Friday, February 01, 2002

11:25 PM LINK

Three Days of the Cheney

So what exactly in those documents that Cheney won't fork over? Why does White House spokesman Ari Fleischer insist that releasing them would damage "the right of the people in our country to petition their government"?

By "petition", I assuming he's referring to Amendment I of the Bill of Rights, which would be evidently harmed if the GAO gets its way.

Wow, that's heavy! Must be powerful stuff. Maybe we (as well as Congress) better just take Cheney at his word. Maybe we just don't want to know how the Energy Task Force came up with its conclusions.

This sort of reminds me of that speech that Cliff Robertson gave to Robert Redford at the end of Three Days of the Condor, basically telling him that when people's lights and heat go off in their homes, all they want is the power turned back on. They don't care how it got there. To wit:

TURNER (Redford)
Boy, what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?

HIGGINS (Robertson)
No. It's simple economics. Today, it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years... food. Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?

TURNER
Ask them.

HIGGINS
Not now. Then. Ask them when they're running out. Ask them when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who've never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask them. They'll just want us to get it for them.

11:14 PM LINK

More Cheney Woes

Things look grim for Cheney. Even the National Review is coming out against him.

9:30 PM LINK

Cheney's Legalisms

Good piece on Slate from Chris Suellentrop about the GAO lawsuit against Cheney.

7:00 PM LINK

The Mystery of Rawdatain

Big news from Kuwait. Production at the Rawdatain oil field, the country's second largest, has been halted due to a disastrous fire. On a normal day, Rawdatain pushes out about about a third of the Kuwait daily production of 1.7 million barrels.

Not to worry, however. Kuwait's oil output will hardly miss a beat. According to their oil minister, Kuwait can crank up other wells in a matter of a few days to make up for the loss. In the meantime, they can use their stockpiles

As an aside, Rawdaitan wells were previously set afire by Iraqi troops in the Gulf War.

The real point here: the essence of power in the world of oil is not so much how much oil you have, or how fast you're producing it, but how much more you could produce, on fairly short notice, if you really wanted. As Deffeyes says, "this makes you a player."

Kuwait's oil minister, Adel Al-Subaih, has often been OPEC's point-man for pressuring Russia (the biggest non-OPEC exporter) to keep its production down, in order that OPEC can keep its prices higher.

By the way, think it's easy finding out information on the web on oil reserves? Rawdatain is one of the largest oil fields in the world, a source for much of the world's transportation energy. Type "Rawdatain" into Google and see what you find. I got a total of 74 hits. Maybe there are spelling variations I don't know about. Maybe not.

5:52 PM LINK

Big-Time Stalling

Very interesting article by John Dean about the legal issues present in Cheney's refusal to handover documents to the GAO about how the national energy taks force came up with its recommendations.

Dean's opinion is that the task force was explicitly formed in such as way as to get around public disclosure laws, and that:

Indeed, if the Vice President's position should prevail, it will change the very nature of our government's system of checks and
balances. If GAO is held to be as restricted at Cheney would have it, such a ruling will create a black hole in the Federal
firmament - a no man's land where only the President and Vice President can go, unobserved by their Constitutional
co-equals on Capitol Hill.

What they heck are they hiding? It is very disturbing. I am completely at a loss to understand why we as citizens cannot be trusted with information as to how the national energy policy is formed. What information present in it could be so damaging those who provided it that it would warrant this disclosure? The fact that our energy policy could be formed on information "damaging" to anyone is in itself a disturbing fact. What do they want to hide from us, really? Does Saudi Arabia have a lot less oil than they purport to have? Is this a little Al-Jazeer-style "we don't consider the elephant in the room to be newsworthy"?

My opinion as a citizen is that Cheney's position, no matter what it's legality, is reprehensible form the standpoint of representative democracy. This is our national energy policy, for crissakes. We're supposed to just accept it as if it were handed down the petrogods on high, without wondering what kind of calculus went into its formation.

That is very weird, if you ask me.

3:27 PM LINK

Carbon-Carbon Bonds

O.K. I'm almost done with my organic chemistry explanations.

Methane is the simplest hydrocarbon, but it is not present in petroleum, but in natural gas.

To understand the hydrocarbons in petroleum, it is only necessary to ask: can a carbon atom bond to another carbon atom?

In other words, could you put two carbon atom Tinker Toys together?
The answer if of course yes.

How about hooking up three carbon atoms? Yes, you can do that too.
How about four? Yes.
Is there any limit? Not in principle. Molecules with twenty or more carbon atoms strung in a row like this are easy to find in nature.

One important feature, however, is that once you get to four carbon atoms in a row, they don't necessary need to be strung together end-to-end. The carbon chain can be branched.
As you can imagine, as the number of carbon atoms increases, the possibilities for more complex branching increases. Eventually with six or more carbon atoms, the atoms can begin to form rings.

The difference between "straight" and "branched" hydrocarbons, as well as hydrocarbons with rings of carbon atoms, is very important in the refining of petroleum and the manufacture of petroleum-based fuels.

Thursday, January 31, 2002

3:48 PM LINK

Carbon Dioxide is King

According the CDIAC site I mentioned, there is a conventional scale for measuring the potential effect of various greenhouse gases.

In that regard, carbon dioxide is king. That is, it is by far the compound the with strongest potential effect. Methane is second, but it is not even close. So if you're talking greenhouse gases, you're talking carbon dioxide, for the most part.

If indeed global warming due to industrial pollutants is a serious problem, it will in large measure hinge upon the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.

3:42 PM LINK

Greenhouse Gases

Both methane and carbon dioxide (a waste product of the burning of methane, i.e., natural gas) are considered "greenhouse gases" for the potential to change the thermal capacity of the earth's atmosphere.

I find an excellent link about greenhouse gases here, simply giving some raw data about historical concentrations of greenhouse gases. Don't ask me if these are the most authorative figures, because I don't know yet.

The historical concentrations of gases are measured by examining ice core samples from glaciers and ice caps. The ice preserves pockets of air from the time at which was frozen. Like rings of tree, the core samples can be used to examine air chemistry in the past. It is probably the most important tool in the debate over global warming.

If you follow the preindustrial link for carbon dioxide, you'll see that in the Eighteenth Century, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 parts per million. The concentration started to climb around the turn of the Nineteenth Century, and has risen fairly steadily to around 360 parts per million today, about a 30% increase.

The question is of course: what are the consequences of this increase? That's what the debate is about.

The preindustrial samples were taken from the Siple Dome research site in West Antarctica.

The more recent figures are taken monthly from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The two data sets can be correlated because they prettry much agree where they overlap, in the early 1950's, with a figure of around 315 ppm.

3:18 PM LINK

Methane vs. Hydrogen

At room temperatures, methane, the simplest of hydrogens, is a gas. You are familiar with methane in the form of natural gas, which is almost entirely methane.

Thus methane is a fuel. Like molecular hydrogen, it can burn and release energy. It both cases, molecular oxygen and a flame is required in order for the burning to proceed.

The atmospheres of most of the outer planets, such as Jupiter are mostly molecular hydrogen with some small amounts of methane. Lightining is prevalent on Jupiter. But the hydrogen and methane don't burn on Jupiter, because there is no oxygen to let the reaction proceed.

Here are the reactions of the burning of molecule hydrogen and methane.

compound	burning	waste products
hydrogen	molecular oxygen + flame	heat + water
methane	molecular oxygen + flame	heat + water + carbon dioxide

So you can see the difference. Both hydrogen and methane produce water and heat when burned. The difference is that methane also produces a carbon dioxide molecule.

Tuesday, January 29, 2002

10:10 PM LINK

Carbon is King

Besides hydrogen, the other element present in any hydrocarbon compound is, of course, carbon.

In organic chemistry, carbon is "king". The reason for this is that a carbon always wants to make four separate bonds in any stable molecule. Among the lightest elements in the Periodic Table, carbon alone makes four bonds. All the other light elements make fewer bonds. This is why carbon is the key element in organic chemistry. It is most versatile in forming compounds.

Following the Tinker Toy model of models, you could depict carbon and its four bonds.
(the bonds can be doubled or tripled up, but we won't worry about this for now).

As with hydrogen, the orientation of the Tinker Toy piece doesn't matter.

The carbon atom is bigger than the hydrogen. Indeed it is bigger, although the proportions aren't important here. As far as weight goes, a carbon atom is about twelve times heavier than a hydrogen atom.

By the way, the shape here isn't important either. The bonds actually don't come out in a cross shape like this, but it doesn't matter for our purposes. That's the beauty of these diagrams.

How can you hook a carbon atom up to other atoms to make a molecule? It's very simple if you keep the Tinker Toy model in mind.

Can you hook a hydrogen atom on to one of the carbon bonds? Of course. Any piece can go with any other piece.
But we haven't formed a stable molecule yet. All of carbon's four bonds must be attached to another atom of some kind.

Since we're talking about hydrocarbon Tinker Toys here, the simplest possible scenario would be to attach three more hydrogen atoms to four bonds of carbon.
Voilà! There you have it. The simplest possible stable hydrocarbon molecule. It consists of one carbon bonded to four separate hydrogen atoms. Give a child the Tinker Toys of organic chemistry, and this is what they would undoubtedly make.

This simplest of hydrocarbon molecules has a name: methane.

Monday, January 28, 2002

10:24 PM LINK

Cartoon Hydrogen

Like I said, one of the beautiful things about organic chemistry is that you can learn a few basic, simple rules and apply them to leverage yourself into understanding a lot.

Pictures of molecules are very useful. The simple rules behind the pictures: a hydrogen atom always wants to make a single bond. Let's picture a hydrogen atom as red circle. Out of it comes a single line, to represent the single bond it wants to make.

The length of the line representing the bond is not important. Moreover, the orientation is not important.
Bonds hook to other bonds. When you see these pictures, think of Tinker Toy pieces that can be put together. The lines connect only to other lines.

A single bond can be hooked to any other single bond to make a molecule. In a stable molecule, all the bonds are accounted for. In other words, there are no loose bonds sticking out.

That being said, here's a question for you: what is the simplest stable molecule you can make consisting only of hydrogen atoms?

Keep in mind the only rule: all the bonds have to be hooked to another bond. Think of tinker toys, or Legos, if you want to. If you had a bag full of hydrogen pieces like the ones above, how would stick them together to form a stable molecule, so that there were no bonds sticking out.

The answer, of course, as any child could tell you, is just to stick two of the hydrogen pieces..and then stick them together.
There you have it, the simplest stable molecule consisting only of hydrogen. This is called "molecular hydrogen." It is the molecule in hydrogen gas, namely two hydrogens stuck together.

Yes, it's that easy!

By the way, if you think Tinker Toys doesn't sound very scientific, just check out this scholarly article from two physicists at Rice University about a complex carbon compound. The discoverers of this compound (including one of the authors of the article) won the Nobel Prize.

Although molecular hydrogen can certainly be used as a fuel (NASA uses molecular hydrogen as rocket fuel) , it is not a hydrocarbon compound. This is because it does not contain any carbon atoms.

5:01 PM LINK

All the Organic Chemistry You Need

Once it become part of the sedimentary stack, the partially decayed organic molecules from the marine life begin to break down into smaller pieces.

If they break down into the right smaller pieces they can become petroleum reserves.

The right pieces means the simple hydrocarbons, molecules that are the basic combinations of hydrogen and carbon.

How basic are these combinations?

To explain that I need to delve into a tiny bit of organic chemistry. Organic chemistry is great because a little bit of knowledge can take you a long way. If you can play checkers, or pass a driving exam, you can definitely understand the basic rules upon which organic compounds are formed.

For our purposes, all one needs to know is the following two facts, having to do with hydrogen and carbon atoms: (1) when a hydrogen atom bonds to another atom it always makes one bond; (2) when a carbon atom bonds to other atoms, it always makes four bonds.

It's this fact that carbon makes four bonds that makes it the "king" of the organic elements. Four bonds is a a lot in the world of molecules.

Here's the best part: you can understand how stable organic molecules consisting of hydrogen and carbon can be assembled from those two rules alone.

The only wrinkle is that bonds can be doubled or tripled up, a fact we can save until later. Other than, you have now learned as much organic chemistry theory as you need to understand the molecules in petroleum.

One of the wonderful aspects about organic chemistry is that you can draw stick figures of the molecules that actually reflect underlying physical realities.

Going back to our simple rules, we represent the fact that hydrogen makes one bond like this:

	H--

Fig. 1. A Hydrogen atom, with its single bond

That line means that the hydrogen atom is looking to hook up with another atom to form a stable compound (the fact that it is dashed does not mean anything). What kind of atom does the hydrogen want to bond with? It could be anything, including another hydrogen, a carbon atom, or any other element.

Carbon makes four bonds. How do you represent that? Like this:

                |
           --C--
                |

Figure 2. A Carbon atom, with its four bonds

What does carbon bond to, with its four bonds? As in the case of hydrogen, it could be anything, including hydrogen atoms, other carbon atoms, oxygen atoms, etc.

So there you have. The theory of organic chemistry is much more detailed than that, of course, but this is all you need to know for now to understand petroleum. Like I said, a little theory goes a long way in this game.

1:57 AM LINK

A Fellow Geology Freak

Doc Searls is a man I understand. He writes:

"Did I mention I'm a geology freak? Well, I am. But I don't often talk about it because it's one of those subjects that tends to clear the room of all but the other geology freaks, which number, percentage wise in a lightly populated room, around zero.

But still, I'm into it. Which is why reading the geological history of Virginia occupied the last half hour of my life. If you're still in the room, you might wanna dig it."

The link he quotes about Virginia is very interesting. Although it's not directly related to petroleum geology, it contains a wonderful description of "basement rocks" versus sedimentary layers, and specifically about the Greenville rocks.

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