The EIA updated their International Energy Statistics on Monday September 29. However there was an error in their data which I caught right away. They had Kazakhstan increasing C+C production by 856,000 barrels per day.
Above is their C+C data, January through June. I emailed Patrica Smith, the EIA employee who posts these stats. She emailed me right back:
Mr. Patterson, Thank you very much for catching the error. The numbers were transposed. I will ask the database manger to make the correction.
So I waited. The next day the correction had not been made so I emailed her back asking her for the correct numbers because this error also affected total world production as well as non-OPEC production. She emailed me back:
Mr. Patterson, The crude number should be 1520 instead of 2420.
So the number was off by 900 kbpd, Kazakhstan C+C production was actually down 44 kbpd instead of up 856 kbpd. And here three days later the correction still has not been made in the database. I think the international data is getting a very low priority these days. A few years ago, when the International Petroleum Monthly was still being published, they made a similar error. They had Canadian production one million bpd too high. I emailed Ms. Smith and the correction was made immediately and an email went out from the EIA, to all subscribers of the data, informing them of the data error and correction.
Anyway, the data for all charts below is in thousand barrels per day with the last data point June 2014.
Production from Kazakhstan’s Kashagan field is not expected until the second half of 2016, or about two years from now.
World C+C production was up 189 kbpd in June to 76,695 kbpd but is still down 747 kbpd below the peak in February.
Non-OPEC production shot up last November and has pretty much stayed at that level for eight months. Non-OPEC C+C production, in June, was 44,837,000 bpd, up 153 kbpd from May.
OPEC C+C, still about two million bpd below their peak in April 2012, seems to be going nowhere very fast.
Russian production, according to news reports, is still producing near December high. (The EIA has their high in November).
Foreign-owned projects boost Russian oil output in Sept
Foreign-led projects lifted Russian oil output last month to within reach of a post-Soviet record, showing the potential in the country’s existing fields, which are largely unaffected by Western sanctions over Ukraine.
Output of oil and gas condensate in the world’s largest producer rose 0.9 percent to 10.61 million barrels per day (bpd) last month from August, a touch under the post-Soviet record-high of 10.63 million bpd reached in December, Energy Ministry data showed on Thursday.
The Russian Energy Ministry wishes to show that sanctions are having no effect, which makes me suspicious of the Energy Ministry’s data. However the EIA, apparently, does not get their data from the Energy Ministry or the Russian official web site CDU TEK. The EIA Russian numbers are always quite different from those Russia publishes. Apparently they don’t trust them either. You will notice the EIA data from the chart does not match the Russian data from the article. So we will just wait and see what the EIA comes up with for August and September.
And it is still USA production that is keeping the world from an obvious peak.
Africa is interesting, down 2,396,000 bpd since peaking in December 2007. The largest decliner is, of course Libya, down 1,505,000 bpd since that point. But other decliners are Algeria, down 315,000 bpd, Angola, down 246,000 bpd, Sudan and South Sudan, down 261,000 bpd, Equatorial Guinea, down 96,000 bpd, and Egypt, down 61,000 bpd.
Of course some African producers were up. Nigeria was up 40,000 bpd and Ghana, up 98,000 bpd during that period. But there were some other big decliners among the very small African producers. Chad was down 39,000 bpd and Tunesia, down 27,000 bpd. All of this since December 2007.
The pages Non-OPEC Charts and World Oil Production by Gegraphical Area have been updated.
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
I have not seen this posted elsewhere:
Satellite measurements reveal gravity dip from ice loss in West Antarctica
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140930195428.htm
Bogus headline. The gravity map can change, but the planet’s gravity isn’t going to decline from this.
Watcher,
Having made and analyzed thousands of gravity measurements I can assure that the gravitational field in any particular location is a function of many variables some of which which change with time: ice and groundwater included. Addition/subtraction of any mass changes the field and this can be, and often is, measured. Removal of ice (or water) for example also potentially results in something called isostatic rebound, another measurable elevation/gravity variable. Advances in measuring gravitational fields make it possible to “see” relatively tiny variations, spatially and in time, hence the Antarctic observations. Of course “gravity dip” is a bit sloppy when referring to a decrease in the gravitational field; perhaps that’s what you meant?
Perhaps I should have added that the information in Tom’s link is an important bit of information in the AGW dialogue.
Thanks Doug,
I guess I should have added that commentary, but I thought it was fairly self evident. In any event, the results of a few studies about the Antarctic ice sheet have come out recently, e.g.,
Antarctica’s ice losses on the rise
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/05/140519110200.htm
Record decline of ice sheets: Scientists map elevation changes of Greenlandic and Antarctic glaciers
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140820110538.htm
Antarctica’s ice discharge could raise sea level faster than previously thought
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140813182259.htm
A very interesting experiment we humans are conducting on our biosphere.
Best,
Tom
I wonder if oil extraction of 700 million kg per day from Ghawar can be seen this way.
I have a bit of gravity mapping history too, and I’d say yes, but not quite how you think because of the water drive.
The differential water/oil mass should be measurable, but this seems a very good idea. In fact, I wonder if such data could be used for reserves estimate upgrades.
Remember, originally there was oil and gas (the latter very low mass) and these were largely replaced by water (not so different from oil) So, ignoring any other other factors you have, sort of, (mass of oil + gas) replaced by the water mass. Therefore, what you can determine with gravity has three primary variables and of course the gas to oil geometry comes into play. Not an easy problem but like everything, depends on how much information you have. Frankly I think there are better things you could do with your computer’s time — maybe playing Free Cell!
You are right about the water displacing the oil. I forgot about that.
Yo Doug, do you know how far seismic charges propagate? Can some nasty someone position sensors and get imagery from charges they didn’t pay for?
If my math is right that comes to just over 5 million barrels per day. Journalist have been reporting, for decades, that this is the daily production of Ghawar. However the true Gharwar production is a closely guarded secret and has been for many years. My guess is that the Ghawar is producing a lot closer to 3 million barrels per day than 5 million barrels per day.
that’s heavy man!
Kashagan output has been 2 years away for about 15?
Well…….. That is not as bad as fusion energy which will always be the energy we are counting on having forty years in the future.
” Cash is gone ” will probably eventually produce a hell of a lot of oil but the people who put their money into it will probably wish they had invested it elsewhere. Most of them so far seem to wish they had never heard of the place according to the bits and pieces I run across occasionally when scanning the energy news.
Hey! We got fusion energy in huge gobs, right here, right now. We just aren’t noticing it. Unbelievable!
Today I walked by my PV array to clock the watt-hr meter, and found 10kW. Wow! Just a bunch of windows sitting out there seemingly doing nothing, but producing the power that not long ago I had to get from from some goddam big grunting diesel, with all its smoke, noise, fussing around, and fuel $.
Whatsamatterwus?
Hi Wimbi,
The technology in the renewable energy field is developing rapidly. I think (hope) we are starting to reach tipping points. I am not sure of the practicality of this specific advance, but it is at least interesting.
Batteries Included: A Solar Cell that Stores its Own Power
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141003064336.htm
Best,
Tom
Thanks. The real tipping point comes when people start to realize what we already have. It’s one thing to do numbers, EROEI and all that, but when they actually get your hands on a set of PV, and an electric car, people tend to get that gee whiz feeling- gee whiz, this is something REAL. And not only real, way better.
My wife makes a big point with her friends when she gets to brag that they are going down the road just fine on solar energy, which has already been paid up for life.
If the energy return on energy invested is 100% available energy, and not just oil and global warming, it’s way better.
Cave Bio,
Re: the “practicality” of the device…
It’s a Dye Sensitized Solar Cell (DSSC) at heart, with a built-in battery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sensitized_solar_cell
They were invented in 1988, 2 and a half decades ago.
One can buy kits to make demo cells, they’re popular to show it can be done.
http://www.arborsci.com/dye-sensitized-solar-cell-kit-1008
One can use certain berry juices as the dyes – cool huh?
But commercial products? Well, ummm, ahem, uhhh.
Every so often someone announces something “real soon now”.
The rubs are:
(1) efficiency – real-world champion DSSCs use rather fancy Ruthenium based dyes, and even then, don’t begin to seriously challenge inorganic PV. Efficiency matters in a great many applications because much of the Balance Of Systems (BOS) costs are area, i.e. inverse efficiency, dependent, like: racking, glass and other encapsulant materials, cabling, panel install/wiring labor, real estate.
(2) longevity – because the dyes are organic/metal-organic molecules, they are somewhat unstable, and degrade under UV illumination. If one blocks the UV, one can slow the degradation, but then one decreases efficiency.
The charge carriers (electrons and hole) flow at least partway in liquid electrolytes. There are all kinds of side reactions, think loss of battery capacity as they age.
This is typical of ivory tower academics – all kinds of fancy stuff, but ignoring some inconvenient realities, and stuff that works the last several decades, and is already at massive scale.
But existing crystalline silicon solar cells beat DSSCs for efficiency and reliability for a long shot. One can buy modules with a 30 year guarantee of 86.5% of initial power from Solarworld (glass:glass encapsulated modules), and almost all vendors offer 25 year warranties on glass:plastic modules. At the last IEEE Photovoltaics Specialists Conference, Dick Swanson (co-founder of SunPower) talked of 50 year glass:glass modules.
Why would one want to combine the battery (which will wear out long before 30 years – unless it’s an inefficient Nickel-Iron battery) with the solar panel?
Batteries’ self-discharge increases with temperature,
and charge capacity decreases with lower temperature.
I’ll keep my batteries inside (not on the roof!), in a cool but not too cold room, thank you.
How much crystalline silicon PV is there in the world right now?
About 90% of about 150 GWp.
Humans don’t get exponential growth, either of problems or solutions:
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/22/exponential-growth-global-solar-pv-production-installation/
The IEA’s Technology Roadmap:
http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/TechnologyRoadmapSolarPhotovoltaicEnergy_2014edition.pdf
Table 1, page 10 is interesting the growth in 4 years.
From end of 2009 to end of 2013
total PV 23 GW to 135 GW
annual install 7 GW to 37 GW
annual investment 48 B$ to 96 B$.
5x the PV for just the twice the cash.
Beats the snot out of oil, E&P CAPEX triples for +14% “oil” over the last 12 years.
See slides 40 and 41 of Steven Kopits’ Columbia presentation:
http://energypolicy.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/energy/Kopits%20-%20Oil%20and%20Economic%20Growth%20(SIPA,%202014)%20-%20Presentation%20Version%5B1%5D.pdf
PV is by no means the only way to solar electricity.
https://tec.grc.nasa.gov/rps/advanced-stirling-convertor/
Very efficient small stirlings are just sitting there ready to be put at the focal point of a concentrator.
The NASA variety is of course expensive, but there’s nothing in those things that’s out of the reach of an ordinary machine shop using common materials.
They only work in clear sun, of course, but there are lots of places with lots of that. I sure would like to have one. Who’s in for a new business?
The reliance on Direct Normal Insolation limits the marketplace (DNI is lower the further from the equator, as well as due to local climate – fog, dust, etc. It also varies seasonally.), so scale of manufacturing is lower, so costs are higher.
http://www.ftexploring.com/solar-energy/direct-and-diffuse-radiation.htm
There’s also the issue of moving parts, which means more maintenance, and not just for the Stirling generator. One needs a 2-axis tracker per dish, whereas 1-axis trackers are way simpler and one motor can move a lot of troughs or module arrays.
These guys reported a staff of 12 (in shifts) on site at the SES 1.5 MW plant in Peoria AZ.
http://basinandrangewatch.org/StirlingDish.html
There are hundreds of 1.5 MW PV plants on warehouse/big box store roofs/ground arrays with nobody in attendance. The arrays are electronically monitored, so repair work is only done as needed.
Another issue is cooling. Sunligh => heat, but heat engines need a heat sink.
Pretty much all the solar stirling companies I’m familiar with are in deep trouble or are gone.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Infinia-Stirling-Solar-Startup-Files-For-Bankuptcy
Infinia’s assets were snarfed up by http://www.qnergy.com
who makes Stirlings powered by biomass. Their solar version is “under development”.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/stirling-energy-systems-dish-engine-solar-maker-files-for-chapter-7-bankrup
SES sold their projects (still in planning stage) to PV developers.
Their 1.5 MW plant in Peoria, AZ was sold and removed in 2012. Google maps shows some kind of green field there now. The Salt River Project had no interest in seeing it continue operations.
http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2012/03/27/former-stirling-power-plant-in-peoria.html
The idea seems appealing, but the actual track record of solar Stirlings is less than stellar.
http://www.sunpowerinc.com/
On the contrary, looks stellar to me.
NASA qualified them for decades in orbit.
and some have been there for over 12 yrs. Also in use on the space station. No maintenance whatsoever.
Also, they do well at relatively low temps, as would be available in a linear focus concentrator.
So why not on the ground?
The sun power,inc (cryrocooler & stirling engine people, as opposed to sun power corp, the PV people) linear stirlings are mucho expensive, using precision gas bearings.
This is important in a space application for high reliability and less vibration/torque effect on the spacecraft.
But the cost is crazy.
This guy said he talked to them, the EG 1000 (a 1 kW engine) cost between $50K and $100K.
http://www.stirlingengine.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=384&start=10
These days $50K will get you 5-7kW of PV with batteries, depending on where you’re at.
The only reference to Sunpower machines in orbit I can find are to cryocoolers.
The radioisotope thermal generator via stirling (vs. thermoelectrics) seems to be still in development.
Do you have a reference for a power generator on the ISS? (several cryocoolers of various designs have gone up).
There are other Stirlings using flexure “bearings” that are less expensive, but not as good. The real cheap Stirlings use regular bearings, but these wear out.
Apparently Coleman made a stirling cooler for a few years, perhaps it was too expensive. They still make/sell thermoelectric ones – no moving parts.
One can get thermoelectric coolers that do -40 F from ambient for $130.
http://www.coleman.com/product/powerchilltrade-40-quart-thermoelectric-cooler/3000001497?contextCategory=8570#.VDDN3N6KS6E
Then there are miniature conventional compressors that will hold 0 F for $700.
http://www.americanrvcompany.com/Dometic-CF-050AC110-CF-50-Waeco-CoolFreeze-Portable-Fridge-Freezer-AC-DC-CF-50-Trailer-Camper-RV
Then there are stirling coolers that hold -40 C for science use, but these are $3k.
http://www.amazon.com/Twinbird-SC-DF25-Digital-Portable-Capacity/dp/B008B88YXS
Or you can get a stirling cooler good to -86 C for a mere $6k.
https://us.vwr.com/store/catalog/product.jsp?catalog_number=10027-518
http://www.ametek.com/press/press-display/Sunpower-Cryocoolers-Delivered-to-International-Space-Station.aspx
Says there are numbers of them in orbit. NASA does not mess with unreliable lab equipment.
On cost of stirling free piston generator. It happens that I was a consultant to a small engine manufacturer when they examined a Sunpower 1kW stirling. Their engineers were enthusiastic, and estimated the cost/kW in large scale production at somewhere less than $300. This one did include gas bearings, was balanced and had proven good performance and life. The production people said there was nothing in that design any more difficult than a diesel, including the bearings, which were far less finicky than a fuel injector.
The company president vetoed the engineer’s endorsement with “We are making money on what we already sell.”
So much for that.
Who’s in for a new business?
Maybe time to revisit this, eh? More than a decade ago Bill Gross gave this TED talk and in it he describe one very nifty little stirling engine he developed that is able to track the sun with very cheap and reliable off the shelf technology. I’m sure there would at least be a niche market for this today.
https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_on_new_energy
Thanks f or that one,Fred.
I like Bill Gross, but he didn’t do the obvious- read whats out there. That talk was made decades after the thermocompressor, and the free piston stirling were well known and widely worked and published.
look up artificial heart program in the 70’s.
Both of these things are a LOT less complex than his, as well as a lot more efficient. And they had no lube and no seal problem.
As for that pedal thing, seems to me that with the same aiming tech a simpler parabola would work just fine, Accurate tracking is not a problem, and the mount needs only flexures, not bearings.
New business, anyone?
PS. I love my PV, I live smack in the most average place in the US, straight sun is rare. But if I lived on the red sea, or baja california, I would go for a stirling.
There is a theory out there that the sun has already “gone out” at the core and propagation of the event outwards will take a while.
It had to be a fifth grader that came up with that theory. Or perhaps a third grader. That’s not how stars “go out”.
Won’t know for 10,000 years. That’s how long it takes the shortest path initial gamma to get to the surface from the core.
DANG! And I had thought that I had invested in a reliable source of power at last. Ah well—
The Sun contains 99.8% of the mass in the solar system and we have a very accurate grasp of what proportions of elements it is composed of. It’s not some random guess that our star is in the middle of its Main Sequence life on the H-R Diagram.
I agree Astronomy is still in its infancy, but that does not mean we are whimsically guessing that the Sun has 4 billion years of life left as opposed to 10,000.
We know quite well how much Hydrogen and Helium are in the Sun, and in turn we know quite well how long its Main Sequence fusion reactions will last.
In the words of Neil Degrasse Tyson “Just sayin'”
My passion is Astronomy, so I’m really just incredibly happy we’re ever so slightly brushing that subject. For some odd reason no one ever seems interested in 99.9999999999999% of reality. It’s always of Earth, this geologic time period, and human things.
Quite limited in my mind! But everyone would rather discuss last nights Football game, or where they went on vacation than well… anything that doesn’t involve, quite specifically, Earth and humans.
Yes, but after 1 billion years, the Sun will start fusing Helium. Then it will be too hot for life on Earth. Global Warming 2.0. Perhaps Io, or Titan would be a nice place to live then.
John B,
I excitedly agree that we currently have the technology to accurately measure the composition of exoplanets. In fact, we’ve already done it! We found water vapor in an exoplanets spectral signature, which is great news.
The James Webb Telescope, Hubble’s much anticipated, vastly over budget, and far behind schedule successor, will be able to accurately identify the composition of goldilocks zone Super Earths. The JWST will use data from TESS, Kepler’s successor, to pinpoint which exoplanets we can glean spectral info from. This is, quite literally, right around the corner.
It is my personal belief that other intelligent species out there know or have before known that this planet likely harbored life. Any atmosphere, like ours, that fights entropy by having an oxidized atmosphere pretty much has life by definition, and other smart things out there would know this.
What me and Ron doubt isn’t that other life is capable of knowing this rock has life on it. What we doubt is their ability to travel here.
Let me explain.
Voyager 1 has been traveling at 38,000 mph non-stop for 35 years. It just entered interstellar space in December 2012, and is thus 0.02 light years from Earth.
It will have to travel another 75,000 years just to reach our closest neighbor Proxima Centauri.
I love Isaac Asimov and whole heartedly agree that modern technology is identical to magic for people during Galileo’s day. I am in no way doubting that technology will reveal to us splendid things I could never have fathomed.
The problem is that we did not have a good understanding of physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics 400 years ago. Today we have particle accelerators and very, very, very precise measurements of what exactly is possible with the physical laws of the universe.
Keep in mind that Einstein did not prove wrong Newton’s Laws. Newton;s Laws are still accurate if precision is not necessary. And, likewise, Newton did not prove wrong Kepler’s Laws.
Point being, no Theory of Everything of going to overturn the measurements and data we have. A Theory of Everything that perfectly defines the physical universe and overturns our current understanding would simply be a mathematical model that perfectly conforms to our measurements of physical reality, which are now precise down to incredible amounts of significant digits.
A perfect technology would be 100% efficient WITHIN THE PHYSICAL LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE. Not yelling there, just emphasizing because this is the important thing to take away. Technology can only get us to 100% efficiency, and even with a super duper futuristic blow your mind type technology that 100% efficiency would STILL leave us with a very, very, very, very, very, very, very long journey.
I don’t want to do too long of a post so I’ll end it there, but I will gladly explain why, and how it is we know, that things like wormholes, quantum mechanics, super position, and other cited methods are not physically possible. What it comes down to is that our large deficiencies in technology and mathematical models do not change the fact that we have measurements that tell us quite precisely what is and is not possible. Measurement reflects the ultimate reality, and we have an overwhelmingly strong grasp of what is possible, even if our models are clearly wrong – like the incompatibility of quantum mechanics with special and general relativity.
Thanks Brian, astronomy is one of my passions also, but I have a couple of others. However I cannot agree that astronomy is still in its infancy. It may still have a lot of growing to do, if civilization lasts much longer. But it has came a long way since the days of Galileo, Kepler and Tycho. Those were the days of the infancy of Astronomy.
But I have been an astronomy reader for since I was a teenager. Asimov was always my favorite astronomy writer. But I had others.
Hey, I have a pet peeve with a lot of people who think they know something about astronomy. Some folks believe we will actually go to other planets outside the solar system. No, it will never happen, and by never I mean never. Not in the lifetime of any human who will ever live on earth.
It’s all about physics, time and distance. There are no such thing as warp speed or worm holes to travel through. That’s all science fiction and science fiction is not real science.
Um, how about just sending out our DNA structure, the other guy puts it together, and there we are. Speed of light.
Ron,
Always great to see another Astronomy lover. It has always centered me to think of how truly unimportant I am, and how the entire history of Earth – much less of Homo sapiens – is of no import. Makes nothing ever seem like a big deal. I still take pragmatic action when necessary, but don’t attach the emotional vagaries of thinking anything I ever do will have some cosmic importance.
I only say we’re in Astronomies infancy in the sense that we have barely just begun discovering exosolar planets with Kepler. We have faintly measured the atmospheric composition of atmospheres outside our solar system, and we haven’t even begun to touch the surface regarding Astrobiology.
We’re certainly on the same page, it is likely that our galaxy is rich with life, even intelligent life, but they are all forever isolated islands between which even the most advanced technology cannot commute. Technology simply cannot break the laws of physics.
If it you could go back in time a few hundred years. And tell the average citizen of Earth, that in the future it would be possible to travel to the Moon, have pictures sent back from the surface of Mars, photograph planets around other stars, freeze and later revive human eggs and sperm, and that the world chess champion would be a computer. They would probably tell you that you were crazy.
It is true that we can’t send a manned mission to another star with current technology. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it would be impossible to do it in the future. A large generational “Ark” type ship might be possible. Or perhaps further developments in suspended animation.
It is possible now, and plans have been put forth, to build a large space based optical array telescope. Such a device would be able to not only visually detect exoplanets, but observe their weather patterns, and surface features. It is also possible now to communicate with advanced civilizations on exoplanets (if they exist). Organized efforts have been made to listen for intelligent radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
John, you have been reading way too many science fiction novels.
I will only make one point, even with the most powerful telescopes, even space based telescopes, a star is still just a point of light. Seeing weather patterns on a tiny planet circling a star is beyond science fiction.
Hi Ron,
You are obviously an excellent researcher. If you were to put the Peak Oil question aside for a few minutes, and study the current state of exoplanet research. You would find that weather observation is very much a real science, and is being investigated extensively. Even now with existing instruments. Of course, future instruments such as the JWST, will provide much greater detail.
http://www.astrobio.net/topic/deep-space/cosmic-evolution/weather-map-of-distant-world-could-shed-new-light-on-planets/
http://www.nature.com/news/cloudy-skies-on-nearby-super-earth-1.14450
John, I don’t doubt that there are things they can tell about exoplanet atmosphere. My point was, and is, that you are not going to be able to observe the cloud cover, or weather, with any optical telescope.
They analize the light spectrum of the star and observe changes as the planet eclipses the star. Changes in the spectrum are caused by starlight passing through the atmosphere of the planet. Even the star itself however, is still just a point of light.
Ahem!
>
even with the most powerful telescopes, even space based telescopes, a star is still just a point of light
<
http://www.universetoday.com/51741/astronomy-without-a-telescope-%E2%80%93-more-than-meets-the-eye/
http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0927b/
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap031102.html
NAOM
Notanoilman, the picture of Betelgeuse is an interferometry reconstruction from an array of telescopes. It is not a single image from any optical telescope.
However you must understand that Betelgeuse is not an ordinary star. It is a red giant 850 million miles in diameter. The Sun’s diameter is 864 thousand miles. So Betelgeuse almost 1000 times the diameter of the sun. If Betelgeuse were placed where the sun is, it would engulf all four inner planets, the asteroid belt and reach almost to the orbit of Jupiter. Jupiter is 484 million miles from the sun.
But it is the one star that is large enough that, with an array of telescopes, we can reconstruct an image. And with the Hubble Space telescope we can get a pretty good image of Betelgeuse.
So I stand corrected in the case of Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse is only about 10 million years old and has about another million years of life before it goes supernova. Giant stars don’t live very long.
Ron, et. al.
re: pictures of stars, exoplanets…
There are several interferometers now, the
best one I know of is Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy.
It can resolve equivalent to a 1/5th mile diameter telescope (though obviously not collect as much light), or 200 micro-arcseconds, size of a nickel at 10,000 miles. That’s more than an order of magnitude better than Hubble or the ground-based 8 meter class scopes (except those that can be used as interferometers).
http://www.chara.gsu.edu
They have done “firsts” of things like measure the diameter of (large) exoplanets, imaging the surface of a main-sequence star (first was Altair in 2007), imaging an eclipse of a binary system, etc.
So more than Betelgeuse has been imaged.
I’m thinking the continent-wide Very Long Baseline Interferometry radio telescopes have also imaged normal sized stars, though in radio frequencies instead of near-IR.
Also of interest is the Infrared Spatial Interferometer array – they use an isotopically pure CO2 laser to heterodyne the infrared they “view” down into radio frequencies, which they then run thru an RF interferometer.
http://isi.ssl.berkeley.edu
Just for clarification, the “space based array telescope” I was referring to earlier, was not from a science fiction novel, but NASA Administrator Dan Goldin. He had put forth some bold ideas in 1999, but was replaced when Bush was elected. Bush wanted to focus on manned spaceflight, and the array has been budgeted down to the single Webb Telescope. However, the Webb, and the EELT should produce some interesting images in the near future.
Goldin’s vision:
“The ultimate goal is to take a picture with a resolution high enough to see oceans, mountain ranges, cloud cover, and the continents of an Earth-like world.”
http://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff1999/ard1.htm
Cambridge University astronomer Professor Gerry Gilmore on the EELT:
“In 15 years, we should have a picture of a planet around another star and that picture could show its surface changing colour just as Earth does as the seasons change – indicating that vegetation exists on that world. We will then have found alien life.”
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/20/spot-alien-life-european-extremely-large-telescope-chilean
Ron,
regarding all your statements that human ability to image exoplanets is pure science fiction, I submit that you are incorrect.
I happen to agree with you about human spaceflight beyond the solar system (heck even sending humans to Mars would require a financial commitment we won’;t make), but I think you are unaware of the optical physics calculations which show that it is indeed possible to image exoplanets to at least say 25×25 pels (pixel elements) for planets withing say 40 light years from Earth. Calculations suggest that far better images cold be obtained, all without any breakthroughs in physics…no warp drive, no wormholes, no nuclear fusion or any other stuff like that required.
It requires will and engineering, and no, I am not talking about anything near the scope required to construct enough solar power system satellite to power the Earth…the level of effort for a space-based planet imager would be at least several orders of magnitude less than the pipe dram of a total Space-Based Solar energy solution.
Dr. Cash’s starshade concept is one approach that would be part of the required capability:
http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/fellows/mar05/999Cash.pdf
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/newworlds/new_worlds_imager.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Worlds_Mission#Starshade
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/13/direct-images-exoplanets/
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/12/best-photo-yet-of-an-exoplanet/
I ran across one or more no-kidding scientific papers which do the math for exoplanet imaging in great detail…if I can rediscover the links, I will post them.
Bottom line: It is entirely within our grasp to image nearby exoplanets (day within 30-40 ly from Sol) in sufficient detail for for even a non-astronomer to discern oceans/continents and large-scale weather patterns.
It is sad that we piss away resources on counterproductive things (too much MIC, for starters) and don’t make investments in the kit we need to discover more fully the spectrum of exoplanets out there…war is boring…discovering new Worlds would be exhilarating, even if we can never visit one.
Shuffling, they can’t do it now except for supergiant planets that are so big they are almost stars in their own right and also very far from the star they are orbiting.
And your links talk about stuff that are on the drawing boards that some folks think might work. Well they might and they might not.
I think the one you champion here is a little bit far out. It is a huge umbrella like shield with a pinhole in the middle. The shield is supposed to block the light from the star while they search for a planed through the pinhole. But…
It will fly 80,000 miles in front of a space telescope (between the telescope and a target star) and approximately 238,600 miles away from Earth, outside of Earth’s heliocentric orbit.
They will be looking through a pinhole 80,000 miles away. Perhaps, perhaps,
but my money would be on the bet that says this thing never gets off the drawing boards.
If studies demonstrate its feasibility and NASA approves the mission,
Nah….
Hi Ron,
A descent explanation of some observations of and hypotheses about the sun’s current activity here:
What’s wrong with the sun?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627640.800-whats-wrong-with-the-sun.html#.VC9O3xbYcVA
Crazy conspiracy theory (fifth grader) stuff about the sun here.
Is Our Sun In The Very Early Stages Of Shutting Down?
http://thetruthwins.com/archives/tag/the-sun-is-dying
One of the comments on this article is worth mentioning:
While climate change is always happening, you had better be more worried about the rise and rule of antichrist. If you have your eternal house in order, don’t be too concerned about the sun & earth, as after the 2nd coming of Christ, He will rule on earth for 1,000 years…
The challenges that humanity faces are so incredibly difficult–and real. Reading this kind of nonsense truly shakes me to the core.
Best,
Tom
Right, from your “truthtwins” link:
Traditionally, scientists have taught that the sun won’t die until billions of years from now, but in recent years astronomers have observed stars similar to our own sun suddenly begin to behave very erratically and then rapidly die.
That is a crock of shit. Astronomers have observed no such thing. The only dying stars astronomers have observed are supernovas. Otherwise astronomers have never observed a star just go out, or die.
There are periods strong sunspots. And there are historical times where they were much stronger than we currently observe in their 11 year cycle. Also there have been historical periods of hardly any sunspots at all. Sunspots have nothing to do with a dying sun.
Reminds me of Lastthursdayism, the theory that the universe was created last Thursday, and just looks older.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism
Cool. Or maybe the sun shut down 9,999 years ago so all neutrino observations on record are post shutdown and have corrupted all theories and we’re about to see the infrared result.
I actually did a post on this on my blog not long ago.
Turns out that even though some EM radiation takes thousands of years to travel to the Sun’s surface and bolt toward Earth that is but a fraction of a fraction of the billion trillion trillion trillion photons that reach us from the core. Most (within 1 standard deviation of “normal”) get here from the core within 100 years of being generated.
As a result, we would know very well if the Sun decided to be a rebel and behave in a way that is not in accordance with any of the billions we observe.
We do not know much specifically about many stars, but our methods of observation (broad and imprecise) lend us great knowledge regarding changes in stars. We have access to billions of stars, of varied composition, across all kinds of ages and the one thing our broad approach is good at is cataloging when a star changes behavior.
No star like ours – in the middle of its Main Sequence life – has randomly “shut down” or whatever is being suggested here.
Stars are pretty easy to predict. Their atomic composition is easily verified to extremely precise degrees using both spectral analysis, mass, size, and temperature. This isn’t uninformed science that will be taken by surprise. We have millions upon millions of stars of varying ages and compositions we observe. None of them have rendered the H-R Diagram obsolete.
There is, quite literally, a 0% chance that the Sun will do any different than the other millions of examples we have.
We must keep in mind that astronomy is different than many other sciences. Our modern understanding of Astronomy is relatively recent, so we’d expect “surprises”, that radically change our understanding – like our Sun, unbeknownst to us, already being “dead”.
Where most studies of how things change as they age take a long time to refine the study of stars is unique in that we have billions of participants, of every fathomable age, and composed of very few variables (total mass and atomic composition) so the ability to precisely predict changes through time is very accurate with only a short time period of observation.
Fracking is going to eventually in my opinion be conclusively linked to some public health problems in places that have never had to deal with large amounts of industrial waste previously.
Watcher may go a little overboard occasionally in my opinion in his cynicism about the government manipulating facts and figures and supporting certain industries in order to maintain business as usual but there is a substantial amount of evidence out there to indicate that sometimes he is dead on.
Hazardous waste is only hazardous depending on who generates it according to federal law. Oil and gas producers can dump things in pits and wells and rivers and sewers and the very air we breathe that would get anybody else hauled into court in a hurry.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-sludge-in-open-pits-goes-unmonitored-as-health-worries-mount-video/
OFM –
in that link, did you see under the section:
Little accounting for lots of waste
about 3 paragraphs down:
“The United States has so much oil and gas, in fact, that the industry is lobbying Congress for permission to freely export it.”
Geeze – so much for fact checking/reality understanding in Scientific American.
We do seem in fact to have a surplus of certain light oils in relation to our domestic needs and what our refineries are built to handle and we have for the moment plenty of gas and the industry is in fact to export some of both.
What the industry wants to do is export gas and get the going world price for it which is two or three times the domestic price and export some oil that is not well suited to our refineries and import some that is.This supposedly would result in some processing cost savings and I don’t see any reason why this might not be a valid argument. But my cynical guess is that any money saved would wind up as corporate profits rather than as lower prices for customers.
But we are still huge net importers of oil to be sure.
The author and an editor should have caught this little boo boo but if you read the magazine you will find that it gets the facts right in terms of energy just about all the time.
I think Sciam is right about this. Despite our vast deficit, we do have a surplus in certain areas, and exporting would be a smart way to cut the deficit. It would be even smarter (but not mutually exclusive of course) would be to tax consumption…
FYI oil’s sojourn south of $90 didn’t last long. $91 and change by the end of the day.
28 degrees in Williston tomorrow night. First I’ve seen projected below freezing. I wonder if biocide (chlorine) in the big on-wellsite swimming pools raises or lowers freezing point.
Hmm, do they heat that 6 million gallons? A hard night freeze will not let them frack even if it warms up next day. That ice won’t melt that fast. You can’t have everyone standing around waiting for ice to melt. hmmm
re: frack water heating
Hmm, a search for “frack water heater” gives a list of equipment vendors and rental agencies
for frac-water heating equipment.
The phone number on the side of the Hot Frackin’ Water truck is from Billings, MT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWaBeyKZVO4
McAda Drilling Fluids video is a tad bit more informative, barely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T3NLwQmx54
Hmmm – they give a couple more reasons to heat water (I was surprised to see that they are based in Bay City, TX – a place that might barely freeze a half-dozen times a year)
https://mcadafluidsheating.com/about
Besides the obvious freezing weather, if you pump cold fluid down a hole,
the casing might contract and cause a “catastrophic casing failure”.
And cross-linked gels need certain temperatures to work correctly.
I wonder if this might be considered a “catastrophic casing failure”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=648W66s5Fus
Bakken Today has a bit more on snow and cold temps.
Looks like a big issue is just plowing roads for truck access (including hauling oil out),
as well as the need to stop and warm up the people trying to work outside in frigid temps.
http://www.bakkentoday.com/event/article/id/35804/publisher_ID/82/
I was going to say that the amounts of stuff in frack fluid would seem too small to cause significant freezing point depression, and calculate it out based on 200 ppm free chlorine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezing-point_depression
n.b. you cannot increase the freezing point of water by adding anything to it.
But because the pH of fracking fluids is typically changed to bust the gel, one needs a non-pH sensitive biocide, so something like gluteraldehyde is used instead of chlorine bleach.
And not so corrosive is a plus too.
Industry friendly sources like the shale gas wiki typically say “other” (besides water and sand) is 0.44%, so biocide is way down there, 0.001%
http://uscerf.com/index.php/Fracturing_fluid
Now you know another reason why the EROEI of unconventional oil is so bad,
think of all the propane needed to heat a zillion gallons of frack, flowback, and produced water.
Good data. Thanx.
Produced water should already be hot.
Correct. As I recall the geothermal gradient is is 25 °C per 1000m of depth (That would be one degree Fahrenheit per 70 feet if you’re a Yank, or if you live in Burma).
Terrific you caught those mistakes in the data, Ron. Thanks for your observations and maintaining this site. This is my first stop on my daily info trapline after the weather network.
Paulo
Hell, it would have been hard to miss the mistakes. When I saw the totals I knew instantly there was a mistake somewhere. It took only a minute to find it. In Excel, I just subtracted all June numbers from May numbers to see who was out of line. Then it became obvious.
What is shocking is the EIA still has not corrected their database. Four days after publication, the mistake is still there. As I said, the international data seems to have a very low priority these days. All the focus is on domestic production of oil and gas as well as refinery inputs and outputs.
Ron, can you give us their email address? If more of us write to them, perhaps they will have the mistake corrected faster?
It’s on the web at: CONTACT US International Experts
The crude oil contact is:
Crude Oil Production and Crude Oil Reserves
Patricia Smith 202-586-6925 patricia.smith@eia.gov
Kashagan will not be on line until 2017, then it will take two years to ramp up to 370,000 barrels per day and will likely never produce more than that amount.
Kazakhstan expecting oil production decline by 2017
When it finally kicks off, the first stage of development of Kashagan is due to produce around 50,000 barrels per day (bpd) and then ramp up to around 370,000 bpd of crude within two years.
“So far, the partners have spent close to $50 billion, making Kashagan the world’s most expensive oil project by some distance. There is no indication about the timing of a second stage of development, which would push production up toward 1 million bpd, and some sources doubt that it will ever go ahead given the project’s tortured history.”
“It’s not going to happen, no way”, a source close to the consortium says, although other observers say the Kazakh government will not allow its flagship project to be cut short.
You may recall I was in Kazakhstan awhile back while my wife was helping a scientist there with English notations on his paper about quark-gluon plasma and spent most of my time wandering around a major university trying to get some “real” info about Kashagan. It was pretty much like talking to the walls: Stonewalled at every turn — I wonder why?
Classic case of not needing oil to flow. As long as Kazahk’s govt spending and ministers pockets get filled with foreign money, hey don’t care all that much if it doesn’t flow. Of course, they care a little because royalties will be collected, but this is like collecting lease payments for land that never drilled. It’s a shrug to the collector.
Continental Shares Fall On Higher Bakken Costs 18, September
shares in the Oklahoma City-based company fell nearly 8% today while other oil and gas stocks were flat. Considering Hamm’s 70% stake in Continental, today’s market move has shaved about $1.2 billion off his fortune.
The concern appears to stem from Continental’s disclosure that its well costs in the Bakken had climbed to $10 million per well, about $2.5 million (higher) than a year ago.
Time for one of Watcher’ s cynical comments? Last time I looked oil was trading at $88.38.
$89.73. Lotsa sigma.
This article is clearly a reporter who sat in the briefing, the slides of which we went through here a few Ronposts ago.
The increased price per well is not a stagnant number. The slides showed well stage count increasing and proppant use increasing because of indications that increase got more oil flowing.
The reporter did celebrate some numbers on that one particular slide that quoted 1P OOIP and then applied 15% recovery to it. Guy is a bozo.
CLR is down almost 20% since 1 Sep, 2+ weeks before that investor mtg.
But if you’d like a nice dose of cynicism, my offering would be a company orchestrated decline to deny Hamm’s ex-wife-to-be a bigger number.
But if you’d like a nice dose of cynicism, my offering would be a company orchestrated decline to deny Hamm’s ex-wife-to-be a bigger number.
That has to be a joke. I know you cannot be serious.
Watcher, I love cynicism and you’re really good at it: Usually!
btw EOG looks like it’s down 15% over the same time period. The article compressed their ballyhoo to one day.
1) The price rise per well is not stagnant. The wells are different (more stages) and produce more oil (via more proppant).
2) Oil price fall is probably most of the stock price hit. Suncor has it, too.
3) Earnings management is a tried and true methodology of CEO longevity. You give your board a number for the quarter. You can defer sales or costs to tell them what you want, essentially banking news good and/or bad, for future use when you need it. Sometimes the LAST thing you want to do is report better than expected results to the board because they will want 5% tacked onto that number next year. So . . . you moderate what you report so you can show steady 2 or 3% growth instead — which gets you a longer time collecting salaries and rides in the fractional share Netjets plane for you and your mistress to Jamaica — for a business conference. Report big numbers and you fail to deliver growth and maybe a new CEO search starts. So do not imagine a company can’t manufacture any result it wants . . . this is the stuff of non GAAP.
Oh and pssssst, share buybacks.
Oh and pretty good chunk of oil price fall is yardstick changed length.
Let’s see how much:
Aug 29 2014 $96ish
Today’s close $89.86 front month call it $90ish about 6.25% down
0.7
Euro start of Sep about 1.316 dollars = 1 euro
Euro today close 1.25 dollars = 1 euro about 5.1% yardstick change
GBP start of Sep about 1.64 dollars = 1 pound
GBP today close 1.597 pounds = 1 dollar about 2.5% yardstick change
JPY start of Sep 104.8 yen = 1 USD
JPY close today 109.7 yen = 1 USD about 4.9% yardstick change
Note that when these majors move a lot of other currencies piggy back and you get screaming headlines about the ruble and peso. They don’t mean much.
Regardless, big chunk of oil’s move is the yardstick.
Cook Inlet Rig Fire:
http://gcaptain.com/response-underway-for-fire-aboard-cook-inlet-drilling-platform/
Decreasing the total consumption of oil will be a blessing in disguise. Decreasing coal production and consumption will also be a blessing in disguise. You don’t go out and buy some gold to dissolve it in a solution of aqua regia, likewise, it’s time to stop burning oil with reckless abandon. It’s a no brainer.
Using electricity to manufacture synthetic fuel by absorbing man made CO2 from the atmosphere is a blessing in disguise. Kind of like having your cake and eating it too.
A train pulling 110 oil tanker cars of Bakken oil is a problem, a volatile hazardous cargo, 110 million cars with 10 to 20 gallons of explosive gasoline in the tanks are good to go.
uff da, beam me up, Scotty.
I share your opinion but, based on casual conversations in my neck of the swamp, I just don’t see it happening until push comes to shove. I have a very brainy friend who recently bought a humungous Toyota PU truck. He’s good with its miserable gas mileage. This is pretty typical around here.
And collectively we are extremely near sighted with respect to gas prices, rarely looking beyond the range of our gas gauge.
Virtually no one wants additional pipelines, hence transport via rail continues to increase. How many of us in the states either remember or even know about that small Quebec town that was virtually blown off the planet by burning/exploding rail cars?
Based on the charts provided on this site, it looks to me that current world oil production is being jacked up almost completely by Texas and a couple of (large) counties in ND. It will be interesting to see how the global oil markets shake out after that nearly linear increase up in LTO changes and starts heading south.
The decline of the fisheries is a good example. Everyone knows overfishing is not a smart idea, but nobody “owns” the fish stock, so the practice continues until the fish suddenly disappear. The price depends on how easy it is to catch fish, not on how many years it will remain easy to catch fish.
If you are feeling a little too euphoric and think a bit of gloom and doom would make you more balanced, read up on the decline of high sea fish stocks.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Time_series_for_Atlantic_northwest_cod_minus_Canada.png
“Using electricity to manufacture synthetic fuel by absorbing man made CO2 from the atmosphere is a blessing in disguise. Kind of like having your cake and eating it too.”
Hmm, wouldn’t burning that fuel put the CO2 back?
Yes
http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/hydrogensynfuel.pdf
I know this is not exactly on topic, but I thought it was perhaps a bit of a roadmap of what may happen to FFs at some point:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-02/diamond-hunters-give-up-search-for-gems-too-hard-to-find.html
Rgds
WP
You don’t starve without diamonds.
“The earliest date Lake Sakakawea has ever frozen over was Nov. 23, 1955.”
That’s the big Lake between the mega NoDak counties Mountrail, McKenzie. Source of fracking water.
Weird…
And this would be why…
Wonder if it’ll set up into a consistent pattern?
Does anybody know right off how to convert millibars to elevation above sea level?250 would be pretty high up.
http://www.convertunits.com/
Perhaps you already found an answer to this, or perhaps not, but the 250 mb (or hPa) pressure level, or any pressure level for that matter, will not be found at a constant height above sea level unless you have an atmosphere free of weather and attendant temperature changes. Obviously, this is not the case on earth. However, in the mid-latitudes the 250 mb pressure level is generally located around 10-11 km (roughly 33,000-36,000 ft) above sea level. The graphic here is an exception, but usually depictions of the 250 mb pressure level created from weather forecast models include height contours (isoheights, often expressed in decameters [dam]) along with wind contours (isotachs). The latter kind of contour is practically standard on 250 mb charts since the jet stream is frequently found in the mid-latitudes at this pressure level.
I see that the Saudis are not lowering production in order to shore up global oil price. Could it be that they see some benefit in lower prices; stress for high cost producers in the hope their forward production will go unfunded? Pretty sure they can wear lower income for a while especially if it leads to less investment by others. Shale, Arctic, ultra deep…?
Patrick,
That’s confusing. “…. the Saudis are not lowering production…” Don’t you mean the Saudis are NOW lowering production…” ?
Saudi said they cut their production by 408,000 barrels per day in August. However Reuters says they boosted output in September:
OPEC oil output hits highest since 2012 on Libya, Saudi-Reuters Survey
* Supply rises by 810,000 bpd, led by Libya
* Saudi pumps more, other Gulf members keep supply flat…
OPEC pumps a third of the world’s oil and meets next in November. This month, the largest increase has come from Libya, where supply is up by 280,000 bpd despite conflict. Iraq, Nigeria, Angola and Saudi Arabia also boosted output.
The OPEC MOMR comes out Friday the 10th. We will know then what is really happening. Somehow I just don’t think that 810,000 bpd is accurate. But we will just have to wait and see.
So I’m the one whose confused (not unusual). Sorry Patrick (and Ron).
When data gets inconsistent (like with the economy), it pretty much always stems from one or both of two effects:
1) Outright lying, which is quite rare
2) Systemic change in the item measured. Like the “gasoline sales by retail outlets owned by refineries”. Or housing in the US, with buying-for-cash-to-rent-out getting compared to historical buys by families to live in.
The measurements of Saudi output may no longer measure what it used to. I frankly have the same suspicion about the nat gas storage inventory in the US showing an amount far below average for this time of year, but no evidence of price spike. I suspect it’s being stored somewhere now that is not measured by the old method.
In my view Saudi Arabia is defending its market position against shale oil. As the US made a lot of noise to becoming the biggest oil producer worldwide, it has not yet proved that shale oil can be sustainable at low oil prices. We are already seeing a collapse of the junk bond market in the US, which makes financing new shale production very difficult. The 400 bn shale oil and gas market has experienced in the last few months a 20% price drop, which means 80 bn less cash annualized. In addition shale oil and gas companies currently cannot get financing for new production, the bond market is shut as long as oil prices fall. This represents another shortfall of around 80 bn USD. So the shale oil and gas market has a cash shortfall of 160 bn USD annualized- or nearly half of the total market size. The US can show the world now that it is really the future king of the oil market, despite the huge cash shortfall. This is now the litmus test for shale oil and gas.
Specifics.
There are two categories of debt. Investment grade and speculative grade (called “junk”). S&P and Moodys define this via their ratings.
For Moodys the sequence is Aa1, Aa2, Aa3, A1, A2, A3 and Baa1, Baa2, Baa3. Those ratings are investment grade, by definition. Junk starts at Ba1, Ba2, Ba3, B1, B2, B3 and so on down to C.
The jump from Baa3 down to Ba1 is huge.
S&P have their own letter designators that mean the same thing. The two agencies rarely differ.
Continental Resources is rated Baa3 overall as a company as of Dec 2013. That was an upgrade. They were junk. The latest bond issuance on record seems to be April 2013 and it was Ba2.
A tad surprising because I have seen text suggesting a newer issuance was not rated junk.
EOG proposed a note issuance somewhat recently that Moody’s rated A3. Not junk.
KOG’s June 2013 issuance was rated B3.
So . . . one can have some confidence that the smaller fry are issuing junk, but not all the shale players are junk. It is interesting that phrasing like “banks are lending this money and will lose it” probably is not legit. The public buys these bonds more so than banks.
As we have seen during the housing crisis, even triple A bonds can be downgraded overnight to junk, when the underlying business unfolds. This is what exactly happens in the oil market right now . Shale oil and gas needs constantly growing prices. Yet oil prices are falling steeply. It is now interesting to see how deep prices will fall. This is the dark side of being Saudi America: When oil prices are falling, there is the same pain as for any other oil producing country. And shale oil is a very marginal player in the market. Saudi Arabia can sustain low prices for a long period.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-02/orphaned-russian-oil-heads-to-u-s-west-on-asia-overflow.html
It seems that the variations in the physical qualities of different crudes are more than enough to make it profitable to routinely ship them anywhere these days.
I wonder if the owners of refineries are going to start rebuilding them to accommodate the crudes sourced closer to ” home” meaning the refinery itself of course rather than the home of the corporation.
We seem to have passed peak refineries some time back. The folks who own them are probably mostly able to read the peak oil writing on the wall and thus reluctant to spend money on them that might take decades to recover.
Big problem for refineries — the train cars from NoDak have hugely varying content railcar to railcar. Not surprising since the trucks can arrive from a county following a truck from a different county. So the refinery tuning doesn’t get to work for more than a few hundred barrels before it needs changing. Either that or sample every railcar and drive the train back and forth.
Maybe the frackers will have to build themselves a blending plant so as to ensure a consistent product.
Tobacco companies maintain big warehouses full of various tobaccos so as to be able to manufacture cigarettes day after day that taste exactly the same day after day even though the exact mix of tobaccos does vary a bit as they use up one or another kind.
This is probably too expensive to be implemented … unless it becomes necessary in order to prevent the buyers from insisting on sharp price discounts due to the variability of the fracked oils.
Non-vintage wine works the same way.
Lynn Helms recently was quoted about creating a Bakken standard. And a lot of the thinner Bakken liquid goes north to dilute Suncor output — err oil sands output, I tend to treat them as the same thing.
We harp a bit on diesel and kerosene scarcity (compared to Libya) from shale, but truth is gasoline has a market. An apparent big problem with Bakken output is inconsistent metals content truck to truck.
I’m gonna say the blend process would be uber expensive. You have to sample and know what truck has what and then offload this truck with that truck into a rail car.
No way. Nothing that slows things down can be allowed. Production will collapse. 64% of output is wells less than 18 mos old. You CAN NOT slow down.
Which is why the flaring regulations will be waived away (see spelling).
Blending might work differently. Each well probably produces a reasonably consistent crude and so testing would be necessary only once for each particular well.
I happen to know as the result of being a rolling stone that tankers are compartmented. From three to eight or so separate tanks per truck is typical.A single large tank even with lots of baffles is almost impossible to drive safely unless fully loaded or nearly empty due to the liquid load shifting during braking and on curves etc.
SO- The oil from a particular well would be of known characteristics. The oil has to be trucked to a terminal of some sort to be offloaded to trains or into a pipeline.
My guess is that there are already large holding tanks on site to expedite this process since trains and trucks can’t just sit around and pipelines need a nice steady flow of liquids to work properly.
SO- Unloading a truck into a specific tank or tanks depending on what it has collected would allow the terminal operator to produce a series of consistent blends.
It is true that this would cost a hell of a lot of money but the extra holding tanks would, one, probably allow SOMEBODY to get a higher price for the oil, and two, allow trucks to operate more efficiently by reducing wait time during unloading.
It might also be possible to load trains faster.It might not be possible to load an entire train with a known blend at any given time but it should be possible to do it with two or three or blends each loaded into half or a third of the cars.
And various products are shipped routinely thru one pipeline on many occasions with a slug of some other liquid between runs of each product. I only know about this from reading the old TOD where it was mentioned. For instance gasoline can be pumped followed by a slug of kerosene followed by diesel fuel followed by another slug of kerosene followed by gasoline again..I have no idea how the kerosene is cleaned up but it cleans up the gasoline and diesel residues sufficiently that this is a workable process .
Lastly this whole operation might make it possible to avoid the necessity of upgrading all the tank cars. Properly blended crude might not be nearly so volatile and dangerous.
“Blending might work differently. Each well probably produces a reasonably consistent crude and so testing would be necessary only once for each particular well. ”
Maybe old well thinking?
That new well is draining oil from a mile away horizontal. It’s not going to mix itself. Don’t know, but given a full mile of distance it’s conceivable the well output changes nature.
That’s actually a good question. What comes up first? Horizontally near oil and then farther and farther away? It almost has to be this way.
Watcher,
“do you know how far seismic charges propagate? Can some nasty someone position sensors and get imagery from charges they didn’t pay for?”
Well I’d have to say to the earth’s core (big enough charges) and yes, nasty “someones” could probably do that but it might be more efficient to bug the guy’s office or hack his computer; industrial spying in a big (really big) part of life in the oil patch.
However, in my opinion, reservoir geophysics which necessarily includes data analysis that involves processing, inversion, and interpretation is too complex, or maybe I should say too specialized a field, to discuss in Ron’s forum. Furthermore, most important developments in seismic surveying, especially the data analysis, have occurred during the past 15 years when 3-D seismic (an order of magnitude increase in complexity) assumed a dominant position. I do try to keep up on all this stuff, out of habit, but recall that I retired 10 years ago.
Well, it’s not my cup of tea either but there was cause to examine talk of pre salt imagery being different in capability now than in the past and that was here in the comments some months ago.
My recall is someone sharp spoke up and had details.
Good call on the hacking of the contractor being cheaper. Most of those 3D firms look like startups who damn sure aren’t going to burn venture capital on security.
Following is a chart of API Gravity versus sulfur content for 16 types of global crude oil. Note the cutoff point for API gravity:
Yup. I posted a link to a table of assays and they were headed up to 50, with a formal Eagle Ford type labeled above 50.
And it’s important that we don’t just consider this some kind of inside baseball stuff.
This thin oil doesn’t have the same muscle in it per barrel. Period. We are in power decline and there is no fix for this.
Of course, the most critical difference between crude oil and condensate is the distillate yield. Check out the graph in the following article, which I posted before (you can click on graph for a larger image):
http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/crude-petroleum/4561
It would appear that distillate yield drops by half going from just 39 API gravity crude to 42 API gravity crude (from about 24% to about 12%). Note that they refer to 42 gravity crude as “condensate.”
Data . . . diesel has 13% more energy per gallon than gasoline. Kerosene just a tiny amount less than diesel, still more than gasoline.
Should add that diesel engines oncork superior horsepower per unit volume of fuel vs gasoline. So the 13% number just quoted is entirely insufficient. There’s an additional 30-35% advantage in engine design results, but I think part of that is the 13%.
Regardless, the proper quote functionally is 35%, not 13%.
42. It won’t be too much longer before 50 becomes oil.
Here’s the graph.
Note that as the API gravity went from 39 API gravity to 42 API gravity, the distillate yield fell from about 24% to about 12%, and the gasoline yield increased from about 27% to about 70%.
So, for 100 barrels of product from 39 API gravity crude, the refinery got about 24 barrels of distillate and about 27 barrels of gasoline.
For 100 barrels of product from 42 API gravity crude, the refinery got about 12 barrels of distillate and about 70 barrels of gasoline.
One can see where the trend is headed with 45 and greater API gravity condensate.
Hi WestTex,
To get a baseline for our study we recalculated EIA data from 2000 to 2005. The EIA didn’t give API at that point, but they gave exergy (available energy); total energy, and volume. Between 2000 and 2005 the average world API according to the EIA was 37.5 deg. That is why we use 37.5 deg. (140,000 BTU/gal) as the standard all through the study. Every 2 deg increase in API reduces the energy content of the oil by about 1%.
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/depletion2_011.htm
To get distillates out of lighter oils requires a lot of energy, so much so that anything over about 45 deg in most cases makes it unprofitable. The same goes for extra heavy. To process Mayan 21 takes 28% more energy than WTI. Once you get to 50 API all you get is high test camel pee.
Nice graph above. I saved that one.
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/
Been monitoring for some time and might help a bit as to the interception of seismic signal and depth of propogation. Usable signal by a source like dynamite, (depending on charge size), will traverse through say up to around 30-40 thousand feet or more of sediment, if conditions are right, with enough energy to reflect off a density contrast in the rock and back to receivers at the surface. You could theoretically intercept a reflected signal, but would only be of use to you if you had the exact xy coordinate of where the energy was introduced into the ground and the exact time zero of its origin. These factors are neeeded to solve the trig problems as to how deep the signal went and at what angle before you intercepted it. Data received would not be very usable without those.
Well said.
I will add if anyone wants to pursue exploration geophysics topics in depth, an excellent source is: The RECORDER (Canadian Society of Exploration Geophysicists).
For example, I just discovered an excellent paper by Kelly & Lawton: “Interpretation of Time-Lapse Seismic Data from a Heavy Oil Field, Alberta, Canada.”
http://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/interpretation-of-time-lapse-seismic-data-from-a-heavy-oil-field-alberta
But, more applicable to Ron’s Blog is a paper in the same volume: “Unconventional Petroleum Resources and “Hubbert’s Peak” by Laurence Lines
“You could theoretically intercept a reflected signal, but would only be of use to you if you had the exact xy coordinate of where the energy was introduced into the ground and the exact time zero of its origin. ”
Hmmm. It really would be easier hacking the contractor and get all the data after he collects it. It fact, one might want to wait for him to have time to do the analysis, too. Then hack that.
Hmmm rev 1.0.
Multiple receive points of differing distances and geometry should hmmm interferometry technique to reproduce XY and time and abscond with the numbers yadda yadda maybe.
Drought conditions continuing in Australia
By Farmers Journal on 01 October 2014
Australian farmers expecting the worse seeking aid as drought to continue into December.
And the games begin:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/01/ukraine-crisis-gas-idUSL6N0RW3TZ20141001?feedType=RSS&feedName=utilitiesSector
According to the North Dakota government, the Bakken oil production per well peaked in 2012 at 144 barrels/day. It now stands at 130 barrels/day.
https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/historicalbakkenoilstats.pdf
Brian Rose:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
NOT Asimov, although I’m sure he agreed. 😉
Ron,
Images of exoplanets already exist.
http://d1jqu7g1y74ds1.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/BetaPictorisb.jpg
Not much, but it’s a start.
I need a link to the text of the article with this image. I am not sure what it is.
It looks a lot like Sirius B.
You can read a little more here:
http://www.universetoday.com/107854/super-sensitive-camera-captures-a-direct-image-of-an-exoplanet/
It’s Beta Pictoris b, as the file name suggests.
Also here’s a tip (if you use Chrome at least): Right click any image and choose google image search on it.
The reason you can see it is it has a surface temperature of 1700 degrees Kelvin or 2600 degrees Fahrenheit. It glows in its own right, from energy it produces, not from reflected energy.
Beta Pictoris b
The SED is consistent with that of an early L dwarf, but with a lower surface gravity. The effective temperature is constrained to 1700+100
−100 K
SED means Spectral Energy Distribution and an “L dwarf” is a brown dwarf star. The “exoplanet” is almost a star in its own right but its gravity is not quite strong enough. So they decided to call it an “extrasolar planet” instead.
This is the case for all very large bodies that are on the borderline between a star and a planet. That is the light you see is light produced by the body itself, not reflected light of its nearby star.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/global-sand-stocks-disappear-as-it-becomes-highly-sought-resource-a-994851.html
The phenomenon of disappearing beaches is not unique to Cape Verde. With demand for sand greater than ever, it can be seen in most parts of the world, including Kenya, New Zealand, Jamaica and Morocco. In short, our beaches are disappearing. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in the past 25 years,” says Robert Young, a coastal researcher at Western Carolina University. “We’re talking about ugly, miles-long moonscapes where nothing can live anymore.”
The sand on our ocean shores, once a symbol of inexhaustibility, has suddenly become scarce. So scarce that stealing it has become attractive.
Never before has Earth been graced with the prosperity we are seeing today, with countries like China, India and Brazil booming. But that also means that demand for sand has never been so great. It is used in the production of computer chips, plates and mobile phones. More than anything, though, it is used to make cement. You can find it in the skyscrapers in Shanghai, the artificial islands of Dubai and in Germany’s autobahns.
‘Sand Is Like Oil, It Is Finite’
In 2012, Germany alone mined 235 million tons of sand and gravel, with 95 percent of it going to the construction industry. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) estimates global consumption at an average of 40 billion tons per year, with close to 30 billion tons of that used in concrete. That would be enough to build a 27-meter by 27-meter (88.5 feet) wall circling the globe. Sands are “now being extracted at a rate far greater than their renewal,” a March 2014 UNEP report found. “Sand is rarer than one thinks,” it reads.
Ed,
It’s not just sand, it’s everything: water, fish, trees. A few years ago I was at a banquet in China when my host asked if there was anything I wouldn’t or couldn’t eat. I replied, anything endangered plus whale and dolphin. He said, in total disbelief, why you wouldn’t eat dolphin, it’s one of my favorite foods. To which I said, because they are a beautiful, highly intelligent and threatened species. And to this he responded, laughing, I’d eat a dolphin if it was the last one on the planet. At that moment I knew that there is no hope for humanity or for the planet.
I agree, which is why I believe switching to electric cars and wind turbines is not going to make a difference. I = PAT. Technology (T) has served to accelerate the negative impact (I) on the environment. (P= population, A = affluence). People have an overwhelming drive to consume.
Framing environmental damage as a resource issue is a mistake. That’s because species extinction isn’t necessary – it’s a choice.
If I wear hobnail boots on my wood floor, the wood floor’s life will be very limited, and wood flooring won’t be sustainable (it will wear out too quickly to replace economically). If I wear soft slippers, it will become sustainable. If I’m used to wearing boots inside, then slippers are a big change from BAU. OTOH, I think slippers are a great lifestyle, and there’s no sacrifice to changing to them.
So, is the damage to the wood floor a resource issue? No, it’s that vandals are wearing hobnail boots.
I ran across this video segment about the first act of China, Inc. buying NZ farmland.
http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/china-on-a-buying-spree-of-limited-resource-338041923794
The catch line that drew me in to the links was:
“China: 20% of the World’s population, 9% of the farmable land”
Every time someone at work starts popping off about how China (or the ‘Red Dragon’, etc.) is going to take over the World I tell them to thank whatever god or gods they pray to, or to be appreciate for random luck for us non-believers, that they live in the U.S. vice China…it is not going to go well for China down the road…
I am afraid the age of velvet gloved iron fisted colonization may not yet be over. The Chinese are well aware of their situation and as busy as a billion bees doing something about it.
In my opinion based on reading a lot of history they are going to insist on the rights they have purchased in other countries to farmlands and minerals and so forth with as much vigor as necessary.
I have no doubt personally that when the time comes they will not hesitate to put a few tens of thousands of boots on the ground to protect their purchased rights to a large tract of prime farmland or a mine or oil field.
Their educational system is fomenting militaristic nationalism as a matter of policy as far as I can tell from reading an occasional piece about Chinese politics.Tens of millions of young men without women are quite a resource which can be used with abandon. They aren’t about to run short of cannon fodder and their state controlled media isn’t at all likely to turn on the government when the time comes to put those excess young men in harms way.
A few hundred dead American troops are a VERY BIG DEAL . Elections turn on such issues in this country. In China a few hundred dead troops killed protecting Chinese access to resources they have legitimately purchased over seas will be national heroes.
And when they are already on the ground, and they are in control locally, they are going to know how to control access to the local scene and manufacture incidents as necessary to justify actual aggressive actions and taking control of adjacent territory- lots of adjacent territory.
Even guerrilla troops have weapons these days such as small rockets that will reach out for miles. So they will have some justification to take a buffer zone ten miles wide all the way around to protect their purchase. And as long as they have to patrol it they may as well .. ahem .. farm it. Pretty soon all the locals who aren’t for them will begin to disappear. Those for them will find some sort of job and a meal ticket working for their new masters.
A China man after all wrote The ART of WAR.
But it is not inconceivable that birth rates will fall farther than they have already and that the Chinese will turn the demographic corner without going to war for farmland. UNLIKELY in my opinion but not totally out of the question.
So long as food is available for import they will have a world class range of junk to export to pay for it.
AND not everything they export will be junk. I expect that within the next few years Chinese goods will start gaining a reputation for quality – at least the ones with advertised brand names. So far there is almost no advertising of Chinese brands at least not in this country.
The stuff made in China and sold under well established American brand names is ok- not very good compared to our former standards of quality but cheap enough to throw away and just buy new as needed.
“In my opinion based on reading a lot of history they are going to insist on the rights they have purchased in other countries to farmlands and minerals and so forth with as much vigor as necessary.”
What they will insist on is the same per capita oil consumption that Americans have. We already did those numbers and that’s that. They have no reason whatsoever to be patient getting there. MUST GROW CONSUMPTION AS FAST AS POSSIBLE or they are immorally abusing their own populace.
Electric vehicles are far cheaper and cleaner. Oil imports are expensive and risky.
Military projection is very wasteful and expensive. It’s far cheaper just to buy what you need on an open market.
If you buy land in another country, are you going to bring it back and sell it at subsidized prices? If not, what’s the point. If so, that’s mighty expensive…
This is not news. They lease a zillion acres in Ukraine.
http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-china-leases-farmland/25114812.html
And with just a bit more military success, guess who collects the lease payments?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnipropetrovsk see little map
Here is a decent article from the Population Reference Bureau listing some statistics illustrating how much U.S. resource consumption has grown between 1960 and 2012:
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2006/LifestyleChoicesAffectUSImpactontheEnvironment.aspx
The upshot for the U.S.:
The United States’ reaching 300 million people might not seem relevant at a global level. After all, the United States represents just 5 percent of the world population. But it consumes disproportionately larger amounts than any other nation in the world—at least one-quarter of practically every natural resource. And because it is the only industrialized country in the world still experiencing significant population growth, this high rate of resource consumption is expected to continue.5 “Each person in the U.S. contributes more to the global phenomenon [of natural resource consumption] than other people,” says Victoria Markham, director of the Center for Environment and Population, and author of the U.S. National Report on Population and Environment.
Too bad I am only preaching to the choir here…99% of our citizens have no interest in changing our God-given rights to do what we please.
Politics makes strange bedfellows.
I expect to live long enough with some luck to see people in this country turn their back politically on Detroit and the auto industry….. for the simple reason that we have more people who either cannot afford to own and drive a car or who choose not to from one year to the next.The anti auto tipping point is probably not more than twenty years away.
And although I know quite well how my people were treated when we first got ” over here” I am still in favor of closing the borders of this country.It’s totally un PC to say so but life is and will remain a Darwinian phenomenon.
At some point the our recently coined new citizens will realize that more of their kind threatens their established position in this society and adopt my attitude in this respect.
Working class people are not blinded by PC and understand very well indeed the way a labor market works. Employers will never pay any more than necessary to hire the workers they need and if there are four applicants and three openings…. well wages will crash and will never stabilize and go up again until the number of applicants is at least slightly less than the number of openings everything else held equal.
It is all hunky dory to have a young guy with no English but willing to work his tail off and live three or four to a room in order to send money home and bring his family over cutting your grass——– if you have a nice safe government job or professional qualifications that new immigrants lack.
But if you do that sort of work yourself… a couple of dozen of these young guys moving into your neighborhood spells disaster for you.It doesn’t matter if you are just as good a worker. They are always going to be willing to do more for less for as long as it takes and your income is going down as a consequence.
I hire some of them myself.
They are mostly great workers and good people who make good neighbors once you get to know them.They will move up from labor to the skilled trades in most cases.My nieces and nephews are going to be marrying some of them and raising cute kids with brains and ambition without a doubt.
The local guys I used to hire are all flipping burgers or on welfare or dealing dope.
The economy is such these days with automation taking jobs right and left that we are probably always going to have a surplus of cheap labor from here on out and it is the height of insanity to even contemplate the idea of retraining millions of displaced workers for high tech jobs when those same workers failed to make it in school the first time around.
AND if you do succeed in training ten percent of them … which is a reasonably realistic goal… maybe half of them will find local work in their new field.
Been there as an educator and also observed the process as it has played out in my area.Hardly any of the people who qualified for a couple of years of welfare checks and tuition who lost their jobs managed the transition into new professions.
Two years at a community college ten or twenty or thirty years after high school spent operating a machine or driving nails is generally not enough to create a new man or woman with the comprehensive new set of skills social and technical needed to move into a high tech job.
You are going to have to start with reading and basic arithmetic in most cases.
AND employers who are not in desperate need of new hands are going with younger candidates with some experience whenever possible.
The point of the above rant is that without closed borders we aren’t going to get our population under control.Senior moment.
And while it is not PC to mention it, those of us who understand the implications of further population growth have a higher obligation than PC to take into consideration.
Yep, yep, yep, all true. When I say only solution, if any at all, is closed borders, I hear yells of “racism”. My response is “arithmetic”. Doesn’t work, of course, but when was that a barrier to doing the right thing?
So. A lifeboat of starving people arrive on an island paradise. The first guy to jump off yells ” Since I am the first, this whole place belongs to me, and the rest of you people gotta earn your keep or you don’t get any of it”.
So, since the owner doesn’t need anything- after all, he owns a paradise- the other people don’t get any jobs/ income and so they all starve to death.
Now, class, got any comments on this situation?
The anti auto tipping point is probably not more than twenty years away.
It’s here. 16-30 year olds are buying cars, and driving, much less than older generations. That’s true even if they’re employed.
Working class people are not blinded by PC and understand very well indeed the way a labor market works.
So do employers. Don’t be fooled by Fox News: it’s not middle class professionals who like immigration the most, it’s employers.
If we really want to help Mexicans, we’ll help them reform their oppressive government and improve domestic education. But, of course, that won’t help keep wage levels down…
“After all, the United States represents just 5 percent of the world population. But it consumes disproportionately larger amounts than any other nation in the world—at least one-quarter of practically every natural resource.”
So what? This is called victory.
Others have every chance to try to consume more. They should try, if they’re humans. Then we’ll see who continues to be victorious.
For people who think that way, the only solution is the JRB one-
“Take that man out, give him a fair trial, and hang him”.
Ron,
When it comes to seeing the morphology of exoplanet organisms, well THAT is well off into the future…
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0726
I’m afraid peak FFs and AGW will keep us from getting to that point…
http://spaceisbig.net/docs/spie_2013_paper.pdf
http://www.gmto.org/Resources/GMT-ID-01124-SPIE5490-51_v2b.pdf
Yeah, finally someone that agrees with me. From your first link:
We show that after third and fourth generation missions foreseeable for the next 100 years, we will face a very long era before being able to see directly the morphology of extrasolar organisms.
100 years from now, whatever kind of civilization that is left, is likely to face an entirely different set of priorities.
As Enrico Fermi pointed out, if interstellar travel were possible, and there were intelligent extraterrestrial life around, then the Earth would have been colonized long ago.
Ilambi,
Leo Szilard replied that indeed they are here and that they’re called Hungarians.
Leo had to go and blow our cover… >;-)
Something else Fermi once said while questioning his faith in society at large to make wise choices about nuclear technology: “What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature.”
When I was a student Enrico Fermi was like a god to me: Even though he had already died (1954). I suspect he would have been disappointed in many of the ways society has gone.
Am I right in my recollection that Fermi said something to the effect that space travel is possible, and intelligent life should be abundant, and so, why don’t we see them? (Fermi’s Paradox).
My answer- Intelligent life discovers fossil fuel, binges out on it to destroy their atmosphere, and dies. Every Time. Just like we are doing right now.
Almost Correct. He thought intelligent life should be abundant in the universe and summed up an argument by his famous question, “Where is everybody?”
Possibly the speed of light is a governor on travel?
It has so far help up under much examination.
Of course, it could be emergent and changing like everything else we observe, but in works fine on local events.
Hi Doug,
It depends on how you define intelligence. Intelligent life could be everywhere in the universe, but not intelligent life that produces technology. For instance cetaceans, elephants, other primates, even octopus all clearly show levels of intelligence. For all we know sperm whales are doing calculus in their heads. No one encapsulates this better than Carl Sagan, “It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English – up to fifty words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.”
Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years, but has not seen a species with the technology that can reach out beyond the atmosphere until about the past 75 years.
There are numerous other problems with Fermi’s assertion. For instance developing high technology, even by an intelligent terrestrial species is no guarantee. There is a lot of happenstance that led to our current technological condition.
Best,
Tom
Best,
Tom
Yeah, I know. I’ve always thought that my dog is smarter than me and dolphins are a lot smarter than dogs. But of course, I’m not very smart.
Inteligent life would not use fossil fuel.
NAOM
Yes, we are in agreement on the ability to directly see, from Earth, the morphology of alien organisms (if they indeed exist at the scale of humans, zebras, T-rex, etc…Folks in the Ward and Brownlee ‘Rare Earth’ hypothesis camp would make the case that complex multicellular life is extremely rare in the Universe, perhaps as rare as the case where such life only exists on Earth during the present time. These folks will argue the case that perhaps life is relatively abundant in the Universe, but only simple single-cell life (such as bacteria).
Earlier in this thread I gave my opinion that humans probably have the ability, without ‘requiring warp drive’, to construct sensors to directly image exoplanets within a few tens of light years, perhaps at a resolution, to start of 5×5 pixels, perhaps as many as 25×25 pixels or so, which would be sufficient to discern the presence of ocean/continent contrasts and planetary-scale cloud formations. Such capabilities would not require expense anywhere near on the order of taking half, or even one third, or one quarter of the current ‘Defense’ budget. Probably considerably less than that. Being able to (barely) discern ‘close’ exoplanet ocean/land/cloud contrasts, and being able to discern morphologies of creature living on such planets, are two utterly different capabilities….the first is relatively easily achievable in 5-10 years, given adequate budget commitment, the second is likely ~~100 years off, and probably unachievable due to FF depletion knock-on effects…
overexploitation everywhere
The added danger in groundwater depletion is that unlike surface water, it is not easily replenishable. A UC Davis study published in July demonstrates how California farmers draining groundwater to compensate for losses in surface water will diminish the state’s ability to withstand future droughts.
California is currently experiencing the third year of one of the most severe short-term droughts ever recorded. Data from U.S. Drought Monitor shows that as of Sept. 30, 82% of the state is facing extreme or exceptional drought conditions.
http://mashable.com/2014/10/03/nasa-satellites-california-drought/
But the state is not the only area being plagued by critical drops in groundwater reserves. Data collected by GRACE indicates that the supply of groundwater is in decline worldwide, especially in regions that rely on it most.
“We’re seeing it happening all over the world. It’s happening in most of the major aquifers in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world where we rely on those aquifers. But we’re able to see now the impact we’re having on this over exploitation,” Famiglietti told Science Magazine.
My prediction:
by December 31, 2025, Humans will have imaged at least one exoplanet in the .9-3.0 Earth Mass range with enough resolution whereby they will have detected water/land and/or surface/cloud edges/boundaries. This detection will occur using either space-based instruments, or perhaps somewhat more likely, by a ground-based instrument such as the European Extremely Large Telescope.
My bonus prediction: Earth’s oil (C+C) production will stay on the current level ‘bumpy plateau’ until at least sometime in the year 2020. I predict that not too long after ~ that year we will experiencing a significant, undeniable (even by trying to move definitional goalposts) decline in C+C production. Add-on predictions: Oil from Kerogen (‘oil shale’, not ‘shale oil’, which is now known as LTO) production will never be significant. GTL and CTL will production will scale up somewhat, but not nearly enough to offset the decline in C+C production. There is a somewhat better than even chance that nuclear fission power plant ‘production’ (of new plants) will ramp up by the mid-2020s, with the expectation that several major nations’ economies will become more reliant on centralized nuclear fission-produces electricity, supported by the declining conventional C&C production, along with substantial NG production, and continued coal usage, with as much wind, solar, and CTL and GTL as possible. Nasayer who say that more fission power plants can’t happen w/o ‘solving’ the waste issue?…I’d like to agree with you, but when the crap starts hitting the fan the governments will pick a place to put the wast and tell the people to suck it. TPTB will not let BAU slip quietly into the night…BAU will be ‘degraded’ from where it is now, but ‘modernism’ will not easily vanish.
More and more species will succumb to humanity, and AGW will continue, and that will be that, barring a global nuclear war, big enough asteroid, or a repeat of the Deccan/Siberian traps vulcanism events. Earth will be more crowded, less ecologically diverse, hotter, and almost all folks will be poorer, but it wont be Olduvai Gorge, or even ‘Little House’. Even a super-pandemic will not knock future pseudo-BAU into the dirt.
Before anyone gets combative and launch broadsides into this post, know that I wish it would be different: I wish humanity had the wisdom to hold our population down to some long-term sustainable level, say 100-500M people, all or almost of of whom cherished every other life form on Earth and strived to live in harmony with the rest of the planet’s life. Sorry, that ship has sailed. That outcome was never written in out genes, sadly.
Making predictions is cathartic, and satisfying! You have yours, I have mine, a nice parlor game before heading back to the mill on Monday! Didn’t cost me much, and won’t cost me anything if I am a little, or even wildly, wrong…
by December 31, 2025, Humans will have imaged at least one exoplanet in the .9-3.0 Earth Mass range with enough resolution whereby they will have detected water/land and/or surface/cloud edges/boundaries.
Not a snowballs chance in hell of that happening. Right now the only planets we can see are huge giants so big they are almost brown dwarfs and are so hot they produce their own light and far enough from the star they are orbiting that their light can be seen seperately. And even then they just show up as a point of light. Even if they launched that pinhole umbrella thing talked about up thread, 80,000 miles distant from the telescope, and if they did find a planet it would just show us as a tiny speck. That is a tiny point of point of “reflected” light. But if they decided to go ahead with such a plan today, it would be well over a decade before it actually happened.
But the bugs of such a system aren’t ironed out. 80,000 miles out from the telescope would put it in an entirely different orbit with a different orbital speed. Soooooo…..
Your second prediction may be pretty close but I think the decline will begin well before 2020.
Your prediction about BAU continuing but with people just being a lot poorer. Well, I sense a lot of wishful thinking there so I will just let it go.
“by December 31, 2025, Humans will have imaged at least one exoplanet in the .9-3.0 Earth Mass range”
By using what? Not Gaia or JWST (which could be cancelled anytime) and most other space missions don’t qualify. Those likely to really happen are for gamma-ray astronomy (GRBs, cosmic rays, SNe), microwave astronomy (CMB, large scale structure), and IR. And increasingly space budgets seem directed at killing tanks not finding little green men. My prediction is that by 2025 we’ll be trying to keep the world’s economy from collapsing — if it hasn’t already
There are several large telescopes that should be coming online around 2020. Wiki has a nice graphic for comparison:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Comparison_optical_telescope_primary_mirrors.svg
Given the size, the “Overwhelmingly Large Telescope” looks like a bargain for under $2 Billion. I believe the JWST is already over $8 Billion.
OWT…if the Chinese want to continue their quest for Great Power, perhaps greatest Power status, they could undertake an OWT-scale ground-based telescope…or two, and tie them together. China could always partner with Russia and/or India to share cost burdens and accesses a wider talent pool.
If they pursued such a project, either the Europeans and Japanese would throw their lot in with the Chinese consortium, unless the U.S. picked up the gauntlet and enticed the Europeans and Japanese and Australia and Brazil etc. to go all-in on their own OWT-class instrument(s) in Chile.
Such a ‘space race’ would be a great return on investment, much better than pissing Terrabucks down the MIC rathole. It would be so cheap, in fact, that the countries involved could still piss away terabucks down the MIC rathole and also build some OWL-class instruments.
And these class of instrument would be able to image nearby Earth-like planets, at least a few pixels across, bat least barely sufficient to discern land/water/cloud edges.
Break break: Ron, you stubborn cuss, barring an all-out thermonuclear exchange, or a dinosaur-killer-class asteroid or comet impact, or Deccan/Siberian Traps-scale vulcanism, I almost guarantee you that there will not be a very-large-scale (200M+ in the span of a few years) reduction in Earth’s total human population before 2030. //Maybe// Most people may be living destitute under authoritarian regimes, but no large-scale die-off as you predict.
I won’t.
“will not knock future pseudo-BAU into the dirt.”
pseudo BAU is a good label. It’s consistent with a lot of things. Redefine this and redefine that so the measurements look benign and BAU seems to be continuing.
But what is there that can’t be redefined? People having enough to eat and noting that it tastes as it always has. Simply that, and only that. There is almost nothing else about life that cannot be redefined to buttress and reinforce pseudo BAU. But if there’s not enough food or it tastes different, then votes are changed in elections.
We see a bit of it now. Senior Democrats have been urging the prez not to dwell on claims of economic progress. The measurements aren’t measuring what they used to measure. Jobs are part time now and quoting improvement flies in the face of mass experience and the masses vote. It’s not a matter of policy or fault. It’s simply a matter of . . . the masses vote.
The point is that BAU gets defined and redefined up to a point of intolerance. There are limits to pseudo. I suspect they are nowhere near as broad as gentle decliners think.
“You are going to tax this F-150 to discourage me from buying it? Who the hell are you to tell me what to buy? I have a boat I want to haul to the lake. You don’t want me doing that? Anything else you want to dictate in my life? When are you up for re-election again? Ya, I thought so. I hear the other guy is offering tax credits on F-150 buys, to preserve the US car industry and support its employees and Ford’s debtholders, who happen to be pension funds. In fact, a TON of pension funds. I think that will be mentioned in the debates, don’t you?”
Pseudo BAU will be unraveled in a very uneven way. Basically, the optimal way to extend it is take from China.
Perhaps the “Labor Force Participation Rate” is a better measure than the official “Unemployment Rate”.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
Watcher,
I predict that your prediction of a U.S. showdown with China to grab the last resources is not going to happen.
I throw my prediction in with ROCKMAN, who coined MADOR, Mutual Assured Distribution of Resources. I also second the notions offered by Old Farmer Mac: When the Faux Noise voters get more of their chumps in power and then discover that things are not only still declining, but even quicker, the U.S. will, either by dint of poverty, and/or by government direction, trim all the fat out of our lifestyles…and a whole lot of fat there is to trim! Things will happen: people will down-size, carpool, walk, bike, move in with family, move closer to work/relatives, do less with less…The voters will discover sooner or later that the issues are structural and invariant to whatever party affiliation holds the levers of power. Ron is correct that this will cause a lot of folks dependent on this fat to lose their jobs…but that will be the way of things. I predict the government will go all-in on Bread and Circuses (free cable TV, internet, virtual reality, and drugs for all! …Football, Rollerball, Hunger Games!) and perhaps try to reprise FDR with a new CCC, WPA, etc. and lost of local, county, sate, and Federal Extension Office re-education/back-to-basics farming and sewing and canning etc. instruction, maybe even subsides with funny money for Granges and their urban equivalents.
I disagree with your premise…if ‘Extend and Pretend’ succeeds long enough, change may be just barley gradual enough that La Revolution is avoided. Hells fire, man, when I was a teenager (I am almost 50 now) hundreds and hundreds of cars and trucks cruised the main drag in my ~ 60,000-person town…how long has it been since that was last seen? Where is La Revolution? Bread and Circusses Man…the Internet, all manner of mobile/handheld electronic distraction devices, YouTube, Reddit, 4Chan, and on and on and on. So You Think You Can Dance, Dancing With the Starts, America’s Best Chefs, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and so many more…someday The Hunger Games and the Running Man and DeathRace 2030! Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (the modern safer IUDs) plus morning after pills and better condom use = more casual sex…legalized pot takes the edge off, dude! Decline is managed by all manner of distraction…a couple more terrorism events in the U.S. perpetrated by more nefarious folks ‘over there’, and the ‘murkin flags will be flying on every street proudly.
Either something along those lines works out…or Mad Max, who knows? … but I think the definition of BAU will be managed down as gently as possible…’cause no one wants Mad Max.
That’s actually a good layout, Shuffleguy. Where it seems clear it will break down is that the decline doesn’t have to happen.
I guarantee you that if you tell American housewives they have to inconvenience themselves so that Chinese housewives get more than they have now, which is obviously enough for them to grow that population so big, those American housewives are going to laugh at the demand for inconvenience.
This is the point. The decline doesn’t have to happen.
Here.
And come now. Showdown? Obviously there will be some evil Chinese action to steal US oil and response will be merely to right that horrible crime against humanity. The Chinese leadership will be demonized within 48 hrs of any need to do anything. It won’t be a showdown. It will be a manifestation of incredible US leadership restraint as they do what they must to get what they must.
And the really bad news? It will be moral. US leadership has to look after US interests. It’s not in US interests to have some Americans starve so some Chinese don’t.
This is where the gentle argument fails when explained to the housewife. “You have to endure inconvenience. We ALL are enduring it.”
But we ALL aren’t. Go to mazamascience.com/oilexport. Select China’s dropdown and look at their black consumption line. It’s exploding.
There is no point in conserving in the US. You aren’t conserving. You’re sending it to China.
Watcher,
I assess you as a pretty intelligent life form, and of course we know we agree on some points and disagree on some others, and that is A-OK!
I don’t think is will be a matter of telling U.S. housewives how good the Chinese housewives are having it because those darn Chines stole what is rightfully ours (Middle Eastern Oil, I presume? … ’cause we show ’nuff are not going to send them our oil produced here in the homeland!)
I think the case may be that the Chinese are going to increasingly face some sobering internal predicaments, ranging from increasing internal dissent to widespread and profound environmental dilemmas. Whatever slights the American Housewives may suffer, the government-media complex can point to the Chinese Housewives’ worse travails, with the necessary propaganda embellishment if need be, and assuage the American Housewives that they are better off than their sisters on the other side of the planet.
You know how it works…it is not so much your absolute condition, but your perception of your status/condition compared to your neighbors. “I may be hungry but those folks are really hungry…ergo my leaders and system are better than theirs, and I will take solace in their worse condition vis-a-vis mine.
I say again…take ROCKMAN’s MADOR concept to heart…the few BIG DOGS are not going to bleed each other out…that is what the rest of the World will do to support the BIG DOGS!
“You know how it works…it is not so much your absolute condition, but your perception of your status/condition compared to your neighbors.”
That is a factor but more important, in my opinion, is the expectation of future conditions. The Chinese have seen a vast improvement in living standards over a short time interval and this feeds a tremendous feeling of optimism. Another factor is that people, especially the Chinese, will bare almost any hardship if they believe life will be better for their children (or grand children) then it was for them. Concern for future generations seems much lower in Western cultures, to me anyway.
Caveats on this: 1) I spent about 7 years living/working in China and consider my points as an almost universal sentiment, and 2) I have no idea whatsoever how the “Chinese Economic Miracle” will play out.
Agreed. Others will descend to feed the big dogs first.
But “first” is a matter of minutes. They don’t burn enough to make their rightful contribution to the earned American right to out consume others. Note I had a sarcastic “God given” adjective there and changed it to the rational “earned”.
Look, this is just not even debatable. The graph is right there. The Chinese oil consumption growth is exploding. US growth is not. Game over. There’s nothing more to address. You can’t make any persuadable case for accepting any reduction at all when the Chinese don’t. All you’re doing is sending your conservation to China.
That’s not a vote winner.
Persuadable case. Go for solar in a big way, right now. Plenty good enough especially if we quit the 3/4 of the economy that’s just silly and does nobody any good.
example- any manned combat aircraft
Then we coast while the Chinese run around sniffing for oil.
Little problem here- they are going for all that, and we aren’t.
Doesn’t show on the graph.
Manned combat aircraft is a debatable matter. Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have said they believe the JSF will be the last manned US fighter, but there are other forms of combat aircraft.
There are transports. There are bombers. There are tankers for both. Drones don’t have the payload capacity for nuclear weapons and the triad strategic weapon defense design has survived all debates, because it’s probably wise.
ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers. They’re not just for breakfast.
As to the concept in general of total drone reliance, you’re betting air superiority on the absence of EMP or an eventual successful counter weapon.
You only have to be wrong once with such a force design and you have total loss. An enemy that defeats it enslaves your children.
I am one of Rockman’s biggest fans.
Too bad he does not post here.
I believe MADOR is in the cards or at least as likely as any other given scenario.
BUT while MADOR will probably make it unlikely that Americans will confront Chinese troops in actually face to face firefights within the easily foreseeable future it will not solve the depletion problems involving oil, water, and other natural resources.
Hopefully MAD will continue to work and we will never have to fight the Chinese in a hot war.
Mad kept us and the old USSR from coming nose to nose in a direct hot fight for half a century.
Troops . . . aka conventional warfare . . . is really oil intensive.
Nukes are much easier.
Nah, we have perfect accuracy, just need a rock.
Accuracy and nukes is a very dicey thing to connect in conversation. It was the source of breakdown of SALT II discussion at one time, when US SLBM accuracy was so precise that hardened Soviet sites would not have response time from a coast and in the face of that accuracy, hardened sites weren’t.
It caused a moment of bizarre suggestion to the Navy that they degrade their technology and be less accurate.
This, of course, generates the reply that when you target hardened silos that is a military action and moral as such things go, but if you demand less accuracy you increase the chance of hitting a town or city and needlessly (needless because you weren’t permitted accuracy) generating civilian casualties. So accuracy became compassionate in the discussion and the Soviets went back to the drawing board to design how to preserve retaliatory strike options.
“I predict the government will go all-in on Bread and Circuses (free cable TV, internet, virtual reality, and drugs for all! …Football, Rollerball, Hunger Games!)”
That’s a good point, a really good point. We’ve gone a long way in that direction already — the beer-and-football syndrome. It worked like a damn for the Romans, why not us?
And don’t forget the iZombies:
Maybe the f150 will be redefined.
Already scheduled. Aluminum sides and diesel engine. That 300+ horsepower will haul even more stuff.
For all you bicycle fans: Danny Macaskill Rides The Ridge
Danny Macaskill is a very good bike rider. A very, very good bike rider. So he climbed a mountain near his home on the Isle of Skye and did something that will make you scream with joy and horror.
Wow. My ride to work isn’t quite as intense!
That was cool. I like how he gets his bike over a fence. 🙂
So that’s what a Mountain Bike is; maybe Santa will bring me one for Christmas then I can ride around like that. Or maybe not.
Actually, stunning photography as well.
I looked real hard and couldn’t see his rotor. Had to be one somewhere. And I assume that backpack is a parachute? Or maybe a seat ejector?
Peak Bees ?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/us/the-head-scratching-case-of-the-vanishing-bees.html?rref=business/energy-environment&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Energy%20%26%20Environment&pgtype=article&_r=0
Make mead while you can? It’s not hard to make, and requires only, say, screw-top mason jars, 1 part unindustrialized honey[1], 4 to 5 parts unindustrialized water[2], and possibly some yeast and a source of nitrogen if you’re in a hurry, and possibly fruits or spices to taste; drink it young[3], when the bubbling slows down. Oh, and something to stir it with, and something to keep the fruit flies out (e.g. coffee filter + string, replace with lid once bubbling phase starts).
Maybe with bee colonies that live on the farms (oh no, that rules out the pesticide spraying!) instead of being trucked hither and yon at great expense of Carbon…nah. Onwards, Industrial Soldiers!
[1] http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/
[2] Chlorine will evaporate out from standing water; municipalities that gift chloramine probably mandate filters or other complications.
[3] Airlocks and bottling and aging are extra complications that some may find worth the effort.
We had bee hives in our field for 5 years. Never had a die off and by collecting swarms added hives. I use no pesticides in the garden and have planted lots of native wildflowers which I believe made the difference. The wildflowers have brought in a large number of bumble bees, butterflies, moths and wasps.
Whatever is responsible for bee die off , it is not going to be simple and it is probably not going to be found to be the result of a single cause.
It MIGHT be the result of an as yet unidentified disease of bees that is not usually fatal to colonies except if the colony is highly stressed. That is my guess at the moment- a combination of an unknown but ever present mild disease that usually causes few problems except when the bees are stressed more than usual PLUS various unusual stresses.
Couldn’t it just be that bees are suffering from the same general suite of issues impacting invertebrates everywhere? Their numbers are down significantly globally. Bees are perhaps getting hit the same way as other invertebrates, it’s just that we pay more attention to them because humans rely on bees for our own well-being unlike most other invertebrates.
I’ll grant you, this doesn’t point to any particular cause and effect paradigm, but if all invertebrates numbers are dropping, are we really surprised that bee populations are falling in tandem?
That said, animal wildlife numbers are plummeting, but the growth in number of humans continue to be strong. For now. On the horizon, several realistic threats to this state of affairs are perceptible.
It could be simpler, bees are at the top of a chain & may just need clean air to do what they do in the way they do it. Even traces of gas-o-lean fumes drop wasps, no need for expensive wasp sprays when a liter will kill thousands. IIRC saw a study once that Bees are not productive near highways. Perhaps like water cress – thrives around pure water sources, where some other plants can process sludge.
Maybe it’s bee ebola.
A motivating discussion is definitely worth comment. There’s no doubt
that that you ought to publish more about this topic, it
may not be a taboo subject but generally people do not talk
about these topics. To the next! Best wishes!!
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29514920
As has been mentioned previously, this strain of Ebola seems scarily contagious.
‘The Spanish health minister has confirmed that a nurse who treated a victim of Ebola in Madrid has tested positive for the disease.’
No one can blame poor containment standards any more (well I’m guessing the Spanish followed as thorough procedure as humanly possible). Are we going to start seeing more similar incidents as patients brought back from Africa infect others?
This still hasn’t reached proportions anywhere approaching other viruses yet but it seems this outbreak still has a fair way to run.
The same thing occurred to me. One wonders if the mutated virus is in a little bit of a twilight zone between being truly direct contact only and semi-airborne.
Between the two of us a young phd microbiologist of my acquaintance estimates the potential of an airborne disease capable of killing people by the tens of millions emerging at around ten percent per decade.
I am not free to divulge his name of course but he says that a lot of young guys and girls in his field are truly worried about the possibility of a disease worse than the WWI flu epidemic hitting us more or less world wide.
People in his line of work are more or less constrained when expressing their opinion on such matters until they either own their own company or get tenure.
And even people who own their own businesses are generally reluctant to talk about things that will scare away customers.
Nobody hires alarmists if they can help it.
It avoids talking about the meaning of seventy percent first year declines but it does mention them and it also mentions water pollution, sand mining and earthquakes so this is as msm coverage goes well balanced.
http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/10/06/6179292/more-efficient-fracking-means.html
We’re all gonna die!
Anyway, that’s what they say, and it could be true.
Might as well write a song, a requiem for the masses.
It’ll save money and oil, it’s a win-win!
45,000 people in the US commit suicide each and every year, so it is much more of a health risk than the ebola virus, and I doubt that it will change much at all. If the ebola plague becomes a problem, it could even make life better for the survivors, mofe suicides because of the ebola scare, you know. You have to think positive. More oil for the survivors, tough luck for the poor schmucks who succumb to the deadly effects of the viral infection. That’s just too bad, but hey, it is for the best. It might even be biological warfare. Who nose?
Nothing is sacred. One death is a tragedy, a billion, a statistic.here
There is no gravity, the earth sucks. Better off to find a new planet somewhere out there in interstellar space. Space is the place, and it looks better than ever.
Some Reality based POD going on here.. Not what it seems..
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2544045-fracking-has-not-yet-made-the-u-s-an-autonomous-oil-market
Summary
The U.S. industry, which once held oil prices down, is now seeing them forced down further.
Production is rising, but so are costs. Costs can come down in the short run, raising profitability.
Oil is not yet de-coupled from world prices, the way natural gas is.
WTF bout Ag ?!! 100% right about Silver.
Trashing Ag for our Asian pals? Regime Change? Greed? Prepping? Puppy chow?
More money from nothing – chicks are free
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xiajkBuekU&list=UU2nQYGjfe9I_tgWpqgJorUg
A dangerous possibility: why the world might be on the brink of an oil price war
[Excerpt from article]
A sudden slump in the price of crude has exposed deep divisions within the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) ahead of its final scheduled meeting of the year next month to decide on how much oil to pump. Some members, led by Iran, have called for immediate action to stem the drop in oil prices, while Arab Gulf countries have so far argued that it could be another three months before it becomes clear whether the group should cut production for the first time since December 2008.
Whatever they decide, oil remains the lifeblood of the global economic system due to its direct impact on inflation and input prices. Brent crude — a global benchmark of oil drawn from 15 fields in the North Sea, dipped last week to multi-year lows below $92 per barrel as a perfect storm of a strong US dollar, oversupply in the system and declining demand shattered confidence in the market. Brent has tumbled 20 per cent in the last three months after touching $115 per barrel in June….
Opec states have largely managed to maintain cohesion over the last decade as prices over $100 per barrel have enriched their economies and encouraged adherence to quotas. This consensus is now starting to break down, creating more uncertainty in the market and a potentially destabilising situation for the global economy.
Next month’s meeting promises to be the most tense held since the onset of the Arab Spring in 2010, with the Shiite faction of Iran and Iraq already appearing to line up against Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh has placed his cards on the table early by calling for Opec to urgently cut output to stem the sharp recent decline in prices, which threatens the Islamic Republic’s fragile economy after years of restrictive sanctions. According to research from Deutsche Bank, Iran has the highest fiscal break-even price for its budget at over $130 per barrel of Brent, compared with the UAE at around $70 per barrel and Saudi Arabia at about $90.
However, the Gulf’s Arab states are all sitting on huge cash piles that are held overseas through sovereign wealth funds and foreign currency assets that can be drawn upon to help them weather any short-term drop in oil export revenues. Iran, possibly supported by Iraq, will push hard for a change in Opec’s production targets at the meeting and a cut to its overall output by 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) from the 30 million bpd limit that it currently sets for members. The latest figures suggest that level has already been breached with Opec members perhaps pumping as much as 1 million bpd above the group’s agreed quota.
“Considering the downward trend in prices, Opec members should try to temper production to avoid further price instability,” Zanganeh was quoted saying by Iranian state media at the end of last month, even before crude fell to its current lows.
Zanganeh is at odds with his most powerful rival in Opec, Saudi Arabia’s influential oil minister, Ali Nuaimi, who has so far dismissed calls for an emergency meeting to be held ahead of November. Nevertheless, the kingdom has taken the precaution of trimming its own output and reducing the price of crude it offers to customers in Asia in an apparent move to defend its market share. According to Opec figures, Saudi Arabia cut its output over the summer by more than 400,000 bpd to 9.6m bpd.
[End of excerpt]
DB doesn’t have a clue what Iran’s fiscal breakeven price is because they don’t have a clue how much Iran is sending around sanctions.
We ARE seeing something important here. The gentle decline faction has presumed that a price fall forces OPEC to pump even more to defend those precious fiscal budgets. Looks like that’s not in the cards. And as I laid out last . . . sometime . . . most of the price decline is dollar runup vs Euro, Pound and Yen. Scotland was a big part of that. The dollar didn’t run up so much as the pound got smacked, and that dollar strength got contagious.
KSA is run by smart people. They could certainly choose to destroy shale drilling by opposing any production cut and letting the price fall. Their apparent choice to support production cuts would seem to be meaningful in that . . .maybe they aren’t worried about shale.
Yo, Ron. What’s your read on the KSA foreign workforce. What are their living conditions? Would ebola run rampant through them? Are they entitled to KSA medical care? Would they be shipped out? Drop a bomb like that in a Calcutta slum and that’s all she wrote. There seems to be a foreign workforce pumping oil in Nigeria and this scenario of shipping them home to Calcutta has been painted.
Hi Ron,
One thing seems pretty certain concerning production and prices and that is that we will soon – in a year or so I guess- know if you are right about most exporting countries pumping at their limits in order to get their hands on the money.
If they are truly desperate for cash, with only a very few exceptions maybe as few as three or four, almost everybody will keep pumping even if the economic flu continues to keep the economy down.
About how long will it take to tell using the figures you collect? I am thinking a year to two years given the time lags involved.
I have no articles to cite, but workers are leaking plans of shutting rigs in the Permian Basin due to present price, which is around $10.00 discount to WTI.
On that subject Landman sent me this yesterday:
Sumitomo’s US shale oil foray turns sour
Sumitomo Corp of Japan has drawn a line under its disastrous two-year foray into shale oil in the US, with writedowns connected to the project almost completely erasing its full-year earnings.
On Monday, Sumitomo, the fourth biggest of Japan’s trading companies by market capitalisation, said that an impairment loss of Y170bn ($1.6bn) on a “tight oil” project in west Texas would form the bulk of Y240bn of charges for the fiscal year to March 2015…
In August 2012, the company announced that it had struck a deal with Devon Energy of Oklahoma to pay $340m in cash for 30 per cent of a project in the Permian Basin, saying it would supply another $1bn to fund most of the cost of drilling wells.
Tight oil involves the extraction of crude oil from rock formations using similar technologies as in shale gas extraction.
Yet on Monday, Sumitomo said it had decided to sell roughly three-quarters of its acreage, triggering the loss on the assets and the agreement to fund their development. “It is difficult to extract the oil and gas efficiently,” the company said, adding that it could not “expect as much production to recover the investment”.
An item from a year ago:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1705432-the-cline-shale-may-be-triple-the-bakken-companies-to-consider
Sumitomo’s involvement and now pullout is certainly a historically seismic even. Such force behind the LTO crusade helps explains why flow rates exceeded general expectations. Perhaps most cream was skimmed off the top and only plain o milk is left ??
We’re about to learn something important.
Last winter there was a US GDP smack of -4%. NoDak and Texas drilling were similarly smacked. It is VERY possible that the frantic drilling activity that is LTO is a much larger % of GDP than anyone realizes.
Consequently, we could be about to see the bizarre event of an oil price fall causing massive recession in the US, despite drivers paying less at the pump.
Question. What oil price do you think would cause a significant decrease in LTO exploitation (drilling/production, whatever)? It’s roughly $90 now and presumably there is a material refinery discount? In spite of following Ron’s Blog “forever” this isn’t clear at all to me.
There is a big difference between the spot price and the wellhead price. We sold crude oil for $82 in West Central Texas, at the wellhead, in August, when the average WTI spot price was $97.
Thanks.
If I recall correctly, Dennis used to presume a 10% (or thereabouts) discount in his various calculations/projections so it may average out somewhat higher than this. And I’m assuming naphtha is the primary problem (refiners not liking it)?
“And I’m assuming naphtha is the primary problem (refiners not liking it)?”
The best article I saw on this question said the problem is huge variance in metal content in liquid railcar to railcar. The refineries cannot “tune” their process for a given liquid because the next railcar is different.
We are selling 37 API gravity crude. As small producers, we are also pretty much at the bottom of the food chain.
Doug
that was discount rate for npv. I used to use 12/b for transport in the Bakken costs for rail have gone up to 20/b. 65 at wellhead is breakeven in nd.
Watcher/Jeff/Dennis,
Thanks for the clarification/comments.
Lots of variables. The recent CLR hype presentation did quote a cost increase per well, but that was because the wells are getting longer and eat more proppant.
But output is higher.
So the goalposts move.
The one thing that is powerful is it won’t be gentle. 64% of output is less than 18 months old, so when the threshold is hit for shutdown, it will be cataclysmic — though the only real impact that sharpness of event has is shrinking the time available for Congress to act and subsidize the drillers.
As noted above, KSA doesn’t seem to care about destroying shale because they are making production cut noises, so maybe it doesn’t matter what price does. Maybe KSA knows more than we do and knows shale doesn’t have much longer to go.
Also, note that a good chunk of last year oil floated along at $92. Present price isn’t much different and we didn’t hear about shutdowns then.
Though, maybe things got pricier since then. A $100,000/yr truck driver getting his 3% pay increase since then shrinks the margin of error.
So basically we don’t really know? Being almost as cynical a chap as you I tend to agree with the bailout-by-another-name scenario. Maybe $80 would kick in a bunch of dramatic events. I know for certain that even the current pricing has caused a lot of squirming in the UK (and in Norway though somewhat less).
Nobody knows jack. It’s perpetually annoying to see analysts at DB and Citi want to look busy and output studies about these oil questions when they have no clue.
As for the UK, the fracking drumbeat certainly gets its legs kicked out from under it if price falls. There could also evolve to be a question of “why did we want Scotland and its social benefits costs to stay in the UK if its oil flow is getting worthless?”
But I doubt the price is going to fall too much more. OPEC will cut production and some of those UAE bombers will accidentally hit Libyan export facilities. I think THIS is the core event . . . KSA’s willingness to support production cuts. They must not care about shale, because they know for sure lower price would wipe out the shale industry.
In the Bakken it would about 85 if transport is 20 per barrel. That is Brent in US $.
LTO must sell at a big discount from Brent or Louisiana Sweet .. No?
Bakken is a lot a paint thinner in the boondocks.
The official line is transport costs.
I don’t know of any other product that has 20% chopped off because it travels by train.
There is agenda involved in claiming transport costs.
I’m not sure if this is what you wanted but here is the Plains All American Crude Price Bulletin. It gives the price of Williston Basin Sweet as $70.44.
Oops.
http://www.paalp.com/fw/main/default.asp?DocID=1363
https://www.beaconreader.com/mason-inman/the-original-shale-gas-field-is-tanking
http://www.onearth.org/articles/2014/10/oil-companies-are-finally-realizing-tar-sands-is-bad-for-the-bottom-line
Environmental wishful thinking claptrap.
Suncor is THE oil sands company. They got all the sweetspots and they ain’t even remotely shutting down.
Buffett just added to his Suncor stake in late August.
Stuart, I concur…the lweored rig count surely must indicate some headroom. It’s important to remember Aramaco knows a lot more about their own production numbers than we do. The best we can do is look at what they are doing physically (rig count, production methods) and try to piece together the clues by imagining ourselves in their shoes. We just don’t have transparent, allocated production data; so this is the best we can do. Matt Simmons was the king when it came to this. He knew the industry backwards and forwards. I put a lot of stock in his opinions. Very astute gentleman RIP. I will admit, I’m surprised at the drop off in rigs. I would expect them to constantly be drilling in order to offset decline of existing wells IF the biggest fields were in terminal decline. When Ghawar and some of the bigger fields have truly peaked, I expect to see a sustained drilling frenzy in Saudi.On a worldwide scale I think we are going to see another shock in prices needed to justify the costs of exploration…most hopefully, as the world declines as a whole we will continue to see higher and higher prices support the plateau of production so that the current population is able to sustain. However, this does not solve the problem caused by the fact that our whole economy and monetary systems are founded on the paradime of eternal growth. Sustaining and growing are two very different concepts. Growth requires cheap, abundant energy.I think it’s true that we could produce expensive energy for some years to come…the question is how long will it take the economy to completely crumble under the higher energy prices??? In my opinion, NOT LONG. Inelastic demand is finite, just as the whole economy is.