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i thought his comment was spot-on. $ better spent on covid than 'alternative' energy.
My own take is that oil prices are likely to stay low - particularly if Iran sanctions are removed and the Saudis and Iranians play race-to-the-bottom again. If that happens, US production will be BK'd with or w/o additional regulatory burdens.
On the flipside, i suspect natural gas prices will increase as consequence of additional regulatory burdens and lower transportability.
I think both of those work against competitiveness of alternative energy. While the differential betw NG and wind/solar generated electrical power drops, cost to consumer is increased and cost of driving CEs is lower.
I’d like to know which senators believe that a president can unilaterally cancel student debt
some of them are nutty, eg only 2 western most counties in TX are mountain while rest of state is central. My 1st drive from eastern NM to airport in El Paso freaked me out cuz I thought I was 1 hr late after crossing state line and clocked flipped to central. Eastern Oregon is another nutty one
that’s my take as well. It’s a ‘be careful what you ask for’ for the anti-hydrocarbon crowd.
Not that I think it will be done, but if Biden were to be elected and initiate a program to install 500k charging stations, I’d be looking for a large lagging increase in NG consumption (I’d assume that he would also renew subsidies for EVs).
It appears that my scaffolding guess was correct but I think that the HAp will last much longer than the organic part of the filler. Over longer term of repeated use there may be a build up of HAp which I would expect to make the tissue hard and possibly cause damage.
In addition, the recrystallization rate of HAp might cause non homogenous redistribution (on a macro scale) such that hard spots might appear around injection sites.
Hydroxyapatite crystals tend to have large length to width ratios (more needle like than equant). That’s great for forming framework structures (eg HAp+proteins for forming bones and teeth or think why beavers build dams with sticks rather than stones). I wouldn’t expect structure formers to be desirable for things where homogeneity/isotropic properties are desired. That’s probably why they mention ‘microspheres’.
Materials scientists have been trying to produce microcrystalline HAp that approach spherical form for bio applications for many years (less likely to do unpleasant things like form clots - again that structure building problem). Unfortunately, those attempts are trying to defeat a fundamental physical characteristic of the substance. At a macroscopic scale growth rates of different crystallographic faces, & consequently shapes, can be modified by ‘poisoning’ some faces vs others. At a microscopic scale, that’s impractical so materials people rely on things like ‘homogenous nucleation’ schemes followed by quickly killing further growth or, more crudely, by milling. I’ve never seen any of those things work for HAp (but I haven’t messed w the topic in 20 yrs so maybe somebody pulled off a miracle).
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a HAp filler felt hard or got lumpy. I’m guessing that it is used to prolong the filler’s lifespan but related to that I’d worry about long term effects cuz the HAp will last a lot longer than the organic part of the filler.
The good thing about HAp is that it is quite bio compatible, a variety of elements/groups can be substituted into its structure thereby allowing some tuning of characteristics, and it can be metabolized.
I don’t know how important the HAp morphology is in this application but ‘microsphere’ is almost certainly misleading. HAp tends to form acicular crystals even at micron scale. If the particles are amorphous, then might be different matter but I suspect that crystallization is on order of weeks to months. Not sure I’d want that going on in my face.
very aspirational but a pipedream. I'm not a big fan of the 'greenness' of batteries but given the choice between the 2 i agree with semi.
some musings:
fans of 'green' hydrogen love to point out that there is an effective infinite supply of seawater and one can power a desalination plant with solar/wind. However, there are non-trivial details involved in delivering, desalinating, and dealing with waste and maintenance.
Seawater needs to be screened and filtered to remove suspended stuff and biologics. If you dont want to piss off PETA, your plant has beach wells (with downside being supply constraints). Filters require regeneration, cleaning or replacement. Then there are scaling/fouling/corrosion problems.
I have no idea what commercial desalination plants do with their waste streams but the more saline water on the upstream side of a reverse osmosis membrane (hydrocarbon derived) obviously becomes more saline than seawater. That is part of the scaling/fouling problem but it's also volume of waste that is larger than the volume of 'purified' water that is delivered to the electrolysis plant (only a small fraction of the original volume of seawater is 'purified'). If the saline water is pumped directly back into the sea, then there's a good chance you piss off PETA again. If you pump the waste water into wells, then you piss off the anti-fracking crowd cuz that's what will happen (dealing with garbage is always a low margin game that operates on volume so operators like to cheat on injection rates, c.f. earthquakes associated with brine disposal wells in Oklahoma and Ohio). The volumes involved would almost certainly preclude well disposal so i suspect cities that currently run desalination plants dont worry about PETA or unbalancing local ecosystems (i'm wondering now wondering if some red tides are associated with desalination plants).
Some of these problems are avoided if your pumping water out of Lake Michigan or the Mississippi but Denver is gonna have a problem with local water supply for hydrogen generation. Of course, hydrogen can be piped to Denver but that's a problem that has been addressed previously.
The power costs required to run reverse osmosis are just one small part of the pie.
Lithium is just another resource so the short answer is no. To put in perspective its crustal abundance is 50% of neodymium which is another necessary metal for EVs. However, neither are really in short supply in terms of resource availability. If people are willing to pony up the $ for EVs, then companies will produce the resource.
I don’t think govmint mandates on EVs are worth the air wasted in spouting off on such things. CA has obvious problems w electric power distribution that won’t be solved in 15 yrs. The folks that talk about ‘green’ hydrogen as a solution have no idea what they’re talking about (ie the pesky details).
Short story is that EV mandates won’t work without massive infrastructure transformations (eg electric power line and generator installation). I’d put Li availability at the low end of things I’d worry about.
There are some back of the envelope calculations that folks like Newsom ignore. Look at energy content of gasoline and nat gas, the amount consumed in CA each year, assume some conservative efficiency and that will be a fraction of the amount of added electrical power generation necessary. Then look at current wind and solar electrical generation in both CA and US. The differences are enormous.
If you believe that EVs will take over in 15 yrs, then it would probably be smarter to invest in the folks building the infrastructure vs Li miners/extractors.
PS: the author of that article was the brother of Harry Hess who was one of the people who conceptualized and proved plate tectonics
short, short, short
those pegmatites have been mined for a long time for various minerals. There are Canadian spodumene pegmatites that put the NC deposits to shame. Problem w these things is that a lot of energy (and wear) goes into grinding up the silicates and separating out the lithium.
there is a very rich Li clay deposit in Southern California. I’m not sure what the reserves are because it has been mined for at least 50 yrs. I’d bet what was considered sub-economic previously would be economic if battery manufacturing takes off.
For the same reason that the hectorite deposit exists in S California, there are also Li rich clay deposits in Nevada. I doubt that the NV deposits are as rich. The geothermal brines in NV and S CA are very high in Li and I would expect those to be a cheaper source but I’m not an engineer and it may turn out that doing ion exchange from clays may be cheaper than separating the various ions from solution. Perhaps Elon will set up a combo of NH3, cement, and Li extraction plants to mitigate net CO2 production.
fundamental problem w that article that makes it sound like propaganda: Bloomberg talks about the well “spewing” methane into the atmosphere but also states that the well owner didn’t “pump” a single cubic foot. The owner may not have gathered any gas but if pumping is necessary to produce, then I doubt that the well is “spewing”. In addition, if it were “spewing” gas, the monitoring folks wouldn’t put a tent over the well.
what’s the source of H2. Conspicuously lacking that info. “Virtually carbon free” is another red flag
not la la. just not practical for the described purpose. looks like it's based on Seebeck effect. If you put a bunch of thermocouples in series, then a temperature difference between the thermocouple junctions sets up a current in the wire. I've used the same principle/configuration in calorimeters to measure heat effects associated with chemical reactions/processes.
it wouldnt be practical because it would require a crapload of thermocouple junctions (probably millions/panel) to generate sufficient power for household use. Making all of those junctions would be expensive and any set of serially connected junctions would be like old fashioned string of Christmas lights - failure anywhere along the string kills it.
I suggested a similar scheme to some professors at Princeton many years ago for powering satellites and they poo-poo'd it.
if memory is correct you spoke favorably of Fanuc and MTSC
same. this goes straight to the district court file
https://www.ded.uscourts.gov/sites/ded/files/opinions/17-374_2.pdf
i get a malicious site blocked message on my PC and my phone said something about viruses when i tried to use your link
i had to look it up myself. it is apparently jargon used in association with subsidiaries and limited partnerships. Transfer of assets would certainly be clearer. Not sure why the transfer was done but i suspect to meet some requirements regarding debt/asset/income covenants.
i assume that the 'drop down' is transfer of Delek Permian Gathering business and Trucking Assets to DKL. The Red River pipeline expansion refers to pipeline from west Texas near SE corner of NM to Gulf coast near Galveston. the other stuff is obviously vague and i have no idea what it entails and i dont know if any enterprising folks on the conference call asked for clarification.
does that answer question?
on que: DK down 13%
yikes. I bot DK back in March. Looking forward to a similar appreciation in value ;^)
> 3 miles gets into some very deep water on west coast. Any of offshore wind platforms semi-submersible?
stupid question: what is the barrier to anyone using nebulized interferon as Covid treatment?
copper and aluminum miners
I looked into it a bit and polymer or polymer lined piping could alleviate some of the corrosion problem. Still expensive. However, the much greater compressibility would require compressors different than used for NG (I suspect to keep them from burning up). And in the end the product still has 3x lower energy density vs NG. I suspect that once ALL the costs are included, it would be cheaper to string wires across the Mediterranean.
I don’t see how H2 generation in N Africa for use in Europe could come anywhere close to being competitive w local electricity delivered directly to batteries. Compression and piping costs are killer (can’t use NG pipes and compressors). Also, where is the water coming from? Large scale H2 generation from seawater is another impracticality. Desalination plants aren’t cheap and probably better used for other things.
wasn’t just over leverage that prevented pivoting to oil, there were a lot of managers that actively resisted doing so even though it was obvious to anyone w a brain that it had to be done. Lots of mentally impaired types.
As for acreage, I remember seeing a lease map that included areas around the finger lakes in NY. Thoroughly metamorphosed rocks. Not a chance of liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons. But they had it leased. Probably more valuable for vacation cottages.
I’m betting that a large fraction of those buyers are “concerned” about climate change.
batteries have been around for about 200 years and the 1st automobiles ran on batteries yet it’s always back to the future....
don’t know but there must’ve been US federal funding involved at some point because the HHS IG is looking into it.
Desai has several papers flagged on PubPeer including his phd thesis. Long-standing evidence of ‘ethical lapses’ ignored
lots of people have been saying that SA needs $xx/bbl w xx > ~60 to balance their budget but $xx hasn’t been sustained in last > 5 yrs so either the balanced budget supposition is wrong or they’ve deep enough reserves to not worry about it. I suspect both and semi’s happy number for them is close enough to being accurate.
from petrochemicals we came and to petrochemicals we shall return 8^) (my take on dust to dust)
I’m infinitely naive but couldn’t a printable spray coating be applied that’s cost competitive w plastic containers? Even if a plastic coating was applied, I’d think it would greatly reduce the volume of plastic waste.
One thing I suspect it could be used for immediately w/o the aesthetic concern is egg cartons cuz a lot of those already look like crap and it doesn’t stop people from buying ??
so it sounds like the material could be used for milk jugs or other perishable liquids w limited shelf life. Water bottles would be nice but I suspect those have near infinite shelf life so nobody wants to run risk of loss of containment on their inventory. Milk and OJ containers would be a big step in reduction of plastics going into landfill and oceans
how long does the coffee cup survive with coffee in it? Also wondering about mechanism of decomposition. I would expect ramifications wrt to shelf life and product usage/extensibility
[OT] - dimethyl sulfide is not particularly toxic by itself at low concentrations so that's probably not the source of chest pain/respiratory problems. Some of the oxidation products of dimethyl sulfide, e.g. SO2 will cause respiratory and nervous system problems (e.g. SO2 is every bit as toxic as H2S so even very low concentrations of SO2 are toxic). SO2 also has an odor but it's not something you want to get to know cuz consequences can be worse than irritation.
The stench that goes along with piles of decaying algae, as in your picture, is mostly from dimethylsulfide but there's probably a few other nasty, volatile organics that also contribute.
Dimethyl sulfide is both a metabolite of living marine organisms as well as a decay product of dead organisms (side bar note: the buried marine evaporite sequences in SE NM and W TX contain filaments of 260M yr old dead marine algae and the intergranular 'pore space' in the salt can contain substantial amounts of 260M yr old dimethyl sulfide. Sometimes during excavation, the DMS out-gases, sometimes violently, which causes much amusement. Of course, most folks are clueless so the safety folks start analyzing for CH4, H2S, and everything but DMS - dont find anything in their handbook of bad stuff and tell the humble miners to continue on as if nothing happened). The reason i know it was DMS is because the humble miners always report smelling something like rotten cabbage in their incident reports. Most safety minions are morons.)
brevetoxins are the primary metabolite of micro algae that cause respiratory problems. If you check out the human exposure section at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tide
it has a succinct but detailed description. There's also a separate brevetoxin page.
brevetoxins are carried in aerosolized droplets - not gaseous. The droplets can be carried long distances over open water so even if the near shore environment is fairly calm w/ only small waves, aerosols created many miles offshore can be carried to shore where it can affect humans. Apparently, some folks think effects are not limited to ingestion: e.g. dermal contact may also cause problems.
I'm one of those people that think algal 'blooms' that produce brevetoxins are related to human activity, e.g. sewage and fertilizer runoff. Yet another reason to avoid such things.
Sunlight is obviously necessary for most marine algae so there will be a correlation of sunlight with metabolic production of both DMS and brevetoxins. However, because DMS is also a decay product, I doubt that differentiation of the 2 sources would be easy. If you're taking your twilight walks away from sources of decaying, stinky algae, then you're probably avoiding both sources. It's also possible that some of the organisms that contribute to decay are sunlight dependent.
I avoid beaches strewn with seaweed as in your picture mostly cuz of the biting flys that tend to like the decaying algae. Rule of thumb: avoid spending time around dead and decaying stuff 8^)
addendum2: I forgot another route - lots of people eat shellfish when they go to the beach. Some shellfish ingest the algae that produce nasty toxins and store the toxins in their own flesh. Humans ingesting those shellfish can suffer respiratory problems, ie bad shellfish effects are not limited to gastrointestinal system
addendum: re your visible algae. I think you’re focused on the macro algae. Stuff like kelp might be happily living several meters below surface and not be visible. I’m not sure if they are one of the dimethylsulfide producers. However, the really nasty toxins associated w red tide are produced by microscopic dinoflagellates which only are visible when their growth gets out of balance. They are still in the water on any day producing their nasty crap. Some people are just more sensitive than others.