Bush ok's Gulf of Mexico Drilling

[Bill51]

Bill51, I read over the Rand report on shale oil, and one of the 'unknowns' in that report on the newer method proposed by Shell is changes to underground aquifers and the potential for leaching salts left in the rock after the oil is removed. That's a pretty big unknown which would have to be resolved for the $30/barrel price neighborhood. It does state the recovered oil from this method could be sent directly to a refinery without need for immediate treatment for unstable compounds, unlike the other methods.

The other methods, which include potential application of the systems used for tar sands adapted to shale oil, showed $75 to $90 per barrel estimate price required for the first commercial scale plant.

While Rand and others do a pretty good job of analyzing new energy technologies, they wind up being very conservative because of the way processes and techniques are slowly made public. Shell (and others doing energy research) are very skeptical of patent protection and intellectual property protection in foreign markets, so they don’t release many of the details until they’re ready to start production even though they have many more solutions than what they initially make public. The Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) and many other international agreements (even though we haven’t ratified LOST) have “common good” or other language that could allow the UN to declare a patented idea too important to recognize the patent and allow others to use the ideas. This has happened in the drug industry and LOST specifically states that any new technology developed to use in international waters must be given to developing countries to use also – after the UN takes their skim off the top.

I think the day Shell feels comfortable with being able to produce oil at $55 a barrel while meeting strict environmental guidelines, they’ll start up a plant.

 

[lamont]

Shhhh, If them DIR boys hear you mention them it's like inviting a vampire into your home.
They'll show up and explain how the whole energy crisis is caused by jacket BCD's
That if we all converted to BP/W the lighter more stream line BC's would add up to enough savings to off set the National debt in oil savings

Its all those divers struggling to swim with jacket BCs and split fins that are warming up the oceans... If everyone would just frog kick in a BP/W there would be no more hurricanes...

 

[dlndavid]

it's all my fault

 

[Scuba_Jenny]

Shhhh, If them DIR boys hear you mention them it's like inviting a vampire into your home.
They'll show up and explain how the whole energy crisis is caused by jacket BCD's
That if we all converted to BP/W the lighter more stream line BC's would add up to enough savings to off set the National debt in oil savings

 

[TimAZ]

Bill51 (or anyone else who might know) while I am very much in favor of expanding nuclear power generation on principle, I'm curious what advances have been made regarding contamination from the mining that would neccessarily occur. Locally, there has been much attention recently given to the impact of uranium tailings on residents of the Navajo Reservation.

(BTW - great thread)

 

[steeliejim]

Thanks for a great link, though after reading it and looking at the redundancies they’re working with I did wonder if it was written to DIR standards.

The only problem I have with the report is their concern of aircraft compromising the containment vessel. Having seen first hand some of the tests done over the years and actually what we learned new after reviewing the 9/11 crashes, I’m not too worried about that possibility.

A very old test video

Thanks MM and bill51. Here's another article I found.

It's several years old, but an interesting twist on the whole energy supply equation. Namely that our turning our backs on new nuclear plants
"fuels" demand for natural gas which Russia sells rather than using itself. And so, it turns back on it's old nucs to meet its own energy needs, which are built to less safe standards than ours.

http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/0918/russianukes.html

 

[Bill51]

Bill51 (or anyone else who might know) while I am very much in favor of expanding nuclear power generation on principle, I'm curious what advances have been made regarding contamination from the mining that would neccessarily occur. Locally, there has been much attention recently given to the impact of uranium tailings on residents of the Navajo Reservation.

(BTW - great thread)

Interesting question that I don’t know the answer to, but I do know that some uranium producing states would prefer to never see FBRs built as they will drastically cut the amount of yellow cake and uranium ore needed. In that way it will reduce the tailings problems everywhere – no matter what the mining industry is doing about it now.

 

[Bill51]

Thanks MM and bill51. Here's another article I found.

It's several years old, but an interesting twist on the whole energy supply equation. Namely that our turning our backs on new nuclear plants
"fuels" demand for natural gas which Russia sells rather than using itself. And so, it turns back on it's old nucs to meet its own energy needs, which are built to less safe standards than ours.

http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/0918/russianukes.html

Which just goes to back up a statement I made umpteen pages ago about the interchangeability of energy on the world market. Buckminster Fuller made an observation years ago that the international standard of currency should be the erg, or kilowatt hour, because energy sources and methods are completely interchangeable around the globe and regardless how it is produced or what the fuel is as ultimately no one cares as long as they get energy. This is no different than the power plants in Florida wanting to convert from oil to gas if they can get a stable reasonably priced supply, and gas is ultimately better for peak generation if we can get another nuke online down here. If the demand for gas goes up, the price of gas goes up, but the price of oil also goes up. If the supply of gas goes up, the price of gas goes down, and the price of oil also goes down.

 

[FredT]

More oil, more CO2, more global warming resulting in horribly bleached reefs, SWEET, Go Bush!

Look on the bright side. IF as Uncle AL is screaming (a REALLY BIG "IF") ocean temperatures "rise", resulting in a general "rise" of sea level the worlds coral reefs will move north again, and the Condo rubble of South Fla will create enough hard substrate for extensive reef growth all the way north to Orlando. That reef rock ridge has been underwater before, and will be again. When is the only question.

OTOH pacific reefs may make it all the way up to the canyon off your place.

Disregarding Uncle Al's fear mongering red herrings the place to watch for changes is the Bearing Sea. When a land bridge or grounded ice bridge again starts to form there we are in real trouble. The ice age cycle will again start and the earth again goes into the deep freeze for a few hundred thousand years. That one passage being open or closed is the key to ice age ocean current formation with the existing continent mass configuration. That gap is necessary for the Great Southern Ocean wind driven trans-arctic flow that keeps a stable fresh water lens from forming in the arctic sea. As long as there is no stable fresh water lens the density currents will flow, or restart after a decade or so and existing climate conditions will tend to prevail, plus or minus a few hundred miles north or south. Once the stable lens forms the restart cycle is measured in tens of thousands of years.

NOTHING man can do with earth based resources will stop this cycle. We have a variable star driving this system. Unless we can do something to take out that variation the cycle will continue until the continental masses move again and create a gap between continents that negates the need for the trans-arctic current. BTW that current is measure in cubic miles of water per month, not in the same class as the Gulf Stream and Japan Currents, but just as important if not more so.

FT

 

[Bill51]

IF climate change were the result of CO2 rather than solar activity does Eric the Red owe his early success on Greenland to Chinese fireworks rather than the Medieval Solar Maxim – and if Europeans would have started driving SUVs 700 years earlier would his settlements still be thriving today? Would the Renaissance have been possible without the abundance available due to the Medieval Warming Period, and would the French or American revolutions taken place if the planet hadn’t been in the deepfreeze and shortages caused by the Little Ice Age (especially during the Dalton Solar Minimum)? For that matter, would we be in this state of high energy consumption if the end of the LIA in 1854 hadn’t given us the new found abundance of crops, wealth, and capital that accelerated the industrial revolution to the level we now see (during the Modern Solar Maxim)?