Cost of Cooking Thanksgiving Turkey

Approximately 46 million turkeys will be put into the oven or deep fired today for the Thanksgiving Day feast.
But how much are Americans expected to spend cooking just that portion of the meal?
The answer is a bit more than you expect.
TXU Energy estimates that nearly 27 million turkeys (26,680,000 to be exact) will be cooked with electricity this Thanksgiving Day holiday.
At 8 kilowatts per hour for up to four hours, you are taking about a whooping $25 million to cook that turkey. And that price isn’t including the 23 million other turkeys that are cooked by gas.

Top Research?

Frac Gone Wild!

Thhis not an animated gif.
Have you ever wondered what the visuals look like on hallucinogens? This isn't far off (um, I've read). This is not an animated gif, and nothing is actually moving. It's all in your head. Your trippy, trippy head.
Sadly, I do not know who created this incredible optical illusion—I lost the trail somewhere in the bramble of the internet. But whomever he or she is deserves high praise. You can focus on one swirl and it's stationary, but the other swirls in your periphery start to undulate and twist. Switch to another one, and the same thing is repeated. It's exquisitely executed. I should warn, however, that if you're actually on acid, you will either see nothing moving at all, or the effect will be so powerful that your mind will turn to tapioca. Consider yourself warned

Where does oil come from?

Ogallala Aquifer vs. Keystone XL Pipeline

Figure 1

The Ogallala is the largest freshwater aquifer in the world. The maps above show the saturated thickness (vertical distance between the water table and the aquifer floor) of the Ogallala in 1996-97 and the water level changes between 1980 and 1997. The aquifer is depleted in parts of northern Texas and west central Kansas. A large share of Ogallala water lies beneath the Nebraska Sandhills, where the resource remains largely untapped because crop irrigation is uneconomic.

(McGuire et al., 1999)

The Ogallala is composed primarily of unconsolidated, poorly sorted clay, silt, sand, and gravel with groundwater filling the spaces between grains below the water table . The Ogallala was laid down about 10 million years ago by fluvial deposition from streams that flowed eastward from the Rocky Mountains during the Pliocene epoch

Read more: Ogallala Aquifer - depth, important, system, source http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Oc-Po/Ogallala-Aquifer.html#ixzz1dssFiqIE

The Ogallala is an unconfined aquifer, and virtually all recharge comes from rainwater and snowmelt. As the High Plains has a semiarid climate, recharge is minimal. Recharge varies by amount of precipitation, soil type, and vegetational cover and averages less than 25 millimeters (1 inch) annually for the region as a whole. In a few areas, recharge from surface water diversions has occurred. Groundwater does flow through the High Plains Aquifer, but at an average rate of only 300 millimeters (12 inches) per day.
The depth to the water table of the Ogallala Aquifer varies from actual surface discharge to over 150 meters (500 feet). Generally, the aquifer is found from 15 to 90 meters (50 to 300 feet) below the land surface. The saturated thickness also varies greatly. Although the average saturated thickness is about 60 meters (200 feet), it exceeds 300 meters (1,000 feet) in west-central Nebraska and is only one-tenth that in much of western Texas. Because both the saturated thickness and the areal extent of the Ogallala Aquifer is greater in Nebraska, the state accounts for two-thirds of the volume of Ogallala groundwater, followed by Texas and Kansas, each with about 10 percent.

Nebraska Pipeline Map

So the Keystone XL Pipeline will change this landscape?

Mad Dog Field

What is China doing in the desert?

Considering these can clearly be seen from orbit the formations are raising some eyebrows with geeks trying to figure out what exactly they are for. Are these some sort of alignment or targeting grids for space weapons or what? In one of the photos, you can clearly see a grid of structures with three of them either destroyed or partially standing as if they were for target practice.

There are aircraft placed in the center of this circle. I have no idea what it is, but it reminds me of how the military would test the blast radius of some sort of bomb to see what the damage is like further out from the point of impact. What do you think? Is this a military testing ground or the Chinese equivalent of crop circles?

Keystone XL Pipeline Delayed

WashPost to Obama: Approve Keystone XL

The Post still doesn’t like fossil fuels, but embraces reality anyway.
About the Keystone XL pipeline that Obama is tying to kill by delaying approval:

The United States must reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, from any source, and it should encourage nations such as China to lower the carbon intensity of their economies, too. Even if that happens, though, the world will continue to use oil, with all the dirty realities that entails. Rejecting Keystone XL would not change that fact. But it would help China lock up more of the world’s oil production, cost infrastructure jobs in the United States and offend a reliable ally. More delay after three years of review is insult enough.

Read the Post editorial.

Green Loan Program or Crony capitalism?

Schweizer's New Book: 80% of Energy Department's "Green Loan" Program Went to Obama's Backers

When President-elect Obama came to Washington in late 2008, he was outspoken about the need for an economic stimulus to revive a struggling economy... After he was sworn in as president, he proclaimed that taxpayer money would assuredly not be doled out to political friends...

...But an examination of grants and guaranteed loans offered by just one stimulus program run by the Department of Energy, for alternative-energy projects, is stunning. The so-called 1705 Loan Guarantee Program and the 1603 Grant Program channeled billions of dollars to all sorts of energy companies...

...In the 1705 government-backed-loan program [alone], for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.

...The Government Accountability Office has been highly critical of the way guaranteed loans and grants were doled out by the Department of Energy, complaining that the process appears “arbitrary” and lacks transparency. In March 2011, for example, the GAO examined the first 18 loans that were approved and found that none were properly documented. It also noted that officials “did not always record the results of analysis” of these applications. A loan program for electric cars, for example, “lacks performance measures.” No notes were kept during the review process, so it is difficult to determine how loan decisions were made. The GAO further declared that the Department of Energy “had treated applicants inconsistently in the application review process, favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others.” The Department of Energy’s inspector general, Gregory Friedman, ... has testified that contracts have been steered to “friends and family.”

...These programs might be the greatest—and most expensive—example of crony capitalism in American history. Tens of billions of dollars went to firms controlled or owned by fundraisers, bundlers, and political allies, many of whom—surprise!—are now raising money for Obama again...

Italian Cold Fusion Machine?

An atom consists of a nucleus of protons and neutrons, with electrons orbiting around. CREDIT: Dreamstime View full size image

Italian physicist and inventor Andrea Rossi has conducted a public demonstration of his "cold fusion" machine, the E-Cat, at the University of Bologna, showing that a small amount of input energy drives an unexplained reaction between atoms of hydrogen and nickel that leads to a large outpouring of energy, more than 10 times what was put in.
The first successful cold fusion experiment was reported two decades ago, but the process has forever been met with heavy skepticism. It's a seemingly impossible process in which two types of atoms, typically a light element and a heavier metal, seem to fuse together, releasing pure heat that can be converted into electricity. The process is an attractive energy solution for two reasons: Unlike in nuclear fission, the reaction doesn't give off dangerous radiation. Unlike the fusion processes that take place in the sun, cold fusion doesn't require extremely high temperatures.
But the experimentalists who have supposedly demonstrated cold fusion over the years have been unable to explain the underlying mechanism that drives the miraculous reaction they claim to observe, and so the scientific community has largely turned its back on this line of research. Most physicists — as well as the United States Department of Energy (DoE), academic journals, and the U.S. Patent Office — consider cold fusion machines to be hoaxes, because they say physics rules out the possibility of room-temperature nuclear fusion

Noerthern Lights

This amazing shot was taken in Norway by Ole Christian Salomonsen. It's one of the many photos featured in National Geographic's upcoming photo book, Visions of Earth

Potash Mining

This Potash mine is located 20 miles west of Moab. The mine began underground excavation in 1964 and was converted in 1970 to a solar evaporation system. This mine produces between 700 and 1,000 tons of potash per day.
Water is used from the nearby Colorado River in the production of Potash by a company called Intrepid Potash®. Water is pumped through injection wells into the underground mine which dissolves layers of potash more than 3,000 feet below the surface. The resulting "brine" is then brought to the surface and piped to 400 acres of shallow evaporation ponds. A blue dye is added to the ponds to assist in the evaporation process. These ponds are lined with vinyl to keep the brine from spilling back into the Colorado River. A major by-product of this process is salt. The salt is used for water softening, animal feed and oil drilling fluids as well as many other applications.

Decline of Rock Music and U.S Oil Production

So, our energy future will be determined by "rock stars". C'mon Ozzie, Mick and Keith, get after it!

State Owned Oil Companies vs. the Majors: Which is bigger?

Life is getting harder for the supermajors. Their edge over their rivals—the ability to extract oil from difficult places—is terrifically useful while prices are high. But since it is terrifically costly to extract oil from difficult places, their competitive advantage fizzles if oil prices fall. If it does, their bumper profits could vanish like a pool of petrol into which a lighted match has been carelessly dropped.

Natural Gas vs. Wind: Which is Greener?

Why Natural Gas is Greener than Wind Energy

We have an opportunity to actually achieve real energy independence by shifting our efforts away from wind and solar and adopting a natural-gas infrastructure instead. The best part? It won’t require an avalanche of subsidies to succeed, either. All we need to do is get government and its social engineers out of the way.

U.S. Rotary Rig Count

U.S. Workover Rig Count

With data provided by Cameron, the workover rig count provides information for the most recent month and for the two preceding months about the number of workover rigs in the eight major regions of the United States. The most recent month’s data from 12 months ago is also highlighted with the percentage change between the two preceding months and the percentage change over the last 12 months.

View the September 2011 Workover Rig Count Table

Thorium Nuclear Energy

So what is the big deal about thorium?
 In 2006, writing in the magazine Cosmos, Tim Dean summarized perhaps the most optimistic scenario for what a Thorium-powered nuclear world would be like:

What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium. 

The Universe is flat?

WMAP has confirmed this result with very high accuracy and precision. We now know that the universe is flat with only a 0.5% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent; however, since the Universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the Universe. All we can truly conclude is that the Universe is much larger than the volume we can directly observe.

Shape of the Universe - NASA

Happy Birthday North and South Dakota

November 02, 1889

The Dakota Territory

On this day in 1889, North and South Dakota were admitted into the Union. Both North and South Dakota have remained mostly rural, being ranked 48th and 46th in population respectively.

Shale Production Forecast