Thursday, May 30, 2013

Thursday Links

8 comments:

A Quaker in a Strange Land said...

CO2 can increase the 1.2 million production per day by "orders of magnitude"?

12mm BPD? 120mm BPD?

Boy, if that is in anyway close to accurate, Oil will see $20 once again.

Greg said...

Internet security: there's a thought-provoking article on Ars Technica about how very easy it is to crack passwords these days. (I hope it's readable for the non-geek.)

The most thought-provoking part of the article was the comments. Person after person said "well, just use this rule to generate your passwords." Or "a password created like this can't be cracked."

They all missed the fundamental point that what one person can think of, another can. So the only way to come up with good passwords is to generate them completely randomly. People can't do that, but computers can.

What to do? You can wait for Ars's follow-up article, or you can follow the advice of cryptologist Bruce Schneier. In brief: get a password manager, protect it with a six-word diceware passphrase, keep your passwords in it, and use its built-in password generator to change them regularly.

If you want more security than that, the next level is called two-factor-authentication. But only a few websites offer that, so far.

Unknown said...

Hmm, I think it means that could increase ultimate recovery by orders of magnitude (that is, instead of 20 billion barrels recoverable, CO2 injection would increase the amount recoverable to 200 billion barrels). It says nothing about how quickly we can pull it out of the ground.

patfla said...

I figured it was only a matter of time because Bakken well costs would decline.

I'm not sure that growing oil and gas production are going to make a huge dent in the rate at which renewables, in particular wind and solar, are growing.

It continues to be a race against time. Which some say, given the lags that built into the system, we've already lost. I prefer to be guardedly optimistic. Meaning, a great deal of mitigation will need to occur; poor counties will unfairly be hit worse than rich; and climate wars will occur. They're already occurring if you consider that the drought in the Middle East was probably the match that lit the flame of the Arab Spring. There will be wrenching changes for all (both rich and poor) but current civilization as we know it won't collapse. It'll very substantially change and while the climate toll could stretch as high as a bln people, there won't be the vast 98% reduction of humanity that some predict.

Luke The Debtor said...

The Bakken article doesn't really mention why costs are dropping. It mentions something about drilling the Three Forks, though I don't know why drilling another formation on the same pad is significant to reducing costs.

So I wonder if it is the fracking costs which have gone down as capacity has been overextended by operators like Baker Hughes and Haliburton.

Alexander Ac said...

Re: "Bakken well costs may have started to decline (h/t Buck Smith)." --- So cooking ourselves is finally no such a big deal, oh my!

A Quaker in a Strange Land said...

@ ED:

I was being sarcastic... either order of magnitude of increase strikes me as highly improbable.

But, I guess ya never know!

buck smith said...

Luke,

They said they are drilling two horizontal runs from the same vertical well bore, not just the same pad. This is pretty significant. To a first approximation it drops drilling and completion cost by maybe 1/4 or 1/3.