Deepwater Oil Spill - windows can be short, and a digression

The windows that allow significant work on the oil spill in the Gulf are likely to become rarer and more valuable opportunities as the hurricane season, forecast to be stronger than average, moves towards its mid-point. While the starting signals for a hurricane don’t begin by looking that ominous, and those initial signals don’t always grow into a significant threat, as Bonnie just demonstrated, the last thing that can be afforded in this disaster is complacency. And so, as plans are laid out for a methodical approach to sealing the Deepwater well, so we see two more possible threats appear on the horizon.


At the moment the casing is being run for the relief well, there is some curiosity on where all the supposedly spilled oil went (some of which might be explained by the ramp up in flow as the BOP eroded so that in the earlier stages of the disaster there might have been significantly less oil escaping into the Gulf than the flow levels seen at the time of the capping), but there is not a lot of new information. And so, with your indulgence, a little digression.

One of the reasons that I write is to help explain why things are being done the way that they are, and how technical processes now being used to produce fossil fuels came to happen. Early in my experience of doing this I discovered that you can really help ease a descriptive explanation by using the right illustration. As a result my classroom type lectures are now made up with many more illustrations than they are with word-intensive Power Point slides. Yet, to be honest, that knowledge came, in part, from the memories of my childhood, and my still fond recollections of reading historical fiction where, if I was lucky, the story would be illustrated with four or five illustrations of the action. (And it was the presence of those illustrations that often drove the selection of the books that I borrowed from the local library).

Many of these early stories were illustrated by N.C. Wyeth and it was his teacher, Howard Pyle, who noted that “Pictures are highly important for children, well worth a thousand words, especially if they don’t understand 800 of them. First graders know 6,000 words, adults 30,000 or more.” This remains true with older audiences where the technologies being discussed are a little arcane, where the artisans of this new era use words that are not in the common lexicon.

And so, having the chance at the end of the family vacation, today we dropped by the Brandywine River Museum, where for the second time in the last month we spent almost from opening to closing time, wandering around the galleries. (The other was the Peabody Essex in Salem, a more conventional museum and thus a totally different experience).

The Wyeths are a legend in American art, with the major focus being on Andrew and Jamie, and indeed the tour we lucked into joining and given by Andrew’s grand-daughter Victoria focused very much on those two with wonderful, and unique insights. (We went out to the Kuerner Farm that Andrew painted, and also up to the House and Studio that N.C. built; both of which were well worthwhile, and seeing the “backset” with some of the props held a fascination that could have used a lot more time than we had available).

Having stayed across the street in the Brandywine River Hotel, and eaten dinners at the two immediately local restaurants, we have had a really enjoyable break, and one that I would really recommend.

The art of illustration has, to a large extent, been lost over the last half-century even though there are with programs such as Poser, Bryce and Vue; tools that folks such as I (who needs two rulers, a computer and a drawing table to create a straight line) can use to make our less mechanical ideas visual. (I use Strata for my mine models.)

It is no less critical now than it was in Howard Pyle and N.C.’s days that folk understand what the words are trying to say. Witness that Kent Wells uses illustrations and animations to help explain the complexities of the processes being planned at the Gulf.

Our family argue about ranking the members of the Wyeth family and their work, but the legacy of illustration that Howard Pyle and his students grew, and which N.C. Wyeth came to be a master of, brought his work and the pleasure of viewing it to more folk than I suspect have been influenced by his later family. Wyeth and the critics of his time downplayed the role of the illustrator, but it is an honorable and indeed vital need that we, who communicate information, have and make use of.

Sadly I don’t think that nearly enough technical teams across the board of technical application take the trouble to phrase their talks with illustrations, so that those outside of the “select few” that are masters of the technical terms can follow the discussion. And yet I should admit, on the other side there are also those who can present, with a suitably generated illustration a promise of a technical future that is not really born out by the technical details of the technology that is being sold.

But illustration can be a great help to imagination, and so I take my hat off to the masters who made it so, and if you’re in the neighborhood . . . . .

Driving numbers continue to rise

Having been away for a couple of weeks, it is time to settle back to look at some of the regular data that I post on when not traveling. The first of these is the weekly visit to This Week in Petroleum (TWIP) to see how the demand for gasoline is holding up, and to note what the EIA considers important this week. To comment on the latter first, and at the time where the emphasis has changed from driving to heating needs, this week the site comments on the high level of available fuel going into the winter – which comes about, according to the article, in some part because of the collapse last winter, yet the inertia in the oil business which kept the system going long enough for these surpluses to develop. Natural gas stored, for example, is at a volume that is 16% above that of the 5-year average. Similarly coal stocks and oil stocks are high – we will have to see whether the coming of an El Nino will have much effect.

This one does not seem to be typical (which would mean a warmer winter, and less need for fuel) and some caution is now being expressed.

But with this "black sheep" El Niño, as he calls it, "as you move to the central and eastern regions, you start to see pitfalls and [different] opinions."

What that means for the natural gas-reliant Midwest and home-heating-oil usage in the Northeast is that El Niño's influence could wane as it crosses the country. As a result, other weather phenomena could at times take precedence, so a warm winter isn't a given, Schlater says. "From the central Rockies to the Ohio Valley, you could see temperature volatility," he says.
Adam Sieminski, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, concurs and notes that the winters of 2002-03 and 2004-05 had weak to moderate El Niños but were very cold in the Midwest and East. "While we do not anticipate a repeat of those events, the pattern is shaping up such that the 'warm winter' may be confined to the Pacific Northwest to the Northern Plains, making the East favorable for colder-than-normal conditions, possibly along the lines of 2004-05," he said in a note.

Earlier predictions of a strong El Nino and resulting impact on climate and global temperatures seem now to be fading into a forgotten past. But with the situation now indeterminate, we’ll just have to wait and see how the weather turns out.

Getting back to the TWIP, one of the graphs that is interesting to watch is domestic crude production, which has been increasing for a while – wonder how long that will last?

Domestic crude Production over the past year (EIA )

But it is gasoline demand that shows that something at least is growing in the economy.

(Source EIA).
The downturn marks the seasonal transition from producing gasoline for summer driving, to preparing fuels for the winter. Nevertheless, if one goes over to the FHWA for the monthly traffic report for July, one sees that travel was up 2.3% over July 2008. The Texas area was highest with a 2.9% increase, while the North East was held to only 1.4% gain.

This result means that the 12-month rolling average for Vehicle Miles Driven (VMD) now definitely shows an uptick over the depth of the recession in driving.

Moving 12-month total of VMD on all Roads (source FHWA

The rise back to the old peak levels will likely take more than another year or so, but will help indicate where we stand. (Bear in mind however that July is now 3-months ago, and so the recovery today should be more marked). Urban driving, while still up over last year, is not as far along on this as is rural driving, where the numbers now nearly match this time in 2007 – before the recession and gas prices both came seriously into play.