This WIll Send Atmospheric CO2 Surging -- July 27, 2108

oilprice.com is reporting:

Japanese utilities have resorted to starting up old crude oil- and fuel oil-fired power plants and ramping up the capacity of already operating oil-powered facilities as utilities try to cope with record demand amid a two-week heat wave that has killed more than 80 people across the country.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, Japan switched off most of its nuclear power plants to have operators inspect and upgrade them. At present, just six out of 40 available nuclear reactors are operational in the country.

The heat wave of the past two weeks has made households and businesses crank up air conditioning, and demand for electricity is on the rise and power prices have hit record highs. To cope with the surge in electricity demand, utilities are returning to the use of mothballed fossil fuel-fired power plants that have been placed on standby, or are ramping up the capacity at operational fossil fuel plants.

Kansai Electric Power, a utility operating in the western industrialized area which was also the hardest hit by the heat wave, has started up two old oil-fired plants with a total capacity of 1.2 gigawatts (GW), a spokesman for the company told Reuters on Friday.

So many story lines in this article -- don't even get me started.

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The Katie Ledecky Page

Day 3 of the Swimming National Championships, Phillips 66, Irvine, CA. It appears Katie Ledecky did not swim today.

"I Did Not Get The Memo" -- December 16, 2017

Well, now we know how this Palestinian became a billionaire: catering for US troops during the reign of George H. W. Bush:

Sabih al-Masri, a Palestinian billionaire and the chairman of Jordan’s largest lender Arab Bank, was detained in Saudi Arabia for questioning after a business trip to Riyadh, family sources and friends said on Saturday.

They said Masri, a Saudi citizen and Jordan’s most prominent businessman with holdings in hotels and banking, was detained after heading to the Saudi capital last week to chair meetings of companies he owns.

Masri, who originally comes from a prominent merchant family from Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, amassed a fortune from partnering with influential Saudis in a major catering business to supply troops during the U.S.-led military operation to retake Kuwait from Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. 

Apparently he did not receive the memo:

Confidants said Masri had been warned not to travel to Saudi Arabia after mass arrests last month of Saudi royals, ministers and businessmen in the biggest purge of the kingdom’s affluent elite in its modern history. 

My hunch: the Russians intercepted the advice not to go to Saudi Arabia, and Masri thought all the CNN reports about Prince Salman rounding up rich folks in Riyadh was simply "fake news."

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Notes From Twitter

Brexit:

India in 1947 had rather less difficulty gaining its independence than we are having in 2017 leaving the Brussels empire. Time for Boris to go the full Gandhi.

Bakken economy:

Too many data points in this article to go through -- I will archive the article because it will disappear over time -- but for now, simply this: the public school enrollment continues to grow beyond expectation in North Dakota's oil patch.

Some years ago I said the metric to follow if one was curious whether families would remain in the Bakken "after the boom" was to follow school enrollment figures. In the very, very early days of the boom, "experts" said oil workers (mostly men) would be coming to work in the Bakken but their families would not join them, and that eventually the workers (and any families that might have joined their working spouses) would leave the state.

Apparently, to a large extent that did not happen. 

Maine governor wants to get rid of solar panel subsidies:

Maine's Republican governor says he wants to reverse regulators' move to delay a gradual ramp down in compensation for new solar panel owners who generate excess energy. LePage has said utility regulators should have gotten rid of the financial incentive system altogether.

By the way, if there is a shortage of money for North Dakota public schools, the Legislature is authorized to start spending oil money from the "Legacy Fund" as of June, 2017.

Another nuclear reactor ordered to shut down in Japan: link here.

Source for unexplained radiation over Europe: it was the Russians after all.

Another meth lab in Williston? Link here. Having said that, it must have been another slow news day in the Bakken.

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Semi-Finals

Championship Game: January 6, 2018

Coal Surge? Worth Reposting -- July 23, 2017

Speaking of Japanese Coal

Japan plans to build at least 45 new coal plants. From joannenova:

One of the world's largest economies with no land available for wind or solar farms; has also given up on nuclear power. I doubt South Korea has much land available for wind or solar farms. China would have the land, but the overwhelming need for electricity pretty much precludes any significant use of intermittent, undependable, non-dispatchable energy. I assume India is in the same energy boat.

So, Got Coal? How's That Solar Working Out, Abe? -- July 20, 2017

Updates

February 11, 2018: the biggest risk to coral reefs and Hawaii's tourism is not acid rain or global warming -- it's the cesspools of Hawaii.

Sewage from cesspools is seeping into some of Hawaii’s ocean waters, where it has been blamed for infections suffered by surfers and snorkelers. It is also entering the drinking water in part of the state, pushing nitrate levels close to the legal limit.

Hawaii has 88,000 cesspools across its eight major islands, more than any other state. Collectively, they deposit 53 million gallons of raw sewage into the ground every day.

More than 90% of the state’s drinking water comes from groundwater wells.

State lawmakers, who outlawed new cesspools in 2016, are scrambling to find a solution to the thousands that exist.

Replacing all of the state’s cesspools with alternate sewage systems would cost at least $1.75 billion, according to the health department.

Original Post 

From joannenova.com: fifty solar PV companies in Japan are already gone in 2017 as subsidies end. Coal is soaring. Actually, the story is even worse than the headline:

One hundred solar PV companies are forecast to collapse in Japan this year alone.

Up to 100 solar PV firms in Japan could face bankruptcy this year, with more than double the number of firms going bust in the first half of this year than the same period in 2016.

According to corporate credit research company Teikoku Databank, which surveys companies across various industries and has produced its third report on solar PV company bankruptcies, 50 companies in Japan’s solar sector have already gone out of business in the first six months of 2017.

While the market overall has rapidly expanded from the launch of the feed-in tariff (FiT) in July 2012, Teikoku Databank acknowledged that there has been a slowdown in deployment in the past couple of years as the government successively made cuts of 10% or more on an annual basis to the premium prices paid for solar energy fed into the grid.

This comes just days after another "green blog" noted that solar was  dying in Hawaii, also. This is the problem:

• solar needs huge subsidies to compete with coal
• subsidies cost governments money
• coal / natural gas utilities make profits without resorting to subsidies
• governments tax profits
• this is not rocket science

Even Jerry Brown's successor will figure this out.

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Speaking of Japanese Coal

Japan plans to build at least 45 new coal plants. From joannenova (same link as above):

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You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice, Nancy Sinatra

The Road To New England Goes Through The White House; I Can't Make This Stuff Up -- December 29, 2014

From Investor's Buisness Daily:

Feeling low about the incessant screeching that the ice is catastrophically melting at the poles? A lot of us are, so it's good to see a researcher buck the narrative.

Ted Maksym, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, has drawn a conclusion that will surely bring him grief from the global-warming believers and cold shoulder from most of the mainstream media, which is heavily invested in the idea that man is heating his planet by burning fossil fuels.

"The North and South Poles are 'not melting,'" the British Express reported on Christmas.

"In fact," the Express said in its coverage of Maksym's finding, "the poles are 'much more stable' than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought."

Remember those words "previously thought." In the future we will be seeing them a lot more in reference to the continued unraveling of the global warming fable. In the meantime, kudos to the Express for publishing what the mainstream American media refuse to report.

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Can't Make This Stuff Up Either

Phoenix could experience coldest New Year's Day in recorded history ... going all the way back to Alexander the Great. Okay, I made that last part up.

There’s the potential for up to a foot of snow in Northern Arizona.

Farther south in Phoenix, it could be one of the coolest New Year’s on record, says Pace. All the way down to 50 degrees (10C).

All the way down to 50 degrees. LOL. That's a summer day in North Dakota. 

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A Note to the Granddaughters

Who Can't Read This Anyway Because The Blog Has Been Taken Down

What an incredibly good day! My daughter -- not granddaughter -- the daughter with no children wanted to visit a "big" Japanese bookstore in downtown Los Angeles to get a certain puzzle book, not Suduko or Suuduko as the Japanese call it. We haven't been able to find the "puzzle logic" magazines she normally gets; they are caught up in a teamsters union job slowdown with ships stranded out at sea. I doubt that's entirely correct, but there is some truth to the story. But that's for another time, I suppose.

She did find a "puzzle logic" book at the store, so she was very, very happy. I saw a whole new selection of books I would not generally see at a Barnes and Noble. It was awesome.

The store: Kinokuniya Bookstores --

 Los Angeles City bans plastic bags for large retail stores 

selling perishable goods (i.e., grocery stores) but bookstores are exempt. 

Go figure.

There are nine of these Japanese bookstores in the United States. I've now seen two of them (Los Angeles, Costa Mesa); our younger daughter has seen three of them (those two plus Portland, Orego). If she sees the two in the Bay Area, San Francisco and San Jose (possible), and the one in Seattle (very possible), she will have seen 6 of the 9. The other three: Chicago, New York, and New Jersey.

I assume 90 - 95% of the books were in Japanese and thus not for me, but the 5 - 10% of the books in English there were superb. I assume most of the books could be found in a Barnes and Noble, but with such a small "English" collection, the bookstore would only have the best of the best. And the Japanese have the best taste in almost everything, it seems.

I ended up with three books and could have bought many more but I had to stop. 

The three:

• an almost-500 page, small-print, hardcover, of the Los Angeles film culture "before Hollywood," 1905 - 1915; very, very unique;
• an elegant but very small 25-page (or thereabouts) graphic novella telling the story of Steve Jobs and re-inventing Apple after Sculley, The Zen and Steve Jobs; it can be read in 10 minutes but there's something about it that suggests it will be a hard-to-find-but-much-sought-after item ten years from now;
• and, of all things, The Manga Guide to Electricity, a sort of Japanese comic book (in English) that explains electricity. 

Regular readers know my difficulty with understanding electricity and how I want to help my granddaughters learn about it, so I find whatever tools I can to help me as well as help them. This book looks particularly promising. It is very much like the American "Books for Idiots" series, but this is in the Japanese manga style which is much more appealing to a third grader who is into the Diaries of a Wimpy Kid.

The "manga" book is also a fast read, but something tells me it will provide some insights and nuances into electricity that I have not seen before.

Just for the fun of it, I read the first 20 pages earlier this evening, and right or wrong, I think I understand why Europe (and I think Japan also) has 240 volt appliances as a general rule and Americans have 120 volt. Right or wrong, it provides a way for me to remember the "power formula" (current, power, voltage relationship).

COP (BR) To Slow Drilling In The Bakken Due To Slump In Oil Prices; The Road To Fukushima -- October 30, 2014

Bloomberg is reporting:

ConocoPhillips became the first major oil company to announce plans to reduce spending due to falling crude prices as drilling in some emerging North American fields becomes less profitable.

The third-largest U.S. energy producer can meet its target to boost production by as much as 5 percent each year even as it reduces annual spending to below $16 billion, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ryan Lance told investors today.

ConocoPhillips plans to scale back drilling in emerging oil regions such as West Texas and the Rocky Mountains. The company’s ability to produce oil at lower costs in more established areas that have fueled the U.S. shale boom make growth sustainable. ConocoPhillips could also reduce exploration spending, he said. 

The "Rocky Mountains" include the Bakken in this context. In the Bakken, BR is COP. 

Later in the article:

ConocoPhillips increased production 33 percent to the equivalent of 212,000 barrels of oil a day in North Dakota’s Bakken and Texas’ Eagle Ford formations, two of the fastest-growing U.S. oil fields. That follows a 41 percent output increase in the second quarter. The company also completed a sale of its interest in Nigeria for $1.4 billion.

More:

The company has gone from a small player in fast-growing U.S. shale regions to a dominant force able to turn a profit at an oil price of $40 a barrel.

“They have plenty of places to put capital, and they can take the time to make sure that when they drill an unconventional well, they are successful and realize a high margin,” James Sullivan, a New York-based analyst at Alembic Global Advisors, said today in a telephone interview.

ConocoPhillips became the second major oil company today to report rising profits in the face of falling crude prices as an asset sale in Nigeria and higher output in Texas and North Dakota boosted returns. 

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New 52-Week Highs

This is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

Wow, what a market. Hitting new 52-week highs: AEP, AMGN, CSX, EW, SRE.

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Fukushima All Over Again

This is an incredible story. I had a different "headline" but I thought it might be a bit too much (LOL).

A huge "thank you" for Don spotting this story. I missed it. Pretty much encapsulates the entire global problem with renewable energy. Even Spain and Germany are mentioned. Newbies probably need to read the entire article to understand the blurb below, but regular readers will understand this, from the AP via Yahoo!Finance:

The utilities say they can't accommodate the flood of newcomers to the green energy business, throwing in doubt the future of Japan's up-to-now aggressive strategy on renewable energy.

Another challenge is that supplies of power from sources such as solar are not reliable enough or easily stored.

"Kyushu electric shock is spreading in a domino effect," said Oba. "It's like fraud on the national level, with utility companies and the government in cahoots with each other."

Traumatized by the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl and encouraged by the highest rates for renewable energy in the world, Japan has been undergoing a green boom. It's now rapidly turning into a fiasco as the cost proves prohibitive and utilities anticipate putting some nuclear reactors, shuttered since the March 2011 Fukushima disaster, back online. The unfolding green glut in Japan echoes similar experiences in Germany and Spain.

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Ebola

I see the state of Maine plans to ask the nurse returning from Ebolaland vis New Jersey to "self-quarantine" herself for 21 days. One would think the clock would have started when she entered the states, which must have been about a week ago. [I see the 21 days is up November 10, 2014.] I see she has not yet been invited to the White House to be hugged by the president. I don't blame him. It's now well confirmed that the virus can survive outside the human body for a lot longer than suspected or first reported. Like on doorknobs and toilet seats.

[Update: I posted that two days ago, October 28, 2014. Today, two days later, October 30, it is being reported that the CDC is, in fact, reporting the same thing: Ebola is more easily spread than we are being told:

Ebola is a lot easier to catch than health officials have admitted — and can be contracted by contact with a doorknob contaminated by a sneeze from an infected person an hour or more before.

And there you have it.]

[This is kind of funny. The other day Mike Savage, talk radio, was upset about folks using the word "catch" when talking about contracting an infectious disease. He often reminds us that he has a doctorate in something, maybe infectious disease epidemiology but I really don't know and I really don't care, but it is interesting that he was upset about the use of "catch." As noted above, almost everyone uses the colloquial "catch" including the NY Post above. The question is: do recognized medical authorities use "catch" in connection with infectious disease? It turns out that the Mayo Clinic does:

An easy way to catch most infectious diseases is by coming in contact with a person or animal who has the infection. 

I can't make this stuff up. Reason #2,387 why I love to blog. LOL. Mike Savage needs to move on.]

The nurse, by the way, is now out and about in the state of Maine, bicycling (photo of her bicycling at this link). CNN update (their words, not mine), October 31, 2014:

Nurse Kaci Hickox recently returned to the United States after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone. She's been in a tense standoff with state authorities, who want her to stay home for 21 days -- the incubation period for the deadly virus.

"Want her to stay .... "

By the way, speaking of Ebola, the CDC has backtracked. After a call from the White House and the Ebolaczar, the CDC has removed posters warning folks that Ebolavirus, like all viruses, can be found in droplets from sneezing and coughing. I can't make this stuff up.  This was noted October 31, 2014, one day after the posters were noted by mainstream media.

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A Note For the Granddaughters

About two months ago we noted a "new" pastry item at our favorite breakfast restaurant in downtown Grapevine. The pastry item was a "Cronut." I had never heard of such a thing until then. It's a "cross" between a croissant and a donut. I asked the folks at the restaurant what that was all about. They have apparently had it for quite some time; it has become very, very popular. While we were talking -- this was a Sunday morning -- a person rushed in to pick up two Cronuts. Unfortunately the pastry shop had sold out; none were left. The proprietor gave the individual a half dozen other pastry items as a gift to make up for the fact they had sold out of Cronuts. The individual had not pre-ordered; we were told that if we wanted to assure ourselves of a Cronut we needed to call ahead and put an order in. Only so many are made each day and once that batch is made, no more are set out for the day.

The reason the proprietor was so happy to give the aforementioned individual half-a-dozen other pastry items was because this customer was a regular. Actually, the person coming in the restaurant-pastry shop was not the customer; he was the chauffeur to the customer who was outside, waiting in the limousine.

Yes, in Grapevine, Cronuts are very popular.

I, of course, would never have posted that except for an Adam Gopnik's article in this week's issue of The New Yorker: Bakeoff: What is happening to our pastry? The first paragraph:

It would probably be going too far to say that there is a war on between Maury Rubin's pretzel croissant and Dominique Ansel's Cronut -- going too far because the two things can and do coexist grudgingly, one at Rubin's City Bakery, off lower Fifth, and theother at Ansel's self-named bakery, in SoHo, and also because, truth be told, Rubin's combinaiton of croissant sweetness and pretzel salt is by now a familiar staple fo the lower-Manhattan breakfast, while the crowd for Ansel's deep-fried croissant-doughnut is still a phenomenon, creating lines that sometimes start crawling aroudn the block at Spring and Thompson Streets at five in the morning.

"....is still a phenomenon in New York"? Apparently we've had Cronuts in Grapevine, TX, for quite some time and they, too, are still a phenomenon.