Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Monday 12:10 p.m.
(Just a coupla links today, as I snuffle and ache. I'll add more if the internal congestion improves.)

Katrina loosed Navy's armed dolphins

...Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.

'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'...

No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan documentary, begins tonight at 9 on PBS; the second two-hour part is tomorrow night, same time.

Since this all conflicts with Monday Night Football -- Kansas City Chiefs vs. Denver Broncos at the same time on ABC -- I praise again my old Panasonic Showstopper Replay TV DVR.

Sunday 11:10 a.m.
Crude awakening: Rita's educating us about oil
I closed windows last night for the first time since May, and my thoughts turned to heating the house.

This winter could be brutal, even if the weather is relatively mild. Because wages are stagnant while the cost of everything that needs to be transported to us rises, there's no room in most budgets for large increases in heating costs. Too many are barely making it, and the prospect of people freezing in their homes is very real.

If the middle class has no money to spend on anything but essentials, there goes the rest of the economy.

Use the comments below, please, to offer perspective and solutions.

The Oil Drum: I wish I didn't have to be the wet blanket:

...South Texas and Western Louisiana have an immediate problem, and the rest of us have a relatively intermediate term problem. And it has to do with the immediate availability of gasoline. As Rita came close to shore, gas stations all over the Gulf Coast began to run out of gas. It was not really a long-term worry since the refineries were right there and could resupply. But now they are no longer on-stream. The folks that run them have followed instructions and are gone for about a week . It is going to take some time to do the safety checks and repairs needed to get the facilities back to order, and then gas can, to a limited degree, begin to flow again.

But we have lost the stock reserve that has been eaten up in matching the lost production from Katrina, and so now it will be more difficult to bring up the refineries. Not (and this is the good news) because of the sustained damage, (because the word running around is that this has been much less than anticipated) but because they are going to start running out of crude....

...The response of the MSM (mainstream media) so far is still a "we dodged a bullet" but unfortunately we haven't taken our shirt off yet.

But then, on the other hand, maybe global warming will make this a really mild winter. If you live in somewhere such as Maine, perhaps you'd better start hoping that that will be the case.

Be sure to read the comments on that post.

Living on the Cusp: Living through the transition from the Petroleum Age to a Sustainable Future is sort of a blog, linking oil stories and commenting. Here's what leaps out:

It is also clear from the above report from CIBC World Markets (CIBC World Markets Predicts $100 per barrel Oil within Years) that oil producers are having second thoughts about the Gulf of Mexico, the only region in the USA that has seen significant growth in oil and natural gas production. The results of hurricane Katrina, and previously Ivan last year, and now possibly Rita, is either you build oil platforms and infrastructure to withstand more violent storms, or you abandon oil production in this region, or you stagger along and accept that from time to time various parts of the region will be off line, and or damaged beyond repair. Any way you look at it some part of future potential production will have to be forgone because of higher costs, which at some point will outweigh the benefits of that portion of production.

It is interesting to note that this cost, more severe weather due to climate change, is most likely the direct result of burning fossil fuels creating elevated CO2 levels in the atmosphere. This is an unforeseen twist to the peak oil story, direct negative feedback due to climate change, making oil production too expensive and pushing the EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) envelope from positive to negative....

Without a safe secure energy supply industrial civilisation cannot function. What with having armies in Iraq to guard the supply of oil to the USA , and storms in the Gulf of Mexico , and lack of refining capacity, and now effectively no OPEC we are in uncharted and complex territory. Increasingly oil is proving to be a loadstone to the global economy, a position it always had but because of plentiful supply the importance it held was masked. As we reach the first and perhaps the most important of earth's limits my only prayer is that we see the folly of the road we are now travelling and move at all possible speed towards the only safe and secure energy policy. It is one that has renewable energy and conservation at its centre and fossil fuels, at most, at the periphery.

Deepwater Nautilus Breaks Loose in Heavy Hurricane Rita Seas Transocean Inc.'s Deepwater Nautilus, an ultra-deep drilling rig, was adrift in the Gulf. It was heavily damaged by Katrina and was being towed for repairs when its towline broke in rough seas late Thursday, stranding 45 crewmen. Story at Rigzone.

Rita's damage will make gasoline supplies even tighter: This KRT story reports on some refinery damages, which you can locate on these maps:

Hurricane Rita Texas Petrochemical Resources Hurricane Katrina & Louisiana Petroleum Resources

You suspected this: Gas Profit Guzzlers (WaPo):

When the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline peaked at $3.07 recently, it was partly because the nation's refineries were getting an estimated 99 cents on each gallon sold. That was more than three times the amount they earned a year ago when regular unleaded was selling for $1.87....

Related: Rethinking energy. This story from the San Jose Mercury News is in the Journal's business section today. Here's how it ends:

(Venture capitalist Ray) Rothrock was trained as a nuclear engineer. He bemoans how the existing (electricity) grid loses about half of its power in transmission due to heat loss on the lines, and how failures disrupt entire portions of the grid....

A much more efficient system, Rothrock says, would be to have thousands, if not millions, more power sources -- such as solar-powered homes -- freely connected to the grid.

``The model is the Internet,'' he explains. ``It would be like Cisco routers -- if one data line fails, you reroute it with switches.''

A postscript: Yesterday, ordered by my boss and beseeched by my husband to take a day off, I slept a lot. When I finally awoke, Joe was visiting his mother and I had the house to myself. I didn't watch TV, stayed away from the computer. I puttered, made a pot roast, read on the porch in the warmth of the afternoon.

In this spirit -- that life goes on despite our fears and worries -- I offer this from Richard Heinberg's latest Museletter, published at Winnipeg Indymedia: A Peak Oil Survival Manual.

Thinking about hard times is not a morbid pastime; it is a healthy exercise in realism. The world around us - in which most people are living in less-than-sublime ignorance while the ecological basis of their very existence is eroding from beneath them - is a seductive dream-world. As you confirm this for yourself, begin to awaken from that dream (or nightmare) and live a greater proportion of each day in more direct contact with reality. Turn off your television. Get outside and garden; pay attention to nature. Pare down, scale back, and adjust your expectations.

Maybe this is one of the last times I will ever enjoy the convenience of any of a thousand little things. We might as well make the most of whatever comforts we currently enjoy while we have them; the main caveat is that we not be distracted by them from the job of adjusting ourselves to the coming reality.

Of all the high-energy benefits to savor, perhaps the most fuel-dependent and thus transitory is long-distance travel. I have taken some flak for advising young people to travel internationally before air fares become prohibitively expensive: after all, more air travel means more fuel used, more pollution generated. How irresponsible of me! Yet the timeframe in which such travel will be possible may be very narrow, and the benefits may be great. For Americans who have known only Mall Culture all their lives (and I am addressing these comments especially to Americans), a short low-budget visit to Europe or a poor African, Asian, or Latin American nation could be an experience to last a lifetime, and one to be passed down to children and grandchildren. Conserve energy, yes. Drive less. Stay at home and tend your garden. But do not reflexively pass up a fleeting opportunity to see what life is like in other cultures....