Once the worst happens and you and your neighbors rise to the occasion and commit to jointly solving the problems; "the other side" is not so bleak.

I do wonder if much of suburbia will band togetehr though.  Time will tell.

A new statistic in this mornings news.  53% of the people in the Metro New Orleans area are living in "temporary housing".  And that does not count the 200,000 living elsewhere.

Temporary as in a tent inside your gutted home, FEMA trailer, on the floor of a friend's home, renting an apartment with others, living in an RV (4 close to me) etc,

We can no longer tolerate bad corporate behavior that sacrifices the livelihoods of working families for outrageous profits. Please know that I will keep fighting to bring energy prices down for Michigan businesses and families.

--Debbie Stabenow
  United States Senator

You mean we have been tolerting it all this time?
Cool.

Being that today is 6/6/06, I propose that the US Senate adopt a new Constitutional amendment regarding the signature with the beast:

Defining "crude" as the marriage between a dinosaur and an oil company.

We need to stop activist bloggers from trying to corrupt our long standing belief in the fundamental right of all Americans to trade freely with any oil company that has married itself to the dinosaur. Let freedom ring.

Yeh, if we could just get those oil companies, all would be solved.   And as soon as we have converted our entire corn supply to ethanol, then what?  

Being that she is from Michigan, I didn't hear much about driving more efficient vehicles or not driving at all.

I guess I need to move to Michigan if $500 is a house payment.

Waaay too early to tell IMHO- it would take 5-10 years of decline to convince me, given that the main reason for the plateauing of recent years has been entirely geopolitical rather than geological.

If Nigeria and Iraq became stable, and the US and Iran / Venezuala / Russia made up, then oil production would be 1.5 mbd higher, and the price would probably be in the $50 range, IMHO.

It remains to be seen whether reserves in the ground translates into production in the long run, of course.

Gross liquids peak (including ethanol, CTL, etc) only matters for marketing and cornucopian purposes.

He calls this one "Which of these plots is not like the others?"

Given we still have global economic growth we might expect to see demand at least 1 or 2% higher than 2005 i.e. 85mbd. The 1mbd shortfall in demand must be due to demand destruction due to high prices.

So if priced dropped, demand would increase and the Saudis could sell their oil i.e. if they kept pumping the price would drop and they would find buyers.

The Saudi excuse doesn't stack up, either they are manipulating the price higher or they have peaked.

I vote the latter so YES we are witnessing the peak.

If the price of oil stays high than yes we are past peak because demand destruction will limit use even if we could pull out all the stops to produce more.

On the other hand if the price drops $10-15 per barrel over the next year than people will ramp up consumption and maybe production could be ramped up to meet that new demand.

In summary what I think has happened is that the Cost of Goods for oil has gotten so high that there is a permanent demand destruction built into the system.  The world can't afford to use more oil.  This is an economic/political peak, different than a geological peak but they are inter related ultimately.  At some point oil will be so hard to extract that even if we wanted to increase production we wouldn't physically be able to.  In either case I think we may have seen peak production but it will be impossible to sort out what the limiting factor was until long after decline occurs.

On the other hand, I want to know much better what the timeline is, and it's very frustrating not being able to pin things down more accurately so one can have more confidence in what actions to take.

Having said that, I really don't think the things that are going to have the biggest impacts on our lives will be based on the geologic realities of oil extraction, rather it will be how people and societies react to them.  This makes it even more unpredictable, and also means the exact time of the peak is less important.  If I can no longer get fuel because some crazy bastard starts a war with a major oil producer causing short supplies and high prices, I suppose it might be nice to know that more oil could someday be available, but practically it won't help much.  

As I've said before, when you push any system to the maximum of its capacity, the effect of losses becomes much more important.  If we are near the peak, then all of this non-geologic crap that limits our ability to produce the crude and refine and deliver the end products is here to stay.  One of the questions I keep thinking about is if the Hubbert method takes any of this into account - it's based on results isn't it?  I guess when previous regions hit peak there were other places to go to, so while there was a temporary increase in political and other losses, it might be different this time.  Now the non-geologic losses may be far more significant.

OK, enough stream-of-consciousness rambling!

However, If Ghawar, Burgan, Cantarell, etc get into their decline in a serious way, and political issues continue as I expect, I cannot see any way the world could get up to the 90 million barrel mark RR is speculating about. I would be very surprised to see production exceed 86 million. While I deeply respect RR's contributions, especially in the ethanol debate and economics issues, I remain puzzled that he hasn't addressed the issue of supergiant decline or just general depletion with anywhere near the throughness of other issues. "Trust me on this" doesn't do it for me. This is not meant as an attack, but I don't know how to evaluate comments like "mark my words" without more solid information. On the other hand, I certainly can't say I know better.

I don't think the new numbers say anything definitively, but they are quite suggestive in my book. If you define peak as a process rather than as a point, I think we are there to within 1 million barrels per day.

Are you tallying votes? My vote is "No". I believe we have more production records ahead. However, I want to make it clear that I think we need to be preparing for Peak Oil with everything we've got. If Peak Oil happens 10 years from now, however, my feeling is that we won't be any better prepared than we are today.

RR

It could be but I'd bet against it. The emphasis people here sometimes put on specific data elements is troubling. Oh well. One could argue that the inability of people to deal appropriately with statistics is intimately related to society's failure to anticipate peak oil (along the same lines as Al Bartlett and his arguments about exponential growth).

In particular and of late, the over-emphasised data point of choice has been west-texas' "58%". The uncertainty here is large. The comparison with texas is said to be meaningful. And then most people seem to agree? Sheesh. Frustrating.

Aluminum is the new copper for metal thieves

DENVER - Thieves have been stealing copper for years as prices have risen, mostly an expensive nuisance. Now they are targeting aluminum products, with experts saying safety is at risk as everything from light poles to highway guard rails are disappearing.

"Aluminum prices are at an 18-year high," said Chuck Carr, vice president of member services for the Institute for Scrap Recycling Industries.

Thieves in April made off with $4,000 worth of aluminum bleachers -- enough seating for 100 people -- from P.C. Campana Park in Lorain, Ohio.

Copper is still popular, too:

In the past year, copper water spouts have been taken off churches. Coils of communication wires. Power cables for trolleys. Raw copper from the Navy at Pearl Harbor. Authorities attribute at least five deaths to thieves being electrocuted. Railroads have sent out warnings about thefts of spikes, communication equipment and track.

I'm afraid Chavez has struck a nerve

One thought keeps nagging me... It is an observation once made by the historian Niall Ferguson. He pointed out that markets are not that good at taking account of the really big shifts in world affairs. I think he might be on to something.

(No kidding....)

He goes on:

Chavez might be a villain in the West, but he has touched a nerve. One of the darker aspects of globalisation is that many of the world's weaker countries are having their physical assets plundered for a song by Western corporates. The worm, it seems is turning. Each week comes fresh news that a growing number of the world's politically weak but resource rich countries are prepared to play their joker card - a windfall tax, or even nationalisation, in order to exploit their natural resources.

Let me give you a few recent examples that were not widely reported in the press. On May 12 Mongolian lawmakers approved a windfall tax on minerals mined in the country. The tax, starting at 68pc, will be triggered when copper reaches a price of $2,600 a metric ton, or when gold reaches $500 an ounce. There was next to no warning that this tax was coming and some Western miners have complained that it was passed with "inexplicable haste".

Tanzania is considering changing its mining laws because it is thought that the government is getting too little revenue from the mining of the gemstone Tanzanite.

He warns Nigeria may be next:

During the past 25 years Nigeria has earned $300bn (£160bn) in oil revenues, but per capita income has dropped from $1,000 to $390 and more than two thirds of the population live below the poverty line. As a result, some have described Nigeria as the largest failed state on Earth and the reports of kidnappings and terrorism often aimed at global oil companies, such as Shell, is a clear warning that Nigeria could soon become front page news for all the wrong reasons.

And it gets worse.  He thinks even food will be affected:

Recently, Stewart Wells, president of Canada's National Farmers Union, wrote an open letter to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, detailing his worries about global food supply. He points out that in 1999-2000 the world had 116 days' worth of food in storage. This has fallen to 69 days but he quotes an estimate made by the US Department of Agriculture that it will fall to 57 days this year.

Mr Wells said that the last time we saw numbers this low was in the 1970s. The problem this time is that there is less land to farm and crop yields are considerably higher due to the more intensive use of fertilisers combined with the improvements that have been made with the breeding of crops. He shares the worry I expressed here on April 20 that the world might be heading towards a food crisis.

Mr Wells makes the point that we probably need to get back to more localised production of food. In other words, he feels that globalisation and the impact it is having on the climate have added significant risk to the food chain.

I fear that, when we look back on 2006, we will see that it marked a watershed at which the world was revealed to be a riskier and dangerous place than most hedge fund managers realised. While stockbrokers and fund managers worry about corporate profits and inflation the very fabric of modern life is being unpicked.

That was a very good general description of the corn-to-ethanol process, and the flow chart was also helpful.  I will bookmark that one for future reference.

As I understand it, the largest single energy input of the actual conversion process (as opposed to growing the corn) is the heat needed for the distillation step.  Cooking the mash is probably a not-too-distant second.  

I wonder it there is much potential for internal energy recovery in order to decrease the energy input and improve the EROEI. During the distillation step the overhead ethanol vapors must be condensed, probably via some sort of heat exchanger employing cooling water. Perhaps some of this heat of condensation could be recovered and then used to help heat the mash in the cooking step and thereby reduce the energy input?

I suspect that the process, as presently configured, is designed to get the maximum amount of  ethanol production from the smallest amount of process equipment (and hence capital investment), rather than to minimize energy use.

Maybe there really isn't much potential for energy savings, but I ask the question. Anybody?

He also made it clear that any intervention by EU states if Russian firms sought to buy their European rivals would be regarded as unfriendly.

..."The less political issues there are in this area, the easier and calmer it will be for suppliers and consumers and businesses." In today's global market, a firm's nationality was increasingly irrelevant, he said.

"We have global companies - it can be hard to pinpoint where a company comes from. BP is considered a British company and in America it is an American company. There is nothing contradictory in that because its assets are spread all over the world." Russia was intent on "the expansion of our own participation in others' assets".

Darn Commie is using free market capitalism/globalization against us...  ;-)

As for killing birds and bats, very little (large wind turbines spin very slowly).. In fact, orders of magnitude less than moving cars, pet cats and windows.

I guess I believe that in a city like Los Angeles the #1 issue is not so much right of way (thought ROW is always an issue to some extent), but the social-outcast nature that is attached to transit options.

Never, not once, in my travels around Japan, including on some of the most desolate and darkest streets after midnight, even in seedier areas, have I feared of being mugged or having my pockets picked.   Something tells me (namely, my own driving experience around LA) that riding on the LA green or blue line would be a different experience.

I can be packed like a sardine in train car in Japan and not be at all concerned I might lose something.

It is acceptable to women I date that I don't own a car.

I've never been at a loss to find help at a station, for directions or anything else.

Etc., etc.,...

You get the picture... there is much more to the challenge of reinstituting rail in the US than tax dollars.   Indeed, taxes and plans are not really the issue IMO.

Speaking of tax dollars, have you been considering the future of private rail?

Suggest that an answer to your question "Why must our rail transit systems continue to lurch from one financial crisis to another, always begging for the table scraps of transportation spending?" could be:
because you are unwilling to pay a ticket price for a high quality, 99.8% assured service.

The reason I believe this is because of your next statement: "Why is there no dedicated funding source?" as if you expect someone else to pay for your transportation.

Yes, I realize automobile travel is subsidized - vehicle and gasoline taxes don't pay the full cost for private automobile and truck usage.  Perhaps that should change, and the general revenue taxes be refunded to the taxpayers... but I wouldn't hold my breath.

From what you described, it sounds to me like some pressure relief valves popped and sent some gaseous hydrocarbons to the refinery's flare system. Typically, the discharge side of the pressure relief valves are tied together via a piping system that flows to a small flare which is kept lit at all times (sort of like the pilot light in a kitchen stove).  When the hydrocarbons hit the flare, they burn off, and hence the flame you are seeing. If there were no flare system,  the hydrocarbons would be discharge directly to the atmosphere and contribute to VOC air emissions.  So, the flare is both a safety feature and a pollution control device. Obviously, one wants to avoid having pressure relief valves going off too frequently, but sometimes things happen that can't be avoided.

In particular there is also a misunderstanding as to what is being measured and covered. For instance, American Petroleum Institute and EIA regularly publish weekly data on the US stock position (with sometimes conflicting with each other). Note that the weekly bulletin of API is based on voluntary reporting with coverage of about 90-95% on most major series. Best data come from EIA petroleum supply monthly but it comes out 2 months after the fact. (see here for more on that). The EIA uses the same definitions as API. Their reports are released the day after API's. The problem is sometimes is not with stocks but with logistics like frozen waterways and ports being closed due to bad weather.

Maybe this is why?  I'm not familiar with all this type of data, but I ran across this article and it may at least be tangential to your questions and somewhere within this lengthy article, may be your real answer.

http://www.energybulletin.net/16745.html

Elite special forces troops being dropped behind enemy lines on covert missions are to ditch their traditional parachutes in favour of strap-on stealth wings.

The lightweight carbon fibre mono-wings will allow them to jump from high altitudes and then glide 120 miles or more before landing - making them almost impossible to spot, as their aircraft can avoid flying anywhere near the target.

Dunno how practical they'll be in the post-carbon age, though.  Carbon fiber = high-tech plastic.  So it's another petroleum-based technology.  ;-)

What if....there was another plan?  
Already in the works?
A grand 'Strategic Vision'?

Peruse the following two links, in order:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0745322069/qid=1129652725/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-3515470-9410501?s=b ooks&v=glance&n=283155

Left hand column here is excerpted from the book above:
http://inspectorlohmann.blogspot.com/2005/10/let-culling-commence.html

I would bet anything that Rangel knows there's zero chance of that bill going anywhere.

This gives you crude + condensate by country and region for several decades.