Day 1063: The More We Modernize
July 25, 2008 - Filed Under books, culture-society-history, energy
The more we inherently stay the same.
Re-reading Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, with some added experience and urgency, I’ve come across several gems like this description of energy consumers in the 1850s, before the advent of kerosene and petroleum. Sound reminiscent of people today?
… For those who had money, oil from the sperm whale had for hundreds of years set the standard for high-quality illumination; but even as demand was growing, the whale schools of the Atlantic had been decimated … For the whalers, it was the golden age, as prices were rising, but it was not the golden age for their consumers, who did not want to pay $2.50 a gallon - a price that seemed sure to go even higher. Cheaper lighting fluids had been developed. Alas, all of them were inferior.
Did Yergin mean $2.50 in 1850s money or the money of 1993, when the book was published? In any case, what cost $2.50 in 1850 would have cost $43.44 in 1993 and around $65 today.
Day 1061: Slick Missy
July 23, 2008 - Filed Under energy, environment, new orleans
No snanas or smoking by the riverside for any of you this week.
The stink outside is 419,000 gallons of No. 6 fuel oil in the Mississippi River as a result of a tanker ramming into an American Commercial Lines Inc. oil barge near the Crescent City Connection at 1:30AM today. From the T-P:
… State Department of Environmental Quality officials warned the unrefined, tar-like # 6 fuel oil is so thick that it could sink, complicating the cleanup efforts. Therefore, the fuel oil won’t simply evaporate off the surface, which means workers will try to remove it before it starts to sink.
“This is not our first rodeo; we’ve seen spills before,” said Roland Guidry of the Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office.
CNN reports on the spill:
However, the spill is much smaller than the ones that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the Coast Guard estimated that more than 7 million gallons of oil were dumped into the Mississippi and nearby waterways.
But, Bobby Jindal claims Katrina caused no oil spills. I’m confused.
Day 1054: Charlie Rose Interview With RMI’s Amory Lovins
July 16, 2008 - Filed Under culture-society-history, energy, government, science & technology
Charlie Rose talks with co-founder and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, Amory Lovins, about renewable energy and energy policy. I don’t completely buy Lovins’s arguments against nuclear energy (topic for a separate post after more thought), but urge you to pay attention to Rose’s on-point questions and Lovins’s eloquent and far-sighted answers. We cannot afford to be under-informed on this critical aspect of our future.
In my opinion, neither presidential candidate or leading political party really appreciates what a sound American energy policy entails. Therefore, among other great insights, this is the single most important exchange in the interview:
Charlie Rose: “What would you like to see the next president say in his inaugural address and what would you like to see him do in his first 100 days?”
Amory Lovins: “… I would like to see the president do something very trans-ideological, cutting across party lines and perceptions in both political camps of what ought to be done. I don’t think very many progressive politicians understand that what we most need in energy policy is a dose of conservative economic principles, that is we ought to let always to save or produce energy, compete fairly at honest prices regardless of which kind they are - savings or supply, what technology they use, where they are, how big they are or who owns them. Let’s see who’s not in favor of that. Who’s not in favor of that will be all the free marketeers in outward appearance, but actually they are corporate socialists in free-marketeers’ clothing. It is very curious to me that many who profess to be political conservatives are the biggest subsidizers of their favorite technologies and the most opposed to real competition. Conversely, many liberals try to subsidize their favorite technologies as much as the other technologies are getting subsidized. Why are we paying so much of our energy bill through our tax bill? Let’s pay it at the pump or at the meter so we know how much it costs. Then we’ll know how much is enough.”
Day 1052: Offshore US Drilling Moratorium Lifted [Updated]
July 14, 2008 - Filed Under energy, global, government
Bloomberg: Bush Lifts Ban on U.S. Offshore Oil, Gas Drilling
About 17.8 billion barrels and 76 trillion cubic feet of gas are off-limits to drilling as a result of congressional and presidential moratoria, according to the Minerals Management Service, an agency of the U.S. Interior Department.
The oil available would amount to just over two years of U.S. consumption. Bush today said the potential reserve from the restricted areas would last almost 10 years.
Making generously broad assumptions that all 17.8 billion barrels of oil are used in the production of motor gasoline, we extract all of it at once and all of it gets to the pump in less than half a decade, the estimates of two and ten years sound dubious to me. My calculation yields a number that lies somewhere in between. Given that current EIA data has US motor gasoline consumption at 9,253,000 barrels/day (388.6 million gallons/day), you do the math and report back with results. Note that the cubic feet of gas number is immaterial to this exercise since this country doesn’t use LPG/LNG to power its cars.
Two years, five years, ten years, whatever. And then what? Are we going back to godawful OPEC with our empty gas tanks out? When do we start to think ahead?
Update: One would think that the smart course of action is leaving the reserve for more dire situations than imagined in our current myopia and beginning to conserve now. Don’t expect conservation to be backed by any flavor of American government, however, because it would net more oil but the government wants tax revenue now.
Day 1045: Aging Infrastructure + Stormy Weather =
July 7, 2008 - Filed Under energy, environment, louisiana
2TheAdvocate.com | Louisiana often leads U.S. oil spill list (HT, NolaDishu)
… Aging infrastructure and the volume of oil either produced or moved through Louisiana is part of the reason the state saw an average 1,500 reported oil spills a year between 1991 through 2004. That’s about four reported oil spills a day, most of which go unnoticed by the public.
Between 1991 and 2004, reported oil spills in Louisiana involved between 91,000 gallons and 701,000 gallons a year. In percentages, Louisiana accounted for between 5.8 percent and 53.6 percent of the reported oil spill volume in the United States, according to the U.S. Coast Guard and the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office. Those are the spills reported in state waters and don’t account for reported spills in federal waters. In Louisiana, federal waters begin three miles from the coast.
… Another contributing factor to oil spills is coastal erosion. In Louisiana, 22 square miles of the coastline are lost to erosion each year. As the land is lost, oil pipelines, old oil equipment and some old oil waste pits become exposed, he said. “Every time there’s a storm, we have leaks,” [Roland Guidry, oil spill coordinator with the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office] said.
… During hurricanes Katrina and Rita, numerous large and small oil spills occurred along the coast. A preliminary count from the two storms is 464, but [Karolien Debusschere, deputy coordinator with the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office] cautioned that those report numbers remain under review and could change.
… the spills ranged from tiny to 90,000 barrels. “It was worse (than expected.) We didn’t expect that kind of surge,” Guidry said of Hurricane Katrina. The storm surge moved tanks with tens of thousands of barrels of oil and floated them away, he said. “That’s power. That’s power,” he said.
… “Louisiana, they have their oil spill response down pretty well,” [Dean Blanchard, habitat enhancement coordinator with the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program in Thibodaux] said. “They clean up efficiently and pretty quickly.” Blanchard said the office doesn’t get calls from the public concerned about oil spills.
… But that could change, [Jill Mastrototaro, Sierra Club senior regional representative for the northern Gulf of Mexico] said.
Day 1003: Coming Down For Air
May 27, 2008 - Filed Under We Are Not Ok, culture-society-history, energy, government
Newsgator says I’ve skimmed only 1,034 posts and that there are 1,635 posts to peruse before I’m all caught up with two to three weeks’ worth of your blog posts. Guess the Arts & Letters Daily and Jezebel feeds will have to be purged unread in the name of Feedreader Zero. The sad sacrifices of the internerd. Don’t weep quietly, just send cash.
Suspect Device, Virgotex and First Draft have the political butt-kicking covered and with appropriate vigor, which helps during these moments in 2008 CE when a politician opens his or her mouth and I develop a rash and/or a nicotine-fit-esque urge to use this space to tell them to shut their self-serving mouths and go frak themselves but a computer or internet connection is not available and, even if it were, who wants to read a bunch of asterisked-out expletives wrought of travel hypnosis? Besides, who really wants to read anything but Virgotex’s thought-provoking latest, which reminds me that even my fatigued questioning and fist-shaking at those who pretend to shepherd America and their sheep is better than not caring at all, right now?
… We’ve been deliberately and painstakingly conditioned to be cynical and dispirited and complacent. No one in this administration gives a rat’s ass that Bush stumbles and slurs and tap dances his way through another press conference, that every speech and interview is just a succession of nervous tics and malapropisms. They don’t care any more than anyone cared when your principal would stammer through the morning announcements over the school intercom. No one in this administration wants us to be inspired. If they want anything from us, it’s our disinterest.
… There are plenty of us, including Clinton voters and for that matter, Republicans and Independents, who are weary and beat down and ready for change. The thing is, people want the change to be quantifiable and recognizable, they want to know what they are getting into before they jump. They want their change to look familiar and welcoming, and above all, safe. And if possible, easy.
The thing is, we are miles past that being able to happen. We are so far past safe and easy that it would take the light from safe and easy decades and decades to reach us. Taking our country back is not going to be safe and it certainly isn’t going to be easy and it’s going to take a long time.
Let’s talk about change. As an example, this weekend, I watched a CNN snippet on rising oil prices and could swear it was the same segment from last summer and the summer before that and so on, only with the price of oil higher. Every summer, we have the same freakout party we had the previous year, yet I haven’t seen a marked drop in the number of low-efficiency vehicles out on the roads. Even in Madison, WI, which oozes EnviroGreenOrganic out of every pore, there are as many single-driver gas guzzlers per capita as in, say, Dallas, Houston or New Orleans. Granted that Madison has more bike paths than all fifty states put together and those bike paths are very well-utilized, but the point I make here is that either Americans aren’t too concerned with the high price of oil or they are but aren’t going to change their current habits because change is scary and hard and its results are not already known.
Again, I’m not talking simply of lifestyle changes because Oh My God The Sky Is Falling And Polar Bears Are On The Off The On The Endangered List, Let’s Debate, but also the kind in which we stop being assholes to one another and make peace with the fact that we’re all here to stay, so get over it. It’s easy to write off change as a basic human impediment, but that’s a cop-out. What puzzles me about older people, normally the most conservative of voters, is they are the ones who should know that life is nothing but change. Look at everything they have been through in the fifty to ninety plus years of their lives, and living couldn’t have been, didn’t come easy. In fact, some of the most difficult battles ushered in positive changes for blacks, women and immigrants, for Americans. Wasn’t it worth it? Are your descendants not worthy of similar? So, it hurts me to hear Democratic voters of those generations, the ones with a longer view of history than someone like me who was nowhere close to being a Snickers bar in my dad’s back pocket in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, slamming the candidate they dislike with non-arguments like their sex, skin color, religion and choice of spouse. This prejudice is what you fought against! Long-term immigrants who state they will not vote for Obama because he is “a black,” men who will not vote for Hillary because she is “a woman,” Christians and Hindus who will not vote for “a Muslim” and so forth, take a minute to listen to yourselves. I expect this non-issue-focused behavior of the neocon wing of the opposing party who see your Wright and raise you a Hagee, not from folks who label themselves as liberal or intellectual. Change once came in forms that were not quantifiable and not recognizable. You were a part of that scary change and look where it got you and those who followed. It comes again. It’s our turn. Let go so we can enter the unknown to make it right for our children and theirs.
I am far from emptying the glass of Obama or Democrat KoolAid. If anything, having lived in New Orleans for little more than half a decade, especially after August 29th, 2005, has made me suspicious of anyone who runs for political office. (Tell me you wouldn’t be if Ray Nagin and Renee Gill Pratt were two of your parish’s Dem superdelegates.) The current process is dead to me. This does not mean that I am jaded or complacent; I am just the opposite, very actively not buying the bullshit. Voters like me need the promise of a better political infrastructure - one not caught up in maintaining itself at the cost of the country itself - as well as someone competent and inclusive at the helm. As John McQuaid recently posted, “Yes, government at all levels has failed New Orleans. And individuals have done their best to make up for it, often with minimal government support and a great deal of government interference. But that doesn’t mean those people wouldn’t be a lot better off with a government that actually was working to help them.” So, this is my request of the next president and those who put him or her in office: we’re Americans, we’re yours. Ask us to step up to the plate, but give us well-built bats, real helmets and a good game, not one in which members of our own team turn against us or we have to pummel the opposing team to a pulp to win. Or we’ll leave America, mentally then physically. It’s not deserting America. It is America deserting us.
The solution to this ultimatum is, of course, a change of current ways. Ask us to look at each other as people, tell us to stop averting our eyes from the realities of poverty and homelessness, ask us to drive fuel-efficient cars and push us onto trains, quit taxing us and not the corporations and calling it capitalism, demand that we meet challenges of necessity and innovation after first advising us to define what necessity and product means, ask us to support an overhaul of schools, call for an America which makes us demand the most of ourselves and each other. And, for God’s sake, stop placating us and, in turn, yourselves. We don’t need coddling, money and stuff for today, we need a future for all the days beyond. We need value. And you need us. Just ask, damn it.
Day 961: Supply And Demand, Much?
April 15, 2008 - Filed Under energy, government
The national imperative should not be reducing or increasing the price of gasoline. It should be telling automaker lobbyists to take a hike until they come back with more fuel-efficient cars, demanding of Americans to drive less and a huge resurgence of mass transit, including carpools, buses and trains.
Instead, Republican presidential candidate John McCain calls for a temporary suspension of the gas tax. Arguably, too high a price of gasoline (even without the Democratic candidates’ suggested tax hike) will wreak havoc on an economy that cannot pay for it, but we are now in the unenviable position of a recession along with a drop in national drilling, production and refining activity. Lowering the price of gasoline will only make us more dependent on what has already been presented to the public as an economically unreliable commodity. Also, the “tax holiday” is just that - temporary. If such a law gets passed, the prices will more than likely go back up a small while after your buddy McCain becomes president.
If gas prices get too high, we’re screwed. If they are lowered, we’re screwed. Either way, it’s time to pay the piper. Meanwhile, we have to listen to candidates spout the Campaign Trail Kool-Aid Talking Points.
NOLA-Dishu presents a slightly different take on this issue.
Day 941: Shell Oil President On Charlie Rose
March 25, 2008 - Filed Under energy, environment, government, movies/tv, science & technology
Guess it’s not cartoon, Food Network and UFO Hunters night at Casa M&D. Bush’s War on PBS Frontline is over. On to John Hofmeister, recently-retired president of Shell Oil, on Charlie Rose.
Right off the bat, Hofmeister expressed two sentiments that strike me as surprising/refreshing coming out of the mouth of an oil company executive: America has not made oil parsimony a matter of national pride. Additionally, it is the responsibility of federal, state and local governments to slap tariffs on energy abusers. As for the latter comment, let me assure you how thrilled I am not discovering hydrocarbon reservoirs that will fuel, for example, single-driver Hummers and F-350s that have never been off-road, much less over a pebble.
The rest of the program is a predictable dance; Charlie Rose conducts the interview from the perspective of the concerned environmentalist, while Hofmeister is an experienced oil-company spokesman. Following are interesting comments to ponder:
- Hofmeister points out that, in terms of positioning Shell for the future, Shell is very much an oil company, but underpinning this is a technology company, which makes 1, 5, 10, 25, 100 year outlooks. True that, I could write volumes about Shell’s and Chevron’s technological wealth, which resides mainly in the heads of their scientists and engineers. A real tragedy is that hiring did not keep up during the oil bust of the late 1980s and many of these folks will reach retirement age in the next few years. Oil companies’ intellectual assets have already begun to leave taking all that brilliance with them. Along with universities graduating increasingly less petroleum technologists, you could say that the oil industry faces a minor resourcing crunch.
- “Americans use 10,000 gallons of oil per second, not a minute, a second.”
- I’ve noticed that a number of disparate folks, from Herr Doktor Brother to Shell executives, place an immense amount of faith in nanotechnology as the wave of the future, as soon as ten years from now.
- “Politics is the root of the lack of progress. And the image of the oil industry has not helped.” This statement led into the need for a national energy security policy. Immediately, I questioned if this is a policy that involves oil exclusively.
- “We’re not climatologists, but action is needed [on global warming].”
- “We’re for reducing emissions by increasing miles per gallon [through hybrid vehicles, hydrogen cells, etc.]”
As an oil industry geophysicist, the solution as I see it is not in world governments making laws and in Shell and other oil companies enacting resolutions and initiating research for a less-hydrocarbon-dependent future. While these are good first steps, the real answer lies in the combination of consumer ownership of the problem, unfettered research and law enforcement.
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