Guest “geoscientists without borders schist” by David Middleton
NEWS 31 MARCH 2020
Coronavirus lockdowns have changed the way Earth moves
A reduction in seismic noise because of changes in human activity is a boon for geoscientists.Elizabeth Gibney
The coronavirus pandemic has brought chaos to lives and economies around the world. But efforts to curb the spread of the virus might mean that the planet itself is moving a little less. Researchers who study Earth’s movement are reporting a drop in seismic noise — the hum of vibrations in the planet’s crust — that could be the result of transport networks and other human activities being shut down. They say this could allow detectors to spot smaller earthquakes and boost efforts to monitor volcanic activity and other seismic events.
A noise reduction of this magnitude is usually only experienced briefly around Christmas, says Thomas Lecocq, a seismologist the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, where the drop has been observed.
Just as natural events such as earthquakes cause Earth’s crust to move, so do vibrations caused by moving vehicles and industrial machinery. And although the effects from individual sources might be small, together they produce background noise, which reduces seismologists’ ability to detect other signals occurring at the same frequency.
[…]
Nature News
With this reduction in background noise, they might finally be able to detect all the earthquakes that frac’ing doesn’t cause (if anyone is still frac’ing). While the Soviet -Saudi price war hasn’t hit US crude oil production yet…
January 2020 was the third highest production rate in US history. The March 2020 Drilling Productivity Report indicates that tight/shale oil production will increase by 18,000 bbl/day in April, led by the Permian Basin (+38,000 bbl/d).
The Soviet-Saudi price war will soon hit production.
With oil prices in parts of the Permian Basin dropping below $6/bbl, the rig count is dropping faster than anytime in the past 5 years and it’s just a matter of time before we see a repeat of 2014-2016, or worse.
What can the Federal government do tho thwart this assault on our energy security?
Strategic Petroleum Reserve
US to Lease Space for Initial 30 Million Barrels in Emergency Oil Reserve
Timothy Gardner and Laila Kearney, ReutersFri, 04/03/2020
The Trump administration said April 2 it plans to lease space in the country’s emergency petroleum reserve for an initial 30 million barrels of oil in a bid to help struggling crude drillers, after a previous effort to buy oil for the stockpile was ditched over a lack of funding.
The storage lease plan for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, will involve an exchange of up to 22.8 million barrels of sweet crude, which is what most onshore drillers produce, and up to 7.2 million barrels of sour crude. All of the oil will be produced domestically, the Department of Energy (DOE) said.
The new plan could help the U.S. deal with a growing glut of crude oil that risks overwhelming commercial storage tanks and sending world energy prices deeper into a tailspin as the coronavirus pandemic slashes demand for fuel.
The DOE said it intends to eventually lease storage for an additional 47 million barrels, which would fill the SPR to capacity.
As oil prices tumbled 55% in March on the twin threats of crumbling demand and a race for market share between Russia and Saudi Arabia, two of the world’s top oil producers, U.S. President Donald Trump directed the DOE to fill the reserve “to the top.” But the DOE ditched that plan after Congress failed to allocate about $3 billion for the purchase in last month’s big stimulus bill.
The DOE said it expected the first crude deliveries for the lease to the SPR, which holds oil in a series of salt caverns on the Texas and Louisiana coasts, in late April to early May, and that it will be able to receive up to 685,000 bbl/d.
[…]
Hart Energy
A Reverse Oil Embargo
OIL 31 Mar 2020 | 18:46 UTC Washington
Trump considering crude oil import limits for US refiners: sourcesWashington — President Donald Trump is considering a plan which would significantly limit US refineries from importing foreign crude and instead process Bakken, Permian and other domestic crudes, sources said Tuesday.
US Senator Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, pitched the idea to Trump during a roughly 40 minute phone call Monday.
“It just doesn’t seem rational to accept Saudi oil while they’re declaring a price war,” Cramer said in an interview Tuesday with S&P Global Platts.Sources familiar with discussions within the White House said Tuesday that the import prohibitions were among the options Trump is considering to blunt the impact of the ongoing price collapse on the domestic oil and gas industry. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the record Tuesday.
Cramer said the new import prohibitions could be enacted by Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump used in 2019 to impose tariffs on Mexican exports after declaring illegal immigration a national emergency.
The proposal would include some exceptions, particularly for US refineries built to run crude grades unavailable in the US, Cramer said.
[…]
S&P Global Platts
Prior to the insane ChiCom-19 panic, the US produced about 12 million bbl/d of crude oil, but consumed about 20 million bbl/d. While Canada, by far, is our primary source of imported crude (~4.4 million bbl/d), we still import about 1 million bbl/d from Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union (EIA). If the US curbed crude oil imports, we could find a buyer for every barrel of domestic crude oil production, even with the ChiCom-19 crimp in demand.
On the other hand, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union didn’t have sufficient domestic demand to consume their pre-price war production, much less the excess production they are dumping on the market. The US could very easily remove about 5 million bbl/d from global demand, available to the Saudis and Soviets.
While a reverse oil embargo wouldn’t drive up the average global price of oil (it is a global, fungible commodity), it could reverse the price differential between West Texas Intermediate (WTI, the US benchmark) and Brent (the international benchmark), with WTI trading at a premium to Brent.
So…
Day 20 of America Held Hostage by ChiCom-19
As of yesterday, Dallas County (1,015) was a close second place to Harris County (1,106) in Texas ChiCom-19 cases.
| Dallas County | CHICOM-19 | |
| Population | Cases | Deaths |
| 2,637,772 | 1018 | 18 |
| % of population with | 0.0386% | 0.00068% |
| % with, rounded | 0.0% | 0.00% |
| % without | 99.9614% | 99.9993% |
| % without, rounded | 100.0% | 100.00% |
Can you say?
On working from home… If you start out closer to Day 2, you can accomplish this in a few hours…
Hey ChiCom-19… “Make my day”…
Soviet Union? ChiCom-19?
If you don’t care for my description of Russia as the Soviet Union, and all things coronavirus as ChiCom-19…
Geoscientists without borders?
Geoscientists without borders is a “real thing”… I don’t know what it is, but they handed out these goofy @$$ bandannas at the 2016 Society of Exploration Geophysicists convention…
It will finally come in handy!
CDC Now Recommends Americans Consider Wearing Cloth Face Coverings In Public
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They should be able to eliminate background noise by measuring that first. Or maybe not.
Good article and comments
My understanding is that NY has mandated that any patient who dies WITH ChiCom-19, has ChiCom-19 listed as the cause of death. Have a heart condition and die from an MI, but test positive for ChiCom-19? Your death is reposted as caused by ChiCom. Have pancreatic cancer and a ChiCom-19 positive test? You will be listed as dying from ChiCom-19. Run down by a Grub Hub driver, while an asymptomatic ChiCom-19 carrier? Yep. ChiCom-19 killed you. Blow your own brains out after being forced to read another trollpost while mildly sickened? Yep. You too are a ChiCom-19 fatality.
It’s meaningless to talk about rounding errors when the books have been cooked. Someone is going to great lengths to support this narrative of ChiCom-19’s lethality.
best part of the Travis Tritt video?
the headline on the newspaper in the coffee shop scene references Donald Trump paying off Ivanka during their divorce…
What is this chicom-19?