Limerick of the Day, May 27

There was a young belle from old Natchez
Whose garments were always in patches.
When comment arose
On the state of her clothes,
She replied, "When Ah itches, Ah scratches."

                               .......Anonymous

No More Cheap Oil

               The May 24^th issue of Wall Street Journal has an article entitled Facing up To End of “Easy Oil.” (I would provide a hot link but you’d just hit a pay wall.)   The article describes an oil extraction project in Wafra, along the Kuwait /Saudi Arabia border.  The project is using injected steam to recover very viscous, heavy crude oil.   The oil is as thick as molasses, and without steam, it would be unrecoverable.   Using steam to recover heavy oil is nothing new, but usually this is done in places where a source of fresh water to feed the boilers, and cheap natural gas to fire them are both available.   This area has neither.  For water, they are pumping salt water out of the same formation that contains the oil, desalinating it, and then heating it with imported LNG.

              Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are jointly developing this field, with the cooperation of Chevron Oil.   And Chevron is putting up the capital.  If they succeed in extracting oil, the oil they get will be low grade oil that is extremely expensive to refine into any useful product. So why are they even bothering to do this?  Of course, they wouldn’t be doing it—if they had any better alternatives.  For several decades, that part of the world dominated world oil trade not just because they had vast amounts of oil, but also because the oil they had was easy to extract and easy to refine. But those days are over.

            All the great Saudi oil fields, including the Ghawar field, are well past their prime. They will continue to produce oil, but in decreasing amounts.  And the fact that the Saudis and Chevron would even consider a project such as Wafra shows that there aren’t many options left.

            The world is passing, (or has already passed) the point of peak oil production. That means that half of all the oil we started with is now gone.  Of course, the other half is still there, and we can burn it. But there’s a catch.  When our fathers and grandfathers took the first half, they took the easy half.   If some oil was technically easy to extract and some was not, they took what was easy.  If some was in convenient locations and some was not, they took what was close. If some oil was cheap to refine and some was not, they ignored the heavy and skimmed off the light. If some was located in countries that were agreeable to doing business with us and some were hostile, they went where they were welcome.  In short, they did what we would do—they picked the low hanging fruit.  So while half the oil is still there, from now till the end of the oil age we can expect to spend astronomical sums to extract nearly useless oil in remote locations, some of which will be so hostile (think Nigeria) that every oil field will be a battle field.  But with a billion Chinese and another billion Indians who have now entered the world oil market, this oil will be extracted.  But don’t expect any of it to be cheap. 

We All Die of Immune System Failure.

   I was arguing with my doctor a while back, and I made the comment that anyone who dies a natural death dies of immune system failure.  (I was having some immune system issues at the time.)  My doctor was taken aback by what seemed like a perfectly absurd idea.  But when I explained exactly what I meant, he nodded in agreement.
      I said that in even the worst epidemic of any infectious disease,  the majority of people survive because their immune system simply fights off the infection.   So those who do die are victims of immune system failure.  And in some epidemics, like the flu of 1918,  the disease kills by provoking such an exaggerated immune reaction that those who die are actually killed by their own immune system.  And of course, with autoimmune diseases like MS, death is also due to immune failure.
     He said, "What about heart disease?"   I replied that most heart disease begins with arteriosclerosis,  which begins with inflammation  of the lining of the arteries, and inflammation is a function of the immune system.  And cancer too is an immune failure.  All normal people have a few cells going cancerous every day, but their immune system finds and destroys these cells before they cause trouble.
       So what use is this perspective?  It's simply this:    If all natural death is in some way attributable to immune problems, then the one area of basic research which should be receiving more attention is immunology.  Understanding more about the immune system helps us fight everything that kills us.

Is it Rapture Time Yet?

   Just after 6:PM EDT,  I began looking for telltale signs of the rapture--perhaps the sight of unmanned SUVs careening  out of control---or empty green polyester pants suits crumpled up on the sidewalk.  But so far, I don't see much of that.   But then it suddenly occurred to me:   An observer in Iowa might not see the rapture.  Remember the line in Field of Dreams which asks:  "Is this heaven--no, it's Iowa!"   This would clearly imply that Iowa and heaven are one and the same place.   So righteous souls being raptured to heaven wouldn't even notice it if they were already in Iowa.  They'd just stay put.
    So if any of my many friends outside of Iowa observe a noticeable degree of rapture, please respond.   (Not that I imagine that righteous persons anywhere are so numerous that their immediate absence would make much difference. )

Limerick of the Day, May 20

Lightly stirring some gin and vermouth
Makes a drink that's exceedingly couth.
(Unlike boiler makers,
And drinks made in shakers,
And things that they'd drink in Duluth.)

Rabbits as "foodies?"

   For many years, my wife and I have grown a large garden, and except for lettuce, kale, and other leaf crops, we've never bother with fencing out the rabbits.  We could plant 75 tomato plants and the rabbits would ignore them.   Then last year,  instead of just buying young plants from the local supermarket, we sent away for some "heirloom variety" seeds and started some of our plants from seed.  But we still bought some commercial variety plants.  But when the stuff was all planted, in one night, the heirloom plants were all eaten off to the ground by rabbits.  And the next night, they pulled up the roots and ate them too.  Yet the commercial cultivars, planted a few feet away in the same garden, were unmolested.
     So, what's going on here?  Do the commercial varieties have some genes that repel rabbits?  Or do the bunnies simply know what is yummy and what isn't?  I had always assumed that rabbits were fairly  indiscriminate in their choice of food, eating any edible leaves.  But given a choice, the bunnies are the real foodies--not we humans.

More Beaver Shots

      I have added an additional photo to the report on beaver activity posted two days ago.  The new photo views the dam itself from a better angle, and shows how its actually constructed.  Also, the dam shown two days ago was a work in progress, as the road crew had ripped the original dam out with a back hoe a week earlier, and the beaver at that time was just beginning to build the replacement.  Now, only 48 hours later, he has added about two tons of sticks and mud, and the dam has started to assume the look of a standard beaver dam.