2001.03.30
<politics>
Oil & Gas Journal:
President
Bush defends decision not to regulate CO2.
> It's really disconcerting listening to this guy talk. His thinking
is undeniably disorganized.
> I agree that, short term, promoting domestic exploration is a good
policy. And with effort, I think we can responsibly drill ANWR, and
offshore the east coast, and offshore California. Offshore platforms aren't
the most attractive architecture, it's true, but if everyone is going to
drive a gas-guzzling SUV, we're going to have to make some sacrifices.
(ha, ha)
> Anyway, I'm not a knee-jerk Green. I know our scientific understanding
of CO2 and global warming is far from complete. But these issues
are critical environmental concerns, and ignoring them won't make them go away.
</politics>
2001.03.29
There's something happening here ...
Oil & Gas Journal:
EIA
says world energy use to jump 59% in 20 years.
"The agency said in its reference case, projections are that oil prices
will remain at the current $25-28/bbl until 2003 when they begin increasing."
...
"Gas is expected to account for the largest increment in electricity generation
(accounting for 41% of the total increment in energy used for generation).
EIA said oil is expected to remain the world's primary energy source with a
40% market share over the 1999-2020 period."
Houston Chronicle:
Gas
fuels large rise in Gulf lease bids.
Oil & Gas Journal:
Independents
bid heavily in Central Gulf of Mexico sale.
"Acting MMS Director Tom Kitsos said, `We are very pleased with this sale.
Strong bidding by the independent oil and gas companies was major part of
the sale, and we are particularly pleased with the high interest shown in
the shallow water area where deep gas deposits may be present.' Kitsos
noted that 11 companies in the sale were first-time bidders"
Houston Chronicle:
Shell says
it wants downstream assets in U.S., Europe.
Oil & Gas Journal:
Analysts
predict another round of oil mergers and acquisitions.
"... it's clear that major oil companies, which have spent the last decade
unloading North American oil and gas properties, might want to get back in
the game." ...
"Royal Dutch/Shell Group's attempt to buy Barrett Resources Corp. is just
the beginning, analysts predicted....
Barrett has set an Apr. 6 deadline for other companies wanting to look in
their data room. Barrett rival Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has looked at the
books and is itself a takeover target, although the company won't confirm
if talks are underway with a major oil firm.
"Wall Street analysts said other companies believed to be under the active
eye of majors include: Burlington Resources Inc., Devon Energy Corp.,
Evergreen Resources Inc., Forest Oil Corp., and Triton Energy Ltd."
> During the last few years, the investment community went .COM-crazy and
abandoned us; energy was soooooo "old economy." The major oil and gas
companies didn't do too much better. When the financial markets turned a
cold eye, the majors were tripping over each other trying to get out of the
domestic door. The smaller guys -- today's "acquisition targets" -- had
the foresight to swim against the current and beef up their companies (and
their reserves) when everyone else wanted out of the industry.
> I want to see these companies rewarded. But if I worked at one of them,
I don't think I would be happy that I was being sold to the short-sighted
bean-counters who missed last year's opportunities.
2001.03.22
Wall Street Journal (subscription):
Exxon Mobil
Uses Scientist's Data As Evidence of Natural Warming.
"[Exxon Mobil] is increasingly isolated on the issue, not only from the international
scientific community but also from European competitors BP Amoco PLC and Royal
Dutch/Shell Group, both of which largely accept the premise that the Earth is warming
because of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
"Dr. Keigwin maintains that Exxon Mobil's use of his data is inappropriate."
Oil & Gas Journal:
Three
refiners sign consent decree covering nine plants.
"The US Department of Justice said Wednesday it has reached agreements with three
refiners that will reduce air emissions from nine refineries by more than 60,000
tons/year.... Justice said the settlements were part of its effort to reduce
harmful air pollution that it said the refineries had released illegally."
Houston Chronicle:
3 firms agree to air
cleanup.
"Along with previous settlements involving BP and Koch, the three agreements
announced Wednesday cover plants with about 25 percent of domestic refining capacity,
said Christine Romano, spokeswoman for the Department of Justice. Settlement talks
are continuing with several other refiners, which Romano would not identify. She said,
however, that they represent another 25 percent of domestic capacity."
Oil & Gas Journal:
API
chief: Form of gasoline will be used to power fuel cell vehicles.
"Hydrogen and methanol are competing options for rapidly advancing fuel cell
technology, but both appear less suited for the nearer term marketplace than
technology fueled by gasoline, Caveney told a Hart World Fuels Conference meeting
in New Orleans."
...
"Cavaney said numerous reasons exist to believe fuel cell technology will
achieve commercial viability within a decade."
2001.03.21
Oil & Gas Journal:
SEG
official: Geophysicists to expand into other industries.
"`Long-term R&D today is done in universities, if it's done at all,'
said [SEG president-elect Walt] Lynn.
`A principal factor in long-term research is the freedom to fail, but
companies don't have that luxury of failure anymore.'"
Oil Online:
John
S. Herold chairman comments on oil stock valuations.
"... industry executives will learn the
hard way that they'll get no respect on Wall Street for
trying to acquire their way to a higher valuation, Art Smith,
chairman & CEO of energy research and consulting firm
John S. Herold, Inc. told a meeting of the Society of
Petroleum Evaluation Engineers recently."
2001.03.20
Oil & Gas Journal:
President
Bush stresses need for more refinery capacity.
Quote from GWB edited lightly to make him sound smarter.
"... it's important for American consumers to understand that if we have
a price spike in refined product, it's not going to be because of the
price of crude oil being at $25 or $26/bbl. It's going to be because we
don't have enough ... refining capacity....
We haven't built a refinery in 25 years in America. We're not
generating enough gasoline to meet demands. It's the same as natural gas.
We're not exploring for enough natural gas to meet demand; we're not
building enough power generating plants to meet demand, and we're
beginning to pay the price for it."
> I'm not Dubya's number one fan. I met him briefly before he was
governor of Texas, and I thought he was an idiot. But I'm going to make a
point of giving him credit when he's honest.
> The US has been disastrously negligent in terms of not having any
energy policy for the past twenty years. (Unless you count the Gulf War.)
The first step in correcting the situation is
to tell the truth about it. Nothing in the last election pissed me off
more than Gore's "Big Oil" lies. I held my nose to vote for him, and I'm
not really sorry that he lost.
> So that this doesn't sound like a Dubya lovefest, I'll mention that
Bush is *lying* *through* *his* *teeth* about taxes. But that's another
rant.
I sure am bitchy today.
WSJ (subscription):
Energy Chief
Opposes Tax Breaks For Producers, but Warns of Crisis.
"[Energy Secretary Spencer] Abraham predicted electricity shortages for
California and the New York City area this summer as part of a bleak economic
outlook. `The nation's last three recessions have all been tied to rising energy
prices -- and there is strong evidence that the latest crisis is already having
a negative effect,' he said...."
Associated Press:
Rolling blackouts
return to California.
"Nearly 1 million customers were affected in the worst day yet in California's
power crisis. Many fear the blackouts are a preview of what is to come this
summer."
I'm off on a bit of a sidetrack today. Although I have an interest in
energy (and environmental) policy, I'm not going to spend the summer
pointing to "more rolling blackouts in CA" headlines. If this page had
a focus -- it doesn't, but if it did -- it would be on geophysics
and the seismic industry, a small part of the upstream energy industry,
which is quite different from the downstream energy industry, and should
never be confused with the power industry.
Of course, we all have a civic responsibility to keep one eye on the
big picture. </soapbox> bla, bla, bla
Oil and Gas Online:
Egypt's
GUPCO data repository to be built by GeoQuest.
"GeoQuest says eight of its staff members will team with 15
GUPCO employees during the initial phase to build, deploy,
and operate the system.... The contract will service more than
100 users and includes
data pertaining to approximately 1100 wells and 150,000 km
of 2D seismic lineage."
> A support staff of twenty-plus serving 100 users is actually pretty
efficient. I remember a survey about five years ago that concluded that
exploration geophysicists spend 50% of their time managing their data.
2001.03.19
Put on your thinking caps, it's a technical geophysical discussion:
On March 6, I heard Leon Thomsen give a talk at UH on seismic anisotropy.
Toward the end of it he had an interesting point about converted waves,
or C-waves. Not
really anything new, but Thomsen's explanation connected all the dots
and completed the picture for me.
First, some background.
When we collect marine multicomponent seismic with receivers on the
seafloor, we usually assume that the seismic P-S converted waves are
traveling vertically when they return to the receivers. If this is true,
then all the C-wave shear energy is collected by the horizontal phones.
We also used to assume that the C-wave reflections would have SV
polarization, where the vertical polarization plane is defined by the
source-receiver azimuth. This is because we assumed a one-dimensional
earth composed of isotropic layers -- usually a pretty good assumption
in seismic exploration.
Given the above expectation, the first operation in processing
multicomponent seismic data has historically been to rotate the coordinates
and transform the horizontal wavefield components at each receiver
from the receiver coordinates X,Y to the source-receiver coordinates V,H.
(V and H are parallel and perpendicular to the source-receiver azimuth.) By
our assumptions, the SV component of the wavefield should contain all
the shear energy, and the SH wavefield component should be mostly noise.
HOWEVER, our expectation seems to be at odds with much (most?) of
the marine multicomponent data that have been collected over the past
few years. Signal content may differ in the SV and SH orientations,
but the SH signal is not negligible. (In talks during the last
two years I've heard SH:SV ratios of 1:3 and 1:1 reported, but I don't
think those were rigorous numbers.)
Thomsen asserts that anisotropy accounts for all this unexpected SH
energy. In an anisotropic earth, converted wave reflections have two
polarizations, S1 and S2, or fast and slow. These coordinate axes are
properties of the rock layers, not of the acquisition geometry.
C-waves generated in an anisotropic earth, therefore, require a different
processing sequence than C-waves generated in a hypothetical isotropic
earth. For the anisotropic case we should determine the orientation of
anisotropy and use it to define the appropriate coordinate rotations for
the data.
Unfortunately, the axes of anisotropy may be different for each
subsurface layer, and even within each layer.
Whew!
2001.03.14
Oil & Gas Journal:
Industry
praises Bush's reversal on carbon dioxide limits.
"In a letter to Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), Bush said he feared that CO2 limits would
force utilities to switch from less expensive coal to natural gas and further drive
up electricity prices. Bush also justified his decision by citing `incomplete'
scientific knowledge of the role CO2 plays in global climate change. That's a
position most, but not all the scientific community disagrees with, environmental
groups said."
Houston Chronicle:
5-mile-deep well
[in Wyoming] ends up as a dud. Burlington says effort not total loss.
"The well reached its target depth of nearly five miles in early January, after some
300 days of drilling and a cost of about $30 million."
2001.03.13
Oil & Gas Journal:
BP
refiner says cleaner plants and fuels mean better business.
"... BP has committed to a 10% reduction of its green house gas emissions by 2010,
from a 1990 baseline, which would be a 40% reduction in real terms when growth is
factored in."
...
"[Allen Kozinski, BP's group vice president for global refining:] `Our view at BP is
that we should not fight the green agenda but encourage it
and help shape it. We believe the role of business today is to take the initiative,
not for public relations purposes, but for a good simple business reason. If we can
give the world the choice it wants, then the world is likely to give us the business
we want.'"
> ExxonMobil, take note!
Wall Street Journal (subscription):
How Trinidad
Became a Big Supplier Of Liquefied Natural Gas to the U.S.
"Demand for clean-burning natural gas continues to rise. More than 90%
of new U.S. power-generating plants under construction are gas-fired."
...
"[Liquefied natural gas] so far makes up less than 2% of the U.S. natural-gas supply. But
the Department of Energy predicts LNG imports will increase more
than fivefold by 2020, to 390 billion cubic feet a year."
> I love statistics. They're so "big picture."
