Doc 224899

BP Scientist: Ethanol Easier than Biodiesel

Natural gas is a nonrenewable natural energy resource, just as petroleum is. If a massive investment is made to change over to natural gas, the natural gas will run out before the conversion is complete, and we'll be in the same situation with respect to reliance on an energy source that we're in now, with one exception.

The difference is that ALL the resources that will go into converstion to a new NG energy technology are non-renewable and limited. Anything we use converting to a non-renewable energy resource will not be available for use in converting to a subsequent energy resource. If we don't get it right soon it will be too late, and global catastrophe will result.

Many people believe that converting to a nonrenewable energy resource like natural gas will delay conversion to a renewable resource like solar, or wind, or geothermal, or tidal, or nuclear (for all intents and purposes, indefinitely renewable). If the delay is too long and/or too costly, we'll pass the point when we can convert without massive loss of life on a national and global scale, and there will be no way to sustain civilization as we know it.

Leeb calls that outcome "Game Over". I think it's fitting.

Iran will be a net importer of oil in a couple of years, if they aren't already, so the natural gas that comes from their oil wells enables them to afford exporting oil for a few years longer. And that's all it does.

On Jul 27 12:59 PM kebu77 wrote:

> toomuchgas says, "Why not just use abundant NG as fuel and save all
> the processing cost, waste products, and land and water pollution."
>
>
> Good enough for the Iranians, should be good enough for us... ;)
> But seriously, there is a lot of wasted NG, in the form of stranded
> gas released during oil recovery, that is flared, but could be converted
> into methanol via portable plants...

BP Scientist: Ethanol Easier than Biodiesel

Ethanol is more stable than biodiesel, so ethanol has a practical shelf life that biodiesel doesn't. Nonetheless, until cellulosic ethanol is feasible on a massive scale it just doesn't make sense to use concentrated vegetable nutrient calories for liquid fuel.

Best Investments for Rising Oil

The numbers and the fundamentals all point to one stock: PBR. If you care about the fundamentals of oil services, PBR gets the nod because they control 85% of the deepwater offshore exploration and production rigs in the world. If you care about the fundamentals of production, PBR again gets the nod because their government supports and protects the oil company and makes it easy for PBR to make profits.

By comparison, XOM is based in a country that resents XOM's success and leadership in the sector (blame the media and the government for this silly attitude), where the government favors plaintiff's attorneys more than corporations that satisfy basic needs, and where the government taxes XOM ruthlessly after the Kings of Torts are done with it.

Swine Flu Threatens Already Weak Global Economy

The swine flu over-reaction is ridiculously costly, but the Obama administration doesn't care about that cost. They're happy because we, America's citizens, are paying for a public relations campaign that Obamanistas have engineered to scare the public into approving of their bureaucracy-heavy lawyer’s-fee-generating "healthcare reform" legislative package.

That expensive healthcare reform plan entirely ignores a long-overdue legislative approach that would cut healthcare costs by about 70%: tort reform. The Obama plan is little more than re-packaged Clinton-style healthcare reform, which also protected the huge vig raked in by thieving lawyers. No surprise in any of this, except it is all so entirely true to form, and exactly the sort of government rule by manipulating public fear that was exposed by Michael Creighton in "State of Fear".

Even the new acting director of CDC (notice the term "acting director") has been careful to avoid statements that compare this batch of H1N1 virus from Mexico to normal human flu, and to the 1918 flu, but then we should understand that he's on a tight leash and wants to get a letter in the mail telling him he's the new full-time director of CDC, and if he told the public the truth he wouldn't have a chance to get that letter. He couldn’t even say, “You don’t get swine flu from eating dead pig meat because viruses die when the host organism’s cells die,” which is basic high school cell biology that everybody needs to be reminded of so they don’t eschew pork products

You'll also notice that in spite of the fact that isolation and quarantine have been the default strategies in infectious disease epidemic control for over a hundred years, the acting director of CDC couldn’t come out and call for sealing the border with Mexico, where the allegedly dangerous infection comes from, and where all the people carrying it into the US are coming from. Why is that? Could it be that doing so would finally establish one legitimate reason for correcting the porosity of the US-Mexican border, and Democrats don’t want to risk alienating Hispanics, even if it means increasing the risk of killing hundreds of thousands of Americans? (That’s the sort of risk that a real flu pandemic would entail, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. The fact that the border isn’t being sealed may actually prove that it isn’t a legitimate pandemic flu risk.)

So let's look at this H1N1 and the alleged lethality risk it carries.

In Mexico there have been maybe a 100 to 1000 deaths (by the time you read this), reported to American newsies by Mexican officials who are bought and paid for by the American government and who would be utterly defenseless against drug gangsters if it weren't for US support and protection, and who will say whatever they're told to say. Right now they're busy hyping the flu scare and maintaining the silly fiction that drug gangsters in Mexico get their guns from Bob's Bait and Tackle in Waco.

Why are Mexicans dying of this flu? Well, maybe it's because the infection has greater lethality when it makes its initial jump from Mexican swine to humans, and less lethality in its first human-to-human jump, and not much after that. It's a common pattern. The other reason would be that Mexico sells antibiotics over-the-counter without prescription, so people in Mexico commonly self-medicate in a way that either under-treats bacterial infections or otherwise encourages antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains to flourish in Mexico, and Mexicans with H1N1 flu are dying from secondary bacterial respiratory infections that are either under-treated or that involve antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The third reason would be that healthcare in Mexico is even worse than healthcare in Canada or England, so people in Mexico generally just stay home and die or get Mexican healthcare and die when they get sick.

Biologically, this H1N1 viral strain in today's news clearly lacks the lethality factors that have been present in the serious pandemics in the past. In other words, it's wimpy flu, not big strong scary flu.

Thirdly, this H1N1 strain of flu has been infecting humans in Mexico for at least 4 months (just do a little googling for yourself if you don't believe me), and nobody had any reason to make a big deal about it until the Obamanistas needed an infectious disease scare to bully the masses with.

Oh, you ask, didn’t public health officials say there was a warning? Yes, they did. If you were a public health official, and you were in today’s political environment where every boss in the country has been shown over and over that survival today requires a keep-your-head-down-an... mode of professional conduct, you’d put out the warnings you were instructed to put out.

Oh, you ask, didn’t the WHO issue warnings? Yup, and who do you think funds most of what the WHO does every year, without bothering to go to congress for consideration of whether that funding is justified?

Give me a call when 36,000 people in America have died from this strain of H1N1 flu in a year, which is the average rate at which American’s die from normal flu in a normal year. Until then, I’m betting that I’ll be more likely die from being hit by a solid iridium meteorite than from infection with H1N1 flu.

Opportunities in the Oil Sector

Why don't we simply and inexpensively recover the 2,000,000,000,000 barrels of oil in the Bakken Formation (a.k.a. Williston) in Montana and North Dakota, as ordered by the president 3 years ago?

I hope nobody is so mad about "Red State" dissent that the whole nation is being made to suffer, but that's sure what it looks like.