Idle Rambling On A Saturday Morning -- Could North Dakota Drop To #3 In Crude Oil Production? -- June 8, 2019

State production, crude oil, could North Dakota drop to #3?

• California: 14 million bbls/month (March, 2019) -- has held fairly steady since since late 2016;
• New Mexico: surging; now twice that of California, producing 27 million bbls/month (March, 2019); as recently as two years ago, California was out-producing New Mexico; LA TImes is all concerned -- it never gives up; again, water requirements for fracking are a pittance compared to total state demand (we went through same discussion in North Dakota years ago); using produced water (recycling) would mitigate even that concern;
• Alaska: 15 million bbls/month (March, 2019)

So, it looks like:

1: Texas: (151 million bbls/month)
2: North Dakota (42 million bbls/month) -- may have leveled off for the foreseeable future; theoretical maximum is likely to be about 60 million bbls/month
3: New Mexico -- trajectory suggests that we haven't seen how much the state could produce
4: Oklahoma: 18 million bbls/month (March, 2019)
T5. Alaska
T5. California

New Mexico's energy future. New Mexico is not as friendly as North Dakota and Texas when it comes to fracking, Big Oil, so there's always a chance things could turn in New Mexico.

On another note. Earthquakes.

Fortunately for the oil industry the recent swarm of earthquakes cannot be blamed on fracking. My hunch: it has to do with global warming. From The Los Angeles Times:

There have been more than 700 earthquakes recorded in the Fontana area since May 25, ranging from magnitude 0.7 to magnitude 3.2, recorded Wednesday at 5:20 p.m., according to Caltech staff seismologist Jen Andrews. Three of the quakes have been of magnitude 3 or greater.

The swarm initially moved northward, but something unusual began Friday when the swarm turned around and went south, back toward the middle of the swarm and the 60 Freeway.

Having said that, this could be the very "news item" that Governor Newsom uses to justify banning fracking in his state.

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A Point In Time

That was the first song, and the only song, I heard on the radio while driving into work this morning. Wow, did this take me back to another life a long, long time ago.

The song transported me back to Los Feliz Boulevard. I don't know why.

Los Feliz Boulevard starts as East Los Feliz Road, on the far north side of Los Angeles, near the entrance of Forest Lawn Cemetery, final resting place of many Hollywood stars. After a very few blocks, East Los Feliz Road becomes West Los Feliz Road and then becomes a most beautiful drive in north Los Angeles, Los Feliz Boulevard, running east-west and ending at the southern end of Griffith Park, home of the Mount Wilson Observatory.

There, of all things, I never knew this, Los Feliz takes a sharp left turn, heading south, and becomes Western Avenue.

Western Avenue runs straight south, parallel to the I-110, ending at White Point Park, on the Pacific Ocean, in the city of San Pedro.

Western Avenue is just a short walk from where my wife's parents lived in San Pedro. May and I often walked up the steep hill from their home near Gaffey Street up to Western Avenue.

Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac, Gypsy written about 1979
Lou Reed's Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967
Michael Leigh, The Velvet Underground, 1963

Gypsy:

So I'm back to the velvet underground
Back to the floor that I love
To a room with some lace and paper flowers
Back to the gypsy that I was
To the gypsy that I was

1: San Pedro; home of my in-laws. May's family settled there while her father completed two tours in Vietnam.

2: Del Amo Mall, Torrance, CA: May's Japanese mom was a waitress at an upscale Japanese restaurant next to the shopping mall.

3: Western Avenue crosses I-10, the "old Route 66" which ended at the Santa Monica pier.

4: Griffith Park.

5: South Pasadena -- where I lived when going to USC School of Medicine.

6: USC School of Medicine. Also, the jumping off point, I-10, on one of my cross-country hitchhiking trips. I hitchhiked from downtown Los Angeles to Sioux Falls, SD, leaving on a Friday night, and getting back to my college dormitory early Sunday morning.

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The Book Page

The New York Times Book of Physics and Astronomy: More Than 100 Years of Covering the Expanding Universe, edited by Cornelia Dean, c. 2013.

Physicist find evidence for the elusive Higgs boson, July 14, 2012.

From page 196:

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming even more ponderous

Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.

The Higgs field? That sounds a lot like the "ether" early physicists thought existed.

From page 320 in the book, from an article published in The New York Times, on September 28, 1930, physicists were talking about "ether waves." That concept was null and void decades ago, but now -- the Higgs field -- certainly sounds like the "ether" to me.

From the French: "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."