LifeItself

Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a blog, The Bird of Dawn , full of hope for the indomitable human spirit which can transcend and erode all repression, whether religious or political. A year ago, in The Way We Were , I connected the liberal Western Civilization, where my soul and body reside, to its ancient Greek roots. Both pieces have been wildly popular with the readers around the world, because they spelled out hope for humanity and its future. Today we are in Cefalù in Sicily, immersed again in a simpler world of the past, the world which graces us only occasionally when we leave our thoroughly modern, connected academic cocoon, powered by a high-rate throughput of fossil fuels that appear mostly as research funding, electricity, computers, and airplane tickets. Compared with Cefalù’s Arab fortress of 1063, and the Norman cathedral with the magnificent twelfth century mosaics our world is truly ephemeral. It cannot last for longer than a few more decades. Yet, this...

Where are you going, Great Britain? The ongoing vigorous discussion of Brexit seems to be vacuous on both sides of the argument, because it misses the most important physical realities of staying alive in Great Britain, not merely of who gets to stay there. The British Isles consist of some 6000 specs of land with the total area of 315,000 square kilometers (the area of Poland or Arizona). They are inhabited by over 70 million people (roughly twice the population of Poland and over ten times the population of Arizona). My own calculations of Great Britain’s carrying capacity pointed more towards 3 million people, who could be sustained by the local environment. This means that to stay alive the Brits must be a part of a global community; otherwise they will perish. And that’s that. Let me rephrase now: The United Kingdom is a small, overpopulated and rather insignificant country, which thought otherwise and consequently made a rather suicidal choice that would expose its terri...

In Part I of this post, I discussed production of gas from the four largest shale plays in the U.S. Ordered by production levels, these are the Marcellus, Barnett, Haynesville and Fayetteville shales. In my mind it is quite unlikely that much new drilling will occur in Fayetteville and Haynesville.  There will be some drilling in the Barnett and plenty in Marcellus, but significantly less than to date. Based on my calculations, I concluded that these plays may deliver between 3 and 7 years of U.S. gas consumption in 2015, a far cry from the 100-year gas supply postulated by many experts.  Consistently with this view, for at least three years I have argued that the large-scale oil and gas exports from the U.S. may not be good . Here I consider the two largest oil plays in the U.S.: the Eagle Ford and Bakken shales.  Eagle Ford is also a significant gas and condensate producer.  At their respective production peaks, these two shales together produced about 3 millio...

Part I of this post shows my calculations of ultimate gas recovery from the Barnett, Fayetteville, Haynesville and Marcellus shales.  They might deliver 6-7 years of natural gas consumption in the U.S. in 2015, or might deliver only 3 years worth of U.S. gas consumption.  In Part II, I will show my calculations of ultimate recovery of oil and gas in the Eagle Ford and Bakken shales that ultimately might deliver 6-12 months of additional gas consumption.  I will also discuss the physical reasons for the negative impact oil production from these two shales has had on global oil prices. As Asjylyn Loder and others at Bloomberg have noted , another 19 billion dollars of debt of shale oil and gas producers is going into default as of the second week of March, 2016: Since the start of 2015, 48 oil and gas producers have gone bankrupt owing more than $17 billion, according to law firm Haynes and Boone. Fitch Ratings Ltd. predicts $70 billion of energy, metal and mining defa...

We are in the western part of Turkish Anatolia, which in Greek means "East" or "Sunrise."  Suddenly, we are inside of many of the oldest human stories that are particularly dear to my heart. The ancient city of Troy is here.  Around 1300 B.C., when Troy was almost 4000 years old, the mother of all Greek wars was fought there, and immortalized by Homer five centuries later in probably the most important oral stories and later texts ever conceived by rational men: The Iliad and Odyssey.  Some of the Greek Gods were born here, many other dueled with one another for power and revenge, or gave birth to the heroes and heroines who determined fate of Troy and future of mankind. My favorite scary goddess, Nemesis, who is reputed to have been conceived by the primordial Goddess of Night, Nyx, played a pivotal role in the fate of Troy. Her name was derived from the Greek words nemêsis and nemô, meaning "dispenser of dues." This full size statue of beautiful Nem...

In 2015, about 100,000 forest and peat fires were started in Indonesia to clear land for oil palm plantations. Palm oil is a valuable commodity used as an automotive fuel, for cooking, in shampoos, creams, lipsticks, mascaras, ice cream, chocolate, and so on.  We consume ever more palm oil. The Indonesian fires blanketed the entire region with haze and emitted more carbon dioxide than the U.S. Here is a good summary .  I know you are busy and you probably will not devote 31 minutes of your time to watching something that might impact negatively your country and you. Please look at least at the first 10 minutes of this hard-hitting Coconut TV program.  At nine minutes and 41 seconds you will hear about personal threats and thugs sent to dissuade activists from ever mentioning the criminals who run the largest Indonesian racket and pay off the government officials. These criminals work for several large corporations controlled by other nations, mostly rich Western democr...

I just arrived in Saudi Arabia after 17 hours of flights from the U.S.  My wife and I attended our son's beautiful wedding in Sonoma, California, bonded with our children, students and many friends, and I attended the largest Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) conference in Houston, where I realized that I knew most people over fifty.  Kind of scary, but what can one expect after being an SPE member for 33 years? The Patzek family in Sonoma, California, just before the latest enlargement. You may ask what are my impressions from America after a nine-month absence?  There are many positive impressions and some are mixed.  First, we miss America. I loved the lush green trees in Texas, and the beautiful live oaks everywhere I looked in my Austin neighborhood.  I loved being with my children, friends and neighbors.  I did not like the rampant inflation of the cost of food and most living necessities.  This inflation has been at least 10% per year ...