Oil

J00 Table of Content

J01 The Cost of Gasoline
J02 A Little History
J03 Will We Run Out of Oil
J04 It's Crunch Time
J05 What We Should Do
J06 A Little Knowledge includes my first oil spill
J07 A Little Ignorance
J08 There is No Need
J09 The Politics of Denial
J10 Some Caveats
J11 Some Comments
J12 Line 5 includes my second oil spill
J13 Plastic
J14 Water Reclamation at Total's Alma refinery includes My third oil spill
J15 Dynamic Risk Criticism
J16 A Pipeline Through Afghanistan!
J17 Why conserve

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A10J01 The Cost of Gasoline

Yes, America you are being ripped off by the oil companies, but before I qualify my statement, some knowledge about costs is needed. Let me start with the price of gasoline in Michigan. Divide the spot price of crude oil by 42, multiply by 1.04 and add 76 cents, then multiply by 1.06 (MI sales tax) and if you are paying more than ten cents above that amount you are being ripped off.
For those who live another state, subtract MI state taxes of $.19875 from $.76 and add your state gasoline tax to the remainder and use the result in place of $.76 in the above calculation, also replace the 1.06 with your state sales tax rate.
The above calculation may require the following qualifiers. For example, I live in Mackinaw City and shop in Cheboygan and Petoskey. In Cheboygan, each winter we pay more for gasoline than in Petoskey, but we pay less in the summer. Why?
Because when the Straits freeze the oil tankers cannot transport oil to Cheboygen and all oil must be trucked from either Traverse City or Bay City. In addition, when the boats can pass through the broken ice in the Spring and Fall the insurance rates on the boats quadruple increasing the cost of transportation during those times.
Pipelines are the cheapest way to ship oil followed by boats, rail tank cars, and the most expensive way is by truck. The cost also increases with increasing distance, a fact that most people ignore for some unknown reason, when considering the price of gasoline at different locations. Plus they ignore the different state gasoline taxes and sales taxes.
All the facilities and activities of the oil industry are expensive, a million dollars is considered small change and service stations are probably the least expensive and off shore drilling the most expensive for a single unit. Most people can not even contemplate the size of the numbers commonly used in the oil industry. At the same time most people would be surprised that very small numbers can decide the location of oil facilities.
Bigger is not always better, to big means economically infeasible. At sixty three dollars per barrel of crude oil the price per gallon is $1.50, now would you change how you shipped crude oil to save $.0001 per gallon?
When the Alaskan North Slope field was developed $.0001 per gallon was the deciding factor. The oil industry wanted to build a pipeline down the east side of the Rockies. The inventory cost, the interest on the oil in the pipeline, was the deciding factor. Remember, the oil in the pipeline can never be removed and someone must pay for the oil in the line. Once the line is full then you can remove as much as you put in.
At that time the inventory costs of a pipeline down the east side of the Rockies would have cost $5,000,000 more a year than the alternative. The pipeline capacity was to be 3,000,000 barrels per day, so lets do the calculation. 5,000,000 divided by 3,000,000, then divide by 42, then divide by 365 days per year and the saving is $.0001087 per gallon.
The oil industry is driven by fractions of cent per gallon because of the astronomical volumes we consume each and every day in this country. Most people have no concept as to how large the numbers are.
I retired in '88 so I don't have access to what I consider reliable numbers and must rely on my memory. The last numbers that I remember is that only three oil producing countries have any appreciable excess capacity Iran, Russia, and Saudi all the rest are at maximum and/or have declining production.
All of the oil producing countries were deficit spending prior to the last major increase in crude oil prices. On a per person basis their entitlement programs make ours look puny. Every oil producing country needs every dollar they can get and they finally learned that they can get more money by increasing the price of oil rather than by selling more.
Besides if they can't produce more they can't sell more.
We can't control our own destiny, we have no control over the price of oil.

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A10J02 A Little History

The first oil well in the US was drilled in 1859 in PA, but the oil industry didn't really begin until after the big strikes in OK and TX and the wide spread use of the automobile. Smaller fields were discovered in KA, OH, WY, and MI and a large field in Southern CA. After WWII off shore fields were discovered in the Gulf and off Southern CA and later the North Slope field in Alaska was developed.
The first refineries were built near the oil fields because transportation was lacking and the refineries were inefficient and consumed about ten per cent of the oil; therefore, it was cheaper to ship the finished product long distances than to ship the oil long distances and the finished product a short distance. Even though modern refineries are much more efficient the same economics still holds.
The transportation of oil evolved from shipment in wood barrels on a wagons, on rail box cars, on trucks; to tanker trucks, to rail tank cars, to boats, to pipelines, and to ocean super tankers carrying 2 million barrels of oil. Oil was first shipped in forty gallon wood barrels by wagons and box cars. The story has it that the buyers were complaining that they didn't receive forty gallons because the barrels leaked, so the sellers began putting two extra gallons in each wooden barrel so the buyers wouldn't complain. The barrel remained at forty two gallons even after steel barrels replaced the wood barrels.
When I first began tracking crude oil production and finished product consumption in 1964, the US produced 12.1 million barrels a day and consumed 13.3 million barrels a day. World oil consumption was about 28 million barrels a day. Until the first oil embargo (1967) we never paid more than $1.25 a barrel for imported crude oil and most of the time much less.
US production rose slightly as new fields were developed, but old wells were being depleted faster than new wells were being brought into production so our production went below 6 million barrels a day even with the North Slope and off shore oil.
Our consumption rose to 19.6 million barrels a day before and dropped to 16.7 after the second oil embargo (1973). World oil consumption was about 40 million barrels a day. World consumption was 80 million barrels a day '74 and 100 million in '08 and has remained near there.
Our crude oil consumption has remained about 20 million barrels a day because natural gas has replaced heating oil and heavy fuel oil in homes and industry so the oil industry has been importing much more finished product (gasoline and heating oil) from over seas.
It's cheaper to import than to convert heating oil and heavy fuel into gasoline and since we must import to meet our demand it's cheaper to import the product to the location of the customer than to import the crude oil and refine it and then ship it to the customer.
Do you realize how much oil we use every day, almost 20 million barrels, that's 840 million gallons. The number is staggering. To put it in more personal terms, we consume 3 gallons of oil every day for every person in our country. Remember, we don't consume every gallon personally. Our distribution system and industries must use oil to deliver all the goods and services we expect each day, we must count the oil used by all of our trucks, trains, planes, cabs, etc. in our consumption total.
Geography determines how oil is shipped. Mountains and large bodies of water make pipelines economically infeasible. The east and west coasts have very few pipelines and have the highest shipping costs. Because of the mountains and the lack of pipelines crossing them, oil can NOT be moved freely any where in the nation.
Because of this limitation the oil industry divides the nation into three areas, the east coast, the west coast, and mid continent. Each area is for all practical reasons completely isolated from the others. This isolation places severe economic penalties when shipping oil to meet demand in each area.
'Not in my back yard' also plays a very important role in determining the location of oil facilities. No new refineries have been built since the '70's and no new pipelines have been built except along existing right of ways. Electric power transmission lines have the same problem, natural gas pipelines have had more success in obtaining right of ways because people prefer gas to oil or electricity.
I laugh when politicians say, 'We need more refineries.' More is not better, more will not solve the problem. Why build more refineries or any oil facility if we have to import crude oil to meet our needs, it's cheaper to import finished products. Besides, and even more important, the oil industry knows we don't need more facilities, if we conserve we could reduce our imports by 4 million barrels a day, maybe more. And most important of all, why build any facility that will only be used for less than ten years, oil production will be at a maximum by then and we will be forced to conserve.
That's why I'm disgusted with our politicians, they are not leading, they don't even understand the problem and refuse to learn. I have written my congressmen and senators since 64 and mostly, the only response I get is a form letter.
When I first joined Leonard Refineries in 59, Michigan had more than eight refineries, today it has one. Then Michigan produced thirty six thousand barrels a day, today less than four thousand. Now do you think there is a correlation here, 'little or no crude oil production means few refineries'?
The refineries were small, only one refined more than eight thousand barrels a day. As the wells became unprofitable, the refineries closed and sold their assets to other oil companies.
Remember, it takes energy to get energy, a well must pump enough oil to pay for the electricity, gas, or diesel fuel to pump the oil, an operator to check on the well and perform routine maintenance, the fuel for the truck and a driver to transport the oil from the well to gathering pipelines, to pay for the lease of the well site, etc. This does not include the capital costs, seismic work to find the drill site, the cost of drilling the well, pipe, pipelines, or any of the equipment needed. When a well does not cover the operating costs it will be shut down and the lease forfeited.
As long as a well and / or a field pumps enough oil to cover operating costs, it will be operated in the hope of recovering the capital costs. This is the case of the North Slope field. This field has been a major disappointment, it never produced its projected quantity and the wells are depleting much faster than anticipated.
This is why the oil companies involved want to drill in the Arctic National Wild Life Refuge. With additional wells they might recover their capital investment in the Alaskan pipeline or at least get a better return on their investment if the price increases in crude oil has not provided the necessary return already. Here is a case where I side with the oil companies. My argument goes like this: once resources have been spend I like to see them used to the fullest extent. The Alaskan pipeline is already there, lets use it, but don't be overly optimistic about the amount of oil produced from the Arctic National Wild Life Refuge, I have a gut feeling that it will be just as disappointing as the North Slope field.
The oil industry can produce oil with minimum impact on the environment. Yes, there will be spills, accidents, and mistakes, this is a risk I think is worth taking. Besides, why are we so concerned with preserving small pieces of land when we are unwilling to preserve the whole world by not reducing our consumption of fossil fuels.
To me this piece meal approach is, just, plain stupid and a waste of resources. I mean it's like a doctor treating a patient with a life threatening leg infection saying, 'The patient died, but I saved his leg'. We must reduce our population and our use of fossil fuels or we will become extinct, it's a matter of when, not if. And I want my grandchildren to have a chance.
The first refineries produced only two products, lamp kerosene and wagon axle grease, a very small portion of the crude oil. With the rest of the barrel, what they didn't burn as fuel, they dumped on the ground. Thus began some very bad habits and a very bad reputation, not to mention the environmental damage. If the early refiners and drillers had been more careful, 'Not in my backyard' would not be such a powerful force against new petroleum facilities.
In 59 the US had 52 integrated oil companies and many non integrated oil companies. Integrated means that the company does all four activities required, production, pipeline, refine, and market. When I retired in '88 only twenty six integrated oil companies were left, today even less. I don't know the exact number, but would guess at eight.
Leonard refineries bought three small refineries, the rest were shut down and scrapped. Then CFP bought Leonard and merged it with a production company in Canada and changed the name to Total Petroleum (North America). More acquisitions and increases in refining capacity brought Total to forty two thousand barrels a day. Modern refineries have at least two hundred fifty thousand barrels per day of capacity.
More acquisitions nearly tripled Total's refining capacity. Total's MI refinery was shut down because it was to small and not economical. In my opinion part of the blame lies with our bureaucrats and politicians. The MI refinery processed Canadian asphaltic crude. The bureaucrats and politicians in their infinite wisdom, screwed up our energy relationship with Canada and Canada would not sell Total any asphaltic crude. When the MI refinery could no longer make asphalt, its economic days were numbered. Later, Delmar Diamond Shamrock bought Total and later another oil company bought them.
Michigan is a microcosm of the oil industry. Michigan is surrounded by water, with little crude oil production, with a large demand for finished product, with two crude oil pipe lines (both coming from and going to Canada) and two product pipe lines with three terminals and five boat terminals. That means all products must be trucked from the terminals to customers, very expensive. The average per gallon-mile was 56 miles, remember the truck has to return. Also, the average is small because the majority of the consumption is in large metropolian areas which have the shortest distance.
The east coast does not have any oil fields, so obviously all crude oil must be shipped to the refineries by boat or pipeline. Since the number of pipelines crossing the mountains are few and the size of the pipe small, most of the crude oil is brought in by boat.
'Not in my back yard' severely restricts the number of refineries on the east coast so a large share of gasoline and heating oil is shipped in from refineries over seas making the east coast vulnerable to price changes and inventory constraints.
The west coast has similar constraints with one big exception, the Los Angeles basin oil fields. For many years these oil fields have supplied all of the west coast needs. As demand grew it was cheaper to import crude oil and products across the Pacific because only the smallest tankers can pass through the Panama canal and the only pipeline across the southern desert was very small. It's cheaper to import than to build bigger pipelines or a bigger canal.
Since the north slope production was greater than the west coast demand and with no economic way to transport the crude to the mid continent, the oil industry shipped the Alaskan oil to Japan and exchanged it for OPEC oil to be delivered to the gulf coast. Certainly, Japan gets cheaper oil than if they bought OPEC oil directly, but would you do it for nothing?
From an oil perspective, the mid continent is a country unto itself. Since most of our crude oil production is in the mid continent, that is where most of our refineries, pipelines, and other oil facilities are. It's also the area with the lowest costs.
Since refineries require large amounts of cooling water, most refineries are built near large bodies of water, cooling towers are more expensive, so most of our refining capacity is on or near the gulf coast. Which in turn makes the gulf coast the most economical place to import crude oil. Costs increase with distance from the gulf.
The oil industry tries to maintain about seven days of inventory and can go as low as a three day supply or as high as ten days without economic penalty. This does not include the inventory available at high use industries, such as, airlines, trucking, rail, farm storage, etc. Since oil consumption is very predictable, the oil industry tries to maintain a minimum inventory to meet demand to keep the cost of inventory low.
At over sixty dollars a barrel, inventory costs are very high. To give you an idea of how large the problem is consider the following. We consumed 21 million barrels in'74, that is one billion two hundred sixty thousand dollars a day. One penny per gallon is 882 million dollars a day.
To meet our consumption demand we must import six or seven super tankers every day. Each super tanker holds about 2 million barrels. Not very many people have ever seen a 100,000 barrel storage tank. These tanks vary in size, but most are over 130 feet in diameter and over 30 feet high. Four of them could be placed in a standard city block. That means that five city blocks would be needed to hold the crude oil delivered by one super tanker and thirty five city blocks would be need to hold the amount of crude oil we consume in one day and 254 city blocks would be needed to hold a seven day supply.
Someone said, 'I heard the oil industry has 23 years of oil stored'. Obviously the person who made that comment has no clue, but most people do not comprehend how much oil we burn in our country because the numbers are beyond their experience. Currently we are burning more than 17 million barrels a day. At $50 a barrel that is $850,000,000 a day we burn.
One square mile can hold 576 100,000 barrel tanks with their containment dikes and service roads which is almost a 3.4 day supply. To store one year's supply would require 107 square miles of storage tanks. 23 years of storage would require 2, 461 square miles of storage at a cost of $7,135,750,000,000 at $50 a barrel and this does not include the cost of the tanks, pumps, motors, pipe or the land.
Not even our government can afford to spend that amount of money to store 23 years of oil.
I have heard people say speculators in the futures market are driving up the the price of oil.
A futures is a contract, a piece of paper, it has an expiration date to sell a quantity of a commodity at some time in the future. Because of the time function all futures sell at a premium above the spot market price, but when the expiration date arrives the futures price will be the same as the spot market price and the seller must deliver the oil or buy back his contract. The spot price at expiration determines who makes a profit, the buyer or the seller. Speculators can buy and sell many more contracts than there is oil available and they can drive the price of the futures up or down, but the price of the futures has no effect on the spot market because at expiration date if the seller can not buy back his contract he will be forced to buy the commodity on the spot market to full fill his contract.
The spot market is where people go to buy and sell oil. The traders on the spot market are only concerned with the price that people are willing to pay for oil or to sell oil, now, not some time in the future. You can bet your bottom dollar that the traders on the futures market are paying very close attention to the spot market not the other way around.
The oil industry does not have enough storage to speculate in oil, so how could anyone else speculate in oil. Besides who would have the astronomical amount of money necessary to buy enough oil and store it, in order to be able to speculate in oil. Futures contracts can be bought on margin with a very small amount of money in comparison. Hence, the speculators are in the futures market not the spot market and they can drive the price of the piece of paper up or down, but not the commodity.
In a country that uses so much oil why is so little known. I blame the oil companies the most for not educating our public followed by the gas and coal industries. Several others must share some of the blame: the politicians, the pundits, and the media.
Now do you have some idea about the problem we have. More production will not solve the problem, more refineries will not solve the problem, we cannot continue to consume crude oil at our present rate, we will run out of space and money, not to mention the environmental degradation.
Our government publishes a weekly crude oil and gasoline inventory report. The comments of the pundits following that weekly report would lead you to believe that the inventories are at the mercy of the wind and the waves. They say such things as 'A decline in crude oil inventories by two millions barrels was a surprise'.
It may have been a surprise to a pundit, but you can bet the ranch it didn't surprise the people involved in the oil industry and why are they making such a big deal about two million barrels, that is only one super tanker out of fifty six that must unload every week to meet our demand. So one or two tankers arrived to late or to early to be included in the weekly inventory, why is it a big deal? And to imply that no one knew that a two hundred million dollar investment was behind or ahead of schedule is more than I can tolerate. Whole departments watch inventories and shipments like a mother hen.
A much more realistic report would be to report inventories in terms of 'days of supply'. It would also be a better comparison between years. The amount of oil inventory in terms of 'days of supply' has hardly changed since I first began working in the oil industry. If anything it has decreased because of the cost of carrying inventory.
Do you have any idea how much oil is in inventory and how much it costs to hold it in inventory? A little over one week of consumption is in inventory and at $50 a barrel and at six per cent interest the cost is over $1,000,000 a day. To that the cost of all the infrastructure must be included, the capital cost of all the terminals, storage tanks, refineries, service stations, and other buildings used to carry out the industry operations, plus the cost of all the people involved. Now we are talking millions of dollars a day and some people are complaining about $3 a gallon gasoline!
Another thing, do you know how long it takes for a barrel of crude oil to go from the well to your gasoline tank? For oil produced in the U.S., a little over three days. For oil produced outside of the U.S. shipping time must be added. Oil from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela needs a day to about a week, from the Persian Gulf about three weeks.
Now consider this, each of the large ships hold about 2 million barrels of crude oil and because we produce less than 8 million barrels of oil a day of our own oil, we must import six or seven large ships of oil every day. Now if there is a disruption in the supply of oil from any one of our sources can you imagine what effect it would have on the supply of oil available and the price you would have to pay because of that disruption. Also consider changes in demand caused by price changes.
Here is an example, the sharp price rise this spring caused people to drive less and by June the price of gasoline began to decline. Why? Well, if six large ships are coming into port every day that two million barrels has to go some where. If demand changes faster than the delivery time of the large ships, what happens to the supply. When demand dropped by six per cent in June, the ships from the Persian Gulf were already on their way and when they arrived, the supply of gasoline exceed demand by 2 million barrels, so the price went down so people would use more gasoline so the oil industry had room in storage for the next ship. Can you imagine what would happen to the price of gasoline if inventories were low and one of the large ships was late?
There have been seven spikes in the cost of oil since '64. The first four spikes caused modest increases in the price of oil. The first was caused by a panic among the leaders of Saudi Arabia to a report about the correlation between the amount of new oil discovered and the amount of drill pipe required to find it. The trend indicated that no new cheap oil would be found in the near future and they were giving their oil away. For many years following World War Two the price of Arabian oil never went above $1.25 a barrel. The second was caused by closing of the Suez Canal during the middle east conflict. The third was an attempt by OPEC to get their members to stick to their production quotas because all of the OPEC countries had over spent on social programs and as their populations grew their oil income fell short of their expenditures. The fourth was the result of OPEC actually doing what they said they would do on oil production.
Each time there was a public out cry, "They can't do that to us; The government should do something; The oil companies are price gouging us." If I hadn't been laughing I would have cried at the sheer stupidity. Shortly after the fourth price increase a friend of ours became angry when I said what I though about the situation. She claimed that it was all a government conspiracy to raise oil prices. I said, "Cheap oil is not one of the Ten Commandments."

The last three spikes in the cost of oil were cause by demand being greater than supply.

Most people have no concept of the excellent job our industries and distribution companies do for us. Also, most people have no concept of how vulnerable we are to any disruption in our distribution system. Stop and think, don't you marvel at the tons of food, fuel, and supplies that arrive on time every day all over our country at very low prices. Food goes from the farm to our tables in less than two days. Gas and electricity are at our finger tips. Gasoline less than an hour away and home heating oil and propane can be delivered the same day. Clothing and other articles are available at the nearest store. True, most of the efficiency is driven by economics, but it is still a marvel.

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A10J03 Will We Run Out of Oil?

No, but that is the wrong question and you already know the answer to the right question. Will we run out of cheap oil? We already have. Will more oil be discovered? Yes, but it will be difficult to find and recover and therefore expensive.
I didn't realize how much I took for granted until I read 'Hubbert's Peak', a book I recommend you read. If you have trouble with his statistics and chemistry just keep reading, what he says in between is very important.
Here is what I took for granted: Michigan's oil industry began in the early 1930's. What most people do not understand by that statement is that all the major producing fields in the US and in fact, in the whole world, had already been discovered, except for the North Slope, the Mexican, and Indonesian oil fields and off shore oil fields. How can that be?
Let me use the terms domes and bowls instead of the technical terms. Oil is not found in caves, it is found in porous rock.
There are many very large oil fields that produce little or no oil. Why?
Many variables determine whether oil will flow to a well so it can be recovered, only four will be mentioned. First, and probably the most important, is the porosity of the rock containing the oil. If the pores are large the rock is called loose, if the pores are very small the rock is called tight. Some rock is so tight that oil will flow extremely slow if at all. The Green River formation of south western Wyoming and western Colorado and the large field in North and South Dakota are examples. It is like trying to get oil out of an asphalt road.
Second is the viscosity of the oil. Some oils are so viscous they are almost solid, such as the Tar Sands of Alberta. Even high pressure steam or fire flooding the field will barely allow the oil to flow. Such oils make good asphalt, but very little else. Attempts to mine this type of oil is very expensive. The oil rock is mined like open pit coal or iron ore and crushed and fed into a oven and heated to allow the oil to flow out of the crushed rock. But the trucking of the oil rock to the oven, the crushing of the rock, trucking the depleted rock to waste disposal site, and the heat need to make the oil flow requires more oil than the rock contains. In addition the rock changes composition such that it now requires more space to contain it than before it was mined. No one has found a solution to disposing of the additional rock economically.
Third is the pressure forcing the oil to move. Most of the time water transfers the pressure from the weight of the rock above to the oil from below. Many oil fields also have a large amount of natural gas above the oil between the oil and the cap that traps the oil and the gas. Sometimes the natural gas is dissolved in the oil under high pressure. When a well is drilled into such a formation, the oil and gas will flow without pumping it.
Fourth is the affinity of the rock for oil. Depending upon the chemical composition of the rock it may attract oil or repel it. If it attracts the oil the oil will tend to flow more slowly than if the rock repels the oil.
Proven reserves, what a joke. I have never seen a oil well nor an oil field ever produce its proven reserves, most of the time much less. If the porosity of the rock or the viscosity of the oil changes with distance from the well it may cause a change in pressure allowing water to be drawn up into the producing layer or to allow the weight of the rock above to collapse the layer, blocking the flow of oil to the well. Also as the oil is removed from porous rock, the rock may not be strong enough to hold the weight of the rock above, again allowing the porous rock to collapse, blocking the flow of oil.
Proven reserves are used by promoters and con men to encourage people to invest their money in drilling wells.
Also, the porous rock must not have been heated above 300 degrees C or about 500 degrees F because such temperatures destroy oil and gas. Such temperatures also change the composition of the rock allowing a geologist to determine the temperature history of the rock. When a core sample indicates that the 300 degree temperature has been reach, the oil industry calls that layer the bottom and all rock below the bottom are basement rocks. When the bottom has been reached all drilling is terminated because no oil will be found below that point. The rock must be sedimentary, it must be porous, it must be covered by an imperious layer, and it must be above the bottom. This mean that you can not drill anywhere and find oil. The location must be very specific.
I happened to walk into the office of one of our production people during lunch hour, he was gone, but as I turned to walk out of his office I noticed what looked like a pie shaped piece of fudge on his desk. I picked it up and immediately recognized that it had been plasticized, why would anyone plasticize a piece of fudge? After a moment's thought I realized that it was small section of core sample from an oil well pay zone. It was also easy to see the holes that made the rock porous.
If oil or gas is not trapped it will come to the surface and it does in many places around the world. The La Brea tar pits are world famous and I have heard people returning from a cruise blame the oil industry for oil blooms on the Gulf. What they don't know is that oil and gas seeps from the Gulf floor all the time, that is how the off shore fields were discovered. And close to my home, gas leaks from the Traverse formation around Traverse City. Many water wells in the area contain natural gas.
The best place to find the most oil is under a dome, an impervious cap that prevents the oil and gas from coming to the surface. A trained geologist can recognize large domes just by looking at the terrain. With the advent of the airplane it became even easier. Then came the seismograph which made it easier to locate bowl trapped oil. For oil to be trapped in a bowl formation the strata must have been faulted so that the oil saturated rock layer had moved up or down so as to seal the faulted strata layer against an impervious rock layer. Michigan is a bowl formation. The edges of the bowl come to the surface all around the lakes that is why gas comes out of the ground around Traverse City.
The other oil trapping formations are even more difficult to find and usually the amount of oil is smaller than dome formations. So while it is possible that more oil will be found, the probability is very low.

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A10J04 'It's Crunch Time'

If all the other countries in the world were to consume energy at our rate I hate to think of what would happen. The consumption rate of the rest of the world is increasing at a very fast rate. My prediction is that world consumption of crude oil will be greater than crude oil production in five years. The economic consequences will be devastating and worst of all the effect will be felt long before the actual event because markets are driven by perception and when people finally realize what is going to happen, panic will ensue.
The Tuesday after 911 I drove to Petoskey from Mackinaw City. I passed nine gas station on my route, at each one cars and trucks were lined up on both sides of the road waiting to get gas. I thought it was odd, but it became even odder when I passed a rural station. Again, trucks and cars were lined up on both sides of the road. Almost every vehicle was pulling a trailer, people were filling snowmobiles, lawn mowers, out board motor boat tanks, lawn tractors, spare gas cans, etc.
When I returned three hours later, all the stations were closed with signs saying 'Out of Gas'. Three station were out of gas for one day, three were out of gas for two days, and three were out of gas for three days. Now what would you do if you turned into a station and found a 'Out of Gas' sign?
The next day I learned that someone started an email rumor that a refinery in Chicago had been hit by the terrorists. Fortunately some people had enough sense to call friends in Chicago to confirm the rumor and that was the end of that.
But what if it had been true? What if it had been true for the whole country? What will you do? What will we do?
Shortages will be caused by panic hoarding long before a true shortage occurs that is why we can't wait until the crisis comes we must act before a panic can occur. And don't look for the politicians to do anything, they are concerned with abortion, stem cells, prayer in school, and terrorism. They along with most people in our country do not know the most dangerous threat to our country. The most dangerous threat to our country and to the world is global heating caused by oil consumption and no one is doing any thing about it and haven't since Jimmy Carter and look what the 'idiotologues' did to him.
It's crunch time, a conjunction of major tsunamis will occur in 2020, Global heating and the solar sun spot maximum with the possibility of drought and a shortage of water, the maxing out of oil production with sky high prices, a world population over eight billion and a shortage of food, and the baby boomers retiring with under funded pension plans, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Are we ready?

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A10J05 What We Should We Do

I record all car expenses in one column of my expense spread sheet. Each December I record my odometer reading for each gasoline purchase and when I receive my January credit card statement I use the odometer reading of the last purchase on that statement for my year end millage and subtract it from the previous year end millage giving me my total millage for the year. Then I use the year end car expense total and divide it by my total millage giving me a operating cost per mile. I estimate how many miles I will drive a car when I purchase it and divide that into the purchase price of the new car after subtracting the sale price of my old car giving me the capital cost of my new car per mile.
This number is only an estimate but it is close enough without spending a lot of time to be more accurate to determine how much it costs to drive to make a purchase. I add the operating cost per mile to the capital cost per mile and I then calculate the cost to my usual destinations.
Now if you do the same you can avoid one of the most common mistakes we make in our country. We make frequent trips to save dimes and waste dollars driving to save them. Next time you are about to drive to save money on a purchase, subtract the cost of making the trip from your estimate of how much you will save.
I have seen people spend two or more dollars on car expenses to save fifty cents or less on a purchase. Many times you can save money by paying a higher price by purchasing closer to home and driving a shorter distance.
For example, you cannot afford to drive two extra miles to save two cents a gallon when you fill your tank, it will not even pay for the extra gasoline consumed to drive the two extra miles and if you add in the capital cost of the vehicle you cannot afford to drive two extra blocks.
Once you become aware of the cost of driving it is easier to start driving smart. If you have a choice in which vehicle you will drive always use the least cost vehicle, do not idle your car, turn the motor off, combine trips that are in the same direction or when the total trip is shorter than several individual trips, coast into a stop light or stop sign, don't drive during peak traffic times if you have a choice, etc.

Come on America, do the arithmetic and stop spending dollars to save dimes.

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A10J06 A Little Knowledge can be dangerous

Why is the consumption of crude oil the most serious threat to our country? Let me set the stage.
During a trip to the Rose Bowl with a student from Germany, I became very aware of how many idioms, cliches, proverbs, etc., we use in our everyday speech. We could understand her perfectly, but she could not understand us. We were constantly interpreting our idioms, etc., for her.
While the use of idioms, etc., is efficient, it can be very misleading because we tend to quote only the part that supports our position and that can lead to very lazy thinking because we do not examine other possibilities.
For example, 'A little knowledge can be dangerous', we use only the first verse when the second verse is much more important and would expand our thinking.
During the time I served as a customer service chemist the marketing department made a request for technical help and I was assigned to help. One of our jobbers went bankrupt and marketing didn't want to lose his customers and since Total was his largest creditor Total took control of his business.
The jobber went bankrupt because of very poor business practices one of which was that he didn't keep inventory controls, he claimed his drivers were stealing from him but he could not prove it because he didn't have any records.
The first thing Total's company manager did was to set up inventory controls. At the end of his first day on the job which happened to be a Saturday, he measured the amount of product in each of the tanks with a dip stick. A dip stick is nothing more than a twelve foot yard stick. He put water detecting paste on the bottom foot of the stick and stuck it into each tank though a sampling hole on the top. When he removed the stick he could see the liquid line and read the number of inches of product in the tank to a quarter of an inch and also knew how many inches of water was in the bottom of each tank. Then by referring to a chart on each tank he could calculate how much product was in each tank.
On Monday morning before the drivers began to load their trucks, he stuck each tank again and to his surprise the gasoline tank had lost a large amount of product. Immediately, he knew there was a leak.
He closed the valve on the line at the bottom of the tank. Then he had a contractor remove the dirt from the underground line from the valve to the loading rack with a back hoe and they discovered a union that was never brought up tight. Obviously, it had been leaking since the first day the underground line was put into operation. No wonder the jobber went bankrupt.
The union was tightened and the line was put back into service and that would have been the end of the story except for one very important detail. The jobbers bulk plant was next door to a grain elevator and about a week later the grain elevator had a fire in a small basement underneath the office.
They called the gas company to check on a small hot water boiler that was on the dirt floor in the basement. When they went to check the boiler they discovered small flames coming from the ground in many places.
They shut off the gas at the street but the flames continued to burn. They stuck a probe into the ground next to the largest flame and took a sample of the gas. The sample was analyzed and it was not natural gas.
The elevator manager went to the bulk plant manager and asked if he had a leak. Then phones started ringing in many offices. The insurance company of the elevator went ballistic and the bulk plant manager asked for help.
After a survey of the bulk plant and the elevator, I contracted a gravel company to bore holes between the bulk plant and the elevator with their gravel sampling auger. Two insurance inspectors were present when the holes were bored and when the auger brought up gasoline saturated soil they were very concerned about a possible fire if some one threw a cigarette near one of the holes.
One of the insurance inspectors was a smoker, he threw lit cigarettes into and around the holes, but nothing happened. To further test their concern I took a sheet of newspaper, opened it fully, folded it on the diagonal, and then rolled it into a long cylinder. He lit one end of the paper cylinder for me. I then approached a hole, crouched down low, extended my arm, and moved so the lit end of the paper was over the hole. I did this to each hole that had gasoline soaked soil and each hole burned with a low flame. After I had lit the fifth hole the insurance inspector took his cigarette lighter and lit the sixth hole before I could stop him.
If you have ever heard a flame front propagate down a cylinder, it is a sound you will never forget. That sound caused him to recoil ever so slightly, but enough to prolong his life. When the flame front reached the speed of sound it detonated and a flash of bright blue flames shot fifteen feet into the air singeing a small amount of his hair as he recoiled.
His partner had to support him when he stood, his face was ghost white and he was shaking. He knew he had been within a fraction of an inch of death. Several minutes later he said, 'Now I know why you did what you did'.
He had a small amount of knowledge and it was very dangerous, it almost ended his life. He knew that each hole that I lit burned gently and assumed all of them would and that brings us to the second verse and if he had known the second verse this event may not have happened.

'A little knowledge can be dangerous, but a little ignorance can be deadly.'

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A10J07 Some more Ignorance

First, a little knowledge: most people know that plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and give off oxygen, so what is the problem?
The problem is a little ignorance: plants consume every atom of oxygen they produce during respiration and decomposition and release every molecule of carbon dioxide they took in. The system is completely balanced, no increase in oxygen and no reduction in carbon dioxide. Burning is very rapid decomposition, so when we burn plant material as a fuel the system remains completely balanced that is why organic materials, provided we allow them to regrow, are call 'renewables'.
And that is not the whole story. Crude oil by definition is a hydrocarbon, all fossil fuels are hydrocarbons. Plants produce carbohydrates: sugars, starches, cellulose, etc. Now when carbohydrates are consumed they only remove two oxygen atoms for every carbon atom, but hydrocarbons consume three atoms of oxygen for every carbon atom. That means that every time we consume oil, any fossil fuel, we are reducing the amount of oxygen available for us to breathe.
Why worry, the atmosphere has tons and tons of oxygen. That is true, but starting in 1909 with the advent of the automobile, we have nearly tripled the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and we will double it again in the next ten years.
The most recent reports in the scientific journals leave me very depressed. For more than twenty five years our public has been fed a steady stream of disinformation, making the possibility of a panic all the more probable when people finally wake up and realize that they have been told a lie because they will not know who to believe.
I don't want our economy to crash, I want my grand children to have a chance. Alternatives will take ten to twenty years before they can replace our current sources of energy. Oil consumption is our biggest threat and it is also the easiest one to conserve and to replace. We must replace a little ignorance with education, research, and conservation. We cannot continue consuming fossil fuels Willy Nilly. Anarchy and chaos will not help, we must take an orderly approach to the problem and we must start NOW!

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A10J08 There is No Need to Panic

We have a small amount of time, how much, I don't know the exact amount. All I know is that it is urgent that we reduce and eventually eliminate the consumption of fossil fuels because once we convert hydrocarbons and oxygen to carbon dioxide and water, for all practical purposes, we will never get the one third of the oxygen back.
We must make a meaningful reduction in oil consumption, not just a token reduction, because the trend is going up at an ever increasing rate. Remember, in 1909 the world oil consumption was zero for all practical purposes. It went to thirty million barrels a day in the '60's, to over eighty five million barrels a day in '08 and has held steady at about 100 million barrels a day since '12.
Our country consumes one third of the world's energy with less than ten per cent of the world's population, if the rest of the world's population consumes one third as much as we do our biosphere will be swamped. We are very rapidly approaching the day when we will have to make this decision: do I want to drive my car today or do I want to breathe.
The transition from fossil fuels, hydrocarbons, to renewable fuels, carbohydrates, and to other non carbon sources of energy will be expensive, inconvenient, and frustrating. Errors will be made, some energy sources will only be temporary and therefore expensive. The conversion time will be long, unless we make the conversion a very high priority. It will take more than ten years to make the first temporary conversions that is why we must start now.
Oil will be difficult to replace because oil is a safe, convenient, and economical source of energy for vehicles. We over look the magnitude of the problem because our country has the infrastructure to move massive amounts of products from the source to their destinations very quickly. True, economics has forced this efficiency, but when you step back and look closely at the quantities that this country moves, it is staggering. We take a lot for granted and that is an understatement.
Now because oil is a safe, convenient, and economical source of energy for vehicles, this is the source of energy that the developing countries are going to use. This is why oil consumption is the most dangerous threat to our country and it is our own fault. We have taught the rest of the world how to consume, consume, consume and we have done it well.
If it wasn't so serious I would laugh when people complain about the price of gasoline, we caused the price increases. Most people don't even have a clue to what is happening and what is going to happen. Our public is in a state of denial.

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A10J09 The Politics of Denial

I would like to call your attention to two changes in the dynamics of our politics. One change came with the advent of TV. TV is very convenient, but TV is very restrictive, it has a very limited focus. When you read a newspaper if an article does not interest you, you simply skip it and go to the next article. You can't do that with TV.
You can switch channels, but most of the channels are covering the same stories. Plus the fact that TV can only present a limited amount of data in a given period of time and you can't set it down and go do something else and return without missing something. The only other option is to record all the news broadcasts and selectively view each one. How many people have the time to do that?
Another problem, TV is expensive, so the TV companies are very sensitive to their advertisers wishes which places an unwanted bias on what you see and hear on TV. When money is the deciding factor, many times the only deciding factor, we are in great danger.
Politics has always had an element of denial, distraction, deception, deceit, and out right lies, but in 1950 senator Joseph McCarthy took it to a new level and a new intensity with his communist witch hunt. And our country has been hunting witches ever since, Russia, China, and now terrorism.
Because our focus has been on witch hunts we have made many very bad decisions, Vietnam being the worst one. TV has played a major role in the witch hunts because witch hunts have a very limited and narrow focus which fits TV's limitations very well.
Sadly, when our attention is focused on the witch hunts we are not paying attention to our real problems, we are distracted and are easily mislead by the capitalists, so they can achieve control for their own limited purposes.
Earlier another change was taking place, non disclosure. Eisenhower made the first major non disclosure when he learned that our military had intentionally leaked a false story about the Russians building longer runways, which meant that they had longer range bombers and thus the cold war was accelerated out of control. Eisenhower nearly burst a blood vessel when he found out, but for what ever were his reasons he never told the public. He never disclosed the liars. A trend that has continued to this day.
From '50's to the '80's many politicians, some bureaucrats, and a few CEO's, mainly auto and oil, denied that we had problems, but they were willing to admit there was a possibility that we had a problem. Starting with the presidential election in '80 they would not even admit the possibility of a problem.
We have let the capitalists have complete control, they spin every mistake to the point where very few people even have a chance to recognize the mistake. Is there any wonder then why our country is in denial about oil?

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A10J10 Some Caveats

What I'm hoping to do is to give people chance to learn before it is to late and then to encourage them to change in an orderly fashion so we don't crash our economy.
The politicians have made accountability in education a major issue during the last forty years, I would like to have an accountability for politicians. We are letting our politicians get away with murder, murder of the truth.
If we continue to let the politicians murder the truth we will become a nation of idiots and in complete control of the capitalists. If we are incapable of determining the truth, we will be incapable of defining our problems and if you can not define a problem you can never solve it.
In order to keep the witch hunts going, politicians are presenting solutions to the wrong problem; therefore the problem is not solved and the witch hunts never end.
Witch hunts always have an element of truth and most important they always have an element of danger. Both fit nicely into an interesting theme for TV, but the truth is distorted and the danger is misrepresented by the capitalists so they can keep control. Without a free press to present the data about a problem fairly the only way the cycle can be broken is for a major disaster to occur that exposes the lies.
The worst lie currently being presented is about the nature of science. The capitalists define good science as being completely accurate, precise, and certain.
There are five subjects where I find the lack of knowledge completely incomprehensible, especially in a country so dependent on all five, democracy, energy, mass production, fair market and science.
Let me use the data in my own articles in an attempt to shed some light on science. All of my numbers are based upon my memory and if you visit eia.doe.gov and go to their crude oil production numbers you will notice that my number for peak oil production is about 3 million barrels a day higher than theirs. If you also check their foot notes you will notice that their data is based on annual reports, The Gas and Oil Journal, and the Oil Daily. My memory is based upon American Petroleum Institute data. The API based their data on member surveys. Many small oil companies are privately owned and do not publish a public annual report. Over the years as the small oil companies went out of business the difference between the API numbers and the government numbers disappeared, but the question still remains which ones were correct?
Yet after reading my comments can you honestly say that my numbers have to be completely accurate, precise, and certain in order for you to gain some very important knowledge. Do I have to report the day and time to the last second, does it matter if I round off the number of barrels to even millions instead of to the last ounce, and when I make a prediction, how certain must I be before you get the message about the danger. Does it have to be one hundred per cent certain, if so, why do we have collision insurance on our cars and fire insurance on our homes?

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A10J11 Some Comments

I know carbon chemistry is much more complex than I have presented it. For example my use of the generalization of three oxygens to burn one hydrocarbon carbon atom, some molecules require more, some less. In general the longer the hydrocarbon chain the closer it comes to the generalization, but natural gas, methane, requires four oxygens per carbon atom, while benzene requires two and a half oxygens per carbon.
So while it is better to burn natural gas when considering global heating, it is better to burn coal when considering oxygen consumption. The reference point you choose will determine your outlook. Even comparing pounds Vs gallons will change your outlook. In other words, we cannot expect simplistic solutions to solve a complex problem.
We must start conserving fossil fuels now so our technology has a chance to catch up with our life style. The process will be slow and expensive and our current standard of living will fall, but when we conserve fossil fuels we are conserving oxygen. Remember, the GDP does not equal the standard of living.
We have had seven major spikes in the price of oil and very few have paid attention especially the auto companies. I expect the price of oil to fall a little because of fracting, but these wells are depleting very fast and when they do our oil production will be very low. I'm afraid the next major price increase could crash our economy. The trend for the price of oil is up and will not change until demand declines which will not occur until there is a major conservation effort.
Talk about short term thinking, the hedge funds are speculating in oil options and futures, I hope they reinvest their earnings in non carbon fuel research because you can't eat money and you can't breath money.
I hope you will follow the lead of the few who are paying attention to our problem. For example, our home is super insulated as much as our budget will allow, we have hot air solar panels on the side of our home in '91 and photo voltaic panels on our roof in '09, we drive a fuel efficient car, 32 mpg on an annual basis, we limit our driving to necessary trips, etc. But that is a drop in the bucket unless many people join in.
You will not like my suggestions for what we should do. Because we are twenty five years behind the curve, we should tax all crude oil and crude oil products both foreign and domestic at least one dollar per gallon and tax natural gas consumption an additional penny for each ccf above 1000 ccf consumed per month and electricity an additional penny for each Kwatt above 1000 Kwatts. Make the changes in taxes slowly so our economy has some time to adjust. Incentives will encourage only a few people to change their habits, but most people will respond to changes in their pocket book.
We will need to use mass transit, not because it will be cheaper or save more energy, but because it will much easier for mass transit to use non hydrocarbon fuels. We do not have the infrastructure to use non hydrocarbon fuels. We need to install wind generators as fast as possible which will require changes in zoning laws, it will be easy to install electric car charging stations because all that is needed is an electrical connection. Alternative energy sources will not supply any where near the amount of energy we consume in the near future.
Several people mentioned that they were disappointed that I didn't mention a solution to our problem. I don't have a solution and I don't like any that have been proposed for a number of different reasons that's why I stress conservation, we need time to develop our technologies.
Also several people questioned my use of the word 'simplistic' in the sentence 'we cannot expect simplistic solutions to solve a complex problem'. According to my dictionary, simplistic is an adjective for simplism which means the act or an instance of over simplifying; especially : the reduction of a problem to a false simplicity by ignoring complicating factors.
This is exactly what the capitalists are doing. Obviously, if a problem is defined with false simplicity, it can never be solved.
Over the years, I have offended many people when asked, 'What right does OPEC have to raise the price of OUR oil? Who do they think they are?' by replying 'Cheap oil is not one of the Ten Commandments'.
If you take the data from the five large oil companies on profits and crude oil production and use their average price per barrel of crude oil, you will find that if you subtract the profit from crude oil from their reported profit you will find that they would have a negative number, that is because the cost of R & D plus the cost of exploration and production consumed their profits from refining and marketing.
In other words the oil companies made money not by their own effort. It was a wind fall and so I agree that the politicians should place a wind fall profit tax on the oil, gas, and coal companies. Gas and coal will be able to raise prices based on oil costs giving them windfall profits as well.
I also question the large salaries on the same grounds, they didn't earn the large profits, so why should they get the benefit from something they didn't do.
When the price of crude oil went over thirty dollars a barrel, the politicians should have removed all special tax breaks to the oil industry, for the same reason as above plus the fact that the oil industry doesn't need tax incentives to do what they need to do. Although, the statements of many oil CEO's have been down right stupid, the engineers and scientist of the oil companies are some of the best in the world and they know what has to be done for the oil companies to remain in business.
My guess is that they are waiting to see which technology will be the one to use and then they will use their large amounts of money to exploit that technology.
During '08 the high cost of oil was sapping our economy. At more than $100 a barrel, using the North Sea Brent price, oil accounted for 730 billion dollars a year, making oil expenditures over 12.5 % of our economy. That is a dangerous amount for a single commodity. Prior to ‘08 oil was less than 3% of our economy. This high per cent also indicates that alternatives are not readily available.
Since nearly three quarters of the money spent on oil leaves our country and comes back to purchase our bonds, it does not contribute to our economy. Is there any wonder then why we have high unemployment and inflation?
Most people watch how they spend their money. To become energy independent we must watch how we spend the energy we use. When we become energy efficient we will save money. Our economy can not recover until we become energy independent.
We have had seven spikes in the price of crude oil since Saudi Arabia tried to raise the price of crude in '63 and failed. Five of the increases have been $25 or less until '08 when the price went from $28 a barrel to over $140 and '11 when the price went from $40 a barrel to $114 and back down.
My mathematical models indicated that a 1.5% cushion between supply and demand was needed to keep oil prices stable because of small changes in supply or demand. All of the price spikes fit my models. The small ones encroached on the 1.5% cushion causing the price to rise by a small amount.
When ever demand exceeded supply in my models the price went to infinity. A $112 price increase is certainly a monster. It told me that in Aug of '08 demand exceeded supply, the 84.5 million barrels a day was the maximum production level at that time. Then more production was added so our maximum was about 85.6 million barrels a day, but the '11 spike confirms that demand again exceeded supply. In '12 production was about 100 million barrels a day and has held steady since. To many people believe that there is an unlimited supply of crude oil, not true. We will hit the maximum again if we are not careful and cause another major recession.
Another thing is that most people refuse to do simple arithmetic, so for one of my presentation of 'What I remember about the oil industry' I did it for them. The arithmetic is based upon the following question, 'What if all the people in the world consumed oil at the same rate as we do?'
I used simple numbers, more accurate numbers do not change the conclusion. Since about '76 we have been consuming between 18 and 22 million barrels a day, so I used 20 million. I used .3 billion for our population and 6 billion for the world. So the arithmetic becomes 20 divided by .3 times by 6 which yields 400 million barrels of oil a day.
It took us one hundred years to reach 84.5 million barrels a day. The oil industry didn't really begin until cars came into wide spread use some time after 1909. So how can any reasonable person expect crude oil production to ever reach 400 million barrels a day at any time in the near future?
Now three things should be obvious from this simple calculation. One, we have a population problem, to many people consuming to few resources. Two, whether people are willing to believe it or not we do have a resource limit, we live in a finite world. Three, drilling will not solve our problem if all the people in the world consume oil as we do.
World oil demand is already increasing faster than the oil industry can find, drill, and pump crude oil. Recessions and efficiency are the only things keeping the price of crude oil in check by reducing demand. If we do not get our act together and soon our future is very bleak.
Our country burns 17 million barrels a day and the people of the world burn 100 million barrels a day. At about 150,000 BTU's per gallon and 42 gallons to a barrel and 17 million barrels a day that is 107,100,000,000,000 BTU's of heat we are releasing every day. I will let you calculate how much heat the people of the world release each day.
Where does all that heat go? When fossil fuels are burned a lot of water is released in the form of steam which releases heat to the air when the steam cools and condenses. During the burning process a lot of heat is radiated to the surroundings which again is transferred to the air. The air then transports the heat to the oceans. A small amount of the heat is radiated into space while the above events are taking place, the rest contributes to global heating.
Our temperature has remained cool in spite of all this heat because the oceans are storing most of it. The BTU is a small number, it is the amount of heat needed to raise one pound of water one degree F. The oceans are very large and one cubic foot of water weighs about 60 pounds so the oceans can store a very large amount of heat, but most people are unaware that we have now measured an increase in ocean water temperature more than 1000 feet down. This is why a half a degree C or one degree F increase in ocean temperature is a very important number because the amount of heat the oceans can store is astronomical.
How much longer can the oceans continue to store our waste heat, no one knows, no one was a live the last time this happened. The best we can do is to make an educated guess, mine is 13 more years.
Most people forget that before the first car was made in 1909 almost no oil was burned. Since 1909 the burning of fossil fuels have contributed to global heating in two ways. First, the heat released during the burning and second, by increasing the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
Most people are oblivious to the two fold way we are heating our planet.
It will take a thousand years after we stop burning fossil fuels for the biosphere to start to reduce carbon dioxide in our atmosphere so we must reduce our burning of fossil fuel much faster than we are now doing so our oceans can continue to store our waste heat.
All crude oils are liquid hydrocarbons and everyone is made of carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur. No other atoms. Most crude oils have entrained vanadium oxide. There are many different molecules in crude oil because carbon atoms can join other carbon atoms. The simplest one is methane CH4, followed by ethane C2H6, followed by propane, butane, pentane, hexane, heptane, octane, etc up to about C40. Look up the chemical characteristics of each and you will find that everyone of them has a density less than 1. Water has a density of 1 which means all liquid hydrocarbons float.
I have measured the vapor pressure of all the small hydrocarbon molecules and if you looked up their boiling points you will know that the small molecules will evaporate very quickly.
I want everyone to do three experiments. You will need a 2 gallon pail, an eye dropper, some motor oil, some Vaseline, some dry sand, and some paper toweling. Fill the pail almost full with water, make a fist and put you hand to the bottom to make sure the water does not over flow. Next draw some motor oil into the eye dropper and put it near the bottom of the pail and squeeze one drop at a time out of the eye dropper and tell me how much time it takes for the oil to reach the surface and when it does tell me how much time it takes for the oil to spread across the surface. With the paper toweling remove the oil from the surface and tell me how much oil is on the bottom of the pail. Use some paper toweling to wipe the water and some oil from you arm and hand. Next put some Vaseline on a finger and hold it over the pail of water and wiggle the Vaseline between you finger and thumb until some of it falls into the water. Tell me how much of the Vaseline sank to the bottom. Next make three piles of sand larger than the amount of Vaseline. Remove the Vaseline from the pail and mix it with one of the piles of sand. When all of the sand is mixed with the Vaseline drop it into the pail. Did the mixture sink? If not remove it from the pail and mix it with the next pile of sand and again drop it into the pail. If it did not sink, remove it from the pail and mix it with the last pile of sand and again drop it into the pail. If it did not sink repeat the above until it does. When it does sink you have made a very poor road asphalt. Road asphalt is not asphalt it is a mixture of a small amount of asphalt and a large amount of sand and rock, do not confuse the two.
Vaseline is made from large hydrocarbon molecules, it would be similar to crude oil after the small molecules have evaporated which will happen in the first 24 hour after being exposed to air. Asphalt is made from much larger hydrocarbon molecules than Vaseline.
The mixing of oil with dirt happens when wind or current waves wash the oil on shore and as the small hydrocarbon molecules evaporate the residual becomes more viscous and sticky and the dirt can not escape. When the residual oil is coated with enough dirt or rust or small stones it will become heavy enough to sink when rain or waves wash the oil dirt mixture back into the water.
Density determines which fluids will float and which fluids will sink. The heaviest oil I have analyzed weighed 7.8 pounds per gallon, water weighs 8.3 pounds per gallon and density says the water will go down and the oil will go up.
The Tar Sands crude oil is also called bitumen. Bitumen is a general term for any tarry material, don't confuse it with Bituminous which is the name of soft coal. All liquid hydrocarbons are lighter than water which means they float. Some solid hydrocarbons also float, but most of them are heavier than water and they will sink, Bituminous and Anthracite coal are two familiar examples.
The Tars Sands Bitumen is a liquid hydrocarbon which has a very high viscosity, heat lowers viscosity that is why the Tar Sands Bitumen is heated either in a retort or with high pressure steam or fire flooding. As the viscosity is lowered by heat it can be pumped, but then it must be mixed with a very low viscosity oil so the mixture will have a viscosity low enough to pump at ambient temperatures. The mixture is then referred to as Dilbit. If viscosity is not low enough the mixture will freeze in the pipeline.
The Dilbit is no more hot, toxic, or corrosive than any other crude oil, the person who made that statement was irresponsible. First of all after the Tar Sands Bitumen is heated to extract it from the sand it will cool down and be mixed before it is transported by pipeline. It definitely will not be hotter than the dirt and water the pipeline goes through.
All crude oils contain some sulfur compounds, but except for hydrogen sulfide the rest are not toxic until they are burned to create sulfur dioxide which is quickly oxidized to sulfuric acid by the oxygen in the air. But regardless of what Enbridge says no one puts a crude oil into a pipeline containing more than 5 ppm hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is removed by condensation plants soon after the oil comes out of a well. The refineries remove most of remaining sulfur to eliminate the odor which means the remaining sulfur is in the heavy fuels which means you will only breath that sulfur as sulfur dioxide when you breathe the flue gas from the boilers and furnaces of heavy industry.
Any time you use paraffin, wax, mineral oil or any product containing petroleum jelly, petrolatum, or similar words you are using oil. These products have been used for years without any toxic effects.
All crude oils contain a small amount of benzene, ethyl benzene, and vanadium, they are toxic, but you will breath more benzene and ethyl benzene when you fill the gas tank of your car than you will breath from any oil spill. When crude oil is fractionated the vanadium will end up in the very heavy number six fuel oil which means you will only be exposed to the vanadium oxide in the flue gas of a furnace burning number six fuel oil. I lived for more than twenty years down wind from Total's refinery which burned heavy number six fuel oil and did not suffer from vanadium poisoning. Our bodies have a mechanism to remove heavy metals so as long as the amount we ingest is lower than what our bodies can eliminate we do not get poisoned. Oil is not toxic, it coats everything that comes into contact with it and it smothers the skin of plants and animals and their skin cannot breath and they over heat and if the oil is aspirated into their lungs, it prevents the transfer of oxygen in and carbon dioxide out.

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A10J12 Line five

Enbridge operates many pipelines in the great lakes region, but the line I am concerned about is line five. It begins in Alberta Canada and goes to Sarnia Canada. To get there the line goes east from Alberta, then south east through Minnesota, then east through northern Wisconsin and Michigan's upper peninsula to the west of St Ignace from there it crosses the straits to the west of Mackinaw City, then south and then east to Port Huron, then across the river to Sarnia. When the pipeline was constructed it was laid on the bottom of the straits.
I live a block and a half from the straits. I have been walking, in good weather, the shore from Alexander Henry park west until I go under the bridge and return for thirty years. When I reach the end of my walk and look out toward St Helena Island before I turn around, the last thing I want to see is an oil geyser caused by a rupture in line five. I know it would be a mess, but it would not the end of the world.
At least five groups have been protesting line five, they want line five removed from under the straits, and at least five studies have been done about the conditions in the straits. Compared to Total's pipeline operations Enbridge's operation is very poor, they are not honest, and do not keep the people along line five informed, they continue to tell everyone how safe line five is.
When line five was installed the characteristics of the current in the Straits were not known. Simply by laying the pipe on the bottom of the Straits created turbulence where there was not turbulence before, which washed out some of the dirt under the pipe. To provide support for the pipe Enbridge installed anchors which in turn created more turbulence enough so some of the anchors failed. Enbridge is currently using screw type anchors, I would like to see them be required to drill into the bed rock and install concrete supported iron beams to support the line.
Not once in any of the studies on line five was the speed with which oil comes to the surface mentioned nor how fast it spreads on the surface. I do not have any reason to doubt the result of the U of M's prediction of the distribution caused by the currents in the Straits, they used buoyancy neutral tracers and recorded the distribution every twelve hours. But there is a flaw in their report they never mentioned that oil is not buoyancy neutral, it floats which means the oil will not follow their distribution pattern on the surface. The current at the surface is less than one mile per hour. The wind is seldom under ten miles an hour which means the wind will have at least a ten to one advantage over the current which means the wind will determine where an oil leak will go not the current. The current can only move the oil during the time it is below the surface, about 3 minutes, which mean about 3 minutes at the current speed at that time which means if any water intake line is below the surface and more than that distance away from the leak there will be no oil in the drinking water. Oil does not contaminate water, oil is not soluble in water and water is not soluble in oil, nothing comes out of the oil and goes into the water.
But sadly another study use the current distribution to show where the oil would go and it showed that the oil would cover the entire area of the straits east and west and up and down the coast lines which led another study to grossly over estimate the damage caused by a leak in the straits and the protesters repeated this error many times. And the study did not mentioned the one thing about oil that will keep the tourists away and that is the odor. Most people who come to the Straits do not go into the water, they come to take pictures so the oil on the water will not prevent them from doing so, but the odor will drive them away.
Have you watched where the ice goes in the straits when it breaks up in the spring. It goes where the wind pushes it. The current has almost no effect on where the ice goes. The wind forces the ice to go to the shore and there it will pile up and become grounded, then the wind can no longer move the ice. The same thing will happen to the oil, the wind will push it to shore and because it is floating on top of the water it will move further on to the shore than the water. Once the oil coats the rocks and sand and moves among vegetation the wind can no longer move the oil and neither can anything else.
This why cleaning up an oil spill is an oxymoron. When the oil becomes grounded it is nearly impossible to remove it and if it is removed all that is accomplished is to move the oil to another place which means the oil is never cleaned up. The purpose of a clean up is to move the oil to another place, even if the distance is only six inches, so it is out of sight, out of mind and people will forget.
Someone said a leak in the straits would stop the boats from passing through the straits. Once the leak has been stopped the wind will push the oil to shore which means the open water will be free of oil so the only thing that will stop the boats from going through the Straits is the Coast Guard or ice.
Another factor that will determine where the oil will go is the direction of the wind. 45% of the time the wind comes from the north of west to the west of north which means most of the oil will be grounded on the north shore of Mackinaw City, a small amount will go to Round Island. 35% of the time the wind is from the east of north to the north of east and 15 % of the time the wind will be from the east and south which means no oil will go east of the bridge. 5% of the time the wind will be directly out of the west and that is the only time oil will go to Mackinaw Island. If that west wind is 5 miles per hour pushing the oil from a line five leak, it will arrive on Mackinaw Island in about 2 hours, you can calculate the time for faster wind speeds. Now take into account the amount of time it will take for someone to recognize a leak has happened, contact the coast guard, and the time it will take the coast guard to arrive on the scene, the oil will have spread to cover more than 25 square miles. How can anyone contain and recover an area that size.
I have never seen an oil spill that was contained. On water oil spreads out very quickly, one drop of gasoline will cover an Olympic size swimming pool in less than one minute, but it will never do so because it would evaporate before it could. This is why containment and recovery of oil is an oxymoron. Enbridge and the politicians have set the coast guard up as the scapegoat for their responsibility, despicable.
Also another property of crude oil must be taken into account. Crude oil is made up of many different hydrocarbon molecules each having a different boiling point. Gasoline makes up the bulk of the boiling point range, about 45 to 55 % of a light crude oil and about 30 to 35 % of a heavy crude oil with the intermediate crude oil in between. The gasoline portion will evaporate within the first 24 hours upon exposure to the air. The heating oil range, about 10 %, will evaporate within the first week, the diesel fuel range, about another 10 %, will evaporate in about another week. As the smaller molecules of the the residual continue to evaporate it will become more viscous. As the evaporation continues the residual will become sticky. At this point dirt will stick to the oil and if strong wave action is present the dirt will mix with the oil. But as the evaporation continues and the viscosity increases the residual will lose its stickiness and dirt will no longer stick to the residual. At this point the tar ball is benign and will remain for centuries. The tar ball will be about 5 to 10 % of the original crude oil. When the boiling point of the residual is far above ambient temperatures and the vapor pressure of residual oil is almost non existent, if you held it to your nose, you would have to breathe very hard to even get an oil odor. It will be benign, you can pick it up with your hands. Put in a proper land fill and return it to the ground.
Now tell me how anyone can recover the amount that has evaporated. Sun light and oxygen will convert the evaporated oil into carbon dioxide and water over a period of time, 12 years or more depending upon the size of the molecule.
Someone said dirt would mix with the oil while it was below the surface of the water and on the shore, not true, oil will coat the dirt not mix. Oil will not penetrate water saturated dirt. The only time dirt will mix with oil is during very high pressure and high volume event.
If you have done the Vaseline experiment you will realize that it take a lot of dirt to mix with the oil before it will change the mixture's density enough for the mixture to sink, oil floats even with dirt in it.
To say dirt will mix with the oil if line five ruptures in the straits is absurd. More than 90% of line five does not touch the dirt, this is the danger of line five, most of the pipe is not supported.
Divers have told me that the water in the Straits is very clear which means there is very little suspended matter in the water available to mix with any oil leak and even if it did because it would be suspended in the water it would have to be near buoyancy neutral which would not change the density of the oil even if it mixed with the oil.
In dry dirt oil will seep between the dirt particles and sink until it reaches the water table. As the water table moves up and down the oil will move up and down, but there will be a no man's land in between the high and the low water table mark where the dirt is oil covered and then water covered and if a well point is in this no man's land oil will be in the well water. I have discovered this mistake often.
During a high pressure high volume event such as a large pipeline rupture, oil and dirt will mix until the flow of oil removes the dirt in its path, from then on no mixing will occur. The first oil will saturate the dry dirt and the rest of the oil will flow over it without any mixing.
Someone said Tar Sands crude oil was like putting sand paper into a pipeline. All crude oils have a small amount of sand, water, and bottom solids. All of the Tar Sands crude oils I have analyzed did not have any more sand than any other crude oil.
In addition, Total's pipeline crews would bring the pieces of pipeline pipe they removed during the repairing of a pipeline leak back to a salvage yard and I could not see any difference between the pipe that transported crude oil and the pipe that transported gasoline or heating oil on the inside. All of Total's pipeline leaks were caused from the outside not the inside, so much for crude oil being corrosive.
One author said in effect, only 65% of an oil spill can be recovered. If anyone thinks oil can be contained and recovered from a leak in the Straits with normal 1 to 2 foot waves and at least 10 mile an hour wind, they have rocks in their bottom. I have never seen a recovery that recovered more than 1%. Recovery operations are nothing more than PR, so they can say they did all that they could do.
One of the protest slogans is 'Oil and water don't mix.' That is true oil and water do not mix, nothing in the oil is soluble in water and nothing in the water is soluble in the oil which means oil does not transfer anything into the water not even the oil itself.
On land oil recovery is next to impossible. The first oil spill I worked on, the gasoline sank to the water table and then flowed underneath a grain elevator how could it be recovered. The second oil spill, caused by road salt, I worked on was at a road crossing in a town. The oil leak was discovered when the odor entered a house that did not have a vented sewer line. It was uncapped behind the toilet. When I first entered the house I could not understand how the people could smell the oil above the sewer odor.
The sewer line was about a foot below the pipeline and it was an old unsealed clay tile line which allowed the oil to enter the sewer line. The pipeline crew dug up the oil saturated dirt and replaced it with sand, but again recovery was next impossible almost all of the oil went to the sewage plant.
The oil saturated dirt was dumped into Total's first water recovery pond so the water would force as much oil out of the dirt before the dirt was then composted.

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A10J13 Plastic

Many people are concerned about the amount of plastic in the oceans, myself included, but plastic is not the problem, disposal is.
If plastic is recycled or put in a proper land fill it is the same as keeping oil in the ground.
Here is how I use and don't use plastic. I use cloth bags for my groceries. I use the plastic bags from the produce counter for Romaine lettuce. I remove two leaves at lunch, close the plastic bag with a clip and put it in my refrigerator. This way the lettuce will keep for two weeks. When the lettuce is used, I dry the bags and use them to put my chicken bones, shrimp tails, and meat packaging in them to go into my trash can. I use the plastic bags from frozen peas and carrots in the same way as the lettuce bags.
When I cook lamb stew, I cook enough for six meals, the same for when I cook lamb and Lima beans, and when I make baked beans. I put one serving in each of six reusable plastic containers and put them in the freezer until used. I eat two table spoons of peanut butter and one heaping table spoon of apple sauce at each meal. I put them into three reusable plastic containers each morning and put them into the refrigerator until used. I store apple sauce and pineapple in reusable plastic containers, I use glass pint canning jars for all other food. I use plastic caps instead of the metal rings and caps because the metal rusts. The plastic containers take up less room than the glass plus a side benefit. The plastic has a much lower specific heat than glass so they use less electricity to cool them down reducing my carbon foot print. I eat two cookies each day, I bake thirty and store them in a reusable plastic container.
I cannot remember the last time I threw away any spoiled food, a very real problem when you live alone.

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A10J14 Water Reclamation at Total's Alma refinery.

The refinery used river water to cool gasoline and heating oil to air temperature to prevent the oil from evaporating out of the storage tanks. All heat exchangers will eventually leak, so to prevent any oil from returning to the river the heat exchanger water flowed through a series of four ponds. The input to each pond was near the surface and the outlet was on the opposite side and below the water level. The outlet water then passed through a catch basin to ensure that no oil passed to the next pond or into the county drain which returned to the river. No oil was ever found in any of the catch basins.
All of the rain water from the refinery also went into the first pond along with any oil saturated dirt from any oil spill and any oil recovered from any oil spill. A drag line was used to stir the dirt and water. This procedure meant the first pond was always cover with oil which was skimmed on regular basis.
Every day the environmental chemist sampled the out flow of each pond and fed the gold fish that lived in the last three ponds. He also poured one quart of the out flow of the last pond into a large aquarium in the hall way of the lab which had several different kinds of fish plus snails and water plants.
The third oil spill I worked on was the result of a contractor using the drag line to remove some of the oil soak dirt in Total's first water recovery pond so the dirt could be composted and he hit an unmarked county drain. He did not realize what had happened until the entire pond had drained. The oil in the pond was mostly from oil saturated dirt which was very heavy and contain a lot of dirt and when it reached the Pine river which was almost at flood stage it flowed very rapidly down river. The pipeline crews could not keep up with it and it finally stopped when it reached the marsh land south west of Midland. I helped spread straw in an attempt to stop the oil from continuing down river, but it was an exercise in futility. The pipeline crews did recover a very small amount of the heavy oil when the fast current quickly mix in enough more dirt when the waves drove it to shore so it would sink and then the pipeline crews could pick it up by hand from the bottom of the river. Most of the heavy oil was trapped by the vegetation along the banks and in the marshland where it will remain for centuries.
Oil containment, recovery, and clean up is an oxymoron.
Someone put up a post on Face Book showing a picture of a man wearing gloves with both of his hands together holding what looked like Tar Sands oil. I made the comment that the post was not true. I did not even bother to read the post. I hate propaganda. Even if the facts they presented were true, I was willing to bet they used emotionally loaded words, the picture sure was. These people commonly refer to the Tar Sand crude oil as dirty and other such words. They call it dirty because it is energy negative, that is, it takes more energy to produce the oil than the oil contains. This happens because the Canadian government is subsidizing the production of the oil. They are trying to create jobs so people will move into the region. In addition the cost of natural gas is very low so when combined with the subsidies it is cost effective to produce the oil, but not energy effective. But neither is ethanol from corn and we need the corn more than the ethanol.
By using the word dirty to mean something else it is deceptive as well as misleading. As A. Lincoln said, 'You can call the tail of a dog a leg, but that does not make it a leg'. The Tar Sands crude oil is not any dirtier than any other oil, but it is energy negative and that is how it should be described.
My objection is that the post allows ignorant people to blame the Tar Sands crude oil for global heating. It is not my fault it is the fault of that dirty oil and the people do not change their actions nor do they take responsibility for their actions, the post does not allow them to learn to take responsibility for their actions because they are mislead by the propaganda. We must stop burning fossil fuels period, not just the Tar Sands crude oil.
What I would like to see happen when line five leaks into the Straits, it is a corrosion leak. Most corrosion leaks are very small. I have worked on three oil spills, one of which was a road salt corrosion leak and the actual hole in the pipe was not much bigger around than a pencil so the amount of oil that came out of the pipe was small in comparison to a break in a pipe. The dirt helped to hold the oil back.
This leads to one of my disagreements with the protest groups. Every group talks about the worst possible leak, never any thing small and therefore their estimate of the damage is huge and not very realistic.
The protesters do not display knowledge of the Straits, the pipe, nor the oil which leads to a lot of misinformation. Water is not life because if it was we could give water to dead people and bring them back to life. Water and oil do not mix. This is true, but then don't say oil contaminates water because oil is not soluble in water and water is not soluble in oil and because of the difference in density oil floats on the water. Oil will coat anything that must enter or leave the water when it is on the surface of the water at that point. When the wind blows the oil to shore it can no longer coat anything in the open water.
When statements are not accurate credibility is lost which means those who know will not support the goal. To shut down line five we need everyone to support the goal because without a very large number of people supporting the goal the politicians will only give lip service to the goal and will only shut down line five after a leak occurs. I want the leak to be as small as possible.
The story of the ancient river bed is a hoax. Water cannot run up hill. The bottom of the straits is more than 180 feet below the surrounding land so how could it flow?
Vertical mixing of water takes place every time the surface water temperature is at 40 degrees, but it only mixes water not anything floating on the surface.
When people buy gasoline to go to a protest of any oil facility what can I say that will make them understand that buying the gasoline is telling the oil industry to continue doing what they are doing. The money the protesters spent on gasoline to go to protest speaks louder than their words of protest. Their action of buying the gasoline is hypocritical, why spend money to buy gasoline to go to the protest and then protest the process of getting the gasoline, this is not only hypocritical it is as about as stupid as stupid gets.
What we buy determines what is produced, it is that simple, why can't the protesters understand this. Boycotts do work, protests are hot air. People must take responsibility for their actions, until that happens all protests are futile, a waste of time and energy.
I will believe the protesters are serious when they approach my level of consumption. I burned 144.1 gallons of gasoline the year I criticized the protesters and 414 CCF's of natural gas and bought no electricity. My solar panels produce more electricity than I use so I used the excess for electric heat. I estimate my panels produce about 3,000 Kwatt-hr a year. I was so satisfied with the production of the first ten I had five more installed the next year. I do not have a meter on the last five so I can not calculate my actual production.
It is not practical to reduce my primary fossil fuel consumption further and there is very little I can do to reduce my secondary and tertiary fossil fuel consumption so I am using crowd funding projects to install solar panels on the roof's of home owners who cannot afford to do so. I am in effect reducing my carbon foot print similar to cap and trade. The first project was completed in Nov '17 and has produced 750 Kwatt-hr of fossil fuel free electricity from Nov and Dec. The second project is in progress. I had considered contributing to my utility's solar garden, but decided decentralized production is more advantageous than centralized production, it reduces the load on the local transformer which could prevent a local brown out.
We must stop burning fossil fuels, if you know and understand this, then do something about it, instead of protesting, put your money where your mouth is.
My most serious disagreement with the protest groups is they used the same approach with the Pipeline advisory board, the regulators, and the politicians as they did with the public.
From my experience protesting on curbs, at public places, or at the entrance to the bridge are a waste of time and gasoline. If what you are protesting is not in their back yard those people will completely ignore the protest message. Those who disagree will be even more firm in their disagreement. Those who agree will signal agreement, but they have shown their agreement and will not do any thing else to support the protest because they did not make a commitment.
The final test of any public protest is how many voters did the protest convince to vote for a politician who will actually make a change in the laws in favor of the protest. The most effective place to do this at your local political party meetings. If you do not get the support of those who vote, the protest will fail. This is why many successful protests took many years to achieve their goal because it took a long time to convince enough voters to elect the politicians who would change the laws.
I never read a post from anyone in the protest groups that indicated they were aware of the political reality of living in a low density population area. Even if all of our state senators and reps along line five agreed to sponsor a law to shut down line five their numbers would be small and they would need to convince a large number of the other politicians to agree with them so they would have a majority to pass the law. Honestly, do you think the slogans of the protest groups would help our politicians convince the others?
I laughed when Deb said, 'Enbridge is afraid of us. We have them on the run', after Enbridge mailed a pamphlet to every home explaining how safe line five was and put their message in many newspapers. Enbridge was not afraid of the protest groups, they were afraid of Ed because he was attacking the safety of line five and they knew they could not silence him so they did the next best thing. They kept the protest groups thinking they were successful and would not change their approach and they didn't.
Enbridge was saying the line was safe, so the protesters needed to provide evidence proving the line was not safe. Saying, shut line five down, shut line five down before it leaks, don't oil our water, etc., are noise because they do not provide any evidence to prove line five was not safe. The protesters created so much noise at the Pipeline advisory board hearings that it took attention away from the people who had something to say and they did not get the attention they deserved . The same thing happened with the submitted comments, I only read four comments that provided evidence that would give the board a reason to shut down line five, all the rest of the comments were nothing but repetitions of the same meaningless phrases that did not provide any evidence, so again the four pieces of evidence did not get the attention they deserved.
Enbridge won, protesters lost.
A thought occurred to me after I made a comment to a post. The reason so many protests fail is because the protesters are not making a distinction between material resources and non material resources. When trying to change a system the approach to making the change must be consistent with the attributes of the resource. For example, when trying to change discrimination which is a non material resource the approach must be to change the way people THINK about discrimination. When trying to change the way people use a material resource the approach must be to change how people USE the resource. To protest the supplier is futile because people create the demand and until people stop creating demand nothing will change.

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A10J15 Dynamic Risk Criticism

When I first read Dynamic Risk's (DR) criticism of Dr Ed Timm's (T) work I became irked, but I could not identify what irked me. I am non verbal person and my brain has difficulty converting my non verb thoughts into verbal format, so all I can do is wait for the conversion to be completed. This limitation makes it difficult for me to meet schedules or to respond quickly. Now I can summarize what irked me.

A professional never claims superior knowledge, they display it or it is obvious from their presentations.
A professional attacks the data and or the method, never the person.
A professional follows the mantra of a successful submarine commander they never make the same mistake once.

A few examples that especially irked me.
DR did display knowledge of pipeline pipe regulations, but little else as you will see. Many times they would list many different pipe line regulations. I do not understand what they were trying to accomplish. I have never seen a regulation solve a problem or prevent an event from happening.
They questioned T's capabilities. They read his work and they did not understand his capabilities, I find this very difficult to understand. They claimed that T did not provide the data nor the methods he used. I read T's work and I could see the data he used or a reference to where it could be found and he did provide the methods he used plus he explained his results. When they compared their methods to T's I seldom could find the data they used or a reference to where it could be found and they rarely provided the methods they used and when they did they did not say how they used it or what assumptions they made nor did they explain their results. Very sloppy work by DR.
DR put much effort into challenging T's Monte Carlo results, it was nearly double theirs. But they did not provide the data they used nor the method they used or what assumptions they made nor did they explain their results. Again very sloppy work.
It seems to me that DR missed the entire point of why the method was being used. T knew the speed of the current near the line five pipe from the buoy data was not fast enough to remove all of the dirt from under the many unsupported lengths of pipe. This meant the average speed from the buoy data must be masking the true range of the speed of the current. For example if four speeds of 0, 0, 0, and 10 are averaged the result is 2.5 but the average does not tell about the 10 nor the 0's. The use of averages can give a very distorted view of what is actually happening.
Many years ago I had a friend who was a ship wreck buff and he told me that the current in the straits was very strong which to me meant much greater than the 1.5 result given by DR.
If DR is unwilling to accept that fact I would like to know how they explain the loss of all the dirt from under line five.
By laying line 5 on the bottom of the straits the pipe create turbulence that was not there before and it is the same for each anchor.
It is my guess that the turbulence caused by the current speed is causing the failure of the screw anchors as well. If my guess is correct the dirt will continue to be washed out from underneath line five and will cause more anchors to fail. As a result line five will fail. It is not a question if, but when. From my experience in the oil industry I know all pipelines will leak, it is a matter of how fast corrosion damages the pipe. The speed of the current puts stress on line five which increases the speed of corrosion which again will cause line five to fail.
DR disagreed with T's determination of the angle of the pipe from a picture as it was moved into the straits. They said his method could not be done because of the camera angle. T used a geometric analysis. I did not ask him to explain because I have used a branch of mathematics called perspective geometry. Anyone can do it provided the picture has a measuring stick. In this case the measuring stick is the pipe. The pipe will be the same diameter no matter the perspective. I do not understand how DR could have failed to know this.
Over all I think DR did a very sloppy job, they were not very professional, and their report is not worth the paper it was printed on.

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A10J16 A Pipeline Through Afghanistan!

You can't build pipelines through mountains. What about the CA aqueduct? All right I will modify my statement . Oil pipelines through mountains are not economically feasible.

First, what makes a fluid flow?
A difference in pressure makes a fluid flow, most of the time gravity creates the pressure difference because of a difference in elevation. This is the principle of a water tower and a siphon. When you open a faucet in your home, the pressure at the faucet is near zero while the pressure in the pipe is much greater so the water flows out of the faucet.
A pump can create pressure, but remember the pump does not make the fluid flow, a difference in pressure does. If the pump does not create enough pressure to make a difference in pressure the pump can spin or push forever and the fluid will not move.
Second, you need to know about pressure drop. Many factors contribute to pressure drop. One such factor is the friction between the walls of the pipe and the fluid. The effect of friction is additive, so the pressure drop increases with distance. As the distance from the high pressure point increases there will be a distance at which the friction will reduce the pressure to zero and the fluid will stop flowing. If a hole were drilled in the top of the pipe, at that point, the fluid would not come out because there would be no difference in pressure. Before the zero pressure point is reached another pumping station is required to restore the pressure difference to keep the fluid flowing.
Because a pressure difference makes a fluid flow, a fluid always flows from high pressure to low pressure, in other words, a fluid in a pipe under pressure always flows 'down hill' no matter which direction the pipe is pointing, it always goes from high to low pressure.
Third, the characteristics of the fluid must be considered. If the fluid is not compressible its volume will remain stable under changes in pressure. If a fluid is compressible its volume changes with changes in pressure and its flow may become turbulent which increases the friction which in turn increases the pressure drop. During changes in volume pressure will not be transferred effectively, again adding to the pressure drop.
If a fluid is volatile it can vaporize and the bubbles may cause turbulence and increase the pressure drop. Also a bubble will not transmit pressure effectively. If enough of the fluid vaporizes it can create a large enough bubble to cause vapor lock which will decrease the effectiveness of a siphon. Volatile fluids require enough pressure over the entire length of the pipe to prevent vaporization.
The lower the viscosity of the fluid the lower the friction between the molecules of the fluid and with the pipe wall and the lower the pressure needed to make it move. Most fluids become more viscus as the temperature decreases. Obviously, if the fluid freezes it will not move.
When leaks are considered the surface tension and the viscosity are important, the higher the surface tension and the higher the viscosity the higher the pressure of fluid must be to over come the pressure drop caused by the surface tension and the viscosity before a leak can occur.
Now compare pumping water to pumping oil. Water is not compressible and it is not volatile and it consists of a single molecule so it has a single freezing point. Crude oil is compressible, it is volatile, and it is a mutually soluble mixture of different hydrocarbons so crude oil has multiple freezing points, one for each different hydrocarbon. Also, water has a high surface tension which means it doesn't leak as easily as a fluid with a low surface tension, oil has a very low surface tension, although the viscosity of oil is higher so that tends to off set the lower surface tension. In addition, if water leaks, in most cases it is not a problem. The CA aqueduct has many leaks but it would cost more to repair them than the amount of water lost would cost. This is not true for oil, the cost of the oil lost is very high not to mention the environmental costs and clean up costs.
This means that the oil going through a mountain pipeline must be kept under pressure at all times to prevent it from vaporizing and creating bubbles which increases pressure drop or causing vapor lock which increases pressure drop and heated to prevent its viscosity from increasing which increases pressure drop and to keep it from slowly freezing in the pipeline. In fact some oil is so viscus it can only be moved by using a shovel.
Look at a map and tell me how it makes any sense to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. There is no source of oil, no ports, and no population with a standard of living to use it.
Politicians, pundits, and bureaucrats can say anything because they don't have to pay for it or do it.
Another thing they do not consider is the cost of inventory. Someone must pay for the fluid in the pipeline. A large diameter pipeline can hold a barrel per foot. Multiply that by the cost of oil and the amount is staggering. This is exactly why the Alaskan pipeline goes through Alaska and not down the eastern side of the rocky mountains, the interest on the cost of the oil in the line was to large.
Consider the difference between the CA aqueduct and an oil pipeline through the mountains. The water to be transported is already at a high point and if the water is pumped to the highest point it does not have to be pumped again if all of the rest of the pipe is lower than the highest point, the principle of a water tower, gravity will supply the pressure difference. Oil would require more pumping stations because of its greater pressure drop which means there must be a source of power to run the pumping stations and if it is viscus it will require some means of heating the oil in the pipeline.
So for all practical purposes the CA aqueduct is not a pipeline going through the mountains or over the mountains it is a pipeline going down the mountains. But to pipeline oil through Afghanistan the oil would begin at a very low level and would have to be pumped up to a very high level before the pipeline could operate by the principle of a water tower as the CA aqueduct does. The initial pumping would be very expensive. Plus it would have to be heated.
There is more to this story than I have said and if you would like to know more I recommend that you consult a text book on hydrocarbons, hydraulics, and fluid dynamics.
Because of oil's volatility, viscosity, compressibility, multiple melting points, and cost it is much more expensive to pipeline than water and makes pipelining oil through mountains economically infeasible.

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A10J17 'Why Conserve'

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when our politicians and bureaucrats make the following statements, 'We need more refineries', 'We need more natural gas pipelines', 'We need more electric power transmission lines'. Such simple solutions to very complex problems are sure to fail. The only statement they got right, but for the wrong reason is, 'We do need more natural gas pipelines' because we should be using natural gas instead of oil where ever possible.
Change each statement into a question 'Why don't we have more... The first response to all three is, 'Not in my backyard'. If they are going to be built, they must be in someone's back yard. Who is going to volunteer. The second response is 'Will there be enough electricity, natural gas, or crude oil to justify building them. The third response is 'Will there be a market for the products.'
During the last energy crisis, the electric utility industry learned that it was profitable not to build more electric power plants. They could earn more money when they encouraged their customers to conserve electricity and their customers saved money by doing so. The same is true for natural gas and oil industries as well. Also, following the previous energy crisis, the oil industry learned that we can use less oil, our oil consumption dropped from 20 million barrels of oil per day to 17 million barrels of oil per day as we reduced the weight of our cars. We don't need eight miles to the gallon vehicles, so why should the oil industry build more refineries, when the industry knows we could conserve and make additional refineries unnecessary and a waste of money.
We are right back where we started, we are consuming 20 million barrels a day of crude oil because we went back to being energy hogs. This is the seventh time we have gone through large price increases in crude oil, can't we learn. We don't need two ton plus vehicles to transport one person to any destination. We don't need four wheel drive vehicles on super highways. We don't need a pick up truck to transport a bag of groceries. We don't need eight hundred plus square feet of living space per person in a home, we don't need to air condition an entire house when we only use about three rooms, and we certainly don't need to air condition an empty building.
When we build such large homes, does anyone ask, 'Where are we going to get the energy in thirty years to operate these large homes?' Oh, you are not going to live in them that long! Well who is going to buy them if they can't get the energy to operate them?
Does anyone have any idea how many people would go hungry if any large city went without electricity for more than three days? We don't have an energy crisis, we have a knowledge crisis.
What would you call people who are intelligent and have the data, but don't analyze it or they analyze it and their response is incongruent with the result of the analysis?
A politician's attention span last only until the next opinion poll, industry's attention span is as long as the next earnings report, and a bureaucrat must be politically correct, so who is going to educate the public?
As the world population increases and everyone uses more energy, we will not have enough energy for everyone, we will need to switch to alternative energy sources. We can't do that in a few years. We need at least ten years, maybe twenty, to build the new infrastructure. We must conserve our fossil fuels now, we must deplete our fossil fuels gradually so we have time to phase in alternative fuels so our economy will not crash while we wait for the new infrastructure to be built.
But we must choose alternatives carefully. For example Ethanol from corn. Politicians have a very short time horizon which leads them to move to fast to make sure they are on the band wagon.
There is absolutely no excuse for not making a feasibility study on any project. It doesn't have to be complicated, it can be what engineers call a back of the envelope calculation.
For ethanol from corn it would go some thing like this. Corn has BTU value of about 7000 per pound, at 56 pounds per bushel gives 392,000 BTU's per bushel. Divide this by the BTU's per gallon of gasoline, about 140,000, giving one gallon of ethanol the equivalent of 2.8 gallons of gasoline.
Now if our entire corn crop for the year 2004 of 11,800,000,000 bushels was converted into ethanol it would have been consumed in 39 days. That is a little over ten per cent of our demand and what would we feed all of our cattle, pigs, and chickens.
If this calculation had been done we would not be subsidizing ethanol made from corn.
Now the above calculation is not very accurate, but any refinement would reduce the amount of ethanol not increase it because one of the rules of nature is 'there is no free lunch'. In other words you can never get more energy out of system than you put in. Again, in other words, the total BTU content of ethanol produced can never exceed the amount of BTU's in the corn used to make it. This places an upper limit on the system which cannot be exceeded.
It is this type of stupidity that makes me go ballistic. The above calculation is an extremely simple and fast feasibility check and I find it completely incomprehensible that our politicians and pundits are not able to do it.

PS: I sent the ethanol calculation to several newspapers in April of 05, guess how many published it?

I don't want our economy to crash, but if we don't start using our brains we will have a depression that will make '29 and '08 look like a Sunday school picnic.
At 40 million barrels a day we were dumping excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, now at 100 million barrels a day we are pouring carbon dioxide into it. Remember, for each molecule of carbon dioxide we dump into the atmosphere, we are removing a molecule of oxygen, I'm rather fond of breathing, how about you? A conjunction of major tsunamis will occur in 2020. A solar sun spot cycle and with an increase in global heating there is a possibility of drought, the maxing out of oil production, a world population over eight billion, and the baby boomers retiring. Are we ready?

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