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DrumBeat: November 11, 2006
Posted by threadbot on November 11, 2006 - 9:21am
Topic: Miscellaneous
An assessment of world oil exports
This article is a first simplistic assessment of World Oil Exports, here defined has the total amount of liquid hydrocarbons that are surpluses in producing countries. This assessment is made by projecting in to the future fixed change rates that reflect current trends in liquids production and consumption in countries where presently the difference between the two is positive. The outcome of this assessment is worrisome.
Norway Oil Companies Refocus Exploration Strategies
Oil companies on the Norwegian continental shelf are rethinking and prioritizing exploration strategies to ensure future growth, despite the high prices for rigs, contractors and personnel spurred by high oil prices, industry figures say.Traditionally, exploration costs rise and fall in line with oil prices, but companies are focusing on steadier exploration investment because resources are becoming scarcer.
Irish Police Baton-charge Protestors at Shell Terminal in Ireland
Police baton-charged protestors blocking access to the construction site of a Shell gas terminal in County Mayo in west Ireland, a spokesman said.Police said one protestor had been hospitalized and several other people, including members of the force, had suffered minor injuries during the confrontation.
The Globe & Mail has a special book review section called Are We Doomed?
Among the reviews: Heating the Ivory Tower (Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University, by Michael M'Gonigle) and If You Can't Stand the Heat (George Monbiot's How to Stop the Planet From Burning).
Solar: California's Rising Star
China to Finish Desert Oil Route Ahead of Schedule
China plans to complete a highway across the world's biggest sandy desert, near the ancient Silk Road, six months before schedule to tap oil fields in the western part of the country and reduce reliance on imports, an official said Wednesday.
The 150 billion cubic meters flared and vented annually are equivalent to 25 per cent of the United States’ gas consumption per year, and release about 390 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere
Without oil, Iran would have neither the money nor the wherewithal to develop nuclear energy, much less the bomb. Here, oil is seen as the reason the US overthrew the Mossadegh government half a century ago. And as the world approaches peak oil -- the point at which half of the world's reserves have been depleted, making each successive barrel harder and more expensive to extract -- oil and the atom have become the yin and yang of global energy politics.
Peak Oil Passnotes: Will Oil Rise on the Back of Short Covering?
Last year record long positions were shorted in the last two months of the year. It forced down the price to a floor of $55, around the Christmas and New Year period. Amazingly, after that week the price immediately rebounded up to $61 within days of January 1.Now we approach the same time in the year again. But instead of record long positions, spurred on by the hurricanes in America, we are now looking at record short positions of 172,000 lots. Could we be looking at the same pattern, in reverse, happening again this year?
Join us to look at end of cheap oil
Try recording how many miles per week you drive in your car. Now imagine that the price of gas is $6 per gallon. You cut back on movies and eating out, so you drive 20 percent less and manage to make ends meet.Then gas goes to $10 per gallon, and you figure out that you need to decrease your driving miles by 75 percent. What would you cut?
Oil companies tackle malaria, other issues in Africa
The leader of Africa's most populous nation is endangering not only his own legacy but his nation.
Oh no! We are Doomed! That's right, doomed! And no I am not talking about the outcome of the election (tough I could be) but doomed when it comes to energy and the world around us. In fact we may be so doomed that I may start walking around with a sandwich board that says we are doomed and that the end is near! Now if you think I am starting a panic, maybe I should, because it is not just me saying we are doomed, but the director of the International Energy Agency, Claude Mandil, himself.
A threefold expansion of nuclear power could contribute significantly to staving off climate change by avoiding one billion to two billion tons of carbon emissions annually
Am I the only one who senses a remarkable shift -- or, really, 3 shifts -- in how the press is covering climate change
Climate change special: State of denial
Canadians' reliance on cars, trucks driving up greenhouse gases: StatsCan
Review of George Monbiot's "Heat
"Europe refuses to negotiate South Pacific fishing cap:
AM - Saturday, 11 November , 2006 ELIZABETH JACKSON: Fishing representatives are warning a failure to reach an agreement to cap fishing in the South Pacific could lead to a disaster for stocks in the region. This comes after a breakdown of negotiations at meetings in Hobart this week.
Southern Hemisphere nations are pointing the finger at powerful European fishing interests, saying they're set to repeat mistakes already made in the Northern Hemisphere.
And while environmentalists are warning of a possible ecological disaster, Australia is also being warned of regional instability if the European fishing interests get their way, as Tim Jeanes reports."
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1786256.htm
http://aistigave.hit.bg/Logistics/
I particularly liked the recycled car.
Best Hopes for a Rail Alternative non-oil Transportation future,
Alan
The recycled car was good, but the child riding in the laundry basket horrified me.
Yesterday when visiting ADM I jotted down the yardboard prices on grains.
Grain Cash January
Corn 3.67 3.72
Soybeans 6.23 6.83
Wheat 4.98
Milo 3.82 4.03
The prices have risen quite a bit but in the last day or so have fallen some few cents due to USDA crop report just out.
The weather is very bad in my area of the midwest and is causing tremendous problems in the field but the worst is high moisture content in the grain. The farmer gets 'docked'
for this since it requires a lot of energy(gas of what ever form) to dry the grain to good storage values.
If you have 16% in milo then you can lose perhaps $.50 per bushel which is very significant. Much of the grain is going out at 17 and higher. If you hit 20 they might not take the grain or tell you not to bring anymore of it in.
So this is the point I am heading towards. Global Warming and its possible negative effects on ethanol or use of our crops for fuel.
It appears to me and others that the extremes in weather we are experencing is likely due to GW and other facets that are related directly to GW(El Nino,etc).
These effects play havoc with crops and crop management.
Right now we have semi's broken down in the field, tractors stuck, combines struck and damaged due to the condition of the crops. All this might be multiplied many fold in the future if the weather continues to worsen as I assume it likely would.
Some farmers may find they can no longer continue. One of my friends still has a third(1,000 acres of crops) still at risk and still not in the bin. Water levels rising , soil not drying,and more.
Fingers are crossed and the farmers are basically working extremely long and hard hours.
Will all this go in the future just to keep soccer moms happily motoring? To keep the Wal-Marts flourishing? I wonder.
THanks for these posts on the farming perspective. I learn a lot from them.
Francois
These two(beans and milo) are later maturing grain crops and often bad weather can set back the harvest times. Milo has a large stalk and so rain , floods and wind doesn't usually bother them like it does soybeans. They can be smashed flat.
Corn can be almost totally lost due to high wind and extreme wetness. Thats why the want it out early.
In any event its sometimes early Dec before ALL the beans are done with.
AFAIK hitech farming, such as gmo and no till do not have a substantial effect on the maturing and harvesting. You can buy seeds that have longer germination periods though. You can buy many many different seeds with lots of variation due to soil type,weather , etc.
Farming is a chancy endeavor. You simply cannot control nature. You then learn how to predict or make wise decisions on many facets of it. If you don't you can go under.
Most farmers are very rich, in term of assests but very cash poor. They sometimes only realize their lifelong accumulation when they sell out.
I do know some who brought land when it was cheap and brought lots of it. They are doing extremely well.
Thanks for the above praise. My intent was to let the community know more fully the life and trials of farming, or at least the higher tech style and especially as it relates to our future and the energy situation.
the fish are jumpin and the cotton is high
Grains Have Gone Parabolic
Prices have been bid up despite high harvests. Of course, that doesn't completely ease the pain from getting docked--or if you can't get it harvested at all.
Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog
[http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/]
A New Perspective For Assessing The Role Of Agriculture In The Climate System And In Climate Change
Pielke Sr., R.A., J.O. Adegoke, T.N. Chase, C.H. Marshall, T. Matsui, and D. Niyogi, 2006.
[http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/11/10/a-new-paradigm-for-assessing-the-role-of-agricultur e-in-the-climate-system-and-in-climate-change-2/]
What are the costs per acre of diesel for different farming operation? I am not a farmer (albeit interested in farming), but from my limited knowledge, for any one crop, you would have to pass over the field:
- once to plough or disc in the crop residue (unless you burn it)
- once to add in lime to balance out acidity from nitrogen
- once to harrow or otherwise prepare the seedbed and possibly 'base fertilise' the land
- once to spray out germinating weeds and leave a residual weedicide
- once to sow the seed and place initial fertiliser
- two? times to spray out emerging weed seedlings
- maybe once or twice with fungicide and/or insecticide (unless done by helicopter)
- maybe once to side dress nitrogen (unless done by helicopter)
- once to harvest with the combine
Is maybe 10 passes over each acre in a growing cycle realistic? Or am I way out?Last two questions:
- what is a 'ball park' average of diesel consumption for the machinery involved in these operations (I guess it will differ between the size of the machine, the type of machine, the variable resistance of the soil according to how wet and what type, etc but I am just trying to get a 'feel' for deisel use per crop/acre)
- Leaving out climate variability (I know that's stupid, but for the sake of thinking about it), are there farmers at such physical distance from diesel supply lines that movements we have already experienced in deisel prices make their seed-growing operations marginal? Do such farmers have a price point for diesel in back of their mind at which they know they can't keep going, have you heard?
The USA is currently a major corn (at least) exporter. Government has subsidised exports, and this has worked well when oil was cheap.It seems to me that subsidised exports are hit twice - tax on USA consumers to pay the subsidy, and effective USA subsidisation of Japanese or whoever poultry producers.
This film is an excellent introduction to Peak Oil.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug
Dingell aims to cut American oil habit
A Quick look at Foreign Oil
Russia near deal to join W.T.O.
-C.
He has - certainly to protect interests in his Detroit district. I have also recently heard that he is starting to push for higher fuel economy, but I don't know how serious he is about it.
What we need is a massive, government mandated shift to EV, PEHV/Diesels, CATs and large scale commercial shipping transportation via rail and passenger mass transportation via electrified rail.
Trying to 'fix' CAFE is moronic at this point. Burning MORE hydrocarbons is NOT the answer.
There is no excuses for continuing to use ICEs when the alternatives are not only viable but far more economical and cost effective in terms of combating global warming and reducing our FF consumption.
I'll say it again. Higher CAFE standards are NOT the answer. We need to completely move away from burning FFs in our engines!
When I get off work, I will go into more detail on why US auto makers wont build a commercial EV without prodding. Hint: It has to do with their bloated pension plans and lack of margins on a high efficiency vehicle :)
I've seen it reported to be more in the 20%-30% range.
This site says 20%.
Are you blaiming the ICE for transmission losses, tire losses?
All of this requires some limits on liquid-fuel use. CAFE standards or carbon-emission limits are more or less interchangeable measures, but they're susceptible to gaming through category arbitrage (from cars to "light trucks", etc). Given that electric vehicles are reaching into super-car performance territory, another measure would be to limit the acceleration allowed from combustion engines (say, 0-60 in 15 seconds minimum, set by a governor) and require any additional power to be obtained from stored or recovered energy. That would greatly increase economy and make hybrids the default for anything sportier than a tow vehicle.
Ah ha; Brother troll be working for Chevy.
http://www.netdisaster.com/go.php?mode=tomato&url=http://members.fortunecity.com/ashgann/hothgor .jpg
Bad troll.
Hothgor - have you no shame?
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/2/162019/324#more
I don't think there is anything in Hothgor's call for electric vehicles that warrants your attacks on him. Let's let bygones be bygones.
Whatever we think of CAFE standards, I don't think we should be taking a "cartoons of the prophet" approach to people who may dissent from your view.
There are some good analytical arguments on both sides of this issue. Yours is not one of them.
Rather than improved CAFE standards, I would instead set quotas for percentage of vehicles sold that must be fully electric. The sole exceptions to these might be extremely heavy construction equipment, aircraft, and military usage. But if we moved everything else to a purely electric base, our oil consumption would drop so much that we literally would gain decades to migrate the remaining small percentage of oil users away from oil. Such a program would also lead to large investment in electric power generation, the electric grid itself, and would foster serious public debate about other electric transportation as well, such as Alan's electric rail proposals. In short, a government mandated switch of that magnitude would create jobs, create sustainable infrastructure, and cause developers to plan different sorts of communities to live consistently with these new patterns.
Note: If we cut overall oil consumption to some fraction of current levels, we might actually be able to fill that fraction with sustainable biofuel production. Rather than try to make biofuels fill an impossible niche, why don't we ask what niche biofuels can actually fill then mandate that biofuels go to that purpose with pure electric filling everything else? We are past the point where the wastefulness of a "market" approach can be tolerated to maybe produce a solution. We are rapidly approaching a point where this becomes a li