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Saturday, May 11, 2013

This Will Be ONE Challenge When The Immigration Bill Is Passed

A relatively small percentage of counties across the USA will be impacted.

The LA Times is reporting:
Few regions will absorb the impact of future immigration reforms more than Los Angeles County, home to an estimated 1.1 million people in the country illegally, one-tenth of the nation's total.
As the Senate Judiciary Committee began debating the bipartisan immigration bill last week, county officials voiced concerns that local taxpayers will be "left holding the bag" to pay for the brunt of healthcare and other services for multitudes of immigrants who apply for citizenship.
Local and state officials believe the overhaul bill will encourage those in the country illegally to come out of the shadows and turn to local services during the proposed 13-year-long pathway to citizenship.
And you can bet that the word on the street will be: "13 years? No way, Jose. I'm getting my benefits now. I've already been here for 13 years." 

Good, bad, or indifferent, them's the facts. You pays your money; and takes your chances.

On another note, also on the front page, the LA Times is reporting that the city of Huntington Beach, just a few miles south of LA, will end the ban on hypnotism. (I can't make this stuff up.)
The Huntington Beach City Council has approved the introduction of an ordinance that would repeal a law prohibiting hypnotism.
Brought to the dais by Mayor Pro Tem Matthew Harper and Councilwoman Jill Hardy, the item passed unanimously Monday after council members made light of the city law that was adopted in 1979.
City staff will now draft an ordinance for the council to look at for the next meeting. After two readings, the law will go into effect 30 days after the last approval.
"I just saw no reason for this to even be on the books," Harper said, chuckling about his discovery. "It makes it so that assemblies or certain Christmas parties, etc. that may have hypnotism, in terms of entertainment, would actually be in violation of law. This is outdated, unnecessary and obsolete. Time to get it off the books."
At the time the bill was passed, it was to guard against "sham hypnotists." As opposed to "non-sham hypnotists." 

The BR Mesa Verde Wells Have Been Updated -- Clear Creek Field; The BR Midnight Run Wells Have Been Updated -- Union Center

Click here for the Mesa Verde wells.

Click her for the Midnight Run wells.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

I am still in my Manhattan Project - Los Alamos phase, reading several books simultaneously on the subject. One of the books is a thin little hardback that I can't imagine anyone reading except for those who actually had something to do with Los Alamos directly. That's too bad. It's an incredible book: Inventing Los Alamos, Jon Hunner, c. 2004.

Everything about it, on the bookshelf, and quickly paging through it, suggests that it would be a dry biography of a manufactured town during WWII. Not.

It's hard to believe Richard Feynman was there. Somehow I pictured him as emerging full grown as an adult one day at the California Institute of Technology, perhaps having arrived with the other extraterrestrials who visited the earth in the early 20th century (see Teller).

Having lived on military bases for most of my adult life, and having lived on many "bare bases," I relate easily to the stories that are told about building Los Alamos.

The colonel who had built the Pentagon, the building, was placed in charge of "building" the "Manhattan Project" which would ultimately consist of relatively large civilian-military sites around the US (from Manhattan, NYC, to Los Alamos, to Washington State, and points in between). The laboratory director was J. Robert Oppenheimer, 38 years old at the time, and a known sympathizer and supporter of the American Communist Party (whether he was a member or not was, and is, still a matter of debate). The first base commander was transferred after he suffered a heart attack dealing with the base populace over the problem of bad produce (fruits and vegetables) at the commissary. He was replaced by the colonel who had just overseen the construction of the Alaskan Highway.

The location for the town was selected during the evening of November 16, 1942. By the end of 1945, the work at Los Alamos had pretty much come to and end. Less than three years. Coming just after the Pentagon had been completed, as well as the Alaskan Highway.

And we can't even get a pipeline from Canada built after eight years of studying the environmental impact the pipeline might have.

The book, by the way, reminds me of Hunter S Thompson's Hell's Angels. The stories cannot possibly have anything in common, and yet the observation and description of the human condition by Hunter S Thompson and Jon Hunner have some connection, I suppose. The fact that both books are about the same size probably contributes to a feeling of similarity. And, both are being read under similar personal circumstances by the reader.

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My reading of the Jon Hunner book continues. It was hard to read the pages following that first nuclear explosion south of Los Alamos. The descriptions were unsettling (for lack of a better word, I suppose). And then three weeks later Little Boy is dropped on Hiroshima. Listening to the music and reading the descriptions Hunner provides is almost a life-altering event. How fast events moved in Los Alamos during the next few days and weeks. How fast events moved as the war came to a sudden, decisive end. The USS Indianapolis that had delivered the nuclear components to Tinian Island in the Pacific was sunk a few days later "with great loss of life." I am impressed how well Hunner writes this story. He references Peggy Pond Church's The House at Otowi Bridge who had a deep sense of foreboding during the night of July 15 - 16, from her home in Taos. The bomb was set off at 5:29:45 a.m. Based on the Amazon reviews, I will have to read the book.

Enola Gay, Hillbilly Moon Explosion, very good quality for not being studio

Three days later (another story line), a Fat Man bomb fell on Nagasaki. Nagasaki was the alternate target; the primary target, Kokura, was obscured by ground haze and smoke. Fat Man was dropped from Bock's Car at 11:50 a.m. July 19.

The war ended on August 10.

Statistic:
  • Hiroshima: Little Boy, July 16, one plane: 15,000 deaths/square mile
  • Nagasaki: Fat Man, July 19, 5 tons, one plane: 20,000 deaths/square mile
  • Tokyo: firebomb raids, March 9, 1945, 1,667 tons of explosives, 279 planes: 5,300 deaths/square mile
August, 12, Edward R. Murrow: "Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured."

Front Page Of The Los Angeles Times: Okay To Kill Condors Now. As Well As Bald Eagles, Golden Eagles, and Whooping Cranes; Some Of These Species Will Be Extinct By 2100; The Condor Will Be The First To Go; Whooping Cranes Next; Slicers And Dicers -- Not One Redeeming Feature

Updates

May 15, 2013: The Wyoming Trib weighs in also.


May 14, 2013Carpe Diem has a great post on this, as well as video.

Original Post

The LA Times is reporting:
Federal wildlife officials took the unprecedented step Friday of telling private companies that they will not be prosecuted for inadvertently harassing or even killing endangered California condors.
In a decision swiftly condemned by conservationists and wildlife advocates, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said operators of Terra-Gen Power's wind farm in the Tehachapi Mountains will not be prosecuted if their turbines accidentally kill a condor during the expected 30-year life span of the project.
California condors were brought back from the brink of extinction a quarter-century ago and still cling precariously to survival. Federal law prohibits the harassment or killing of endangered species for any reason.
Fish and Wildlife also made an exception for the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch Co., saying that the government will not prosecute if construction of the company's controversial 5,553-acre development of luxury homes, hotels and golf courses violates the harassment ban in the endangered species law. The exception will last for 50 years. The project is expected to consume 8% of the critical condor habitat in the Tehachapis, about 60 miles north of Los Angeles.
Cue up Connie Francis. 

I don't have a dog in this fight. I will be gone by 2100. I have the same feeling about slicers and dicers that J. Robert Oppenheimer would have had. Or perhaps Ronald Reagan.

By the way, prosecuting slicers and dicers would have never worked anyway, for two reasons. First, no on could prove how a condor was killed in the first place, even if they found the carcass, which would have been very unlikely. Second, there will be so many dead birds the Fish and Wildlife Department would not have been able to keep up with all the carnage.

Sleepwalk With Me

Take two facts, add some Chinese herbal tea leaves, let simmer, and, sleepwalk through this thought process ....

Sleepwalk, Santo and Johnny

These are the two facts:
Add the Chinese tea leaves:
  • The Keystone XL is dead --
  • TransCanada has a huge natural gas pipeline project in the works to the Arctic --
  • China needs oil --
  • Canada and China have a long history of partnering -- 
Back on May 4, 2013,  I wrote:
TransCanada has a huge natural gas pipeline system in this area and at least two natural gas pipeline projects in the works to take natural gas to the western and northwestern coasts of Canada, the Coastal Gas Link Pipeline Project and the Mackenzie Gas Project, which I suppose could be converted to oil pipelines if necessary. Activist environmentalists in Canada might be successful stopping a crude oil pipeline paralleling the Coastal Gas Link which goes through the Canadian Rockies. A crude oil pipeline along the Mackenzie Gas pipeline would be incredibly expensive and would take several years to plan and build. 
I am wrong about taking several years to plan and build: see "Big Inch and Little Inch."

With regard to financing, it is just very possible, the Chinese would be willing to help finance this project.

Other related links: Of all the players, only the US has no policy with regard to the Arctic

Perhaps TransCanada Would Have Been Better Off To Call Their Pipeline By Another Name, Any Name Other Than "XL"

Earlier a reader sent me a link to a great pipeline story: "Little Inch" and "Big Inch."

I will post a permanent link to this story somewhere on the sidebar at the right. Easily searchable using search engines.

According to the Texas State Historical Association:
The Big Inch and Little Big Inch were two pipelines laid during World War II from East Texas to the northeast states.

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes realized as early as 1940 that shipment of petroleum to the northeast by tanker ships would be impossible in time of war because of German submarines.

In 1941, at Ickes's urging, oil industry executives began to plan the building of two pipelines–one, twenty-four inches in diameter, called the Big Inch, to transport crude oil, and another, twenty inches in diameter, called the Little Big Inch, to transport refined products. ....

....On June 10, 1942, the WPB gave approval for the first section of the Big Inch.....

A ditch four feet deep, three feet wide and 1,254 miles long was to be dug from Longview across the Mississippi River to Southern Illinois and then east to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, with twenty-inch lines from there to New York City and Philadelphia. Crude oil was delivered to the end of the first leg, Norris City, Illinois, on February 13, 1943.

By August 14, 1943, the Big Inch had been completed. In January 1943 approval was given for the first half of the Little Big Inch; approval for the entire line was given on April 2. This line, beginning in the refinery complex between Houston and Port Arthur and ending in Linden, New Jersey, was completed on March 2, 1944. Cost of the two lines was $146 million, financed entirely by the RFC. Together the pipelines carried over 350 million barrels of crude oil and refined products to the East Coast before the war in Europe ended in August 1945.
And that's why President Obama will never go down in history as an extraordinary president. His chapter on how he facilitated America's energy independence will consist of a title, one line, and a footnote.
The title: Energy Independence.

The one line: America became energy independent during the president's second term in office.

The footnote: According to the president's memoirs, this success story was entirely due to his efforts and those of Michelle's. The facts remain that the entire energy story was one of private enterprise during that time period. The only government involvement in energy resulted in the failure of no less than twenty solar energy companies through grants provided by the Department of Energy. After eight years, the president left office still studying the pros and cons of a Canadian pipeline, whose name is long lost in the coal bin of history.
What an incredible missed opportunity.

So, two things:

These two transcontinental pipelines were approved in June, 1942, and completed the next year, August, 1943.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

I have three coming of age stories, none of which you will read here, but can find elsewhere.

The Summer of '42, when the pipeline above was being built, and ...

Music by Michael Legrand

Cruiser1834, in the comments, says it better than I could:
"There is a profound sadness when I listen to this piece of music. It reminds me of my youth, lots of carelessness, in taking things for granted, of loves lost, and an endless rush to do things...none of which, when I think of it, really mattered....in the end.

I am leaving the 50s behind this year and am the sadder for it. But, the music also hints at hope...and, as Frost said it best, "I have miles to go before I sleep...".

"Gold Rush" In The Arctic; US Unlikely To Participate; US Will Let The Russians, Canadians, Norwegians, Danes Take The Lead; Heaven Forbid The President Could Make A Decision That Fast

 Updates

May 28, 2019: Zerohedge updates the Obama Doctrine.

March 30, 2019: court agrees. The Arctic belongs to Denmark, Norway, Russia, Canada, China, others, but not to the US. The US cedes the Arctic to the rest of the world. Link at WSJ

March 15, 2019: now it's Norway. Norway announces plans to expand exploration areas in the Arctic. Thank you, Mr Obama.

March 12, 2019: Russia's next oil boom is happening in the Arctic.

August 29, 2015: US ceding the Arctic to Russia, New York Times

August 4, 2015: Los Angeles Times headline -- Russia claims 460,000 square miles of the Arctic -- and the area's oil and gas resources.  That was easy. GOP slams Obama on this, August 8, 2015.

September 27, 2014: Russians discover huge reservoir of oil in the Arctic; could be bigger than "the US part of Gulf of Mexico."

June 19, 2013: Norway moving closer to the Arctic; US will not participate.

June 5, 2013: add the Chinese to the list of "everyone" looking to drill the Arctic for oil.

May 13, 2013: I posted the link/article a couple of days ago. Now Bloomberg is confirming exactly what I said. The US is the only Arctic player without a policy: it's going to be a "land grab" and the US won't be participating -- at least not in any meaningful way. Russia, especially, sees Obama as a paper tiger. 

Original Post 
 
The Houston Chronicle is reporting:
The icy Arctic is emerging as a global economic hot spot — and one that is becoming a security concern for the U.S. as world powers jockey to tap its vast energy resources and stake out unclaimed territories.
Diplomats from eight Arctic nations, including Secretary of State John Kerry, will meet next week over how to protect the thawing region as its waterways increasingly open to commercial shipping traffic.
U.S. officials estimate the Arctic holds 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil reserves, and 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits. Until recently, however, the lucrative resources that could reap hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues were frozen over and unreachable.
But global warming has melted sea ice to levels that have given rise to what experts describe as a kind of gold rush scramble to the Arctic.
On Friday, President Barack Obama announced a new U.S. strategy for the Arctic, calling the region "an amazing place" and maintaining a need among nations to protect its fragile environment and keep it free of conflict.
"An undisciplined approach to exploring new opportunities in this frontier could result in significant harm to the region, to our national security interests, and to the global good," the 13-page strategy concluded.
The Arctic is getting hotter faster than any part of the globe. Experts predict the region will be free of sea ice during the summer within about 20 years. Sea ice is important because it keeps the rest of the world cooler, and some scientific studies suggest that its melting may be indirectly connected to the extreme weather in the United States and elsewhere in the past few years, changing global weather patterns, including the track of Superstorm Sandy.
President Obama won't have to worry about any "conflict" in the Arctic. As long as the US stays out, the Canadians, Danes, Norwegians, and Russians will be more than happy to split the spoils. If the president can't even come to a decision on a pipeline, he will never come around to a decision on the Arctic.

And so it goes.

But the nice thing about free market capitalism: investors can buys shares in foreign oil companies that will drill the Arctic. Like Statoil. And it will be US oil service companies that will partner with foreigners in the Arctic, like Halliburton (which at one time was run by Dick Cheney), TransOcean, and Schlumberger. Oh, that's right. Schlumberger is French. And TransOcean --- I don't know what they are any more; their offices are in Switzerland, I believe.

With the Arctic sea lanes opening up, Susan Sarandon and Johnny Depp can take their private cruises up to the pole to watch the drilling.

First Full-Sized, Full-Powered Natural Gas Trucks To Be Manufactured Are Now In Georgia

Torque News is reporting:
The first full-sized, full-powered, 12-liter heavy-duty trucking engines powered by pure natural gas to be commercially produced are now in service in Georgia. 
And you can expect to see many more of them in the near future.Modern Transportation, a Pennsylvania-based fleet operations company, has purchased and put into service two natural gas-powered Freightliner Cascadia trucks in Georgia. 
The trucks will carry supplies from Sanford, North Carolina to Owens Corning's roofing plant in Savannah, Georgia. This marks a new era in commercial transportation. While natural gas engines are nothing new in lighter-duty commercial vehicles, such as buses, some construction vehicles, and trucks of 16,000 gross vehicle weight (GVW) and lower, they are relatively new to the heavy-hauling, full-sized semi-truck sector. 
Cummins-Westport, one of the world's largest heavy-duty engine makers, has built natural gas engines for some time. Last year, they began offering a spark-ignited 11.9-liter dedicated natural gas engine, the ISX12 G, to truck makers. 
The engine has been adopted by several major truck manufacturers, including Freightliner, Paccar (Kenworth and Peterbilt brands), Mack and others. Among the first full-sized, commercial semi-trucks to roll off the line with the engines in them were Freightliner Cascadias, two of which were purchased by Modern Transportation.
The tide is turning. We may have hit a tipping point in natural gas transportation.

Week 19: May 5, 2013 -- May 11, 2013

Best educational Bakken article of the week: back story on flaring in the Bakken
Non-Bakken Story Of The Year?

Keystone XL
Non-Bakken Energy Story Of The Year?
The President could care/couldn't care less about the pipeline

USGS 2013 Survey of the Bakken
Observation 6: UND-EERC not mentioned
Minneapolis StarTrib with 2-page story on the survey

The Bakken, general
Whiting's analysis of the Bakken/Three Forks
EOG's analysis of the Bakken/Three Forks

Natural gas
Bakken propane: a $2 billion/year nuisance

Operations
Downspacing -- EOG
OXY USA has a nice well
Newfield with a gusher
Several huge wells reported: WPX, Oasis, KOG, MRO
Spacing in the Bakken -- Reuters perspective
Bakken wells dropping in cost -- Newfield
Bakken wells dropping in cost -- Oasis
Oasis establishes in-house Oasis Midstream Services
Random update of CLR's super long lateral; bogus report in Petroleum News Bakken
Random update of the Matthew Schmidt wells -- see link above, also
EOG's Liberty wells in Van Hook, Parshall have been updated
Random look at three 640-acre spacing Fidelity wells
Twenty-two (22) new permits in one day

Montana
Some nice wells in Montana; starting to hit its stride?

Economic development
Growers to build $1 billion fertilizer factory near Grand Forks using Bakken natural gas
Native America refinery to break ground in August
Farmers, others demanding more pipelines

Human Interest
Mark Perry on Kudlow, CNBC
Flashback: all those folks who said the Bakken was hyped, back in 2010, 2011
Photograph of Big Foot's foot prints in North Dakota, dragging his tail
Investment in the Bakken

Leases
North Dakota state's quarterly lease; one tract going for $15,100/acre
BLM auction in North Dakota, Montana

For investors only
NOG to offer $200 million in senior notes
EOG surges $11/share -- back up to its 52-week high
EOG's earnings report
Investors like NOG's earnings report

Non-Bakken
EPA won't limit greenhouse gases from coal mines; the government can kill the coal industry other ways
Coal mining is surging in Illinois, President Obama's home state

WSJ Links

WSJ Links

Stop here first.

Section D (Off Duty):
  • Some interesting recipes.
Section C (Review):
  • Oh, yes, a must visit: the French viaduct -- the highest road deck in Europe when it was built; if you do nothing else today, take a look at the photograph of this stunning bit of work (then imagine the bullet train in California -- for which they have not even yet bought the land).  If you cannot access the WSJ article, google Millau Viaduct.
  • Book review, "The American Iliad" --  The Guns at Last Light, Rick Atkinson, the third and concluding volume of his history of the US experience fighting in Europe between 1942 and 1945 (fewer years to enter and conclude a war than it will take President Obama to make a decision on one pipeline; what a loser.)
  • Book Review: Wow, having just read James Gleick's The Information, and George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral, this new book, Surfaces and Essences, by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander looks awesome. The argument that analogy-making is the basis of all thought is explored. The reference to "The Analogue World" is very, very interesting.
  • Book review: Wow, it just keeps getting better: now a review of Imperial Dreams by Tim Gallagher, the search for the imperial woodpecker, which, at two feet tall, is the largest woodpecker that ever lived, and has not been seen in more than half a century.
Section B (Business & Finance):
  • McDonald's dumps the Angus burger.  People don't visit McDonald's for good food. They go there for Ronald McDonald (the kids), the play area (the kids), cheap food (all of us), locality (they are everywhere), free wi-fi (road warriors). But folks don't go to McDonald's for Angus burgers. For a real hamburger there are a dozen other choices, including Ruth's Chris Steak House, no doubt.
Section A:

Front Page Feature Story In The Wall Street Journal For Mother's Day: This North Dakota Mom, 77, Reared 69 Kids

Hopefully you can get to the story. If having difficulty, try googling "This North Dakota Mom, 77, Reared 69 Kids."

The author of this article was child number 23.

The author: Mrs. Dumont Reared Kids Over Six Decades; 'I'm Child No. 23'
DUNSEITH, N.D.—Few mothers are likely to get more cards, flowers and phone calls this Sunday than Joyce Dumont.
Mrs. Dumont, 77 years old, a Native American of the Chippewa tribe, is at the root of a family tree so tangled that it seems more like a forest. By her reckoning, she has had 69 kids—including six through childbirth, five stepchildren, 11 who were adopted, several dozen foster children and a few who simply moved in when they had no better place to go.
Her latest three were adopted by Mrs. Dumont and her husband, Buddy, also 77, over the past few years. They range in age from 7 to 10. "They're really rambunctious," she told a recent visitor to her home near the Canadian border, where a washing machine chugged and a chubby Chihuahua named Peewee scoured the floor for Cheerios.
Social workers say Mrs. Dumont is exceptional in terms of the number of children she has nurtured over six decades. Chuck Johnson, president of the National Council for Adoption, a nonprofit group in Alexandria, Va., knows of people who have fostered scores of children but said such cases are rare.
"Everybody knew they could count on Joyce," said Andrea Olson, who arranges adoptions through the AASK Adoption Program in Grand Forks, N.D.
In a poor rural area of central North Dakota, social workers regularly called on her to take foster children; she volunteered to shelter others after hearing they were in trouble. Some just showed up. A high-school buddy of one of Mrs. Dumont's stepsons was invited for a sleepover in the late 1970s—and ended up staying two years.
For me, this puts the oil boom into perspective and why I don't have a lot of time for whiners elsewhere. Especially when they complain about "their small fortunes."

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I've been in a Santo and Johnny mood all day; this seems a nice video to go with this story.

And I Love Her, Santo and Johnny