No gas

[IPerkWVU]

Access to inexpensive LNG/ natural gas is required for so many industrial applications.

Think oil refineries, essentially you ‘boil oil’ to distill it into finished products, lots of natural gas going into those heaters.

 

[roverhi]

I’m not sure. Israel has been doing desalination for a while now with great success from what I’ve read.

I’m also not sure how California can continue to recycle water when they are running out of water with each passing day (or so it seems).

California doesn't have a water shortage problem, problem is storage. That can be traced back to Jerry Brown and the Sierra Club in the '60s. There was a proposal to build close to a dozen reservoirs that would store water that now goes into the ocean. Brown and the Sierra Club killed the plan and only a few of the reservoirs were built leaving the state in its present water emergency. The bulk of California water usage is agriculture. Anyone who drove I-5 during the last drought emergency remembers seeing the acres and acres and acres of farms that were left fallow or dead orchards. That means expensive food, bankrupt farmers and food production exported to countries that aren't so stupid.

Wild Catters went full bore into drilling and fracking at the beginning of the Millennium. It takes about $160 a barrel to make fracking break even. When the oil prices dropped to under $140 in the mid teens a host of the drillers went bust. Understand there was a record of number of oil patch bankruptcies as a result. Unfortunately when demand and/or world conditions brought the price back above $160 a barrel there aren't enough surviving driller/frackers to meet the demand. Classic example of law of supply and demand. Unfortunately the current administration is very happy with high fuel prices and would drive them higher if they could get away with it. They have done nothing but obstruct increasing supply of US produced oil while begging such wonderful governments as Venezuela, Saudi's, Iran and even Russia to make up the slack. The oil producing nations are very happy with $100 a barrel and tickled pink with $150 a barrel oil so aren't in the mood to make up for the loss of Russian Oil. reduced US production and increased world demand. Oil prices were going up before Russia invaded the Ukraine so it's not just that that is causing the problem.

 

[pc1p]

Since this is now a somewhat energy thread.

https://www.owensborotimes.com/news...ailing-hawesville-operations-for-9-12-months/

In order to continue to operate its smelter located at 1627 State Route 3543, Hawesville, Kentucky (the "Hawesville Smelter"), Century Aluminum of Kentucky GP ("Century" or the "Company") must be able to purchase reliable, affordable electric power. Unfortunately, an unprecedented rise in global energy prices arising from the Russian war in Ukraine has dramatically increased the price of energy in the U.S. and around the globe. The cost required to run our Hawesville, KY, facility has more than tripled the historical average in a very short period. Given these circumstances it is necessary to fully curtail operations for a period of approximately nine to twelve months at Hawesville until energy prices return to more normalized levels. This is expected to result in the layoff of 628 Hawesville Smelter employees, including 504 employees represented by the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial Service Workers Union, AFL-CIO(*USW").

Century is one of just a handful of aluminum smelters left in the United States and the only high-purity smelter in the world. Hawesville is Century's largest U.S. smelter and is the largest producer of high-purity primary aluminum in North America. Four of Hawesville's five potlines are capable of producing high-purity aluminum, which supports the United States' national security efforts and is used in defense applications such as the F16, Airbus, Naval war vessels, 747 airplanes and the International Space Station.

I don't work in the aluminum world and don't know their electricity/energy demands (here are some details from 2009), but something about this smells fishy...

I work in high-volume, relatively low-margin industrial gas manufacturing. Most of our CO2 sites use ~90,000 MWH per year and most of our ASU sites use ~310,000 MWH per year. Yes, energy has been expensive, but so has demand. In a world where "make it and they will buy it", it's hard to believe that something else is at play here...

I mean, this is the same location that was somewhat recently investing $116,000,000 to upgrade the smelter: https://www.kentuckytoday.com/state...cle_834e0c94-caa4-527a-bce9-db0e47548719.html

But who also has a history of locking out union workers while hiring temporary replacements: https://www.lanereport.com/48350/20...cks-out-560-steelworkers-at-kentucky-smelter/

I wonder if the layoffs are part of Century's broader strategy to move aluminum prices higher, while keeping production higher at non-USW locations...???

 

[pc1p]

California doesn't have a water shortage problem, problem is storage. That can be traced back to Jerry Brown and the Sierra Club in the '60s. There was a proposal to build close to a dozen reservoirs that would store water that now goes into the ocean. Brown and the Sierra Club killed the plan and only a few of the reservoirs were built leaving the state in its present water emergency. The bulk of California water usage is agriculture. Anyone who drove I-5 during the last drought emergency remembers seeing the acres and acres and acres of farms that were left fallow or dead orchards. That means expensive food, bankrupt farmers and food production exported to countries that aren't so stupid.

Wild Catters went full bore into drilling and fracking at the beginning of the Millennium. It takes about $160 a barrel to make fracking break even. When the oil prices dropped to under $140 in the mid teens a host of the drillers went bust. Understand there was a record of number of oil patch bankruptcies as a result. Unfortunately when demand and/or world conditions brought the price back above $160 a barrel there aren't enough surviving driller/frackers to meet the demand. Classic example of law of supply and demand. Unfortunately the current administration is very happy with high fuel prices and would drive them higher if they could get away with it. They have done nothing but obstruct increasing supply of US produced oil while begging such wonderful governments as Venezuela, Saudi's, Iran and even Russia to make up the slack. The oil producing nations are very happy with $100 a barrel and tickled pink with $150 a barrel oil so aren't in the mood to make up for the loss of Russian Oil. reduced US production and increased world demand. Oil prices were going up before Russia invaded the Ukraine so it's not just that that is causing the problem.

Of all the reservoirs currently in the west, how many are near or above historical averages? Seems like more of a conveyance issue than a storage one.

https://cdec.water.ca.gov/resapp/RescondMain

That said, even with a lot of built reservoirs, you need a lot of space and have to deal with the other ramifications of dams/storage (fish flows, coastal sediment transfer, etc). Moving water is also energy intensive - probably one of the biggest electrical users in the state if I had to guess.

Similar to what I said earlier about smaller, community/neighborhood based water reuse systems, coastal Cali needs to follow what was done (successfully) in other Cali locations near the Sierras, plus take some tips from other world cities with similar climates. Unfortunately you have financial motivations around dams/reservoirs, as well as desalination, so home/community/neighbor rain harvesting has stayed out of the mainstream and even been reported as being "illegal" (it isn't!).

 

[wrangler4fun]

not a fan really of fox news or any major news outlet but this seems applicable

 

[pc1p]

not a fan really of fox news or any major news outlet but this seems applicable

Not a fan of Fox News either, mainly b/c they don't make boots high enough to deal with the amount of bullshit the leak out on a daily basis...

KXL was never "11k jobs" - at the highest during construction, it was ~1500, all of which were temporary and many of which were from Alberta. TCE got that 11k figure by estimating the workers currently working on the KXL, the workers that had stopped working, and all future workers (still, all of which would be temporary). When finished, KXL would have needed ~50 workers (35 permanent, 15 temporary), many of which would be located in Alberta.

Not only is the "80% reduction in federal lands" grossly false, here's a fun tidbit most don't realize: the Biden administration approved 34% more drilling permits than Trump did his first year in office. As of March 2022 (the last report I saw), 60% of leased sites are currently being unused, despite overall production at or above 2019 production volumes (for crude).

Biden did make a huge f*(%$#* mistake taking on the energy sector right out of the gate. Inflation was creeping (even if only transitory at first), pandemic was still running amok, and this fool came out swinging for the fences to prove that he was the "progressive" the far left hoped he was. As idiotic as that was, he is hardly to blame for the global markets and price pressures that every other nation is feeling (sans those nations that subsidize and/or control production). Granted, he didn't do himself any favors with O&G (not that they care, they made $41,000,000,000 in operating profit in Q1 alone!).

 

[mrblaine]

Not only is the "80% reduction in federal lands" grossly false, here's a fun tidbit most don't realize: the Biden administration approved 34% more drilling permits than Trump did his first year in office. As of March 2022 (the last report I saw), 60% of leased sites are currently being unused, despite overall production at or above 2019 production volumes (for crude).

There is more to it than that isn't there? Did they not also levy a much higher fee for the leases and the ongoing residual costs as well? There was also a big stink about "procedural errors" that took a large number of leases out of possible use over some bullshit GIGO crap they had going on.

Biden did make a huge f*(%$#* mistake taking on the energy sector right out of the gate. Inflation was creeping (even if only transitory at first), pandemic was still running amok, and this fool came out swinging for the fences to prove that he was the "progressive" the far left hoped he was. As idiotic as that was, he is hardly to blame for the global markets and price pressures that every other nation is feeling (sans those nations that subsidize and/or control production). Granted, he didn't do himself any favors with O&G (not that they care, they made $41,000,000,000 in operating profit in Q1 alone!).

The 41 billion is a bit disingenuous when you factor in previous near term losses. I believe it was reported earlier in this thread that the net to date is running about 8% positive which is clearly not what the 41B shows.

 

[pc1p]

There is more to it than that isn't there? Did they not also levy a much higher fee for the leases and the ongoing residual costs as well? There was also a big stink about "procedural errors" that took a large number of leases out of possible use over some bullshit GIGO crap they had going on.

There are increased royalty fees being proposed, though that would be all post federal-land-lease-pause; current leases have been "stocked up" for a while (last I read at least, not sure if something has changed in the past 2 months or so). IIRC, I saw a proposed rate ~18% (around 13% historically).

I know the BLM came under fire about procedural delays during COVID but I don't think that's an issue currently. Having had to deal with a dozen state agencies the past 12-14 months, I've got my own delays to deal with lol...

The 41 billion is a bit disingenuous when you factor in previous near term losses. I believe it was reported earlier in this thread that the net to date is running about 8% positive which is clearly not what the 41B shows.

The top 5 O&G companies (TE, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, and BP) lost $76,000,000,000 in 2020. It's important to note that the majority of the "losses" realized in 2020 (about $69B) were attributed to asset impairments and write-offs (usually from tax deferral, asset depreciation or abandonment), so not a loss in cash flow in the typical sense (oddly enough, it was the CARES Act that allowed them an extension on these carry back losses - though the O&G execs are quite notably quiet on that topic).

In 2021, the same top 5 O&G companies made $113,000,000,000 in profits (the top 28 O&G producers made ~$184,000,000,000 profit, so you can see the market share of the top 5). In 2021, O&G also boosted stock buybacks by ~2100% in Q4 alone.

We should also not forget that 77 US based energy-sector companies (crude producers, refiners, etc) took $8,200,000,000 in CARES Act money, despite cutting 60,000 jobs during 2020.

My sympathies for major corporations, especially O&G, who spent decades buying back stocks, tightening work forces, and generally turning capitalism into corporatism is very, very low

 

[Chris]

 

[someguysjeep]

it's way over my head now. i can read the words but it'll take 4x to comprehend it all.

i agree with smaller systems across the board, every city has an electrical grid set up we just need a new feed. keep the large plants going for the big city but start isolating the burbs from it. lessen the load, lessen the chances of major widespread outages.
cities been running their own water and sewage, they can handle power if it can be farmed or generated economically.

IDK if i'm down for more nuclear plants, i think we could do quite a bit with wind and water and sun. just 100yrs ago every small town up and down every river had a mill and paddle wheel.......so we make some power since we don't grow grain anymore.

the desalination y'all mentioned scares the shit out of me TBH. all it takes is the byproduct to be leached or dumped back into the oceans and you can pull the curtain on us all. the tech gets worldwide it'll be catastrophic........ not if.....but when they start dumpin brine back into the sea. and can we guarantee the working sys mentioned are not already doing this?

 

[sab]

San Antonio Water System (SAWS) brought a brackish desal plant online about five years ago. I toured it about three years ago with a group of water policy makers. It actually combines a desal plant with an ASR system (Aquifer Storage and Recovery). If I recall correctly, it pulls groundwater from a brackish aquifer that's not used for potable water, treats it, pumps the concentrated brackish water back into one well field (which may have been in another aquifer with even higher salinity) and the newly-fresh water back into another well field. The clean water stays as a "bubble" in the brackish aquifer with little mixing due to the nature of the aquifer and is then pumped out as needed. As an engineer, I had two thoughts during the tour: 1) What a remarkable technological project, and 2) Wow, they spent some money (and will continue to do so in maintenance costs)!