Whoever Thought We Would See This Headline ....

.... BloombergBusinessweek is reporting: US crude oil exports will soon break the record, last set in 1957.

The USSR launched Sputnik 1 in October, 1957. Since then the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, Nixon goes to China, the blue dress, a couple of wars in the Mideast, and now US crude oil exports will set a new record:

U.S. oil exports are set to surpass a record held since 1957 as traders find ways around a four-decade ban on supplies leaving the country.

The U.S. sent 401,000 barrels a day abroad in July, 54,000 shy of the record set in March 1957, according to data compiled by the Energy Information Administration, the Energy Department’s statistical unit. While Canada accounted for 93 percent of the shipments, Italy, Singapore and Switzerland also took oil from U.S. ports. Coupled with Alaskan supplies bound for Asia, total U.S. exports will reach 1 million barrels a day by the middle of 2015, according to Citigroup Inc.

Shipments abroad have quadrupled from a year ago as U.S. drillers pull record volumes of crude and natural gas out of shale formations across the middle of the country using hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Exemptions to a federal ban on crude exports allow for deliveries to Canada and permits some shipments from Alaska and California. The Commerce Department also issued rulings this year allowing processed condensate, an ultra-light crude, to be sent overseas.

Much, much more at the linked article.

Helping to set that record, The New York Times is reporting:

The Singapore-flagged tanker BW Zambesi set sail with little fanfare from the port of Galveston, TX, on July 30, loaded with crude oil destined for South Korea. But though it left inauspiciously, the ship’s launch was another critical turning point in what has been a half-decade of tectonic change for the American oil industry.

The 400,000 barrels the tanker carried represented the first unrestricted export of American oil to a country outside of North America in nearly four decades. The Obama administration insisted there was no change in energy trade policy, perhaps concerned about the reaction from environmentalists and liberal members of Congress with midterm elections coming. But many energy experts viewed the launch as the curtain raiser for the United States’ inevitable emergence as a major world oil exporter, an improbable return to a status that helped make the country a great power in the first half of the 20th century.

And again, much, much more at the linked article. I have mentioned many, many times, this is exactly how it will be done: there will be no big announcement, no change in policy, but it will happen.

See also this post on condensates. 

**********************************

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going

A Note For The Granddaughters

From PBS:

For the men leading the Panama Canal project in 1904, challenges of building the canal were exacerbated by the infectious diseases that ran rampant in the hot, wet Panamanian climate. By 1906, more than 85% of the canal workers had been hospitalized. The threat of yellow fever created panic and made the site undesirable and feared by employees. Malaria was no better -- someone who fell ill usually required a stay in the hospital, and recovery did not ensure immunity. During the course of canal construction, tens of thousands of workers fell ill with yellow fever or malaria.

Yellow fever's gruesome symptoms and high death rate were so horrifying to American canal workers that even a whisper of an outbreak sent boatloads of men fleeing. Early symptoms of yellow fever were headaches, fever, and muscle pain. As the disease progressed, however, the patient experienced jaundice, thirst, and a dark black vomit caused by internal hemorrhaging. Ultimately, the disease could lead to kidney failure, delirium, seizures, coma, and often death.

Patients with malaria also experienced chills, headaches, fever, aching, fatigue, and nausea. In the worst cases, malaria caused kidney failure and potentially even coma or death. Unlike survivors of yellow fever, however, malaria survivors were not immune to recurrences of the disease. Malaria's lower fatality rate and frequent reappearance resulted in frequent and expensive hospital stays.

At the time, doctors disagreed on how to stop either yellow fever or malaria; mosquitoes had not yet been accepted as the primary transmitters. Hospitals treated patients with high doses of whiskey, eggnog, or by rubbing a solution of kerosene and oil on the skin. There were mustard baths and ice baths. Quinine, made from the bark of a cinchona tree, was taken as a fever reducer and painkiller, although the bitter-tasting liquid often caused deafness as a side effect. The most common treatment was simply to keep the patient quiet and comfortable, and hope that they survived.

Ebola, too, will be conquered. And when it is, it will again be the Americans that do it.

As a reminder:

France began work on the Panama Canal in 1881, but [gave up] because of engineering problems and high mortality due to disease. The United States took over the project in 1904, and took a decade to complete the canal, which was officially opened on August 15, 1914.

Dr Gorgas retired in 1918 at the mandatory retirement age of 64; he died two years later, in 1920.
For his work he did not receive a Nobel Prize, but this week three scientests were awarded a Nobel Prize for "inventing" the blue light-emitting diode.

No Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in 1914 (the year the Panama Canal was completed). No Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in 1915. Or 1916. Or 1917. Or 1918. But the scientists who invented the blue light-emitting diode have theirs. At least of one them was said to have been quite surprised.

When Ebola is conquered, and it will be, President Obama should share in the Nobel Prize for Medicine for that feat. That will be one he has earned.

********************************

The Impossible Takes A Bit Longer

I'm reminded of Dr Gorgas, the Panama Canal, and the recent article about US military personnel being sent to Ebola ("Ebola" is the large geographical area in west Africa with undefined borders, much like Kurdistan in the Mideast). It's possible a Special Forces team went in first, but if so, it was the US Air Force that brought them in.

I have some incredible memories of flying multiple missions with different C-130 crews into west Africa many, many years ago. It is probably their granddaughters and grandsons now piloting some of the same C-130's or larger and newer cargo planes into the heart of darkness.

And somewhere, in some cockpit, some co-pilot has hung up a cardboard mobile with these words on it from a black Sharpie:  “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.”

********************************

Source: Bartleby.

 

QUOTATION: With willing hearts and skillful hands, the difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a bit longer.

ATTRIBUTION: Author unknown.

Inscription on the memorial to the Seabees (U.S. Naval Construction Batallions), between Memorial Bridge and Arlington Cemetery:

 “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.”

—Motto of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, according to The Home Book of American Quotations, ed. Bruce Bohle, which says that other branches of the service also used this slogan. Newsweek, March 8, 1943, attributes this “cocky slogan” to the Army Air Forces.

A higher comparative:

“The impossible we do at once; the miraculous takes a little longer,”

was said to be the motto of the Army Service Forces.—The New York Times, November 4, 1945. This echoes a remark attributed to Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, Louis XVI’s minister of finance. Marie Antoinette asked him something in a tone that brooked no refusal, adding that perhaps it would be difficult. He replied, “If it is only difficult, it is done; if it is impossible, we shall see.”—J. F. Michaud, Biographie Universelle.

**********************************

Hurricanes

And the US is the only country that regularly flies into tropical cyclones, the name given to the class of storms that include hurricanes and typhoons. Just saying.