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biofuel is another fiasco. from the fermenters to the finished products, nothing works out in practice at scale versus concept. And when is the last time u heard about knuckleheads driving around collecting grease from fast food restaurants to turn into biodiesel?
Plants do get sick but worse, they get weeds and bugs. Sometimes they need fertilizer and water that isn’t delivered by Mother Nature. Beef cattle r relatively low maintenance and contrary to popular misconception- I’d venture most r not corn fed. The whole argument about the amount of energy wasted in converting cow food to meat is crap. The sun is gonna shine on those fields regardless and if it isn’t grass growing in those fields, it’s gonna be something else that makes money but also eats up a lot of money to grow it. Grass grows freely.
My mostly ignorant guess is no. Even if 1 lb of $1/lb soy product can replace 1 lb of $4/lb butadiene, I doubt that would have any impact on overall oil prices. More importantly, the price on the soy product wouldn’t remain $1/lb. I also have doubts about the relative cost claims.
I think something may have been lost in translation betw Tehran and NYC.
sounds like it might be an additional 22 B bbls on top of an already identified 31 B bbls “in the region”
in addition, it’s not clear if there is 80 m of payzone or if the reservoir is 80 m deep. If it was 80 m deep, and given where it is, they would’ve been drilling thru it for decades so it could hardly be a discovery.
The oil guy in the article below appears to indicate a 10% recovery which sounds more like very heavy oil and very misleading news that seems to have been gobbled up with gusto by (fake news 8^) ) media
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.express.co.uk/news/world/1202850/Iran-news-oil-field-US-sanctions-Donald-Trump-President-Hassan-Rouhani/amp
Heavy oil? 83 m seems like it is probably like Alberta tar sands.
to give an example of 1 symptom of the disease i referred to in prior post:
https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=project%20manager%20schlumberger&l&vjk=498fd9be74dfc16f
No where in that job ad do they state what kind of project is to be managed. The 1st item in "Main Objectives" of the job is "Drive Safe"! "Drive Safe" is one of a bazillion dysfunctional SLB "life-practice" training programs that probably falls out of liability law/insurance. The point is not about the functionality, or lack thereof, for such programs but that they are perceived by upper management as being of higher priority than the actual job. No respect is given to management of projects by people that actually understand the subject being managed. Management is seen as a job function that is independent of what is being managed. SLB is far from being alone in this delusion (the US gov't and gov't contractors make SLB look amateurish on that front).
In the LinkedIn version which seems to have vaporized, SLB states far down in the ad that the work involves hydrology and geochemistry. i believe that the job is to manage an analytical chemistry/geochemistry lab so you might expect SLB to target, with some specificity, people with that kind of skillset but noooooo.....
I’ve never been a fan of Shell. To adopt semi’s metaphor, they should take dancing lessons from Sean Spicer. They’ve mastered the art of making bad deals and chasing bad technology and sociological ‘concerns’ that are peripheral to their core business. They suffer badly from the disease that inevitably stifles profitability and growth in all large corporations.
CHK files “going concern” warning. -17% @ $1.30. Been a very slow but inevitable death.
agree that the amount mentioned in the article is negligible (I think the actual quantity mentioned was 30 tesla batteries which must be a typo) but they were referring only to waste rock. I’m sure the quantity in the borate ores and brines is much larger and could be solution mined as is done at trona. In the end I think such endeavors must always b handicapped against CA’s regulatory and tax environment
lithium - borate connection
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hoping-to-find-gold-rio-tinto-strikes-lithium-instead-11571726163?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1
hardly shocking. apparently Rio Tinto doesnt hire competent geochemists cuz this is something that i pointed out on this board. The presence and grade of lithium in such occurrences is NOT the problem - it is the occurrence in California and whether recovery costs are economic.
looking for gold in such rocks wreaks of some knucklehead in the company having far too good access to clueless and gullible executives.
I disagree on the public image and irony aspects. If renewables do grow to the extent that some folks expect, then market for copper and other metals will grow proportionally. It’s a hedge.
and even worse for service companies. I heard HAL had a mass whacking over past 2 weeks and SLB probably will in next month or so. $12.7B write off. Sheesh
most painful and long lasting miserable experiences I’ve had was an ecoli infection. on the humorous side , I heard a woman describe it as more painful than childbirth. I thought: “geez, now I don’t feel quite as sorry for women’s lot in life”
I hope the cotton candy and fried turkey stalls weren’t close that.
on your theme: 1. lots of field workers poop in fields/orchards. Flooding prior to harvest = e-coli outbreaks. Non 2 leg creatures often get blame but it’s the bipedals that r at fault. 2. I hate people that use manure for fertilizer. So many bad things. Chicken based is the worst.
Hope everyone is done with dinner
I suspect it’s due to stocking up for winter but I’ve seen many more coal trains in last few weeks than in previous few months.
don’t feel bad, anyone that eats grain and soy products has eaten bits of Bambi, snakes, rats, and various bugs. Combines aren’t particular about what they draw into their maws.
the length is the problem. Can’t go round bends too sharp, dips too deep etc. the logistics of moving the super long blades r very nontrivial. The more ‘generic’ windmills I’ve seen in Montana and California r much less problematic but as you’ve pointed out, efficiency goes up w diameter so folks r pushing to use those where they can. Since the blades come into ports in single pieces, inland transportation becomes limiting factor.
your assessment is correct and is explicitly stated here
https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=IA
if you click on Data tab and then Supply and Distribution you'll see the break down as of June 2019. Effectively ALL of the "renewables" is from wind.
Iowa has some large advantages for wind: Mississippi River allows barging very long blades and lots of flat, straight roads, that dont pass through major population centers, to move blades and tower pieces away from river.
Note Iowa is a net electrical exporter.
coal fueled electrical power generation in Iowa was 76% in 2008
in 2018, 45% of electrical power generation in Iowa was from burning coal.
yup but my comment was a sarcastic take on Amazon employees thinking ‘oil is bad’. Amazon employees wouldn’t have their jobs if it weren’t for air shippers and air shippers don’t exist without oil
maybe that’s why fedex cratered
indeed. blaming it on "the timing of the investment was poor" is lame.
timing would've been just as bad for HAL, and I think the Obama administration's blocking of that deal was also lame, but HAL wouldnt have completely munged the result and the result probably would've been better for the industry.
“Mark received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Carleton College, and his master’s degree in the Energy & Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Mark has also worked in research roles at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the National Renewable Energy Lab, and for a half-dozen utility clients in several large consulting engagements”
ie he was a lab tech and found a different way of grifting taxpayers and donors with better intentions than sense
bit OT but peripherally related anecdote: when I was a kid my grandfather raised cattle in fields bounding a stream through our property. Perhaps counter-intuitively that stream always ran clear at that time. There were many fewer trees along the stream, no thick brush growths, and no algae or other obnoxious water plants. Fish and crayfish we’re plentiful and while we never found beaver to be desirable, they existed. Now those fields are all cropped and exactly the opposite is true of the stream. I’m sure some of the changes are due to fertilizer runoff but others r simply due to cows not trampling and eating stuff in and along the stream. The point is that when folks talk about “more sustainable planet” when contemplating supplanting cows with plants, they are not considering the full range of ecosystem effects. Some creatures are favored over others in either circumstance. I’m not saying one is better than the other, only that they are different and creatures “sustained” in one are not “sustained” in the other.
I suppose someone might be inclined to chime in about things would be different yet if “organic” farming was practiced and I have no doubt that’s true but that imaginary world doesn’t exist.
in the big picture of food production, your sample size and perspective is on a single pixel.
Folks that shop at Whole Foods have different motivations but they generally have more disposable income than the general population. They are also a miniscule fraction of the population that likes to eat (many of whom dont happen to be in the US).
I'm completely supportive of Whole Foods and their clones (I've only shopped at a couple of Trader Joes and wasnt impressed). However, I'd bet that for any town that has both Whole Foods and Walmarts, if you compare the grocery traffic, the sum of the Walmart traffic will dwarf that of the Whole Foods. The folks that design the stores obviously recognize that fact.
Walmart sells organic stuff too but most of their customers are mostly concerned about price. The lower price of "conventional" products comes from mass production and efficiency. Part of that efficiency is a product of the use of chemicals in growing the crops.
Since i like precision in language: the use of the word "organic" to differentiate food products is stupid (i.e. at a higher level of idiocy that you recently ascribed to the chemical company CEO). Yet because its usage has become common amongst a rather effete demographic, it is accepted. For most products, I have no idea what differentiates "organic" from "conventional" but i do know that many "organic" grain products taste like cardboard. I suspect most people who blather on about "organic" foods would be horrified to hear that organic chemicals are used to grow food regardless of whether it is "organic" or "conventional". I'd also bet that the death rate from starvation would dramatically increase dramatically if agricultural chemicals were not used routinely.
millennials are trying to stick their irresponsibility to everyone but themselves but ‘millennials’ is an American thing. The rest of the world likes to eat and most US citizens don’t give a crap about the use of chemicals in farming.
and the Monsanto line is entirely accurate even if trite. At the time, and probably even now, the average citizen doesn’t comprehend that every thought and action is due to some chemical process
explain why that is an exhibition of idiocy
lepidolite has been an ore of Li for a very long time. Hectorite is very similar in composition. Li-rich lepidolite is about 5 wt% Li (50000 ppm). Hard rock lithium sources comprise ~30% of li production.
The hectorite deposit is pure hectorite. It's not laterally extensive (from what i remember, maybe a few 100 meters across was being mined open pit). I dont remember the thickness but the pit wasnt very deep - 10s of meters. It was pure hectorite (has the look, density and texture of white candle wax) - no sand/carbonate/other clays that needed to be separated out. The mine had a handful of employees to do the digging, processing and bagging (like literally < 6). That was 35+ years ago. At that time it was very profitable as a clay (an aqueous suspension is extremely slippery so amongst other things it was used for very high end drilling fluid)
many basinal/oilfield/geothermal brines contain 100s ppm Li. My memory is that one of the Salton Sea wells produced 4000 ppm but i havent found the reference.
Lithium tends to partition into aqueous solutions rather than precipitating out as silicates, oxides, carbonates, chlorides etc. which is why it is concentrated in evaporites and pegmatites (pegmatites are the last part of a magma to crystallize so that magma tends to be very rich in H2O and a bunch of elements that dont fit into the structures of more common minerals; metals like beryllium and lithium being too small). For the same reason that lithium is concentrated in pegmatites, it tends to get concentrated in geothermal brines with magmatic components such as the Salton Sea Geothermal brines. And since the solubility of lithium chloride is so high, it tends to stay in the aqueous phase so any basin associated with volcanism and has interior drainage and high evaporation rates will have lithium enrichments. Those dont have to be modern geologic terrains which is why the stuff tends to be enriched in many basinal brines. I wouldnt be at all surprised if 2000 ppm Li brines exist in some parts of east africa and western china. Folks are actively drilling or planning exploratory wells in southern california for solution mining of lithium (and probably other stuff, similar to Trona and in same general area)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining#Lithium
Note that Paradox basin (Utah) solution mined brines (potash) are also high in boron and lithium.
more detailed description of how lithium deposits come to be
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3616/dd9db704d285b027c13185f4b6af3b9f2262.pdf
and if my memory is correct, their NG needs some serious processing so it might not be as competitive as stuff from Madagascar etc
ultimately, my point is that lithium miners seem like a particularly bad investment because the market is already over-supplied in world in which there is no significant geographic limitation on the commodity. It's not much different from silver ore in that respect. If demand doubles but the supply already exceeds demand by 2x, then the demand growth doesnt matter.
I think the lithium market will be a race to the bottom. I dont think the market is big enough to support consolidation of worldwide resources into a few companies whose management I'd trust to follow GAAP. Again, i see it being a lot like the silver market. Somebody will make money but it's not likely to be small investors in any one of 100s of small mining companies. In the 1990s i visited a bunch of Mexican silver mines: there were large, international companies following modern safety and engineering practices and there were companies with naked miners, climbing crate wood ladders, and making $6/week. Growth of the former tends to be restricted by the existence of the latter.
As far as purity is concerned: the evaporite deposits in South America are particularly easy to process but I'd bet that there are similar resources in western China that are similarly easy to process. If it werent for the over-achieving environmental types in California, the Salton Sea geothermal brines would be a very attractive lithium resource (there is a company attempting to do that but because it is CA, i'd bet their economic viability is challenging). Achieving high levels of purity in Li2CO3 or LiOH is not difficult - old-school fractional crystallization and ion-exchange processes can do the trick very easily.
Somewhat as an aside: there is an almost unique lithium clay deposit in southern California (Hector and thus the clay hectorite). Hectorite was a particularly valuable clay when used for its clay properties but if by some miracle, lithium prices spiked, that clay deposit would become a lithium mine rather than a clay mine.
ps: i suppose cheap lithium is good for your EV interests since battery costs are ultimately the barrier to supplanting hydrocarbons. Unfortunately, i dont think cheap lithium will put much of a dent in the cost of batteries.
according to this:
https://www.mining.com/lithium-demand-battery-makers-almost-double-2027/
Lithium market is vastly over supplied and will continue to be so for many years. I think they’re being conservative, ie supply ~2x demand
China is looking to develop their own substantial resources. I wouldn’t count on Li prices improving anytime soon - or in years
which goes to my original question of why HES wasn’t a better acquisition target.
FYI: some heavy crude oils and petroleum coke are particularly rich resources of vanadium
and that would be part of the reason why he has a lot more money than me
i dont think they can blame their situation on 23 wells although the thought processes involved in their bad experiment are certainly related to their larger problem. There's no excuse for doing what they did and being surprised by the result. They must've had dozens of people making decisions who paid no attention to the plethora of empirical observations of closely spaced wells. I suspect that they thought that they could control the interactions better than they could but it sounds like their sequence of experiments was done completely backwards, i.e. moving from aggressive to conservative spacing.
i think you would be hard pressed to find a mining company that was a good long term investment - doesnt matter what is being mined.
lithium is just another commodity metal and it isnt scarce. Extraction and transport are probably the important considerations. Canadian silicate sources are expensive to extract. South American sources are easy to extract but difficult to access and transport.
I'd venture that extracting lithium from Salton Sea Geothermal brines would be cheaper than South American dry lakes if it werent for the Salton Sea being in California. I know there is a company that is trying to accomplish the feat, and it may be cheaper, but i'm skeptical of the viability of California natural resource enterprises. California borax operations may be an exception but i suspect the recent earthquake caused them a different sort of problem.
Whiting whacked 33% of their employees yesterday.
I think some folks are having 2nd thoughts about their Permian basin activities. Of course, folks like XTO might have opportunity for firesale acquisitions.
the clogging up the plumbing comes from the higher melting point (~35 degC) of fully hydrogenated oil. Virgin oil is still relatively high but ~25 degC. It has a relatively low smoke point so that can be problematic but i suppose problems can be avoided depending how and what is being cooked. Maillard reactions can be wonderful things.
When i was working in SLB i had a load of lab grade, virgin coconut oil i was using for some of my research. When they closed the lab we were supposed to throw everything away but i kept the coconut oil and used it for cooking for a long time.
just a WAG on your observation regarding the effect on your tooth: might be related to surfactant or antibiotic effects of the acids in coconut oil. Coconut oil also contains sterols which might have an anti-inflammatory effect.
i was just looking at % total fat in product without differentiating sat fat vs unsat'd fats.
My cursory result showed 36% minimum for heavy cream (I goofed 1st time and noted light cream) and 59% tot fat for almond butter. That was from Wikipedia
the cream number is a minimum reg req for US.
Interesting tidbit about prostate. If true, I’m in for a world of hurt.
I have a libertarian attitude about dairy substitutes and fake meats - whatever folks prefer; I just get annoyed when people prop them up as being energetically advantageous and therefore people should abandon cow product consumption to save the earth.