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some of the toxic and noxious stuff produced by living and rotting algae are gases, eg dimethylsulfide. At shore, concentrations of aerosolized droplets and gaseous metabolites are higher and are diluted away from shoreline.
I’d also venture that even relatively flat water still has a lot of churning and splashing and that onshore winds can bring aerosolized droplets from many miles away from the shoreline.
your headline is accurate & what they are doing is typical of them but I wouldn’t feel sorry for the CHK workforce. CHK has looted stock, bond and lease holders for benefit of its employees for most of its existence. For as much debt as CHK carried, it was hard to excuse the level of luxury that most CHK employees had access to as working benefits, eg the multistory ‘fitness’ building w masseuses, multiple cafeterias providing subsidized food & staffed w gourmet chefs, employee gardens staffed w bee keepers, company store in which employees could spend their CHK $ (not real $ but scrip), so many vacation days that one would wonder when work was expected, division wide golf tournaments with fairly lavish prizes awarded at each hole....
lol. sounds like there is a divorce in the near future.
those Bloomberg folks would be exemplars of my point about the illogic used in determining who has a job and who doesn’t
H2SO4 is very bad choice for drain cleaning. Recent disgusting local case i heard about recently (seriously bad timing). Lady and her elderly mother had a 1 bathroom home with toilet that they repeatedly clogged and just as repeatedly used H2SO4 to unplug. FeSO4 is rather soluble. The home had iron plumbing (copper pipes would behave likewise poorly). Eventually said pipe dissolved. No problem with clogged plumbing for a while until the pile underneath the house grew high enough. Not sure how folks with a clue came to discover the situation but was quite the ordeal to fix.
i wouldnt just limit my comment to oil-field service companies. i've seen competent, productive people whacked and astoundingly incompetent (and dishonest) people retained in and outside of the oil industry (the stories i could tell you about the nuclear waste 'industry').
SLB just whacked 100s of 'advisors' who tend to be senior. As far as i can tell, practically everybody near 25 yrs of service was offered a retirement package. Some very sharp, long termers werent offered that consideration. I think they use an algorithm to determine whacking order for everyone else and the algorithm was designed by HR folks who like to 'assess' highschool or college GPAs without any other context. They also worry about things like physical location and it doesnt matter if the whacked person in Calgary is 5x more valuable than an 'equivalent' in Houston.
sulfur is a localized commodity. There is frequently a more than adequate supply close to the point of use. There is plenty of sulfur along the US GOM coast either extracted in elemental form from salt domes or during refining of sulfurous crudes.
For the benefit of others: most sulfur is used in the form of sulfuric acid. Vast quantities of H2SO4 are used as 'catalyst', plastics production, and in mining operations (e.g. phosphates).
I'm not sure if anyone is still seriously pursuing but GE was working on lithium-sulfur battery technology. If my memory is correct, such things could be viable for trains or fixed storage. Some folks have come up with other interesting energy production processes involving sulfur, e.g. sulfur-iodine cycle but every part of that process tends to involve some rather aggressive chemistry. Burning sulfur can produce a lot of energy and some useful products, e.g. H2SO4 but is suspect that would only be slightly less horrific than the sulfur-iodine process.
I'd venture that if mountains of sulfur bricks are no longer accumulating in places like Alberta, then it is mostly a function of increased US production of light, non-sulfurous crudes and lowered oil-sands production.
are you saying that the sulfur mountains, in general, are no longer accumulating or just the Tengiz heaps?
edit: to be more precise, you said sulfur mountains no longer exist. I'd be shocked if those in Alberta have gone away
I’d venture that the ability to cut costs further is nonexistent. In addition, when demand does get back to 2018 levels, oil and service companies will be lacking a lot of skilled personnel and it’s not like all of those that are remaining are cream of the crop. Many companies have interesting hiring and firing strategies that have nothing to do with the ability to contribute to profitability.
I agree, apparently people didn’t see the movie the 1st 10 times it played.
I doubt it. Thoughts of harvesting Mn nodules goes back to 1970s. It’s no where near as simple as harvesting potatoes and the environmental orgs would spike projects before it made it out of the proposal stage. Other currently forming sea floor ore deposits, eg Red Sea basins, have on-shore analogs that are cheaper to mine (eg kuroko type deposits). There are some very metal rich geothermal brine systems that are periodically pursued at commercial scale (there’s an active Li project in SoCal) but I don’t think any ever turned a profit. Those should be far simpler than sea floor mining.
Somewhat related: SLB recently started a “new energy” venture w Ashok Belani at helm (I think was long overdue demotion step on way to forced retirement but he claims otherwise). This venture pursues Li production services as well as geothermal energy but in typically clueless fashion - considers them to be unrelated and treats them as entirely separate business units within the division. This is because they deal w legacy geothermal projects in places like Philippines and Indonesia which don’t have associated Li. The continuation of minor, low margin business as part of a supposedly forward thinking business unit while ignoring commonalities between subunits doesn’t strike me as a recipe for innovation and success. But Belani has successfully pillaged the company for years so what do I know.
There are some near shore Au and Ti deposits that are mined.
seems reasonable. I don’t think oil well piping is going to be a market anytime soon and “infrastructure” always seems to bog down into more patchwork and man hours versus 1930s type projects, eg the shovel-ready Longfellow Bridge project seemed to involve more paying guys to eat lunch under the bridge for hours on end than actual construction
i'll be on the beach catchin' some rays with my trumptini ;^)
folks really should take the resurgence threat more seriously. One of my great-somethings (not sure if it was 1 of great-grandmothers or her sister) died of Spanish flu in Feb/March 1919 (serving in red cross in Russia) - just before it went away. It aint over til it's over.
amazingly nimble and responsive for a company of XOM’s size
that makes sense and should’ve been predictable & mitigated on the front side.
sentence linking SPR & high sulfur crudes munged; did you mean that high sulfur crudes become lower quality after storage in SPR caverns? Or that crudes pick up sulfur thru SPR storage. Latter doesn’t seem surprising.
could be both
i would think that all Trump has to do to solve this problem is say: "thanks for your help, we'll be removing all military presence and assistance from Iraq, Qatar, SA, and UAE effective tomorrow. Good luck".
i suspect that for the volumes in question that worrying about building tanks is like trying to exterminate black flies in Saskatchewan with a fly swatter. Arguably cheaper than tankers but still impractical. In any case, i suspect that the rate limiting step in the creation of new storage is at the state and federal regulatory offices. One of those things where "shovel ready" jobs meet the reality of getting past an environmental regulator.
that's 13M bbls which is probably in excess of US daily consumption now.
according to Wikipedia and DOE, there's ~80M bbls unused SPR capacity as of 3 weeks ago. If there were some astute federal purchasers and accountants, they would've been buyers of all those contracts yesterday and recouped some of the bounty being dispersed out the other door at the US Treasury/FRB. Maybe they'll wake up for the June contracts.
PS: I’m hearing about much butchering going on in oil-field today.
I did mean that literally although high rise windows are more difficult to get through now vs 1929-34. I suspect there were many small investors/speculators that were financially ruined yesterday.
I don’t usually pay much attention to CME but reading into semi’s comment yesterday, it wasn’t possible for negative contract trades until 2 weeks ago. However, I doubt that an exchange bar would be practically or legally enforceable. The negative trades would simply be outside the exchange. If those have happened in the past, then it probably was kept confidential
if I understand correctly, 1 contract = 1000 bbls oil. ~90% of contracts are traded by people w no intention of taking delivery of the underlying oil. A buyer pays $x/contract for delivery of oil at $yy/bbl on future date. Contracts lock in 1 month prior to delivery. If Joe Shmo paid $2/contract in Dec 2019 for $20/bbl oil delivered on May 20, 2020 then Joe is betting that by April 20, the price of oil will be > $22/bbl so Sam Bigoilrefiner will be happy to buy the contract (any intermediate can buy the contract at an time betw Joe’s purchase and Apr 20 so doesn’t have to be a refiner). If oil was ~ $23 betw Jan to March Joe could’ve sold his contract and made ~$0.50/contract.
Unfortunately for Joe, a massive quantity of oil didn’t get consumed betw Dec and April and the Saudis and Russians dumped a crapload of oil on the market so storage space vaporized. prices collapsed so Joe was losing money on his contracts but to add insult to injury, nobody wanted to buy his contracts cuz there’s no storage. So now Joe is faced with either having to take delivery or get sued for failure to perform. So Joe’s only recourse was to pay somebody to take his contracts.
there were enormous losses and gains today. i wont be surprised if there were a few window jumpers because of what happened today.
nor is it evidence that a laboratory was not the source - plenty a movie has been made about naughty things escaping from laboratories 8^)
many of the wells in west Texas and SE NM are drilled through salt that is several thousand feet above reservoirs. What do you think the chances of salt creep causing well failure in an abandonment scenario?
The reason i ask is because there are many wells drilled relatively close to the WIPP nuclear waste repository, e.g. within 1.5 miles. I dont think that's a failure scenario that they've anticipated. If they have I'd bet that shutting in wells within some radius of WIPP cost >> $20k.
particularly since a lot of shut-ins will be owned by companies going bankrupt.
good point. question out of my ignorance: a lot of new wells in Delaware have pumpjacks on them even though most of their production is gas. Is it possible to run such wells as strictly gas producers?
a lot of the wells are primarily NG producers and I’m guessing the marginal oil they produced is what kept those wells viable. A lot of wells will be shut-in but I don’t think it will be close to 50%. I wouldn’t be shocked if 50% of the shut-ins are permanent
I’m amazed that so many wells with such low production have been running for the past 5 years. Given the numbers u provided, I won’t b surprised if ~100k wells r shut-in. Lots of very comfortable rat nests will be available in TX, NM, MT... (ie man camp barracks and rental homes).
considering that one converts light to electricity and the other is an electrical power storage medium - why would the former make the latter go away?
did you mean 80k wells? that also seems high - but possible
I’m guessing that whatever banking wizards came up with that sound bite hadn’t yet talked to their lawyers. The hiring process should also be interesting.
the number of chicks that can be sold to individuals wanting to raise chickens in their backyard is minuscule relative to the number of chicks that will be hatched unless the eggs are tossed. Somewhat similar problem with pigs. There will be bazillions of piglets being whacked because nobody wants them with meat processing plants being shut down.
if Boeing only made airplanes, then I might agree but they are also a major defense contractor and rocket/satellite manufacturer. I also think people fear airplane crashes more than death by car crash so unless Boeing has a few more 737max debacles, they have a perception of quality as a necessity advantage over airplanes made in 3rd world
I’m sure there was plenty of early anecdotal data on severity but Navarro’s 2 M US dead was only likely if there were zero precautions. I think an old folks home full of dead elders cured that problem (except for Bill de Blasio, a bunch of spring breakers and Marci gras types)
the memo that is now getting attn falls into what i would characterize as "lucky rather than smart". It is consistent with Navarro's usual hyperventilation.
he hasnt been on Fox News this morning so no 'stupid comments of the day' to quote. In general i think his views on trade are terribly misguided, e.g. tariffs. Being opposed to IP theft/ransom is not original to him. Everybody except thieves are against theft. However, his solutions to such problems are not solutions. If he wants to stop Chinese IP theft which ultimately enables them to undercut US manufacturing, then cut off visas to Chinese students and workers. That would solve several problems. I dont believe for a minute claims by folks in the tech industry that they need more H1/J1 visas for workers from countries that dont honor IP. HR and hiring managers are frequently just lazy and then there's the compounding effect, that once somebody that came in on a visa gets into a hiring position, they tend to hire people from their culture.
As a little side rant that may sound Navarroan, in SLB's former DBR facility (Canada), the programming group had 12 people when i arrived. 10 were Chinese. The group manager was Chinese. None were born in Canada/US and most were on visas. Shortly after I arrived (2014), they fired the 1 female (I think Algerian - some former French colony) in the group who had just returned from maternity leave. 1 year later they fired the remaining non-Chinese person. The group composition and order of firing had nothing to do with competency - it was all about ethnicity and communication because they generally spoke Chinese in the group.
Trying to resurrect generic steel manufacturing in the US is foolish. I suspect he'd argue that CV19 shows that there is a strategic need for such domestic production. I say BS. There's no need for production if there's no consumption and under normal circumstances, which is >99% of the time, there are dozens of countries that can manufacture steel and therefore there's no real strategic threat due to dependence on a single source. Our circumstance is not like Japan pre-1941 but he seems to think the US is approaching that level of dependency and vulnerability.
article below paints him as the grifter i think he is and as it says:
amongst practically anything that comes out of the guy’s mouth. literal Peter Principle
expression of concern issued on that paper by society that published it