Gillette Star & Tribune is reporting:
That sound you hear coming down the tracks is Wyoming's growing oil industry.
Business leaders and Gov. Matt Mead celebrated the opening of Eighty-Eight Oil LLC's new transloading facility on Tuesday in Fort Laramie. The rail terminal is aimed at exporting new oil production from the Powder River Basin to buyers outside the state. It will also connect pipelines transporting Canadian crude to Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad's mainline near Eighty-Eight Oil's existing crude oil terminal in Guernsey.
"By connecting our terminal to BNSF’s expansive railway system, we can provide producers in the Rocky Mountain region and Canada further flexibility in adding value to their production and transporting it to markets throughout the United States,” Eighty-Eight Oil Superintendent Jerry Herz said in a statement.
The terminal consists of three loop tracks, each capable of accommodating 100-car unit trains. The initial loading capacity of the facility is 80,000 barrels per day with the potential to expand, Eighty-Eight Oil said.This -- CBR -- is turning out to be very, very interesting.
President Obama's decision to dither on the Keystone showed activist environmentalists that they could stop pipelines. Even in a good environment, the pipeline industry was not keeping up. All one has to do is look at the situation in North Dakota. But it's not a good environment, and the tea leaves suggest the environment for pipelines will get worse: the activist environmentalists have become emboldened.
The oil and gas industry is not waiting. There is a huge resurgence in the US railroad industry that no one could have predicted. Warren did not predict this; he was simply lucky.
This is huge for the US economy. Pipelines have a huge up-front cost and huge employment up front, but then it drops to "zero" and the only benefit is rental payments to land owners. [A reader corrected me: the payments are all up front; it's the county -- local governments -- that continue to reap annual income through taxes.]
But rail is capital expensive at the start, and that CAPEX continues as locomotives and tank cars are replaced. The personnel costs are huge and will get bigger when the government requires an additional engineer in all locomotives as a way to minimize rail mishaps.
Rail is going to become a bigger and bigger story - all driven by the Bakken experiment.
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Speaking Of The Same
John Gribbon reviews Heinrich Pas' new book, The Perfect Wave, another book on physics, neutrinos, time travel, string theory, and multiple universes. The timing could not be better. I am back into one of my recurring physics phases, this time initiated by the Sunday night series "Cosmos." I don't have any better understanding, but if one does not "use" something, one "loses" something. I keep forgetting 20th century physics, and each time I read it, I see something new.
Recently beta decay finally "makes sense" to me if one can use that terminology when studying quantum mechanics. I guess the short sound bite: beta decay is the "release" of an electron from an atomic nucleus. Until this last week, I completely misunderstood where this "electron" came from. I wrongly recalled/thought that the electron was from the electron cloud. Wrong. The electron is a "by-product" from beta decay when a neutron "mutates/transforms" into a proton. To conserve energy, an electron is also formed, which leaves/escapes the new atom. An antineutrino is also produced in order to conserve lepton equality. Pretty simplistic, I know. A quick wiki search reveals a gazillion more concepts to sort out.
I am back to re-reading Louisa Gilder's Age of Entanglement. When I read Gribbin's review of Pas' new book, I got the feeling that readers were not going to learn anything new if they already were readers of modern physics.
So, I will peruse it at Borders to see if The Perfect Wave is worth buying.
An aside: I'm only a few pages back into Gilder's book and I'm already seeing things that I had not seen before.
