LifeItself

My dear old friends from McKinsey & Company have come up with their view of the world's top technologies .  As a historical note, beginning in the mid 1980's and through the 1990's, McKinsey was instrumental in irreversibly damaging the U.S. oil and gas industry.  McKinsey was hired by the scared oil & gas managers to do a hatchet job on the researchers and operations staffs across the U.S. and - for a lot of money - did a awesomely devastating job. Suffices it to say that the oil and gas industry in the U.S. will never again have the same breadth and depth, ever.  This statement of fact has some interesting connotations when it comes to operating in the ultra-difficult, super-inhospitable environments, which seem to enter into our future.  In fairness to McKinsey and several other consulting outfits, they acted as expensive mercenaries used by management to execute (no pun intended) the already agreed upon plans, as in: "What do you want me to conclude, bo...

On May 17th, 2013, Joe Nocera of the New York Times wrote an editorial, Energy Exports Are Good!   In it he follows the classic paradigm of neoliberalism: Let the "markets" decide what will happen with natural gas and let us export it if someone so desires. According to Wikipedia, neoliberalism in economics was originally coined in 1938 by the German scholar Alexander Rüstow at a colloquium that defined the concept of neoliberalism as “the priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise, the system of competition and a strong and impartial state.” To be "neoliberal" meant that – in the name of liberalism – a modern economic policy was required. So far so good, especially if everything can be traded over infinitely long times (centuries for us) with a perfectly smooth substitution of one resource for another and one product for another.  But this assumption does not hold for depletable resources, whose production does not adjust easily and instantaneously t...

The Spring 2013 Semester has just ended and I am beginning to see light in the tunnel. So I can restart writing my long-neglected blog.  Many things have happened in the four months since my last entry:  Thousands upon thousands of innocent people have died in wars and ethnic/religious strife. Most of these wars have as background access to oil, gas, and drinking or irrigation water. More narrowly, Shell decided not to go back to the Arctic in 2013, and Statoil and ConocoPhillips are waiting on Shell to go to the Arctic. According to mass media, the world is awash in liquid hydrocarbons everywhere. Or is it? The question I have been asking myself repeatedly is: How do I explain things to people who in general are not interested in l earning and understanding the things I am trying to explain? I just checked Google to find out about "peak oil." Google reported that 58 million people posted something with this phrase. Then I googled the "peak oil myth."  Among th...

As Nicholas Taleb stated in "Antifragility": Now as a skeptical empiricist, I do not consider that resisting new technology is necessarily irrational: Waiting for time to operate its testing might be a valid approach if one holds that we have an incomplete picture of things. This is what naturalistic risk management is about. [ I.e., management of risk by nature, TWP.] However, it is downright irrational if one holds on to an old technology that is not naturalistic at all yet visibly harmful, or when the switch to a new technology ... is obviously free of possible side effects that did not exist with the previous one.  (Page 191) So what does this statement have to do with the current developments in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas?  It turns out that a lot. First, both sides in the Arctic disputes have taken fragile, absolutist positions. Environmentalists claim that there is no technology that could ever be applied in the Arctic from here to eternity, because all techno...

  Picture a vast gray ocean that dissolves into gray sky pregnant with heavy dark clouds, and a gray flat sandy shore that slowly oozes up from the Chukchi Sea.  This is what our Ocean Energy Advisory Committee saw from the Coast Guard C130 plane , chartered by BSEE's Director, Admiral James Watson. Click on this image to see it in full resolution and hit Esc to go back. This gray vastness is surrounding our C-130 plane, flying the BSEE Advisory Committee to the Burger Prospect in the Chukchi Sea and to Point Barrow in Alaska. In summer, the Arctic ocean is dotted with white ice floes. In winter all is frozen. Our incredibly young and competent Coast Guard pilots are gradually descending to 500 ft above water. On August 30, 2012, we flew close to the Burger Prospect at 500 ft above the sea level.  This is the area where one day Shell will drill their first wells.  The sea was dotted with ice floes, some very large.  Similar floes stopped all arct...

To my relief, Dr. Paul Krugman has published yet another sermon, When Prophecy Fails .  For months, I have been fascinated by Dr. Krugman's blithe, unwavering insistence on the superiority of his arguments over those of differently clueless economists.  Today, I decided to compose my reply. Back in the old days, in Poland, I often listened to a lovely satirical radio program on an FM station with a short range and not much attention from censors.  Among others, each week brought an installment of a philosophical discourse, entitled "On the Superiority of Easter over Christmas." The author, Jan Tadeusz Stanisławski, a self-proclaimed Professor of Applied Presumptology, would explain in short, exquisitely absurd monologs the utter stupidity of the various pseudo-scientific arguments about economics and society. This episode, " Greed for Gold ," is as good as any.  It ends with the following summary: Why are we talking about gold, someone might ask? They also a...

I am about to cover a very serious subject, so please forgive my somewhat formal and unduly precise language.  Since I am talking here about the future of our crude oil-powered civilization, I do not feel too guilty. Besides, you can always stop reading... The six categories of liquid and solid hydrocarbons in Figure 1 are lumped together into three different combinations in the reports of global liquid fuel production maintained by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Figure 1: Click on the image above to see its full screen version. All liquid and solid hydrocarbons and alcohols are grouped into six categories that exhaust the classification of liquids used by the U.S. DOE Energy Information Administration (EIA) in their reports of global fossil fuel production. Note that depending whether heavy oil flows or not at the initial reservoir conditions, it is classified as either a transitional crude or unconventional crude. Solid tar sand bitumen is mined and li...