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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Nov 27, 2012 - 02:02pm PT
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That's a classic example of IWR (internet whackjob reverberation), no different than this gem from the same website:
"Luciferian Technocrats Rule the New World Order"
That website is mostly interesting for the fact they are really all over the map...
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 27, 2012 - 02:10pm PT
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What are you guys doing here? :-)
You're supposed to agree with me that my carrot tastes like sh!t because you don't care.
What kind of scientists are ya all anyways.
Ya all been exposed as rascals in that article.
Most likely ya all lost yer taste buds too.
Guess what yer gonna lose next?
Ho man .... :-)
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 27, 2012 - 03:26pm PT
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Werner, I guess we're lucky here in Santa Cruz, the dude down at the Farmer's Market sells organic baby carrots that taste fantastic. It's like you're biting into a flavor party, all the buds on your tongue lively up yourself.
On the downside, the climbing in Santa Cruz sucks donkey.
I suppose you get what you can...
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 27, 2012 - 03:50pm PT
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I ate all of Werner's carrots at the FaceLift.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Nov 27, 2012 - 03:57pm PT
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If plagiarism were really a crime then the conspiracy business would disappear and crawl back under a rock where it belongs.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 27, 2012 - 04:02pm PT
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There's no conspiracy, it's all true.
I read it all on the internet.
That Hiker guy has been eating my carrots.
And Ed knows where to and how to make nice juicy ones .......
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10b4me
Boulder climber
member since 2002
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Nov 27, 2012 - 04:05pm PT
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where did he go?
now you all have gone and done it.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 27, 2012 - 08:57pm PT
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That site that Werner linked to actually seems kind of legit.
Then you read the stuff that that single writer puts out and he is off his nut. Supposedly jet engines are spewing aluminum particles out in their contrails, yet nobody knows that there is aluminum in the jet fuel.
Trust me. You can't have a big conspiracy unless it is undertaken by just a tiny group of people. I'm not saying it is impossible, it is just very difficult. If the ten richest people on Earth got together and decided to corner the carrot market the next day, they probably could.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 27, 2012 - 09:14pm PT
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Back to the topic of old climate cycles in the rock record, which is filled with the damn things, one of the provisionally accepted ideas are what are often called Milankovitch Cycles.
There are eccentricities in the Earth's orbit. There is a precession in the Earth's axis, and there is obliquity in the axial tilt. These cycles are fairly well figured out, but they each follow different time frames and coincide on a really long, but predictable basis.
For many years this was one of the main poo-poo's of AGW, but even a warm period in the cycle can't account for the rapid change in the rate of warming. It doesn't match up.
It does seem to match up to the big geologic cycles that depend on rise and fall of sea level, which is caused by melting and accumulation of thick continental ice sheets. Fortunately, land has been at the south pole for hundreds of millions of years, providing a nice reservoir to store a lot of water in the form of ice.
edit: You get a guy like Huntsman up against godly men like Santorum and Perry and to a lesser extent, Romney, and he gets buried in the first month of the Republican nomination race. The GOP doesn't believe in science. They don't even understand algebra. That one guy, a physician, said that it all comes from the gates of hell.
Why did Huntsman get whacked? Strictly because he listened in biology and physics class in high school.We have made great advances in some of the sciences over the past 100 years, and all parties seem to agree that we need more scientists and engineers, yet the GOP chooses to publicly rebuke really basic junior high level science. They are dangerous on social issues. I think that they would love a theocracy, as long as they controlled the religion.
One thing I have been wanting to mention. Science isn't done. Science doesn't know everything, including the biggest of them all: What we don't know. Or as Donald Rumsfeld accurately put it:
There are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns. Any study or science has the same problem, if you want to say that it is a problem. I see it as an opportunity.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Nov 27, 2012 - 09:58pm PT
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base ,i think you own this.....
i would still like to know about your views on fracking.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 28, 2012 - 04:39pm PT
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Fracking is a red herring. There is basically no groundwater issue involved.
Drilling these wells which are super deep when you add on the horizontal section, cost 7-11 million bucks per well. Taking care of groundwater is cheap.
First, when I was up at Chesapeake, they had been taking pre-drilling water samples out of every domestic well, as well as drilling their own water wells to monitor the ground water over time. Fresh water is usually found in the top 500 feet. Below that, porous zones almost always carry EDIT: SALT water. Nobody drills into that garbage for a water well.
Frac's do not cause earthquakes. Saltwater disposal zones can cause small Earthquakes, but in most areas of the country it is so rare that you can't plan on it unless the geology is super unfavorable for saltwater injection. You inject produced saltwater into deep zones that carry saltwater and always will contain saltwater. There are a lot of hoops to jump through for a saltwater disposal well, and the disposal zone has to be thick and have super duper permeability to handle the huge volume of saltwater that it takes. One saltwater disposal well might take water from several hundred wells. Other times your well produces so much saltwater that you drill your own. The rules for how that well is drilled is very strict, and the wells undergo the annual Mechanical Integrity Test which looks for casing leaks in the inner string by pressuring it up to near burst strength and holding. If the pressure bleeds off you know you have a leak and the well is plugged. Modern well plugging is strict and observed by a regulator. It is way more involved than ancient wells where they just tossed whatever junk was laying around and then walked away. Now you have to set a series of cement plugs and modern wells are considered quite safe now that we have regulations.
The regulations aren't even hard or that expensive to follow. They make sense and the cost is only 5 to 30 grand depending on depth.
The Marcellus shale in the northeast U.S. is the only frac play with a big problem. There is shallow gas all over that basin, at depths as shallow as a few hundred feet, and methane in the groundwater is common in certain areas. Chesapeake actually had their own division of groundwater hydrologist who worked their areas and mapped out areas with high methane content. If you have ever seen the movie Gasland, where the guy lights his faucet on fire, what they don't show you is the other 4999 people in the town that has the same thing. Methane isn't poisonous, but it sure isn't good to have it in the groundwater. It is awful.
Chesapeake found many wells that produced methane before they started drilling. They would provide some sort of vent system in the wellhouse that would seperate out the methane before it comes out of the faucet. This is in wells with natural methane. So Chesapeake is very careful.
They also spend about a half million extra for another protective casing string to go over the groundwater.
Casing is steel pipe that has been drifted and tested to a high pressure. Each diameter comes in a variety of strength flavors for its job. Even the pipe threads can be damaged in transport, so we have the threads inspected by a company with fancy equipment before we run it into a well. Casing burst strenghts are in the multi thousands PSIA bust strength range.
Depth to base of treatable water is known in areas from tons of old records. The gas well can also see it on geophysical logs, providing extra data points. So here is how a casing program works. We usually double that to make sure, but in the Marcellus they go further.
A casing program works like this:
6 foot diameter conductor casing is set to about twenty feet just to keep the area around the well clean. The well is then drilled with a huge diameter bit well below the fresh water and cemented to surface. Modern cement jobs use highly technical cement used for that purpose. It is thixotropic and provides a great bond between the pipe and the wall of the wellbore. You wait for the surface casing cement to set and then go inside that pipe with a smaller diameter drill bit and go a few thousand feet more and cement in an extra string just to be bulletproof. Then you go inside that string with an even smaller drillbit and drill down to that particular shale zone, which is 400 feet thick at its highest in most shale basins. It is overlain by 8,000 to 12,000 feet of plain old shale, limestone beds, and porous sandstone zones, each of which would require their own frac if they were productive in the area. Usually you drill through maybe 30 saltwater bearing zones. So the idea that the frac somehow cracks through the surface out there away from the wellbore is a joke. People have no idea how hard that would be.
As the well approaches the particular portion of the shale that is most productive, the directional guys go from vertical to flat in 500 feet. If you do it right, you will end up flat right in your zone.
Then you run another casing liner down to the "landing Point" and cement it in. You can't cement this string all of the way to the surface, because of the weight of cement, but you can cover the shale zone and about 3000 feet of the overlying rocks.
Then I come out and steer the well for the next one or two miles, going up and down keeping the well in the shale.
When I reach total depth, we run another casing string that doesn't come back to the surface. I is hung off of the last intermediate string that you used in landing. Then you cement it in over the entire length of the lateral.
At that point the well is drilled and the drilling rig moves on. It takes about a month, is noisy with trucks and stuff coming and going, and generally turns your peaceful farm into a small industrial site. These are really big rigs, because the weight of that drill pipe in the hole, along with the drag through the horizontal, needs a really big and strong derrick just to pull that pipe out.
There is a whole collection of trailers out there while drilling. I am steering this well from home at the moment and are coming if for the landing in about ten more vertical feet, which takes a while with an inclination of 88 degrees.
The "Company Man" or the drilling supervisor has his own sweet trailer. The directional hands, who do nothing but deal with the directional tool and steering it according to directions from me have their own trailer. They are a subcontractor who could be anyone. We used Baker Hughes on the last one for the down hole steering tool, which is 50 feet long has the drillbit on the end, and is stuffed with electronics. If you lose a tool it is a million bucks, and they only let you insure half of it.
There is the Driller's trailer. The driller is in command of the Drilling Rig, which is often a subcontractor. Very few companies own their own rigs. The Driller keeps things in order and manages the three shifts of roughnecks, which is 4 per shift unless you are offshore.
Through all of this you have trucks coming and going, that machine that can drill 4 miles through solid rock is big and noisy, and they generally make a mess of the local roads, for which they pay a big bill. Municipalities can make a fair amount of money for their own regulations.
If you are fortunate to own the mineral rights below your farm, you will probably get wealthy. However, in most areas with a production history, farms are sold and the old farmer keeps the mineral rights. All that the surface owner gets is surface damages, which can run over 50 grand.
Farmers who don't own the mineral rights, and who have little to gain, can be pretty offensive. They complain and call out the regulatory inspectors for all kinds of crazy stuff. We always joke about how we have to buy them cattle guards just to shut them up. Nevertheless, keeping good relations with the landowner is very important for as long as the well produces, so we will go way out of our way and spend money that we aren't legally obligated to, just to stay on good terms.
In my state, the mineral estate is superior to the surface estate. This means that the actual mineral owner has the right to explore for oil or gas beneath that land. So the surface owner can rarely stop it. Most states have basic rules that say how close you can get to a house, but other than that, if you don't own the mineral rights, you can't stop the drilling without state regulations, and even with those, if you hamper the mineral owner, he can sue for lost income, which could be billions if there are enough pissed off mineral owners.
The oil company leases the mineral rights gives the farmer a ton of money per acre in these plays, usually far more than the farm is worth, as well as a royalty on production, which is usually 19-25%. Damn near every farmer in NW North Dakota and NE Montana is a millionaire even before driling begins.
Anyway, when the exploration company gets the lease, they also get the same rights to explore as the mineral owner, and if the surface owner doesn't own minerals, he gets nothing but damages.
That sounds harsh, but when you buy any piece of property, your attorney who does the title opinion will tell you if you do or do not own the mineral rights. So even if you thought nobody would drill on your land for a million years, you are still aware legally that you don't own the minerals.
That sounds harsh to people who don't know about exploration, but around here, severed minerals (when mineral ownership is severed from the surface rights), are very common. Pretty much everyone knows if they own mineral rights, because companies will come in over the years and lease it over and over again in some areas, most of the time never getting around to drill it. They may have drilled a dry hole in the neighborhood and then all of that offsetting leasehold will expire.
The exception is Louisiana, whose laws are different from all other laws in the U.S. whose laws are generally derived from English Common Law. Louisiana was french, and although I have never drilled there, as I understand it, the minerals revert back to the surface owner after fifteen years ago unless production is established. Then the mineral owner still owns the minerals until the wells become uneconomic and are plugged.
Frack explanation will come next, but I am suddenly busy again.
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lostinshanghai
Social climber
someplace
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Nov 28, 2012 - 07:14pm PT
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Werner you are correct about your carrots,
It is called "there is no such thing called 'pure water" as in chemical free water. we are not talking about earth's natural minerals. There was a time but that was a century ago.
Plus it could be clone ones. They say they last for months and stay crunchy.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Nov 29, 2012 - 01:20am PT
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Nice one Bruce!!
It could be a clip from the Onion and not be funnier. Bonus points for the background of dozens of deer heads!!
except this is REAL, and dude in on the Science Committee!!
We are fully hosed. Sell your vacation homes on the sea Republicans, we're going for a swim, but no worries, you can start smoking tobacco again. That was never "Really" proved harmfull right?
Totally reminds me of this scene in the classic "Pleasantville"
and looking it up, it even has them surprised about the rain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9xg5Uup01g
Peace
Karl
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Yeah, I mentioned that dimwit congressman about a dozen posts back. Nobody listens to me!!!
Perry and Santorum are just as bad. Neither believe in evolution. Look. Evolution is real. If you aren't comfortable with that, just put God into the equation and say that God rigged Nature to work that way.
I'm not aware of why the laws of Nature are the way that they are, they just are.
So if it makes you feel better, you can say that modern science has refined God's work over the last 200 years or so, and that much more is known about how he did it. New discoveries about it are found all of the time.
Fine by me. Your motives are not important. From where I stand, there is no motive. Nature is the way that it is and that is it. Asking why is a much more touchy feely question that I frankly don't care about.
The important thing is that we keep saying that we need more science and engineering graduates. That is great and all, but some of the leaders who say this are the same ones who choose not to believe the most common aspects of nature. That congressman, Perry, Bachmann, Santorum (who was the last one standing against Romney) all choose to ignore what we know about nature, even the most basic parts that you learn in Junior High School biology class.
In the meantime, many countries are far ahead of us on turning out new science and engineering students. When I was under my contract with Chesapeake, it was so multicultural that it was amazing. Science and technology are very active in other countries. Those who think it all comes out of the U.S. don't pay much attention.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Did humans evolve over millions of years, or were they created by God in the last 10,000 years? We've asked that one too.
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dirtbag
climber
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Gee, I know we are all dying to know what Chief Running Mouth thinks about all this.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Not even slightly!
But keeping things real, here's an economist's-eye-view (by my favorite economist) of the future of oil, taking into account technological advances like what BASE has described. Emphasis added.
My view is that with these new fields and new technology, we’ll see further increases in U.S. and world production of oil for the next several years. But, unlike many other economists, I do not expect that to continue for much beyond the next decade. We like to think that the reason we enjoy our high standard of living is because we have been so clever at figuring out how to use the world’s available resources. But we should not dismiss the possibility that there may also have been a nontrivial contribution of simply having been quite lucky to have found an incredibly valuable raw material that was relatively easy to obtain for about a century and a half....
Optimists may expect the next century and a half to look like the last. But we should also consider the possibility that it will be only the next decade that looks like the last.
http://economics.ucsd.edu/economicsinaction/issue-7/exhaustible-resources.php
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 3, 2012 - 07:16pm PT
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Contemplating climate change catastrophe at COP 18 in Doha
Latest findings suggest that the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2ºC may now be beyond reach, and that we may now be locked into a 4-6ºC temperature increase.
"The only way to avoid the pessimistic scenarios will be radical transformations in the way the global economy currently functions: rapid uptake of renewable energy, sharp falls in fossil fuel use or massive deployment of CCS [carbon capture and storage], removal of industrial emissions and halting deforestation."
These are not the words of some wild-eyed environmental activist, but from business advisers at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) in their November 2012 Low Carbon Economy Index. The PwC advisers concur in many regards with a consortium of environmentalists who issued an open letter as COP 18 convened.
 Amy Goodman |
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