Category Archives: energy

Get Your Energy Soundbites In Order, Folks

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Before you read on, consider this: Much like with patients and doctors in the case of the healthcare debate, neither folks who have to live in the filth nor those who actually work in the energy industry get a say in the policymaking. In other words, this conversation is held at all the wrong levels.

Shikha Dalmia at Reason:

… the part that has liberals really foaming at the mouth is [Rick Perry's] suggestion to severely check the power of the EPA and give states more leeway to set their own environmental regulations. The standard criticism of such rollbacks is that states, released from Uncle Sam’s iron fist, will engage in a race to the bottom and gut environmental standards to attract business. But states have a far greater incentive than distant bureaucrats to look for ways to protect their natural resources with minimal sacrifice of economic and other priorities.

A state government is no less reckless and capricious than its federal counterpart. Are we sure states truly have the wellbeing of all of their people as well as the required long-range thinking to hold themselves up to such high standards? Ask and the Louisiana news will answer.

The Gambit | Landry, Vitter Meet With Oil Regulators On Drilling

“The purpose of this meeting is to make sure the information given to us in Washington is the same going on here as well,” Landry said. “And how we as legislators can help to address the lack of permitting going on in the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon incident. We hope it’s a step in the right direction to getting the Gulf back up and running and people back to work.”

… “These are great American jobs we need to preserve and build here,” Vitter said. “As these two charts illustrate, it’s major revenue for the federal government to help with lessening deficit and debt. (It’s the) second biggest source of revenue (for) the federal government after only federal income tax.”

What about the tourism and fisheries jobs and protecting the natural environment for our descendants along with responsibly drilling for oil? But wait, let’s look at how many of those great American jobs we will preserve here. Dalmia again, from the same article as above:

[Job] projections are notoriously difficult to make accurately, and there is every reason to believe that Perry’s claims, largely lifted from oil industry studies, are way off. Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that Perry’s plan will create 620,000 jobs at best [vs. 1.2 million as predicted]. If Levi is right, Perry has needlessly opened himself up to attack by using inflated numbers. And for what? The main point of energy liberalization is not to create jobs. It’s to make cheap and reliable energy available to individuals and businesses. That’s the message that Perry should be hammering.

Cheap, reliable, fast. You pick two. Anyway, I’ll leave you with that.

On Bayes And Uncertainty Analysis

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“When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” — Thomas Bayes, British mathematician and Presbyterian minister

The New York Times reviews Sharon Bertsch McGrayne’s The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy.

Three topics I love to think about rolled into one: anything at all to do with Enigma, geophysical parameter estimation and the craziness behind not changing your mind given the increasing likelihood of evidence to the contrary.

336 pages long, so I kinda expect it to be a quick Winchester-esque romp through probability estimation, but any book that shows how much we use Bayes’s theorem in almost all fields of science and engineering and everyday is alright by me. In fact, Bayes is one of the first things taught in an oil and gas reservoir characterization class. Quantifying unknowns is tricky business and the subsurface is inherently unknown at best, so it is to every reservoir geophysicist’s advantage to use as many data sets as possible in parameter estimation and assign uncertainties to each input – seismic attribute volume, velocity model, core sample, log curve, etc. – as early and often as possible. (Paper: Bayesian reservoir characterization by Luiz Lucchesi Loures)

The reviewer states that “a serious problem arises, however, when you apply Bayes’s theorem to real life.” What exactly that is supposed to mean? As pointed out earlier, Bayes’s theorem is used in very real-life areas as nebulous as cryptography and the search for fossil fuels. Also, news flash: every undertaking has associated human agendas. So, why can Bayes not be implemented in studies of global climate change and autism? But on one thing we agree – the sad fact that there are many of us, scientists or not, who are “wedded to [our] priors.” So, and I guess this goes for everyone, absorb and digest as much information as possible, stop to think about or research the likelihood of what you learned and try not to let confirmation bias get in your way.

Good luck. (Get it? Good luck? Never mind.)

Texan Whiplash

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Yesterday’s Houston Chronicle:

Texas’ main electric grid operator is warning customers to reduce their usage during the peak power demand hours of 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. today as high temperatures and unexpected power plant outages will stretch supplies.

Today on Capitol Hill:

An amendment from Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient starting next year was approved rather anticlimactically by voice vote.

Cut off nose, meet spited face.

Post-Moratorium

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Here is a good article on the latest from the oil patch: ExxonMobil Announces Three Discoveries in Deepwater Gulf of Mexico

I’m not going to name any names, but there has been some stupid reporting on this in the last couple of days. Note to self: Write a primer on how not to report an oil discovery. For now, my request to people doing so is to make it somewhere between “Look at me in my domestic-drilling cheerleading outfit and oil-soaked pompoms” and “The eeeevil ooze comes from a giant container in the ground which we suck out through a straw.”

Prospects are named way before they are drilled. This one was already named years ago – Hadrian. It sits 250 miles southwest of New Orleans, at 7000 feet water depth and the prospect itself is of Lower Pliocene age, which I approximate as 15,000-20,000 feet subsea. I gather Hadrian was slated to drill this time last year but was put on hold by the moratorium. A huge find by Gulf of Mexico standards, but don’t believe the rest of the hype about billions and billions of barrels behind it.

Update: The “possible tens of billions of barrels” confusion arises from the fact that Reuters is reporting the Hadrian sands as Lower Tertiary in age, when in fact they are Lower Pliocene. How to report an oil discovery Tip #1: Get yourself a geologic time scale and look it over.

Dumb As A Box Of Rocks

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“A is for Arsenic someone thought fun
To include on the icing on top of a bun.”
– “ABC” by The Tiger Lilies & Kronos Quartet

When an undergraduate and folks asked me why I went into geology, I’d reply, “Because you can talk to rocks and they don’t talk back.” Unlike with humans, entities that are another variety of dumb.

1) You’ve lost me, Mr. Obama.

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

2) “Who cares, it’s done, end of story, we’ll probably be fine.”

BP initially ordered the extra centralisers. But when the devices arrived at the rig, engineers mistakenly thought they were the wrong type. BP decided at this point to continue with the project without the additional centralisers, taking other safety steps.  It also decided not to rerun the cement modelling software, and questioned the accuracy of the technology.

3) Aliens! Bears! Alien Bears! Shut up.

Regardless, the runaway speculation in the blogosphere imperils the work of trusted science reporters who respect the embargo system and may have wanted to cover the paper. Most professional science journalists have access to Science’s embargoed papers through the EurekAlert! service run by AAAS (which publishes Science) and would have been able to easily figure out that the research behind NASA’s cryptic press release did not support the hype about aliens.

CJR should have said “runaway speculation in the blogosphere AND the following unvetted copycat reporting by the lamestream media.”

I don’t really blame Kottke for connecting the dots wrong because a) nowhere does he call himself a scientist and b) he said he was guessing. But, for everyone else online to get their undies in a wad because Kottke Said Something and for so-called Real Journalists to ignore the whole vetting thing before publishing just so they can be Fr1st!!!1!! is irresponsible.

To top it all off, it’s not even an arsenic-based lifeform.

Rally To Just Kinda Be Ourselves For One Day, Part II

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The costumes. This is why you have to go vote today. So I stop inflicting these nerdy, quadruple-entendre getups on you.

The sad part is D’s costume didn’t take all that much effort and HE got high fives and “Duuuuude” all day long, while people came up to me and said, “What are you?” (or yelled “Love the hat! What are you?”) If I have to explain this nation’s love-hate relationship with Louisiana and its fuel sources as well as the (most recent and arguably) worst environmental disaster in US history to a bunch of folks attending the Stewart-Colbert Rally For Sanity, we’re in a lot more trouble than people not getting my costume.

Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear

Day 150 Unvanished, Unfinished

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Untoward. But not unfathomable. We, in these here parts, are accustomed to years-long aftermaths and revelations, after all.

WDSU.com | Government Accused Of Bungling Spill Evidence: Companies Say Failed Blowout Preventer Not Adequately Preserved

al.com | Oil spill claims czar: “I over-promised and under-delivered” Meanwhile, back in the real world where people live and die paycheck to paycheck, Gulf Coast Residents in Financial Dire Straits, Waiting for BP Claims. Feinberg could have delivered at least 20 checks in the time it took to feel sorry for himself.

nola.com | New wave of oil comes ashore west of Mississippi River The Zombie points out that this article was well-hidden in the Times-Pic’s Outdoors section (gotta have our information priorities), while Swampwoman asks “Didya REALLY think it was over?”

CBS News | Oil 2-Inches Thick Found On Gulf Sea Floor As far as 80 miles from the BP well.

***

The EPA yesterday concluded a two-day hearing in Binghamton, NY on the topic of hydro-fracking. This is what an attendee said at this hearing (as tweeted by @edrcommonground): “No one wants H2O contamination but NY economy is bleeding blue collar jobs, need fracking now.”

Sound familiar, Louisiana?

Narratives a.k.a. Of Happy Hive Minds And Prevailing Versions Of History

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It appears America up and exploded in these past few weeks. Specifically in the last few days. But It’s All Under Control. As you were.

On August 22nd, a 400-person riot broke out in the peaceful, hippie-beatnik town of Ft. Collins, Colorado. Irony: It happened right after Earth, Wind & Fire performed at something called NewWestFest’s Bohemian Nights. Public take: A bunch of folks came to see OMG Earth, Wind & Fire OMG and began to beat each other up. Those people. Reality: A shoving match between two drunk morons escalated to a surrounding collection of drunk morons. Drunk morons in groups. Go figure.

***

A September 1st University of New Orleans student demonstration against Governor Jindal’s drastic reduction of the state’s education budget “turned rowdy.” A handful of students barricaded themselves inside a building and another group marched on the administration building and *horror* stormed Dean Wormer’s office to re-enact The Strawberry Statement would not leave. Two protesters were arrested, peace has been restored to Louisiana and students can expect tuition increases while Jindal hits the American interstates with his success story. It’s all in how you spin budget cuts, you see.

***

Then there’s the eco-freak who held three people hostage inside Discovery Channel HQ while program directors looked up the Wikipedia reference for Malthus. Wait for the right-wing airwaves to buzz with the “it is only terrorism when environmentalists, liberals and Muslims do it” message, while they conveniently ignore Crackpot Manifesto Item #5, which calls for “solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that.” Which is not too far off from the wingnut’ I Detest You (But Damn You Mow My Lawn For Cents On The Dollar Sssshhh We’ll Keep You Around) view of illegal immigration, so like Artemio Muniz, admitted “anchor baby” and writer at Texas GOP Vote, I have to ask

While the media focuses on the “eco-rant” of James Lee, ask yourself, is this a terror act from a man who was an extremist of an emerging cult or pseudo-religion? Or was he just plain crazy? Either way, why are some “Republicans” willing to use the same talking points as James Lee?

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Yesterday, NOAA “reopened a 5,130-square-mile stretch of [Gulf of Mexico] waters from far eastern Louisiana into western Florida to commercial and recreational fishing” [link]. The sponge and starfish frolicked on the beach hand in hand singing, “I say Moratorium, you say Affecting Operations, let’s call the whole thing off!” As if the Gulf of Mexico needs any more trouble at this juncture, Mariner Energy’s Vermilion 380 platform exploded yesterday while still in production. Thankfully, the lives of its 13 crew members were spared, the fire was just put out and shutoff equipment worked, but what the hell?

On the day before the explosion, a Mariner Energy spokesperson reportedly derided the Obama administration’s moratorium on drilling (which incidentally does not affect shallow water operations like the Vermilion 380):

“I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this administration is trying to break us,” said Barbara Dianne Hagood, senior landman for Mariner Energy, a small company. “The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the gulf coast, gulf coast employees and gulf coast residents.”

Not if the Gulf Coast and its residents and workers are dead or dying from these explosions and its consequences first. You’re breaking yourselves and have only your poorly-ordered priorities, shoddy safety guidelines and inability to manage risk to blame. Do you know what people said about BP and Mariner before April 20th, back when you were doing your jobs relatively properly in the Gulf of Mexico? Nothing. So, quit whining, buy what you broke and fix your company. And remember that you’re not exactly adding to the return on your stockholders’ and national investment at this point.

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After I left New Orleans this past Sunday, what I got from many was, “I watched the Katrina Anniversary specials on cable news this past weekend and thought of you. It looks like New Orleans is really coming back and that the nation’s help worked.” My response, “I appreciate that you did, but wish you were at the launch of A Howling In The Wires and the fifth annual Rising Tide conference, where you would have learned what cable news didn’t tell you then and will never ever tell you.” That:

- the “nation’s money” has still not made it to the right people, i.e. even regular, middle-class folks desperately trying to return home, forget the poor,

- public safety, healthcare and education are age-old problems in New Orleans that will take more than five years and national apathy or sympathy to solve,

- tourism is not a sustainable economy and, if a child’s reward for doing well in a New Orleans school is shucking your oysters and slinging your drinks, why the hell should he or she bother? Why should he or she not turn to a life of crime if it offers more pay and social respect?

- New Orleans may be a cultural island but not a political or economic one and that decisions made at the federal and state levels do affect the city; we are all interconnected this way, and

- for the love of god, you watched FoxMSNBCBSNN. These idiots don’t know their New Orleans geography beyond the corner of Canal and Bourbon Streets (you should have seen the number of newsvans with satellites parked outside the Royal Sonesta hotel) and you take them seriously? Then, these douchebags establish other douchebags – Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, Mary Landrieu, Ray Nagin and Douglas Brinkley – as The Experts, who are there only to serve themselves and their financial backers’ versions of history and not Louisiana.

This is why I am pleased to report that the Rising Tide conference had 210 paid attendees this year. We growing, people! All of the panels nicely conveyed the mission of Rising Tide, which is to “dispel myths, promote facts, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels.” (And to party like rockstars, WHAT.) We, the ones who sprang into action during the evacuation of August 2005 and haven’t stopped since and those who read, check and balance us and become information providers themselves, are “the first line of defense against ignorance & forgetting,” to use keynote speaker Mac McClelland’s terminology. Against the pablum and feel-good fed to the world by our news media and government this past weekend and every single day before and after.

More and varied independent news providers are crucial for this to happen. It is not cable news’s place to make up a narrative for me. Even so, it is not my place to do the same thing for someone who cannot rebuild their home five years later, as it is not their place to speak on behalf of someone who drowned when they could not fight the raging floodwaters. As Lolis Elie said, culture and experience are like Carnival. “It depends on where you’re standing and who you’re with.”

There are narratives. There always have been. We are creatures of memory and story. Our work then lies in observing and remembering enough and correctly, and what, whom and how much we are willing to believe before we use that to make vital decisions for ourselves and, more importantly, others. What we accept as the truth versus as fable matters. Being able to weigh the ultimate value of that which we hang onto, so tight that another fact or idea and scrutiny can break us, matters.

It has been five years since Hurricane Katrina, The Flood and the information flood it brought with it. My hope for five years from now is increased information flow, but more than that, that we consider the source and its intent. That we build a more accurate picture, and not a sparklingly precise one. For the future we make comes from what and why we remember.

Day 121 Sophisticated Technology

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NPR | Hungry For Oil: Feeding America’s Expensive Habit

A nice quick look at America’s current hydrocarbon extraction technologies.

But this:

New technology has changed oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico too. As seen in the wake of BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf, companies have sophisticated technology like remote-controlled submarines. That means they can explore for oil in places humans can’t even go. Sometimes the projects resemble a space mission.

I seriously thought the next line was going to be “Can you say hi to Gaston The Gator, kids?” Oh dear. Where do I start? Remote-controlled submarines have been around for decades. Inside the crust of the earth, where humans could never go, is normally where hydrocarbons come from. Remote sensing, seismic … oh, never mind. Yes, operating in deeper water depths is cool. Now move along.

While I developed and utilized some hella amazing and new Sophisticated Technology as an oil worker, the way NPR and the rest of the media utters the phrase, you’d think it is a special, infallible weapon bestowed on us mere mortals by a fearsome sky god. Oh, drill rig of omens, give me petroleum beyond petroleum.

Technology is not magic, it’s a set of tools and processes developed by humans to address our problems. Thus, anthropomorphizing it, imbuing it with super-human powers and, worst of all, not questioning its effectiveness is not exactly productive on the part of the news media. Why? Because even the most Sophisticated Technology on the planet is only as good as its human operator. Again, the potency of any technology ultimately comes down to the humans in control of it, all the way from proper design and maintenance to not cutting corners and taking the proper, prescribed safety precautions during a malfunction. If the humans in charge are lazy, incommunicative, penny-pinching shitheels with limited imaginations, chances are the technology will not do what it was made to do and maybe even … wait for it … fail. So quit ooohing and aahing at a company’s New-Fangled Technology and investigate and report the human culture behind its use.

Speaking of chance, there’s something amiss about the usage of “low-probability, high-cost event” to describe this oil spill. One problem with such an event is that it doesn’t occur in isolation and the effects of many events of varying magnitudes are cumulative in a finite-resource environment. Another issue I have with it is, all things remaining equal, one doesn’t figure out the probability of recurrence until another such event occurs. Will it? Won’t it? Who knows? If this can’t be answered with a certain degree of confidence, calling it a low-probability event is probably a waste of time. I offer to our esteemed media that the language shift to that of true prevention and effective, scale-sensitive disaster management, away from probabilities of recurrence and other buzz-concepts dropped by corporate PR departments.

And then this: “Focus on the low-probability side of that equation … The fact that you can count on one hand the kind of blowouts that have occurred in the face of these tens of thousands of wells is a pretty remarkable testimony to the safety and the risk management that the companies provide.” Gee, think of all the blowouts that could have happened! We’re doing you a favor. Even if it’s our job, ferchrissakes! You tell them that on our behalf, NPR!

It appears a possible BP pipeline leak is being investigated up here in the Midwest. Not low-probability and not high-cost when compared with the Gulf. But not Sophisticated either, I fear. We have a long way to go.

Day 114 Science & Disgust

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As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, an online hub which explains science news and implications to laypeople is in the works. And not a moment too soon. For the schist is up to here, folks (you can thank D for this one).

While more of the same continues in Washington, the general public is less and less informed of what’s going on, parrots the media soundbites of the day (“I hear the oil has vanished, Maitri. Herp derp.”) and is unconcerned about things like independent and unfettered scientific analyses performed for their own benefit.

* DOJ gags scientists studying BP disaster

… ecosystem biologist Linda Hooper-Bui describes how Obama administration and BP lawyers are making independent scientific analysis of the Gulf region an impossibility. Hooper-Bui has found that only scientists who are part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process to determine BP’s civil liability get full access to contaminated sites and research data. Pete Tuttle, USFWS environmental contaminant specialist and Department of Interior NRDA coordinator, admitted to The Scientist that “researchers wishing to formally participate in NRDA must sign a contract that includes a confidentiality agreement” that “prevents signees from releasing information from studies and findings until authorized by the Department of Justice at some later and unspecified date.”

* University of Southern Florida says government tried to squelch their oil plume findings

“I got lambasted by the Coast Guard and NOAA when we said there was undersea oil,” USF marine sciences dean William Hogarth said. Some officials even told him to retract USF’s public announcement, he said, comparing it to being “beat up” by federal officials.

The USF scientists weren’t alone. Vernon Asper, an oceanographer at the University of Southern Mississippi, was part of a similar effort that met with a similar reaction.

***

In related energy news, I am happy to report that my house did not explode “into a fireball so massive observers saw it 20 miles away” thanks to my early detection of a leak in the fixtures surrounding the external gas meter and an extremely faint gas smell in the basement. This morning’s conversation with the gas company’s emergency worker went like this:

Gas man: The meter doesn’t detect a leak. Not even a slight bump. You sure you’re not smelling one of the local gas wells?
Me: I smell it right now. Right *pointing at leak* here.
Gas man: Oh whoa, there it goes! You’re right!
Me: Duh.
Gas man: They say women have better noses.

The old South Indian Sense Of Smell TM. Never doubt it.