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my impression was that shell doesnt have a centralized organization which deals with climate change topics. Conversely, it appeared that many departments had at least one person who dealt with the topic. I wouldnt be surprised if those positions were created for folks who werent useful in revenue generating positions. Kind of like the "rubber rooms" for teachers that cant be fired. There were some "true believers" in Shell that were in their positions because they wanted to be but at least one of those people shouldve really been committed to a rubber room (she sent an email to Andrew Gould when she worked for SLB that contained a few f-bombs and berating him and the company for how women were treated by the company. She thought her summons to Paris the next day was for a promotion).
I think the outrage over Pruitt's comment is overdone and how it is being portrayed is bit twisted - although the link you provided is better than some I've seen. What he said is not inconsistent with CO2 contributing to climate change and his argument is actually more objective than the views of many supposed scientists I know.
Not sure what you meant by "shortest working administration ever"
edit: I dont think i would be alone, even amongst federal government scientists, in believing that EPA has the worst scientific organization in the US. It's an embarrassment to the concept of technological advancement that they are allowed to establish what tools can be used by other scientific organizations in the federal government.
Shell's clever scheme to cut director pay
Silicon and SiO2 is all the same ;^). Most oil people dont have very good grasp of chemistry (chemical engineers can be surprisingly clueless when it comes to the chemical part of their appellation).
i suspect the less sophisticated proppant companies (i.e. quartz sand providers) will go the way of most other natural resource commodity companies if micro-proppant useage becomes common place
https://www.spe.org/en/jpt/jpt-article-detail/?art=2715
i'll make another semi-bold prediction: eventually service companies will figure out how to create these microspheres by mixing "incompatible" fracturing fluids at the perforations as part of the fracturing event. The incompatible fluids would be homogenous liquids which precipitate a solid upon mixing. The trick is nucleating bazillions of micro-particles on the reservoir side of the well in the time frame that the fractures are open with sufficiently strong particles that can prop the fractures and dont seal off flow into the fractures and the wellbore.
i'd say so. Expecting 2x from here seems very optimistic.
looks like the folks who did promo work for obamacare found jobs with PhRMA
i cant resist. what kind of lab were you in?
interesting idea but what is your logic behind Mettler-Toledo versus other analytical instrument manufacturers. I would think Mettler is a bit high end for the marijuana market. The stock has performed amazingly well for past several years but i wouldnt expect pot to give it further juicing.
catch 22 for former oil workers
Calls Made for Oil, Gas Worker Discrimination Investigation
http://www.rigzone.com/news/oil_gas/a/148475/Calls_Made_for_Oil_Gas_Worker_Discrimination_Investigation
i suspect that potential employers in other industries are afraid that if they hire former oil industry workers that those folks will jump ship as soon as oil prices rise
that would probably be a safe assumption for younger ex-oilfield types but as i pointed out earlier, i think there has been rampant age-discrimination going on in the oilfield layoffs so this is a "stupid gets, what stupid creates" situation.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/investor-honeymoon-with-opec-falters-as-shale-drilling-booms
since alternative facts are popular these days:
I'd bet 'commercial' pot growers spend far more on security than fertilizer. Not exactly a row crop grown in large open fields so security covers a lot.
depressing indeed. trimming mostly depends on where you are and who you're connected to. I know many extremely competent people who have been whacked while a guy who plagiarized 3 pages of a project proposal from wikipedia is still employed. Sometimes i think people who still have jobs must have pictures or other evidence of their boss doing something really nefarious cuz i cant see any other reason for them having a job. One guy i know literally has not produced anything over the 20 yrs he's worked for SLB, he only has a high-school degree, he's a 'functional' alchoholic, he's had several sexual relationships with other employees that have led to those other employees quitting or getting transferred, and he's a major source of morale problems in his department. I just cant explain his continued employment any other way.
2+ yrs of layoffs + what is referred to as "the big crew change" (at least on the service side).
the industry has been concerned for ~10 yrs about the graying of their workforce with diminished inflows of engineers and scientists coming out of good schools.
I may be prejudiced but it appears to me that in spite of that supposed concern, the graying crowd was over-represented in the layoffs of the past 2+ yrs. In one case I know of, age was explicitly stated as the reason for a layoff by a young manager from Africa who apparently had slept thru the part of his management training that informed him of age discrimination laws. In that case, the manager said he was given a list of people over 55 and was told that they should be given priority in his choice of who to trim. That was part of his apology to the guy he was whacking who was extremely experienced and was over-seeing 5 contracts at the time he was whacked so it wasnt like he was a slouch. SLB had to hire him back as a consultant in order to keep those contracts. I'm sure SLB saved a lot of money on that move (that's sarcasm).
early in my time in oil i was told by a VP that he knew 80% of the people working at my location were useless but he didnt care as long as they didnt get in the way of the 20% who actually did something useful. While in principle market collapses should provide an opportunity to trim that 80% and increase the productive %, i dont think that has happened. The same 20:80 exists, just fewer number of bodies and the 20 part includes a lot of well intentioned but less knowledgeable humans.
lack of personnel with appropriate technical knowledge and skills
i read that as an observation of current practice rather than an assumption that big oil would not eventually return to mega-projects.
I think the return to 'mega-projects' is inevitable but the specific cases mentioned in the article make zero sense to pursue at the moment and probably for at least another 2 yrs. If i were running a large E&P i'd be looking to buy known assets in much less physically challenging areas and they can be had for pennies on the dollar now.
Regarding Shell's Chukchi Sea adventure: that project was rife with mismanagement as well as being assaulted by regulatory agencies. So I wouldnt say that big companies have a competitive advantage just because the company is big and the project requires substantial capital. It can just be a big opportunity to lose a lot of money. Plenty of E&P and service companies have adopted that plan.
This may be Trumpian naivete but given the dislocation in the industry now, I suspect that big oil is not capable of pulling off mega-projects now even if the price were to go back to $70 tomorrow. Little projects will be the training wheels for a lot of people.
https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/analysis.cfm?iso=PAK
Says all that need be said. They'll b Haiti before they become a 2nd world country. Keep in mind that the piece of crap house that bin laden lived in was portrayed as a mansion. Their middle class would be obamian poverty level.
I would like to know what was in that requirement that wasn't already covered by the foreign corrupt practices act (which should also go away).
Since many of the countries where oil, gas and mineral ores r extracted have national companies as owners, I don't see a practical difference between a payment to the government or to the government owned company. The ruling family of Angola aren't billionaires because the US does or doesn't block payments to national oil companies.
Need a lot of equipment for that wall
exactly. the "aboriginal peoples" are actually a bigger hurdle to a western Canadian pipeline. All of these people tend to be anti-US and I'd venture if you took a vote from the population opposing the western pipeline on what they disliked more: pipeline or US, the US would 'win'. However, they can have a direct and immediate effect on the pipeline whereas screwing the US is a bit more subtle so they have trouble grasping the concept. Canadians are their own worst enemy. Not sure if Ned Ludd had any progeny but if he did, i suspect they moved to Canada.
sort of. the article cites him as saying “We’re going to renegotiate some of the terms, and if they’d like, we’ll see if we can get that pipeline built.” I suspect that means he intends to use KXL as leverage in his NAFTA renegotiation which probably wont help with the $15B claim against the US by TransCanada.
When it comes to KXL, the only leverage Trump has against Canada is Canadians. If Canada could get its own act together, they'd build their own pipeline to the BC coast and give the US a big 'up yours' salute.
the way the sentence in the article is written, it's difficult to ascertain whether the 10-20% refers specifically to cost of sand or to materials and services in general. However, a 10-20% increase from near zero is not particularly impressive. So either way i dont think the article and my comment are inconsistent.
Increased costs will be incurred by things like putting train lines back into shipping sand rather than container freight. There's also my favorite of putting extra crap and non-productive people into the system to avoid violation of new EPA and other government regulatory rules.
The 'bar room brawl' aspect is that every tom-dick-and harry service company will be competing for jobs that dont require the high-end services which are the forte of HAL, SLB, and BHI. The big boys are also trying to compete for those low end jobs in NAM just to keep market share and people and equipment busy. Given their higher operating costs, that's a big loser.
there is much written between the lines in that article. i dont see how service companies have any pricing power in current environment.
SLB reports 20Jan and I'd bet it wont be pretty. They are still firing good people, keeping some rather poor 'performers', cutting divisions and moving people and equipment around and between continents, and they've yet to learn that they won't be beating Corelab anytime soon. Changing management on a poorly conceived business model wont fix the problem. On a positive note, they're further reducing operations in France and moving those operations to the US so they'll get a gold star from Trump.
In spite of things like that, becuz everything is being done on short term contracts, when demand does return, then prices will go ballistic. That so many experienced people are out of the industry now and wont be returning will exacerbate costs throughout the chain so I'm not sure that high prices will necessarily mean high profitability. Of course, Ive always said that there are a lot of jobs in the oil industry that a Walmart stocker could do better so i could be wrong (but i doubt it 'cuz the powers-that-be have never recognized that Walmart workers could do many of the jobs for 20% of the cost - specifically anything involved in the supply chain)
If u want another good laugh read the comments to that article. They're all written by someone using the name Bruce saltzman which I'm betting is an alias for the ghost of deng xiaoping
yes, and edible too!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_battery
there are many types of batteries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_types
some would be harmless and others are worth recycling
I was wondering if they used lead-acid and jbog addressed that unasked question.
what kinds of batteries?
I'm sure it'll eventually show up on poofy restaurant menus as "Amaranthus salad" rather than pigweed. So much more sexy. I never cease to be amazed at the stuff i consider to be a butt ugly weed which subsequently shows up in high-end restaurants and grocery stores.
I've seen it around but no 7 ft tall plants. i dont think it's anything more than an annoyance.
some growers in western KY are starting to grow canola but i have a foggy memory that harvesting canola requires some equipment expense, e.g. the seeds are so small that the same combine used to harvest wheat doesnt do well with canola. Not sure what modifications are required to fix the situation but i wouldnt be surprised if that's the major barrier.
my part of the world has 2 crops/yr which r either wheat+corn or wheat+soy . As u said people adapt to how they see the market going with the additional consideration of maintaining soil health. There's no need or expectation of government 'help' and the interference that does come is usually blatantly harmful.
agreed, if Ford's prognostication were to transpire - which i dont think will happen in 15 yrs. However, I think the ultimate goal of the electric car crowd is to eliminate hydrocarbon fuels. There's an obvious disconnect on that point. How is the electrical power output doubled while reducing hydrocarbon and coal consumption by double digit %s? The most disconnected folks think that wind, solar, and batteries can accomplish that task but those folks havent come to grips with the concept of base-load power generation, the magnitude of power consumed, what would be required to meet that magnitude via wind & solar, and the physical attributes of batteries (who hasnt noticed that battery performance in their cellphone deteriorates over time?). Nuclear could do the trick but the anti-carbon crowd tends to be just as adamantly anti-nuke (and frequently, anti-hydro).
One thing I'm sure of is that if solar and wind output was increased by 10x (which would get those to ~50%) in 15 yrs, most of the people clamoring for that increase would have a very different perspective on the back end (assuming they would be alive, paying taxes and utility bills, and caring about winged creatures and other environmental 'issues').
buy aluminum and steel companies
the US consumes ~7E9 bbls oil/yr ~90% if which goes to transportation fuels.
1 bbl oil ~ 1.7 MW*hr ; the US consumes 5E9 MW*hr/yr electricity
if oil consumption is cut by 50% and that power is replaced by electricity, then the US would need to generate and create the distribution system for an at least an additional 5E9 MW*hr/yr (that's a very conservative calculation).
Ford's statement requires more than doubling the electrical power infrastructure in 15 yrs - thus the recommendation to buy aluminum and steel if Ford's prognostication is to be believed. For the climate change folks, I'm hoping all of those additional aluminum processing plants are hydroelectric powered.
Maybe it's Ford's turn to go bankrupt.
the Dept of Labor says all of the west african producers are guilty
https://www.dol.gov/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-of-goods/
filter by Cocoa
Country Good Exploitation Type
Cameroon Cocoa Child Labor
Cote d'Ivoire Cocoa Child Labor, Forced Labor
Ghana Cocoa Child Labor
Guinea Cocoa Child Labor
Nigeria Cocoa Child Labor, Forced Labor
Sierra Leone Cocoa Child Labor
suspect both. was going to post the link that biotech researcher posted. momentary lapse of reason on Argentina - i was going by memory.
thanks for the feedback in flavors and fragrances. My interest was somewhat peripheral to the cacao thread thru vanilla although I suspect the 2 markets are tied at the hip. I'm guessing that vanilla doesnt get the same level of attention as cacao because vanillins can be synthesized more easily than the flavors in cacao.
Part of my point was that other regions where cacao can b grown (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia) r not economically competitive because those countries have higher labor standards. If child labor was ended, then I think u would get the cacao shortage u mentioned. In addition, higher oil prices combined with the elimination of child labor might also indirectly contribute to higher cacao prices.
Is there really a biological barrier to where cacao can be grown? It appears to me that the climatological requirements are met in several continents but the primary growing area is west Africa because of labor costs.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the major African cacao exporting countries use child labor and r also oil exporters. I suspect children r the available work force for the prices being paid.
dont know why they would want to hide buying a russian drilling services company but i have doubts as to the purchase going through. SLB tried that ~ 2 yrs ago and it eventually collapsed. I'd expect such a purchase to be more problematic for HAL since their russian ties are far weaker.
i thought i did too but i'll take being right by being wrong
the link doesnt do the case justice. The guy sent >1000 lbs of corn seed to China. He works for a Chinese seed company. His sister is married to the CEO. 5 or 6 others that were indicted fled the US so he was left holding the bag. He has cancer which is currently in remission; i suspect he was chosen for corn stealing duty because of his cancer (I'm sure his children will have a nice life insurance payout). He was caught literally digging plants out of field (apparently not his 1st time; he was being surveiled). It is suspected that he and his colleagues had help from DuPont and Monsanto employees although none have been charged.
No idea. Freak day. Somebody bot a bunch of $100/bbl Jan 2018 options. Mayb they also bot a bunch of HAL.
SLB is still firing people and GE O&G is talking about work force reductions (they were hiring people 6 months ago). I don't c much in the way of good oil news in near future but I also don't think any of the service companies r cheap now
Just to clarify: u r affirming that it would b a waste of capital to drill most of the US eastern offshore (which I agree)
I had the same question as to how difficult it would be to toss obama's invocation of the 1953 law if Congress wanted to do so. I suspect it would b easy although inconsequential.