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i wouldnt draw the conclusion that the US is on a green streak. Dirty, messy stuff tends to go to lower cost countries where part of the reason for the lower cost is that they dont spend money on environmental care.
interesting that Venezuela is on the reduction side. I suspect not because their society is becoming more efficient. The EU isnt looking very good. Maybe they should have a few more CO2 sequestration banquets and throw up a few more windmills.
Of the world's top 4 most populated countries, the US is the only one on the reduction side. As biotech_researcher pointed out, some of that is because coal burning power plants are going away but also because things like steel and cement manufacturing are moving out of the US, c.f. https://www.wsj.com/articles/miners-test-greener-ways-to-dig-1531733401 (the graphics may not show up in Chrome).
Just curious - why not?
I was pulling your leg with the science news story. I just happened to see it after the wsj story.
another question of curiosity. Do u know where aqb gets their feed and what it is?
HAL has had an advantage over SLB in North America for many years. The reasons for that r manifold but I suspect have also changed in last few years. SLB management might argue that HAL is more willing to offer price concessions and SLB refuses to do so. I suspect that’s BS.
HAL is more nimble and they don’t lock themselves out of projects by insisting on combo service packages. I also know HAL licenses other vendors’ technology while SLB insists on using only “in-house” technology and sometimes theirs is inferior or more expensive.
SLB is also in the process of deluding themselves that they are a ‘big data’ company. This from a company that is still using internal software designed for Windows 3.1. The short story is that I think HAL’s management is now superior to SLB’s. SLB was saved by the Obama Justice Dept for deep 6ing the HAL/BHI merger.
Yeah. If I was smarter, I wouldn’t, but GE spalling them off probably won’t hurt the share price. Maybe HAL will make another shot at ‘em ;^)
I see bazoons of HAL vehicles around scenic SE NM but very rarely any SLB or Baker. It’s either HAL or the much smaller service companies.
not sure if this is a set of Solaris silos ~3 miles south of Carlsbad NM airport. Came across while taking dog out for run this morning. quality is bad cuz it's a cellphone shot from about 1 mile away.
there was a group of 4 sand trucks waiting at the intersection of the gravel road to the pad and the highway.
~14" pipe was being laid few 100 ft behind me in general direction of silo. Looks like it wasnt going to be buried. Bedrock is effectively at the surface.
I’m not talking about fringe wells either. I live in 1 of the busiest parts of the Permian basin at the moment so everyday I c in detail what most of the people in this group hear about 4th hand in vague form. My admittedly less than expert understanding of investing is that better than average returns r usually made at choke points. Pipelines r not the choke points in the Permian basin nor r they likely to ever be so.
how do you arrive at that conclusion? The choke point now is getting oil from wells to refineries. From what I see oil is transported by truck from widely scattered tanks at a wellpad or near a cluster of wells to a small refinery which may be 5-50 miles away from the storage tank. Then the oil is piped along major transportation routes to larger refineries. Installing new pipe along those major transport paths wouldn’t b a huge problem but I don’t think that’s where the problem is or will be
or CAT or trucking companies/manufacturers.
I see pipelines in some out of the way places which must’ve been difficult to install but I don’t know how much appetite there’s going to be for installing more to service widely scattered wells over several 1000 square miles. In SE NM I’d bet most of the oil is transported by tanker trucks
That’s a generally good article with few goofs, eg as far as I can tell, the fracturing in the Khazzan reservoirs is not slick water like used in many US “unconventional” reservoirs. It’s also dry gas which is not what a lot of US producers r chasing.
I have no doubt that the Russians will massively increase production from hydraulically fractured unconventional oil resources. Their rate limiting steps r not available, knowledgeable people, appropriate infrastructure support, or technology and I doubt they’ll fall into the 1 recipe must be used in all cases approach that may be applied elsewhere.
“Not sure what good he's accomplished since any idiot can pass a large stimulus tax cut when you control Congress”
As proven by Barry Obama
the DJ went up 500 pts the day after trump was elected. It’s gone up another 7500 pts since. That didn’t happen because Hillary Clinton was elected. If u think trump hasn’t done anything beside a tax cut to foster that stock gain then there might b a good reason why u don’t have a JD - not that all lawyers r honest (cough, Clintons)
Trump might b an uncouth idiot and his trade policies r misbegotten but u might want to work on your objectivity
Staged maybe but no major automobile manufacturer would run the risk of getting caught doing so. There would be a near zero chance of not getting caught.
Musk sounds like he’s ramping up excuses for yet another failure to meet expectations. I’m smelling a bigger fall than what Aubrey McClendon experienced with his over-leveraged position in CHK
Nope, no familiarity but if it has advantages, then it will almost certainly b copied
The key word that many people will miss is “added”. Of course, the opposite of your conclusion could be read in as the existing electrical infrastructure is so robust and sufficient that it doesn’t require replacement or addition to.
what hasn’t he missed? With as many words as he spewed, he said nothing useful.
There is no moat to the business, there are dozens of companies doing the same work. Nothing special about slinging glorified fire hoses across miles of desert
Cartridges of batteries could be swapped in and out so that entire vehicles wouldn’t need to b idled but since the cost of the batteries would b a big chunk of the cost of the plane i agree that such things r unlikely to happen
Venezuela has a long history of not paying bills, and given the terminal phase deterioration of their economy, any jobs that are lost in the near term probably would’ve been lost anyway. In the longer term more and probably better jobs will be generated with the assets out of Venezuelan hands.
“Looks like the only American brand left with passenger sedans will be Tesla”
U r still confusing American car manufacturers not making sedans in the US with American car manufacturers completely exiting the sedan market. US customers want SUVs and non-US customers want sedans so makes sense to match manufacturing and customer. Not like Ford doesn’t have manufacturing plants on every continent but Antarctica. Tesla will be fortunate to still be in business in 5 years.
Departing the sedan market and cutting to 10% of US production are very different things
If you’re inquiring about a specific url, then use “fusion power” and scroll down to “records” and “runtime”
If you’re making a comment on the credibility I’ll leave it at: 1. For this sort of topic and most of the audience in this forum, Wikipedia is a more than an adequate and credible resource 2. It’s more credible than the original link to the popular science article that claimed fusion had no associated radioactive waste
WRT to reactor operating time have specify type of reactor. According to Wikipedia 1 fusion reactor operated for 19 hrs but all other types r on the millisecond range u noted.
Not nearly as bad as cold fusion but I wouldn’t count on 2019 as a date that anyone will have a commercial unit. Maybe 2190. Agree that whoever does so will have the most valuable company in the world.
If Bezos and Musk thought it could be done in their lifetimes, they’d b all over it
Addendum WSJ railroad article
Why Working on the Railroad Comes With a $25,000 Signing Bonus
Tight labor market forces BNSF, Union Pacific to dangle big incentives from Missouri to Oregon
somewhat related: lots of local potash mines (hype darlings of a few years ago) would not be profitable, or in business, if it were not for their water rights ownership. I suspect access to water is one of the bigger logistical problems in West Texas and SE NM
Where’s the folding part?
“Nothing involved in fusion is radioactive at all”
Most fusion reactor designs inherently generate neutrons and when those interactions interact with surrounding materials they definitely do generate radioactive isotopes. In at least 1 design that is a desired result.
As for funding: as one of the former heads of the AEC’s research division once said to me ~”it’s a matter of net benefit. Are we going to get more by spreading several $million around to many programs or pouring it all into a single program?”
As it stands, many $billions (non defense) have been poured into fusion energy research over ~60 yrs and it’s still in the stroller.
Best to leave to companies like TAE Tech. I’m sure they get US tax $ but at least they shop around for other sources.
Luddites of Iceland
WSJ story on data centers in Iceland
Iceland Takes Hard Look at Tech Boom Sparked by Its Cheap, Bountiful Power
“It’s our responsibility to use the power resources that we have,” said the chief executive of Advania’s data center unit Eyjolfur Magnus Kristinsson, echoing the argument that Iceland used a half-century ago to bring aluminum smelters to the island.
Iceland now has a trivial part of the world’s aluminum refining capacity
Maybe Iceland is trying to leverage better deals but I don’t think they’re that clever. There is no other country that has the amalgamation of things that an environmentally conscientious tech industry would desire but I suspect the Icelandic government is going to stick themselves in their own eye again.
There’s definitely some truth to that article but if those problems can b overcome in the 5th world, they can certainly be overcome in SE NM and west Texas.
I now live in Carlsbad NM and the place is literally choking on oil related traffic and people. The town was designed like any 1 of 10000 towns between Cincinnati and Denver. There was absolutely no consideration that something might happen to cause the population to swell dramatically.
There’s effectively 1 road going north-south which parallels the railroad track (more on that later). Going east-west ish has 3 options - north of town, middle of town, and south of town but most of the oil traffic uses the latter 2. There is nothing close to a ‘bypass’ or ring road around town. Everything is funneled thru town. There r dozens of hotels along the N-S road and not far off to each side dozens more of trailer parks and “man camps”. A crappy hotel room costs $100/ngt. There r 3 grocery stores - all along the N-S road.
So the short story is that for a town of 15k population, the traffic feels a lot like an LA freeway at rush hour but with a dozen stop lights and more dust. Fatal or serious injury traffic accidents on the N-S road r a near daily experience which takes some talent when the highest speed limit is 45 mph. The local hospital isn’t equipped to handle a lot of that business. The next best hospital is 50 miles away and it’s still dicey.
The railroad mostly hauls frack sand. Trains run continuously 24 hrs/day. As u might’ve guessed, the E-W ish roads cut across it. No over- or under-passes. Great for the train business, not so good for auto traffic. Horn blasts r incessant.
The trains dump a bunch of the sand at silos north of town. As I said earlier, most of the oilfield workers and their trucks use the 2 southern E-W roads so the trucks that haul the sand from the silos have to do the full monty on roads that didn’t contemplate anything much heavier than a model T and there’s a few 90 degree bends and turns across traffic involved (see traffic accident comment). It’s always good fun to watch a pumping rig ‘4-wheeling’ it across a sidewalk or some other bit of property that is not the road.
Piping seems to also come from the north, I’m guessing the scenic metropolis of Artesia which along with Hobbs are the ‘permanent’ hosts of a lot of oilfield operations (SLB and HAL both have bases in both towns). Those towns r about the same as Carlsbad in terms of my description above as well as population. 1 truck hauls 3 lengths of ~10 m casing. 100s of those lengths can b used in a single well. 100s of wells r being drilled. Lots of trucks and trains and people moving stuff from train to trucks.
So the bottom line is that the support infrastructure and population from which to draw employees is sparse. Once stuff is dumped off a train at 1 of those towns, it has to be hauled at least 50-100 miles by truck - frequently at a snails pace and many of those trucks require accessory ‘flag’ trucks alerting us to the fact that the fat truck is bigger than the road.
I think the guys that would otherwise b working at the dozens of fast food restaurants drive the flag trucks so the fast food restaurants always have hiring signs displayed. Apparently, the list of disqualifiers from the oilfield jobs doesn’t include most felonies so god help those that eat at the fast food restaurants (they seem to get whoever can’t get a job related to oil).
I’m sure there’s some investable knowledge buried in there somewhere
Biocqr already posted that and I already debunked it
at 1st i thought it was an interesting possibility because submarine exhalative metal deposits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedimentary_exhalative_deposits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanogenic_massive_sulfide_ore_deposit
were 1st identified in Japan and formed in somewhat similar environment.
However, after crunching some rough numbers for the area mentioned and assuming the 'mud' was 1 meter deep, then the concentration of rare earths is in the 5 ppm magnitude which is roughly the same or lower than the concentration in your backyard. The grade could be increased by lowering the thickness of the mud but then the recovery costs probably go up.
So once again, somebody is trying to sell something that only the unwitting will buy (which i see happen on a regular basis so i wouldnt rule it out).
OT: u r talking about open forum discussions. I was referring to side bar activities.
That all sounds reasonable and consistent with my experience. I learned a lot - more from the bio/botany people involved than the earth science crowd. There were a couple of Stanford bio profs that really opened my eyes to many of the extremely naive views regarding climate change that are prevalent in the lay and Hollywood populations.
The unpleasant aspects had more to do with political and ethical aspects of how funding for programs was assigned (merit was definitely not always the governing consideration), operational aspects within SLB, and Stanford had the most uncomfortable chairs in their conference facility that I’ve ever had to sit on.
A big part of my problem with organizations like gcep is that they r largely wine and cheese gatherings for political and research program maneuvering and while they do contribute in ways u pointed out, that isn’t the ultimate goal.
Pre doe. I think the program acronym was GCEP but I could b mixing that acronym up with somebody else’s climate change program. I worked in SLB’s CO2 sequestration program. There was a collaboration between Stanford and SLB. I think GE was also involved and maybe XOM. I don’t remember if there were other co-managing institutions. Involved 2-3 meetings and a conference every year and reviewing a stack of research proposals every year. Was an unpleasant experience so not something I dwell on.
Ok, I thought it came from concatenation of Franklin and thus my spelling. I’ve had many meetings with him thru his climate change activities.
Those r liberal organizations whose primary goal is not to land-lock Canadian oil for the benefit of the US, rather they r trying to strangle Canadian heavy oil production - period.
Production from the shales is a different matter and problems with getting pipelines built to make that production viable is due as much to the ‘indigenous peoples’ standing in the way as it is to anti carbon politics.
I have to agree with biotech researcher’s comment about Hewlett and Packard turning over in their graves. Same for J Rockefeller. Their trusts have gone completely wacko from the founder’s beliefs.
As for Lin Orr, he’s fully into the climate change game and is more of a politician than engineer or scientist and Stanford earth science dept is definitely more into alternative energy and climate change than oil and gas.
SLB was up ~4% so either people think del taco is ok or it was just a good day for oil ??
1st million was more like 100 yrs if u want to start from the 1st commercial EV
Under normal circumstances u would b correct but even Alberta is run by leftists now
good luck with the cobalt mining. The area in Idaho that Formation has permits for is a historic cobalt producing area (something like 19kt Co to date but i think most of that was betw 1940-1960). Formation was awarded permits in 2008 but they ceased further development in 2012 according to
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arthur_Bookstrom/publication/305508647_The_Idaho_cobalt_belt/links/57e594bb08ae9227da965606/The-Idaho-cobalt-belt.pdf
I think the date on that report is 2013 so may no longer be true. Some of the ore grades look comparable to the African deposits but some of the African deposits are extraordinarily easy to mine (thus pictures of kids digging holes on the surface and pulling stuff out with their hands).
My personal bias on such things is that small mining companies should be avoided like the plague. I know a guy who became wealthy investing in Canadian mining companies but he's the only person i know who managed that feat (he was also a very early stage investor in Qdoba, e.g. when they only had about 7 stores so the leprechauns have been good to him).
you are a brave and stubborn human to have stayed with Cree for a long time. Their technology was doomed to being stolen from the outset.
CLB's operation is bigger, more systematized than several of their competitors, and has history with their clientele that the clients are loathe to break. They dont serve fancy food but it's consistent. In the oil industry, getting the right answer isnt necessarily the preferred outcome. The clients want consistency so they can compare things on a relative basis. If the service company has procedures that are highly human dependent or they change their procedures, then that can cause problems. SLB used to serve the high end but tried to compete with CLB by introducing very systematic procedures in their labs and dropping the expert advising services but they dont have the breadth and history that CLB has. The SLB reports you get now are computer generated with zero interpretation that are specific to the case and the lab personnel have what i consider to be very modest scientific credentials. Weatherford had a long history with many clients but i think their financial problems broke that back. CHK is still trying to get into the core and fluid analysis business and they built a lab facility that would be the envy of any institution but they dont have the personnel or history to do anything with it.
fluid analytical labs are a dime a dozen so things like flow and rock property analysis are what make the difference (in addition to the history aspect).
does "outright trickery" include technological and industrial espionage in and outside the US?
these give %s on sector consumption of oil
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=oil_use
and contribution of hydraulic fracturing to production
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=26112
w/ regard to other comments:
The oil and gas industry succeeds in spite of itself. It is an industry full of very smart people that is very slow to innovate and adopt new technology. Much of that is due to risk aversion. Some is due to the fact that regardless of how nifty some technology is, the implementation will always involve some Neanderthal who knows how to do something one way and any deviation from that way usually ends up training new Neanderthals. Some of the Neanderthals r in the field and some r in the supply chain or some other supporting role (and some run the company).
Michael Dell was inadvertently a great contributor to the oil industry cuz he’s the guy that invented ‘connect the purple plug to the purple hole and green to green’. But regardless of how brain dead a system is designed there will always b Neanderthals that think putting bricks into a mud sampling system or leaving electronics in a container in the jungle for 2 months won’t hurt anything (or that it will still b there).
Automation is the obvious solution to many of the problems and nowlurking has alluded to that previously. But that demonstrates my prior point. Russia developed many automated drilling technologies >30 yrs ago and the industry is still working on making those sorts of innovations routine.
Oilfield service companies would benefit greatly by following Amazon’s business model but somehow that concept has escaped them and they still have armies of knuckle-draggers writing stuff on whiteboards and manually transferring information from paper to excel worksheets. And that invariably results in wrong stuff getting delivered or no stuff getting delivered while very expensive people and equipment sit around for 3-4 days. That’s a management and political problem. Much of the business is conducted in socialist countries and countries where making jobs and work is more important than being efficient. The problem is compounded because many of those people eventually end up in the US or Canada and they continue to operate as if they were in the 3rd world (or France, Italy, etc).
And just to be more equitable. Poor management isn’t just a multinational problem. When I worked for CHK one of the 1st things I noticed was a map of their lease holdings which included a huge amount of acreage around the finger lakes in NY. As a kid I spent a lot of time there so I remembered the rocks and now as a geologist I knew that area was worthless wrt to natural gas production but they had been operating on the basis of ‘lease everything and sort out the chaff later’. That approach had also obviously been used in hiring many of the senior management and technical staff.
“Big data” is now a big thing in the oil industry. The logic is that they have more data than they have been able to make use of and that the human processors may have missed connections between data that algorithms may be able to find. The logic is somewhat puzzling - especially if you’ve been exposed to the sophistication of their supply chain software and the whiteboard thing. I find SLB's approach to this particularly humorous because they opened a Big Data center in the Bay Area in the midst of the current market collapse 3 yrs after they closed a similar facility in the same place. Competing with Google, Apple, etc for competent personnel on oilfield salaries in a depressed market seems like a bad conceptual model.
So the bottom line is that when it comes to investing in the o&g business if u have access to investment in non-publicly traded companies, I’d look around the edges. Picks, shovels and blue jeans rather than mining the gold. Some of the best services and technologies are developed by small private companies that fill a niche. “IsoTubes” is an example. Absolutely brain dead yet brilliant innovation for systematically collecting and delivering oilfield fluid samples to analytical labs. Because it was simple, uniform, and met shipping regs it took over that part of the market and became quite profitable. Weatherford eventually bought the company. I don’t know what market share is now or whether it contributes positive income to Weatherford but Weatherford isn’t doing well and I know that SLB’s effort to usurp the IsoTube business never left the launch pad and if it had, it would’ve failed because of their inefficiencies (Amazon would’ve run that business beautifully).
With the exception of CoreLabs, the oilfield analytical chemistry business is a loser but providing the means of getting samples from the well to the lab is a great business. CoreLabs is effectively the McDonalds of the oil and gas industry’s analytical chemistry business. Weatherford’s is Dairy Queen, SLB’s is Del Taco and CHK’s version is the local food truck.
Another example related to hydraulic fracturing involves pumps. Propping fractures involves putting sand into the fractures and service companies somehow thought that putting sand thru pumps was a good idea. Not surprisingly pumps don’t like sand. Since I do chemistry I had a solution that involved chemistry but a private company had a better mechanical solution. SLB eventually bought them but I still don’t think that solution has become mainstream and I’d bet body parts that patents won’t protect it from being copied everywhere.
Some folks may point out that the oil and gas industry has been a victim of its own success in adopting technology, e.g. hydraulic fracturing. However, I see that as another supporting data point for my more critical view. George Mitchell's company was on the verge of bankruptcy when they tried hydraulic fracturing out of desperation. They had nothing more to lose on technology that had been partly developed outside the industry many years before (1940s). It wasnt until after 2006 that hydraulic fracturing became routine.