A Never-Ending Rabbit Hole -- December 24, 2024

Locator: 44524WORDS.

Going down the rabbit hole. 

It all began with one of my favorite accounts on X talking about books.

That brought me back to one of the sites I link on my Links Page.

And that brought me to a most interesting list:

That list has twelve recommendations. All of them, except two, link to "dictionary-like" sites.

Of course, there's Shakespeare. But Shakespeare is in a class by himself.

The other outlier? 

ZAMM by Robert Pirsig.

Wow. 

That led me to rhetoric in ZAMM. 

That led me to D. A. Hickman's essay on ZAMM.

And that led me to Judy Sandler's essay. One of my favorite essays ever. LOL. 

And then it got weird. That took me to an NPR essay on ketamine clinics. I was vaguely aware of the issue but had not thought about it in a long time. And the the topicality?

Emily Witt has become the most cited (?) individual when it comes to ketamine clinics. Her landmark "study" was published in The New Yorker back on December 29, 2021.

The Los Angeles Times followed up with a story from the California perspective about two years ago.

 

For the record, I administered ketamine to a burn patient in northern Iraq decades ago. It is an incredible anesthetic.

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Chocolate Chip Christmas Cookies

The recipe at this link is practically identical to the recipe found on every Toll House bag of chocolate chips.

The "amount" of various ingredients varies and this recipe includes a small amount of baking power along with the "standard" baking soda.

Other than that, I'm not sure there were any differences.

Reserve Assets -- Saudi Arabia, Russia -- December 24, 2024

Locator: 44522SAUDI.

Russia. Link here.

Saudi, September, 2024, link here:

What A Great Holiday Gift! WTI Back Above $70 -- Christmas Eve, 2024

Locator: 44521B.

Good morning! A shout-out to ISO-NE and ISO-New York, link here and link here:

• ISO-NE: in the big scheme of things oil, coal, hydro are all in the same ballpark as renewables. Wow.

As stated earlier in the blog:

• ISO-NE has a supply problem, self-inflected;
• ERCOT has a demand problem, a nice problem to have

 

 

Federal Reserve sued: Federal Reserve already making changes, but the Big Banks said, "too little too late," and will proceed with the lawsuit.

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Back to the Bakken

WTI: $70.05.

Wednesday, December 25, 2024: 45 for the month; 148 for the quarter, 676 for the year

• 40335, conf, Grayson Mill, Sponheim 31-34F 2H,
• 40334, conf, Grayson Mill, Sponheim 31-34F 1H,
• 40333, conf, Grayson Mill, Hopes 30-27F-3H,
• 40332, conf, Grayson Mill, Hopes 30-27F 2H
• 40331, conf, Grayson Mill, Hopes 30-27F 1H,
• 40198, conf, Grayson Mill, Hopes 30-27F 4H,
• 38491, conf, Petro-Hunt, State 153-95-17B-16-1H,
• 37666, conf, BR, Nordeng 1A MBH,

Tuesday, December 24, 2024: 37 for the month; 140 for the quarter, 668 for the year

• 40002, conf, Hess, GO-Hoyt-LE-157-97-2833H-1,
• 38490, conf, Petro-Hunt, State 153-95-17B-16-2H,
• 37584, conf, Enerplus, Niobium 147-93-09D-04H,
• 26491, conf, Grayson Mill, Wahus State 152-97-12-1-3H,
• 26490, conf, Grayson Mill, Wahus State 152-97-12-1-11,

RBN Energy: Natural gas producers, utilities, big-tech companies racing to power data centers. Archived. 

The pace of data center development accelerated in 2024, raising questions about how to power these energy-hungry behemoths. Natural-gas-fired plants are a go-to approach to helping local utilities provide the reliable, around-the-clock electricity that large-scale data centers need. Now, two giant oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil and Chevron, want to do something they’ve never done before: build gas-fired plants and sell power exclusively to data centers. And some utilities are partnering with big-tech companies on power plants of their own. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss data center power needs and the unusual notion of building big gas plants to serve individual customers. 

What’s a Data Center?

Let’s start with the basics. As we discussed in Storm Front, a data center is the home for hundreds or even thousands of networked computers that process, store and share data. Data centers — many of them owned and operated by tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft (see photo below) — are among the most energy-intensive building types, consuming up to 50 times the energy per square foot of a typical commercial office building, with electrical demand at larger facilities ranging from 100 megawatts (MW) to 2,000 MW. [For perspective, we noted in Just Can’t Get Enough that a city the size of Lubbock, TX, (population 267,000) requires about 700 MW.] Demand for data centers has grown exponentially with the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which demand far more computational power — and energy — than conventional Google searches.

The Interior of a Microsoft Data Center. Source: Microsoft 

Now, we’ll dive into the news. Chevron and ExxonMobil announced separately in December that they are each exploring ways to jump into the electricity-supply business by using natural gas (with carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS) to power data centers. Each said they do not intend to put the electricity from these new plants on the overall power grid; instead, the plants’ output would be dedicated to the data center customer.