No. wrt the Hawaii case: 1. I think your prior conclusion is correct & 2. when Hawaii became a state it was admitted w unique agreements wrt federal jurisdiction that may afford a legal position that is not available to most other states. However, I'm not a lawyer and don't know the details of the case.

This kind of suit doesn't look much different from going after prostitutes while exempting the customers from prosecution. 

bans on single use packaging will only be effective (adopting a generous use of the word) in affluent societies. Eliminating all plastic packaging is not practical or desirable. 

Ultimately the problem is on the disposal and environmental persistence problem - not CO2/climate change. The solution is in addressing the environmental persistence of fossil carbon based plastics. Plant based plastics can not be competitive - particularly in societies in which the environmental persistence problem is most pronounced.

Their CUNY scientist, Wang, has been charged with several federal crimes

If they have fuel cells that would make 2028 possible, then they could demonstrate those engines now. If they can’t/wont do that, then vaporware

Water depth is about 5k ft. Reservoir at ~30k ft below sea level. Reservoir temperature is about 120 degC.

thx. Not so insane after all. Just difficult. I'm assuming that the gas being reinjected is separating out of the oil upon production versus primary gas production. For those that may care, the injected gas serves to maintain reservoir pressure to minimize or avoid gas separation in the reservoir as well as apparently lowering viscosity as well as "swelling" the oil. Gas separation in the reservoir would impede production because interfacial tension between gas and liquid can block mobility. Lower viscosity helps flow and swelling helps move things along and lowers density.

https://onepetro.org/JPT/article-abstract/75/07/63/528655/Approach-Improves-Vertical-and-Areal-Sweep-in?redirectedFrom=fulltext

aside from the hazards of separating and injecting H2S-rich gas, my thinking behind insanity was:
1. asphaltene precipitation - but the oil appears to be light enough where asphaltene probably isnt a problem. Asphaltenes are high molecular weight, complex heteroaromatic compounds that tend to contain transition metals. Dissolved asphaltene concentrations tend to be higher in heavy oils and are low to non-existent in light oils. Causing asphaltenes to precipitate during oil production is bad.
2. corrosion and scale/mineral forming reactions. These can happen during production, processing, reinjection, and in the "stimulated" reservoir away from the wellbore. Reactions in the reservoir can be good or bad. In this case the reservoir rock is carbonate and H2S and CO2 are "acid" gases so it's conceivable that injection would improve permeability. However, that presumes the presence of water and what dissolves in one place may precipitate in another place. Reprecipitation is not necessarily bad but can be. Corrosion of infrastructure is probably why the cost of the project was ~twice what was anticipated. Still better than government planning.

while fractionating off H2S makes sense (same process as what I described), injecting it rather than burning seems insane. Are you sure they are reinjecting? I’m genuinely curious.

more wagging: in a long pipeline, pumping stations are required along the length of the pipeline to keep the fluid moving. Otherwise friction stops movement. The lowering pressure and pressure boosters may refer to different parts of the operation. Lowering pressure can cause condensation of some compositional fraction of a gas stream. Those condensed fractions usually have higher carbon numbers and are more valuable. Thus, pipeline operators sometimes siphon off the condensed fractions at low pressure points in the pipeline. Those liquids can be shipped more cheaply by other means or used closer to the extraction point.

There are offsets in operational costs betw pipeline pressure and diameter. Usually, the larger the pressure & diameter, the lower the pumping costs and efficiency but lg diameter, high pressure pipe is expensive. Also, whatever is feeding into the pipeline might not support large volumes and high pressures. My guess is that the Kazakh supply system can’t support lg vol, high pressure. Could be bc logistical reasons as well as physical. I’m not a infrastructure person so that may be BS.

WAG: i think it’s for better accuracy in determining the volume or mass of material passing thru the metering station

tangentially, by the same logic, I think the beyond meat et al folks are eventual dumpster fodder

IEA prognostications of oil consumption are notoriously bad. Since thermodynamics rules & consumer population will grow, OPEC is more likely to be correct

fed land and fed enclave follow up

The Presidio in San Francisco is one of the exceptions to the fed government making money/acre. The downside is that personal injury, labor disputes, … all get chucked into federal court bc ‘federal enclave’. I’m not sure how things like robbery or assault are handled. The consequence is that cases get bogged down and there can be egregious abuses of justice due to absence of federal remedies. I would expect this to have some impairment although big government contractors or big franchise vendors like McDonald’s find such situations to be very advantageous.

In terms of area, yes, but most of Alaska isn’t a particularly valuable real estate holding.

Military reservations and land around national labs comprise a large area in lower 48. For example, the Hanford reservation is several hundred square miles (probably > 1000 mi^2) and it has negative value outside of gov’t. The area around Oak Ridge, Savannah River and the Idaho ‘lab’ is about same.

A good chunk of fed gov’t owned land in Southern California is bombing & artillery range (I had an unexploded shell as a doorstop when I was in grad school ;^) ). Some of that land could be valuable for mining but California….

Then there’s the big chunks of Nevada that are fed owned. Mostly negative valuation.

Total federal land ownership is about 30% of the country. One of the scarier aspects of that ownership is that legal disputes arising out of incidents that occur on that land often get chucked into federal courts. Federal Enclave law is very complex but since I’ve become aware of the concept, I’m paranoid about stepping foot on federally owned property. Different topic ….

much of the land holdings of the US gov’t are better considered as liabilities rather than assets. For example, national lab and military bases would be superfund sites if operations ceased.

i dont see how electrolytic refining of iron and processing into Fe plates (not clear to me if they are actually making steel) is cheaper than conventional processes. I agree that it looks like smelting would still be required. I suspect that it could be possible to create steel sheets, by growing from an aqueous solution, that had similar properties to steel produced via conventional methods, but i'd bet the cost difference would be huge. I dont think that cost difference would ever go away. Any process involving water will require very large quantities of water, acids, bases, and recycling. When all of the associated energy and CO2 production costs are added up, I'd bet that such Green processes are actually Blacker than an old Pittsburg blast furnace.

Since cost is often a good proxy for energy efficiency, i doubt that the processes in the WSJ article are actually "green". For example, the article mentions that the Boston Metal process involves heating iron solutions to 3000 F while electrolytically reducing the dissolved iron to metallic iron. My intuitive reaction, based on some experience with heating aqueous solutions to 1500 F, is that it is an absolutely nutty idea for a commercial process. Aside from the energy required to heat large quantities of water to 3000 F, aqueous solutions at 3000 F tend to be hard on equipment lifespans. Whatever is reducing the iron in that case is oxidizing something else. I'd like to know what that something else is.

Somewhat as an aside, an aqueous solution at 3000 F has no resemblance to hot liquid water containing dissolved salt that people might casually envision when reading the article. Some people might be inclined to point to the critical point of pure water but if the process started with dissolved iron, then the system is compositionally far removed from pure water and the critical point of water is only peripherally relevant. I would be very surprised if there were only 1 or 2 fluid phases in addition to the liquid iron in such a system. Turbulence due to temperature gradients could be extreme and might cause process/handling problems. In addition, those different fluid phases would contain finite quantities of dissolved stuff and those dissolved things tend to poop out, either as yet additional fluids or solids, as soon as they hit a lower pressure and temperature. Again, very non-trivial process problems that cause me to think such ideas are commercially nutty and uneconomic.

The only advantage i see is the ability to process lower grade iron ore. I suppose that might make the process economically viable in some niche markets.

“Ferrets are not people, of course.”

You know better quality people than me.

(apologies to any ferrets that I’ve offended)

do you think they’ll discuss plant inspection tomorrow?

OT: flip side. I live amongst lg fraction of Mennonites, ~100% unvaxxed. Some of them are ‘afraid’ of people who have been recently vaxxed (ie they ask and wont work for or around recently vaxxed people).

I’ve heard that this has been a problem known to the vial manufacturer(s) for a while. Apparently, the pH > 10 (I’m amazed that isn’t ‘uncomfortable’) in some injectables. In those very alkaline solutions the glass, unsurprisingly, reacts and forms clay particles that eventually are large enough and of sufficient quantity to be visible. Apparently, the Mg-bearing borosilicate glasses are particularly prone.

Delek has a chain of convenience stores and they’re also headquartered in Nashville. ;^)

3, 4, & 5 all seem to be quality control items. Are those likely to require another inspection? 3 and 5 explicitly state that the QC folks lack authority or evidence of authority. Seems like a bad thing to have not taken care of prior to inspection.

i find peer-review to be much worse. Check out PubPeer.com if you want to see the horrors of what makes its way into the scientific literature. Most of the stuff there is biotech related so it can be handy for deep diving into sketchy biotech companies.

My personal experience w the peer-review process is that it is only as valuable as an author wants it to be. A good author seeks out rigorous peer-review. A sketchy author usually manages to find equally sketchy peer-reviewers or journals that tend to use sketchy peer-reviewers.

However, even ‘notable’ authors from prestigious institutions still manage to get sketchy stuff published. There are several Nobel Prize winners and profs from Harvard, MIT, CalTech etc that have been outed for fraudulent papers. Frequently grad students & postdocs get thrown under the bus but the point is that the sketchy stuff makes it thru solely cuz of the trailing name on the author list. There have have been a couple cases where investigators have tested the process by submitting gibberish to journals and the stuff has been accepted for publication.

A more recent problem, particularly w authors from the PRC, is the Paper Mill. Those are professional scientific paper production enterprises. Until recently this practice was unintentionally incentivized by the central government. An author pays according to journal, language, impact factor etc and the mill churns out a paper - usually entirely fraudulent. On a good day, they may actually use real data but the data and the subject and conclusion are not necessarily related.

I am personally familiar with a scientist who has been publishing falsified science for at least a decade (not in the Karl Popper sense). He’s somewhat prolific. He uses real numerical data but what he attaches the numbers to is the falsified part. His work is peer-reviewed both prior to journal submission and by the journals. Nobody managed to catch him until I came along. The institution won’t fire him or retract the articles cuz liability (eg paying back many $millions and risking suspension/termination of a multi-$billion project).

Democracy is much better at self-correcting than science. You don’t hear about science fraud cuz institutions tend to be complicit in hiding fraud. In fact, in the case cited above, one of the management excuses is: “the work made it thru peer-review” so it’s ok.

thx. That was another question. Section 2.8 of Proxy seems to indicate closing within 5 business days of Feb 20 unless something else causes delay within a 3 month window starting on Feb 20.

Not sure 2022 is any more favorable tax wise or for moving to PR 8^)

Thx. Did PFE set up PF Argentum Acquisition to get around the BC-Supreme Court approval requirement or is that still necessary?

enh, peer-review isn’t all it’s cracked up to be ;^)

thx. Seems like options should be hopping off the shelves

perhaps stupid question: if TRIL is being bot for $18.50 why is it trading for ~$17.50?

read my entire message and the EIA page. I specifically addressed that

kind of surprised that this drivel comes from Barron's

11 billion liters is about what 100k people use/yr. that’s about 30% of their work force. They could probably make up a good chunk of the 11 billion liters by playing w their toilets and getting rid of employee coffee machines ;^)

this makes much more sense than tomatoes and is in line with my comment re vanilla (which could be much more lucrative).

The problem w vanilla is that either a specific bee species is required or each flower must be pollinated by hand. However, I saw an article recently about a ‘smart’ mechanical bee that had been engineered. Presumably, such a beast could replace hand pollination and avoid the environmental sensitivities of the live bees.

Vanilla vines take up a fraction of the space of cocoa plants and are prolific. I’m not sure if wholesale price/bean but retail is ridiculous. Successful greenhouse growing could probably cut price by at least 50%.

that’s what I would’ve expected. I don’t think the article was specific as to geography. If so, that is yet another important aspect that was neglected.

I’m waiting for somebody to come out with a scheme for harvesting H2 from nuclear waste/fuel rod storage/cooling ponds. Radiolytic hydrogen generation would be relatively clean and seems like it could be cheap. Turns waste into a resource. I’m sure the usual screaming meemies would get butthurt about such a thing so I don’t see it happening.

Also, re the 3.5% CH4 loss: that seems extraordinarily high. If it were true, there would be a lot more dead oil/gasfield workers due to H2S poisoning. I suspect this is another case of lies, damned lies and statistics. The writer has created the impression that the 3.5% loss is at the production point whereas if the number is real, it is the total from production thru the processing and distribution chain. That difference is important cuz the screaming meemies go with the 1st impression and want more rules and regs at the production point while ignoring the rest. Doesn’t accomplish much except for higher prices.

curious as to why u dumped HQH.

I’ve held HQL for >10 yrs.

I don’t think climate change will be prevented - or even mitigated - partially because population will increase. The original reason for this board was that global standard of living would parallel that population growth and there are investment gains to be made. The trade off is increasing energy consumption and damages to the environment. It’s inevitable. That doesn’t mean I endorse waste - quite the opposite. I think much of which is forwarded as being ‘green’ is actually wasteful and environmentally harmful for the global system. Ultimately, I think people will figure out that adaptation in the form of not worrying about Miami being under water is the more pragmatic solution. It’s not like it would be a new discovery. Folks were doing it before they figured out the wheel. I ‘spose that could be viewed as optimism.

As for fatalism, it’s a fairly common phenomenon for organisms to eventually trash their homes to the unlivable state - think yeasties in a champagne bottle. Eventually their waste prevents further metabolism no matter how much food is thrown at them. Portlandites and ebola virii might also serve as examples unless you want to quibble about viruses being classified as organisms.

Then there is the ‘shit happens’ factor and some of that is completely beyond the ability of humans to control or affect, eg pick a geologic or astronomical process. Again, inevitable and not necessarily something that is gonna take 1 million years. I’m pretty sure that’s why Elon and Bezos are on top of things (that’s a joke). Just wish Elon would hurry up with my disk….

“something will replace us some day”

exactly.

“I thought plants, trees etc. gave off mostly oxygen?”

my point was that environmental control systems tend to consume a lot of power and water. Lab protein requires a lot of both. Even if the local, facility power is generated by solar panels, somewhere along the line you can safely bet body parts that hydrocarbons were burned in producing the building and materials of the facility and the local power source. The environmental control for my grandfather’s cows was 0 and their water came from the creek. They obviously required some work but I’d bet that the human supplied power/kg protein was < than for lab protein.

“Good for us, not so good for the world's oceans”

The oceans will do fine - maybe not w the same set of creatures as exists now, but marine creatures have been resilient. The oldest carbonate rocks are >2.5 billion yrs. those rocks form by creatures removing CO2. The Devonian was considerably warmer and atmosphere considerably higher CO2 concentrations (and would have had really impressive surfing and full moons). The oceans and creatures in the oceans did fine until they didn’t and a new set of creatures came along. Some form of carbonate forming/atm CO2 buffering creatures were a constant throughout.

Folks that talk about ocean acidification are usually spouting BS.

“A mileage tax would encourage people to drive less.”

or find more ways to break yet another misbegotten law