mspohr
Well-Known Member
I think Miami has been building seawalls, etc. for a few years. They do realize that the flood is coming.
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No. The real story is that the growth of solar is now larger in absolute numbers than the growth of wind. Which is very interesting; we've all been expecting it, but it took a long time for solar to catch up.
15 + 5 - 11 - 7 = +2, so it was up. You know hydro is primarily fluctuating against a baseline average, so it's not interesting to include the hydro fluctuations.
Didn't
Wind growth has *flattened*; wind totals are growing linearly instead of exponentially. This is probably largely due to NIMBYs, frankly. We are in a transition period from onshore wind, which is having trouble getting siting permission any faster, to offshore wind; we should see a boost in wind once offshore wind properly gets going in the US, in a couple of years.
Pffft, that's local tariff effects, which are one-time effects. Solar's worldwide growth rate is still at the standard 50%/year with 20%/year cost declines. Nothing to worry about.
Gas is currently displacing coal but that's yesterday's news. Today's news: The total fossil electricity production in the US is dropping. Not as fast as we need it to, but it's dropping, from 780037 year-to-date last year to 774857 year-to-date this year. Nuclear is dropping faster, but fossils are dropping.
Meanwhile, of course, all renewables except hydro are producing more year-over-year.
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Yeeeeah, the Miami projects don't amount to much. Miami Beach has been elevating roads, but they haven't been elevating them nearly enough.
Seawalls don't work in Miami due to porous bedrock.
adiggs
Well-Known Member
Warning - if you like random bits of new knowledge, that petroleum.co.uk site is a black hole. It has been at least for me 
Lots of good info about the basic chemistry, refining, and the whole oil & gas industry.
Lots of good info about the basic chemistry, refining, and the whole oil & gas industry.I've been trying to avoid learning too much about an industry soon to be obsoleteWarning - if you like random bits of new knowledge, that petroleum.co.uk site is a black hole. It has been at least for me
-- thanks for the warning, as random bits of new knowledge is my catnip. ;-)
Solar __grew__ at 28.9% in 2018, wind at 12.6% in 2018 (planetary)
Statistical Review of World Energy | Energy economics | Home
adiggs
Well-Known Member
I've been trying to avoid learning too much about an industry soon to be obsolete
One interesting thing I learned from that site, and could easily be me reading too much into it, is the way that site emphasized the central role of gasoline in the classification of crude, in the economics of refining and O&G - it's the primary source of value from a barrel of crude.
As a result, today the very best crude (of which both WTI and Brent are examples) is sweet light crude. It's crude that needs the least refining to get it into components to make gasoline and therefore get the highest value refined product with the least amount of energy and other inputs.
That's got me thinking - if personal EVs take off bigly enough, that might hurt the O&G industry in a different way than I've usually though. Instead of straight demand reduction, you get demand of the highest value refined product that the refining industry is largely optimized for. I guess the outcome that I now see as possible - aggregate demand is still relatively high, but because gas demand is being hit hard, the refining industry gets hit particularly hard. There may still be demand for the overall basket of refined products, but with gas demand out of whack with historical demand, independent refiners (who have to actually make a profit, rather than refine the raw barrel and make their money from the raw barrel and treat refining as a cost of doing business) may find themselves with the wrong mix of output.
Sort of like the Philadelphia refinery fire - enough refiners get hurt economically and can't reprice their other outputs to compensate, and crude demand gets hit because their aren't refiners to convert crude to finished products.
Another possible shift - sweet heavy crude may become the new "best" crude due to easily getting a higher fraction of diesel (as the larger refined products mix shifts from gas primary, to diesel primary). I haven't seen anything on that site yet talking (seriously) about combining lighter hydrocarbons to get heavier hydrocarbons - it's mostly about breaking longer chain hydrocarbons into shorter chain hydrocarbons. Diesel has some overlap with gas, but is mostly longer chain than the components of gas (so you need your inputs to start out as longer chain).
adiggs
Well-Known Member
Couple of articles about Miami.
https://www.businessinsider.com/miami-floods-sea-level-rise-solutions-2018-4[URL="https://www.businessinsider.com/miami-floods-sea-level-rise-solutions-2018-4"]Miami is racing against time to keep up with sea-level rise[/URL]
Miami Is Sinking Into the Sea—But Not Without a Fight
Interesting to me is how old these articles are - 2015 and 2018. The big success in recent years is installation of a bunch of pumps around Miami to pump water from the drainage and sewer systems out into the bay. That's been enough to stop flooding during more routine full moons at least. Many of the standard solutions for cities at sea level don't work for Miami since it's built on limestone (basically former coral reefs), so the ocean water seeps into the bedrock and is coming up there too
Yeah - they know it's coming. I'd say Miami is a goner - maybe during my lifetime. The second article has an idea of what "goner" might actually look like - think Florida Keys, except put the current Keys underwater, and convert Miami into the new Keys
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
Yes, I discussed this a few hundred pages back --- when gasoline becomes an unwanted byproduct, as it actually was before the Model T, the refining industry (as currently configured) gets smashed financially.
Refineries needing to retool was one of the three reasons I believe that we could see a period when the oil price dropped while the gasoline price went up. The bigger reasons were the loss of economies of scale in the distribution network, and the reduction of scale down to the point where local gas stations became able to use monopoly pricing.
That's because basically nobody knows how to do it cost-effectively, for a product which is just going to be burned.
You can do it with polymerization, used to make plastics, but it's *expensive*. The difference in price between full synthetic motor oil (which is partly, but not entirely, made by polymerization) and normal oil (which is simply separated / filtered out of cracked crude oil) is quoted as "2 to 5 times as expensive", so that gives you a sense of the order of magnitude of the expense of making longer hydrocarbons from shorter ones.
Using fully synthetic jet fuel would mean doubling the price of jet fuel, which is obviously a non-starter even for jet fuel. Let alone for diesel.
Yes. So the gasoline/naphtha fraction becomes a *disposal problem*. It probably gets cracked into the smaller molecules of methane/ethane/propane/butane.
But you're right, heavy sweet crude should become more valuable than light sweet crude. Unforrtunately for the oil industry, there are no new sources of heavy sweet crude. The tar sands sort of produce it, but it's too heavy, very hard to extract, and so they're super unprofitable.
So happy to see this. I'm in the same situation - my grandfather was a regional exec for Exxon and when I receive the inheritance money I will be buying solar panels and another EV.
A Family Divesting From Fossil Fuels To Invest In A Green Future
A Family Divesting From Fossil Fuels To Invest In A Green Future
Doggydogworld
Active Member
It's amazing. The weekly version of this chart shows we've been a net exporter a few times recently.
Also amazing is we went from importing $500b+ of oil per year around 2007-08 to almost nothing today yet our trade deficit is only slightly lower now.
Half of US oil production and effectively all of the export is from shale fracking, unfortunately, which is a disaster on several levels. Most interestingly, it runs out really fast. Also, it's unprofitable.
The result is that this is going to reverse quite spectacularly, which should lead to a giant spike in oil prices. But it might not, if the demand decline driven by electric vehicles has gone far enough by the time the shale oil stops flowing.
The result is that this is going to reverse quite spectacularly, which should lead to a giant spike in oil prices. But it might not, if the demand decline driven by electric vehicles has gone far enough by the time the shale oil stops flowing.
Two different sets of Rockefeller heirs have already divested their family foundations.
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
I disagree. Our fossil interests have just maximized their total revenue before the petro-nations. They're gonna need to maximize production at all costs very soon as well, and that combined with the of clear knowledge of peak demand should cap Brent for good.
I think this thread dramatically underestimates the level of production that should bring for 2020 on out through peak oil.
Doggydogworld
Active Member
Shale declines fast, but it also ramps fast. This is a new thing. It takes deep offshore a decade to respond to a price spike, a shale field with DUCs can respond in a couple months. That doesn't guarantee we'll never have another spike, but it provides a huge dampening affect. Especially if horizontal+fracking ever expands beyond US borders.
Look at events the past 4-5 years - continued decline in Mexico, collapse in Venezuela, war in Libya, sanctions crippling Iranian exports, etc. A single such event could spike prices in prior years, now multiple events happen simultaneously and the price barely budges. Even threats of a US-Iran war can't get the party started.
Well, maybe? But the fracking companies have nearly all lost money for nearly their entire existence.
This has been made possible by the executives scamming the money out of stupid investors (banks, pension funds, ExxonMobil, etc.) and then extracting it as salary + bonus, fleeing with the bags of investor cash before their company collapses. (Except for Aubrey MeClendon, who committed suicide.)
I don't see how they can keep that up. Maximizing production at any cost makes no sense to an investor who wants to make a profit. Countries like Saudi Arabia which can lift oil from the ground at $1/bbl, yes, they would want to maximize production, but the fracking companies? They're only doing it to scam investors. As soon as enough investors wake up to the scame, they have to stop doing it.
But WHO IS PAYING FOR IT?
So far, it's been the "dumb money" paying for it. Investors put in the money, some of it is wasted drilling the wells and extracting the gas (and some oil) -- the gas and oil is sold at a loss for less than the cost of drilling -- some of the money is siphoned off by the executives, none of it ever gets returned to the investors.
How long can this go on?!?!
P.S. Not sure I dropped these links here before:
This is how the frackers convince investors to burn their money. They claim much-longer-than-real depreciation/depletion schedules for the wells:
IEEFA/Sightline analysis: The fracking depreciation dodge - Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis
Key quotes: "A company that overestimates its wells’ lifetime production will likely understate its annual depreciation expenses."
..."oil and gas companies use a variety of tricks to inflate their production forecasts for their oil fields. They cherry-pick data from a few good wells. They extrapolate from highly productive sweet spots and apply them to an entire oil field. They underestimate the pace at which oil production declines over time."
When I was looking at the companies a few years ago, I found they were typically overestimating how long the wells will last before they run out -- by a factor of 2 to 10.
This is the view of someone in the shale oil industry on the financial state of shale fracking:
Shale Pioneer: Fracking Is An “Unmitigated Disaster” | OilPrice.com
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as an outsider, looking in
FIRST, you have to find unfracked reserves, and investors willing to lose buckets of money
It seems more like an analogy to the dregs of a milkshake, slurping up the last fractional percents of leftovers, why they rapidly play out, last gasps.
accelerating into, not a brick wall, but a layer of CAM (condensed/collapsed anti matter) that utterly destroy everything in a flash of
"....and we'll all go together when we go, in a sudden wink, of an incandescent glow"
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The current mood in the industry -- bankruptcies and mergers coming:
Shale Executive Sees “Another Round Of Bankruptcies” Looming | OilPrice.com
Shale Executive Sees “Another Round Of Bankruptcies” Looming | OilPrice.com
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