Exploring the Issue of Hydrocarbon Depletion

Joe Sparano: The Facts about the Peak Oil Theory

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:14:00 +0000

Part of the problem here lies in the fact that the word theory has two distinctly different meanings.

In science, the word theory is used to denote "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena".

In colloquial non-scientific parlance, the word theory is mistakenly conflated with the termhypothesis, "a tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena". Of course obfuscationists rely on and encourage this confabulation in the public mind to keep the uninformed swallowing their drivel.

The latter is the mistaken sense in which the term is used when people utter the platitude, "just a theory". The former, scientific meaning is what is actually indicated when the phrase "peak oil theory" is used amongst those who understand the phenomenon. Denialists of course attempt to convince people that the colloquial misapplication of the term is what is meant...

The Big Move

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:06:00 +0000

We just recently moved after looking for what seemed like forever for our new home. What a pain in the butt...! After arranging a million different details, then we still have to confront the actual move itself. We went with the rent a ruck & hire individuals method this time, which was a mistake.... broken furniture... missing items... tracking mud & dirt thought both houses... how I wish we had found these guys first. http://www.moveme.com

Conveyancing means more than just moving stuff, as we discovered. All the contract and legal work could have been done through a single vendor, but we tried to save money doing these things oursels and ended up spending even more money. All in all I sure wish we had done a little research before diving headfirst into this process without professional guidance.

We sure could have used this advice for a Conveyancing Quote.

The first mistake we made was being dependant on the sale of the old house to purchase the new house. This meant we could not close on the new property until we had cash in hand from the sale of our current property. This created all kinds of difficulties we could have avoided if we had used a service like MoveMe! Not only that but having professionals to help guide us through the entire process could have saved countless headaches as we went thorough the process of listing, closing, the old house as well as getting setup for the new house.... what a pain!

The key is finding Cheap Conveyancing of course. A little research suer would have saved us a ton of hassle, money and frustration. Make sure you do your homework on your next move and avoid these problems.

Hindsight is 20/20

IBID

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:10:00 +0000

Sorry to serial-rant, but I should say that I think there is actually some hope in all of this....
.
I should also explain that I used to work in one of those places where the incumbent technology was about 40 years old, the sales cycle for innovative products was about 10 years, because it is a basic-materials business that is pretty well commoditized, selling into a mature industry (the automotive supply chain, of course)....It's similar enough to the refinery business that I can figure out a lot of the economics....

In that kind of environment, it is pretty easy to build a nice career, and get a nice salary, by being an innovation killer. Here is how it works: Someone in engineering, or maybe customer service, has some idea about how to improve the product, or improve some aspect of service, delivery or logistics, and in one of the periodic communication meetings that happens would thoughtfully put out some kind of proposal..... Sometimes this happened informally, but from time to time, this would happen deliberately, and a lot of the planning and business modeling would be laid out in some detail.

Meetings would be held, the innovators were allowed to state their case, and it was at that point that the "counter-innovators" would come up with a lot of excuses for not doing it, question the base assumptions, and slow down, if not completely stop, the entire process. The reason that this was a successful career strategy is that it is easy to kill an idea, or starve it to death, because the default position, so to speak, let things go on the way they have, is risk-free. The basic assumption is, "that's the way it is... it's what made us successful all of these years...."

An innovation that fails, of course, makes the innovation killers look brilliant and the innovators look like idiots. It takes 100 times more energy and talent to innovate than it does to kill an innovation, so most of the time, the innovation killers have the odds in their favor.

Any changes to this massive-scale equipment was expensive, of course, and sometimes the business would have to make a pretty sizeable investment to make it work, so in a way, in the short run, they were right. In the long run, of course, it's a catastrohpe.

An offshoot of this, of course, is the Al Dunlaps and/or Nardellis of the world, who built their career on cutting..... reducing overhead and/or streamlining operations, which is a useful skill in and of itself because it improves economic efficiency, but is terrible from the standpoint of innovation, because by its very nature, innovation is messy and inefficient.....That was the subject of an earlier rant, that we can probably unearth....

The point of all of this is, that there gets to be a lot of tension between the innovators, who have ideas on how to improve the business and make it grow, and implement change, and the counter-innovators......and at least in the mature business that I was in.....It was particularly dangerous for an innovator to be put into any kind of position of authority, because the first thing he or she did was start to shake up the status quo.... which got people nervous....and violated Peter's first and foremost rule of organizational behavior: The Hierarchy Must Be Preserved....Typically, the innovation killers were the ones that were populating the higher levels....being as it was one of those mature industries....

And, of course it is the very reason, particularly in automotive and other manufacturing, that these companies refused to change, even in the face of catastrophe, and had to be bailed out by the government.

The bright side is, from time to time, the analysts and management figured out that the headcount was too high, so there was an overhead purge, and along with the skill-free yes people, occasionally the innovation killers that were running the place would use it as an excuse to get rid of some of the 1% of the people that ticked somebody off at some point........From the point of view of the organization, these people were a bit dangerous..... but from the point of view of the rest of the world, they are the ones who are bright, ambitious, determined, innovative, risk-taking, and not afraid to keep the ball in play even if they failed from time to time...Naturally they did not fit into the corporate structure.....especially in a mature industry where a "success" might take you five years... A lot of them even had cluttered desks... can you imagine?

With these seeds of creativity finally liberated from their protective pod, these people are free to develop new products, establish new business and industries, and generally make things better for the economy and society as a whole. Of course, there are plenty of failures that are liberated as part of this too.... and it's kind of hard to distinguish between the two in the early stages.... but that is not all bad...

Failure makes you smarter, provided you learn from it, and use it as a chance to change....

The point is, that situations like this have the potential free up a lot of human energy that, in maybe 1% of the cases, can sow the seeds of a new industry. It's definitely going to be rough for the 99%.....

BTW a side point: I think the current argument about universal health care completely ignores the fact that a lot of bright people right now are dumbing themselves down, and putting up with a lot of BS in a corporate type environment, so that they can work in a place that has health insurance, rather than going out and innovating......

w/ population growth, a jobs recovery is now impossible

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:52:00 +0000

Quote:

Just to stay even with where we are today, and keep our total unemployed number stable, we'd have to add 144,000 jobs a month.

Well, the population growth thing is a two edged sword, naturally, because population growth also equals "more customers"....

There is a school of thought that says that the population growth in the country is too slow, thanks to us baby boomers discovering artificial birth control, and having smaller families than the two previous generations. We got into the preposterous situation of this baby boom generation all reaching middle age, and not consuming as much as we used to. There's now way for the echo generation/gen Y to buy as much crap as we did....particularly in light of the fact that we have screwed them out of decent entry level jobs, as documented elsewhere, hence the big slowdown....

I think the demographers have been worried about this for years... The solution: Import the most productive segment population from south of the border, so that they can buy cars, cellphones, and rent our apartment buildings. and pop out a few babies to keep the game going...Same can be said for the H1B cases that we were talking about the other day.....In either case, we are not going to tell 10 million people at the prime of their consumption phase to go back home......You never hear that argument....

Quote:

Those in their 50s who remain unemployed for any serious length of time are completely screwed. They are too old to go back to school and too expensive to insure. Moreover, these are exactly the people who have been draining their home equity to fund consumption.

I just have to comment on this, as well.....since I am in this age group....I am focused on the 50-year old white collar worker at the moment....

I've been around some corporate-type environments, and I have to say that it never ceases to amaze me how many people there are in some of these places that add no real value to the business....They show up every day, email things back and forth to one another, have important meetings to determine the agenda for the next meeting and do a lot of wheel spinning, and a lot of them get paid a lot of money for it. How did such a thing come about? There was a 25 year period without a serious business downturn, and during this time, a lot of weak managers got jobs they shouldn't have, and set up their organization full of attractive people with good lines of BS but no real skills....There was no "cleansing" period during which some of the excess could be wrung out of the system.

The modern "HR" systems added to the problem. If you could manage somehow to get a job, all you had to do is be pleasant around the office, ideally well-dressed and good looking, and you'd get a favorable job review every year, because the systems are set up, as Laurence J. Peter suggests, to measure "input", that is, your participation in the system, rather than "output", the performance of some measurable amount of work....

So year after year, even at the high levels, these companies were populated by people who got where they were by agreeing with the boss, looking good around the place, and making as few waves as possible. Some of these people actually became managers. A lot of them, not all, have never run any actual business more complicated than a lemonade stand...

This did no favors to the employees, as we are now seeing. You get a job, you figure out the corporate environment, you keep your head low, and make sure to show up at the company christmas party and play nice during the meetings, and you get a good review and you do exactly the same thing the next year.... so there is no incentive to innovate, to take risks, develop new skills, and do anything if there is a potential of failure. You get people in their jobs who have not developed any sort of risk-taking skills, have no real self-assessment ability, since all they did was agree with the boss for all of those years....You get your 3% raise every year, and eventually, you are making pretty good money doing nothing of real value to the organization.

Naturally, you go out and buy a bigger house, you get a nice car, so that you can be seen as powerful around the office, you take your vacations to Cancun, put your kids in private school.... I suppose I do not need to rant at this point.....because Tyler is exactly right.... this is where the spending habits entrap them even more into the situation.

So the business hits a brick wall, the few competent managers around finally correctly start to question some of the activities, and start to lay people off, and before long, a lot of these people find their way onto the street....The situation is correctly described above: No relevant job skills except agreeing with the boss, a lot of overhead to pay for, maybe you are smart enough to save and maybe not, and you get a lot of fearful people....the most fearful, of course, are the stepford/trophy wives, that are at home taking care of the status symbols.... and have themselves developed no useful skills since getting their MRS degree in 1985 and then retiring....This adds one more source of irritation to the already frustrated man of the house..

A lot of them got overweight during this period too. Just saying.

Ironically, well, not ironically but tragically, the reality is, that a lot of these people know that they're trapped. They are not emotionally or intellectually satisfied with their jobs either (it is soul-robbing to spend your career being a yes-man )..This causes just as much stress and frustration, and makes it pretty unsatisfying to show up at the office every day.

So, what ought to be a blessing, a chance to be liberated from this kind of environment, be creative, be all you can be, and reset your career to something fun, which gives you a sense of accomplishment, becomes a life catastrophe for some of these guys. They sit around and whine, and do their outplacement which is a placebo version of what their job was, and wait....I am sure the suicide rates among these people are increasing, but suicide requires a bit of initiative, so it would not surprise me if it did not....Their stepford wives go into panic mode, at the prospect of losing their gravy train, which makes the situation even worse....So the divorce rate starts to climb....The health insurance thing makes it even worse.... I can name at least 3 overweight 50-55 year olds that need hip replacements....

So, what is going to happen? Well, these are the flower children of the 60-'s and 70's... They will use their political power (it's a democracy, after all) to do what they always did, which is to whine so that someone comes and bails them out.

So that is what is going to happen. This will go on as long as it can.

BTW my personal attitude toward this issue is completely different than most....

US will experience collapse from First to Third World

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:02:00 +0000

laissez-faire economics... Keynesian fiscal policies...

Social Darwinism anyone?

Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)

Quote:

The core belief of free-marketeers is that people should be free to do what they want in life as long as they don't harm anyone else. They say that on the whole, society's problems and challenges are best dealt with by people and companies interacting with each other freely without interference from politicians and the State. This means that government action, whether through taxes, regulation or laws, should be kept to a minimum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Economic_Affairs

Quote:

There are "troubling similarities" between the US President's actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history

Quote:

"It is also not impossible that the US will experience the kind of economic collapse from first to Third World status experienced by Argentina under the national-socialist governance of Juan Peron."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/6147211/Barack-Obama-accused-of-making-Depression-mistakes.html

Cell Phone Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:51:00 +0000

So not long ago I laundered my BlackBerry. I was just washing a load of laundry, and found my BlackBerry Curve staring up at me from the bottom of the washing machine with a look of sad resignation on it's face. Just as a note for future cell phone treatments, this washing did nothing to improve the performance of my device. In fact... well... you can imagine.

I've been a BlackBerry user for many years as a corporate warrior, and consider the phone an extension of my digital presence. So of course I went on a hunt for a replacement for my now water-logged device right away. Being the Internet guy I am, I started looking online for shops specializing in smartphones and came across these guys. I had intended to just replace my damaged phone, but after looking at some of the other offerings I decided to replace my BlackBerry with Google's GPhone. I had considered the iphone because of the many iphone accessories, and cool iphone case choices but went with the Gphone instead. I liked the iphone car charger available with the iphone, and the full body case as well as the dockking station which is also a charger, but liked how the GPhone used the same mini USB for headphones. It was a tough decision because the iphone is so popular, and there are many add-on applications available for it, but in the end it was the open source operating system of the GPhone, and the excellent HTC hardware which won me over.

I love it...

Since I already use GMail & Calander etc... the GPhone was a simple transition. Popped my old sim card into my G1 and the phone did the rest. All my contacts, email, calanders etc... just appeared like magic and I was off to the races.

And take my advice... if you want a headset... get the JawBone... you will love it. Clear as a bell.

Now if I can just manage not to wash this one... I'm good.

Why Peak Oil may prove irrelevant (REDUX)

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:49:00 +0000

No. The US experience is vastly different than that of other nations owing to the ability of citizenry to own mineral rights, which has created a whole class of minor scale operators who have no analogue in any other producing nation.

Look at the EIA page for Distribution and Production of Oil and Gas Wells by State. 355,537 operating oil wells, 125,933 of which produce 0-1 boe/d. This is not a situation that obtains elsewhere. I've asked people with experience in the industry such as R Rapier or ROCKMAN if they thought NOCs could replicate this level of attention by opening up drilling rights to citizenry, and the answer was "damn unlikely," followed by "likely wouldn't make much difference."

The HL method seems to suggest overall world decline will be fairly gentle anyway, however. But we have a lot of very steep declines making their way into the equation, owing to the prevalence of deepwater in the last quarter of the 20th century, which could hasten the decline somewhat.

More pressing than that is how nations will react when peak oil registers as a fait accompli, which of course is wholly unmeasurable.
Where you measure the decline rate is of import as well:

Biggest Losers for 2008 from Stat Review:

Code:
Yemen -11.59%Chad -11.50%Italy -10.88%Brunei -10.00%Mexico -9.05%Tunisia -8.89%Other Africa -8.33%Nigeria -7.89%Denmark -7.72%European Union # -6.24%Vietnam -5.98%United Kingdom -5.76%Other Europe & Eurasia -5.18%Other Middle East -4.98%Syria -4.10%

Biggest Winners:

Code:
Other Asia Pacific 3.23%Brazil 3.48%Indonesia 3.48%Saudi Arabia 3.66%Turkmenistan 3.66%Oman 3.70%Total Middle East 3.94%Kazakhstan 4.54%Thailand 4.81%Azerbaijan 4.95%Peru 5.13%Kuwait 5.32%Angola 8.27%Colombia 9.21%Rep. of Congo (Brazzaville) 10.92%Iraq 11.52%Qatar 13.17%

Would be interesting to compare decline rate to overall production.Tex - US Production minus Alaska:Looks like a neolithic spear head.

That piddling little uptick in the 80s is what the greatest drilling campaign in history produced.

Heart Surgery In a couple hours

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:12:00 +0000

So I've been recovering at home in what I assume is the traditional fashion.

No unexpected complications to relate... just the healing process. Had my first follow-ups with surgeons & cardiologists which seem to have gone well, so it seems like these folks have saved my bacon, as it were.

As mentioned earlier this thread, I fall into a category of preexisting, & therefore non-insurable cardio-treatment. Which basically means I'm on the hook for 100% of the costs associated with this experience. This makes me a poster-boy for medical reform efforts in the US I suppose...

The short version is I'm a 45 year old male with a pretty typical history of medical care, as well as professional history. I have been working since 14 years of age in a variety of occupations, the last 20 years of which have been as a professional technologist. I started at $2.10/hour way back when, (minimum wage) & worked my way up the wage ladder over these many years to the 6 figure guy I am today.

It's been a rocky ride between 1975 & today, with many ups & downs along the way; both personal & financial.

The vast majority of this time I have been contributing to mandatory taxation including Social Security contributions, as well as voluntary insurance programs mostly sponsored by my employers. I'd be hard-pressed to give an accurate total for these contributions over the decades, but it's certainly been many 10's of thousands of dollars.

Fast-forward to a period where my Cobra extended insurance coverage expired before I managed to procure new employment-sponsored insurance, and we find my first cardiac event. This of course makes all subsequent heart-related medical events preexisting as far as insurers are concerned, and therefore un-insurable.

The result of this timeline of events is of course, massive amounts of debt.

Multiple trips to the stint lab for angioplasty plus this latest bypass procedure adds up to about a million bucks in debt. This excludes doctor visits, prescriptions etc... I'm paying for all of this "out of pocket" as it were, which is, of course, absurd on it's surface. It effectively makes me a medical share-cropper for life. No possibility of repaying this debt in my lifetime, and therefore in perpetual servitude to the medical-industrial community in perpetuity. To be fair, this beats the alternative... these folks saved my life... no doubt. And I also have a keen appreciation of the triage process which much have occurred prior to this bypass surgery in my favor. A panel of medical folks who were well aware that I'd never repay the debt generated by this procedure, made a decision to perform the surgery anyway. What a nightmare decision this must be, especially since they must get confronted with multiple instances representing individual lives on a regular basis. Our system is literally forcing life/death choices on medical administrators, surgeons & doctors across the country.

So where do we assign blame/responsibility for this condition?

My fault for failing to get new insurance coverage and prevent gaps in coverage?
Insurance companies for excluding preexisting conditions?
Medical device/service providers for the incredible costs of these systems?

All the above?
More?

And where do we go from here?

Since I can't possibly pay for the accumulated debt of these treatments, this financial burden will fall onto the shoulders of taxpayers & insured consumers at the end of the day, in the form of higher taxes & higher premiums.

In a world of shrinking resources, what will be the criteria our medical community employs to determine who receives these heroic measures... & who does not?

I am of course grateful beyond words to be here to write this post, and my thanks goes out to all of the people who made this possible for me. But if you're gonna save Aaron from peakoil.com, you're gonna get some pointed questions eventually which are directly related to energy, resource depletion, financial fidelity & the moral/practical application of these concepts to individual humans, and society as a whole.

As always, your thoughts & comments are most welcome...

A Dark Hole: How the Fed Prints Money Out of Thin Air

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:55:00 +0000

William Greider, The Nation

Quote:

If Congress chooses to take charge of its constitutional duty, it could similarly use greenback currency created by the Federal Reserve as a legitimate channel for financing important public projects -- like sorely needed improvements to the nation's infrastructure. Obviously, this has to be done carefully and responsibly, limited to normal expansion of the money supply and used only for projects that truly benefit the entire nation (lest it lead to inflation). But here is an example of how it would work.

President Obama has announced the goal of building a high-speed rail system. Ours is the only advanced industrial society that doesn't have one (ride the modern trains in France or Japan to see what our society is missing). Trouble is, Obama has only budgeted a pittance ($8 billion) for this project. Spain, by comparison, has committed more than $100 billion to its fifteen-year railroad-building project. Given the vast shortcomings in US infrastructure, the country will never catch up with the backlog through the regular financing of taxing and borrowing.

Instead, Congress should create a stand-alone development fund for long-term capital investment projects (this would require the long-sought reform of the federal budget, which makes no distinction between current operating spending and long-term investment). The Fed would continue to create money only as needed by the economy; but instead of injecting this money into the banking system, a portion of it would go directly to the capital investment fund, earmarked by Congress for specific projects of great urgency.

This is what Ellen Brown, author of Web Of Debt, has been advocating strenuously - get rid of the Fed and have the government print its own money without any indebtedness to private bankers. The national debt is beyond repaying anyway. Who still believes it could possibly by paid down? The current system is bound to snap.

I'd be in favor of another Estate in government, in addition to the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, called the Monetary branch. Members (say, 12 of them) would be appointed by the president, confirmed by Congress and would serve open-ended terms similar to Supreme Court Justices.

The infamous Mayer Amschel Rothschild Quote, "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws", is a pretty good indication that the People, not private interests, ought to control their own money supply.

Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:11:00 +0000

Tanada

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:47 am

Expert

Joined: Thu Apr 28, 2005 2:00 am
Posts: 4766
Location: West shore Lake Eire, MI, USA

Aaron wrote:

Quote:

The French State still owns 79% of Areva – the company supplying the Finnish reactor,which also operates the French reprocessing plant at La Hague. Having unnecessarily givenlarge contracts to Areva over past years to reprocess its spent fuel, EdF has accumulated over80 tons of plutonium, and vast quantities of nuclear waste at the reprocessing plant at LaHague. So it is now confronted with huge liabilities, but insufficient funds to cover them.The Court of Accounts estimated France’s nuclear liabilities at Eur 71-billion, with Eur 48-billion of that belonging to EdF. There are also huge uncertainties attached to these liabilities.For example, the cost of a potential deep disposal facility for nuclear waste could be between40% and 230% higher than allowed for by EdF, according to radioactive waste managementagency Andra. (35). It appears, therefore, that EdF currently plans to fund only around half ofFrance’s nuclear liabilities.

Nuclear power is a failed technology which has failed to deliver. It has squanderedunparalleled, unstinting support from taxpayers around the globe leaving them with burdensthat may last for millennia. The idea that such an industry should be resuscitated with orwithout even more public subsidy is absurd.

http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/reports/Nuclear_Subsidies.pdf

That's just funny given that Edf turns a large profit every year selling electricity and that money is turned in to the French General Fund to be spent on other government expenditures.

_________________
Always appeal to a man's enlightened self interest, you can trust him to look out for himself honestly, It's when you appeal to his Honor or the Common Good that he stops paying attention.

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pstarr

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:52 am

Expert

Joined: Mon Sep 27, 2004 2:00 am
Posts: 9065
Location: Behind the Redwood Curtain

Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Can we now safely assume the correct nswer is SOCIALISM?

_________________
yesplease wrote:
"Odds are economic growth will start to even out as population reaches it's top of ~10+ trillion"

yesplease wrote:
"What we're seeing, adding about a billion people every thirteen years or so, is linear population growth."

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Tanada

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:55 am

Expert

Joined: Thu Apr 28, 2005 2:00 am
Posts: 4766
Location: West shore Lake Eire, MI, USA

pstarr wrote:

Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Can we now safely assume the correct nswer is SOCIALISM?

I think in this case it is, the electricity industry is government owned and operated. Isn't that the definition of Socialism?

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Aaron

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 12:13 pm

800 lb Gorilla

Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2004 2:00 am
Posts: 6868
Location: Houston

Tanada wrote:

Aaron wrote:

Quote:

http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/reports/Nuclear_Subsidies.pdf

That's just funny given that Edf turns a large profit every year selling electricity and that money is turned in to the French General Fund to be spent on other government expenditures.

Sure it does...

With taxpayer funding you always "turn a profit".

_________________
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln

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Arthur75

Post subject: Re: Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 2:40 pm

Tar Sands

Joined: Sun Mar 29, 2009 4:10 am
Posts: 35
Location: Lutèce

pstarr wrote:

Why is nuclear power so successful and popular in France?

Can we now safely assume the correct nswer is SOCIALISM?

I'm not sure you can really call that Socialism ...

First of all a lot of these big "national enterprises" , EDF for electricity , SNCF for rail date back from right after WWII or just before for SNCF, France Telecom (ex PTT) even before, and are all related somehow to "infrastructures".

And since the war, there as not been any "socialist labeled" government before 1981 and Mitterrand's election, it was either "Gaullist" in power or "center right"

Now it is true that there is a strong "services publics" tradition associated to the "corps de l'Etat" and major engineering (and administration) schools as stated above.

But this tradition is somehow down for quite some time already, the Anglo Saxon "liberalism" (European meaning) having taken its toll on this glorious devoted nationalist spirit ...

And in concrete terms, all these markets are being liberalized these days (EDF has been splited between the network and producers part, same for SNCF (network and trains operators), telecoms deregulated like for AT&T at about same time, etc)

To tell the truth I'm not sure the big "no government everything private" dogma means much when you talk about infrstructures ...
And for instance, whereas in France and other European countries many freeways are privately operated (with tolls), the US highways infrastructure is what ? A socialist shithole ?

What was exactly AT&T before the deregulation ? Is AT&T eating most of what was deregulated right now or not ?

As to EDF, the CEA, or Areva making or not a profit, yes they do (maybe not for the CEA)

Letter from a Dodge dealer

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:16:00 +0000

May 19, 2009
Letter from a Dodge dealer

letter to the editor
My name is George C. Joseph. I am the sole owner of Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu, a family owned and operated business in Melbourne, Florida. My family bought and paid for this automobile franchise 35 years ago in 1974. I am the second generation to manage this business.

We currently employ 50+ people and before the economic slowdown we employed over 70 local people. We are active in the community and the local chamber of commerce. We deal with several dozen local vendors on a day to day basis and many more during a month. All depend on our business for part of their livelihood. We are financially strong with great respect in the market place and community. We have strong local presence and stability.

I work every day the store is open, nine to ten hours a day. I know most of our customers and all our employees. Sunshine Dodge is my life.

On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars. This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as "new," nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service. There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.

Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler's insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.

HOW IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CAN THIS HAPPEN?

THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS NOT A GOVERNMENT ENTITY

This is beyond imagination! My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN. We did NOTHING wrong.

This atrocity will most likely force my family into bankruptcy. This will also cause our 50+ employees to be unemployed. How will they provide for their families? This is a total economic disaster.

HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN IN A FREE MARKET ECONOMY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

I beseech your help, and look forward to your reply. Thank you.

Sincerely,

George C. Joseph
President & Owner
Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpag ... ealer.html

Response:

Dear George:

Sorry you are having so much trouble. In a way, it's not all your fault, to be sure, but in a way, of course, it is.

You have spent the last several decades selling Dodge cars. You of all people ought to know that far from a glorious tradition of automotive excellence, a lot of these cars were pieces of junk. The contract you had with Chrysler Corporation said that you agreed to sell whatever they sent you, no matter how crappy, and you did so, with a smile on your face, for many years. I am sure you are good at what you do.... you have to be in order to stay in business.

http://www.daimlerchryslervehicleproblems.com/

One of the ways that you stayed in business is by the service department that you are so proud of. I am sure you told your sales people to brag about it every chance they got. What you did not want to tell them is that making crappy cars works in your favor.... you get to charge your poor customers for the honor of fixing up the car that you sold them. What they really, really wanted was a car that would not break down. I am sure you have a dealer convention or something where you could feed this information back to Detroit, but evidently they did not get the message.

Another of the ways you stayed in business is by making sure your prices were lower than the Dodge dealer in Ft Lauderdale. To you, it was important that if someone wanted to drive a Dodge, they could go to you for the lowest price in the area. The guy in Lauderdale was doing exactly the same thing. From Dodge's point of view, both of you were undercutting one another, and it was costing them several hundred dollars per car. So, with one of you out of the picture, they are hoping that they can do away with some of this.

What they don't know, unfortunately, is that people nowadays can get on the internet, find the lowest price in the nation for the car they want, and with a couple hundred dollar airplane ticket can go someplace else and drive their car home. You, and the rest of the dealers, did not embrace this technology and take advantage of it, because you, after all, are just the grey haired version of the same greasy car sales people that you hire and fire every day.

Speaking of which, I can think of no other business where the customer is so shockingly humiliated and disrespected as he or she is in the American automotive sales transaction. Just saying.

Anyway, George, I do not want to keep you too much longer, because I know you have a short attention span, but I would just suggest that there are plenty of ways for you to make a living, starting with your big service department... people still need to have their cars worked on, even Toyotas break down occasionally, and they all buy tires and other supplies..... You are a victim of cirumstance, it is true, but what you really are is a victim of hubris... doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You probably could have made the change gradually... or you could have gotten the message back in 1979 when the first Chrysler bail out happened.... but you stayed with what you know because you could, and now you can't. Sorry.

Anyway, if you are smart, you will figure it out. That really is free enterprise for you.

Later
pup55

My old man said. ....

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:56:00 +0000

My father is 85, born as a menonite farmer during the depression, was going to be a preacher until he went to World War II were he met my irreverent Italian mother whom he married and brought back to the US. He dropped religion and became an athiest even though in all other ways culturally he remained quite conservative and true to his prudish upbringing. He ended working for Westinghous in their atomic energy division until that closed down. He was a lifelong democrat until Reagan, become a republican through George Bush's first term. He voted for Obama.

So I asked the old man yesterday how he viewed the current economic crisis and what he saw happening going forward.

He said the economic recovery will not happen quickly this time around since there is no more bubbles to inflate since the last two, the banking and consumer were fake, unlike the manufacturing and information technology booms which were based on something concrete. He said the era of governments backing corporations and the banks is over and that the government will turn to a more socialist agenda to focus on the needs of the middle class. He said this is necessary since now it has become clear that corporations and banks are only out for their own profit. He said it is time for the government to look out for the little guy. He is a great fan of Obama by the way.

Around mitigations for issues like peak oil and global warming my Dad said the human being is not capable of changing his appetite for growth and expansion and all attempts will be futile. He said this will be taken care of by mother nature sometime in the next 200 years. I told him it will happen in my life time and certainly in the lifetime of my daughters. He is skeptical of any radical changes to the status quo in either direction, up or down.

Just interesting getting an old man's view of things which I thought I would share.

Weekly US Petroleum and NG Supply Reports 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:32:00 +0000

Prediction
Unleaded Prediction 24-Apr
Beginning Inv mbbl 217.3
Imports Wk/Day 7.7 1.1
Production Wk/Day 64.4 9.2
Available 289.4
Balance Wk/Day 70.7 10.1
Ending Inv Mbbl 218.70
Prod Supplied 9.1
Predicted Change 1.4

Distillates Prediction 24-Apr
Beginning Inv mbbl 142.3
Imports Wk/Day 1.4 0.2
Production Wk/Day 27.3 3.9
Available 171
Balance Wk/Day 28.7 4.1
Ending Inv Mbbl 142.3
Prod Supplied 4.1
Predicted Change 0.0

Crude Oil Prediction 24-Apr
Beginning Inventory 370.6
Domestic Prod 38.15 5.45
Imports 65.8 9.4
SPR+/Supply- -1.61 -0.23
Total Available 472.94
Provided to Refineries 101.5 14.5
Ending Inventory 371.44
Predicted Change 0.84
Refinery Utilization 83.000

You just get the feeling that there are some funny things going on.... maybe it's just below the surface... maybe it just stayed too quiet for too long.... maybe it's just the season, people getting ready to gear up for summer...

a. We have this situation with the tankers, noted above... an unprecedented collapse in the baltic dry rate, lots of floating storage available.

b. big fluctuations in the import figure every week... the system importing as much oil as ever, even though the inventory is at a multi-decade high....

c. the refining capacity dropping temporarily to a new multi-decade low for April a couple of weeks ago, followed by an uptick last week..

d. the pricing, increasing a couple of dollars on Sunday night, like it did yesterday... still off by 66% versus a year ago...

e. You have the demand. Unleaded demand is within roundoff error of what it was last year at this time. Distillates way off, jet fuel way way off....

f. The little "gap" between calculated and actual demand on unleaded.... it was over 1.1 mbpd last week, which is really high, compared to its historical level of about .7, which suggests that there are a lot of blending components coming into the country, that are double counted as they are blended at the tank farm....

g. We have the trillions of dollars that were pumped into the economy over the last six months looking for a home... some of it ended up in gold, which is still over 900 I think.... perhaps some of it is ending up in oil....

h. No word from China on anything.... except their demand was down 16% or something year-on-year.

i. Suggestions that OPEC did indeed cut back this spring, but all of the volume being made up by Russia and Brazil

j. Potential collapse of Cantarell....

So, there are a lot of things going on in the subsurface, that for the moment are ending up as nothing, but might at some point end up as something.....

As long as we continue to import 1.1 mbpd of unleaded into the country, at the current usage levels, we will continue to build inventory.

Despite the increased refinery usage, plus deposits into the SPR, we will continue to build the crude a little... despite the fact that the citizens of Cushing are already ankle-deep...as long as we continue to import over 9 mbpd

the production dial is all the way turned toward "unleaded" right now, so we will be about even in distillates, as long as the demand remains seasonally like it now is.

This could get fun, if there are widespread disruptions in the travel system because of the flu.....

Perhaps it is time to lay in a supply of popcorn....

Re: American Tax Protests Growing

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:38:00 +0000

Quote:
I wonder if a tea party Party could be formed out of this

...yeah, right. This stuff happens every few years.... and never accomplishes anything, because in the famous words of Howard Ruff, Americans have figured out how to vote themselves benefits out of the federal treasury, and that goes double for the middle class white guys who are running these so-called "protests". They whine about lower taxes, but at the same time do not want to give back the generous government benefits that they themselves are getting.They drive to the rally on roads that are paid for by the government, they go home to their suburban tract homes which are subsidized by tax breaks on their interest, they complain if their public school has a smaller stadium than the next suburb over.

They whine if somebody breaks into their car and steals their stereo because of too few policemen patrolling the streets... it's a big scandal if the government ambulance or fire department takes five minutes instead of one, to get to their house when they have the big H from eating subsidized beef and pork... They drive to work on to either a Lockheed plant, whose profits depend almost solely on their ability to sell more and more complex weapons systems to the US Military or Space Program, or else to their job on an assembly line at the new Kia plant, which was built out in the country by generous industrial revenue bonds issued by the county, or direct subsidy by the local and state government, which they were happy to do in order to get people to work and pay taxes to keep the whole thing going.

On the weekends, they go to the local lake, an impoundment put up by the Corps of Engineers to generate power, so that their electricity will be nice and cheap.... they catch a nice bass that was stocked in the lake by the Fish and Wildlife department. It is nice out there, clean, because the state paid someone to go out and pick up the old beer bottles....and kept the chemical plant upstream from discharging its waste directly into the water supply.

They call their elderly parents on the phone that night.... their elderly parents that have been kept alive via Medicaid and Medicare the last couple of years, after their heart attacks, which were caused by smoking the government subsidized tobacco all of those years, and they are happy that the old folks are able to live in their own house, subsidized by social security and/or a variety of other public pensions, without which they might actually have to (ugh) move in with them....

Who wants to cut back on all of that stuff?

nobody.

They go shopping.... where do we begin? The produce aisle? How much government money went to irrigate all that land out in California to produce all of those beautiful vegetables.... The bread department? Farm set-asides and supports for wheat farmers, regulation of the product by the FDA to keep it from poisoning you, and naturally, easy transportation via the highway system.... The milk section? Lord knows how much a gallon of milk would cost.... or whether or not it would be thinned out with formaldehyde like it was at the turn of the last century without government resources.... Anyplace else in the supermarket, including the supermarket itself, which is inspected by the local health authorities on a frequent basis to keep rats from overrunning the place....You can look no farther than the nearest jar of peanut butter to know what would happen to the food supply without some sort of government review or regulation.... and it is a huge scandal if the health department lets some guy get something past them....

So, these guys can protest all they want.... but they would not think of walking away from some of these things...Better yet, they should spend some time in the so-called "developing countries" to see what life is like without a lot of this stuff....starting first with a minimum wage, and some labor and job safety laws, that keep you from getting your fingers chopped off in some piece of unsafe equipment.... all of that stuff takes government resources...laws, regulations, and inspectors.....I have been all over the world, including the so-called worker's paradise in China, and can tell you some stories....

Now to be sure, the tax system we have is bullshit, and I am second to no one in my desire to have some of this be common-sense such as not requiring 10 handicap parking spots in front of the local skating rink...but I would say that 99% of the fat white guys that are running this stuff have no idea how good they have it.

Since I am in a ranting mood.....That is not to say that the government, at any level, is organized in some kind of efficient way either....Billions spent on weapons systems, hardware, satellites and other crap for the military that is the next thing to useless....I just had to laugh at the following article on Savinar's site today....http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/
Quote:
Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they’ve been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn’t turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren’t about to let it go.

A military that is designed to project power and protect our oil supply and keep the system together another year, which is unable to protect two of our three tallest buildings from attack by a seven-foot, left-handed, cave dweller on dialysis, and unable to conquer a nation of 22 million rug salesmen in five years, at the expense of a Trillion dollars....and unable to protect our southern border from an invasion by somewhere between six and ten million potential guerilla fighters....A school system in which the lowest paid people, the teachers, are the least respected, but simultaneously the ones in charge of performing the actual customer service, while the good old boy ex-football coaches, as Ross Perot used to say, are running the show, making the curricculum decisions to fit the economy of 1977, while the kids are going to have to earn a living in 2037, while the little kids in Malaysia are working their asses off to learn English so they can take our jobs while we sell hamburgers to one another.....

In our state, the two highest paid State employees are the two football coaches at the state universities... followed by the basketball coaches.

The ongoing catastrophe that is our "social welfare" system, that is anything but, and fails to produce anything except another generation of government-dependent thugs....and the development of a permanent underclass...

State and local agencies that are used as a jobs program, to fatten up a particular constituency, or tilt regulatory activities in one way or the other, rather than as a way to provide government services....

The Democrats used to be the prime proponents of this, as anyone who has waited in line at the DMV knows, but Republicans became expert in this by populating the federal agencies with of graduates of Liberty University and other similar places ref: Monica Goodling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Goodling

Our billion-dollars worth of jails are full of non-violent drug users, while our biggest growth industry, from various reports, is the importation of "illegal" dope from places such as Afghanistan, which is ostensibly under the control of the US Military, and one or more of our Southern neighbors.....

Our bridges fall down, our levees break....one thunderstorm in Chicago sends our air-traffic-control system, if you want to call it that, into complete chaos....

we have a massive bureaucracy in charge of preventing 75 year old ladies from carrying on more than three ounces of &^#$& toothpaste aboard an airplane flight...and containerloads of dope and other contraband coming into the country via the highways and ports....

But, we keep spending the money. In fact, we spend much more than we take in, because the coward politicians will not go to the public and ask them to pay for the government services...I don't blame them. They're probably embarrassed, the system being in the condition that it is in. They might be held accountable.

And accountability.... that's a joke. A politician's popularity is more linked to how much pork he can bring back to the state.... and congress still has a 90 percent re-election rate, despite the chaos.The bailout thing... that adds a completely new dimension to the problem....an unprecedented taxpayer reward of incompetence.... or corruption... or some combination, never before seen in human history. Ironically that whole thing has an excellent chance to swamp any of the above in terms of the sheer magnitude and audacity ....

I can come to only one conclusion: We are stupid.

I guess people are people.... maybe it's human nature. Individually, we can all see that there is a problem, but collectively, we are a bunch of idiots. I am afraid there is going to be a lot of chaos, and there is no way to make it any better with the system the way it is, and no guarantee that any other system will make it any better.

But, it's unsustainable, at the scale at which we are now trying to run it, in the way we are trying to do it.

Sorry to tell you this close to lunchtime. It's enough to make you sick.

GM Pensions Could Be Worthless

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:28:00 +0000

All pension schemes, be they GM, Social Security or 401K are not supportable in the long term without perpetual growth. The longer a company is in business, the more retired workers it generates. You need to keep increasing the number of new workers and the size of the business to pay for all the retirees you produce as well.Immigration was encouraged in the US to keep the Ponzi scheme alive. As long as more workers kept coming in and could be taxed on their labor and their consumption, those at the top of the pyriamid who got in early could still be paid off. Now of course, nobody wants new immigration, because there aren't any jobs for them on which they could be taxed to support everyone else.

It doesn't matter whether you saved for your retirement yourself in a 401K invested in "safe" Bonds or whether you participated in a pension scheme like GM or just stuffed your mattress full of dollar bills, you still will get the same result in all cases. There isn't productivity to keep paying nonproductive people in perpetuity. The money in the matress gets renderred valueless over time thru inflation.

There is no such thing as a "safe" investment, and everybody is going to get punished for simply being part of this system to begin with.Blaming GMs failure on the burden of its pension system or the Unions is ludicrous. The whole REASON workers gave up their lives to deadly boring jobs on the assembly line was because of the PROMISE made to them of security through the pension and health care bennies they offered to employees. That is HOW GM got its workers. Unions simply negotiated on behalf of the workers for the best deal they could get, and you always have more bargaining power as a group than as an individual. Of course as soon as they could find cheaper forms of unorganized labor in China and Mexico, off they went to those places with the jobs, but by then it was all being financed thru debt anyhow, and they still had the burden of obligations made to get the car company off the ground in the first place.

It had to fail, and so it did. Its really just a microcosm of the whole Capitalist scheme, which eventualy becomes top heavy and periodically has to crash. Long as there is still exploitable resource out there you can restart after a while, but we are fresh out of those resources now.How long before every last system here collapses?

ShortonOil pins the maximum as late in 2011, that seems a reasonable estimate to me, but I'll be surprised if it lasts that long. Every last financial scheme out there is in some stage of collapse at the moment, and is only being propped up by steady infusions of Funny Money. Its all going up in flames now, in the Greatest Bonfire of Paper Wealth in all of Recorded History.

AIG sues the US taxpayers for $306 million

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:50:00 +0000

Quote:

While the American International Group comes under fire from Congress over executive bonuses, it is quietly fighting the federal government for the return of $306 million in tax payments, some related to deals that were conducted through offshore tax havens.

A.I.G. sued the government last month in a bid to force it to return the payments, which stemmed in large part from its use of aggressive tax deals, some involving entities controlled by the company’s financial products unit in the Cayman Islands, Ireland, the Dutch Antilles and other offshore havens.

A.I.G. is effectively suing its majority owner, the government, which has an 80 percent stake and has poured nearly $200 billion into the insurer in a bid to avert its collapse and avoid troubling the global financial markets. The company is in effect asking for even more money, in the form of tax refunds. The suit also suggests that A.I.G. is spending taxpayer money to pursue its case, something it is legally entitled to do. Its initial claim was denied by the Internal Revenue Service last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/busin ... .html?_r=1

These guys are putting the robber barons of old to shame. They're actually using the American peoples' money to SUE the American people to get back all the taxes AIG was forced to pay when they got caught red handed in their tax haven scams.

Natural Gas Crisis Looming

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:05:00 +0000

Rockman has come up with a startling view of the near term future for natural gas in the US. He said he was ok with me starting a thread on this very important matter. Here are some of his quotes from the neighboring thread on drilling:

"...NG is where we'll see the big decline due to rigs being dropped. We're one of the big unconventional NG drillers and are dropping 40% of our rigs in the next few months as the contracts expire. The drop off in drilling combined with the steep decline rates of all those unconventional NG wells (which were the primary source of NG production increases in recent years) will result in significant supply drops in the next 12 to 24 months. Even if demand continues to fall as the economic contraction worsens we may see increasing NG prices down the road. And that's one more burden we won't need on top of every thing else."

"...I suspect the rig drop in the next few months will shock some folks. The down turn came very quick and companies responded as quickly. But the UNG wells take 2 to 3 months to drill. Add contractual commitments and it can take a company 5 or 6 months to completely shut down if they choose to do so. We and other companies are paying penalty fees in order to drop rigs faster.

And we see it daily on the personnel side. Rig workers at the bottom level are being dumped daily as well as salaries being cut for the keepers. As I type I’m working on a deep well in S La. There are a few young guys here with shiny new pick up trucks and worried faces. There are different job levels and many are being demoted to the next lower level. Essentially improving ability levels at a lower cost.

What I can't guess is how quickly production will fall. I might be too optimistic (for the consumer) by guessing it won't impact significantly for 18 to 24 months. If we have a colder then average winter (always the NG seller’s wet dream) there’s an outside chance we could see short term shortages as well as higher prices by next winter."

...
"Until I saw our latest drilling schedule I figured we wouldn't see a big drop for 18+ months or so. And then only if the slow down stretched out. But when I saw us cutting back from 18 rigs to 3 rigs I wondered if it might hit you folks by next winter (it will hit us air conditioned folks hard in Texas too...a big chunk of our electricity comes from NG). Even a better chance of rougher times ahead if the others operators are cutting back to a similar degree. I don't have a data base that I can model the decline potential but perhaps someone hanging around TOD does. Qualitatively, I am concerned we could see much higher NG prices in the next winter cycle even if demand destruction continues. Higher unemployment and higher NG/electricity prices: truly painful times."

"The current NG rate is composed of a number of different types of reservoir drive types (with different decline profiles) of different ages (thus at different points in their decline lives). There are old conventional NG fields which individually produce small volumes but collectively add up to a good bit. The decline rates in these fields is generally low. Then there are other conventional reservoirs which are relatively new. Last summer the Deep Water Independence Hub pipeline system became active in the GOM. It came on close to 1 billion cubic ft per of NG. Fortunate timing because it made up almost exactly for the production soon to be lost from the hurricanes. Much of that lost production is still offline and coming back on slowly. But no way to project those gains. Those Deep Water NG fields have high initial rates but fairly quick declines (4 to 6 years) but not as rapid as the unconventional NG plays. And then there are the UNG wells themselves with high initial rates and then quick decline followed by a low decline but a potential long life at those low rates.

To come up with a projected US NG rate for the next couple of years one needs the numbers and age of wells in each category above and their current flow rates to generate even a rough production model. That is the lacking data base I refer to above. A rig count projection only gives a part of the model: how many wells won’t be drilled in the future. An important part of the model but only a portion. That data base isn’t so much lacking but beyond my time and logistic capabilities. The USGS could throw 4 or 5 folks at the task and come up with a fairly good projection in a month. The data is out there and all publicly available. Whether they know to do it, want to do it, have already done it and don’t want to tell the public….who knows. I can only offer a qualitative guess. The rapid rise of US NG rates were due largely to the UNG and the Deep Water GOM. Both have relatively high decline rates. Thus my final conclusion: we’ll see NG rates go down almost as quickly, just as quickly or even more quickly then they rose.

Whatever the case, it won’t be good for the economy. Whether it drives NG rates below demand even as that demand declines with a worsening economy remains to be seen. Remember: all NG reservoirs are always declining at some velocity. The UNG reservoirs at a very high velocity. It’s their relative percentage of the mix that will determine the potential impact. It was only the ever expanding UNG drilling that hid that overall decline from view."

Link

Denninger to Congress: The Truth Ben & Hank aren't Telling

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:49:00 +0000

Congress, please listen:

The Truth is that we now require about $5 of debt to generate $1 of GDP.

The Truth is that the reason you were not asked to approve $700 billion to capitalize 10 new banks, thereby creating seven trillion in lending capacity is that the economy cannot soak up that new lending capacity; each dollar of new debt generates almost no aggregate GDP. If this were not true then that would be the logical and effective cure for the 'credit crunch" - if the borrowing capacity and impact on GDP necessary to help existed. They do not.

The Truth is that you were lied to about the purpose of the TARP/EESA, because what you were sold was mathematically impossible. It is supposed to be unlawful to lie to Congress.

The Truth is that the purpose of the EESA/TARP is to rescue the bankers on Wall Street and elsewhere who have made imprudent loans, all of whom are aware of the declining value of a dollar of debt in the economy - a fact they have intentionally concealed from you. The bankers (including Hank and Ben) all know how to do this math, and they are well-aware that the best they can do at this point is to "Rob every dollar you can while the getting is good, and hope they don't figure it out before you get the cash."

The Truth is that once you reach a level where a dollar in debt will not support a dollar in GDP you must inevitably either pay down or default that excess debt. Unfortunately, in this case we must pay down or default approximately 80% of the aggregate public and private debt in the United States in order to return to a standard were $1 in debt will generate $1 in GDP. Defaulting or paying down less will "turn the clock back" to a degree, but does not change the ultimate outcome. Only returning to $1 of debt returning $1 or more of GDP, and holding the total level of debt outstanding at or below that level, results in a stable monetary system.

The Truth is that if we reach the point where a dollar of debt has a NEGATIVE impact on GDP The United States monetary system and government will implode. The reason for this is mathematically obvious - each additional dollar of borrowing beyond that point actually contracts GDP instead of growing it; this is, for all intents and purposes, a "black hole". It is that event that has led to the implosion of other monetary systems such as the hyperinflationary implosion of Argentina.

Oil Price: Dead Cat Bounce

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:00:00 +0000

You may have heard this little nugget of wisdom referring to market behaviour as prices fall.

"Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls far enough".

It works the same way in reverse. Take a peek at oil's roller-coaster ride over the past decade. link Expect price volatility like never before seen... if Peak Oil is a credible concept.

It's just Adam Smith's cold, dead hand enforcing supply & demand economic behaviour. The recent meteoric fall in oil's price should be at least as disturbing as it's assent... it heralds the violent correction to come.

These swings will devastate hydrocarbon alternative industries globally. With no firm economic base to ensure profitability, these fledgling oil alternative businesses will struggle for financing, and ultimately be delayed by years... perhaps decades. Imagine the downstream impact this interruption will have on our collective future.

"Drill baby drill" should contribute nicely to wild oscillations in price.

Can you say "demand destruction"?

I knew you could.

How about "poverty"?

Yeah... thought so.

The Coming Peak Oil Grand Depression

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 01:54:00 +0000

Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 10:48 pm

Yeah... in '05

The Great Depression, which began in late 1929 and lasted for about a decade, was the worst economic downturn in U.S. history, and one which spread to virtually all of the industrialized world. The coming Grand Depression will be no less far-reaching. The "roaring twenties" was an era when our country prospered tremendously, much like we have done over the last few years. And, like then, it was all due to wild speculation and inflated assets. In the 1920's, the U.S. came to rely upon two things in order for the economy to remain on an even keel: credit sales, and luxury spending and investment from the rich.

Same thing today.

Our consumer spending is not funded by an increase in income wages, but by an illusionary equity in our homes. In other words, all the inflation has gone into real estate prices. Prices have reached levels that make no sense in terms of traditional patterns and rules of thumb for valuation. A range of evidence suggests that at the market peak in September 1929, something like forty percent of stock market values were pure air: prices above fundamental values for no reason other than that a wide cross-section of investors thought that the stock market would go up because it had gone up. Now, real estate investors think the same thing of the housing market.

In particular, the FED's efforts to lower interest rates have caused an asset bubble to form around real estate. People tend to over-invest when interest rates are low and when interest rates are raised to stave off the inevitable inflation, the bubble pops. That process is under way as I write this. Throughout the years preceding the Stock Market crash of 1929, the Fed did just that. The Fed set below market interest rates and low reserve requirements that all favored easy credit. The money supply actual increased by about 60% during this time. The phrase "buying on margin" entered the American vocabulary at this time as more and more Americans over-extended themselves to take advantage of the soaring stock market. Today, it is the housing market, and to some extent the stock market again. It was in 1929 that the Fed realized that it could not sustain its current policy. When it started to raise interest rates, the whole house of cards collapsed. The FED is starting to raise interest rates now for the same reason--to cool off consumer spending/speculation and reel in the trade deficit.

One of our members, somethingtosay, suggested I "interview and learn from the people that lived and survived the great Depression of the 30's. Report back to this Web site on the wisdom they learned the hard way." Some of the following is from some old-timers I talked with recently, and the rest from interviews posted on the Internet. I will let the following quotes speak for themselves. It is a chilling account.

Quote:

Well, everybody went on relief, and everyone raised a big garden. We raised everything from peas to potatoes and onions, and the extra vegetables we had we sold to people who didn't raise one. We lived off that garden for some time, and it was a big help. Once a month they'd give commodities out. You'd get dried beans, pound of bacon, pound of butter, dried milk, and sugar, and depending on how big your family was, was how much you got; and since we had the cow, we would trade the dried milk for coffee to people who didn't like coffee. That was supposed to last you a whole month, but that was government surplus, and they'd have a place that they dished that out; and I tell you we were so poor we had a gas stove, but we didn't even have the money to hook it up. We also had an icebox and couldn't even afford ten cents a day to put ice in it. When my son was born I'd mix his formula and put it down in the well on the rope and every time I had to feed him I would pull the rope up and get the bottle, but we had no refrigeration and everything we needed refrigerated went across the street to my mom and dad's place. When the war started in 1941, a lot of jobs were left vacant when the men left for war, so unemployment virtually disappeared after that.

Quote:

Gas was sparse, so when me and a group of buddies would drive down a hill, we'd turn off the car so we wouldn't waste gas.

Quote:

Seemed to have just enough food to eat...no leftovers...had to eat everything on our plate. Things we take for granted now, such as water and heat in our homes was something precious in the depression. All farmers had to can food for winter and they ate out of gardens in the summer on a farm, there was no money and the people had to eat from gardens

Quote:

It has affected me all my life. It made a lot of people learn how to conserve. My dad could not find work so we went to live on the farm with my dad's parents. We had no money so when we needed something we had to "make do" or do without.

Quote:

The city was affected more than rural areas. We always had food and wood from the farm, but city people had very little food or wood. They had to collect coal that dropped from the trains. Lived on a farm and had plenty to eat because we grew everything moved from town to live in Smithfield MO on a farm so that they could grow crops and have food to eat.

Quote:

African Americans suffered more than whites, since their jobs were often taken away from them and given to whites.

Quote:

Every tear I saw my mother shed was over the lack of money. All we seemed to do was to, literally, count the pennies in the house among all of us. We fought over money almost all the time, my mother would go into a panic if she could not account for every penny. Not one cent was ever foolishly spent and not one cent ever went for anything that was not vital to life. The memory that I retain to this day (77 years old) is that of my parents crying, singularly and together, about money! I remember one dinner where my mother, myself and my brothers and sister sat down to a meal. The meal consisted of 3 boiled potatoes and one slice of white bread which we divided up amongst us. I noticed my mother was not eating and I asked her why she was not eating. She answered that she was on a diet. When I was about 50 years of age it hit me that she had not been on a diet but was giving up what there was to us!

Quote:

When I talk about the essentials of life I mean just that. The list is easy to put together and here it is:
Rent, food, but no ice cream, candy, baked goods; only the essentials, electricity, gas for the stove, clothing, medicineâ€”and that was it. We walked everywhere and I do mean everywhere. If a trip was less than 5 miles we would walk it.

There are five things that seem to be predominating in all that I have read about the Great Depression:
1) There was not one single private or public institution that was up to the task of coping with the depression.
2) The United States suffered more than any country in the world since we were the most industrialized.
3) People had to grow much of their own food in gardens.
4) There was a mass exodus to the country to live with farm relatives.
5) Money was seldom seen.

Are we headed there once again as peak oil/gas inhibits our ability to grow the economy, provide new jobs, and feed--clothe--house the new comers? Even without peak oil, this seems to be in the cards. And without an abundance of cheap energy to grow our way out of it, the forecast for the future is ominous.

Bush Bailout Plan is Unconstitutional debt servitude

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:39:00 +0000

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits "debt servitude." The 13th Amendment prohibits the use of "fear" and "intimidation" to coerce payment of debts. The prohibition of debt servitude includes peonage. For a primer, read this wiki on it:

13th Amendment Wiki

The Bush plan violates the 13th Amendment, because it is a plan to socialize the debts of wealthy onto the backs of the taxpayers using fear tactics. On the one hand, the President argues a bailout is needed to prevent "financial panic", but what does that mean? Bush, in his address to the nation, defined "financial panic" as a "recession."

Quote:

And ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession.

Text of Bush' speech

A recession is a normal part of the economic business cycle. America has gone through many recessions. The normal recession last about 6-9 months, the longest recession since 1953 lasted 18 months.

Quote:

On average, the market peaks about six months prior to the start of a contraction and begins to decline more aggressively as the contraction begins. Based on the 9 previous recessions since 1953, the market bottomed an average of 6 to 7 months into the recession (the average recession has lasted 11 months). But this average masks a lot of variability. There have been important bear markets that lasted longer. The market bottomed 18 months after the beginning of the 2001 recession and 10 months after the start of the 1973 recession.

A recession, even a severe recession, doesn't justify pushing capitalism aside and socializing debt of the wealthy and forcing taxpayers to pay for it long after the recession is over.

This bailout is not in the best interest of the taxpayers and is not intended to help them. The fear mongering isn't justified. For example, last night Bush tried to scare the taxpayer by saying if the bailout wasn't approved immediately, their local banks might close. Here's what Bush said:

Quote:

The government's top economic experts warn that without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic, and a distressing scenario would unfold:

More banks could fail, including some in your community.

Text of Bush' speech

This isn't true. The bailout won't prevent community banks from failing. The problem is, the subtle lie is, the bailout is not intended to help the local banks and won't help the local banks. In fact, for over a year now, the FDIC has said that in 2009 they expect numerous regional bank failures, and the causes of these failures will not be alleviated by this bailout plan. In fact, as Bush is asking for $700 billion bailout, the FDIC, which insures the banks, is asking for a $150 billion in insurance based on an its estimate that 100 banks that are going to fail next year.

Bloomberg

Further, this banking expert says the banks can weather this storm just fine, that the bailouts aren't necessary.

Quote:

So you oppose the idea of the government putting preferred equity into solvent but troubled banks that cannot raise capital on reasonable terms?

Ely: Yes, it is not necessary, even now. There is absolutely no need for the Treasury to have the authority, as you suggested, to "inject capital into solvent banks that are temporarily unable to raise new capital." If a bank truly is solvent, it can raise additional capital or sell itself, if its present owners are realistic about what their bank is worth. The reason solvent banks have a problem raising capital, or selling themselves to a stronger bank, is that they set their price too high, as did AIG. As an aside, I am glad to see AIG's shareholders getting whacked by the warrants associated with the Fed's taxpayer's loan to AIG. There is absolutely no need for the taxpayer to subsidize banks so they can stay independent, provided no barriers are erected to prevent new entrants into bank or specific banking markets.

This bankinNaked Capitalism

So, Bush is full of crap. He is fear mongering. He is using unjustified fear of calamity to coerce the American people to pay the debts of the wealthy, which is classic indentured servitude prohibited by the Constitution.

Relocalization and Cottage Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:57:00 +0000

I started this all off by thinking about food preparation. I was packing corn in Mylar bags and got to thinking that none of my neighbors were doing this, and that few of them would know what to do with it, and that even fewer have the tools to do much with it. This is where it took me... Having spent the last few decades living in cities, eating fast food, prepackaged TV dinners, and food so heavily processed they can't identify the ingredients, a great many people have lost the ability to prepare basic meals from fundamental ingredients. Corn, rice, wheat, oats, and beans are simple foods. They are available cheap, in high volume, and store for years when properly packaged. There are plenty of people who are not able to identify whole wheat. Hand someone a bag of whole dry corn, they have no idea what to do with it.

Rice, on the other hand, has a chance. I was looking online at some recipes for beans. One recipe said something like open the can, cut some hot dogs, mix the hot dogs and beans in a bowl, microwave for 2 minutes, serves 4. years ago I was training a kid to be a shrt order cook at a diner just outside albany NY. We had an order for 2 eggs over easy with some toast. I told him to put two eggs in a pan, buttering it first, then 2 slice of bread in the toaster. He buttered the pan, put in 2 eggs, then showed me to see if he had done it right. I said "Thats good with the butter, but you'll need to crack the eggs open. I though it best if I took care of the eggs, he moved on to the toaster. After a few seconds I hear the guy going "Ouch, Ouch!" It was a conveyor belt toaster, he did not understand that you simply set the bread on the belt. He was singing his hands holding the bread inside the toaster. Simple skills have been lost. Much of the loss is a result in the simple nature of modern appliances. It used to be common for every home to have a woodstove or fireplace, a couple of cast iron skillets or pans, and every town had a grain mill. The loss of the electrical grid will remove the ability to cook a meal from a great many homes in the developed world. If you don't own a grain mill, how many of your friends have one. Where is the nearest one to which you can gain access. What can you make with dried whole corn and or beans?

In the absence of electricity, how many people out there can heat a quart of water to 160 degrees? Its not that many. There are some people who have the ability, campers, camp stoves, bbq grills, some woodstoves out there as well. I can see these items being in high demand in a crisis situation. Bread is a common staple. Local bakers are still around, although the big box stores with a bakery department are surely cutting into the market. I live in a town with 10,000 other people. I know of 1 small bakery downtown. Where is the bread made that the big box stores stock? I have no idea. How many people do you know who have made bread before? The ability to bake bread in a crisis situation would be a skill in such demand that I don't know what to predict. This of course assumes ground wheat, oil, sugar, salt and yeast is available, along with a working oven to bake it in. To maintain bread production a community would need everything already in place to last a considerable period or the ingredients and energy brought in regularly. Equipment which operated on locally available renewable energy would be required at the very least in the event the electricity goes down. In a Post Peak Oil collapse, everyone returns to gardening to replace the lost goods from failed distribution systems. How many of these people will be able to raise enough tomatoes, as well as other ingredients, and produce tomato sauce.

How many have a cooking device which will allow them to do so if they knew how? Preparing for the Future is a tremendous project, requiring tools, expertise, systems, equipment and skills for even the most basic of self sufficient production. The ability to raise and grow food. Garden tools, arable land, water, energy to move the water, the know how to raise this food in a sustainable, duplicatable manner. Harvesting and processing the food, and storing it. Pressure canners, as well as jars and lids, dehydrators, sinks, stoves, pots and pans, mills, grinders, knives, and of course all the tools and supplies to clean up and maintain sanitation. Cooking equipment, be it stoves, ovens, open fires, smokers, BBQ pits, pots, pans, griddles, and a myriad of smallwares are essential to a diet based on local foods coming ripe at different times. How many people do you know who can make their own cheese, flour, butter, vinegar, or wine, have all the equipment in place and are able to grow all the ingredients in their backyard? Don't get me wrong, there are people out there with some ability. Soap and candle making is a hobby craft, basket weaving, pottery, cooking, organic gardening as well. There are those who tinker around in the shop with metal sculpture or blacksmithing, woodworking set up with great skill and a keen eye for detail. Some people make quilts, dresses, even hats. Of all these people, what percentage would be able to continue their skills without electricity and a distribution system to bring them supplies and actuate equipment? A crash that is slow enough to motivate people to get deeper into their crafts to such an extent that they are able to create their products from local materials is a best case scenario.

Small economies and team work can help. One guy cuts down trees, makes lumber and firewood. Another builds fences and cabinets. Someone raises sheep for meat and wool, another takes fresh wool and turns it into yarn, then socks. Someone raises bees for honey and wax, others make candles and mead. The population needs time to relearn crafts which were performed locally a century ago, lost to the ravages of machines and industrial production. A town without a beekeeper has no honey and no candles. Maybe there is a beekeeper in a town close by. Sure their may be horses, but the closest farrier is 50 miles away. If the farrier needs charcoal, he's hoping there are plenty of trees around and someone who knows how to produce charcoal, with the equipment in place. There are seamstresses out there who can make a suit of clothes in her home, but she needs a source of thread, fabric, and parts for the sewing machine. Farmer John can raise the wheat, mill it, even bake the flour into bread. He still has to get it from the farm to the customer, and needs a system of money or barter in order for his activity to be worth his effort.

Relearning a single skill for a cottage industry is all well and good but for that industry to be viable, a support system needs to be in place. While barter can replace money as a means of trading goods and services, there needs to be something out there to trade for. Farmer John is not going to spend all his time baking bread in order to give it away. He'd do better spending some of his time canning tomato sauce or cutting firewood for the winter. An entire community needs to relearn a wide array of skills in order that ancillary products and services are available. It takes time to learn a craft, and the right tools and equipment to do it. Whats more, the tools equipment and skills need to be useful in a pradigm of energy depletion. You can't run to Sears, buy a bunch of tools and start building cabinets unless you already have an understanding-even a basic one-of the steps involved. To keep going, your tools will need to work without elecctricity or fossil fuels. People can learn, they do it all the time, but the awareness of what they will need for the future is not in place on a scale that will be needed to continue any sort of localized barter based economy. The firewood guy will eventually have to give up his chainsaw for an axe, and give up his F250 for a team of horses to haul the logs out of the woods, otherwise there is no more firewood. Furthermore, someone needs to have axes and teams of horses in place ready to sell.

How then, do we move backwards? How does a society, with most of the people having no clue of future events, move from being dependent on a vast and intertwined network of goods and services produced by the indigenous people of whereever, to a local resource and renewable energy based society, and do so in the timeframe available (20-30 years using the most liberal extimates, 10-20 with resonable estimates, 5-10 with worst case scenarios), all the while prices on everything increasing, world politics getting more militaristic, governments continuously reducing civil liberties, shortages of goods on the market and weather patterns resembling bad Hollywood movies? I think the world will simply explode under the pressure.

Environmental Services Industry Booming

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:25:00 +0000

So I have been tracking the activities of industries directly related to peak oil, including associated environmental remediation markets as an indicator of where we really stand in confronting the massive environmental challenges ahead of us.

If there is anything that the so called "free market" system does well, it's getting on top of potentially profitable trends. By examining these commercial efforts we can deduce the level of engagement on a variety of environmental topics, as well as make some meaningful predictions about the future based on the trend analysis.

I like to examine primarily environmental remediation & disaster prevention companies which I consider to have much more real-world impact than stuff like indoor mold remediation for example. These industrial caliber outfits handle things like cleaning up hazardous material sites, radioactive remediation, environmental compliance monitoring etc...

While the governmental side of environmental services is an influential and useful contribution, it can never match the power the market has to transform the landscape of a given market.

Make almost anything profitable, and business will make it happen... guaranteed.

Peak Oil means the smart money goes into oil-alternative businesses, for very obvious reasons. A person could look at Peak Oil, and conclude that there are significant opportunities in environmental services, based on the idea of servicing the needs of oil-alternative companies, who in many cases, will have painful environmental challenges to handle.

Imagine the scope of what is happening to the global energy business as companies & governments struggle with ever increasing prices for conventional oil. We will strip-mine Canada for oil... level the rocky mountains for shale... exploit our nature preserves... convert coal into oil... and on and on.

All these activities have terrible environmental consequences both in terms of destroying ecosystems, and accelerating greenhouse gas emissions from these very dirty fuel sources. Even gentle solar businesses use heroic amounts of electricity in manufacturing.

So, if my theory is correct about the market following trends, then we should see many new ventures into markets to serve these needs.

Sure enough... amazing growth in new companies & new initiatives from existing companies. There is a buying, merging, partnering frenzy going on that reminds me of the DOT com days, where an entire new market was being born in months rather than years.

Fluor, (a giant energy company), is well ahead of the curve looking at co2 sequestration technology for coal power plants, in anticipation of future demand.

Quote:

The primary focus of this partnership is to enhance the technology and to demonstrate its application to safely separate carbon from the flue gas of a coal-fired power plant. This will be the first demonstration of the technology on a coal-fired power plant. Both companies, in applying the Econamine FG+ process, will demonstrate an optimized adaptation of the CO2 scrubbing process that complies with U.S. and EU environmental requirements. E.ON brings essential experience in the operation and engineering of coal-fired power plants to this strategic partnership.

Forbes

Small & medium sized companies are re-capitalizing to expand their services in anticipation of mounting demand. USA Environment just partnered with an investment firm for exactly this reason...

Quote:

Wingate Partners and USA Environment LP (USA) have joined forces in a recapitalization of USA.

USA is a full-service environmental contractor that provides a full range of high-end environmental services. The company is a licensed contractor in 30 states that specializes in turnkey solutions for any environmental construction, remediation, industrial services, radioactive material handling, disposal, transportation or spill problem.

IVS

And so forth & so on... too many to really track, but a very clear indicator that despite their silent treatment of peak oil, many seem quite aware of what's coming.

It would be interesting to see some gross statistics showing percent growth broken down by service I think.

Your dog wants remediation.

Weekly US Petroleum and NG Supply Reports

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:46:00 +0000

Quote:

Prediction
Unleaded Prediction 9-May
Beginning Inv mbbl 211.9
Imports Wk/Day 9.8 1.4
Production Wk/Day 61.6 8.8
Available 283.3
Balance Wk/Day 72.1 10.3
Ending Inv Mbbl 211.20
Prod Supplied 9.3
Predicted Change -0.7

Distillates Prediction 9-May
Beginning Inv mbbl 105.7
Imports Wk/Day 1.4 0.2
Production Wk/Day 29.4 4.2
Available 136.5
Balance Wk/Day 30.8 4.4
Ending Inv Mbbl 105.7
Prod Supplied 4.3
Predicted Change 0.0

Crude Oil Prediction 9-May
Beginning Inventory 325.6
Domestic Prod 35.679 5.097
Imports 72.8 10.4
Total Available 434.079
Provided to Refineries 104.3 14.9
Ending Inventory 329.779
Predicted Change 4.179
Ref Utilization 86

I am not smart enough to predict that this week will be any different from last week. The last couple of weeks we have seen a flood of imports in both crude oil and unleaded (not distillates) and lower than normal refinery utilization, because of the high crude oil prices and relatively low refinery margins.

The unleaded inventory will be especially interesting. We should be in the time of year when this inventory is built up to take care of summer demand, and the numbers themselves suggest that there is plenty of gas around, but even with fairly strong imports of 1.4 mbpd, the demand lately has been such that with the refinery system running the way it was last week, at about 85% capacity, we will still see a slight draw down in unleaded inventory. The longer this goes on, the more serious it is going to get.

In crude oil, I have assumed above the same low inputs to refineries, high imports (despite the pricing) and the same domestic production we always have, and the result is a pretty strong build.

In distillates, we saw a little bump in demand last week, with spring planting just underway, and very low net imports, and if that same thing happens this week, with typical production levels of 4.2 or so, we will see this inventory break just about even.

Code:

Closer to Reality

pup55 28
Analysts 26
Tie 0
Avg 0.518518519

Directional Correctness
pup55 36
analysts 41
ttest 0.028524

Sum of Weekly Predictions
pup55 Analysts Actual
Unleaded 12.187 -0.125 4.1
Distilla -19.537 -13.820 -21.5
Crude 34.839 32.660 36

Avg Difference from Reality
pup55 analysts t-prob
Unleaded -0.426 0.222 0.07
Distilla -0.103 -0.404 0.22
Crude 0.061 0.176 0.34

Deviation from Reality (Abs Value)
pup55 analysts t-prob
Unleaded 1.601 1.536 0.41
Distilla 1.168 1.180 0.48
Crude 3.844 3.021 0.02

pup55 Forecast Correctness
Production
Avg Exact
Unleaded 0.019 4
Distilla -0.013 5
Crude 0.007 18

Imports
Avg Exact
Unleaded 0.025 5
Distilla 0.000 7
Crude 0.026 1

Demand
Avg Exact
Unleaded 0.104 2
Distilla 0.047 3
Crude -0.061 5

Here are the stats for the year-to-date. Despite being slightly ahead of the analysts on closeness to reality (over 50%, which as we all know was my long term goal) the pesky analysts are beating me on average deviation from reality in crude oil and unleaded, by a statistically significant margin.

The reason for this is that my little unleaded demand model underestimated demand consistently in Jan-March (it has been pretty close the last couple of weeks) and also, the lack of ability to predict crude oil and unleaded imports. Of the first roughly six months of the year, I have only managed to correctly predict crude oil imports once.

Other than that, pretty good. Now that I understand the seasonality a little bit better, it should be possible to refine this demand model some.

The crude oil imports are up to the Saudis, Mexicans, and weather conditions in the Gulf, so I do not feel too bad about that.

Thanks for your help as we continue to try to understand this important data a little better, to keep with the original goal of the thread, which is to use these reports as a potential indicator that the effects of PO are being felt in the US.

Top 20 Oil Consuming Countries in the World (2007).

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Dunlap) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:41:00 +0000

Country Consumption (MBD)

1. USA- 20,698,000

2. China- 7,855,000

3. Japan- 5,041,000

4. India- 2,748,000

5. Russia- 2,699,000

6. Germany- 2,393,000

7. South Korea- 2,371,000

8. Canada- 2,303,000

9. Brazil- 2,192,000

10. Saudi Arabia- 2,154,000

11. Mexico- 2,024,000

12. France- 1,919,000

13. Italy- 1,745,000

14. UK- 1,696,000

15. Iran- 1,621,000

16. Spain- 1,615,000

17. Indonesia- 1,157,000

18. Taiwan- 1,123,000

19. Netherlands- 1,044,000

20. Australia- 935,000

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2007.