Graphene Data

A lot is now coming out on Graphene. Therefore I will be posting several stories over the next few days. This one is perhaps the best exposition so far. We are learning to manufacture this stuff and starting to imagine novel applications. We are only beginning here, but step by step we are finding ways to create layers that are a single atom thick and how to work with them.

We have already seen this show up on the outside of an apparent UFO nosecone where it would accommodate powerful magnetic fields.

An upcoming item will explore the possibility of using structures to absorb hydrogen for storage.

An early application could well be the creation of random complex traps to hold useful free ions. Simply charging the material would let it absorb the free ions so that they could be stored safely and they could be released by the expedient of applying a reversal charge.

A new solution to graphene production


As every schoolboy knows, the stuff in your pencil lead is graphite, a naturally occurring form of carbon, useful but not very interesting. What is more interesting is that graphite is made from a stacked system of layers, each just one atom thick. It was long thought that these graphene layers were unstable and that removing them from the parent crystal would cause them to roll up. This raised the question of how thin you could make graphite. Ten layers? Five? By peeling layers from a graphite crystal with sticky tape and then rubbing them onto a silicon dioxide surface, a team from the University of Manchester found a surprising answer: it is possible to produce graphite crystals just one atom thick.

1 It soon became clear that this graphene had intriguing electronic properties. For example, due to the symmetry of its 2D honeycomb lattice, charge carriers in graphene appear massless.

2 More important for microelectronic engineers, these carriers have ultrahigh mobility, opening the door to superfast transistors.

3 The huge potential of graphene comes with one small catch: mechanical cleavage of graphite is a very slow process with very low throughput. As a result, graphene is the most expensive material known to man, costing approximately $1 per square micron.

4 New, high-yield, cheap ways to make graphene are urgently needed. For microelectronics, the solution will probably be to grow graphene on silicon wafers using reasonably well known processes. However, for most other applications it is accepted that a method to produce graphene in liquids is required. Much progress has been made, with a number of groups having developed chemical techniques to split graphite into sheets of graphene-like material such as graphene oxide.

5, 6 However, such materials tend to have many defects, thus altering the interesting properties. Attempting to resolve this problem, we recently demonstrated an alternative liquid-based process to exfoliate graphite to give defect-free graphene.

7 We used methods developed recently to obtain individual carbon nanotubes suspended in liquids. Nanotubes tend to aggregate together, which reduces their energy. But you can remove this propensity to aggregate if you place them in a liquid that binds to the nanotubes as well as they bind to each other. We found that liquids whose surface energy matched that of nanotubes gave stable suspensions of individual nanotubes.

8 As nanotubes are rolled-up graphene, we suspected the same approach would allow us to split graphite into graphene.

We mixed graphite with a nanotube-suspending solvent and applied sonic energy. Initial tests showed that significant quantities of graphite could be suspended in this manner. To test whether the science was the same as for nanotube suspensions, we mixed graphite with dozens of carefully chosen solvents and measured how much graphite remained suspended after centrifugation. When plotted versus surface energy, it became clear that the amount of suspended graphite peaked sharply for solvents with surface energy close to that expected for graphite. The mechanism was the same.

The key question was, Had we suspended graphene or just small flakes of graphite? The high boiling point of our solvents precluded the standard approach of depositing the flakes on a surface and examining with a microscope. Instead of this, we dropped the suspension on special holey substrates designed for electron microscopy. The solvent tended to run off the substrates leaving small flakes deposited in its wake that could easily be found using a transmission electron microscope. We used electron diffraction to confirm the presence of monolayers and to estimate the number of layers by focusing on the flake edges. It was immediately apparent that about 30% of them were one atomic layer thick, similar to the monolayer. In addition, a number of bilayers, multilayers, and folded monolayers, were observed.

To make real progress, however, we had to show that the graphene was chemically unmodified and not highly defective. As a test, we used x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, a technique that gives information on bonding in a material. This clearly showed that the graphene was not chemically modified. But the results did not rule out the possibility of defects. Consequently, we carried out Raman spectroscopy with the help of collaborators at the University of Cambridge. With great care, Raman spectra were obtained from individual graphene flakes, giving information on the presence of defects. The answer was unambiguous. The level was too low to measure, showing that our liquid processing was not introducing defects. The high quality of the graphene was elegantly confirmed by atomic resolution transmission electron microscopy, carried out by colleagues at the University of Oxford: see Figure 1(C). In principle, this production process can be scaled up to make very large quantities of defect-free graphene.

For now, it is becoming clear that graphene can be produced, cheaply and easily, in certain liquids at a reasonable yield. In the future, we hope to improve the yield, increase the flake size, and extend this method to aqueous systems. We expect that this method will be useful, not only as a low-cost and straightforward way to make graphene, but as an enabling technology for applications such as graphene-based composites and coatings.

We acknowledge financial support from Science Foundation Ireland.

References: 1. K. S. Novoselov, A. K. Geim, S. V. Morozov, D. Jiang, Y. Zhang, S. V. Dubonos, I. V. Grigorieva, A. A. Firsov, Electric field effect in atomically thin carbon films, Science 306, no. 5696, pp. 666-669, 2004.

2. K. S. Novoselov, A. K. Geim, S. V. Morozov, D. Jiang, M. I. Katsnelson, I. V. Grigorieva, S. V. Dubonos, A. A. Firsov, Two-dimensional gas of massless Dirac fermions in graphene, Nature 438, no. 7065, pp. 197-200, 2005.

3. S. V. Morozov, K. S. Novoselov, M. I. Katsnelson, F. Schedin, D. C. Elias, J. A. Jaszczak, A. K. Geim, Giant intrinsic carrier mobilities in graphene and its bilayer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 1, no. 1, pp. 016602, 2008.
4. http://www.grapheneindustries.com/ Homepage of a commercial supplier of graphenes. Accessed 9 October 2008.

5. G. Eda, G. Fanchini, M. Chhowalla, Large-area ultrathin films of reduced graphene oxide as a transparent and flexible electronic material, Nat. Nanotechnol. 3, pp. 270-274, 2008.

6. S. Stankovich, D. A. Dikin, R. D. Piner, K. A. Kohlhaas, A. Kleinhammes, Y. Jia, Y. Wu, S. T. Nguyen, R. S. Ruoff, Synthesis of graphene-based nanosheets via chemical reduction of exfoliated graphite oxide, Carbon 45, no. 7, pp. 1558-1565, 2007.

7. Y. Hernandez, V. Nicolosi, M. Lotya, F. M. Blighe, Z. Sun, S. De, I. T. McGovern, B. Holland, M. Byrne, Y. K. Gun'ko, J. J. Boland, P. Niraj, G. Duesberg, S. Krishnamurthy, R. Goodhue, J. Hutchison, V. Scardaci, A. C. Ferrari, J. N. Coleman, High-yield production of graphene by liquid-phase exfoliation of graphite, Nat. Nanotechnol. 3, no. 9, pp. 563-568, 2008.

8. S. D. Bergin, V. Nicolosi, P. V. Streich, S. Giordani, Z. Sun, A. H. Windle, P. Ryan, N. P. P. Niraj, Z. T. Wang, L. Carpenter, W. J. Blau, J. J. Boland, J. P. Hamilton, J. N. Coleman, Towards solutions of SWNT in common solvents, Adv. Mater. 20, no. 10, pp. 1876-1881, 2007.

Thera 1500 BC

This article is a bit to wade through so I will save you the trouble. They are sorting out the Bronze Age chronology of the Mediterranean. That really means getting it all to agree with ultimately every site. It is likely a good time to attempt it. Carbon dating has had one revolution a generation ago and this effort is able to take advantage of the huge increase in available data while recognizing that other factors can really throw any one method.

The important fact that emerges is that Thera must be properly dated to 1500 BC. This makes me strangely happy, although I am unable to recall why, except to recall that a long ago research had made that date most probable. I suppose I need to recheck chronologies although perhaps we should wait for these folks to get it all right and integrated with Egypt.

That makes a three hundred and fifty year gap between the memory of Thera and 1159BC, which was perhaps two hundred years before Homer and Solomon’s Temple. Three hundred more years, we are upon Classical Greece and the Judaic Temple culture. The gaps are close enough for languages to remain intelligible and for some of the event information to be transmitted.

This makes rereading the old texts fruitful because we have a sense of the problems facing translators who would be describing events through the language of a five hundred year old document.

Open doors to sunny shores

Archaeologists working around the Mediterranean met two weeks ago in Cairo to discuss intercultural relations between the countries of the region, reports Nevine El-Aref

Far from being a modern concept that came to pass only with the formation of the European Union and the Barcelona process, the dialogue between the different cultures of the Mediterranean region has been in place since time immemorial. This is becoming increasingly clear as more and more archaeological finds are discovered. Indeed, considering the Mediterranean as an entity deserving research in its own right has recently become a topic of discussion.

In the light of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) organised a conference to look into intercultural contacts in the region. This was the first international convention to address this topic in a southern Mediterranean country.

The conference focussed on theoretical and methodological issues related to the study of intercultural contacts in archaeology on the one hand, and on actual case studies of intercultural contact on the other.
Papers presented at the meeting dealt with a wide variety of topics, including the methods and theory of the study of contacts in archaeology, immigration patterns in different countries including Egypt, trade and exchange, the import and local imitation of foreign objects, the adoption of foreign religious ideas, influences in artistic and architectural styles and seafaring. Although ancient Egypt is often seen by the wider public as a unique, united and rather isolated culture, the presentations made clear that Egypt had many and far- reaching contacts all over the Mediterranean. Not only did Egyptian objects and ideas reach the furthest corners of the region, but Mediterranean people, ideas and objects were also welcomed in Egypt itself.

Seven internationally renowned speakers presented keynote addresses, including Manfred Bietak, the director of the Austrian Institute for Archaeology in Cairo and the director of the excavations at Tell Al-Dabaa in the Nile Delta.

Bietak explained that over the last nine years the Austrian Academy of Sciences had carried out a large research programme in order to synchronise the divergent regional chronologies of the second millennium BC. Sciences and humanities were combined for this programme to include dendro- chronology, Egyptian and Mesopotamian historical chronologies, and archaeological branches of most of the eastern Mediterranean, especially ceramic research. Very helpful were index markers such as Levantine painted ware, different groups of Eell Al-Yahudiay ware, Kamares ware, Middle and Late Cypriot pottery varieties and Mycenaen ware, which mark specific datum lines with their first appearance in the local markets of the Eastern Mediterranean. With their help and with a control of combinations of ceramic types and other artefacts, it was possible to create a dense network of data for a common chronology. For the time being, Bietak continued, this was based on historical Egyptian chronology. A datum line was also created with a first appearance of pumice of the Minoan Thera eruption not before the late Bronze Age in the Levant and not before the beginning of the Tuthmoside period in Egypt.

"The evidence makes it highly likely that the Thera eruption did not happen in the second half of the 17th century BC, as radio carbon dates suggest, but around 1500 BC," Bietak said.

Dendro-chronology with Lebanese cedar wood will still need many years of study to fill the gaps for an absolute standard chronology, and scientists are working on other independent dating methods. The historical chronology with its datum lines of first appearances of artefacts and pumices and with "stratigraphie compare" have, on the other hand, provided a consistent umbrella-chronology which suggests linking the Egyptian with a quite low Mesopotamian chronology. "While the main outlines of this chronology seem to be satisfactory, detailed research has still to be undertaken to establish a well founded chronological structure," Bietak said.

Marie-Henriette Gates from Bilkent University in Ankara presented a keynote speech on the maritime business in the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean, saying that archaeological analysis of imported and exported finds had shifted over the past century from description to explanation, in line with other developments in the discipline's research enquiry. The appeal of exotica remains constant, however. Their very presence opens an immediate window onto maritime cross-cultural contacts.

"Although Bronze Age sites in this region provide a rich illustration of such transactions, neutrally attributed to trade and exchange, it has also proved a more difficult challenge to reconstruct the economic, cultural and social mechanisms behind these exchanges," she said.

Gates explained that contemporary written documents gave precise evidence that was both invaluable and one-sided. The predominance in explanatory models for Mediterranean and Aegean maritime affairs, particularly for the second millennium BC, had magnified administrative constraints and emphasised classification of goods.

Few discussions address the eastern Mediterranean's dense distribution of Bronze Age ports, ranking, like settlements on land, from large and well-connected to modest and remote. These ports reflect economic circumstances of differing scales and intensities, but they were all equally dependent on shipping networks and maritime business.

Linda Hulin from Oxford University took the audience to another segment of the Mediterranean, that of the Libyan community during the Bronze Age. Hulin said models of Libyan society in the pre-classical period came from a variety of sources that were rarely contemporary or indigenous.

"We rely primarily upon epigraphic and art historical material from Egypt, particularly the Third Intermediate Period and from the classical world, to model Libyan society in the Bronze Age," she said. "The small amount of archaeological material, including rock art, is difficult to date."

Diamantis Panagioopoulos from Heidelberg University said that after some decades of intensive scholarly research, the study of cultural interaction in the eastern Mediterranean of the second millennium BC had reached a critical stage. In the vast and fragmented terrain of relevant literature scientific approaches go in quite different directions, while the gap between empirical historical knowledge and theoretical visions is still growing. Within this climate, he said, it had become increasingly difficult to establish a common ground of scholarly research in which the interrelationships between new spectacular finds and new theoretical models could fruitfully be interrogated. Facing these difficulties, Panagioopoulos suggested it was important to reframe the current state of affairs and identify some collective concerns for future studies. "Taking the concept of transculturality as an overarching of theoretical umbrella under which one can explore the most salient aspects of cross-cultural interaction in a systemic manner is an attempt to contribute to this aim," he claimed. Within this broad semantic concept, he continued, the focus would be on the cultural dynamics of maritime activity which constituted a core element of transnational exchange during the late second millennium BC.

"The key questions will be to what extent the expanding arteries of maritime contacts and trade fostered cultural mobility and change in the eastern Med." He foresees that a brief overview of geographical, social and political structures, channels and agents of exchange and materiality would help to comprehend this historical phenomenon as a complex interaction of multiple dynamic parameters.

Leila Badre from the American University in Beirut spoke of the cultural interconnections in the eastern Mediterranean during the late Bronze and Iron Ages. This relationship was highlighted through pottery found in the Tell Kazel area in Summur in Beirut, which was excavated by the American University of Beirut museum team in 1985.

"This site has produced an interesting amount of important pottery which sheds some light on trade relations between Beirut, Cyprus and the Aegean in the late Bronze and Iron Ages," Badre pointed out.
Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, head of the Central Administration of Ancient Egyptian Monuments, presented his paper on the remains of what is up to now the largest fortified city of the New Kingdom. Tell Habua I and II, three kilometres northeast of Qantara East in North Sinai, measures 400 by 200 metres and is reinforced by 24 towers. Archaeological evidence has revealed gates on the north and south sides and two complexes of large storerooms dating from the beginning of the 19th Dynasty, notably the reign of Pharaoh Seti I. The team has also found a temple from the reign of Ramses II. "This discovery confirms the identification of Tell Habua with Tharw, as mentioned in the inscriptions of Pharaoh Seti I at Karnak, describing the Way of Horus," Abdel-Maqsoud said. The Way of Horus or Horus Road was the main trade and military route from Egypt to Palestine.

Suaan Sherratt from Sheffield University said investigation into intercultural contact in the Mediterranean area during the second and first millennia BC was often a matter of reconciling various types of textual information with archaeological data. "We should not feel that we can afford to neglect either but attempts to integrate them frequently run up against issues of theory and methodology," she said, adding that methodology was arguably less of a problem as long as it was borne in mind that all types of information needed their own contextual source criticisms and that the devising of methodologies to address particular questions had to be approached on a strictly ad hoc basis.

"All that we need to think about lies in the shadows, susceptible more to informed imagination than to direct information, whether textual or archaeological, or to theory derived from anthropology or the social sciences," Sheratt said.

Gert Jan Van Wijngaarden from Amsterdam University stressed in his paper that the relationship between Egypt and Mycenae covered a long period of time, as finds of Mycenaean pottery at several areas around the Mediterranean testify. Only in Egypt, however, is ample additional epigraphic and pictorial evidence found. A number of faience plaques from Mycenae have even been interpreted as royal gifts from Egypt.

"The cultural contexts of the Mycenaean finds in Egypt and the Egyptian finds in Greece will assess the significance of Egyptian-Mycenaean relations in their Mediterranean context," he said.

Ancient Egypt was often viewed as a unique and isolated culture, but on the contrary, owing to archaeological discoveries and research, it is now seen that ancient Egyptians were in contact with their neighbours from prehistoric times and not, as is often believed, only since the Open Door policy opened up trade with the European Union. To illustrate these connections, on the fringe of the conference the Netherlands- Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC) has mounted a panel exhibition on intercultural contact between ancient Egypt and other countries of the Mediterranean. The exhibition, entitled "Ancient Egypt in the Mediterranean" and held in the garden of the Egyptian Museum, was opened by Zahi Hawass, secretary- general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and will last until the end of December. It highlights the friendly relationship between ancient Egypt and its neighbouring countries around the Mediterranean Sea, as well as telling the story of foreign groups who lived in Egypt in ancient times. The exhibition displays the far-reaching influences Egypt had on its neighbours and its involvement with regard to the trade routes of the ancient Mediterranean, together with how ancient Egyptians adopted foreign technologies and ideas.

The panels, which were written by young scholars from around the Mediterranean and other parts of the world, highlight such topics as trade, war, seafaring, art and specific archaeological sites from predynastic times right through the late Pharaonic era.

"I am very happy to have this exhibition at the Egyptian Museum, where people from all over the world come to enjoy and learn about ancient Egypt", Hawass said at the opening.

Klaus Ebermann, the EU Ambassador in Egypt, said that it was wonderful that visitors could learn how people from a variety of ancient cultures met and influenced each other, with Egypt as a key point of contact. Head of the NVIC Kim Duistermaat pointed out that the intercultural contacts and dialogue had been part of the lives of people in the Mediterranean region for thousands of years, and it was fascinating to see that ancient Egyptian objects and ideas reached even the furthest corners of the Mediterranean, such as Spain. "As archaeologists, we are interested in understanding how these contacts functioned, how people exchanged objects and ideas and why."

The exhibition has been organised by the NVIC in cooperation with the SCA, and is funded by the Delegation of the European Commission in Egypt and the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Cairo.

The Eden Machine

The Eden Machine

Some friends of mine who control the public company known as Lifespan LSPN:PK lifespaninc.com) have decided that it is a great time to pursue the development of my atmospheric water harvester concept and are prepared to organize the necessary funding to make it all happen. I formulated the original concept four years ago as part of writing my manuscript Paradigms Shift and then excerpted the key chapter as my third post when I initiated this Blog. You may want to read that particular post at:

http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2007/02/global-terraforming-chapter.html

I have referred to the concept many times since. The problem can and has been solved expensively using classic technologies primarily as a drinking water system using household power. It is after all a variation on a refrigerator used to collect humidity.

We have to go far beyond this, but we will give ourselves one break. We do not need to fuss with the water itself because it will go directly into the adjacent soils for irrigation purposes. There are three primary subsystems besides the control system. We have already recognized the need for refrigeration. We also need energy storage but it does not need to be mobile which will let us work up prototypes with our old friends the lead acid battery. Then we need an energy source other than the power grid.

The first big saving comes from the mere fact that the power used will not travel removing the whole issue of transmission losses. With the water also not traveling we are designing a stand alone unit that can be placed anywhere, set up and walked away from potentially for months at a time, except for occasional maintenance.

We have already decided that the optimum design objective is a device capable of collecting 100 liters a day at close to 100 percent humidity. We formulated this around the knowledge that a full grown fruit tree will respire 50 to 70 liters of water per day. This makes it easy for operators to manage their units.

We am expecting to use a solar array to generate the working energy and was in fact waiting for the cost of solar energy to come down to around $1.00 per watt. This year, Nanosolar announced just that price and are now shipping. However, for prototyping, any supplier will do initially. We will simply design so that various panels can be switched in and out as needed.

The solar panel could be put on a mast as the trees grow larger, but in the early stages a simple upright sheet should be sufficient and save on excessive hardware. In some respects, this part of the system can be expected to follow the development of the original satellite antenna that went from six feet across down to eighteen inches and design can easily accommodate that sort of shift. Having them initially close to the ground also allows easy cleaning protocols and maintenance.

We also recognize that we need to store the solar energy during the day and consume it at night after the temperature has broken for maximum yield. The most likely battery system will be the vanadium redox battery. It weakness is low energy density, but this is offset by the capacity to cycle millions of time without ever wearing out the battery, The energy is also stored by pumping the active fluids into tanks after been acted on. There is also no particular limit to the speed of the process. The energy can be collected and stored for twelve hours and then dispensed in two hours, which may be the optimal design. The fluid tank can act as an anchor to the static system as well. The cost of the membranes is still custom driven, because no mass market has been yet developed for them. We may be the necessary mass market.

The good news is that the Vanadium Pentoxide is a one time purchase that will be recoverable. We do not know yet how many pounds will be needed and I would be guessing if I suggested a hundred pounds.

The stored energy is then released at night to operate a solid state cooling system which passes already night cooled air over it to induce the separation of the humidity. The dried air is then passed over the hot obverse side of the same panel to carry off the heat produced by the panel. The Eden machine is designed to cheaply, efficiently and continuously generate water for human, agricultural or industrial utilization.

We know where we wish to end up and I know that it is possible to produce an expensive working machine. We are in the same position that Henry Ford had at the dawn of the automobile age. A wide array of design elements will be pursued with the objective of driving the manufacturing costs down in incremental steps to achieve our goal.

We expect that our first customers will be back yards in LA and later, the Great Valley. After that we are good to go. It would also be fun to manage a million acres in the Empty Zone. Note that efficient application of the technology will commence in high humidity areas and progress toward more arid zones bringing their water with them in the same manner that the Amazon is watered. Once proper tree cover is established with absorptive soils, we can expect natural precipitation to largely take over most of the work load.

We also plan to be Nanosolar’s best customer before we are finished. I only wish that I could buy stock in that company. Anyone that can attract 300 million in private investment to build a couple of factories has my attention, to say nothing of their two million dollar tool that produces the power equivalent of one nuclear plant per year.

THAI Expansion Approved

This newspaper story is much more revealing than normal corporate pronouncements and is very encouraging. In fact, the technology is advancing rapidly and needs to be sped down the road in view of pending supply difficulties. It is business as usual with the regulators, though.

He is talking about a eighty percent recovery of oil. That is utterly amazing in terms of oil industry practice and experience. All conventional fields with extremely light oil are lucky to approach fifty percent after decades of drainage and stimulation.

I suspect that when the Saudi’s bounced their reserves from 110 billion barrels to 260 billion barrels, it was done by the expedient of merely adding in the total resource including the unrecoverable 60%.

In other words our boy is been very bullish. However, read my lips. This is all done with wells on the world’s single largest oil resource. The initial pilot was three wells. This phase is another three wells to fold in the CAPRI protocol.

They have not given us bench marks but I suspect that the wells will ultimately produce nearly 1,000 barrels per day of 15 to 18 gravity oil from the 8 gravity bitumen. Now you too know what to watch for.

The next phase now entering permitting is for production levels of 100,000 barrels, if I recall correctly. That can be replicated a hundred times without putting a dent in the ultimate resource, particularly if recovery approaches eighty percent.

You do get a sense of the slowness of regulatory process in these matters. If we do have a supply emergency, then fast tracking this all is a matter of putting a thousand drills to work tomorrow morning. It would still take time to ramp up even then but it would be predictable also.

The second article is now giving us numbers. A barrel of production is capitalizing at $10,000. In other words, if the operating net is a mere $10.00 per barrel, then it is paid of in three years, which is very good by industry standards particularly when you do not have to find the oil. Even at $50.00 per barrel, I suspect we have a $15.00 net. You can do the rest of the math.

Petrobank wins approval for heavy-oil project expansion

ERCB rejects objections from two local groups

Dave Cooper, The Edmonton Journal

Published: 2:34 am

An Alberta petroleum company using a revolutionary process to extract underground bitumen has finally won ERCB approval for an expansion to its heavy oil pilot project south of Fort McMurray.

Petrobank Energy's Whitesands site had three insitu wells demonstrating the THAI (toe-to-heel air injection) process, and wanted to add an additional three to further study the CAPRI process which uses a catalyst between the inner and outer liners of the slotted horizontal production well.

"We would have liked to have those three wells on stream so we could have more information for our next application" for a nearby 10,000-barrel-a-day project, said Chris Bloomer, a vice-president of Petrobank.

The Energy Resources Conservation Board rejected the "broad letters of objection" from two local groups, said Petrobank.

In a release, the firm said "the delay in receiving the decision was not related to the technical merits of the application. Petrobank views this decision as a validation of our values and strategy to consult, rather than compromise the process by making extraordinary financial payments to intervening parties to facilitate the withdrawal of objections and thereby shortening the regulatory process."

The ERCB dismissed objections by the Beaver Lake Cree Nation and the Métis Nation of Alberta - Local 1935.

Bloomer would not comment further on the release, but "you could say it has added a year to what is really a development project."

He said THAI could replace the current SAGD (steam assisted gravity drainage) and CSS (cyclic steam stimulation) systems used to extract bitumen that is too deep to mine. But some in the oil industry say THAI won't be a significant technology for another 20 years.

"I think that's unfair. If you take a look at the state of the technology today, being able to do simulations and monitoring, and knowing what we know about the reservoirs, the tools we can use are light-years away from what was available in the past," said Bloomer. "I think they are taking a very parochial view, that it took SAGD 20 years so it's going to take any other technology 20 years. We think this is a technology that has to proceed."

Earlier this month, Petrobank signed a royalty and joint venture deal with True Energy Trust to apply THAI technology to two test wells at a heavy oil property in Saskatchewan.

Bloomer said THAI is applicable to many heavy oil fields around the world. The process offers high recovery rates -- up to 80 per cent of the oil in place compared with 20 to 50 per cent for SAGD. It also uses little natural gas and water. In THAI, air is pumped under pressure into the toe of the reservoir, creating natural combustion to heat the cold heavy oil, which flows into horizontal slotted pipes.

dcooper@thejournal.canwest.com

Oilsands regulatory delay frustrates Petrobank boss

Holdup leaves CEO fuming

Dan Healing, Calgary Herald

Published: Saturday, November 29, 2008

The head of a Calgary company with a promising technology to recover bitumen from the oilsands says he is regretting choosing to build in Alberta after an 18-month wait to obtain regulatory approval for a three-well expansion.

"It's cost us time. It's cost us a world of opportunity," said John Wright, president and chief executive of Petrobank Energy and Resources Ltd.,which owns the toe-to-heel air injection or THAI technology that uses in-situ combustion to enhance recovery of bitumen and heavy oil.

"We think our technology is going to change the way heavy oil is extracted by reducing the amount of fresh water that's used, eliminating the need for gas and cutting the greenhouse gas emissions in half, so why would we ever want to see that delayed?

"If we'd known it was going to be this long an approval process in Alberta, we would have thought twice about doing our first project here."

Petrobank announced late Thursday it had received copies of letters from the regulator, the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board, to the Beaver Lake Cree Nation and Metis Nation of Alberta--Local 1935 indicating that their objections to Petrobank's project had been dismissed.

Both parties indicated they traditionally used the area 120 kilo-metres south of Fort McMurray for hunting, trapping and fishing, but the ERCB wrote that neither had proven those claims and therefore would not be granted standing at a hearing.

opportunity.See of expansion plans has "cost us a world of "

The decisions clear the way for approval of the project.

ERCB spokesman Bob Curran defended the process, noting the public often loudly accuses the regulator of rubber-stamping every oil project and the companies complain more quietly that the process takes too long.

"We hear it from both sides all the time," he said. "It just goes to show we have a thorough process and we make no apologies for that."

Curran added that although the objectors can appeal the ERCB decision within 30 days, the licensing of the project will not face further delays.

Drew Mildon, a Victoria lawyer who represents the Beaver Lake band, said it hasn't been decided if the decision will be appealed.

"It's not unexpected," he said. "I've seen the approach the ERCB has taken to First Nations complaints in the past."

He criticized the ERCB for not considering cumulative effects and for its insistence that complaints are"very site specific,"noting that development affects the forest and therefore the natives' treaty rights.
The process left Wright vexed and vowing to put all of the correspondence related to the application on the Petrobank website.

"If you read those letters," he said, "they have actually stated the parties that have written these general objections . . . don't have standing. (They're saying) you can't make a general claim that anything happening anywhere within 100 miles of you is going to affect your future enjoyment and your ancestral use rights."

He added the dissenting par-ties had offered to drop their objections in return for compensation from Petrobank.

"That's not the way we do business,"said Wright. "We're not going to buy someone's approval.

Curran said companies are allowed to compensate parties affected by their development plans and those arrangements are not part of the ERCB's mandate.

Gary Leach, executive director of the Small Explorers & Producers Association of Canada, said 18 months is too long to wait for approval of a straightforward project.

"That's the kind of delay you'd expect with a very complicated, significant project with scores of people with interests, and lots of studies and environmental assessments. For a relatively modest project to drill a couple of wells, I'm surprised it would take that long. It's probably excessive."

Leach added there is growing concern among oil and gas developers about interveners in regulatory matters who object (and have their expenses covered by the company if they are granted standing) for the sole purpose of delaying development.

"We're not looking for a relaxation of standards, but there are points in the process where there is potential for abuse by people who aren't legitimately affected and use the rules as they stand to stop resource development."

David Pryce, vice-president of western Canadian operations for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said slower regulatory processes create uncertainty and delays that result in additional cost for businesses.

"I think it is a concern," he said. "We've seen the approval process kind of stretch out around these sorts of things."

Both CAPP and SEPAC are working with the government on regulatory reform.

Wright said Petrobank had wanted to wait until it drilled the three wells before seeking approval for its planned 100,000-barrel-per-day May River commercial project, but it has moved that forward while waiting and now expects to file its application within days or weeks.

The project is to be centred within two kilometres of the demonstration site and built in phases, at a cost of about $150 million for each 10,000 to 15,000 bpd phase.

He said May River will reach 100,000 bpd by drilling 100 to 150 wells within three to four years. The resource is big enough to produce for 25 to 30 years.

Petrobank has drilled three wells at Whitesands to demonstrate its THAI technology. The new wells are intended to further demonstrate its CAPRI technology--which employs chemical catalysts to further improve the quality of the oil --as well as a revised down-hole completion design and longer well lengths.

The company recently licensed its technology to True Energy Trust in return for an initial 50 per cent interest in a portion of its Kerrobert, Sask., heavy oil pool.

In addition, Petrobank will earn a 10 per cent share of all production on the True lands following a threshold reserve recovery.

Late last year, Petrobank licensed the technology to Duvernay Oil Corp., which was then sold to Shell Canada.

Ben Bova on Global Warming

I hate to say it, but I suspect that Ben has come to the Global Warming party rather late in the day with the horse disappearing over the hill. Global temperatures are reported to have dropped swiftly and significantly and there is no sign of a quick rebound.

And we are having a real winter.

Global warming was very real until the peak in 1998. It stayed warm until the excess heat escaped into the Arctic in 2007. Then it dropped. Unless something sharply changes in the next few months using as yet unidentified mechanisms, this recent cycle of global warming is over.

It was pleasant while it lasted, but my concern today is the likelihood that recently elected governments are so committed to this silliness that they enact a slew of well meaning policies that are not only wrong but will turn out to be historically bone headed. Since 1998, the data was telling us to wait and see. Now it is telling us to back off.

He even hauls out poor old Patrick Henry who merely asks us to open our eyes. Please look at the data Ben.

Ben Bova: Facts show global warming is real

By BEN BOVA

7:01 p.m., Saturday, November 29, 2008

I have a number of friends who don’t believe that global warming is real. They suspect it’s all a plot by Third World collectivist nations to cripple our economy.

Global warming has lots of doubters.

For example, in a commencement address a couple of years ago, the late author Michael Crichton remarked that if weather forecasts can’t be depended on for accurate predictions a few days ahead, why should we take seriously alarms about a global warming that won’t fully manifest itself until decades or even centuries from now?

Global-warming opponents are quick to jump on any shred of evidence that the current warming trend isn’t global, or is not actually happening. They have long pointed out that as recently as the 1970s climate experts believed that the Earth was cooling, not warming.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the main sources for global-warming data, was embarrassed recently when it had to admit that its declaration that last month was the warmest October on record was wrong, based on a faulty reading of the temperatures in Siberia.

One of my closest friends sent me through the Internet a newspaper account of the Goddard fiasco, together with 136 pages of comments by various bloggers, many of them gloating over the error.

In the face of such doubts and mistakes, though, I remembered a piece of wisdom uttered by the great science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Heinlein once told a graduating class at Annapolis:

“What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget ‘what the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not for what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable ‘verdict of history’ — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”

The facts are based on actual temperature measurements around the world. Despite the Goddard Institute’s recent gaffe, those measurements consistently show that global temperatures are rising. The rise is most noticeable at high latitudes, where Canadian and Siberian villages that have for centuries rested on solid ground are now sinking into mud, because the permafrost beneath them is thawing.

Migrating animals head north earlier because spring temperatures are arriving weeks earlier in the year.

Plants blossom earlier too. And both plant and animal species are expanding their habitats northward because of the generally warmer temperatures. Arctic sea ice is thinning drastically. Glaciers are melting away.

These are observable, measurable facts.

In California’s Yosemite National Park, a group of researchers recently completed a survey of small mammals in an area that had been surveyed about a century earlier by other scientists. The new survey found that, compared to a century ago, species that lived at low altitudes have moved their habitats to higher areas, while the original high-altitude species have declined in numbers. This is a clear response to a warming climate: as the climate heats up, the low-altitude species are seeking cooler habitats and making inroads on the living space of the original high-altitude species.

Field mice and pine trees don’t have politics. They are responding to the climate changes that they face. Those changes are real.

What’s not real is the claim that until the 1970s climate scientists were worried about Earth’s climate cooling into a new ice age. That’s a canard. A team from the National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina surveyed climate research papers published between 1965 and 1979; their study showed that only seven papers predicted that global temperatures would grow cooler, while 44 papers predicted warmer temperatures and another 20 were either neutral or offered no long-term predictions.

The climate-change doubters are especially hostile to the idea that human actions are causing global warming. They fear that attempts to control climate-altering greenhouse-gas emissions are thinly-disguised attacks on the economies of the Western nations, especially the economy of the United States.

While I agree that the Kyoto Treaty’s approach to lowering greenhouse-gas emissions is a half-baked piece of international politics, and the U.S. is right to refuse to sign it, it seems equally clear to me that human actions are indeed causing at least part of the planet’s rising fever.

Our Earth goes through climate shifts over the course of time, but the greenhouse gases we humans are pouring into the atmosphere are accelerating a natural warming trend. If we can move away from fossil fuels without doing fatal harm to our economy and our way of life, it will alleviate the warming.

In his famous “Liberty or Death” speech, Patrick Henry said, “… it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. … Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and to provide for it.”

Despite the naysayers, global warming is real. It may be hardly noticeable to most of us, but the world’s temperature is rising. How far and how fast it will rise, no one can yet predict. But studies of past climate changes show that the planet can switch from ice age to tropical in a few decades.

If we want to avert wrenching changes that would come with an accelerated global warming, we should do all we could to move from fossil fuels to cleaner, less-damaging energy sources. Such a change would be good not only for our global climate, but it would be good for our economy and the world’s political situation, as well.

Look at the facts. Make up your mind. Then act.

Financial Size Regulation

In my article on the establishment of a universal health care system, I emphasized the importance of distributing oversight and management down to the State level. Upon reflection, I realized that this must be also done for a number of quasi government agencies directed to implement national policies.

The most visible today are Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac. They are, as national instruments, far to big to fail. As State instruments, they could and be swiftly reconstituted as viable enterprises. And the temptation to deploy resources into the international securities market both as a buyer and seller abates. Do you really think that this could have happened had that been implemented in the first place?

Surely AIG deserves the same fate for the same reasons. Besides, the underwriters are past masters at syndicating the larger deals needing that scale of support. It is time they earned their fees.

The big lesson for us all, is that the ease of capital availability to larger enterprises will always bring the temptation to grow an organization by simple acquisition. This eventually creates organizational sizes that in the event of failure are dangerous to the national interest. We have that now with GM, hobbled for years with the strangle hold of their non competitive union contracts. It is finally broken. Its collapse will massively damage the US economy. Its trip through chapter 11 will resolve the contract problem.

Other companies do come to mind. GE is an extraordinarily well managed company that simply does not need to be under the same corporate roof. Six hundred plus divisions are all operating on a stand alone basis. I guarantee you that if we spun out every one of those divisions, the resulting market value would be far higher that the present. Particularly for it to be a primary asset in Warren Buffet’s portfolio.

Mergers and Acquisitions are the plaything of money managers and is driven by fat fees rather than any net gain. In fact, there is more typically a net loss. They make good sense when a strong mature company is able to provide capital access for a rapidly expanding business. The best example of that was Wendy’s acquisition of Tim Hortons. Ten years on a solid capital diet and Tim Hortons surpassed MacDonalds in Canada and began a sound expansion program in the USA. It did so well, in fact that investors forced Wendy’s to disgorge Tim hortons.

A principal of national; oversight must become the distribution and wise breakup of assets large enough to damage the national interest on failure. In fact, I would go so far as to mandate sharply lower credit availability in such an instance. The risk is clear, so regulate it accordingly.

The big five investment banks needed less leverage several years ago because of their size rather than more. That would have leveled the playing field and preserved them from participating from a dash to the bottom. And if they did not like that, then break up.

Health Care System

The incoming US administration has the capability and possibly the will to introduce a universal health care program that will surely take its lead from the experiences of other countries. I will share some ideas that may provide an anchor for the program’s design.

First, distribute control and management of the system to the States with a fifty-fifty cost and revenue sharing formula. This immediately removes the whole subject from the National legislature, rarely to be heard from again. It also gives the states a high level of responsibility and localized management under the pressure of state to state competition.

Second, design the program around a broad palette of authorized core services. There will always be someone unhappy and complaining, but good investments in future human productivity can certainly be identified and nurtured. Let the States manage this. Failures will attract censure and keep them all honest.

Third, permit premium services but do not allow anyone holding a medical license to provide such services to more than a third of his practice. Ensure that all practitioners are trained in modern scheduling methods to eliminate wait times.

An umbrella organization can be set up and extended to each State as it adopts the program and sets up. Ensure that licensing and all individual rights are completely transferrable between States. Some States will have to solve funding issues, and some will be more restrictive than others, but in time this will all sort itself out without wasting further effort on the part of the National government. Private insurers will be allowed to provide extended services not covered by the basic coverage.

I have kept this as short and simple as possible. The idea is to lay this off to the States as quickly as possible. They want State rights – let them have the hot potato. It will keep them on their toes for the next century or so. It certainly worked forty years ago in Canada and a noticeable result is that medical profession has forgotten what bad debt is and they rarely let themselves be dangerously overworked.

Of course, young surgeons will complain about the long waiting times that they are subjected to because the old boys have first dibs.

I do not think it was ever fully appreciated in Canada how first one province made it happen (one of the poorest) which triggered a couple of more provinces to bend to popular demand. That then led to a National system that was quickly adopted by all provinces. It really came from the bottom up and in the face of virulent opposition from the medical industry.

The same has not happened in the USA while the status quo has actually worsened. Remember, the USA pays fifty percent more per capita while excluding a third of the population than Canada for essentially the same core service. So called wait times apply only because of imperfect planning and could easily be taken out of the system but has not because of the usual political howl.

Solid State Refrigeration and Microchips

This gives us another eyeball into the world of thin film solid state refrigeration. Everyone understands the importance of this work and here we see application work underway to harness this for microchip cooling.

We are very much on the early phases of the research road, but the destination is clear and obvious. We need solid state hyper cold surfaces to maintain super conductor circuits and perhaps magnetic exclusion. I think it is fair to say that everyone is going in the same direction.

As I have posted, we know this will give us the ability to manufacture a closed craft able to exclude the surrounding magnetic field. This still a very small step.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1599508
Solid-state refrigeration for cooling microprocessors
Ramanathan, S. Chrysler, G.M.
Components Res. Dept., Intel Corp., Hillsboro, USA;
This paper appears in:

Components and Packaging Technologies, IEEE Transactions on
Publication Date: March 2006
Volume: 29, Issue: 1
On page(s): 179- 183
ISSN: 1521-3331
INSPEC Accession Number: 8808104
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TCAPT.2006.
Current Version Published: 2006-02-27

Abstract

Thin-film thermoelectrics (TECs) are potential candidates for cooling microprocessors due to their large cooling power density and ability to integrate with packages. In addition, there are no moving parts or noise generated during their operation. In particular, thin-film TECs offer the ability to cool localized regions of high heat flux (hot spots) in the die selectively, which is very useful for chips with nonuniform power maps. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the performance of thin-film TECs for reducing the junction temperature at hot spots in a die. We report the reduction in junction temperature for a representative power map as a function of input power to the TEC films for the first time. The potential benefits and limitations of scaling the TEC legs are calculated by solving the general TEC equations within a fully three-dimensional numerical model of the assembled die and package. Parasitic electrical contact resistance and back conduction from the hot-side to cold-side through any encapsulating or material surrounding TEC legs are also included in the model. Model calculations are performed for TEC figure of merit (ZT) values of 1 and 3 (for comparison). We determine an operating envelope for the TECs that leads to an optimum cooling capability. The impact of operating the TECs are calculated as well taking into account the temperature increase of the heat spreader due to heat influx from the hot-side of the TEC. It is shown that material breakthroughs as well as process improvements could enable solid-state refrigeration to be an attractive candidate for spot cooling in microprocessors.

Aube Balten on Interest rates

For those who like their financial news grim, I am serving up a further dose of Aubie Baltin. He is worth supporting, if only to prevent one from ever getting too exuberant.

He is quite right about the direct consequences of low interest rates on the global financial system. It has promoted reckless lending simply because it gave the lenders no other choice other than exiting the business. This way they postponed it for about five years and now they are all gone. I remember wondering where the portfolio managers were getting their returns from with interest rates so low. We now know it was from thin air and based on the unreasonable proposition that a third of the population was going to double their incomes in a couple of years.

My own experience has informed me that when everything is working fine, bright young rookies are allowed free rein because they simply do not understand the limits. These guys go full out producing crummier and crummier product. They barely know better. And once the genie is out of the bottle, only a market downswing can end it, usually by busting the tyros.

The banks need to start lending and to accept that they must now charge their best clients perhaps six percent while forgetting about apparent unlimited access to cheap money. They need the real income because their real cost of money is no longer tied strictly to the nominal interest rate. It is tied to a ballooning loss rate that is certainly no longer 0.5% but likely closer to 3%. That means that even at zero interest for money that their cost of money is too high. Therefore, if they project a 3% loss ratio on their portfolios and place the funds at 6% they will be fine. At the portfolios improve, this cost structure will return to historic levels fairly quickly.

The mismanagement of the mortgage portfolio is already under control, except that they have yet to restructure the loans as per my suggestions. The overhang is so large that the underling real estate will continue to sink in value putting all mortgages underwater. The price drop in the USA was an astounding 20% this past quarter. This process is the equivalent of approaching every mortgage holder and effectively demanding immediate repayment.

We must set a mark to market day against which all mortgages can be automatically be restructured by the lenders.

Otherwise we will go to a price structure that taps only folks able to pay mostly cash.

The truth is that this is all pretty depressing to dwell on since ye and thee can do naught.

This crisis or collapse of confidence has exposed all the weak sisters for what they are and they will now be either fixed or rooted out. It is difficult and will require time.

Two things are happening or need to happen.

First of and well underway, the financial industry has had its capital replaced to make up present losses and thus permitting them to stay in the business of trying to fix their portfolios. All this money has already been lost into the economy over the past five years and cannot be recovered. It prevents fire sale liquidation of the banking industry as occurred in the, and was the real cause of the Great Depression. It is one thing for half the financial system to disappear into thin air, it is quite another for half the real economy to disappear as a direct result.

Second and not yet beginning we need a massive encouragement of investment in the energy business with guarantees and related contracts. This should include a massive switch over to electric cars ASAP. These will all repatriate cash flow into the domestic energy business. The Middle East needs to be put on notice that we are withdrawing from the oil business permanently.

If this were all happening, the USA balance of payments would quickly right itself and we would enter rapid growth. But as Aubie Balten laments, who is listening?



Dec 1st Issue

UNCOMMON COMMON SENSE
For People Who Think


THE PERILS OF PAULINE

THE DANGER AND PITFALLS OF LOW INTEREST RATES
The world, as well as all the experts, are witnessing in utter shock and disbelief the potential break down of the world’s financial system. They still can’t figure out why this is happening and therefore do not know what they should or could do about it.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES are the main reason why free markets work and managed markets (Socialism) must eventually break down; nobody ever even thinks about the potential seemingly unrelated unintended consequences. Even if there were a few smart people who do think about such things, it is impossible to conjure up all the possible permutations and combinations that over time only a Free Market can factor in while giving the exact right amount of weight to each factor and come up with the exact right price and solutions.

ARTIFICALLY LOW (ZERO) INTEREST RATES

That’s enough of generalities; the main topic is ZERO interest rates and the unintended consequences of the FED maintaining artificially LOW interest rates. On numerous occasions, I have pointed out and explained the functions of interest rates, such as determining the marginal propensity to consume vs. save. and the most efficient allocation of scarce savings among investment projects. But theses are well known factors even though they have been ignored and are the main causes behind the business cycle.

LEVERAGE has become the main unintended consequence of artificially low interest rates. With a real inflation rate of 3% and yield spread of only 2%, it is impossible for Banks to make money and therefore no lending will take place unless a way could be found to increase the rate of return on their capital: Low and behold, LEVERAGE was discovered. If you could leverage your capital at 10 to 1, a 1% profit becomes a 10% profit. At 40 to 1, 1% becomes 40% and at a 100 to 1 you double your money every year. Not to bad, AY? But alas, there is a catch; leverage is a two edged sword. A 1% loss on a 100 to 1 leverage wipes out your capital completely. Among the first highly leveraged deals was the carry trade; buying US Treasuries with borrowed Yen. And what a deal that turned out to be. Initially, not only did they make money on the interest rate spread but they made even more as the Dollar began increasing 5% to 8% a year against the Yen. This gave rise to the Hedge Fund Industry as they convinced everyone how smart they were. Of course they did not warn anyone about the risks involved or of the possibility that the Yen would reverse and go up against all currencies. Therefore the only safe thing to do was to move the business offshore, limiting the investors to exempt investors and institutions: Low and behold, no Government rules or oversight and no SEC approved audited prospectus requirement: After all, exempt individuals and institutions are supposed to be smart enough to protect themselves, right? Too bad they had to ignore all the little suckers but never mind, there were enough rich suckers with a lot more money to go around. What they never expected was that after a few years of 40%+ returns, the biggest suckers of all, the major Pension and Endowment Funds, after 10 years of no gain in stocks, would jump into the quicksand with both feet.. PARADISE FOUND.

There is always an element of self preservation at work at all times and now that they had found a license to print money, they looked for a way to both increase their leverage and more importantly, protect themselves against risks. Low and behold, Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and other insurance derivatives against other types of risks (interest rates, currency, etc.) were invented, which allowed leverage to be increased to unimagined levels. But it didn’t stop there. Whatever the Market was looking for Wall St. created. The one thing Pension, Insurance and other big Investors were looking for was AAA Bonds that paid a high enough rate of return (since Treasuries were no longer paying enough) to allow them to stay in business without taking undue risk. Sure enough, the experts on Wall St. provided that using sub-prime mortgages packaged and repackaged using CDS’S as they coerced the credit rating agencies into give them AAA ratings on junk sub-prime MBS’S and they were snapped up like crazy. The real professionals knew that the stock market was way overpriced and all they wanted was a reasonable 5% to 7% return on AAA no risk Bonds. Ask and you shall receive. Wall St. couldn’t package them fast enough. But they should have known better because any time you are offered something that is too good to be true, it usually is not true, especially not in the volumes that were involved. They were making so much money that Wall St. began to believe their own B.S. and so when Yen started to appreciate and the carry trade was no longer so hot they loaded up on their own junk. After all they had to put their ill gotten gains somewhere. Everything was going fine as long as the real estate market, the ultimate insurer, that was backing all this pie in the sky, was appreciating at a compound annual rate of 15% to 25% plus. But alas, all good things must come to an end as reality eventually sets in and all bubbles and Ponzi schemes must also eventually blow-up.

We are now living through and witnessing what happens when government interferes with the free markets and no matter how good the intentions, their inability to identify all of the unintended consequences of artificially low interest rates, came back to bite us all in the neck.

WONDER OF WONDERS

It is hard for me to understand why Economists (left & Right) still want to continue doing what got them into trouble in the first place. Hasn’t the last 20 years of Japan’s, zero interest rate, recession, taught them anything?

As far back as 2004, I began writing essay after essay, trying to explain what the functions of interest rates are and how they worked, but nobody was listening and nobody took any interest. In letter after letter there was often a paragraph that pointed out the perils of excessively low interest rates. What about the savers I screamed as the nation’s saving rate dropped from a high of 15% to zero and then -1%? What about the retired seniors who had their life savings in12% and 15% CD’S and Treasuries that were now maturing and could only be replaced with 3% or 4% CD”S - how will they be able to pay their bills?. Let them buy Stock Mutual Funds that have returned an average of 8% over the last 75 years (the BIG lie). Besides, what are they complaining about? We just gave them free prescription drugs didn’t we? But who cared, the party was a blast and the champagne (money) was flowing like water. Besides, who wants to listen to a kill-joy when you’re having fun? Unfortunately, even the best of parties must come to an end as the sun always rises and every party must be paid for by someone. The bigger the party, the bigger the bill. This party was so big that the whole world will end up paying a far higher price than anyone could possibly have imagined. (say unintended consequences?)

If history is any guide, World War III is near at hand. GOD I hope I’m wrong this time.

GOLD

They've been dumping Gold for a couple of reasons: 1) prices are falling; 2) credit lines are either being pulled back or completely taken away. 3) In many cases, investors have no choice but to liquidate their gold positions as they are their only positions that have a decent bid and or are their only positions in which they are still showing a profit. ( Great Idea; cut your profits short, so you can pay taxes on them, while letting your losses run; Is that how its supposed to go?)

During the heyday of the commodity bubble, I cautioned all investors that there would be a major supply response to continued high prices. The Laws of Supply and Demand may be asleep but they are not Dead.
What could keep Gold prices down?

You would really have to get back to a place where the economic, political and financial situations are no longer worrisome ... before you see people sell gold and jump back into stock and bonds. That's the only likely scenario for lower gold prices that I can come up with In the gold mining equity market or any other mining market, even Oil and Gas, you saw that the price of the equities were pushed much higher by the momentum players (hedge Funds) than what could be considered a reasonable value. Now, the prices of a lot of equities are far below what you could consider a reasonable value for the enterprise. The rules of the game never changes but they do masquerade in an attempt to fool the majority; the lazy and the gullible: It’s the way the world works, I guess.

WHERE TO NOW DOW?

If you can recall my Jan. 2008 article “GOLD AND A KONDRIETIFF WINTER” If you can’t then I strongly suggest you go back in to my archives and read it again. By the S & P breaking down below its 2002 Bear Market lows; we now have confirmation that we are in multi-generational Bear Market of Grand Super-cycle proportions. If it is to be only a Wave {IV} down, correcting Wave {III} of the Bull Market that began in the mid 1700’s as Prechter, Hughs and some other well know Elliott Wave Theoreticians, believe and not the fifth and final WAVE {5} then the good news is “The World is Not Coming To an End” The BAD NEWS is that we will most likely see significant NEW lows that will probably go much lower than Thursdays lows (maybe as low as DJII 4000) before this Bear Market is over. We have only seen the first wave (Wave A) of the Tsunami and the devastating second Wave (Wave C) is yet to come. Luckily things are not all bad and the good news is we are about to enter a period of relative calm, Wave B of the Forth Wave {which is usually an a,b,c,d,e, Diagonal Triangle; with the a wave being the longest} is often only a sideways type phase- to this three phase Bear market. This Grand Super-cycle wave {IV} down is correcting centuries of Bull Markets and it will seem fast, and furious. But time-wise, it may be relatively short compared to other Grand Super-cycle waves, but damage-wise, this Bear Market could change the world. The next 4 years and the election of 2012 could be the most important election since 1776 as it will determine whether we regress into the Demagoguery of Communism - Fascism or explode into a new era of FREEDOM.

HAS THE BOTTOM BEEN MADE?.
We are at or near the end of the first phase; Wave {A} down. That bottom is imminent. In fact it may have been made Thursday, November 20th, 2008, Or, it may need one more declining wave to complete this wave {A} down move from October 2007, a Super-cycle wave that has wiped out a decade of stock market gains, over 50 percent of the market's value, in just one year!

Wave {B} up which may have started Friday, November 21st, or will within a week or so ( I will be able to get a better picture once I am sure that the Wave {A} bottom has been made)

.WARNING DO NOT CHASE A 1000 POINT BOUNCE:

Wave {B} up is a gift. It is for short term Traders only use it to BUILD YOUR CASH POSITIONS AND GET OUT OF DEBT. It is like the eye of a level 5 hurricane. Your last chance to raise cash at higher prices. Because, once it completes, the devastating plunge will resume and take prices far lower than anyone - even Bears can - now imagine, wave C’s down behave like Wave 3’s, They are usually the longest and strongest of the waves and therefore Wave {B‘s} are the best time to accumulate GOLD.
The Industrials are down 2,204 points, or 22.8 percent since Election Day. The S&P 500 is down 266 points, or 26.5 percent since Election Day.

What bothers me is that Thursday did not see a DJII closing low below the Bear Market low of 2002. But since Friday closed 5 percent higher, I cannot rule out a bottom but I am still a bit hesitant in calling a bottom because (a) my Elliott wave Declining pattern does not look complete and (b) the 10 day average Advance/Decline Line Indicator actually got worse Friday for both the S&P 500 and for the NDX, on a day when prices rose 5 percent. That is odd for the start of a rally phase after such a strong sell-off - Call it a minor Bearish Divergence. (c) New Lows were also way too high again on Friday, (d) 47 percent of total issues traded on the NYSE were down. And Advances were only 63 percent of total issues traded. The start of major rally phases normally do better than that. We also did not get a 90 percent up day Friday, which is something I would like to see at the start of a major rally. And finally Friday was options expiration day which is usually a rally day, anyway: And last but far from least The rally according to all the media talking heads was tied to the big news that Obama is tapping the popular New York Fed's President to be the next Secretary of the Treasury in 2010, really?. Rallies on news often can't really be trusted, especially when the big new is really no news at all.

THANKSGIVING DAY SPECIAL
I am offering a Special two year subscription for only $339. The one year subscription is still a reasonable $199 until the end of the year at which time prices will increase to $269.00 and $469: Extend your subscription Now “PROCRASTINATION IS THE THIEF OF LIFE”

If you have been enjoying these letters and have found them to be useful please tell your friends

HAPPY THANKSGIVING GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS


UNCOMMON COMMON SENSE November 24, 2008
Aubie Baltin CFA, CTA, CFP, PhD.
2078 Bonisle Circle
Palm Beach Gardens FL. 33418
aubiebat@yahoo.com
561-840-9767

Please Note: This article is for education purposes only and is designed to help you make up your own mind, not for me to make it up for you. Only you know your own personal circumstances so only you can decide the best places to invest your money and the degree of risk that you are prepared to take. The Information on data included here has been gleaned from sources deemed to be reliable, but is not guaranteed by me. Nothing stated in here should be taken as a recommendation for you to buy or sell securities.

National Geographic Airs Documentary on Biochar

This has aired and is worth seeing when you get the chance. Biochar is entering the mainstream and people are now aware everywhere of the potential. Ample experimentation is underway. There is still a lot to be done, but acceptance is now no longer a problem.

As I commented in the very beginning of this emergent story, no one will be able to get past or challenge the thousand year field test in the Amazon. Without that lifetimes would have been wasted. Now everyone knows it works and a decent understanding of why is speeding fresh research.

Of course all the newcomers will have to climb the learning curve, but there is enough data out there, including that on this blog to speed the process. We have already come a long way in eighteen months.

ON TV Lost Cities of the Amazon airs Thursday, November 20, at 9 p.m. ET on the National Geographic Channel.

Centuries-old European explorers' tales of lost cities in the Amazon have long been dismissed by scholars, in part because the region is too infertile to feed a sprawling civilization.

But new discoveries support the idea of an ancient Amazonian urban network—and ingeniously engineered soil may have made it all possible.

(See Ancient Amazon Cities Found; Were Vast Urban Network [August 28, 2008].)

Now scientists are trying to recreate the recipe for the apparently human-made supersoil, which still covers up to 10 percent of the Amazon Basin. Key ingredients included of dirt, charcoal, pottery, human excrement and other waste.

If recreated, the engineered soil could feed the hungry and may even help fight global warming, experts suggest.

Before 1492

Scientists have long thought the river basin's tropical soils were too acidic to grow anything but the hardiest varieties of manioc, a potatolike staple.

But over the past several decades, researchers have discovered tracts of productive terra preta—"dark earth." The human-made soil's chocolaty color contrasts sharply with the region's natural yellowish soils.

Research in the late 1980s was the first to show that charcoal made from slow burns of trees and woody waste is the key ingredient of terra preta.

With the increased level of agriculture made possible by terra preta, ancient Amazonians would have been able to live in one place for long periods of time, said geographer and anthropologist William Woods of the University of Kansas.

"As a result you get social stratification, hierarchy, intertwined settlement systems, very large scale," added Woods, who studies ancient Amazonian settlements.

"And then," he said, "1492 happens." The arrival of Europeans brought disease and warfare that obliterated the ancient Amazonian civilizations and sent the few survivors deep into the rain forest to live as hunter-gatherers.

"It completely changed their way of living," Woods said.

Magic Soil?

Today scientists are racing to tease apart the terra-preta recipe. The special soil has been touted as a way to restore more sustainable farming to the Amazon, feed the world's hungry, and combat global warming.
The terra-preta charcoal, called biochar, attracts certain fungi and microorganisms.

Those tiny life-forms allow the charcoal to absorb and retain nutrients that keep the soil fertile for hundreds of years, said Woods, whose team is among a few trying to identify the crucial microorganisms.

"The materials that go into the terra preta are just part of the story. The living member of it is much more," he said.

For one thing, the microorganisms break up the charcoal into smaller pieces, creating more surface area for nutrients to cling to, Woods said.

Anti-Global-Warming Weapon?

Soil scientist Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University is also racing to recreate terra preta.

The Amazonian dark soils, he said, are hundreds to thousands of years old, yet to this day they retain their nutrients and carbons, which are held mainly by the charcoal.

This suggests that adding biochar could help other regions of the world with acidic soils to increase agricultural yields.

Plus, Lehmann said, biochar could help reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere from the burning of wild lands to create new farm fields.

For example, specialized power plants could char agricultural wastes to generate electricity.

The process would "lock" much carbon that would have otherwise escaped into the atmosphere in the biochar. The biochar could then be put underground, in a new form of terra preta, thereby sequestering the carbon for centuries, Lehmann suggests.

Current Amazonian farming relies heavily on slash-and-burn agriculture—razing forests, then burning all of what's left.

By reverting to the ancient slash-and-char method—burning slowly and then mixing the charcoal into the soil—Amazonian carbon dioxide emissions could be cut nearly in half, according to Woods, of the University of Kansas.

With slash-and-burn, he noted, 95 percent of the carbon stored in a tree is emitted to the atmosphere. Slash-and-char emits about 50 percent, he said.

"The rest is put into different forms of black carbon, most of which are chemically inert for long periods of time—thousands of years."

In addition, the technique would allow many farmers to stay sedentary, Woods said.

Because the soil would apparently remain fertile for centuries, "they don't have to cut down the forest constantly and send it up into the atmosphere," he said.

Climatic Conditions Normal

With this sudden wave of climate skeptics, you may want to ask why they waited so long to make their opinions heard. After all, the arguments against the global warming theory have not changed.

What has happened is that the abrupt reversal in global temperatures has utterly wrecked the thirty year warming trend and it has made everyone review their thinking about the climate.

Exactly the same thing happened to me last year when I woke up to find we were suddenly having a cold winter immediately after an amazingly warm Arctic summer.

That brought me to ask what was actually happening to the global heat equation. Forget about the sun and CO2 or anything else that is by its nature on a slow cycle. An abrupt end to a warm era is still abrupt. Were did the heat go?

Well we know that in 2007 that the winds picked up extraordinarily and dumped a lot of heat into the Arctic melting a huge amount of sea ice. That certainly took care of a lot of Northern Hemispheric heat buildup.

The remaining question was if there was a quick recovery of global heat content right behind it. Well, no such luck. Right now, it looks like the cycle is reversing back to the low end of the cool part of the cycle and I am beginning to think that the real heat machine runs over a seventy year cycle and is managed through the Pacific Decadal Cycle. In other words, this all happened once before with the prior peak in the Thirties.

Internal variation masks a lot of it with the likes of El Nino and La Nino and the odd noisy volcano. But that seems to be the big picture as we can presently discern it.

It is also hard to isolate any significant contribution from solar variation in this scenario. The big picture is able to adjust global temperatures by about a single degree and no more. All other postulated movers are operating within that one degree and not so strongly as to properly separate themselves from the noise.

Right now, I think that we have our answer regarding the condition of the global climate. It is fine and if we want it to warm up we are going to have to convert the Sahara into a garden spot.

Scientists urge caution on global warming

POLITICO.com

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=D0C4924D-18FE-70B2-A808D77A9C1FFFD3

November 25, 2008
By: Erika Lovley
November 25, 2008 05:42 AM EST

Climate change skeptics on Capitol Hill are quietly watching a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation.

While the new Obama administration promises aggressive, forward-thinking environmental policies, Weather Channel co-founder Joseph D’Aleo and other scientists are organizing lobbying efforts to take aim at the cap-and-trade bill that Democrats plan to unveil in January.

So far, members of Congress have not been keen to publicly back the global cooling theory. But both senators from Oklahoma , Republicans Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe, have often expressed doubts about how much of a role man-made emissions play.

“We want the debate to be about science, not fear and hypocrisy. We hope next year’s wave of new politics means a return to science,” said Coburn aide John Hart. “It’s the old kind of politics that doesn’t consider any dissenting opinions.”

The global cooling lobby’s challenge is enormous. Next year could be the unfriendliest yet for climate skeptics. Already, House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) has lost his gavel, in part because his peers felt he was less than serious about tackling global warming.

The National Academy of Sciences and most major scientific bodies agree that global warming is caused by man-made carbon emissions. But a small, growing number of scientists, including D’Aleo, are questioning how quickly the warming is happening and whether humans are actually the leading cause.

Armed with statistics from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center, D’Aleo reported in the 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac that the U.S. annual mean temperature has fluctuated for decades and has only risen 0.21 degrees since 1930 — which he says is caused by fluctuating solar activity levels and ocean temperatures, not carbon emissions.

Data from the same source shows that during five of the past seven decades, including this one, average U.S. temperatures have gone down. And the almanac predicted that the next year will see a period of cooling.

“We’re worried that people are too focused on carbon dioxide as the culprit,” D’Aleo said. “Recent warming has stopped since 1998, and we want to stop draconian measures that will hurt already spiraling downward economics. We’re environmentalists and conversationalist at heart, but we don’t think that carbon is responsible for hurricanes.”

D’Aleo’s organization, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, is collaborating on the campaign with the Cooler Heads Coalition, a subgroup of the National Consumer Coalition with members including Americans for Tax Reform, the National Center for Policy Analysis and Citizens for a Sound Economy.

More than 31,000 scientists across the world have signed the Global Warming Petition Project, a declaration started by a group of American scientists that states man’s impact on climate change can’t be reasonably proven.

If the project gains traction, it might give skeptical lawmakers an additional weapon to fight cap-and-trade legislation to curtail greenhouse gases — a move they worry could damage the already fragile economy. At the least, congressional aides say, it could caution additional lawmakers from rushing into a hasty piece of legislation.

Many Hill skeptics have varying opinions on whether the earth’s temperature is warming more slowly than some environmentalists predict and how much man is actually contributing to it.

Inhofe’s staff has been steadily compiling a list of global cooling findings. And aides report that they have received countless e-mails from scientists worldwide supporting the theory. While Inhofe hasn’t indicated that he will move forward with the information anytime soon, his aides continue to compile it.

Republicans aren’t the only ones who are wary of hastily passing a greenhouse gas bill. Ten Democrats wrote to Senate leaders earlier this year, citing economic concerns as a key reason why they didn’t vote for the Senate’s cap-and-trade bill.

And despite Democrats’ pickups in the Senate this fall, several of the new Democrats are from conservative, energy-producing states and may not be supportive, either.

But congressional aides say it could be a long wait before lawmakers are comfortable pushing science that contradicts the global warming theory. And until the lobby gains traction, skeptics plan to continue pushing their ideas by arguing for protection of the economy, where they hope to meet middle ground with global warming supporters.

“Never underestimate the ability of Congress to offer nonsolutions to problems that do not exist,” said Marc Morano, communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “We could spend weeks arguing the mounting scientific evidence refuting man-made warming fears,” he added, “but it’s the economic arguments that have the most immediate impact.”

At the Cato Institute, senior fellow Patrick Michaels, a contributing author of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said most of Washington is already too deeply entrenched in the global warming mantra to turn back.

“You can’t expect the scientific community to now come to Washington and say this isn’t a problem.

Once the apocalypse begins to deliver research dollars, you don’t want to reverse it,” said Michaels. “ Washington works by lurching from crisis to crisis.”

Despite the growing science, the world’s leading crusader on climate change, Al Gore, is unconcerned.

“Climate deniers fall into the same camp as people who still don’t believe we landed on the moon,” said the former vice president’s spokeswoman, Kalee Kreider. “We don’t think this should distract us from the reality.”

XCore Plans Ticket Sales

I imagine we will see more of this in the press. But I am sure my readers likely care. This bird looks good to go and with the burst of private investment we are getting modern materials science applied to whole problem. We are now seriously overdue for a crash program to reengineer the shuttle program or a crash program to support an expanded version of one of these alternative birds.

We are a couple of steps away from been able to replicate the magnetic field exclusion lift system that UFO’s use, but still nowhere close to providing the energy. In the meantime, it would be a real break if we devised a smart strategy to use aerodynamic lift to get a hot engine on an easier trip above the atmosphere. We really do not need to be engineering through the first twenty miles or so if it can be avoided.

That gives me another idea. That post yesterday on the Pomare object cum nosecone.

It may be a fib but it got it all right. We need to follow up with a supply of money. That object can short circuit decades of painful research wit hard evidence. Anyone wish to back a real adventure? Contact me.

XCOR Aerospace to Announce Ticket Sales for Suborbital Space Flights

In a display of the power of competition, American entrepreneurs have broken the government monopoly on space travel, and succeeded in lowering the cost of space access before a single paying participant has taken a flight.

So, even if the overall economy may look down, the market for space tourism is looking up.

On Tuesday, December 2, XCOR Aerospace, builder of the 2-seat Lynx rocket-powered suborbital launch vehicle, is introducing its General Sales Agent for ticket sales and will announce a price that is substantially lower than prices quoted by leading competitors.

XCOR will introduce its new partner, a well-known and established travel entrepreneur with extensive experience in high-end adventure travel, who will outline the total Lynx flight experience, from initial screening, to training, and finally, the flight itself.

The first commercial Lynx suborbital space flight participant will also attend the conference, a European adventurer who aims to be the first person from his country to make a suborbital flight.

Three time shuttle pilot and commander, Col. Rick Searfoss (USAF-Ret) will describe the Lynx flight experience from the point of view of a test pilot and astronaut.

XCOR CEO Jeff Greason and COO Andrew Nelson will also attend. They will discuss design features that allow the Lynx to minimize its environmental impact: non-toxic propellants, clean-burning efficient engines, and a fully reusable system.

Chris Gilman, Founder and Chief Designer of Orbital Outfitters, a NASA spacesuit contractor, will join the press conference wearing the special spacesuit to be worn by all who fly aboard the Lynx. Gilman is also a renowned special effects expert who won an Academy Award for the "Cool Suit" climate control system used by actors in heavy costume.

Nanosolar Ships First Megawatt

A short note here catches us up on the activities of Nanosolar. While I do not understand the media silence on this major story, I do notice that plenty of folks are awake and tracking this story. Of course my readers have followed me with several stories that have steadily broken into the mainstream.

These suckers are about to be installed on a serious facility and will be beyond question or dispute. I suspect that we will see an IPO in the spring. Why lose any of this news?

Flexible solar cells!

Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Phalgun Shenoy

It is heard that Nanosolar has started shipping its flexible thin-film solar cells, meeting its own deadline and marking a milestone for alternative solar-cell materials, that the first megawatt of its solar panels will be used as part of a power plant in eastern Germany! The company has developed a process to print solar cells made out of copper indium gallium selenide, a combination of elements believed to be an alternative to silicon. Owing to the high price of silicon, most companies are making thin film cells from copper indium gallium selenide, but it is stated that many have run into technical problems.

Solar energy would be significantly cheaper than fossil fuel and this is said to be attributable to the manufacturing process the company has developed and that eventually the company would be able to deliver solar electricity for less than a dollar per watt !

Oil Reserve Calculations

It struck me, after posting my recent note on the problem with the unchallenged reserves quoted by the Saudi’s and the members of OPEC in general, that few people outside of the oil industry have a clear understanding of how these reserves are calculated.

Unlike the mining industry, who quite rightly minimize reserve calculation because it is very expensive and needs to be sufficient only to remain several years ahead of production, oil operates against a very different model because the reserves can be calculated early and accurately.

To book a reserve creditably in the oil business, it is necessary to make a discovery well first. That puts you in a field. At that point it is possible to map the confines of the field’s closure with relatively inexpensive seismic. A judicious placement of the next well usually toward the farthest closure boundary confirms continuity. At that point, provided the well is successful, you can do a preliminary reserve calculation that will probably stand up.

In fact it will stand up. That is why a deep discovery with only the discovery well in the pocket can be proclaimed so confidently as a multi billion barrel reserve. A second production well quickly refines the numbers to a level of confidence that permits production planning.

Thus, once such a reserve calculation is made, it is very unlikely that it will ever be upgraded significantly by additional in field drilling. Technology changes will upgrade resources, such as happened with the Alberta Tarsands. Expect additional upgrades driven by the development of THAI. Just remember though that no new oil is been found or even needs to be found in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The resource itself already exceeds a trillion barrels and apparently hugely exceeds that.

Therefore the addition of 150 billion barrels of Saudi reserves, not previously quoted by the pre Aramco discoverers is very suspect. Folks who find fields do brag about them at appropriate industry seminars. And the nature of reserve calculation as I have just described makes it very unlikely those reserves are coming from prior discoveries.

And it is not just the Saudis who are playing bullshit poker, so is the entirety of OPEC. As a result, the world has been gulled into sitting back and behaving like very good customers. The World has not invested aggressively in other resources with the exceptions of Canada in the Tarsands and Europe in the wind business and in nuclear. The US political system chose to sleep as this unfolded and is only now waking up to the dire necessity of action, although business has not been sleeping and has been pushing everywhere for position in the coming race to provide fresh energy.

By the by, if those reserves had a drop of credence, Saudi production would not be sitting at 5,000,000 barrels per day and teetering on the edge of sharp decline. You would have brought those reserves on line and lowered the take on existing fields. Instead they applied water injection to their best field as a method to maintain production volume. In the event, the shoe is overdue to drop. The way they squirmed last summer before they promised to release more oil, surely tells us that their above ground reserve is drawn down and is leaving them with no flexibility to massage the market.

The truth is that the dominos are falling slowly as field after field is in clear decline already, and the last to hit the wall will be the Saudis if it has not happened already.