- There was a loud boom and a shower of sparks. It was gone. Matthews turned to see why the captain was so anxious. He found himself staring at a wall of water — a 50-foot wave, the biggest they had seen. The Alert went straight up its face. “There was this feeling of up and up and up and up and up and up,” he said. He put his hands against the back window to stabilize himself. White water was running over the front window. They couldn’t see anything. “When is this going to stop?” the captain asked.
At the top of the monster wave, they could suddenly see for miles. “This incredible moon was out,” Matthews said. “There was this oceanscape. These mountains of water. Storm clouds. It was a thing of awesome beauty.” It lasted for only a second or two. Then the Alert tipped down the other side, and the whole tug shuddered as it dived into the trough. The window filled with the view below the waterline, a Pacific green. It looked like an aquarium.
So here's an interesting question that I haven't heard addressed in the media: Which is worse for the environment, high or low oil prices? Low oil prices encourage usage, but they severely discourage fracking, deep water/arctic drilling, tar sands extraction, and all that other nastiness that is acutely bad, and not just global warming bad.
That was the other thing I took out of this article -- I wasn't aware of the 'proved reserves' definition or how it was impacted by oil prices, although now it seems obvious. But in the long term, do low oil prices push down innovation that would be happening in the clean energy sectors? That's the biggest con.
Not an economist, but: "Unconventional projects" tend to be executed in environments with fewer environmental regulations. The rise of oil prices brought an increase in refinery capacity in the United States, not in exploration (fracking is largely about natural gas, a separate economy). After Deepwater Horizon, there's a moratorium on deep drilling in US waters. Light sweet crude is hovering around $50 a barrel right now. Which means right now, Shell loses $20 a barrel on shit like ANWR, deepwater drilling and the like. Also, environmental regulations aren't relaxed in times of cheap oil. The incentives to produce as cleanly as possible remain, while powerful disincentives to sporty exploration appear. Finally, institutional energy prices rarely drop: ConEd is going to charge you the same regardless of whether or not oil is cheaper for them. Southwest and United aren't going to cut you a break on fares just because their gas is cheaper; in fact, they've likely locked in prices long-term (Southwest did this in '08 which allowed them to ride out the recession sitting pretty). So the incentives to use more fuel are greatly diminished. I would guess that low oil prices are better for the environment, but it's a guess. Harvard seems to think the sweet spot for the environment is between $60 and $80 a barrel.As a result, the hunt for oil went to technical and geographical extremes like shale oil in South Texas, tar sands in Alberta, deepwater sites in Brazil and offshore wells in the Arctic. And the hunt became more expensive: The break-even point for many unconventional projects was $70 or more per barrel.
So fuckin' baller. NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE I might just have to subscribe to Deca. Great find.When they got close enough to the rig’s snapped emergency towline, he would throw the hook. He would reel it in by hand. Then he would get the Alert’s own tow cable and tie the two together with the knot he suggested: a bowline... They worried that if they got too close, the Kulluk, half the weight of the Titanic, would crash on top of them.
The shore was only a few miles away, and now Matthews had to figure out how to untie his knot. His bosses called and suggested that he cut the thick cable with an acetylene torch tied to a broomstick. When he peered out the back window at the tow winch, three feet of water was surging over the tug’s weather deck. He put on foul-weather gear and tried to time the waves.