted areas from areas of higher water saturation… Doug has eluded to stress micro fractures in the rock, frac’ing of course just opens up those little highways. And lets not forget that 150,000 BW is being used to frac the damn things.
I don’t know enough about the rock. Its thick organic shale that has high clay content and varying degrees of carbonate content. Brittleness is a factor they look for, which would indicate laminates from stress, etc.; all that makes sense. I don’t know about the Bakken; the EF is thought of a source bed where hydrocarbons were made and I guess because of the gross thickness of the organic shale it must have been deposited during a very calm geological period. I never thought of the existence of hydrocarbons in source beds being as a result of a trap. Having said oil saturations vary within the beds. As I said to Doug, shale may be more reservoir-like than I think.
Choke management during flowback and to regulate bubble point I think is resulting in what they think will be higher EUR, so its a big deal right now. I think, hope the days of needing to make big PR splashes are over. 2 7/8ths OD production tbng.
Thanks again.
Mike
Mike, I’ve come to believe most of the oil is trapped in non shale low permeability beds, fractures, tiny pores created by little fossils which were later dissolved, etc. These are source beds. A source bed has to have a way to release the hydrocarbons. And I suspect the same pathways used by the hydrocarbons to get out are later used by water to get in.
Mike and Ron,
Water in shale is almost all connate. In terms of water migration, it is quite simple. First, the production from the Bakken is NOT primarily from shale, but rather from the tight carbonates of the Three Forks and the middle Bakken. The shales of the upper and lower Bakken serve as the source (>10% TOC) but not as the primary reservoir. The carbonates have a porosity values ranging from 4-6%, so fluid flow is not irrational, especially in a highly fractured reservoir like the Bakken. Though it is a technically unconventional play, the hydrocarbons in the middle Bakken and Three Forks still separate from the water in the formation, so if a good seal is in place (shale members of the Bakken) then the initial fluid in the upper part of the reservoir is mostly hydrocarbons. As the hydrocarbons are produced, the pressure drawdown will begin moving some of the water, that might have originally been held in reservoir by poor pressure as well as what was underlying the hydrocarbons, to the wellbore.
There is also the issue of wettability of the reservoir, but I wont get into that now.
A good paper on this is:
Integrating Geology and Engineering: Implications for Production in the Bakken Play, Williston Basin (2013) by Cosima Theloy and Stephens A. Sonnenberg
Thank you, sir. I do not believe that the EF has that kind of porosity but I may be wrong. The Bakken, on the other hand, clearly is more like a fractured carbonate…you said that, sorry. As pressure declines water moves up to fill the pore space and increasing WOR is indeed an indication of depletion, same as just about any other reservoir rock. I understand wettability and am working on something right now that appears to be neither water wet, or oil wet. I will read the paper as soon as time allows.
Thank you very much, all. I knew if I could gig some smart guys the picture would become clearer.
Mike
Hi Ron,
More of the high Well IDs have been completed recently than the lower numbers, so the idea is that over time the oil companies have decided that more choke will result in better well performance. Basdd on the explanations that Mike has given this makes perfect sense and the Data I have seen from FreddyW, and Enno Peters shows that the 1 month, 2 month, 3 month, and 6 month data in the North Dakota Bakken for cumulative output has changed very little over the last 2 years or so.
It is possible that the 24 hour IP data you have gathered shows us something, that will be come clear by next summer, or the guys that work in the oil patch like Rockman and Mike have it right and it is just changes in how the wells have been choked during the first 24 hours during the last 13 months or so. Time will tell.
Dennis, I agree that the 2, 3, an 6 month data has changed very little over the past two years. That, however, has nothing to do with what my study. I am talking about the latest wells that have been drilled and brought on line. None of them have been on line that long. I am talking about wells in the high 27,000s and all the 28,000s and higher. The highest number being drilled is well number 30,050. About 85% of the wells being drilled are in the 28,000s or above. About half of all wells currently being drilled are in the 29,000s.
We will know by early year when more of these wells start to come on line, large enough to get a real representative sample.
Hi Ron there are quite a few wells in the 27000 to 28500 range that have been producing for 1 or two months, you are correct that higher numbers above 29000 we do not have enough data and will have to wait a few months to see what happens.
Anyone reading this Sunday probably wants to know.
Oil down 80some cents early Asia trading. Sub 64.xx.
errr sub 65, at 64.xx
News in solar continues to come in fast and furious. I have no idea how scaleable this idea will be, but it is an exciting advance. If we can get 40% conversion to the market, it will be a game changer.
Best,
Tom
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141207091648.htm
Sorry, forgot to put in the title to the article:
In world first, researchers convert sunlight to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency
Probably doesn’t matter in the short term. Efficiency is only important if you are running out of places to put up panels, and nobody is. for example Germany is by far the most heavily solared country, and about 3% of the households have solar. Until that other 97% of the rooftops gets saturated, nobody except maybe NASA will be looking for more efficiency.
The only interesting number is price per watt of capacity, and that is being quickly improved by the very headline-unworthy method of incremental improvements in manufacturing.
Don’t you think, though, it does have some PR value? As efficiency increases, doesn’t that lessen the argument that solar will never work? Doesn’t increased efficiency expand the places where direct solar can be used to power machines and the like?
Most of the solar PV in my area is going up as large arrays in local fields. Land costs money initially and in taxes so to be able to produce more than twice the electricity per acre, reduce support structure costs and maintenance costs per kwh produced would be a huge benefit to profits.
A huge part of solar cost is installation. If I can put up 10 kwh array for the installation cost and footprint of what a 5-6 kwh system is currently, then it is a no-brainer and this would be a game changer.
My caveat is that if I had a nickle for every solar advance that I have ever read about then I would not need to go to work tomorrow. But this one does look interesting.
Best,
Tom
Not going to help much. Little detail but it seems to be a method for dual using mirrors on solar concentrators. The mirror is coated to let through light at the wavelengths that the solar cells can use while reflecting the rest for thermal concentration. Not coming to a roof soon.
NAOM
Bingo. The whole focus the beam so you can essentially lie about surface area converting to electricity has been around for years, all sorts of places other than roof tops.
According to this article, the new cells would be suitable for rooftop solar.
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-australian-scientists-breakthrough-solar-cell.html
That ain’t the same technique from the previous article.
And multi-spectral junction response is not new.
Much older story but rather than multi-junction it converts red light to yellow to boost the efficiency.
NAOM
Ummm – Fraunhofer et. al. did a 44.7 % efficient (at 297.3 suns) 4 junction concentrator cell back in 2013.
http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-and-media/press-releases/presseinformationen-2013/world-record-solar-cell-with-44.7-efficiency
Topped by 46% lately:
http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/soitec-achieves-46-multi-junction-cell-for-cpv_100017342
I’ve been letting my Progress In Photovoltaics pile up unread, but hard to believe that Martin Green, (the editor, who also does the efficiency report semi-yearly) wasn’t aware of the Fraunhofer/Soitec work – or maybe the “world record” stuff is some specific sub-category, or the words of some PR hack.
This is particularly odd since he wrote about a 43% efficient split spectrum system back in 2009.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pip.924/abstract
The use of dichroic mirrors to spectrally split light to match cell bandgap is old.
The earliest reference I find in a few minutes is from 1955.
Jackson ED. Areas for improvement of the semiconductor solar energy converter. In Transactions of the conference on the use of solar energy. University of Arizona Press: Tucson, Arizona, 1955; 122
The problems with the Concentrated PhotoVoltaics system the sciencedaily repost of a press release describes are:
* Any concentrated solar system is dependent on Direct Normal Insolation (sunshine coming direct from the sun) – haze, dust, etc. can screw with that a lot.
* You need very good tracking –> mechanical parts to break.
* the power tower idea has been shown to be hazardous to birds, etc.
* unlike Concentrated Solar (thermal) Power – there’s no advantage in storage, you’re doing batteries or pumped hydro, etc. just like non-concentrated PV, wind, etc.
PV magazine has more details on the RayGen announcement:
http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/unsw-researchers-achieve-404-cpv-cell-result-with-outdoor-testing_100017427
Efficiency is but one component of a many part cost-benefit tradeoff.
Better energy capture and conversion would will indeed be a game changer if it happens at an acceptable cost given that so called ” balance of system” costs are anywhere from half to three quarters or more of the cost of most pv systems.
Going from fifteen or twenty percent which seems to be the state of the art as a practical matter these days to forty percent would not reduce the cost of planning and permitting and financing and all other soft costs but it would reduce the cost of the actual physical installation of a system by half or more.
So- given our current cost structure for smaller systems such as are used at houses and stores a forty percent panel would cut costs anywhere from maybe a quarter on up towards half compared to current panels- at the same price per watt.
There is also the additional benefit to be considered that the same amount of space devoted to mounting panels would generate about twice as much juice.
My personal opinion is that we will catch up to the Germans in a few more years in terms of installing solar power systems in terms of cost. They do it now for about half what we do.
When everything is measured in dollars and returns on dollars this is a big enough difference to put the pv industry in shape to compete with fossil fuels on a dollar for dollar basis – and that is the basis that most individuals,businesses, and governments are waiting for.
Well ,er, ahem…. Mostly people, businesses, and governments are not actually waiting but once they understand that a solar system is going to cost them less per month in payments on it that it will save them on their electricity bill…..Well, at that time any young guy who knows how to sell and install them can work a hundred hours a week if he wants too and never have a prayer of catching up for at least a decade.
Little problem here. I love my PV, which does all I could ask when the sun shines every now and then. But the last weeks’ weather summary said rain, light rain and fog, heavy rain, rain/snow, fog.
This week it was different- heavy rain, clouds, wind and snow, ice storm, freezing rain/snow.
Of course I have the grid, but hate to see that meter go the wrong way.
So I went to that domestic-scale pyrolyzer/thermocompressor. All very simple stuff and easy to do, but NOBODY working on this obvious cloudy day PV booster, which we need far more than super-efficient PV in this pea soup time of the year. And of course the Germans are even worse off.
I am hoping that somebody, somewhere, with resources proportionate to the task, does something effective to fill in this gap.
But no, they’d rather work on hyper-hard quantum level PV viagra.
My own efforts are personal fun but that’s about it.
Proe power was working on an interesting design for a hot air engine. The efficiency was good and the initial cost was about $3/Kw. Other folks have been working on turbine designs which also look promising and cheaper than gasifiers. Not near as picky about feedstock quality.
Yeah, know about pro. Don’t have much faith in it, from personal experience.
Gasifier is a thing that produces a combustible gas by partial combustion of wood. Pyrolyzer in my book is a thing that cooks wood in absence of O2 to get it to outgas volatiles and leave most of carbon behind- two separate products out- fuel gas more energetic than gasifier gas, and carbon
Real small turbines are all over in the junk yards disguised as turbochargers, but small turbines tend to have low efficiency as gas expanders but ok for woodstove PV boosters. That’s my intent with the thermocompressor.
I’ve kicked around the turbocharger idea also so interested to hear how yours turns out. Any particular advantage of using pyrolysis over direct combustion?
Pyrolyzer gas cleaner and higher energy/vol because no N2 or products of combustion. Can go into IC after a little cooling. Also produces carbon/ash- -back into ground.
Net carbon negative. That carbon came out of the atmosphere.
Q- Is there a site that focuses on this kinda stuff??
Interesting approach, producer gas with a similar energy content to a steam gasifier without the complexity just more char for fertilizer.
Where I was going with direct combustion was using a heat exchanger on the exhaust of a wood furnace rather than burning gas in a burn chamber.
I’m not aware of any sites that cover these types of projects. Occasionally someone might post the results of their garage tinkering although most of what I have seen involves gasifiers.
Woody. If- big if- I get something that really works, will keep you informed. All of my stuff is free, and sometimes worth the price.
Hi Wimbi,
You may rest assured that NECESSITY is the mother of invention – and that once it becomes NECESSARY then the Wonderful Wonderful Market and the Invincible Invisible Hand will bestir themselves and rub the sleep out of their eyeballs and fart and take a leak and holler ” how bout some breakfast woman” and eventually get around to REALLY doing something about energy efficiency and storage.
People really are remarkably adaptable – even spoiled ones such as current day yankees – if they are only gradually forced to adapt to new circumstances as a matter of affordability.I for instance back in my younger days drove a Chevy with a back seat big enough – well in the interests of good taste I will refrain from saying FOR WHAT.
I was a STUDENT from a poor family back then fer chrissake.Now I drive an Escort which HAS a back seat but not one I can easily get in or out of.Never mind you know what.And I am at least financially comfortable if not well off.
Living on the farm as a youth I could never imagine being satisfied living in house in town-who the hell would want to spend all or most of his time not at work INSIDE?
But I tried it and I got used to it.
There are dozens maybe hundreds of ways we can use existing technologies to get along ok on intermittent renewable power and we will use them when we must- but no sooner.
Lets just hope the coming energy crunch develops slowly enough to allow us time to change our ways successfully.
The Wonderful Wonderful Market and The Invincible Invisible Hand will supply us with micro hybrid cars that go two hundred miles on solar power and another hundred on a gallon of diesel- if the need for such cars comes about gradually.
Refrigerators with an ice reservoir large enough the fridge needs to actually run only once a week.Streetlights that light up when somebody is within the area they illuminate and turn themselves off five seconds later.
Super insulated tract houses.. Passenger trains again.
The Market and the Hand don’t get excited about such things any sooner than absolutely necessary.
I am partly serious partly sarcastic.
Waiting for the Market and the Hand may well be a fatal mistake.
With you all the way on that, OFM.
Back seat- my habit was to buy bottom end death traps and ruthlessly modify rear to whim of moment- pickup, bordello, workshop whatever.
On the invisible hand, etc. I have found a more rewarding life by ignoring the masses and getting together with that tiny sliver of humanity already on same track as me. More fun, more productive, much more holier than thou.
Money? Never thought about it. Born at time guaranteeing engineers never had to look for work. Work looked for them.
“You may rest assured that NECESSITY is the mother of invention – and that once it becomes NECESSARY then the Wonderful Wonderful Market and the Invincible Invisible Hand will bestir themselves and rub the sleep out of their eyeballs and fart and take a leak and holler ” how bout some breakfast woman” and eventually get around to REALLY doing something about energy efficiency and storage.”
So much awesome in that paragraph! I’m dying here in my office cube. That was funny!!!
Take this, doom quacks!
Overpopulation is a myth.
I read this article, and the author wrote a number of words that didn’t end up saying very much.
His main thrusts were that the rate of population growth is slowing, and that there is a large and growing divide between rich and poor.
He did not talk about any finite Earth/Limits to Growth topics at all.
He made one appeal to fear referencing the Tambora bottleneck and therefore isn’t it great that we have 7+B humans to buffer against an environmental calamity (such as an asteroid strike I suppose).
There was no there there…just some vague claptrap about ‘more people is better’.
Carrying capacity…The Second Law…EROEI…entropy…diminishing returns…”Be fruitful and multiply’ is not an open-ended suicide pact…although some of my deep Baptist relatives would argue otherwise…more souls to be Raptured and judged…
Humbug…Humans will do the wrong things, and the results are broadly predictable. Enjoy you lives.
Sorry for the double post. My “snark” got lost on this one.
Take this, doom quacks!
/snark
Overpopulation is a myth.
A professor at the university I attended stated that the world could house fifty billion people. The carrying capacity is that great, according to the professor. What birdbrain would come up with such an estimate? The oil would disappear in 1/8 the time it is going gone now. Just wouldn’t be prudent to have fifty billion souls trampling down the earth everywhere you go. At fifty chickens, one per week, you would need 250 billion chickens to have for dinner each week, every year. The insect population would be threatened worldwide.
The North American continent has a bird population of 20 billion and they all seem to be surviving ok. Plenty of bugs to eat and duckweed can feed the ducks, some barley for the geese in the fall when they’re migrating.
My guess for the entire world would be around 140 billion population for the birds.
Fifty billion people might be stretching the limits.
Didn’t notice the name wasn’t there. Just so you know.
Maybe the professor is into cannibalism.
I had professors I wouldn’t hire to cut my lawn. All of us have. My God, give someone tenure and stand back and listen to them pontificate. 50 billion people? The is from someone who probably hasn’t even had a garden much less knows anything about agriculture.
A professor at the university I attended stated that the world could house fifty billion people.
Lemme guess, he didn’t teach ecology…
No, didn’t teach ecology, environmental sciences. A nutty professor, as it were.
After ecology, I needed a break to keep my brain from frazzling.
The textbook for ecology was by Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology. A recommended read and kept the book for future reference.
If I learned one thing about ecology, it was carrying capacity. I suppose I knew some more after learning one thing in class, but not much.
Hi Ronald,
Often these types of calculations assign a certain amount of space per person on the surface of the planet and ask how many would physically fit or maybe as a ratio to arable land. Using arable land we have 279 square meters of arable land (2011 data) per person at 50 billion people.
With typical yields of 3000 kg/hectacre (10000 square meters) or 84 kg per year=0.23 kg/day and about 2500 Kcal/kg we have 575 Kcal (dietary calorie) per day per person. This assumes away water, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other limitations. Typically humans need a minimum of 2000 Kcal/day if they are sedentary, so we would need to reduce the 50 billion by about a factor of 3.5 to 14 billion if we assume other agricultural problems can be solved and that climate change is not an issue (I don’t think either proposition is valid.) The other issue is farm productivity as we run out of oil and natural gas, agricultural productivity will likely decrease as we need to replace fossil fuels with biofuels to run tractors in the future, possibly human waste can be transformed to fertilizer in factories as natural gas depletes.
Another huge issue is reduced ground water as aquifiers are depleted, there will either be less irrigation in the future or sea water will need to be desalinized at huge energy cost. Again without irrigation agricultural productivity will be reduced. For all of these reasons the lower carrying capacity numbers in the range of 4 to 8 billion (possibly less) make more sense as we start to reach peak oil, coal, and natural gas and then other resource peaks (water, phosphorus, and nitrogen inputs to agriculture for example).
Hi Fred,
Probably an economist. They are an optimistic bunch that generally do to recognize thermodynamic and physical limits to technological innovation.
Somehow in a discipline that has a law of diminishing returns, there is a magic asterisk on technological innovation that seems to allow us to reach to infinity and beyond 🙂
“Probably an economist.” Or one of those dudes who project oil production from collections of wells out to infinity. 🙂
Hi Doug,
Or even to 2030 or 2040, note that my background is both physics and economics, so I am the rare economist who realizes that the laws of physics applies.
I simply take the data we have, make explicit assumptions and show what would happen if the assumptions are valid. I often point out that the assumptions are unlikely to be correct and often present a range of scenarios to reflect some of this uncertainty. I could of course just assert that I think A or B without any modelling based on my gut feel. I prefer to make a set of assumptions and create scenarios rather than make blind assertions. I actually have created World scenarios out to 2100 to compare with those of Jean Laherrere and I often take my scenarios to 2040 to compare with forecasts by the EIA, IEA, and others. Any forecast is likely to be wrong.
Interesting paper on carrying capacity at link below:
http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/GEAS_Jun_12_Carrying_Capacity.pdf
Most studies put the carrying capacity at 8 to 16 billion (page 3 of paper), though the range is from 4 billion to 64 billion (if we throw out the lowest 6 and highest 5 of 65 studies in figure 2 on page 3).
On page 11 after a discussion of finding compromise policies which might work under several possible futures (or paradigms, which are impossible to predict accurately.)
As Oxford economist Robert Cassen says,
“Virtually everything that needs doing from a population
point of view needs doing anyway” (13). Perhaps in the
end, reconciling the paradigms is not as important as
accepting the limits of our ability to predict the future
with certainty, and then making robust, pragmatic
decisions that will hold up under a variety of futures.
Adopting a more humble idea of our ability to predict the
future, we can still work to build and maintain resilient
natural and social systems well suited to whatever the
future brings.
This view point is optimistic if viewed as a prediction of what will happen, I interpret the author as simply suggesting this would be a good way to proceed. Find a range of scenarios that might describe the future (from pessimistic to optimistic with reality falling somewhere between), then design policies which would allow resilience under any of these possible futures.
Dennis, I understand your optimism but you know I do not share it. The human carrying capacity of the earth is a lot less than the current population, a lot less. Watch this fantastic 11.5 minute video by Chris Martenson:
The Environment: Increasing Waste – Crash Course Chapter 24
But back to your article. The eight conclusions they reach are nice platitudes but just that, platitudes. I quote the last two, bold theirs:
7) We have existing methods that have proven to be effective sustainable development tools: These include providing access to sexual and reproductive healthcare and contraception; investment in education beyond the primary level for all genders; empowering women to participate in economic, social and political life; and reducing infant mortality. These measures enable families to better decide on the number, timing and spacing of children. Demographic change is the result of individual choices and opportunities, and best addressed by enlarging, not restricting, these choices and opportunities.
8) We also have new tools and better models that can be used to help us develop policies: However, in order to become effective and implementable solutions, these models need to be further refined and elaborated. Additional research is needed.
We are literally poisoning the ocean right now. Coral and the fish are dying right now. We are destroying the earth right now. Millions of species are going extinct right now. And because we are already deep into overshoot we will continue to do exactly what we are doing right now… except, except it will get worse.
The idea that birth control, empowering women will fix anything is just ludicrous. And the idea that better policies and tools can fix anything is… words fail me. Good God, are people completely blind to what is happening to the earth? Do they not see the seriousness of things. I quote again from your article, quoting Limits To Growth:
They found that Earth’s economic system tends to stop growing and collapse from reduced availability of resources, overpopulation, and pollution at some point in the future. Various scenarios of technological innovation, population control, and resource availability could delay the collapse, but only a “carefully chosen set of world policies designed to stop population growth and stabilize material consumption could avoid collapse.
We have done nothing, since those words were written around 1970, to delay collapse. World population has doubled since 1970. And all the very nasty things that were happening in 1970 have also doubled since 1970. Posting platitudes about what we must do to fix things in just silly. We will continue to do what we have been doing since the beginning of history, we will continue to take over every niche on earth, drive out the current occupants of that niche, then we will slowly destroy that niche’s ability to support life as we know it.
Ron, I share your “pessimistic” realism.
To the optimists’ credits, one might say that since the 1970s, we have managed to reduce the environmental impact in certain non-important, non-vital areas (such as air pollution in advanced capitalist countries).
In addition, the world has managed to reduce the pace of worsening in nearly every important areas (like oil consumption, CO2 emissions). In these areas, the impact per unit of GDP has declined but at a pace less than world economic growth rate. So the world is heading toward ecological catastrophes nonetheless.
If we just take the current global bio-capacity, then the carrying capacity based on the “current technology” should be less than 5 billion.
Of course, the future technologies may (or may not) reduce the ecological footprint per person (depending on the future world GDP). But the fact is that right now we’re overshooting and the gap of overshooting continues to widen.
Hi Political Economist,
There are widely varying estimates of global carrying capacity,
in another comment (link below)
http://peakoilbarrel.com/eias-world-production-numbers/comment-page-1/#comment-466382
I argued that the carrying capacity is likely to be 4 to 8 billion or possibly less. There are many nations on the planet with total fertility ratios below 1.5 such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Europe as a whole is less than 2, the World total fertility ratio has fallen from 5 to 2.5 over a 40 year period, it could easily fall to less than replacement levels in 30 years and to 1.75 by 2100 with proper policy. All that is needed is universal access to modern contraceptives and education for women. In many parts of the world this can be achieved though there are some cultures that may resist such changes.
There has been progress on many fronts, and there needs to be more progress.
Another consideration is that the World economic growth rate will slow down as population peaks and as developing countries become more developed so the pace of improvement in environmental impacts may catch up and surpass GDP growth rates.
In addition the depletion of fossil fuels, which will likely peak by 2030 +/-5 years will raise prices and lead to substitution of wind, solar and nuclear power for fossil fuels which will tend to reduce carbon impacts as emissions from fossil fuels will be reduced. In addition this will reduce GDP growth rates during the transition (or permanently) further reducing environmental impacts.
There is a certain caricature of economists not being aware of limits to growth and I have been out of that field for years, but the economists in graduate school that I knew in the late 80s were well aware of environmental problems. I would think that not all economists (particularly those 40 or younger) would not be blind to limited resources as well as physical limits to technological progress.
Despite what Ron thinks, both platitudes and attitudes can make a difference.
The simple truth of the matter is that if platitudes and attitudes could make a difference they would be making a difference. Things would be getting better instead of what they are doing, getting worse.
Did you take time to watch the video? Watch it then tell me things are getting better.
My point is that the problem is human nature. We have always behaved like we are behaving today. We will not change. We will continue to expand our niche until we have pushed every species of megafauna from theirs. We will kill them all. And we will continue to degrade our own habitat until it will not support our own ballooning population.
Basically Dennis, you are saying: “Not to worry, things are bad but we will fix it all.” And I am saying; “That is pure bullshit, we will only keep on doing what we have been doing ever since our species evolved.”
Ron,
I am aware there are many problems, many of them stem from the attitude that humans are small and the earth is large, clearly we cannot do damage to the earth. That view is wrong.
When most humans realize that humans are destroying the ecosystem, things may change, these things take time, attitudes do not change overnight. My assertion that things may change and your assertion that they will not cannot be proven. I think there have been changes over the past 50 years or so in attitudes towards the environment, I believe these changes will continue. I agree that the pace of change should have been quicker, but there is nothing that can be done about the past, except to learn from past mistakes.
I disagree that it is a waste of time to attempt to make the future better, which seems to be your base position. I no more expect to change your view than you expect to change mine.
“When most humans realize that humans are destroying the ecosystem, things may change.” You can’t be serious Dennis. And when is this likely to happen? I suggest you take a trip to China or any third world country and ask about ecosystem concern. By the time most humans care squat about destroying ecosystems we’ll all be toast. Most people on the planet want to live like Texas millionaires: The most popular TV program in the Philippines is Dallas, that’s their ideal.
Doug, the sad part is, Dennis is serious. He really believes that crap. I think one trip to the the market of street vendors in Brazzaville, or any other Sub-Sahara African city, would change his mind. He would see every species of monkey, bird or other wild animal being sold as “bush meat”.
The wildlife in Africa is being killed for food. And the people are soon going to realize what they are doing and stop? Give me a break, they don’t really give a damn. They only know they are hungry, their kids are hungry and bush meat will feed them.
Dennis, go here: Bushmeat markets in Africa and tell me what you think.
Hi Doug,
There are places where there is very little concern for the environment, is that true everywhere or is it uniform. Has it always been the same in all places without change for all of time?
I have never been to China, but have spent some time in West Africa.
I suppose in Doug and Ron’s world nothing has ever changed in the history of the world and nothing ever will.
I suppose in Doug and Ron’s world nothing has ever changed in the history of the world and nothing ever will.
Dennis, now you are just getting downright silly. And that is putting it kindly. Otherwise I would not use the word “silly”.
Things change all the time. Just look at a graph of the human population and see how things have changed in the last two hundred years. The population curve looks like a hockey stick. That is change Dennis, change in spades.
Look at energy consumption. Another hockey stick. More change. Look at animal extinction, more change. Look at ocean fish. They are mostly gone. More change. Look at coral reefs, they are disappearing, more change.
Yes Dennis, things are changing and changing extremely fast. But if you think change only means change for the better then… well no, things are not changing.
Hi Ron,
Interesting, so only negative changes, that is all change has been change for the worse.
Do I understand you correctly now?
For your position seems silly to me.
Dennis, of course there have been some small changes where a few things have gotten better. I can only think of one worldwide situation where things have gotten better. The outlawing of some aerosols have helped the ozone hole somewhat. But nothing else. In the US some rivers in the US have been cleaned up due to pollution laws.
Other than the ozone layer, worldwide nothing has nothing better. But if I had time and enough space, it would take a book, I could tell you all the things that have gotten worse.
And no, that is not being silly.
Hi Ron,
One of us believes there have been both positive and negative changes, the other believes that with only two exceptions all change has been negative. To me the first view is both more balanced and realistic.
My point is that the problem is human nature. We have always behaved like we are behaving today. We will not change. We will continue to expand our niche until we have pushed every species of megafauna from theirs. We will kill them all. And we will continue to degrade our own habitat until it will not support our own ballooning population.
You may be right that nothing will change, but on the other hand, seems like periodically in human history there have been religious movements that have tempered the worst of human behavior in order to ensure the survival of the tribe. If people are in the process of killing each other off or behaving so badly that their behavior is resulting in mass extermination, some charismatic figure appears and convinces enough people not to do that anymore.
Ron, while I do understand and for the most part share your pessimism, I also believe there is still hope. Small for sure, but still there. There are a lot of people that care and are trying to do something.
Just watched this documentary. It has both the pessimism and the hope in it.
http://virungamovie.com/
Dennis,
The fertility issue is an interesting one. Within Europe, for example, there are subgroups that have much higher fertility than the average, and others with much lower. The groups with higher fertility rates are often strongly religious. Some demographers speculate that the subgroups with higher fecundity will eventually outbreed the less fertile groups and push up birth rates, and “the religious shall inherit the earth”.
Certainly, looking only at the fertility rate for a whole country only tells part of the story on a low resolution. I don’t think the demographic transition story will ever play out, as demographics are things which are constantly changing and evolving, and are full of surprises.
Hi Sam,
I suppose that is a possibility, but for the world as a whole the total fertility ratio has been falling since 1965 from 5 to 2.5, there are many nations where total fertility has fallen to 1.5 or less, the trend could change, but there are some nations that are considered religious such as Iran, where total fertility ratios have fallen from 5 to under 2 in a very short time frame (25 years or so).
Human behavior is notoriously difficult to predict, but with the advent of modern birth control and reduced infant mortality, the total fertility ratio tends to fall.
The real challenge we face in the 21st century is undoing the mess we made in the 20th so the world can support the huge populations.
Technical innovation gives us a fair chance but we’ll have to change our ways, and that will be hard.
Some societies will do better than others based on how they choose to address the challenges facing us.
+1
Hi Illambiquated,
I agree. I also think positive change is possible, though
I do not take it as a given.
If most humans believe that mostly bad things will happen and that most change will be negative, that is a recipe for less change.
One could argue that no change would be better because most changes caused by humans have destroyed the ecosystem.
I disagree fundamentally with that position and think that positive changes are a possibility.
That video is actually AWFUL:
On Monarch butterfly migration changes: “It’s a safe bet that . . . new and overly-powerful classes of pesticides we are using in the name of so-called modern farming are big parts of the story.”
The “new” pesticides are better, less toxic, more regulated than the old ones. But with no references, it’s hard to figure out what the fuck the narrator is talking about. Here’s one debunking of many:
http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/03/25/monsanto-v-monarch-butterflies/
On honey bees: “…are dying off precipitously….there again we strongly suggest a combination of new pesticides and herbicides and fungicides….”
Not.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090507121949.htm
On “chemicals”: So many “compounds” being released into the environment! We just don’t know their effects! But anyway, monarch butterfly die-offs, obesity, and clinical depression are rising, and of course correlation is causation.
Three strikes, and the video has lost credibility.
Mike the lurker,
With all due respect. .. you are completely FOS and deluded. If you actually believe science has made better quality food than what our ancestors ate… you have been bamboozled by corporate technology.
Steve
You cannot be serious.
What I mean to say is this: I have been eating such food that “science has made” for about 54 years now, and, unlike my “ancestors,” who were mostly like dead by 25, I’m still alive, kicking, and trashing stupid food myths.
Thanks to medicine, not food. Your ancestors could happily live to be 90+ years old on their diet, and many did. Those that did not were killed by injuries, infections, bacteria and viruses.
Thanks to medicine, not food. Your ancestors could happily live to be 90+ years old on their diet, and many did. Those that did not were killed by injuries, infections, bacteria and viruses.
I was reading about how the leafy green vegetables we eat today, even the ones we consider nutritious like spinach and kale, don’t have nearly the nutritional value of weeds in the wild. And of course we know that the average commercially grown tomato has much less taste than heritage ones.
A lot of commercial fruits and vegetables have been developed to withstand transportation and months before getting to market. And processed grains aren’t as nutritious as unprocessed ones.
I think large scale farming has allowed more people to get more calories, but the quality of the food has likely gone down. It’s easier for people to get enough of it, but a lot of it amounts to obesity-making junk.
“The Art of Fermentation” by Sandor Katz might be worth a look. Not sure how whatever science is is involved in the making of food. Most of the articles I’ve read have been busy flip-flopping over whether butter is good or bad, eggs are good or bad, carbs are good or bad, and hey hey hey fad diet train. While all that get sorted out, I’d wager in the meantime that pumping folks full of sugar and corn solids probably isn’t the best of plans—traditionally, corn was fermented, which just so happens to improve its nutritional profile. Same deal with sourdough, nukazuke, tempeh, etc.
Though, alas, I can no longer stand modern industrial bread. What a terrible fate!
The garbage about our ancestors not living past their thirties is just that. The average lifespan was brought down to that number by a large number of deaths at birth and before age five. People still lived just as long and maybe longer. It’s a statistical flim flam.
Mike, it is you that has lost all credibility. The article did not deny that monarch butterflies are disappearing, it just claimed that Monsanto is not the guilty party. I don’t really give a shit which party is doing it, all that matters is that we humans who are responsible.
Species are going extinct at a rate not seen since the KT extinction 65 million years ago. Acidification of the ocean is killing off, not just the coral reefs but also all species that depends on zooplankton for reproduction. Zooplankton is the bottom of the food chain. That means all life in the ocean is in danger. The video points that out.
And you have the audacity to say the video is awful? Good God man, just what the hell do you think would be a good video?
I can tell you exactly what would be a better video:
One that simply edited out that crappy first four minutes.
You are over-reacting, Ron.
By the way: I’m an old peaker from way back. At the end of 2009, I had a realization: The peaker set it chock-full of quacks, including the likes of apocalypt Martenson, anti-GMO zealot Guy McPherson, and climate-denier Robert Hirsch
I still listen to people like Robert Rapier, and sometimes even Westexas.
Then there’s the fact that I still “lurk” your website. So, yes, I guess that means I have no credibility?
Maybe you can get the Fed to print you up some credibility. In the new normal, no one has to run out of anything.
The peaker set it chock-full of quacks, including the likes of apocalypt Martenson, anti-GMO zealot Guy McPherson, and climate-denier Robert Hirsch.
I don’t know what an “apocalypt” is but I think you mean someone who is apocalyptic in their view of where civilization is headed. If so then you forgot to add one other “apocalypt”, and that is Ron Patterson.
About no credibility, I mean one who sees a video that describes to a tee what kind of damn mess the world is in and calls it awful and claim that the video has no credibility. There is more credibility in that video than in a thousand videos that claim there is no population problem, no pollution problem, no problem with ocean acidification.
I believe that we are indeed causing global warming and climate change. But I do not believe we will ever do one damn thing about it. We will keep on doing what we have always done. We will dump CO2 into the atmosphere until we have burnt every ounce of fossil fuel we can possibly pull from the earth. Talking about it just makes people feel better.
To Ron, just above:
I believe that we are indeed causing global warming and climate change. But I do not believe we will ever do one damn thing about it.
Yes, that’s right. Because we can’t. But that’s not the point of my original post.
The issue I raised concerns the spurious arguments that the video opens with. One can’t possibly agree that a video “describes to a tee” what is happening when it’s very first three points are unsupported or downright false.
And if a video opens with three fatuous arguments about monarchs, honeybees, and chemicals leading to obesity, which all sound like they were gleaned from headlines at Mother Jones magazine, then how can an observer possibly take the rest of it seriously?
I’m assuming because you spend so much time maintaining this website you’re concerned about the quality of its arguments.
So what do you propose to explain the drop from 1,000,000,000 butterflies to about 40,000,000 (a 96% decline)?
I’m curious.
Perhaps it isn’t the pesticides, but something must be happening or is a 96% decline actual demonstrative of nothing?
Similar declines in other invertebrate species seen elsewhere:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0714/240714_invertebrate-numbers
Or is there really nothing to see here? Who knows, maybe there is nothing going on out there in the real world that I need to worry myself about. Can you please confirm?
http://www.tfsp.info/findings/conclusions/
http://headlines.ransquawk.com/headlines/tesla-tsla-model-s-us-sales-plunge-to-1-200-in-november-according-to-insideev-08-12-2014
trala trala trala
Elon Musk claims otherwise…
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/526971201231409152
http://www.bnsf.com/about-bnsf/financial-information/weekly-carload-reports/pdf/20141129.pdf
At 10,331 carloads of petroleum, it is about 1500 fewer than the previous weekly carload report and down 200 from 2013.
Still outpacing 2013 by some 61,000 oil tanker cars.
There is no history prior to Oct.
Story out this morning that the Russian routing of SSS Sorta South Stream through Turkey has caused some EU upheaval. They are making noises about wanting it still to go thru Bulgaria and willing to “work with the Russians” to satisfy all requirements.
Sounds like Bulgaria was not happy about a future with no natgas.
prospect of gas going through non vasal country is real reason what ticked them off.
Yup.
Ooooh, talk of Goldman securitizing energy sector high yields. That’s big stuff. Facilitates QE.
You can project any carrying capacity you please depending on the assumptions you are willing to make.
Being a realist acquainted with the basics of geology , geography, and biology as they apply to my own field of agriculture I can say that depending on the assumptions any number up to fifteen or twenty billion could work IN THEORY at least for a while.
The question is what do you assume? IF you assume people stay put – very little travel- eat simply- very little meat- live frugally – no cars no mcmansions- stay warm on the basis of crowding together and sufficing with body heat – have two pairs of pants two shirts two pairs of shoes made to last- recycle all their personal waste by putting it in the gardens and greenhouses that will be EVERYWHERE- spend most of their time growing food rather than making selling buying consumer goods- amuse themselves by playing board games such as chess rather than shopping shopping shopping- that the collective luck holds- no staple crops wiped out by disease or pest etc no megadroughts – then ten billion or more is a reasonable assumption.
Five hundred million to two or three billion is a realistic estimate of carrying capacity after we run thru our one time endowment of fossil fuels. IF there are three billion of us post fossil fuels most of us will be living a very simple life based mostly on putting food and water in our bellies and staying warm. It doesn’t really take all that much to live if you cut out all the middle men and grow your own beans and rice and chicken.
I have furniture made by a relative that is totally functional that was made almost entirely by hand out of locally harvested trees – furniture that will last hundreds of years in constant use.Thick solid oak. I COULD grow enough food and plenty to spare for myself on an acre in temperate Virginia BARRING BAD LUCK.And if I caught all my own number one and two in a chamber pot and put it very carefully back on that acre- I wouldn’t need much in the way of purchased and transported fertilizers.I could get by forever without ever using another plastic bag or throwaway food container.
I could wind up my water by hand from the hand dug well near the house which we used for forty years. Before that my Momma toted water in buckets from a spring a thousand feet away down a steep hill.
I don’t really think there is any way to come up with a decent estimate of global carrying capacity other than knowing there are hard limits imposed by geology geography climate biology etc. The number of assumptions that must necessarily be made is simply too high and the number of feedbacks between them too many to even estimate.
Any estimate may well be off by a factor of two or even three or four.
I do not doubt that overshoot is going to take away a substantial portion of our species within a half a century. My best wild ass guess is that the human population of the globe will eventually stabilize at less that a billion or so.
I realize this figure is at least double the estimates of a lot of professional biologists but otoh most biologists don’t really know a whole lot about the practical possibilities of subsistence farming. Even professional farmers know little or nothing about subsistence farming these days. I have read extensively about it and lived it to some extent as a child so I know more than most.
There is good data available from places where subsistence is still practiced but virtually none from places where it is not and has not been practiced at least not during recent times and the state of the agricultural arts is much advanced compared to a century or even a half century ago.
We understand a lot more about preserving soil fertility these days and about controlling diseases via crop rotations for example than we did fifty years ago. We have crops imported from other places and we know more about biological control measures when it comes to pests.
A place such as New York City is going to shrink dramatically indeed. Without fossil fuel slaves to keep the water flowing places such as LA may well become ghost towns.
But the rural countryside all thru the middle south and the deep south is thinly populated and could support ten or twenty or even fifty times as many people as live there currently.They would generate enough surplus to support basic industries such as are needed to supply tools and building materials that are not easily manufactured locally just as subsistence farmers have done historically for the last thousand years.
Anybody who wants to gain some real insight into the possibilities of intensive labor based subsistence agriculture is very well advised to read ” Farmer of Forty Centuries” which is available free online.
This book is devoted to describing the methods used by Asian farmers who lived mostly in semitropical areas on river deltas. So it will not do to extrapolate their results to places with real winters and less favorable geography.
But it is still priceless in terms of insights.Nothing else is even close.
Hi OFM,
Thanks for that assessment.
You wear two hats, sometimes you have your optimist hat on and at other times are more of a pessimist. It seems based on your comment above, if this is combined with some of your more optimistic comments about solar and electric vehicles catching on, I come up with this.
Fossil fuels peak and become much more expensive so less is used for things like driving cars and heating homes and is used primarily in agriculture, also population peaks in 2050 and begins to decline, reaching a TFR of 1.5 by 2100 and to 1.25 by 2150 with population falling to 2 billion by 2200. Wind, solar, nuclear, and biofuels on farms provide energy, waste water in cities is recycled to use for irrigation on farms, human waste is turned into fertilizer at fertilizer factories.
None of this would happen quickly or easily, but it seems with falling population and the knowledge and wealth that is already accumulated we might be able to muddle through until population falls to sustainable levels in 2250. Travel will be mostly on electric trains and possibly some electric cars, goods will be moved by rail and electric truck, heat will be with heat pumps (ground source in colder climates). Transition will be difficult, but may not be impossible.
Forgot the following population scenarios with different total fertility ratios (TFR), I propose we follow the 1.75 TRF path to 2100, transition to 1.5 by 2150 and to 1.25 by 2200. All would occur through development, education, and easy access to contraceptives.
Carrying capacity can also be increased by the removal of wolves, bears, tigers, rhinos, lions, sharks, mice, giraffes, gorillas, ants, panda bears,wasps & wetlands and parks; getting rid of buffalo and most native Indians seems to have helped quite a bit as well because of all the wheat land now available. This was my wife’s over the shoulder comment!
Hi Doug,
I think perhaps you meant native Americans.
Human population can fall, this will reduce the pressure on other species, biodiversity is important to maintain, policies which expand education, access to contraception, and empower women will help on the population front. Perhaps your wife would agree.
“Human population can fall, this will reduce the pressure on other species.” Sorry Dennis but that’s total bullshit. Species are going extinct at an exponential rate — they’re not coming back.
Hi Doug,
I realize that plenty of species are becoming extinct. So you think human population decrease would not improve the situation? I am just trying to follow what you think is bullshit. Would the best plan be to continue on the present path then? Kind of sounds like your argument.
Woe is me, nothing will change. Is that about right?
Dennis, by the time we see any human population decrease the plight of many other species (the ones that still exist) will be dire indeed. To think otherwise and keep making ray-of-sunshine remarks serves to downplay the utterly horrible situation the world is in and I think this makes problems worse rather than better. In other words, it qualifies as bullshit (in my view). I know you will respond with some long winded reply which I will ignore because it won’t lead to any resolution. You seem to be hardwired with a Pollyanna world view and I disagree with your thinking. So lets just move on and leave it at that?
Hi Doug,
I agree that the environmental destruction is terrible. I also agree that many more species will be lost in the future. I propose that a reduction in human population would be better than an increase of human population.
Crazy. To me recognizing that things are bad and getting worse and attempting to develop policies to either slow the rate that things become worse or even to improve the situation from the present trajectory makes sense.
Others seem to think the best course is to announce the bad news and predict that it will get worse and assert that nothing can change this ever.
Woe is me, nothing will change. Is that about right?
Of course things will change. Things will get worse, a lot worse. But the woe is you part, that won’t change. 😉
Yep,
Only changes for the worse will happen. It is clear, any inkling that any positive change is even possible, is considered Pollyanaish by Henny Penny.
The point was that fewer humans is likely to lead to fewer extinctions, I am clear on the meaning of extinction. By pressure on other species, I am referring to those that are not extinct, if human population falls to 2 billion you do not think that improves the prospects for other species?
I must be missing something basic here, because somehow the argument for reduced human population is provoking angry responses, strange.
Dennis, yes you are definitely missing something. Humans will not voluntarily reduce their population to 2 billion. Even if everyone on earth suddenly became aware of overpopulation and decided to have fewer children, it would still take centuries for the population to drop that far, if it ever did.
But that is not going to happen. If there were never a collapse and the population leveled out at 9 billion and then started to slowly drop after that, it would take so long that virtually all the world’s megafauna would be gone.
But what about collapse? What if the population collapsed back to 1 or 2 billion? Even worse because that would mean people died because of starvation. During periods of widespread famine, people will eat the songbirds out of the trees. Every animal people can catch, shoot or trap will be eaten for food.
Dennis, the problem is too many people. There is no pleasant fix for that problem. And the unpleasant fixes would be terrible for both people and the animals.
Dennis, the problem is too many people. There is no pleasant fix for that problem. And the unpleasant fixes would be terrible for both people and the animals.
I’m not sure there is a “fix” as such. But populations may be reduced as a result of disease and lack of food and water. I don’t think it will hit all areas equally. Seems like Africa and parts of Asia are most vulnerable. I think it would more likely that populations in some parts of the world might be reduced significantly, while other parts much less so. So I’m not really expecting people in suburban American to have to start eating their dogs and cats.
Hi Ron,
The key is the total fertility ratio(TFR), for the World it was about 5 births per woman in 1965 and it had fallen to 2.5 births per woman by 2010, cut in half in 45 years.
In Iran TFR fell from 6.5 in 1985 to 1.9 in 2010, in Singapore TFR fell from 5 in 1965 to 1.3 in 2010, and in South Korea TFR fell from 5.63 in 1965 to 1.23 in 2010.
Population falls pretty quickly when the TFR falls to 1.5 or less. It would take about 75 years for population to fall from 8 billion to 4 billion if TFR falls to 1.5 worldwide.
Humans in the following countries already have volunteered to reduce their population as of 2010, TFR is below replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in all of these countries TFR is number to the right:
China, Macao SAR 0.94
China, Hong Kong SAR 1.03
Bosnia and Herzegovina 1.22
Republic of Korea 1.23
Singapore 1.26
Other non-specified areas 1.26
Slovakia 1.31
Hungary 1.33
Poland 1.34
Romania 1.34
Japan 1.34
Germany 1.36
Portugal 1.36
Italy 1.39
Ukraine 1.39
Malta 1.40
Austria 1.40
Eastern Europe 1.41
Spain 1.41
Serbia 1.41
Lithuania 1.42
Belarus 1.42
Channel Islands 1.42
Bulgaria 1.43
Southern Europe 1.43
Czech Republic 1.43
Croatia 1.43
Slovenia 1.44
Russian Federation 1.44
Greece 1.46
Switzerland 1.47
TFYR Macedonia 1.48
Thailand 1.49
Latvia 1.49
Republic of Moldova 1.50
Cuba 1.50
Cyprus 1.51
EUROPE 1.54
Lebanon 1.58
Mauritius 1.58
Eastern Asia 1.61
Luxembourg 1.62
Canada 1.63
China 1.63
Western Europe 1.64
Estonia 1.64
More developed regions 1.66
Puerto Rico 1.70
Montenegro 1.73
Armenia 1.74
Aruba 1.74
Netherlands 1.75
Albania 1.75
Georgia 1.80
Trinidad and Tobago 1.80
Belgium 1.82
Barbados 1.83
Finland 1.84
Denmark 1.85
Northern Europe 1.86
United Kingdom 1.88
Viet Nam 1.89
Australia 1.89
Iran (Islamic Republic of) 1.89
Sweden 1.89
Brazil 1.90
Chile 1.90
Bahamas 1.91
Martinique 1.91
Costa Rica 1.92
Norway 1.92
Australia/New Zealand 1.93
United Arab Emirates 1.97
France 1.97
Curaçao 1.98
Azerbaijan 2.00
Dem. People’s Republic of Korea 2.00
Ireland 2.00
NORTHERN AMERICA 2.02
Saint Lucia 2.04
Tunisia 2.05
United States of America 2.06
Myanmar 2.07
Malaysia 2.07
So there are a few humans that are willing to reduce there family size and this will reduce population.
Where are all the Sub-Sahara African countries?
Anyway Dennis, all this is academic. We are already in deep overshoot. We have already wiped out over half the species that were present just a few hundred years ago. We started when the world’s population was a fraction of what it is today. And we will continue until to wipe them out until our population is down to about 1 billion.
Hi Ron,
There are many countries with total fertility ratios(TFR) above replacement, the sub-Saharan countries have some of the highest TFRs.
I agree that population needs to be reduced, I do not agree that it can only happen through catastrophic human population collapse. The UN low fertility scenario to 2100 and the TFR is presented in the chart below, the TFR can continue to fall to below 1.5 after 2100, but if it remains at that level World population falls to 2 billion by 2210.
Dennis, do you realize that your population reduction scenario will take centuries before the population is back to the 1970 level of half what it is today? And do you realize that means business as usual for at least two or three more centuries?
Do you realize that virtually every animal larger than a rabbit would be extinct by that time, that all the fish in the sea would be gone by that time? That …. oh never mind.
Your scenario assumes no harmful consequences from peak fossil fuels and no really harmful consequences from our current destruction of the environment.
Our difference Dennis, is that you see a Pollyannaish outcome to every serious problem currently faced by humanity and that only humans matter. I don’t see it that way.
Hi Ron,
You said,
Your scenario assumes no harmful consequences from peak fossil fuels and no really harmful consequences from our current destruction of the environment.
You are fond of saying, “I never said that.”
Where did I say there would be no harmful consequences to ecosystem damage or from peak fossil fuels?
I have repeatedly said that a transition is possible but it will be very difficult.
The “difficult” part means that there will be many harmful consequences.
World population in 1970 was about 3.7 billion, if World population follows the low fertility UN scenario, world population falls to 3.7 billion in 2160 or about 145 years. So yes it would be about 2 centuries for population to rise from 3.7 billion to a peak and then decline back to 3.7 billion.
I also don’t think that population will follow that path, if the worst case scenario occurs, population would fall more quickly as there would be an increase in the death rate.
A big difference in our points of view is that I think there are steps that could be taken to take a bad situation and make it better. You believe that either there are no such steps or that such action absolutely will not be taken (possibly both.) Though you have never said it precisely in that way (to my knowledge.)
I am guilty of being a humanist. The destruction of the ecosystem will destroy humans as well.
The hennypennyish point of view leads to inaction in my view. It is hopeless, nothing can or will be done is not productive, there are serious problems and we should attempt to address them.
New bookby Jonathon Eig.
The Birth of the Pill (How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution). The crusaders were Margaret Sanger, Gregory Pincus, Dr. John Rock and rich heiress Katharine McCormick http://www.amazon.com/The-Birth-Pill-Reinvented-Revolution/dp/0393073726
Hey Doug, that’s exactly what we are doing, we are killing them all including the elephants. You forgot about the elephants, and the hyenas, and the monkeys, and the chimps, and the few other million species we are killing off like there was no tomorrow.
I find it strange when people talk about “carrying capacity” they always mean “human carrying capacity”. In truth the earth is at 100% of carrying capacity for life and has been sine the Cambrian Era. When we expand the carrying capacity for humans we deplete the carrying capacity for some other species. If we add in one place we must subtract in another. It is simple arithmetic.
Actually I didn’t forget elephants because I could have filled the page with species already gone or about to be gone and would have developed tennis elbow before I was finished. Like you this cornucopia bullshit pisses me off. Elephants, a much beloved creature, are actually on the endangered list now.
Doug,
Don’t forget elphant dung beatles. Without dung beatles we wouldn’t be able to coat our toxic laden commercial apples with wax.
People have no clue that the wax we coat on commercial fruits and veggies comes from dung beatle droppings… lol
Steve
Ummm – I believe you are confusing dung beetles with shellac bugs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellac#Current
oh thank goodness. I much prefer lac beetle secretions.
Your wife’s comment is right on but we don’t know how far we can go in that direction without inducing positive feed backs that would bring down the whole kit and caboodle.
My guess is not much farther before Mother Nature takes a serious bite out of our collective ass as she has done many times already when pushed too far.
Bubonic plague and the BLACK DEATH is best and most usefully understood as an overshoot problem. We got to be numerous enough and got to traveling enough for the bug to explode in its newly enriched environment. The bug itself overshot too of course and burned itself out (mostly ) due to a lack of hosts.
Back in the sixties we spent a small fortune spraying poison on a little red bug known reasonably enough as the red mite on our apple trees. The class of insecticides we used for that bug finally bit the dust partly thru tighter regulations and partly thru the bugs evolving immunity.
And guess what – We have no red mite problem at all now- because when we quit using that suite of chemicals we quit killing off the red mites predators. You actually have to HUNT to find one these days whereas they were numerous enough to turn the trees reddish looking at times back then.An experienced orchardist could actually see the off color reddish tinge.I have seen twenty five on a single leaf.
Simplifying machinery and computer programs is good practice but simplifying ecosystems beyond a certain point is playing roulette with a pistol with a real bullet in it for sure.
Hi Mac, “without inducing positive feed backs” So they’d be negative feedbacks then. Just kidding, positive feedback it would be. Ron’s right though. by “carrying capacity” people always seem to mean “human carrying capacity” and this is about as egocentric as you can get: especially if you’re a chimp.
Back in the sixties we spent a small fortune spraying poison on a little red bug known reasonably enough as the red mite on our apple trees. The class of insecticides we used for that bug finally bit the dust partly thru tighter regulations and partly thru the bugs evolving immunity.
And guess what – We have no red mite problem at all now- because when we quit using that suite of chemicals we quit killing off the red mites predators.
Do you have data on that, or is this an after-that-therefore-because-of-that story?
What suite of chemicals is now used to control mites and other arthropods that do not kill off the red mites predators?
[Licensed pesticide applicator here.]
Any proper answer would take all day so I am going to cheat a little and just give you a good link and ramble a minute or two.
http://extension.entm.purdue.edu/publications/E-258.pdf
We are talking fifty years ago and while I am not yet totally senile I nevertheless haven’t spent much time during that fifty years trying to remember the names of the specific miticides we used back then- the problem is that the stuff we were using was broad spectrum- TOO BROAD .
We were still using some organochlorides and the earlier organophosphates – most or all of the organochlorides are off the market now(depending on where you are and what you grow, in some countries you can get still get stuff outlawed decades ago here) as are a good many of the organophosphates.
At one time when I was actively farming I kept up with the details of the chemistry of pesticides to the extent I could given my background – but an organic chemist I most certainly am not.
So as a practical matter I know and knew about as much as you do about any particular pesticide being a licensed applicator ( agricultural not for hire in my case) myself.
I am retired now and you are probably better informed on current pesticides than I am.
If it were important I could think about it a while and come up with some brand names and give you a better answer but the link should suffice to make the point clear.
Most people don’t realize it but the various regulatory authorities are in the habit of removing one or another restricted use pesticide from the market quite often, or tightening up the regs for using a given one, if a suitable substitute is not available.
The idea is to reduce environmental and public health impacts to the extent possible without unduly restricting food production.
Farmers grumble like hell but we generally get along without the ones taken away by using the newer ones taking their places – the problem is that the newer ones are generally more expensive.They are also hopefully safer for people and wildlife.
The regulatory process overall in my opinion must be judged a huge success even though it is not proceeding nearly as fast as most environmentalists would like.
The pesticides we are using now in this country are definitely much safer than the ones we were using back then on average- and we are using them in much smaller quantities on a per unit of production basis in orchards. We don’t spray nearly as often as back then and we don’t put nearly as many ounces of pesticides out per acre per spray.I would guess that the actual physical mass now is less than half what it was back then.
I would like to see faster progress myself but on the other hand I don’t want to see the price of fruits and veggies in particular and food in general to jump sharply upward.A hell of a lot of people actually on the verge of starvation and a hell of a lot of people who get sufficient calories are not getting the expensive stuff- fresh fruit and vegetables- that would substantially improve their long term health..
Biological control strategies are not something that organic growers have a patent on . Conventional farmers generally adopt them as fast as they prove practical at scale.
Of course some things that will work for a small farmer won’t work for those producing at ten or twenty or fifty times or more the acreage.Nevertheless progress in bio control is being made steadily and it is adding up as the years go by.
Pesticides in the quantities used by commercial farmers are damned big line item cash expense , sometimes the biggest one, and one every farmer is anxious to reduce to the extent he can.
I want you to know I saw this, and thanks so much. I will read the Purdue document.
My orchard is very small, so I can do a lot of IPM–raking leaves and such–to cut down on fungicide applications. The main problem is that we planted an “heirloom” orchard years ago in a fit of romantic longing for the past. What a mistake! They should be called “obsolete” varieties, not “heirloom.”
In any case, I’ve learned to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the various varieties (all 24 of them, 80 trees total), and I’ve learned to love summer apples like Chenango Strawberry, and weird apples, like Calville Blanc d’Hiver.
The customers in chi-chi food $hop$ in the nearby city love them, too!
You are most welcome.
I can say with certainty that if you want to use chemicals to the least possible extent that keeping your orchard golf course neat is mandatory. Cut the grass short and keep it SHORT. If you own the land within a hundred feet of your trees keep it cut short too. This is your best non chemical defense against field mice and voles that will happily gnaw the roots off your trees otherwise.
Prune aggressively and take the brush away and BURN it.
The idea on the heavy pruning is to open up the tree so the sun and the air penetrate thoroughly and quickly and the fruit and the leaves dry quickly after a rain.
Plus plenty of sun penetration means more colorful fruit from the interior limbs and limbs near the ground.
IT is also very helpful to thin a heavy crop aggressively by hand as soon as you know the fruit is well set. A third as many apples three times as big makes the same number of pounds to sell and bigger ones generally sell better. You want to thin until you have minimized limb breakage and avoid the limbs bending down and matting together which means the leaves and apples stay wet after a rain.
With an orchard as small as yours you probably will have time to do selective picking taking a portion of the yield from a tree and leaving the rest for a second or third picking which will improve the fruit size, color, total yield and flavor of the harvest from any particular tree.
I mention these basics because I have no idea how much experience you have or if you have a friend with experience to tell you about this stuff.
Another thing-If you like slow cooked bbq pork then green apple wood added to a slow fire does things for it that must be experienced to be appreciated.Seasoned wood soaked for a while works too.
This is very heartening, because much of this I have discovered over the years the hard way, and I can say you are right about it!
Lots of biowarfare contingency defense planning evolved from good ole Yersenia Pestis. Some plague tidbits.
The usual focus of start is 1348 England. Oxen Ford kept good records. There is a recent theory out from data noticed a long time ago that the velocity of spread of the disease from its port of entry to interior towns was faster than man or rat traveled. Considerable doubt existed that y. Pestis was / is indeed the plague explanation. There were also an array of symptom descriptions very carefully recorded, frequently, that are not what y. Pestis does.
So the recent theory is a virus. Maybe airborne, though the wind patterns don’t seem to match the spread records. The underpinning of the virus thought is that there were three massive famines in England just before 1348 and this generates a presumption of immune weakness.
There is definitely an issue also of rattus rattus vs rattus norwegicus. One has tight fur to the body and one does not. Non equivalent flea comfort.
Perhaps most interesting, Napoleon was never stupid enough to invade Russia as winter approached as is popularly thought. He had a separate army deployed to approach through Russia from the south and function as a grand pincer unit to link up with his forces moving eastward. It went through the Middle East and I think Turkey . . . and caught plague and got wiped out. Thus, plague stopped Napoleon, not winter.
I think the flea/rat theory of plague is not all that old. Near 1900, as I recall.
Stunning Video: A Year In The Life Of Earth’s CO2
An ultra-high-resolution NASA computer model has given scientists a stunning new look at how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere travels around the globe.
Plumes of carbon dioxide in the simulation swirl and shift as winds disperse the greenhouse gas away from its sources. The simulation also illustrates differences in carbon dioxide levels in the northern and southern hemispheres and distinct swings in global carbon dioxide concentrations as the growth cycle of plants and trees changes with the seasons.
The carbon dioxide visualization was produced by a computer model called GEOS-5, created by scientists at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office.
The visualization is a product of a simulation called a “Nature Run.” The Nature Run ingests real data on atmospheric conditions and the emission of greenhouse gases and both natural and man-made particulates. The model is then left to run on its own and simulate the natural behavior of the Earth’s atmosphere. This Nature Run simulates January 2006 through December 2006.
While Goddard scientists worked with a “beta” version of the Nature Run internally for several years, they released this updated, improved version to the scientific community for the first time in the fall of 2014.
The video is an eye opener. its really interesting to see the CO2 concentration is much lower in the Southern Hemisphere, which I presume has a lower albedo and relatively higher outgoing long wave radiation..(?). I also noticed the co2 swings with the season. Coupling the way vegetation grows to a climate model must be fun…
Well, in Year 1150, 80% of the Norse Greenlanders’ diet came from terrestrial sources (grain, veggies, etc.). The idea of such farming in Greenland even today with increasing temps is still not possible — it still needs to get warmer. But boy was it warm enough back then.
By 1400s however, over 80% of diet was fish. Why? Because it got so cold so fast they were unable to grow much of anything and had no choice but to resort to fishing. These colonies died out by 1450 or so because they couldn’t feed themselves. It had become too cold.
By the 1600s London papers were printing stories about ice skating on the Thames. Big change indeed.
Then the Little Ice Age started coming to an end. By the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, skating on the Thames was out, ice was rare to never on the Thames. More big changes.
Now some folks who happen to be partial to the concept of communism want us to believe that the ongoing climate changes we see today are definitively caused by carbon. Well, maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. But we certainly know that we were warming and cooling very fast indeed — long before carbon entered the picture. We also know that not one of the computer models that the IPCC and the climate change communists/alarmists rely on almost exclusively can duplicate the ACTUAL temp readings of the past 100 years or 50 or 20 or 10 or 5 even. Not one model. They simply have no scientific explanation for “The Pause” (the fact there has been no global temperature increase for the past 18 years) or the incredibly fast build-up of Antarctic sea ice (which is now at its highest level in recorded history) that evidently none of these “know-what’s-best-for-you” scientists were able to predict. This has all happened as carbon in the atmosphere has supposedly been increasing by leaps and bounds.
So until these mysteries can be resolved, and they most affirmatively are NOT resolved no matter how often the “know-what’s-best-for-you” scientists and their power-hungry freedom-destroying masters in government bleat about “certainty,” we do not and cannot know with any reasonable certainty that carbon is, or is not, the cause of the onetime warming seen more than 18 years ago or the increase in Antarctic ice, etc.
Kyle, prepare thyself.
(Got my popcorn…)
only took 2 hrs for a denier to show up
They must have a big staff of people who monitor the entire Internet to post on any mention of global warming.
I think that as more articles and comments are going to mention global warming, it’s going to keep those deniers busy, trying to respond to them all. It should get interesting.
I’ve had people call me a denier. I guess they treat the issue as religious dogma. They get shook up because I lack faith in their beliefs. But I’m more of an integrator, and I like to look at graphs. The Obama lines don’t get reaction with me.
Now why would people call you a denier?
They expect total adherence to climate dogma. Some believe Hansen is Jesus, I guess. Or maybe Mohammed?
OBAMAAA!!!
If that’s all you’ve got, you’re not really part of the conversation.
Why? I meant that Obama’s climate talk doesn’t get traction with me. May I suggest you ignore what I write? You’ll feel better.
Check this NASA site. Arctic ice cover at the low point in September was 50% higher than in 2012. How to explain in the warmest year?
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
This article says this:
Sea ice extent in November averaged 10.36 million square kilometers (4.00 million square miles). This is 630,000 square kilometers (243,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average of 10.99 million square kilometers (4.24 million square miles) and 520,000 square kilometers (201,000 square miles) above the record low for the month observed in 2006.
So it is below the long-term average. Seems to fit global warming.
Yes. I worked on a project to ship oil from Russia via a northern route. The data showed ice was thinning. But the world is warming and yet Antarctic sea ice extent hit a record in 2014. It can be confusing.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/antarctic-ice-loss-tripled-in-the-last-10-years-141203.htm
The melt rate of glaciers in the fastest-melting part of Antarctica has tripled over the past decade, researchers said Tuesday in an analysis of the past 21 years.
Glaciers in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica are losing ice faster than another part of Antarctica and are the biggest contributor to rising sea levels, said researchers at the University of California at Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Arctic ice extent is just one indicator out of many.
Consider this. An athlete often has the best day of his career on a day his team loses.
You can’t just go by one thing at a time.You have to consider everything.
This is not easy to do and nobody can guarantee his predictions. But we have organizations that look at the overall performance of college football teams etc and while their predictions are not perfect by any means they are actually pretty damned accurate compared to random guesses.
The general trend according to all the evidence of the sort that relates to heat energy in versus heat energy out is that heat energy is accumulating at a steady scary rate.
Nearly all that energy is now understood with great certainty to be accumulating in the top few hundred feet of the oceans.
It is and has been well understood that the temperature of the atmosphere is closely related to the temperature of the oceans and it is a virtually inescapable conclusion that the heat accumulating in the oceans is going to bleed over into the atmosphere. The question is when not if.
We know that a degree or two warmer water on average results in noticeably more violent hurricanes.
The climate in Western Europe is largely determined by the Gulf Stream current that carries warm water north where the winds pick up the heat and transport it to Great Britian and points east. So it stands to reason that it will get warmer in that area as the seas warm up more.
Some paradoxical observations are easily understood if you understand a bit of basic chemistry and physics. Increasing ice extent down at the southern pole is brought on by more fresh water running off the continent – meltwater- which is lighter and freezes easier at a higher temperature than sea water.
Being lighter it floats on top for a while since it takes a while for it to get thoroughly mixed with sea water – and it freezes at a higher temperature so it freezes easier and faster.
Most or all of the evidence I have seen for a lack of warming is cherry picked evidence put forward either by people who have little understanding of such matters or else who have reasons to take a stand as doubters.
It may seem to be a vastly over simplified conclusion on my part but believe me when I say this you can verify it by reading a few up to date books on human behavior.
People make up their minds what they want to believe based on where they live in the ” us ” versus ”them” political spectrum.
A hard core conservative is very likely to automatically take the position that warming is a fraudulent political ploy by the liberal and environmental political wings of society and thus just automatically assume man made warming is simply not happening.
All the evidence in the world will not change such a persons mind even if he is technically well enough educated to understand the evidence. He will simply cling to the ever smaller statistical chance that the warming trend is a random fluctuation and a natural event..
Conversely it is just about a foregone conclusion that a hard core liberal is never going to consider a lot of things that are obviously true because these things are in his mind associated with the enemy conservative political camp.
I won’t post specific examples of liberal fantasies because this is Ron’s blog and I don’t want to get too far afield and give either camp ammunition with which to attack the credibility of this site.
But I will post just one general example. The Tea Party types may be wrong about more things that I could list in an hour but they are RIGHT about one thing.
Governments right left and center are badly overextended and financial collapse is a real possibility. Getting a liberal to admit this as a stand alone fact is goddamned near impossible.
They won’t because they think that any cutbacks in spending will be concentrated in programs they think are too important to be curtailed.
Liberals who believes taxes are too high ace almost as scare as sixteen year old virgins in bordellos.
(Incidentally I myself believe we cannot afford to cut spending on a lot of liberal programs but I do believe cuts SOMEPLACE are absolutely essential to prevent the financial system from imploding.Some things that could be cut range from sports stadiums to art galleries to agricultural subsidies to highway construction to research on nuclear fusion (Payofff too far down the road) to Nasa to research into more efficient automobiles- the industry is prosperous enough to pay it own way on a world wide basis and the market will take care of THAT problem.
We get next to nothing for the bucks we spend on a federal department of education.We have a totally screwed up patent system that encourages lawyer parasites to keep useful inventions tied up in court for decades on end at enormous expense.
We pay for large numbers of programs in public schools that contribute next to nothing to the economy and that are simply no longer justifiable in terms of dollar and cents in hard times.
Music is wonderful but I must question the wisdom of paying for music instruction when we are failing at math instruction.
Hi OFM,
Do you think it is important for governments to have a balanced budget?
Although you didn’t say that it seemed to be implied.
Let’s say balanced or close to balanced is your goal. Now you think there are some programs worth keeping, let’s say they cost X, we will cut to zero all the stuff that you deem a waste, we will call that Y.
I am convinced that the total tax revenue T is less than X. If that is true, do you still think that taxes are too high?
It seems to me that the cuts that you suggested will reduce the budget deficit by very little.
Also on government budget deficits, why do people, most of whom have home mortgages (or did at some point in their lives) think that the government should not borrow money?
Should people also not be able to borrow money for a home or new car? Should businesses not be able to sell bonds or borrow money from banks?
Why should it be different for the government?
Please explain because I just don’t understand the need for a balanced government budget.
Governments right left and center are badly overextended and financial collapse is a real possibility. Getting a liberal to admit this as a stand alone fact is goddamned near impossible.
They won’t because they think that any cutbacks in spending will be concentrated in programs they think are too important to be curtailed.
Liberals who believes taxes are too high ace almost as scare as sixteen year old virgins in bordellos.
I consider myself left-of-center and my concern is not that government might cut back spending. It’s that conservatives will use that as an excuse to get into office and then keep on spending as usual. The Bush administration is the prime example. “We can fight wars, run up the debt, and no problem, as long as we’re the ones doing the spending.”
I really don’t expect anyone in office to advocate eliminating all government contracts, government jobs, and government transfer payments. The economy would collapse and there’s no politician in office who wants to take on that responsibility. I, on the other hand, think the environment might be better off if spending and consumption were dialed back drastically. It would be painful, but if people couldn’t afford to buy anything anymore, that would force the shift to a smaller world economy and lower consumption.
They simply have no scientific explanation for “The Pause” (the fact there has been no global temperature increase for the past 18 years) or the incredibly fast build-up of Antarctic sea ice (which is now at its highest level in recorded history) that evidently none of these “know-what’s-best-for-you” scientists were able to predict.
They believe the pause is due to the ocean absorbing more heat, which will be released into the atmosphere forthcoming.
As for Antarctic ice, there is this:
Data confirms these three factors:
Antarctica is warming
Antarctic sea ice extent is increasing
Antarctic land Ice mass is decreasing
http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/antarctic-ice-melt
Yes, it may be heat in the ocean being stored and then some may be released. But it could also be other phenomena. Or maybe it’s a combination of things. The climate industry has a long way to go with their climate models. And the political leadership seems to be in Lala land.
Given that oil is getting harder to come by and likely more expensive, we should be planning on a world that consumes less oil, global warming or not.
And as people have less money to spend, consumption is likely to go down anyway (e.g., smaller, more efficient houses replacing big ones).
That leaves natural gas and coal to deal with, plus methane if more of it gets released into the atmosphere.
I think there are good reasons to reduce production of CO2, even if one is skeptical of global warming. So what might be up for discussion is how quickly we reduce CO2 production.
I agree, partially. The effort to control emissions is going to help adaptation to the reduction in fossil fuel production capacity and/or higher prices.
But I don’t agree with your other comment. People have more money to spend (world GDP is increasing). Plus we know that eventually we will run out of natural gas and methane.
I was curious as to how much CO2 we could leave in the atmosphere if we burned the “proved” reserves carried by BP in their yearly worlwide report, and arrived at a peak of about 630 ppm. Right now we are at 400 ppm, therefore the global warming problem is of lesser importance than fossil fuel exhaustion.
Hi Fernando,
If Atmospheric CO2 reaches 630 ppm, that will be a problem, hopefully the reserve estimates in the Statistical review are not correct ( or you calculated incorrectly), I did something similar based on Steve Mohr’s PhD Thesis and leaving out kerogen reserves and got about 500 ppm of atmospheric CO2 (1200 Gt total carbon emissions from fossil fuels, cement production, natural gas flaring, and land use change).
If my estimate is correct and equilibrium climate sensitivity is 3 C per doubling of atmospheric CO2, we might be ok, there are areas such as cloud feedbacks and aerosols that are not well understood so it would be wiser to emit less carbon than 1000 Gt (all sources including land use change).
Boomer II’s basic point that we need to transition to other types of energy is correct, this is true whether climate science is correct or not.
Dennis, they’ll hit 630 ppm unless we have an unrelated catastrophe. But I’m not that worried. If we hit 630 ppm temperature will increase a couple of degrees. But the lack of fossil fuels is going to get a lot of people killed.
Hi Fernando,
There is a range of estimates for a doubling of CO2 from 1.5 to 4.5 C, nobody knows for sure what it will be, but 3 C is the current best guess.
If 3 C is correct and there are no further Earth system changes which lead to further warming, biologists believe there would be significant problems adapting.
Fossil fuels will also be a problem
3 degrees C isnt my best guess (i’m a good guesser). And as far as i can tell 630/400 = 1.6 (i dont want to get too detailed, let’s just say I’m not that concerned over a few tenths of a watt per m2 imbalance).
Hi Fernando,
The comparison is with pre-industrial temperatures and CO2 levels. CO2 was 280 ppm before 1750, so a doubling of CO2 is 280 times 2 or 560 ppm.
You will forgive me if I trust the experts in the field where there is a large range of 1.5 to 4.5 C for equilibrium climate sensitivity with 3 C as the best guess for 560 ppm (this assumes CO2 stabilizes at that level and there is time (300 years or so for climate feedbacks to operate, there is a lot of heat stored in the ocean at present, as the ocean warms less heat is stored in the ocean and there is more atmospheric warming). You may be thinking of the transient climate response which is lower (about 2 C for a doubling of CO2, these are the fast responses which do not have to wait for the slow warming of the ocean.
Predictin’ is hard says Yogi.
Making specific quantitative predictions about things such as climate is tough which is why the error bands are so wide if you actually read the predictions.
But making a general prediction about what will happen when you change things in big way is very easy.Nobody disputes that if the price of oil goes up the cost of living will also go up as well given time.
Nobody disputes that if you spend a little more than you earn on a long term basis you will wind up broke – or that if you save a little on a long term basis you will not go broke barring bad luck.
No engineer in his right mind would argue that increasing the CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere does not lead to the earth absorbing more heat on a net basis since the short wave solar radiation still gets in but the long wave does not get out as easily as formerly.
The net result is that the amount of heat energy stored in the oceans and the soil and the air is increasing slowly but inevitably unless some unknown negative feedback mechanism comes into play to slow the buildup.
The oceans are without any doubt getting warmer. And anybody who understands the abcs of climate and weather must understand that hotter oceans are sooner or later going to make for a hotter climate.
We hear all this shit about how it is not getting any hotter but any body who knows shit from apple butter about statistics can ask a counter question- how long has it been since we had a COLD year?
That generally stumps a doubter pretty quick- if he understands anything at all about statistics- since he is argueing that a growing string of warm years is not proof of warming.
I am only guessing being a layman but my guess is that the next el nino will result in some new upside records.
Yes, the energy imbalance increases. This raises the temperature. When the temperature rises the energy imbalance is balanced. The “official estimates” assume we have an endless fossil fuel deposit. Their “business as usual” case has oil production peaking at 175 million of barrels of oil per day. I looked at their studies and they don’t seem to focus too much on the issue. They are more worried about their climate studies. This is why I decided to work my own figure and arrived at the 630 ppm peak.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27869-extinction-rate-rivals-that-of-dinosaurs-2014-likely-hottest-year-ever
A look at the data.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/12/recent-global-warming-trends-significant-or-paused-or-what/#sthash.UINtppAt.dpuf
Now some folks who happen to be partial to the concept of communism want us to believe that the ongoing climate changes we see today are definitively caused by carbon.
Oh yeah, that reminds me…
“Santa Claus wears a Red Suit, He must be a communist. And a beard and long hair, Must be a pacifist. What’s in that pipe that he’s smoking?”
Arlo Guthrie
The IPCC did lower their lower range estimate of sensitivity in the 5th assessment report. So there is at least some acknowledgment that their earlier estimates were too high.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ipcc-revises-climate-sensitivity/
The actual satellite record looks to be an average .1 degree C per decade.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_November_2014_v5.png
I’d like to hear the argument why ocean acidification isn’t happening. Those who think it is ok to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere don’t seem to have an opinion about dying oceans. Not that I have ever seen anyway.
Ocean pH is increasing. I would be funding geoengineering research to see if we can start experiments to drive CO2 to turn into carbonate rocks. But the powers that be seem to be wearing blinkers. They focus on their unachiavable fake targets, rather than trying to work the problem from several angles. That scientific advisor of Obama’s sure looks a bit goofy.
It has been a very long time since I did mass / energy balances as a ChemE but I would hazard a guess the energy required to create carbonate rocks would be phenomenal. Once you’ve let the CO2 out, there is no easy way to get it sequestered again. In the meantime calcium carbonate shells of marine organisms are being eaten away. I don’t pay attention to Obama’s science advisor. Once politics gets involved everything is warped. I recognize anthropogenic global climate change but believe the sacrifice of getting off fossil fuels will be too great for humanity to make. Most want more. Very few volunteer for less. Many here would disagree but I believe the effort needed would require world wide extreme poverty. A world of PV, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles will never scale up. They need fossil fuels to build and maintain. Costs rise rapidly as thresholds are reached and the easy resources used up; as in when solar PV and wind power account for more then 20% of the grid. I can see from reading comments on this blog faith in technology can be as strong as faith in going to heaven.
Many here would disagree but I believe the effort needed would require world wide extreme poverty.
And I expect that is where parts of the world are headed.
Even in this country, look at somewhere like Detroit.
We’ve eliminated jobs because of automation. We have spread jobs around the world, so countries are rising in income, but places that used to provide middle class jobs are losing out to places where people will work for less.
As machines can do more, fewer people are needed to do work. Their incomes decline. The small percentage of people who are very wealthy can get by with far fewer people in the world laboring to support them.
I imagine you can lose a good chunk of the world and have some enclaves of the very wealthy who can survive pretty nicely.
Economically, large segments of the world are expendable as far as the wealthy are concerned.
Albedo (how reflective things are) has nothing to do with CO2 concentration.
Most of the burning of fossil fuels happens in the Northern Hemisphere, with a peak in winter – people keeping warm.
n.b. about 90% of the population lives in the Northern Hemisphere.
http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/563-pop-by-lat-and-pop-by-long
And since most of the land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere,
the summertime plant uptake there is also visible (as the valleys) in the Keeling Curve.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#SKC
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#maunaloa
If you can read Fortran, the climate models are on the net – open source.
There are two here:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/
Us mere peons have to download frozen versions as tarballs.
Yes – a bit of complexity: time of day varying by season, 8 types of vegetation (tundra, grassland, shrub, trees, deciduous, evergreen, rainforest, cropland), CO2, local nitrogen, temperature, pressure, all kinds of plant physiological constants, hydrology, plant respiration – a few of the things I saw in a brief tour.
Other model links at realclimate.org
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#GCM_code
One can argue albedo has an impact on atmospheric CO2 concentration. I worked out the logic and wrote it using my neuron calculator.
Untimely release:
http://headlines.ransquawk.com/headlines/eagle-ford-oil-production-for-january-seen-up-30-000bpd-according-to-eia-projection-08-12-2014
Bakken projection up 28K, Permian up 46K.
If there was ever a day for EIA not to hype projections of more supply it would be today at $63ish. BTW, Lynn Helms quoted -$16 for Oct Bakken sweet (58.xx that day) vs WTI spread. That means, yes sportsfans, today’s price is $47.
But hey, shale breakeven will be $20 soon, maybe by the end of the day if the designated analyst can get an Uber ride to the microphones.
Sorry, but from a geopolitical standpoint the powers that be need low oil prices. It will boost the world economy, put the Russians in a bind, throw a wrench in the Venezuela’s dictatorship’s plans, make Islamic State sales less profitable, etc.
Fernando is right.
I do not for a minute believe that various shadowy figures in banking and industry and government have worked together to bring about the current low oil price but I do believe that just about everybody in a position of power in banking and government and industry – with the sole exception of those individuals and companies that are dependent on the oil industry- is as happy as a pig in shit that oil prices crashed.
This will give nearly all of them an opportunity to pursue business as usual a little longer on the usual basis rather than dealing with the world economy sinking back into contraction again- hopefully not anyway. Even this big shot of adrenalin may not be enough to get the economy up and on its feet again.
And for what it is worth- I don’t think these current low prices will last very long at all unless the economy is a lot sicker than it looks to me. But I am not an economist and not qualified to judge. Maybe the economy is a dead man walking even with the price of oil as low as it is.
This will give nearly all of them an opportunity to pursue business as usual a little longer on the usual basis rather than dealing with the world economy sinking back into contraction again- hopefully not anyway. Even this big shot of adrenalin may not be enough to get the economy up and on its feet again.
This makes sense. There have been ample opportunities to make oil more expensive, but relatively few in recent years to make it cheaper.
And if the goal has been to keep prices high, then there shouldn’t have been a rush to frack in communities where fracking hasn’t been welcome.
Maybe the economy is shale based. That changes the flavor of the slurpee, yes?
5 years ago I could fill up a trolley cart in the grocery store with food staples for $100. Today I can barely fill 2 plastic bags with $100. Oil can go all the way to $10 and I will still not be able to buy with $100 what I bought 5 years ago. So all that talk about “shot in the arm for economy” because of imaginary $100 a month of savings in the pockets due to oil crash is just distraction for the masses as far as my home grocery budget is concern 🙂
It will take the current low price of oil a long time to filter thru the agricultural and food processing and distribution portions of the economy and even then the impact on food prices at retail will not be very large and most likely lost in the noise . A lot of other factors are more important in determining retail grocery prices.
But Joe Sixpack who foolishly locked himself into buying fifty more bucks a weeks worth of gasoline in order to drive his truck to work has gotten a temporary reprieve to the tune of twenty five or thirty bucks- enough to make a difference to him.
When I was composing my comment I was thinking about bankers and bureaucrats and corporate executives.
A trucking company that is going broke putting four hundred bucks a day in fuel in each truck may be highly profitable when the same amount of diesel costs only two hundred fifty bucks.
The airlines which as a rule are perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy are in tall cotton right now too.
IF it were to last the current low price of oil would have the same effect as an honest politician who would campaign no the slogan ”Vote for me and things won’t be quite as bad as they will if my opponent wins.”
decent Kunstler podcast interview with Art Berman. Touches on many of the subjects cover here. Probably nothing new to most, but interesting perhaps to hear it instead of reading it.
http://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-260-petroleum-geologist-art-berman-on-shale-oil-and-gas/
Closing price just over $63. Trading resumes in a few hours. I do believe it got under $63 briefly. That would be $46.xx for Bakken sweet. trala trala
WTI $62.96 now. Brent $66.12.
If the Fed buys some of that Goldman securitized and packaged HY paper, we will have total proof that you don’t have to earn a profit. Just get the oil.
Oh hell, I thought this was from a generic ZH wacko. It’s from Gail.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/jobs-in-shale-vs-non-shale-states-from-zero-hedge.jpg
Most jobs in the recovery are in shale states. Aka from shale activity. More ammo for that appealing category of TBTF.
Odd how that makes it more credible. ZH does have some wackos.
But it looks like non-shale states are recovering much faster now and that the shale states are leveling off.
Except that she left out New Mexico and Kansas. And Ohio.
THE EXTINCTION CRISIS
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiversity/extinction_crisis/
“It’s frightening but true: Our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals — the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half-billion years. We’re currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.”
Then again, perhaps something will come along and speed up the process. 🙂
RUSSIAN SCIENTIST SPIES MOUNTAIN-SIZED ASTEROID HEADING OUR WAY
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/russian-scientist-spies-mountain-sized-asteroid-heading-way-170022867.html
“In a video posted online Sunday, astrophysicist Vladimir Lipunov says the newly discovered asteroid could collide with Earth during its three-year orbital cycle. A giant meteor exploded over a Russian city in 2013.”
Maybe it will hit in northwest NoDak and produce the mother of all frack events.
http://headlines.ransquawk.com/headlines/saudi-arabia-to-supply-full-contractual-volumes-of-crude-to-asia-buyers-in-january-and-steady-vs-december-according-to-sources-09-12-2014
BTW for those who still believe in money, the Shanghai Composite index has now risen 25%, in one month. You can make these things happen when you have your own central bank. Look what the Fed accomplished printing about 4.1 trillion.
$62.55 in Singapore, and falling. Dollar up pretty strong against the 3 majors.
Watcher, Hate to say it but maybe you were (are) right.
KEEP THE SHALE BOOM ROLLIN’ WITH A CONGRESSIONAL KEEP ENERGY ACT
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/miarticle.htm?id=10895#.VIcZQckrlnc
The thousands of small and mid-sized companies in the hydrocarbon shale fields nearly single-handedly kept the Great Recession from becoming a second Great Depression. The data shows that if it were not for the $300 billion or so added annually to the U.S. GDP from the oil & gas sector, along with more than two million new jobs, the nation would have had near zero or negative growth over the past six years.
Didn’t mean to be Anonymous.
At such a moment it is dignified and gracious to say something like “I’d like to thank my grad students who labored tirelessly into the night producing the data that led our project [notice the modest OUR] to this conclusion”.
But since nobody gives points for that, I’m gonna go with
hahahahahahahahaha
BTW apparently that’s from Forbes. That provides a ton of political cover for GOP critters wanting to be pure free market types. As for the Dems, the legislation will be drafted by a bipartisan array of Senate offices — or rather, a bipartisan array of K Street lobbyists.
Hi everyone. Ed Morse, head of commodities research at Citigroup Inc., said that:
“U.S. shale oil production will keep growing because the rate of decline from wells has been overstated”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-09/oil-drops-as-deeper-opec-discounts-signal-fight-for-market-share.html
Dennis, Mike, Ron, what do you think of it? is it for real?
Dean, thank you for asking…me. Production from shale wells can be tracked very meticulously thru State regulatory agencies and several very good data research banks. Those horrific decline rates, sometimes upwards of 75% or more in the first 18 months of production, in the Eagle Ford anyway, are very real, sir.
One of the many reasons I have so little regard for the shale oil industry, as an oilman myself, is that it simply cannot tell the truth. From the beginning it misled the American public about its sustainability and hubbub about “energy independence.” Shale oil production was never anything but a very high cost, low return bubble in domestic oil production. It worked for awhile for one reason, and one reason only…high oil prices.
Apparently these shale guys, and the people that fund them, are not going to give up the ghost very easily and will continue to try and bullshit America right up to the very end.
Thanks for the quick reply!
Quote of the day from Mike:
One of the many reasons I have so little regard for the shale oil industry, as an oilman myself, is that it simply cannot tell the truth. From the beginning it misled the American public about its sustainability and hubbub about “energy independence.” Shale oil production was never anything but a very high cost, low return bubble in domestic oil production. It worked for awhile for one reason, and one reason only…high oil prices.
It’s the follow up of the newly classic:
“So how much oil do you think will come out of the Bakken.”
“Well, I don’t want to make any predictions on that because in 2009 I didn’t think it would be much at all.”
“So you are humbled.”
“Only a little. If the price of oil stayed what it was in 2009, I would be highly paid now as a brilliant analyst.”
Hi Dean,
The Bakken average well declines by about 70% from month 2 (peak month because month 1 averages 15 or 16 days of output) to month 19. Chart for the average North Dakota Bakken/Three Forks well from 2008 to 2013 based on NDIC data gathered by Enno Peters.
Thanks! great work
Your welcome. And a big thanks to Enno Peters for sharing the well data from the NDIC that he put into an easily usable spreadsheet.
Are the barrels produced total liquid or is it oil? (I’m thinking the discussion about watercut a couple of posts ago)
rgds
WP
Barrels reported by the North Dakota Industrial Commission are crude + condensate and that is what we use here unless otherwise stated.
Your question about water cut in the context of total liquids? Total liquids does not include water. Total liquids are hydrocarbons only.
great – thanks!
WP
The first wells (2008y) was the starting flow rate less than now. Therefore, this dynamic reduction of the flow rate. Transfer it to last well, not quite right.
HI MIKE
Most people understand that it takes a while to stop a ship or a freight train and reverse direction.
Given that you ARE an oil man albeit not a tight oil man – How long do you estimate it will take if prices remain around sixty bucks to start seeing the number of COMPLETED tight oil wells start dropping noticeably ?
Right now if I remember correctly somewhere in the neighborhood of from two hundred to four hundred tight oil wells are completed every month in this country depending on just how the well is classified.
When will the completions start dropping off noticeably?
I guess this is about the same thing as asking how far ahead drillers commit to spending money in part.
Any money already spent to lease a rig probably means the rig is going to run.
And seven or eight million sunk into well already means it is probably going to be completed pretty soon even if the price of oil stays down.
See, this is what is not so clear.
It requires an entire train of xx flat rail cars to hold enough sand to frack just 1 well. It doesn’t really matter if a driller places an order for a trainload. It is not the placing of orders that matters.
It is the confidence of the shipper that he’s gonna get paid some several weeks after he . . . not ships, delivers. Sand would be the big difference from conventional. It travels hundreds of miles. The calendar moves, and all the labor to mine the sand and load it has to be prepaid.
It’s all about confidence. If the sand guy doesn’t want to front that labor money because of doubts, it all stops then. It’s not the driller’s forward budget that would decide things. It’s terror on the part of the sand guy.
Orrrr he can demand payment in advance. That will be interesting.
Mr. Mac, I tried to think like a shale operator a couple of evenings ago and flat could not do it. It made my head hurt so bad I had to go and make myself a drink.
Oil prices must already be causing great pain the N. Dakota. Rig counts I don’t think have moved much here in Texas yet because of dedicated, 2014 budgets. If the bigger shale companies have got it in the cookie jar, they will spend it. Rig contracts will mature at different times for different operators. Hedging helps, but not like most people think; it costs money to hedge, volumes of oil must be guaranteed ( hard to do with 75% decline rates ) and I think most the shale guys, in their infinite wisdom, used collared hedging anyway, which moves the floor on the price of oil downward, with downward prices. I don’t understand hedging too well; its all I can do to hedge against my own dumb mistakes.
Right now I think everyone, (including me) is shell shocked about oil prices and hanging on to hope. In 2 months, if prices have not changed, when 2015 budgets are being made, that’s when the rigs will start getting stacked, I fear. And I have already heard some horror stories. If prices stay at 65 dollars, I think this time next year the shale oil industry is going be looking painfully like the shale gas industry. I wish I had a better answer for you; I hate speculating.
By the way, I do not want the shale industry to fail. Wringing oil out of dense shale is a testimony to American know how and my industry. We are eventually going to need every ounce of oil those guys can get us. I just would like for them to tell the truth about our hydrocarbon future. Americans already mistrust the oil industry, all of the shale oil industry’s BS just makes it worse.
Watcher, a typical shale well might use 10 million pounds of frac sand. That’s 5000 tons at about 250 dollars a ton, delivered to the location. That represents a little over 15% of total well costs. Again, shale oil development is a big boy’s game and the big boys pay things up front, most of the time. Rig contracts, for instance, require it, as do frac’ing services. The oil service industry has been thru bad times before; they know how to protect themselves, I assure you. This is not our first rodeo. Money guys funding well manufacturing are not going to stand for unpaid bills and liens being filed on their “collateral.”
Mike
That’s good data re pay in advance.
However. This means the lenders have control rather than the suppliers. The cash has to be in the driller’s hand before he can place an order for sand and wire the money.
I had thought the response was going to be something like: look, the suppliers want to keep the party going, too. They aren’t going to play hardball when they have payrolls to meet.
But that’s not the scenario if prepay is the norm. The scenario now is the lenders say . . . where else can I loan this money. Hell, I can get 3% guaranteed from the US T for 30 year paper vs 5.5% mega risky from these soon-to-be deadbeats. I think I’ll just close the spigot and wait for prices. I got no payrolls to meet.
Also, Mike, you touched on a big deal. Distrust of the oil industry. How does it impact a subsidy?
I think K Street can overwhelm any hand waving green Democrats from New England who have Sierra Club donations to beg for. They can do that by scaring the Dem senator from NoDak, scaring the Dem Senator from Colorado (that will be interesting, given the other Dem Senator was just booted). Ohio’s Dem Senator is not up til 2018, but he has shown no interest in retiring so he’ll have his finger in the wind. The interesting situation will be in shale drilled Pennsylvania, with a weak GOP incumbent Senator up for re-election in 2016 and a strong Dem incumbent not up until 2018.
Point being, distrust of the industry plays differently in the two parties. The Democrats will want to make green noises and the GOP will demand some sort of pure capitalism — as their default kneejerks.
This gets attacked by that GDP contribution evidence and the fact some Dem senators are in these shale states and have to fill their campaign coffers.
Thanks Mike.
”When 2015 budgets are being made” has a strong whiff of coon to this old coon dog. If the 2015 budgets were not made at least six months ago and commitments made then to spend the money in ‘ 15 then the slowdown is going to look like freeway crash.
Now I am supposing that a guy working conventional oil probably IS planning his budget at least a year or two ahead. So the worst and most of the slowdown will be in unconventional oil.
Mike, aren’t the decline rates in your wells looking hyperbolic? If they are hyperbolic (as they should be) then the decline rate will decrease. I suspect in some areas they’ll have really high gas to oil ratios. Maybe you need to swap tubing to a smaller size, or put in a velocity string. You know, something to keep them flowing nicely.
Gracias, Fernando, para I don’t operate any stinking shale wells myself. Yuk! I get the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. Most of the decline curves appear more exponential to me; the better areas in the EF have very high GOR, yes. They put those shale wells on rod lift at the first sign of weakness.
Watcher, keep at it, man. I don’t know who controls the purse strings anymore. Everybody hates the oil business, its the politically correct way to be.
Adios.
The curve shown by Dennis Coyne appears to be hyperbolic. I like to have a full set of data before I start guessing, but that seems to be a type curve. So, we can conclude it IS hyperbolic. The system physics tells us it ought to be hyperbolic. That type curve shown by Coyne has about 100 thousand barrels to be produced….more or less. What do they do with the gas they produce from these wells in the Bakken?
Hi Fernando,
The curve for the Bakken/Three forks is straight average well data from the NDIC for the first 60 months, then a hyperbolic fit to 84 months and then exponential decline at 10% from month 85 to abandonment at 277 months at 7 b/d. EUR is 335 kb. Chart below with vertical axis in barrels per day and horizontal axis is month from first output. Average well over the Jan 2008 to August 2014 period for North Dakota Bakken/Three forks.
Note that a more conservative abandonment level such as 10 b/d (instead of 7 b/d) would occur at 237 months (roughly 20 years) and the EUR would be somewhat lower, about 325 kb rather than 335 kb.
On the gas side, we have a Citi Vs. Citi debate:
It’s interesting to look at some regional declines in US oil and gas production, e.g., marketed Louisiana natural gas production (the EIA doesn’t have dry processed data by state).
According to the EIA, the observed simple percentage decline in Louisiana’s annual natural gas production from 2012 to 2013 was 20%. This would be the net change in production, after new wells were added. The gross decline rate (from existing wells in 2012) would be even higher. This puts a recent Citi Research estimate in perspective.
Citi Research estimates that the gross underlying decline rate for overall US natural gas production is about 24%/year. This would be the simple percentage change in annual production if no new sources of gas were put on line in the US. Based on the Citi report, the US has to replace 100% of current natural gas production in about four years, just to maintain current dry processed gas production for four years. In round numbers, this requires the industry to add the approximate productive equivalent of the current gas production from the Marcellus Play every year, year after year, in order to maintain current gas production.
Hi Dean,
The optimistic analysts may not expect new well EUR to decrease in the near future.
Along those lines, I made my average well profile somewhat more conservative with exponential decline after 68 months at a 15% annual rate, EUR is 299 kb.
Based on comments by Mike and Manbearpig well cost was reduced by 10%.
New wells added decrease from 200/month in Oct 2014 by 10 wells each month reaching 120 new wells per month in June 2015.
So far there has been no evidence of reduced new well EUR so EUR decrease is assumed to begin in June 2016 (it was 2 years earlier in recent models), which is probably optimistic (we do not know in advance when this will begin).
Two oil price scenarios are used, a low price scenario with real oil prices fixed at $67/b in 2014$ (quite pessimistic in my opinion) until 2040 and a medium price scenario with prices at $67/b until 2015 and then rising at a 1.2% annual rate reaching $80/b in 2014$ in 2030 (still conservative, in my opinion.)
The low price ERR (ERRlp) is 4 Gb to Dec 2040 and the medium price ERR (ERRmp) is 8 Gb to Dec 2040. Note that recent proven reserve data from North Dakota suggests about 5 Gb of proved reserves from the Bakken/Three Forks plus 1 Gb of oil produced so far so that we would expect a minimum of 6 Gb of ERR if no more reserves are added in the future. If oil prices remain low long term then some of the proved reserves(2Gb) will move to the contingent resource category from the proved reserves category due to low oil prices. Chart below.
Nice work. Try changing the decline rates to 10 % per year. But be conservative about the abandonment rate.
Hi Fernando,
Thanks!
I can change the exponential decline to 10% (I use actual data out to 48 months, then a hyperbolic fit to the data until the monthly decline rate is equivalent to a 15% annual decline rate (or I can use 10% as you suggest) and then exponential decline (where the monthly decline rate remains constant) up to abandonment.
To be clear on abandonment rate, this is the monthly output at which the well would be plugged and abandoned. (Correct me if I have misunderstood, please.) In the past, Mike has suggested 7 barrels per day might make sense for an abandonment rate for LTO wells, by “conservative” do you mean something higher like 8 or 9 barrels per day?
Dennis, your approach is boiler plate. when I suggested a bit higher abandonment I was thinking of 10, but that’s somewhat arbitrary. I have a hunch the exponential decline should stabilize between 10 and 15 %. If you use 10 % with a low abandonment you may get one boundary (P20?), at 15 % with a high abandonment it may be the other boundary (P80?). But I haven’t seen the gas production figures and prices. I have a hunch the industry works a bit cowboy in the Bakken. What do they do with the gas production? (Warning: I’m in Europe and my consulting was focused on heavy oil EOR in the last three years, so I haven’t kept track of the Bakken operating practices).
Fernando, its very cowboy, yes; its all about well manufacturing and booking reserves to keep the finance guys from taking long walks off short high-rise roofs. As I said, they put wells on rod lift as soon as they get a little sluggish; at that point managing bubble point and GOR is not SOP. I don’t know what portion of the Bakken is flared, but its a lot. They’re trying to rain that in with regulations. A few smart guys are even re-injecting gas, but not many. If they were real smart they wouldn’t be drilling that stuff for 40% IRR’s. Sorry, now 20% IRR’s.
Those are type curves, IMO, based on hope. Somebody smarter than me is going to have to explain to me how a shale well is going to produce <15 BOPD for 20 years; I don't believe it. Dennis at 40 dollar WH prices 8 BOPD is the economic limit using 15 dollars per barrel LOE. Who knows how much produced water those puppies will make, and require disposal, when they get old, if they get old. Eight is a good limit.
Years ago there use to be a saying…if you don't have an oil well, get one! I think folks will be able to buy shale wells on Ebay pretty soon.
Mike
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the input. Let’s say the refinery gate price is the Brent price (which I believe is pretty close for east coast refineries (on the Gulf coast the LLS is probably closer to the refinery gate price, I may be wrong). So at $65/b for Brent and $12/b transport cost, I get a wellhead price of about $53/b, taxes and royalties would be about $15/b and when natural gas sales are used to offset some of the LOE I get about $8/b ($11/b minus $3/b net income from natural gas sales), I think you have suggested about $3/b for water disposal so if we add that in we get $53/b minus $26/b in various costs for a net of
$27/b. If we assume the well costs $8 million (reduced from $9 million due to the bust) at these oil prices the simple payback is at 300 kb.
It is not clear that many wells will be drilled if these low prices continue because there is not much money to be made, or I may have miscalculated.
Once the well has been drilled the decision to abandon the well seems like it would be based mostly on OPEX (about $8/b), water disposal ($3/b), wellhead price, and royalties and taxes. So at $50/b at the wellhead, royalties and taxes would be about $15/b, plus $11/b in other costs so the net would be $24/b.
I don’t understand how the 8 b/d economic limit is determined, I assume the LOE must increase as output decreases. I think of the economic limit as the point where producing the oil makes no money so that revenues are equal to cost. So at a well head price of $40/b, after royalties and taxes we would have about $28/b, so this would imply that at 8 b/d the total cost of operating a well (including water disposal, overhead, and a long list of stuff I don’t know about) would be $28/b?
How low can you go on conventional wells at today’s prices before abandonment, for a well with an “average water cut” and that is in most ways and average well (I realize that in the real world there is no average well.)?
Hi Mike,
So would 16 b/d for the low end and 8 b/d for the high end make sense for abandonment?
On the “less than 15 b/d for 20 years”, the Bakken profile I get based on the first 60 months of data would reach 15/b/d after 15.5 years and if it was abandoned at 8 b/d it would produce for 6 years at between 15 and 8 b/d and be abandoned at 21.5 years with an EUR of 330 kb.
I think the economic limit in EUR work might be based on 8 BOEPD x 40.00 net WH price (Bakken), – royalty (22.5%) – taxes production and ad valorem taxes (7.5%) -15.00 LOE/BOE, minimum, = 13 dollars a barrel, net. 8 BOPD makes 3,200 bucks a month. I am suggesting that incremental lift costs at year 12 will be 15 dollars because of increased water disposal, that is just a wild guess.
So, hypothetically, Dennis is operating a Bakken well that makes him 3100 dollars a month net income. You bought the well from Shale R Us, cheap, but you don’t have the 150-200K tucked away to plug the well and clean up the mess to Rancher Rick’s complete satisfaction (and he wants, not very nicely, his land restored to its original state). At some point your down hole pump wears out, or rods part, or you wear a hole in the production tubing and it is going to take 70K to fix the well and put it back on line.
You can see how ugly it gets trying to operate deep wells, on rod lift, making a lot of water, in the face of high abandonment costs, at 40 dollar net oil. Dennis, I’ll bet, wants no part of that.
Mike neither.
Thanks Mike.
That’s why I ask questions, I am assuming someone like you (who knows what they are doing), bought the well at a point where it made economic sense to do so. The costs to plug the well have been socked away and at the end of the well’s life, I can see that if a piece of equipment breaks down (which undoubtedly happens way more than I realize), the well will be abandoned, but if not, I would think the oil will be lifted as long as it is profitable to do so, the question comes down to, do I want the $3100/ month or not, now if I own 10 of these wells, that’s $372,000 per year, I could get by on that. I don’t know squat about producing oil so it ain’t gonna happen.
At some point I bet even Mike may buy some of the stinkinshale wells if they were cheap enough, but based on comments so far, probably not. Seems they might have to pay Mike to take those old wells.
What do you think of a scenario with oil prices rising from Jan 2015 to Dec 2030 at a 3.7% annual rate of increase (real price in 2014$) reaching $118/b by Dec 2030 and starting at $67/b in 2015? Price get back to $100/b in 2026 and are at $85/b in 2021. Does that seem reasonable if World oil output peaks by 2018 (at the latest)?
For conventional wells, quite low. But it depends on depth, lifting costs (function of depth), etc. That being said, many wells pumping 150 bwpd are still economic.
Ahh messed up. I meant less than 5 bopd and greater than 150 bwpd is still economic in a conventional waterflood under most conditions.
Thanks for this, MBP; I am counting on you and Doug, and Ron, and Toolpush and Dennis and a couple of others to keep it real around here. I am trying to hang as long as I can but I am thinking I might have to go in the Porta Potty cleaning business pretty quick.
Before I do I am working on a graph of oil prices vs. consumed scotch. Its beginning to look like oil prices vs. the USD.
I was on a job once in the ME, we had some slack time, I was telling a very smart, young KSA engineer, an A&M grad, in fact, that I could make money with 2% OWR’s. He was clearly puzzled, and questioned me relentlessly about how to move 2000 BTFPD and what to do with it when I moved it. He had a hard time with the concept.
Its complicated the oil business…folks that did not pay any attention to it whatsoever 5 years ago, who are now peak oil experts, can seem to only relate to shale oil and all the ramifications therewith. Pity, that.
Mike
Hi Fernando,
I really am not in the industry so my information has been gleaned by reading Rune Likvern’s work and others such as Rockman over at peakoil.com and the industry guys such as Mike and ManBearpig along with what I have learned from Doug Leighton and Ron Patterson, so I am no expert by any means.
My understanding is that about 20% of output on a barrels of oil equivalent basis is natural gas. There is not enough pipeline and natural gas processing capacity near North Dakota to get all the natural gas produced to market so a fair amount of the associated gas is flared (I do not know what percentage).
Rune Likvern has estimated a net income of about $3/b from natural gas sales for each barrel of oil produced. I did a quick check on this by looking at Continental’s 2013 10k and it seemed a reasonable estimate (if Continental is representative of the industry in general in North Dakota).
Thanks for your help, eventually I may get this in the ball park.
One more question, so “low abandonment” might be 5 b/d and “high abandonment” 10 b/d?
Low estimate- 15% decline and 10 b/d abandonment, P80
High estimate -10% decline and 5 b/d abandonment, P20
This seems like an excellent approach.
Based on Mike’s comments I will use 8 b/d for a high case with 10% exponential decline and 13 b/d and 15% exponential decline for a high case.
What do people think about the “medium oil price scenario” I used, too low, high, or about right?
I changed prices to ha higher scenario that reaches almost the AEO reference scenario price by 2030,prices start at $67/b in 2015 and rise at a 3,66% annual rate though Dec 2030. Well cost is assumed to be $8 million and a low EUR with 15% exponential annual decline rate starting in year 5 and wells abandoned at 13 b/d, EUR is 310 kb in 2014 and high EUR with 10% exponential annual decline rate starting in year 9 with wells abandoned at 8 b/d with EUR=368kb in 2014.
Not that big a difference in ERR with low case being 8.3 Gb and high case 9.5 Gb. Due to the higher prices I assumed wells are added at 140 new wells per month starting in April 2015, in the previous scenario 120 new wells per month were added. In all recent scenarios (this and the previous case) no more than 37500 wells are added, though in the previous low and medium price cases the well totals were much smaller, in this higher price scenario 37500 wells total have been completed by 2035. By Jan 2030 in the low EUR case 12,000 of 32,000 wells have been abandoned leaving about 20,000 producing wells. Chart below.
Whoops, wrong chart. Ignore chart above, I clicked on the wrong icon.
Is it possible to dine on Dodo bird? No, there they were gone. You have no idea what you could have had for dinner had somebody just saved a few dodo eggs.
The Passenger pigeon? No. Gone.
What a treat it would be to have some Passenger squab, but no. Hunters forgot to keep count.
A trip to the moon on gossamer wings, don’t it make you want to go home?
Oil destroyed the whaling industry, absolutely gave it a knockout punch. Kerosene to light lamps was a fraction of the cost of whale oil. Then Edison came up with a light bulb and kerosene sales plummeted. Then next it was Henry and the Ford Model T saved the oil industry and the whales both. The days of manufacturing horse drawn wagons came to an end. The industry was hammered by the ice.
Oil saved the whales, not mankind. Had oil not been discovered and used for the same purpose, to light lamps, whales would still have to use some evasive techniques and exploding harpoons work well. Harpoon covers whale.
There is some redemption there for oil, it ain’t all bad.
Killing the whales off indirectly thru ocean acidification is much of a redemption.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/business/energy-environment/oil-falls-to-5-year-low-and-companies-start-to-retrench-.html?_r=0
Sometimes the Old Grey Lady just prints the same old pablum and sometimes she goes into little depth and actually seems to pay a reporter to do a little research.
This article has some sobering figures in it culled from industry sources in regard to oil industry layoffs happening now and projected spending cuts for the year coming up.
It also points out that projects nearing completion are going to come into production within the next year anyway and that some majors will thus have rising production even as the cut expenses- at least for the next year or so.
My own wild ass guess ( really just an average of the guesses of other people who I happen to respect ) that oil is going to stay down for a year or so is confirmed in this article- this being the case because the oil industry is so big that changing directions is like changing directions with a huge ship- time consuming.
The author comes up with a picture of as many as about a third of the drilling rigs currently operating being mothballed within a year or so. I guess it is going to take that long to work thru the contracts already signed and finish up wells that have so much money sunk into them already that it it is prudent to finish these particular wells.If you ain’t busted and you have leased a rig already you are still going to have to pay for it and you might as well run it.
But if thirty percent of the rig inventory is sitting idle – then rig prices and rental rates are going to sink like a stone. The Chinese will probably buy up a bunch of them for a song and put them to work again pretty soon – within a few years at most.
The sharpest business men understand that the time to buy is when everybody is trying to give away assets. I got my backhoe for half what it would have been worth had the construction market held up rather than crashing a few years back.. If I had waited six more months I would have gotten it even cheaper and it would not have seen any use for that six months.I could sell it now even though the construction industry locally is still in the doldrums for what I paid for it after using it quite a bit.
“The sharpest business men understand that the time to buy is when everybody is trying to give away assets. ”
Except that . . . ya notice only the Fed bought those Mortgage Backed Securities, when all the banks were trying to get rid of them? That’s why mark to market was abrogated. There were no buyers.
Does this mean only the Fed were sharp business men? Or does it mean only the Fed could print money?
The sharpest business men also realize that having a super sized stooge big brother operated by their alumni is good insurance. 😉
I would not question the brains and acumen of the people running the fed to any great extent except to the point that I take just about all conventional businessmen and economists for fools (considering their opportunities to learn better) given that just about all of them believe in eternal growth the same way my dear old departed Momma and my soon to be departed dear old Daddy believe in Heaven.
I do strenously question where their loyalties lie given the revolving door nature of the banking industry and our regulatory system.
If the issue comes down to saving their buddies versus the welfare of the public their buddies comes first.
Now I am not TOTALLY cynical about this. If it comes down to EITHER THEIR BUDDIES OR THE GENERAL ECONOMY SURVIVING I hope to sky daddy that they will come down on the side of the overall economy.
They will after all have a strong incentive to do so given that if there is a general economic collapse the public will insist on seeing some bankers jailed. The public can only be pushed so far.
So far as I am concerned the biggest miscarriage of criminal justice in my adult lifetime in this country is the failure of the justice department to lock up any bankers.
But they slipped thru the hands of the police for the very simple reason that their friends run the country from the White House and Congress and they own enough politicians on both sides of the aisle to get away with their thievery – SO FAR.
But there are plenty of drawings of guillotines on the internet and if the day ever comes when we are lopping of bankers heads I will build one myself and donate it to a peoples court. JUST KIDDING of course.
There is no doubt some computer program will flag a remark such as this one within a few seconds of it being posted and that I am probably already on some sort of preliminary watch list. Suspected of having a big mouth only so far but if anything in the line of terrorism or heavy duty civil disobedience ever happens in MY neighborhood then I will probably be moved from a preliminary list to a higher list of people that are more likely to be actively investigated.
The biggest reason I don’t get involved in protests of various sorts these days is that I am old and fat and near enough broke that it would be way too much hassle. Besides that there is nobody else willing to look after Daddy.
Back in my younger days the protests were a good place to be to meet people and especially liberated girls and just generally have a good time while thumbing my nose at the established authorities which seemed like a very good thing to do at the time.Its still a good thing – sometimes.
“The sharpest business men also realize that having a super sized stooge big brother operated by their alumni is good insurance.”
That’s somewhat the point. There is no heaven unless there is hell. If you deny the world the ability to lose money, then there can be no capitalism.
Verbal gobbledygook. Oil scarcity is ripping the shrouds of obfuscation off just about anything, because you can’t print oil. There is no fix for it. That which is inevitable is inevitable.
WARMER PACIFIC OCEAN COULD RELEASE MILLIONS OF TONS OF SEAFLOOR METHANE
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141209101257.htm
“Water off Washington’s coast is warming a third of a mile down, where seafloor methane shifts from a frozen solid to a gas. Calculations suggest ocean warming is already releasing significant methane offshore of Alaska to Northern California.”
“Still unknown is where any released methane gas would end up. It could be consumed by bacteria in the seafloor sediment or in the water, where it could cause seawater in that area to become more acidic and oxygen-deprived. Some methane might also rise to the surface, where it would release into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, compounding the effects of climate change.”
Those bacteria!! They’ll mutate to function at high temps!!
I wouldn’t mind seeing methane concentration numbers in the water column. Calculations are only good enough to make me budget a vessel to go drop a couple of tethered buoys and catch water samples. This could be like the Russian lady’s famous methane burps in the Laptev.
The dollar is being shorted across the board this morning. Someone somewhere has figured it out. Oil up 60 pennies.
http://headlines.ransquawk.com/headlines/eia-cuts-forecast-for-2015-world-oil-demand-growth-by-240-000bpd-now-sees-0-88mln-bpd-a-year-on-year-increase-09-12-2014
The EIA for the 2nd day running is backstabbing the shale industry with their press releases. A reduction in demand projected.
That link btw has a Bank of American projection down to $50/b.
Little heads up. Greece has hit the radar screen again. Their election events were to be early next year but there seems to have been acceleration, which one must suspect derives from Russia routing nat gas through Turkey (and then west to Greece to distribute northward). Greece has suddenly become important and they HATE the EU.
Syriza, the bomb throwing opposition, leads New Democracy by 6% in latest polls. If elected, they WILL default. EU oil issues will get much, much worse.
Actually I wonder why Portugal isn’t hitting the radar big time lately. Their local ‘Dow Jones’-equivalent isn’t doing very well.
They won’t leave the EU. That’s the difference. Greece would be a big precedent and worsen EU consumption.
Portugal & Ireland are “playing” a role of good aka improved students in order to coax the “bad” student performance. Once a “bad” student drop the class (leave EU) you have to find another “bad” student in the line. 🙂
EU is not immune to that meme “if there were not just THOSE people, everything will be a milk and honey” 🙂
That was floated in 2011. “If those scum in Greece would leave the EU, the Euro would be stronger and we would not have to carry them anymore.”
Merkel looked it over and said nope, if they leave it sets a precedent. Now, they owe a few hundred billion Euros to the Troika and would default the day they leave. And then the people who agreed to lend that money has to answer to someone.
Besides which, a stronger Euro is not all that desirable when you are desperate to export stuff.
It appears as if C+C is rising at the rate of 350,000 bpd/yr worldwide. With 80 million additional people being added each year that is about 0.2 gallons of crude per day for those people. That is compared to the current 0.6 gallons per day per person now in effect worldwide. Sounds like oil has gone over peak already and is descending, when one just takes into account the increasing population. If one takes falling quality or EROEI into account, oil energy is descending even faster.
The gallons don’t mean much if they don’t provide enough end use energy per person. Since another billion people are supposed to reach a relatively high energy life style in the next twenty years, the situation is well over the edge already.
Thank goodness we have some leeway in energy conservation and efficiency, otherwise the world would hit the petroleum energy wall hard and soon.
Of course everyone here knows the picture is not even that rosy, as the shale plays plateau and fall in the near future. Even moving to the latest available engine/efficiency technology starting now will only dent the problem as it will take a minimum of 1o years to replace half the vehicles on the road.
How many more years to this party before the fan starts to really stink?
The world will hit the petroleum wall hard and soon. (We should not only be talking about oil. Natural gas decline/depletion will be the bigger surprise, I believe.) But the world is a big place. All powers will try to make anyone other than themselves hit walls first. That means other countries but also ones own lower middle class.
The descent of the middle class is an ongoing project in the US.
A cynic might argue that because the middle class consumes a higher proportion of its income, that lower income for all but the wealthy is good for the environment. We should lower corporate taxes to the income tax rate (or eliminate them all together so there is not double taxation of profits), and institute a flat tax so the wealthy are not paying more than their fair share.
Maybe we could eliminate income tax all together, because work is good and we should not discourage it. Consumption is bad, so we should only have sales taxes in order to discourage consumption, yes that’s the ticket. In that way we can really drive down GDP and reduce environmental destruction. 🙂
I had never really thought of it in these terms, Ronald Reagan was really a closet environmentalist, trying to reduce the income of the middle class to save the environment. 😉
A cynic might argue that because the middle class consumes a higher proportion of its income, that lower income for all but the wealthy is good for the environment.
I am such a cynic. If you concentrate the wealth in just a few hands and everyone else has to get by with less, consumption will go down.
We’ve already seen that companies with huge amounts of cash aren’t using that cash for hiring. Concentrating wealth does not product jobs or demand.
I think economic policies that increase income inequality are unfortunate, but I console myself with the belief that it is likely better for the planet.
Look at it this way. If the Tea Party folks could actually reduce the US government to an absolute minimum, think of all the money that won’t be in the economy. If the government ended government transfer payments, government contracts, and government jobs, the economy collapses.
I have more fear that the cutbacks won’t happen. We’ll just get the Bush version, where the government is expanding, running up huge debts, and putting more money into the pockets of military contractors.
And imagine if there were no bailouts and no QE. It would transfer risk back on those wealthy folks who took it, but I suspect the government wouldn’t allow that, either.
Stop and think about this a bit.
Let’s say economic policies were in favor of what conservative, wealthy people want. They don’t want taxes, they don’t want health care, they don’t want to support schools, and so on.
Now, they have all extra money in their pockets. What will they be hiring people for? Will they need more people in retail? Probably not. They can have more self-check stations. And what they would pay for retail help wouldn’t give those folks enough money to buy from the stores they work for.
Will they be hiring more people to build cars? Probably not if people don’t have the money to buy those cars?
What industries will be expanding that need people to work for them? Now, if you are a top notch coder, maybe you can get a job. If you are in health care, you probably won’t be hired if no one can afford health care.
What are the boom industries that are going to generate a middle class again?
A lot of the “wealth” in this country is now created via financial activities, which involves wealthy trading back and forth with each other. How will that wealth create jobs?
Hi Boomer II,
It would be a disaster for the economy. Kind of like 1929 to 1932 in the US. In fact Milton Friedman’s argument that everything would have been fine if the Fed had allowed the money supply to grow enough in 1929 to 1932 has been disproven by the Great recession. There was a huge expansion of the money supply (or at least the Fed did everything possible to try to expand the money supply) and the economy would not have recovered at all without an increase in government spending, it has not recovered fully because the expansion in government spending in response to the financial crisis was too small by a factor of 2 or 3 (in the US).
Oilfield contractors hired to drill wells and fracture rock to raise crude and natural gas to the surface will have to lower prices by as much as 20 percent to help keep their cash-strapped customers working.
Ultimately, that could carve out more than $3 billion from the 2015 earnings outlined by analysts for the world’s four biggest oil-service companies — Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB), Halliburton Co. (HAL), Baker Hughes Inc. and Weatherford International Plc. (WFT)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-09/fracking-discounts-seen-cutting-profits-by-3-billion.html
I didn’t see this earlier and sfaIk it has not been linked to at this site.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2014/12/03-keystone-xl-america-oil-kane-puentes-tomer
The Keystone is old news for the moment but this article has some superb maps and charts and statistics about pipelines both oil and gas, refinery locations, terminal locations, employment etc and most of us here will be glad to see the maps and charts.
DUE DISCLOSURE -The rest of this comment is a foul tempered rant.
Now the typical Brookings reader seems to be a hard core liberal and so reflexively rejects any idea or proposal he associates with conservatives and big business. So the comments are as one might expect uniformly anti pipeline.
I think we are fools to reject it considering that it will be a brand new line and thus safe enough in my estimation that we need not worry about safety.The tar sands oil is going make it to market one way or another and so the climate issue is a second non issue so far as I am concerned.
Maintaining the tightest possible relations with Canada and having the oil pass thru this country is absolutely ( as I see things) going to be a truly major trump card in our hands at some future time- not right this minute of course.
But anybody who has a serious level of appreciation of what peak oil and peak resources means in terms of future troubles and who has any insight at all into international politics simply must understand that when the shit hits the fan we DON’T want that oil flowing east and west and committed directly to Asian and European markets.
There is PLENTY of reason to believe the the world will be fighting hot resource wars with oil being the single most critical resource that we will be fighting about.When- Someday. Probably within the lifetime of most of the readers of this blog in my opinion.
Possession is nine tenths of the law in an international crisis situation. If the oil is shipped from American ports rather than east and west coast Canadian ports then when the time comes to deny it to the enemy we won’t have to sink ships or embargo our next door neighbor by force of arms.
Beyond that I for one am of the opinion that WE will need the tar sands oil before another decade is out to support our own economy. We won’t be first in line for it if we are so foolish as to provide the Chinese an opening to build and finance east and west lines in Canada and lock up the production years in advance.
( I believe electric and hybrid cars are going to sell like ice water in hell sometime in the not too far distant future but this does not mean I believe we can transition away from conventional cars and trucks fast enough to keep peak oil from knocking us flat on our collective economic ass. It merely means that I do have some hope we will be able to get up again before the referee counts us out.)
This is a peak oil site . I believe in peak oil.I am not so big on doom and gloom as the hard core pessimists here but otoh I do fully realize that peak oil MIGHT VERY WELL mean the end of business as usual on a world wide basis.It might even mean the end of life as we know it here in the US within our own personal lifetimes.
But I am not CONVINCED that peak oil means the end of industrial civilization by any means, at least not in the US and not in our closest allies.Power and resources are not equally distributed in the world and this country and our close allies have hogs shares of both. Beyond that THIS country IS big enough to support all the industries domestically that are critical to life as we know it from the manufacture of toilet paper to computer chips.
World wide trade has it’s advantages no doubt but only an IDIOT who understands nothing but money and banking and knows nothing about hands on industry could possibly believe we could not SURVIVE JUST FINE without a single dime moving between this country and other countries.
No doubt transitioning to a self reliant economy would be a traumatic experience – especially since we so foolishly off shored so much of our industry. When the industries left we didn’t just lose the machinery and the pollution- we lost the skilled work force as well.But we can get back those industries and bring in enough skilled workers to retrain our own people if we were to decide to do so.Anyway in is not as if we don’t have ANY welders or electricians or computer programmers or millwrights or engineers. The ones we have can train helpers who will eventually be journeymen and professionals.
Tough times and end times are two different matters.
People globally are going to starve by the tens and hundreds of millions within the foreseeable future barring near miracles on the renewable energy front and in the recycling of non renewable resources such as phosphates and potash. There just isn’t going to be enough stuff along the lines of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides available to feed ten billion people -It is not that this stuff CAN’T be manufactured but rather that the people who are going to be most in need of it are not going to be able to PAY for it.
But unless I am badly fooled we are not going to experience such troubles here in the US.
If we simply MUST HAVE Venezuelan oil or Chilean copper then we will make up an excuse and go down there and take it, or at least give it the old school try.My guess is that if it comes to that we will succeed. The Venezuelans and the Chileans aren’t the Russians and they won’t have friends behind them with the sort of clout we exerted on the behalf of the Russians when the Germans invaded them last time around.
And insofar as the pollution is concerned – the major pollutant, CO2 ,takes only a few months at most to get thoroughly mixed into the atmosphere no matter where it originates. We are breathing in plenty of CO2 that originated in China no more than six months ago with every breath we take.
It is true that we have next to nothing in terms of production of certain minerals but it is also true that there are ways to get by without them. And most of the ones that are really valuable COULD BE mined in this country if we were to choose to do so.
Giving up that pipeline is giving up something potentially priceless for something worth almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. The only thing we would actually be giving up is whatever part of the landscape is spoiled during the building of the line.
In exchange we would get a security boost and a considerable number of permanent jobs. Some of the naysayers have said there would be only a three dozen permanent jobs associated with the pipeline.There will probably be more jobs than that just on crews needed to maintain the right of way not to mention the local tax revenues.
People who REALLY want to best protect the environment in such situations should understand that the thing to do is hold up the pipeline builders at gun point ( figuratively ) and force them to buy ten acres of sensitive lands to be set aside forever as publicly owned nature preserves for each acre of sensitive land disturbed by the construction work.
But environmentalists occasionally seem to be as dumb as fence posts when it comes to drawing lines in the sand and shooting off their own toes.I tried like hell to explain just how pissed off the conservative wing of the country was about OCare for instance to my remaining liberal friends but they simply would not listen and just winked at me when I asked them if they believed they could keep their policies and their doctors. (In actuality most of them could and did since most of them are government employees.)
My local highway department spent a million bucks on a so called artificial wetland a couple of years ago that will not amount a hill of beans except maybe as a mosquito farm.
That same million bucks could have bought a hundred acre tract three times over a few miles away with some real wetlands included that will soon be logged off and converted to cow pasture. It would have been necessary to buy it AFTER the timber harvest to get it at that price but hey trees DO grow back.That tract has at least ten acres of REAL wetlands. That whole ten acres could have been had survey , lawyers and all for fifty grand or so , trees intact.Swampy ground sells cheap around here.
I could go either way when it comes to Keystone, but I have been horrified at the environmental damage I’ve seen from the tar sands photos. Much worse than the clear cutting and strip mining of past eras. If we need to do that to forested areas to get some oil out of the ground, we need to be moving away from an oil economy as soon as possible.
Some photos in case someone here hasn’t seen them.
http://www.businessinsider.com/photos-destructive-canada-oil-sands-2012-10?op=1
Hi Boomer,
There is a limit to how much of the oil sands can be mined, most of the tar sands in the future will need to be produced by steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) and other non-mining methods. These will not disrupt the landscape to the same extent as mining.
By the way, if the USA doesn’t import heavy oil from Canada it will import it from Venezuela. The Venezuelan regime is a dictatorship and abuses human rights. I do wonder if you realize the heavy oil the USA imports from Venezuela is identical to the Canadian “bitumen”? Sometimes I wonder if the opposition to the pipeline may not be aided by the Venezuelan regime? I heard their “president” Maduro give a speech in which he ranted against USA shale production. He used all sorts of dumb arguments, clearly intended to feed the watermelon campaigns elsewhere. This energy game sure is complex, isn’t it?
I really did enjoy reading this about Venezuela abusing human rights on the day when the papers are full of tales about CIA torture nethods. Just remind me what is the name of that bit of Cuba occupied by foreign military where Habeas Corpus is a meaningless phrase and human beings have been incarcerated for near twelve years without trial? – Ah yes – Guantanamo. Yes, those Venezuelans sure do have a lot to answer for.
Excellent point Mike. You might have added the predisposition of police forces to shoot people dead without any accountability. Oh yeah, I forgot the admonishment process of being placed on leave for awhile — with full pay.
Not me, the oil guy. I ignore political issues whenever possible. I have been to Venezuela many times; I don’t judge people, or governments, who struggle with life.
I have seen them and take the destruction to heart. BUT it is no worse than the destruction of the landscape near my home where coal is mined.
The coal WILL be mined and the tar sands WILL be produced. I know only a handful of really dedicated ” greens” who have any real idea what is meant by getting away from coal and oil.
As one conservative friend with a brain put it, the daughters he is paying an arm and a leg to have brainwashed (his word not mine) at university are all in favor of tiny little houses and tiny little cars and subways and street cars and chi chi dried beans – for everybody EXCEPT themselves and their friends.
FOR THEMSELVES they still insist on the luxury car (a Tesla maybe but most of them hardly realize Teslas exist) the winter tickets to the ski slopes and the beaches ,the upscale apartment or more likely the close as possible to town McMansion and the gold and platinum debit and credit cards.
And Daddy being Daddy stays in his law office sixty or seventy hours to indulge them although he always dreamed of fishing three or four days a week by stage of his life.
Such is reality. Label me a realist first and foremost.
Failure to build the keystone MIGHT slow down overall oil consumption enough to measure the effect. But the companies there are evidently getting all they can produce NOW to market and the pipelines and railroads to move future increased production to market WILL get built barring a general economic collapse. The question is where not if.
The when is ” soon enough”.The people in the no oil provinces are already negotiating the maximum amounts they can extract as transmission taxes in exchange for the permits to build . And the people who want the oil vastly outnumber the ones who want to stop the pipelines. Canada DOES have a federal government and IS a democracy and the end result will that the minority will either accept the pipelines along with the bribes or the pipelines without the bribes.
The Canadian central government DOES have the power to force the construction in theory although maybe not it terms of SUPPORT at THIS time. The support WILL grow as the people in the more populous provinces come to understand how much that oil will mean to them in terms of prosperity and security.
I really am reducing my oil consumption. Walking rather than driving. Living in a tiny place. I am prepared to make those sacrifices to slow oil consumption.
And I think the fact that we’ve had decades to scale back on oil consumption and haven’t done it and now go to even further efforts to get it out of the ground is unfortunate. The fact that the country has tolerated dirty coal mining in the past doesn’t mean we can’t question what we are doing now in terms of tar sands.
The idea that, “We’ve always done it, so we’ll do it now” doesn’t impress me as a great argument. Maybe we have to make changes at some point, so why not now?
People scaling back their lifestyles isn’t always about energy consumption. It can be about economics. If you can’t afford more, you get by with less. The lifestyle that Americans had (big cars, McMansions, lots of possessions) requires income and/or debt financing. Eliminate both of those, and people don’t consume as much. I think economics rather than politics is going to cut demand. And that’s why I think the global warming argument is probably going to have less impact than the fact that people realize they must get by with less.
A couple of brief supporting remarks.
EV +PV to feed it will take off like mad when people finally realize the one simple thing about it-
it’s cheaper to operate and has lower life cycle cost BY FAR than that dodge ram + tar to run it.
US ain’t gonna collapse from running low on oil. There are lots of people around here, and lots of other places who get along right now on not much, and know how to do it, and would hardly notice if they couldn’t buy any more crap from china, or for that matter, bananas from anywhere.
Hi wimbi,
As a way of trying to reduce inputs from the grid, would excess PV used to heat water with a heat pump water heater when the sun is shining and then storing the heated water in a large superinsulated storage tank for later heating use, be a possible solution?
Also there is the possibility of battery backup or buying green tags.
Basically if you are net zero over the year, which I believe you already are, you are doing great.
I’m about 5000kw-hrs below so far, but recent gloom has cut that down a little.
Water heat pump+ storage. Sure, that’s what I do. Takes very little in the way of junk-pile stuff to make the storage and insulation – can get unlimited good insulation from packing crates.
BTW, I am doing a lot more than what just makes sense, since my target is to demo to the others around here what’s possible, and even easy. Also, it’s my hobby, and I get lots of fun out of it
That’s certainly my intention.
2011 Nissan LEAFs are selling for $14 to $15 k used. Many more are beginning to hit the market coming off of lease, and that volume will increase over time. Datsun/Nissan has an excellent history of long term parts support for their vehicles, hopefully the same will be true for battery pack upgrades.
A 2kW PV array will provide all of the domestic and transportation power I need. (does not include heating).
So with an investment of about $20k, my vehicle needs including fuel will be taken care of for at least 10 years, and assuming one battery replacement, possibly for the rest of my life (after 23 years my current car still has some life in it).
Seems like a bargain.
Hi Old Farmer Mac,
I agree with your position in most respects. The Affordable Care Act is very similar to Romney’s plan instituted in Massachusetts, which Romney tried to run away from in the last presidential election.
It has angered many conservatives, but within a few years prices will come down and people will dislike the Affordable Care Act (ACA) about as much as people dislike Medicare (which is another program that angered conservatives when it was passed).
I especially liked this part of your post:
This is a peak oil site . I believe in peak oil. I am not so big on doom and gloom as the hard core pessimists here but otoh I do fully realize that peak oil MIGHT VERY WELL mean the end of business as usual on a world wide basis. It might even mean the end of life as we know it here in the US within our own personal lifetimes.
But I am not CONVINCED that peak oil means the end of industrial civilization by any means, at least not in the US and not in our closest allies. Power and resources are not equally distributed in the world and this country and our close allies have hogs shares of both. Beyond that THIS country IS big enough to support all the industries domestically that are critical to life as we know it from the manufacture of toilet paper to computer chips.
My position is very similar to this, but I fail to state it as eloquently.
Thanks. I have posted many times here and elsewhere that in the long term OCare will evolve into a European style health care system and that it will be a big – a huge – victory for the liberals and democrats OVER THE LONG TERM.I support it myself not because I am a socialist at heart but because the so called free enterprise health care system we supposedly had did not it fact actually exist and in fact did fail to take care of those of us without tons of money or a job offering good insurance.
Ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I am not in favor of a compulsory draft as a matter of principle when the question is individual versus state. But when the survival of the state is in question then I must bend to reality and support a draft. I would not like to live under a Nazi regime in case one threatened us and would join the home guard and insist on the young fellas toting rifles like it or not.
Our very existence as a stable peaceful society is threatened by a lack of affordable health care for poor people. In times past maybe they would have been unable to make their power felt but nowadays with the internet they understand the score and they won’t stop at rioting unless they get a fair share of the basics such as medical care.I don’t want a third party arising on the left that is a mirror image of the tea party on the right. We don’t NEED a faction of either sort wielding big time power in this country. I hope and expect that the tea party will more or less melt back into the mainstream conservative faction pretty soon.
I am one of those free market types without a ton of money and know many many hardworking people unable to afford insurance or to find a job offering insurance. Some of them are close kin.
Ya gotta accept reality. IF the only way one of my darling little relatives who needs an operation can get it is thru socialized medicine then so be it.This is not liberalism versus conservatism as a philosophy but simply good common sense. I like to be able to sleep at night with a clear conscience.
Ignoring this sort of problem results in future troubles more expensive than the available cure. That cure is a Euro style health care system.
The doctors hospitals pharmaceutical companies lawyers and insurance companies have brought OCare onto themselves thru their collective failure to perform.
A REAL conservative as a MATTER OF PRINCIPLE says let ‘ em pay the price for that failure and replace their system with something that works better.
INCIDENTALLY I have a close relative in the medical profession who is well into the one percent class. To the best of my knowledge she doesn’t donate more than a pittance of her time or income to looking after poor people – not even poor people who are relatives known to her personally. She does however have Mercedes and a palace.
Hi OFM,
Those rich doctors in many cases do offer care to the poor through Medicaid (where reimbursement rates are very low) and for many who are almost poor with no health insurance who are billed, but in most cases do not pay.
I don’t know about you, but I would prefer to have competent doctors taking care of me, if we paid doctors $50k per year, do you think the quality of the average doctor would be very good?
Singapore is giving it all back. $62.91. Dollar slightly up.
Funny, I was just reading another article about how this was the coldest summer in Antarctica and the ice sheet expanded (remember the psuedo-scientists who got stuck in the ice sheet a while back?). So, this global warming science is NOT settled. The climate is changing, it is always changing and 100,000 years from now it may not be fit for man nor beast, but it is just the way this planet goes and there’s nothing man can do, or does to it, to change things.
Al Gore and his Learjet Liberal friends really don’t believe in the GW nonsense either, otherwise he would not have sold his failed network to an oil rich kingdom, would have sold his house on the beach in California for fear of rising seas and would take public transportation. Just like he and his other Hollywood Hypocrite friends should do.
Man made climate change is a fairy tale being told by academics in desperate need of ever more stolen taxpayer money for their grants and Third World corrupt governments hoping to force the developed world into sending trillions and trillions of dollars to them so they can ride in Learjets and have fabulous mansions just like Al and the Hollywood Hypocrites.
Ah, another person dropping in only to comment on climate change. Or maybe these are all the same person, using various aliases. Or maybe a programmed machine.
It must be so time consuming monitoring all the global warming sites around the Internet. A full time job, I’d expect.
You are right boomer.
As if one year makes a climate and as if a slight increase after many years of decrease actually changes things. The same old anti-climate change drum beat, picking the data to support an already preconceived conclusion.
As if one year makes a climate and as if a slight increase after many years of decrease actually changes things.
One year of increase, and many years of decreases? How did you come up with that?
Let’s get perspective here. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing volume at the rate of 125 cubic km per year. Antarctic sea ice volume is increasing at the rate of 30 cubic km per year. As a comparison, the Arctic is losing sea ice at about 500 cubic km per year (1979 to 2011).
The Greenland Ice sheet is losing volume at about 375 cubic km per year.
So you warming fanatics would rather attack me instead of acknowledging the facts I presented? Typical. Just because I am a blogger liaison to the Heartland Institute doesn’t mean global warming is any less of a fairy tale. Apparently credibility is only important to the folks who lack the brainpower to read and understand the real agenda behind all the hard core leftists pushing the junk climate change science. Which again if you ask the scientists who are actually faithful to the science and not left wing politics is anything but settled. My suggestion is before you try to insult others you need to clean up your own act first.
Antarctic sea ice hit a record. The ice sheet in Western Antarctica shrunk. The ice sheet in Eastern Antarctica grew. Sea ice isn’t the same as ice sheet (continental glacier or ice shelf) ice. Sea ice is ice formed when seawater freezes. Ice sheets are formed by snow getting packed and compressed into nice, clear, solid looking ice.
Hi Fernando,
To be clear, are you suggesting that one possible hypothesis for an expansion in the sea ice in Antarctica this past year might be due to the extra fresh water added to the Southern ocean fro the meting ice sheet, which would both cool the ocean and reduce its salinity, thus tending to increase the amount of sea ice formed?
Denis, I don’t have the expertise nor the information to make a guess. The fresh water doesn’t convince me. Antarctica is a huge continent, when we put that ice donut around it we end up with a huge area. And I don’t know if they have sufficient data to pinpoint WHERE in that donut is the ice growing. Hell, I could probably get a dozen Metocean experts in a room for a week, grill the hell out of them, and I doubt I would have any certainty about this issue.
They aren’t attacking you, they’re just trying to get your goat. Those goofy left wing nuts never quit. Al Gore should live on the beaches of California and panhandle.
Weren’t the Alps purdy much free of snow a few years back, seems as though I remember that happening?
When you have seven billion humans exhaling one kg of CO2 daily, it is going to be added into the air. Each breath you take adds some CO2 into the atmosphere so the plants can breathe too. It’s a win win.
Jim Steele, a field biologist in California, wrote a book about it all. He does see some hypocrisy in the global warming camp.
You’ll find some help here:
https://www.masterresource.org/climate-exaggeration/steele-book-climate-skepticism/
I haven’t insulted you. I have suggested that it is obvious that people (or machines) look for global warming mentions all over the Internet and then post responses to that. You don’t join in the overall discussions (like this one about peak oil). You have an agenda yourselves, which is to oppose any mention of global warming.
But because there are more and more mentions about global warming, you’re going to be kept busy. And you can’t block it out. It’s too widespread. Even if politicians managed to block funding for climate research in the US, it’s still going to be done elsewhere and the results are going to be published elsewhere.
Hi Henry
I don’t doubt personally that you MAY be serious. I know tons of people who think like you do who are serious. My grandfather on my Mom’s side never did accept the obvious (even to you most likely ) fact that the earth is not the center of the universe. He died about ten or twelve years ago in his mid nineties convinced that the sun goes someplace to rest and circles around out of sight back to the east every morning. He never was clear on the Earth being round rather than flat.
And yet he was a man with a better than average brain. He could figure up the price of a truckload of mixed produce in his head to a penny without making a mistake faster than I could with a pad and a pencil and a college education including a year of real calculus- the same freshman calculus the math majors took.
He just happened to grow up at a time and a place where he never had an opportunity as child to learn to read ya see.
So the KJB was all the explanation he needed to understand the world – as it was explained to him by the local preachers who COULD read. OF course they seldom ever read anything else except maybe the local weekly paper and that not very often.
But the fact that you may be serious doesn’t mean you know do do from apple butter about what is happening in terms of natural climate variability and man made forcing of climate change.
Anybody can learn enough in a few hours to set himself up to be fooled by your arguments.Most people have learned this much just by watching tv and listening to forked tongue folks with skin it the game.
The vast majority of the people in THIS forum have mastered the amount of science that takes a FEW YEARS to master rather than a FEW HOURS.
I must conclude that you are either a semi literate ( when it comes to science ) person who is serious but mistaken or else just another person who attacks the science and reality of climate change BECAUSE you are a hard core conservative and therefore see any thing supported by liberals as the work of an enemy. Quite a few of my relatives think the same way you do. They just don’t know enough to know better.
AND YA KNOW WHAT? Given what they DO know their thinking process is sound. The bankers and politicians and business men of this world habitually and as a matter of practice lie their asses off about their actions and their motives and everybody understands this. Even people who think like you understand it.
So – since you lack an understanding of the way science really works it is not surprising you think that scientists are willing to lie their asses off for grant money.Business men and politicians lie their asses off all day for money. Why shouldn’t scientists do the same?
Ya see there is this thing called accountability in science where you have to produce actual evidence to other people who have the necessary skills in math physics chemistry geology physics etc to understand your evidence and pass judgement on it.
Now there are some physicists who work in climate science but the vast majority work in other fields.
And any one of those others is NOT ONLY FREE to tear up bad evidence like a chicken tearing up a dry cow turd-
HE OR SHE STANDS TO GAIN FAME AND FORTUNE IF HE (OR SHE) CAN TEAR UP THAT EVIDENCE.
Now as it happens hardly any physicist – maybe one or two out of a thousand – SAYS that climate scientists are pulling the wool over everybody else’s eyes. That one or two generally seem to have connections to outfits such as the Heartland Institute and they after all are just humans and some humans will always lie and sell out their profession for money. Ya ever hear of preachers going to jail for stealing the collection and spending it on high living?YA EVER HEAR OF JUDAS?
A third possibility – that you are actually on somebody’s payroll or trying to get on one.
I post these responses to guys like you not in an effort to change your mind but rather to perhaps throw a little sunshine on the way science actually works so that any open minded youngster who happens to read this forum will understand that science is based on EVIDENCE rather than opinion.
Such a person if they have real doubts should seek out people they trust who ARE trained in the sciences – people such as doctors for instance – or younger folks who are at universities where the sciences are taught. Every doctor I have ever met who is under forty or so believes in anthropogenic climate change.
Almost every young engineer I have ever met believes in it in private although any that work in the auto industry or fossil fuel industry or related industries generally prefer not to discuss the subject.Whatever is said will eventually make its way back to management and thus they keep their mouths shut.
Open minded investigators without science training will find out fast that ninety nine percent plus of the chemistry and physics majors believe in forced climate change where as not more than one out of a thousand chemists or physicists expects to make a career in climate science.
They will find that ninety nine percent of the premed students believe in anthropogenic climate change.
And older doubters or open minded questioners -ones who know their own children well – in case their children happen to be university students – will find that their own children generally believe in anthropogenic climate change. UNLESS their kids are gung ho young republicans or majoring in religion or business. In that case they are very unlikely to be taking any science classes.
You by friend are on the wrong side of the facts.
By insisting that you are right you are keeping your troops together in the short term for this election and the next.
But you are also making yourself and your political philosophy out as foolish in the eyes of the younger generation.
I am an old conservative fart but I have solid scientific education and the reality of forced climate change is clear to me. Pretty soon I will be gone. So will most of the older scientifically illiterate or semiliterate conservatives who are unable to accept the evidence.
Any young conservative who expects to make a career in politics is well advised to get to know a bunch of young fellow students who ARE majoring in the sciences and listen to what they have to say- all politics aside. Otherwise he is going to have to eat a lot of crow later on- maybe enough to choke to death on it as far as his political career is concerned.
Ya can’t sell people on the idea the earth is flat any longer. Or that diseases aren’t caused by germs and viruses.
Or that air pollution doesn’t bring on heart attacks and strokes and emphysema. AT LEAST NOT YOUNG PEOPLE other than scientifically illiterate or semiliterate conservatives.
My best life long friend died two years ago of pancreatic cancer that spread to his liver. I will say this for him. He never cried about feeling sorry for himself because he was fooled by the tobacco and alcohol industries into thinking that smoking and drinking are safe activities and that he should make up his own mind about smoking and drinking rather than listening to them there liberal meddling busybody socialists.
One of the last things he faced up to was the evidence that he would have cut his chances of dieing of this particular cancer in HALF had he listened to the scientific establishment rather that the right wing political establishment..IN HALF.
But the Heartland Institute was one of his favorite places to go for a good old helping of that good old time conservative religion.
A good case can be made that it killed him since it helped keep his attention focused on the wrong arguments..
We used to read the Washington TImes together quite often. I majored in agriculture which is science based. He majored in business. We agreed about most things. Not about over shoot until he was already sick.Not about peak oil until a few years ago when the price shot up by a factor of four or five with production of the real stuff just holding flat.
You could get the WT at a convenience store near where we lived back then a few miles north of Richmond Va.
You can still read it for free on the net.It is right about a lot of things but all wrong on climate and fossil fuels.
China: Turning away from the dollar
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4ee67336-7edf-11e4-b83e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3LTlSknNf
I just read that article – thanks for posting part of it.
China doesn’t buy UST because they love owning them. They buy them because they need to manage their exchange rate to the dollar and in order to do so they can’t be selling dollars / buying remimbi. So they are stuck in dollars. Given that, they’d rather own treasuries than take the unsecured credit risk of having deposits at Citi, JPM etc.
Also, when the US buys widgets from Brazil is the bill paid in Euros? Why would the largest economy pay bills in dollars to a non-dollar seller?
The move away from dollars is happening and eventually will pick up pace. Just don’t think it is going to happen overnight – decades are more likely – unless some significant event happens….
rgds
WP
The whole world wide financial house of cards is going to collapse someday and imo someday probably not too far off – maybe tomorrow maybe ten years or fifteen years from now.Maybe a little longer that that.
This collapse is inevitable given that population is growing fast even as one time thru non renewable resources are used up at an ever increasing rate.
The technology and economic adaption ambulance is not going to make it to the hospital without running out of gas.
Financial collapse will not likely happen over night like an earthquake but more gradually.It is already happening in places such as Greece but not on a scale to bring down the whole financial system -not yet- HOPEFULLY.
Note I did say a general collapse COULD happen tomorrow.
The signs of it are everywhere and the only real hope of preventing it consist of political pipe dreams based on the world coming to its senses.
The Wonderful Wonderful Market and The Invincible Invisible Hand might possibly save us if the time frame were long enough but the calvary and the cowboys don’t always in reality get there in time to save the settlers from the Injuns the way it always happened on tv back when I was a kid.
(I am not apologizing for failing to be pc. All I have to say is that if the locals had been wiser they could have driven us back into the sea when we first came ashore. Someday somebody else is going to take this continent away from us just as we took it from the original settlers.)
The Market and the Hand are not on the job to anything like the extent required and WON’T be on the job until too late to bring about the necessary changes.
Electric cars and mass transit and high rise apartments COULD save us from the consequences of peak oil for a few decades at least- but peak oil is NOW and the electric cars and mass transit and high rise apartments are a couple of decades away.
The Chinese are smart enough to know that their dollar holdings are eventually going to be worthless and they WILL get rid of them to the extent they can before the shit is well and truly in the fan.
But getting rid of them without crashing the market for dollars is going to be tricky. IF they move too fast nobody will take the dollars. Too slow and they will be worthless due to inflation -eventually.
It will be either inflation or outright repudiation. Repudiation in the case of hot war. Inflation otherwise as this is much more politically palatable.
Only a fool expects Uncle Sam to ever pay off his debts. The very best that can be hoped for is that he will be able to continue to roll them over and accumulate new ones without having an economic heart attack.Personally I believe that business as usual is a dead man walking – in historical terms. But Old Man Business AS Usual may live another ten or twenty years. I hope so. That is about how long I expect to live myself with luck.Ten or twenty years is a long time in human terms.
My niece, a Norwegian Petroleum Engineer who lives in Bergen, keeps me up to date on the “local scene” there. Clipped the following from e-mail she sent me last night. I found it surprising that offshore rigs would actually suspend production owing to oil price. On the other hand, why not? Obviously the stuff in square brackets is mine.
“…..it doesn’t affect me but here boom is over Onkel [Uncle] Doug. Johan Castberg [field in the Barents] has been shelved (til å skrinlegge). Company [Statoil] also has deferred decision on investing 40 billion Krone [$6 billion] in Snorre [field] in Norskehavet [Norwegian Sea]. Surprising the Company is idling (right word? like inaktiv) several offshore rigs as oil price drop: Three rigs, COSL Pioneer, Scarabeo 5, and Songa Trym are suspended until at least the middle of next year and maybe more later. This is because of low profit….”
Oasis has announced their preliminary 2015 capex plans — the first “big” Bakken producer to do so up to this point.
Planned capex is $750-850 million in 2015, or about half of what will be spent in 2014. The 16 rigs they have been leasing all this year (incidentally, only Continental and Hess have been running more rigs in the Bakken during 2014) will be whittled down to 6 by the end of March as they concentrate all drilling to the company’s best acreage, in north-central McKenzie County. In spite of this, they still expect a 5-10% increase in year-over-year production by the end of 2015.
If you’re into such things, they have posted a new investor presentation to coincide with the 2015 capex announcement. For obvious reasons, more focus is placed on costs in this presentation compared to previous presentations.
The stock is down more than 75% over the past 5 months, and, so far, today’s announcement has not yet helped.
BTW, Watcher: Oasis is one of the public Bakken companies that has all its wells and related assets organized into an LLC. To be exact, “Oasis Petroleum North America, LLC.” Hess is another notable Bakken driller that also does this. Their LLC is “Hess Bakken Investments II, LLC.”
This LLC thing is ridiculous; as was mentioned in this link, Oasis is the 3rd most active driller in the Bakken. Hess is the 2nd most active, both are large, semi-integrated public companies. They are also LLC’s, so what? There seems to be two implications regarding this LLC issue, one being that any company carrying those initials behind it can simply walk away from its debts and leave everyone else holding the bag. That’s bunk. Ask a lawyer.
Two, the issue with LLC’s is that there are thousands of them operating shale wells, that LLC’s drill the majority (?) of shale wells and when they all walk, the shale industry will die immediately. That’s bunk too. The implication is, I think, that there are lots of mom and pop companies able to drill 10 million dollar wells that will go belly up because of oil prices. Shale oil is a big boy’s game that is played with big money.
The only way to resolve this “fear” is to define what constitutes a small shale oil company and what constitutes a big shale oil company. Then a lot of time has to be wasted listing all the shale companies in the Bakken and judge them as small, or big. Y’all can do that, then decide who is the flight risk.
By the way, make sure that you are comparing apples to apples, operators to operators and not operators to service companies. There are indeed lots of mom and pop LLCs providing services to the shale oil industry, so what again?
I bit late:
11/12/2014
World on drip of unconventional oil
http://crudeoilpeak.info/world-on-drip-of-unconventional-oil
Now I am ready to do my breakfast, later than having my breakfast coming over again to read further news.