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  1. #191
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    Quote Originally Posted by Haighus View Post
    I would rather we pull out of using fossil fuels for energy pretty much altogether. Current estimates put us past the (probably to lenient) point of no return for CO2 levels in 17 years I think? Assuming 'business as usual' for that period. To me, that means we need a serious shake up in how we produce energy, and we need it now.

    What I can't get my head round, is why the top brass in the oil and gas industry can't see this coming. We are heading towards climate disaster, if we burn all currently known reserves we go well over the 'safe' limit, and if nothing else, it is a finite resource. Governments are and will continue to implement stricter and stricter regulations on the fuel industry, it is a dying business, albeit slowly. Even China is trying to curtail it's fossil fuel use and has had a decrease in the amount of coal it has burned, because they have already caused climate change across an entire province within their country. Yet despite all of this, oil and gas companies are actively spending huge sums on finding more reserves?! I actually just don't understand. I don't expect them to stop producing fossil fuels tomorrow, but if I was at the helm, I would do something similar to GSK in the clinical trials transparency debate; in other words, realise times are changing, cut my losses and get on with getting to grips with what the new system is going to be, and get a head start. I would be investing that money in renewable technologies, not looking for more reserves, and diversifying into new branches of energy to create a sustainable future for the company. Is the lure of 'easy' money that strong?
    Its not "easy" money really. I live right close to Alberta aka Canadas Texas aka "we got a lifted trucks unh". Ive worked the rigs and a couple other related jobs. The problem as usual is human nature. The opinion of the little guy is "oil n gas has the money so **** em, they can pay"

    Ill lay out a little scenario that is not theoretical. I watch it happen even now. Even when oil and gas is at its lowest.lowest in a while.

    Workers get paid large wages. Thats a fact. Im talking triple to quadruple minimum wage. Thats a large chink of money they pay.

    Next up raw materials. I used to sell steel and the company had special rates. Like 20% more than non oil and gas. Thats a cost to them.

    The subcontractors all mark up installing/fabricating their stuff. This is my industry and I do this but ill wxplain why later.

    In order to foster good relations and "get the town on their side" oil companies build structures and donate money to said towns. Hell, they built an arena for our town.

    When they do setup shop, due to the great costs incurred in eveb getting to this point they are often forced to use out of town labor Cuz the local attitude is usually "they got money, juice em" unfortunately said labor from out of town will often half arse the job. Then, they gotta pay a guy like me to come in and fix it. Ive already done this on two local plants. Its pathetic to see the corners people cut.

    There are more ways that people screw the oil and gas companies but those are ones I have personally witnessed and had a part of.

    The worst part is that the end user, us, pays for it. All these shenanigans we pull on them just to pay in the end and have zero power over. But again they also make it hard to do business as they are often 90 day payers, so u gotta mark it up a bit to overcome the length to get paid.

    Its all one giant human clusterfock greed with our planet caught in between. But even then its cheaper than windmills, which cost enormous sums to maintain here and less environmentally damagimg than nuclear. So like most things. We did it to ourselves and now we wait and see.

    This is probably the most derailed thread ive ever read. Grats guys :P

  2. #192
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    Big oil sucks. Guess there's a very real chance we'll cause our own extinction level event.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Alaric View Post
    This is probably the most derailed thread ive ever read. Grats guys :P
    I simply must demand a ribbon for any contributions made! Judges?

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Psychosplodge View Post
    Point of thread was to be able to rant about anything and everything, very original post was about being stuck in the middle of two friends very bitter break up.

    Just latest rant seems to have stayed topical for too long.

    Or derailed in a serious if contentious manner...
    Being in that situation is absolutely awful!

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  3. #193

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    Quote Originally Posted by CoffeeGrunt View Post
    Nuclear? If it could break the stigma, it'd be fine, but every proposed site is picketed into oblivion by, "concerned locals."

    ...

    The only real option is Fusion, and that's still a scientific fairy tale until we finally design a reactor that puts out more than it takes in.
    I don't see how fusion wouldn't get the same NIMBYs denying sites everywhere as fission does.
    To them they're both "oh noes nucular bums"

  4. #194

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    Quote Originally Posted by Houghten View Post
    I don't see how fusion wouldn't get the same NIMBYs denying sites everywhere as fission does.
    To them they're both "oh noes nucular bums"
    To be fair, you're right. They wouldn't understand the difference between Fission and Fusion. Personally, ITER gives me a lot of hope, if it comes to fruition it'll solve a big problem, and it's an international effort, which always gives me the warm 'n' fuzzies. They also have an on-site visitor center which explains everything that'll make the plant tick, allowing them to make sure the locals and any visitors are educated well in advance of it activating, so there's nothing to fear.

    Doesn't stop the nutjobs who claim it's an alien plot to open a portal to their world, or some other conspiracy theory, but you'll never get through to those types. It's like Anti-Vaxxers. Anything that supports their claim is the gospel truth, anything that doesn't is a government sponsored lie. Ijits.

    Actually anti-vaxxers are one group I'd like control removed from, because they present a clear and obvious danger to themselves, their kids, and those around them. Thankfully-yet-horribly, the ones who have dying kids are starting to see why we started vaccinating in the first place, a pity it took small measles epidemics and a kid dying of diptheria to get that into their heads, though...

    Workers get paid large wages. Thats a fact. Im talking triple to quadruple minimum wage. Thats a large chink of money they pay.

    Next up raw materials. I used to sell steel and the company had special rates. Like 20% more than non oil and gas. Thats a cost to them.

    The subcontractors all mark up installing/fabricating their stuff. This is my industry and I do this but ill wxplain why later.
    Our company's sadly a bit cheaper, especially for onshore support. You only start raking it in once you start stacking up that time offshore. While I would love the paycheck, the offshore life ain't for me personally. Given the situation and the workload, a high wage is pretty fair, (IMO.) Joe Bloggs on a boat in Kenyan waters skirting the border of Somalia, doing electrical repairs deserves more wonga than if he were sitting in a nice workshop on land.

    As far as the prices, I can confirm that up 'til recently, everything we bought had an, "offshore tax," an arbitrary cost that our suppliers attributed to kit being sea-ready. This is actually partially why I got brought in, so we could build our own kit and not have to pay so damn much for it. Took a while, but we're there, just in time to avoid losing our jobs to the oil price crash. :P

    We're lucky in that our kit's simple enough to make in-house though. Kit for rigs, other specialised, custom-manufactured parts are hella pricey. To be fair, a friend of mine works as a machinist in that sorta job, and the qualities of steel as well as precision of manufacture can be really demanding. You need well-trained staff to guarantee doing that quickly and efficiently while wasting minimal material.

    As far as sourcing locals, trust me if it weren't necessary for PR or some legislation, we'd use our own guys almost exclusively. Especially offshore. Some countries demand you use local labour, like Brazil. For my particular field, said labour force is largely untrained as my company is one of the only ones that has an active training program for our work. I tell you, that job was the worst to deal with in terms of communication. Everyone from us at the technician level up to our MD got pretty much no communication from the Brazilian clients, (problematic when you're there to verify the work is being done to international environmental standards.) We've vowed to demand our own guys wherever possible after that, as it made a year-long job into the department's biggest headache all the while.

    Took months to get the kit back into shape as well, and the computers had to be wiped and reset. Nothing against Brazilians in particular, just using untrained locals, regardless of locale. Trust me, the UK labour for what we do is equally untrained, but the UK doesn't demand local workforce if you can prove your foreign workforce is better trained and equipped.
    Read the above in a Tachikoma voice.

  5. #195
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    Since most people don't believe we have any impact on the environment they generally don't support clean renewable energy.
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  6. #196
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    Today I met someone who said they didn't believe in climate change. I had to bite my tongue and not comment that it's evidence based so it doesn't matter if you believe in it or no.
    Fan of Fuggles | Derailment of the Wolfpack of Horsemen | In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

  7. #197
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    Pesky evidence... always getting in the way!
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  8. #198

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    Quote Originally Posted by CoffeeGrunt View Post
    The current system still makes a lot of money. Trust me as someone who works in the industry - it's glacial from an environmental perspective and many people genuinely own an exploitative view of the world. There's a lot of old, selfish men in the industry. Heck, the environmental company I work for attends a lot of conferences, and while we're not allowed to discuss clients, let's just say a certain well-known company that rhymes with "hell" is well known for client reps that simply don't give a damn.

    There's been several industry summits recently trying to get an idea of what, exactly, to do. You get a wide spectrum. There's the, "stop everything immediately and save the world crew," who are often a load of hippies who propose this vehemently without proposing how. That's the problem, we can wean ourselves off oil but the infrastructure is built and bred for it. This view is seen as unrealistic by many because the dependence on oil is a fact of life, and despite using it with ever-increasing efficiency, the exploding numbers of people using it mean we're needing more and more each year.

    Then there's the other end of the spectrum which you get a lot of people sitting at. Quite simply, "f*ck the environment." One of the guys I work with was at a conference where a rep honestly reacted to the problem in the industry where cetacean species are disrupted by the sonic booms used to map seabeds for oil deposits with, "well then they shouldn't get in the way of the oil then." These people are used to everything jumping at the click of their fingers, they don't consider working to another system. They're arrogant and callous in a way a movie director wold tone down for fear of being unrealistic, and they're in charge of a lot of oil production.

    The majority sit in the middle, between the inevitability of our oil dependence, and our need to break away from it. The big question is...where? Solar and Wind aren't able to work to the yields we need, and coal would be even worse. Nuclear? If it could break the stigma, it'd be fine, but every proposed site is picketed into oblivion by, "concerned locals." The same kind of people who picketed wind farms a decade ago, actually. They don't care about the damage to the environment so long as it's out of sight and out of mind. Heck, the American people only really care because of Deepwater Horizon and largely because of the Gulf of Mexico's reliance on its biodiversity for fish stocks and tourism. The average person just wants someone else to deal with the issue, and the buck ends in some third world country to poor to pass up the money. Hence the reason why places like Myanmar are so popular right now as it stumbles out of a civil war in dire need of cash.

    The only real option is Fusion, and that's still a scientific fairy tale until we finally design a reactor that puts out more than it takes in.
    Fusion isn't as great at is seems- still irradiates stuff over time with neutron radiation, but slower than fission iirc. Will be very helpful in the future though I'm sure. The thing is, it still needs the same infrastructure changes as wind/solar/tidal/geothermal/hydro for the most part- which is that everything needs to be electric based. I think we should be making a big shift to electric technologies, which is beginning to happen already, as we can still carry on using fossil fuels to provide that electricity for now, then slowly switch to more sustainable ways of providing that electricity. Well, hopefully not that slowly. You say it isn't feasible to get the required capacity from renewable sources, but I'm not sure if that is true- subsidising a massive nuclear fusion plant is going to be pricey for the government, I don't think it would be much different to change planning laws so that large warehouses/farm barns etc. must be built with solar panels on the roof, for example. They are an eyesore anyway, so it changes little to use that space for energy. It will be loads of small schemes like this adding up to a big combined total that will be the way to do it.

    Either way, what I was originally talking about is why oil and gas is choosing to invest huge sums in finding further reserves when they already have huge reserves, instead of using that to create a different path for the company in the future and wean themselves off fossil fuels. I know it is earning plenty still now, but they have loads of reserve to keep their pockets lined for the foreseeable future, so they should be aiming for a sustainable future as a company. It just seems really odd that they are planning for the company in a long sighted way, quite probably after the current staff are retired or even dead, yet even with that in mind, they are still planning in an environmentally damaging way in the relatively far future when there are other options.

    The problem I see with adjusting the infrastructure change is that the way that most renewable energy sources work, is by having them small but plenty. Loads of smaller wind turbines spread out, rather than a single huge power station for example. Now aside from needing a bit more wiring to get it plugged into the grid, the main issue with this is it exposes more people to the infrastructure going up, so more people complain. From what I have seen, for the most part, people actually don't notice when someone sticks a turbine in the field half a mile down the road, but they do notice when they put those planning notices up in the village and someone (it would seem usually retired with time to read the things) reads it and starts spreading the word. I travelled past a turbine twice a day for several years without even noticing it was there till someone mentioned it existed and where it existed and I was looking out for it, and it was only about 100m from the road. They are not very intrusive. The real barrier to them being implemented is people obstructing them for various reasons which are usually not the ones they campaign about.

    We have experienced this in our own small community- some poor sod tried to put a turbine up just the other side of the hill. Well, it sure divided the community, some people got really aggressive over it. Well, the really f**king annoying part is that the vast majority of the people against it couldn't even see the bloody thing without going at a mile down the road; even more annoying is that the ring leaders of the whole group organising the meetings and so on, the people who are actually living in an old windmill (yes, seriously), had actually considered putting a turbine on their windmill, but couldn't, and so by extension their logic was basically that no one else should benefit from one if they couldn't! Basically, the most vocal people were vocal because they couldn't benefit from the 'bounty' this farmer was getting. He withdrew his claim in the end, wasn't expecting all the backlash and was quite hurt by it actually, just decided it wasn't worth the fuss. NIMBYs. Of course, every meeting was full of "we think renewable energy is a great idea, but..." Grrrr gets on my wick. Most of them won't live to see any of the future they are creating, and a good chunk of them didn't have kids to see it either.

    Well, at least things are progressing, if I get an electric car, I could reach pretty much anywhere in the country without running out of charge now, that is a good start. Vehicles are a big use that relies on oil at the moment, so moving them off oil would be great. For now, they will still use electricity generated from fossil fuels, but it allows a fairly simple switch of source in the future.
    Quote Originally Posted by Alaric View Post
    Its not "easy" money really. I live right close to Alberta aka Canadas Texas aka "we got a lifted trucks unh". Ive worked the rigs and a couple other related jobs. The problem as usual is human nature. The opinion of the little guy is "oil n gas has the money so **** em, they can pay"

    Ill lay out a little scenario that is not theoretical. I watch it happen even now. Even when oil and gas is at its lowest.lowest in a while.

    Workers get paid large wages. Thats a fact. Im talking triple to quadruple minimum wage. Thats a large chink of money they pay.

    Next up raw materials. I used to sell steel and the company had special rates. Like 20% more than non oil and gas. Thats a cost to them.

    The subcontractors all mark up installing/fabricating their stuff. This is my industry and I do this but ill wxplain why later.

    In order to foster good relations and "get the town on their side" oil companies build structures and donate money to said towns. Hell, they built an arena for our town.

    When they do setup shop, due to the great costs incurred in eveb getting to this point they are often forced to use out of town labor Cuz the local attitude is usually "they got money, juice em" unfortunately said labor from out of town will often half arse the job. Then, they gotta pay a guy like me to come in and fix it. Ive already done this on two local plants. Its pathetic to see the corners people cut.

    There are more ways that people screw the oil and gas companies but those are ones I have personally witnessed and had a part of.

    The worst part is that the end user, us, pays for it. All these shenanigans we pull on them just to pay in the end and have zero power over. But again they also make it hard to do business as they are often 90 day payers, so u gotta mark it up a bit to overcome the length to get paid.

    Its all one giant human clusterfock greed with our planet caught in between. But even then its cheaper than windmills, which cost enormous sums to maintain here and less environmentally damagimg than nuclear. So like most things. We did it to ourselves and now we wait and see.

    This is probably the most derailed thread ive ever read. Grats guys :P
    Well, I meant 'easy' for the guys in charge more than the lower tiers in the industry.
    Hehe, well, I'm having a rant about NIMBYs, so I guess that makes it on topic... sorta?
    Quote Originally Posted by 40kGamer View Post
    Since most people don't believe we have any impact on the environment they generally don't support clean renewable energy.
    It is a bit different here in my experience- for the most part, people seem to think it exists, but consider it someone else's problem to worry about, and just half-heartedly do what the council has implemented, such as recycling. See NIMBYs above...

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by CoffeeGrunt View Post
    It's like Anti-Vaxxers. Anything that supports their claim is the gospel truth, anything that doesn't is a government sponsored lie. Ijits.

    Actually anti-vaxxers are one group I'd like control removed from, because they present a clear and obvious danger to themselves, their kids, and those around them. Thankfully-yet-horribly, the ones who have dying kids are starting to see why we started vaccinating in the first place, a pity it took small measles epidemics and a kid dying of diptheria to get that into their heads, though...
    Oh no, anti-vaxxers will have to be a rant for another day.. XD Don't get me started on that, I need to go to bed soon...

    Damn, now I'm thinking about Wakefield.
    Last edited by Haighus; 07-01-2015 at 05:03 PM.
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  9. #199

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    I don't think it would be much different to change planning laws so that large warehouses/farm barns etc. must be built with solar panels on the roof, for example. They are an eyesore anyway, so it changes little to use that space for energy. It will be loads of small schemes like this adding up to a big combined total that will be the way to do it.
    The problem is that remote locations like that lose a lot of the power generated in transmission losses, unless you farm them up into large batches of panels. For extra effectiveness you want them to track the sun as well. It doesn't get around the issue of them not generating power at night when power is used most, which given the way our power generation is setup means they simply don't work. We can't store power with any effectiveness. Changing that, would change the world. This means that power must be generated on demand, and renewables can't do that in the way fuel-based reactors can. What if it's night time and there's no wind? We need an alternative we can control.

    Either way, what I was originally talking about is why oil and gas is choosing to invest huge sums in finding further reserves when they already have huge reserves, instead of using that to create a different path for the company in the future and wean themselves off fossil fuels. I know it is earning plenty still now, but they have loads of reserve to keep their pockets lined for the foreseeable future, so they should be aiming for a sustainable future as a company. It just seems really odd that they are planning for the company in a long sighted way, quite probably after the current staff are retired or even dead, yet even with that in mind, they are still planning in an environmentally damaging way in the relatively far future when there are other options.
    The changes to infrastructure necessary to wean ourselves off fossil fuels are so massive that they won't reach fruition in our lifetime. The supply needs to be secured, both to keep the turbines turning, and to keep the oil companies earning. Oil companies have their fingers in many pies, and are reputedly devouring patents useful to them. I don't doubt they have plans for their future, no-one gets to run a company that big by being short-sighted.

    Wind turbines also need a ridiculous amount of maintenance, otherwise older models will literally spin themselves apart in high winds. They're also incredibly hazardous to migrating birds.

    Well, at least things are progressing, if I get an electric car, I could reach pretty much anywhere in the country without running out of charge now, that is a good start. Vehicles are a big use that relies on oil at the moment, so moving them off oil would be great. For now, they will still use electricity generated from fossil fuels, but it allows a fairly simple switch of source in the future.
    Check out the [URL="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012.00532.x/epdf"]estimated environmental damage[/URL] an electric car's battery creates from raw resources to final manufacturing. You'll take decades to pay off that Carbon debt. Also, EV batteries typically only last for around 100KM before they need replacing.
    Read the above in a Tachikoma voice.

  10. #200
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    I always love when non scientists discuss scientific concepts....

    So lets see a show of hands for whose got the education and training to properly understand the science of renewable energy sources currently in developement and therefore the people who are qualified to make statements over what issues such sources may or may not actually have in terms of supply. Even better lets make these comments with proper refence to scientific literature instead of blog posts and poorly researched news articles.

    As far as im aware its Morgrim and myself, but please if you feel you belong on this list please let us know your qualifications.

    CG, looks like you have a background in science as wel, is that correct?
    Last edited by daboarder; 07-01-2015 at 06:08 PM.
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