Let it be known that I'm all for new and better forms of energy. I just don't think that shifting resources away from food crops is the way to go. Look what happened when America gave even a relatively small subsidy to ethanol production. Now imagine if the world as a whole did it.

 

You keep saying trust me on this but I would have to ask you how long you have worked in the oilfield. I've spent close to 35 years working in the oilfield and think I might know what's going on out there better than you do.

As an example. If they are not manipulating the price how come we are paying close to $100 per barrel of oil when production costs of remained the same if not dropped during the past decade.

You mention the effects subsidies have but you fail to note that the major oil companies actually enjoy many tax breaks and subsidies. As examples the energy bill recently passed still contained the tax breaks they enjoy even when the major oil companies are raking in record profits.

Here's a couple of things in just today's newspaper. The major oil companies the control the Alaskan Pipeline have over charged for delivery of oil to the tune of $80 million dollars. I have been personally hurt and the company I worked for was put out of business by the corrupt practices of ENCANA whose profits increased 63% in the fourth quarter of this past year.

There is also a full page ad from the oil and gas industry in today's paper about why they should be allowed to do year-round drilling in what is called the Pinedale Anticline. Now it was just a decade or so ago that these same producers were telling the public that if allowed to drill in this area they would respect the monumental environmental concerns and not drill during the winter months because almost every species of big game animals and birds depend on this area for massive migrations that allow them to survive the winter months.

Two years ago they were also saying it was perfectly safe with their new technology to drill gas wells only 50 feet apart. The public never knew that after that was approved a rig drilled into an existing well and the roughnecks had 30 seconds to flee for their lives before the rig burned to the ground. Also in todays paper is the story about a friend of mine who died a horrible and unnecessary death on a rig, but because our state workers compensation laws make it impossible to sue your employer, his family which has been financially devastated by his death can't collect any damages.

So you bet the major energy companies as they are calling themselves now monopolize and manipulate far more than just the price of oil and gas.

As to your belief that if incentives were offered for biofuel production it would have devastating effects you are wrong on a couple of counts. All you would have to do is drive across the state of North Dakota and look at the amount of land, vacant farms and ghost towns, that are the result of devastating reduction in farms from two decades ago to realize how much land we have available for biofuels. Likewise, incentives would allow us to break up the monopoly that is currently manipulating ethanol from corn. Also what you would see is small refineries created near where the fuel is actually needed.

Most importantly it would end our dependence on foreign oil and get us out of Iraq and the middle east.

Another thing you need to understand is that we may produce 48% of our oil but not for long. The US oil fields are dwindling fast and there is no new discoveries on the horizon. Only more rip off's that will result in even higher energy costs.

You are actually doing this right now as I type this but you are doing it for the monopolies such as Exxon-Mobile and Archer Daniels Midland which is more or less the same manipulating mega corporations who are ripping us off.

And I am not so much worried about what the rest of the world does as I am about finding ways for America to stop fighting wars and killing 100's of thousands of innocent people to protect oil company profits.

 

And last, here is your unfounded allegation that we went to war to grab the oil, Iraq and Kuwait are two of the smallest exporters to the US, whoops guess we screwed that up too.

 

Just because the Bush administration hasn't admitted to it doesn't mean the allegation is unfounded. When the U.S. marched into Baghdad, what was the only government ministry they immediately locked down?

And why does the so-called oil-sharing agreement, which among other things guarantees access by U.S. companies to Iraqi oil, remain the top diplomatic priority and benchmark for the U.S.?

And why won't Cheney reveal who was behind his energy policy?

Even that arch-liberal Alan Greenspan, in an unguarded moment, admitted that it was all about oil.

 

This is another typical example of how the liberals twist what is said to suit their agenda.

Greenspan's comments were not from a position of policy, they were his opinion, they were taken from a interview. His comments were about the impact of oil production and shipments if Iraq controlled the Strait of Hormuz. He stated that in his opinion, it was a good war to stop that threat.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-goldberg18sep18,0,6583630.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/16/AR2007091601287_pf.html

 

Good God...you complain about liberal "twist" and then you hit me with a hack like Jonah Goldberg??? Please...

The Woodward article makes it clear that Greenspan advised Bush that removing Saddam would be a good thing in terms of energy security. Where's the evidence, other than administration denials, that Bush didn't heed the advice?

And by the way, there's no way on Earth that Iraq could control the Strait of Hormuz. Look at a map.

 

Don't you remember the incidents of Iraqi gunboats in the Strait of Hormuz??? No, me neither.

Perhaps he was referring to the problems that would be caused if Iraq controlled the northwestern part of the Persian Gulf and the havoc they could raise if they interfered with tanker traffic.

By the way, if you can pick who you quote, why can't I?

 

Back to a topic a bit closer to the thread title;

Castro is blaming ethanol production for starving the worlds poor.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/4229

 

You're certainly free to attack my sources any time you want. But Goldberg has a particularly bogus pedigree.

I assume that was a snark about the Iraqi gunboats...so I'll let it pass.

 

You might think that, but I grew up in it sweetheart. Don't make assumptions.

Because the market will bear it. You can't sell something if no one is buying, and if you can sell it, you're within your rights to sell it for the highest price you like. As to a true mechanical reason that prices have gone up: demand has gone up. If they could manipulate the price of oil, probably one of the most fungible commodities in the world, then oil would be $150/bbl, or whatever would maximize profits.

And just like adding a new tax to oil, all the removal of the incentives will do is increase the price of gasoline.

And ENCANA isn't a major oil company. A large independent, surely, but not quite a supermajor. And while you may have been personally hurt, if you've been in the industry for 35 years, you've also been personally enriched.

And it's also become apparent that it doesn't greatly affect them, like the caribou in Alaska that love the pipeline because of all the heat. I've been to Pinedale, many of my friends work there. From what I've seen, the locals are far harder on the sage grouse than the oil companies are. There's also the policy for getting drilling permits from the BLM. If you're saying that a thorough environmental study couldn't find a single place on the anticline to drill that wouldn't hurt the animals, I'd say you're probably mistaken.

I actually sat through a lecture at the BLM office in Casper, WY. It was most enlightening. When asked "What is a noxious weed?" by one of the students at the lecture, the BLM rep replied "Whatever I say it is." When faced with that sort of subjectivity, I'd assert the oil companies are perfectly within their rights to offer up any evidence they can to support environmentally sound drilling activity, year round or not.

And having grown up around production operations in both the south east and in Colorado, I can assert that big game animals are rarely affected much by drilling and production. I've seen them on and around drilling locations and production facilities countless times in my life. Add to that that farmers/ranchers have threatened at least as many, if not more, species than oil and gas have and I think that this argument holds less than water.

And I have personal experience with a facility in Houston that has 6 2000' horizontals drilled less that 100' away from a series of about 14 3000' vertical wells and they've had absolutely no problem with directional design. The horiztonals spudded about 50' apart from each other. Just because a directional driller or a drilling engineer fucks up is no reason to rule a technology is too infantile to be used. Check out Occidental's project in Longbeach, called the THUMBS or something like that. Very interesting use of directional drilling, very closely spaced wells.

And there are also stories of rigs burning down on perfectly vertical wells because the drilling crews make mistakes. Should we ban drilling altogether?

Unless the laws were written by an oil company, I'm not sure you're directing your complaint at the right people. If they were, then was your friend working for the operator or the contractor? Was he third party? Who caused the accident? A number of variables that your narrative of the story doesn't adequately address. And if he was working a rig without adequate providisions for his family in the event of such a disaster, I'd say he wasn't very good at planning. I'm sorry if it comes off as callous, but everybody I've ever met who worked rigs had provisions made for their death that were independent of suing their employer.

Of course they try to manipulate things. Prices they can't manipulate, it's too big a market and the non-national oil companies control too small a part of the reserves to be truly heard. I assume you're referring to laws with the story about your friend dying on the rig, but I would challenge that the energy industry has a much larger ability to manipulate legal matters than any other large group of people. Take unions for example.

On the issue of manipulating environmental controls, I would point you to offshore Alaska. Recently, Shell was halted from shooting seismic there by an injunction filed by some environmental group or another, I forget. The injunction was not filed against Shell, but against the MMS, for not doing due diligence, I believe. That hold up cost Shell an entire year, and I think that they would have halted it had they been able to manipulate the system so effortlessly as you seem to believe.

It wasn't too devastating, I think. Unless you were a farmer who failed to plan.

Anyway, with all that land where will the farmers come from? A plot of land does not production make. Could you convince people to tear up their life and move to North Dakota in the hope of making a living growing weed? Apparently we couldn't convince them to stay their growing corn and the like, elsewise they wouldn't have left.

Because permitting a refinery is easy and everybody wants one in their backyard. At any rate, small refineries for small communities might work, would even be cool to see, but how do you take care of massive centers of population? You either produce the ethanol elsewhere and truck it or pipeline it in or you build a refinery near the big city and ship large amounts of hemp across the country.

No arguments there, both good things. If it would work. I stand by my claim that if it will make money and people know how to do it, somebody would be doing it. The world is too big a place for no one to be taking advantage of an opportunity like you seem to think exists. And I'm certain that the America would love to buy ethanol made from hemp, just like it will buy oil largely regardless of the source and human cost.

Except off-shore Alaska. Shell has actually just won quite a few leases to drill up there. They are regarded as the "largest, most proven undeveloped reserves in America" or something like that. There's also the EGoM, where we're currently not allowed to drill. I'm sure prices will dictate a change in policy there soon. As to production slowing, in most you're right.

But America also has massive amounts of production shut in waiting for someone to pump it. Veneco in California got their start on a field like this. They turned it from a loss to a cash cow, just by changing the pumps. Also, Americans are some of the best in the world at supplemental oil recovery, mostly because we've been trying to scrape the bottom of our barrel for so long.

There's different types of resources opening up as wel. There's the oil shale in Colorado and the heavy oils in Canada. Both of those are resources on the order of trillions of barrels. The oil shale, according to what I've read about it, is one of the most energy dense resources in the world.

Exxon-Mobile at least, made less money per dollar spent than most American coporations, as pointed out tenguy.

You're not much worried about what the rest of the world does, but worry about the lives of people in another country? What do you think would happen to the Middle East if the oil industry went under? It would implode, I think. Be much nastier than when America came in.

But, sadly, hemp won't stop those wars, I don't think. You think we fight a war in the Middle East to protect profits now. If America could generate enough fuel from Hemp to suit our own needs, especially with the relatively low costs of entry that you've stated, the next step would be to produce more and sell it to other countries. And then we'll be competing with the Middle East, won't we? We'll fight to protect the hemp companies' profits at that point. A different man, or the same man in a different suit.

 

I didn't expect to encounter a lobbyest on our little forum but since I have lets fall out in the yard and get right after it then.

I'll have to call a bullshit on this one right out of the gate. You can damn sure sell oil for what ever you want because it is absolutely necessary and the world oil monopoly has made sure of that since the very beginning clear back to prohibition. We're talking about an essential product for transportation and manufacturing that has more than tripled in the past decade and the demand has sure not tripled so the only other explanation is price gouging.

That wasn't the point which you are trying to side step here. The point was during a time of record profits and price gouging the major oil companies still enjoy tax breaks and incentives that considering the price and dwindling oil supplies should be going into alternative energy sources. And the price of gasoline is already increasing as well a diesel fuel and those are driving up the price of everything else. This isn't the first time its a pattern that has been very consistent for the past 30 years.

You're right ENCANA is not a major oil or even energy company at least not like British Petrelum so how in hell did these two foreign companies end up controlling and producing the biggest and most profitable oil and gas fields in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska? I tell you how because part of the international monopoly is to swap ownerships around on paper to avoid being able to tax them. Just because the oil companies are raking in windfall profits doesn't mean they are willing to pay a windfall profit tax on them like they did back in the 1970's so they just create a new paper trail but its still the same good ol' boys.

You're bullshitting here and I'll bet you know it. First because the Alaskian Pipeline had had some pretty serious impacts on wildlife and keeping Caribou warm won't make up for that.

But more importantly we are not talking about Alaska here. We talking about a unique area in the state that is the literal survival and has been for thousands of years for deer elk antelope and moose that have had to migrate to survive the winter. Don't try to bullshit me on this one I've seen the impacts the road kills and the disruptions and just because the state and federal government is willing to play ball with them doesn't change the fact that it is killing off lots of big game animals. That was the reason the area was not open to development on a mass scale for decades. They've been producing oil and gas there since the turn of the centuries and the locals you mention that had their own little companies found a way to work around the migrations without serious impacts. Its ENCANA and BP that keep lying about their intents and get they way by buying politicians and football fields and score boards.

Now you really showed your stripes here kid because I never mentioned the Sage Grouse which the oil companies are scared shitless is going to get placed on the endangered species list you did. That shows you've got the inside track on these issues not just some passing interest.

Bullshit again and if that BLM man couldn't answer the question all he had to do was look at the list and we both know we are talking about things like haligeton and other non-native weeds that are brought into the area through vehicle traffic and are not only poisonous but also have a tendency to take over the native plants. Its another one of the issues the oil and gas companies have been trying to duck for two reasons. One the introduction of these non-native weeds, the destruction of the native plants including the grass for livestock and wildlife and then ducking the reclamation and eradication costs.

The other thing you trip yourself up on is you know the current history and I'll bet you know the past history. First we want to increase development in the Pinedale Anticline but we will be careful not to harm the environment because we recognize the unique environment required for wildlife. Then they wanted to double and triple the number of permits and wells. The field started to spread out and even crowd the river and creek bottoms that were supposed to be left alone. Then the well spacing got smaller and smaller. But they still had to get off the mesa and the other areas that were critical range in the winter for the migration. And finally they are even renigging on that and you bet the state and the BLM which with Bush Cheney in the Whitehouse they are going to get it.

It doesn't change the facts that they are pretty much destroying the country and damaging the wildlife and could give a shit less because all they care about is their profits.

Who do you think you are trying to kid here doggy. Sure you see animals around production operations. They don't have anyplace else to go. You also see them drowned in reserve pits, poached or shot for the hell of it by oilfield employees most of which are not residents of the states anymore. And your claim that ranchers and farmers have threatened more species is what doesn't hold water. Other than the wolf and passing regulations to make them stop using getter guns and other poisons agriculture and wildlife have found a truce and they ranchers and farmers even get paid for the damages wildlife does. But those are established areas when there is no place they won't put a drilling rig, a production unit or a pipeline. The wildlife was already crowded into less and less space and less and less to survive on.

You know they claimed the same things about clear cutting for timber in this state like it was a great benefit to wildlife and the pushed that lie for decades by taking pictures of elk and deer feeding in the clear cuts. You'd have to look somewhere else to find the pictures of the erosion, the roads, the noise. The sad thing was and it will happen with oil and gas too, they passed off those bullshit tales for decades but as soon as the timber was depleted they went ahead and stopped the logging and closed the mills anyway. So the jobs were still gone and so were the resources and animals.

I never tried to claim any such thing as the technology for directional drilling is not there. I just got off of wells in Colorado that are only six feet apart and they drill up to 30 wells on the same pad. What I said is because the boom is on and the windfalls are coming their way the companies are willing to lie through their teeth about what they are planning to do and don't give a fuck who gets killed in the process and the public will never be the wiser. All I was pointing out was that these companies again went to the state and gave them a bullshit line that just so they could drill more wells faster and make more money and claimed they could and would do it safely. Bullshit the example I put up proves they lied at least about that much. Sure they can do it other places but not with the worms and genzels that said they could.

You bet there are and sometimes the drilling crew does fuck up. But I'll tell you straight up that more often than not it is the company and the company men and the engineers in Huston and Denver that fuck up and it is the drilling crews that pay the price with the cost of their lives and limbs, because they are disposable and cheaper. It's way cheaper to kill or cripple a roughneck than it is to drill the well. That's why its always safety first unless the rig is on down time, then if it costs an arm or a leg or a life well that's just the cost of doing business.

Actually the laws that make it impossible to sue your employer in this state were not written by the oil and mining companies, they were written because of the oil and mining companies after the permanently disabled thoushands of workers during the last boom in the 1970's and then left the state when the energy glut occured because there was no energy crisis in the first place. The companies left but they left those all those disabled workers here and the workers compensation fund went broke. To make up for it since they had under charged the oil and mining companies during the boom the state had to make it mandatory for every employer in the state to pay into workers comp when before it was just the hazardous occupations. That was had to be done during the bust and to make up for the economic impact on ma and pa type business they wrote employer protection into the law as a trade off. Now we are back to killing and crippling an average of a man a week out there because they will hire anyone and the lack of experience is literally killing people.

And yeah sure it was the workers responsibility to provide for his family when it was all he could do to support them because of the rising housing, food and other costs that come right along with the boom. It couldn't be the companies fault for not having experienced hands that knew how to do their job, or junk iron that never gets fixed, or companies willing to risk people's lives to beat the drilling curve and stay ahead of the competition.

What unions you know damn well there is no oilfield union and it would do absolutely no good if there was because starting back in the 50's the oil, gas and mining industries made damn sure any state that had extraction potential also ended being a "right to work state" which means unions have absolutely no power because even if its a union job you don't have to be a member of the union to work on it.

And you are right the oil, gas and mining companies do have a much larger ability to manipulate legal matters than any other large group because they hire the best lobbyists they can get their hands on as well as the best public relations firms and simply overwhelm and/or buy state legislatures like Wyoming. You end up with something like the Mayor of a small town or a handful of citizens going up against 50 highly paid professional lobbyists every time something comes up and they don't have a prayer. And another they don't have a prayer is because of the conflicts of interest and greased palms and campaigns that make up the government.

Get real here Doggy. One incident of that when the Alaskan Pipeline all but collapsed during the past year through lack of maintanence. When there are oil spills every where the oil is. When the only way you can stop a company is by taking the government to court. When they are trying to drill in wildlife preserves and wilderness areas. Who do you think you're bullshitting here, there have been no virtually no environmental controls since Bush/Cheney got in office and any government employee who does try to enforce the laws ends looking for a new job.

Again you are just trying to dodge the point and doing a piss poor job of that Doggy. You tried to claim we don't have the farm land and I simply pointed out that is bullshit. All we have to do is put the farm land back in production that was taken out of production during the 1970's and 80's and we don't have to be creating new farming land, cutting down trees or causing the other environmental harm you originally mentioned.

And in reality we are paying through the nose right now for farm subsidies going to already rich individuals and corporations not to grow crops.

Most of them would who were forced off their farms when the Reagan Adminstration pulled the farmers loans out from under them would gladly leave the oilfield they were forced to go into to go back to farming if they could make a living on it. Famers who raised their kids as farmers would love to see their kids have a place to farm instead of working at Walmart of leaving the state to make a living. No one had to convince them to stay they were put out of farming because there was no market for their commodities and the government was no longer willing to subsidize the farming industry for the small farmers to grow crops like corn, wheat and sugar beats. Hemp would be a great cash crop for them just like it was in this country up until 1939.

First lets talk about refineries for a minute. How come the closed most of the oil refineries near the oilfields like in Casper, Cody, Rawlins and dozens of others back in the 1980's? Boy talk about hurting our economy, putting people out of work and then leaving the state with contamination problems so big that the feds had to step in with environmental super funds just to clean up the plumes of pollution. We and the rest of the country were told because it was for effecency and lower fuel costs because they were going to build super refineries. Then for the next 28 years all we've heard is that the cost of gasoline is going up because demand is high and the refineries are opeating at maximum capacity. Funny we never had that problem before we had the "super refineries" and funnier still with all that demand they didn't build any new refineries for decades. As we speak right now they are finally advertising that they are actually going to build a new refinery down in the flood planes of Louisiana.

The deal with ethanol refineries and I bet you damn well already know this is that they are simple compared to oil refineries, that can be built to the scale needed and you can grow hemp just as easy near large population centers just as easy as you can grow it in small communities. One of the huge advantages is the versatility of both the hemp and the refineries.

Especially as opposed to what we are doing now which is piplineing and shipping oil clear across the country and the world to a few central points.

Except you are so conveniently overlooking the fact that one of the things the oil companies helped manipulate is making hemp illegal in the US and the UK especially and that was one of there specific goals and still is.

And your absolutely right the American people and the world would be glad to buy cheap fuel made from hemp that would bread the strangle hold of the oil monopolies and the Middle East dependency as well as reduce the dangers of global warming if they knew about except the oil companies, the governments and politicians they've purchased and people like you and others that just want to protect the status quo don't want that to happen so the American Public remains ignorant and misinformed about an easy and beneficial energy source.

Is that who you are working for; Shell? They've known about those oil reserves for decades and they are a drop in the bucket compared to the increase in world demand and you hear the the largest most new oil reserves all the time. It's bullshit propaganda which you admit youself. There are no undiscovered oil reserves. There are just the places that up until now were too environmentally sensitive to destroy but you bet Bush and the Boys are going to make sure those get drilled in instead of supporting alternative energy sources.

Which is it there doggy? We've got massive amounts of production shut in just waiting for someone to pump it or were scrapping the bottom of the barrel? You sure seem to be contradicting yourself here, so I'll tell you. We've got depleted high maintenance wells with no pipeline capacity available shut in but those are mostly either very high recovery costs or very low grade oil that is actually not good for anything more than asphalt.

The truth is we are scrapping the bottom of the oil barrel in the US and instead of developing new alternative energy sources like biofuels we put our resources and tax breaks into new ways to try and scrape the same old oil barrel.

I wish we were having this discussion face to face right now because I'd be laughing in yours. The heavy oils in Canada is only profitable not that oil prices are hovering around $100 per barrel. Its not even oil in the normal sense of the term it used to be road tar until the prices got high enough. And the only bigger joke is the oil shale in Colorado. They've been claiming they can recover that since I was in the fourth grade and that was in the early 1960's. They even tried to use a nuclear bomb to heat it and extract it back in the 1960's. In the later decades Union oil went in there great guns and was actually going to try and mine it. And just last year we were being told they were going to bust the top of the Colorado Platue wide open and drill wells with four foot spacing to heat it and extract it. Ain't happening that's for sure and won't until oil is up to $400 a barrel is my guess.

You guys just floor me with this bullshit. How can you take in the highest profits in history and still claim you made less per dollar spent than most American Corporations? I'll tell you how. First you inflate your costs which also include paying off the government and the political campaigns and the public relations firms to get your message out and then you cheat like hell on the international level.



You're not much worried about what the rest of the world does, but worry about the lives of people in another country? What do you think would happen to the Middle East if the oil industry went under? It would implode, I think. Be much nastier than when America came in.

But, sadly, hemp won't stop those wars, I don't think. You think we fight a war in the Middle East to protect profits now. If America could generate enough fuel from Hemp to suit our own needs, especially with the relatively low costs of entry that you've stated, the next step would be to produce more and sell it to other countries. And then we'll be competing with the Middle East, won't we? We'll fight to protect the hemp companies' profits at that point. A different man, or the same man in a different suit.[/quote]

 

Sorry I missed these two points because I sure wouldn't want to do that Doggy.

Let's just call it prioritizing shall we. The major oil companies with the help of the US government in the form of the CIA have been manipulating and exploiting the middle east since the late 1940's. We put the Shaw of Iran in power as well as Saddam Hussien in power to continue that manipulation. There's been more than 100,000 people killed in Iraq alone and we've lost 4,000 troops and your trying to sit there and tell me it would cause trouble in the middle east if we developed alternative energy sources. Can you hear me laughing at you from here?

How about this since one of the things driving up the price and depleting the reserves is the increased oil demand in China and India they could sell it to them.

I lied. I guess I don't want to answer this absolute nonsense here. Its a god damned sick joke considering the problems we and the rest of the world are facing over oil.

 

OK I want to know this. I have a theory that ALL of the global warming if there is such a thing (this is getting to be as tortuous as religion)(lmaybe it is a religion)

is caused by CIGARETTE SMOKERS. Has no one looked at the statistics on how lmany tons of tobacco is burned hourly and what the atmospheric products are?

It isn't cars because the emissions have been virtually zero in this country for many years now. It isn't freon for that has been banned also these many years so no one could infringe on Du Pont's expried patents.

 

Yes Z, that is certainly one the prime contributors, when coupled with the energy (both electrical and human) required to power the excruciatingly long posts by some in these forums.

 

Moi? C'est moi???? O noe, sorry
But if we could hook our keyboards together and turn the power from the keystrokes into electricity, we could light up New York City for all time.

 

No not you Z, your posts are certainly electrifying but not a waste of energy.

 

i really dont care nemore about global warming cuz i kno me and the rest of us on here will be dead in about 65yrs, i'll leave it for my kids to deal with, im tired i just want to go to heaven

 

bye

 

if im gonna die your comming with me tenguy

 

Does this somehow comfort you? BTW, you don't know that you won't be dead a minute from now, do you?