Posts Tagged ‘Super Glue’
“Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen”*…
… and at the same time, all too predictable…
Oil executives love to talk about the energy transition. But for all the platitudes about technologies such as hydrogen and carbon capture, most are doubling down on what they know best.
Oil.
Spending on new offshore oil projects over the next two years is projected to soar to levels not seen in a decade.
In Saudi Arabia, the state-owned oil giant is embarking on a series of massive offshore expansion projects designed to boost the kingdom’s crude production. The United Kingdom and Norway are pumping more money into the North Sea in hopes of lifting out more oil. Exxon Mobil Corp., America’s oil giant, is plowing money into projects in waters off Guyana and Brazil.
The offshore revival represents a shift after a decade of focus on onshore shale plays and amounts to a vote of confidence in oil’s long-term future. The move is notable as it follows several years of mounting talk of diversifying oil companies’ business models…
The world is still likely to consume large amounts of oil for decades to come, even if energy transition efforts gain steam and global crude demand begins to decline. That means investment in new or expanded fields is needed to offset declining production from existing wells. The result is something of a race, with oil companies seeking to identify fields that can produce at low oil prices and outlast competitors in a shrinking market…
Rystad Energy, a consulting firm, reckons that offshore spending will eclipse $100 billion in 2023 and 2024. That would mark the first time offshore oil investment eclipses the $100 billion mark in consecutive years since 2012 and 2013, the firm said. Offshore spending will account for 68 percent of spending on newly sanctioned projects over the next two years, compared with 40 percent from 2015 and 2018…
At first glance, offshore projects appear ill-suited for a world moving away from oil. Offshore development is incredibly expensive and time consuming. Exxon’s Payara development off Guyana, for instance, comes with a $9 billion price tag. Hydraulically fracturing and drilling a shale well, by comparison, is relatively cheap and quick.
Yet shale production is increasingly challenged. Output from shale wells tends to fall quickly, meaning new wells have to be quickly drilled to offset production losses. After more than a decade of intense drilling, many of the most productive locations in the United States have been tapped, analysts say.
Rising interest rates also present a challenge for U.S. shale producers. Many shale companies are relatively small by industry standards and rely on debt to fuel their drilling programs.
Offshore, meanwhile, tends to be the domain of large producers, which are flush with cash after a year of record profits and better able to finance projects from their own balance sheets. Offshore platforms also rely on massive economies of scale, producing vast amounts of oil for decades at a time. Exxon’s Payara project, for example, is projected to deliver 224,000 barrels of oil a day…
More at: “Offshore oil is about to surge,” from @EENewsUpdates.
Related: Countries spent a record-breaking $1 trillion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2022– “Want to cut global emissions by 10%? Stop fossil-fuel subsidies.”
* Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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As we contemplate carbon, we might spare a thought for Harry Coover; he died on this date in 2011. A chemist and inventor (with 460 patents), he is best remembered as the creator of Super Glue.
In 1951, while working at Eastman Kodak, Coover accidentally discovered (then patented) the adhesive properties of cyanoacrylate monomers that needed neither heat nor pressure to permanently bond between a wide variety of surfaces. His creation was initially marketed as “Eastman 910,” largely for industrial purposes. In 1963, Loctite purchased the patent and business from Eastman Kodak, and began marketing (what they trademarked “Super Glue”) more broadly. While it still found industrial use (and then medical application, e.g., repairing arteries, veins, teeth, and as a spray to seal open wounds of soldiers during combat in Vietnam), its big push was into the consumer market. Memorable advertising showed a car lifted by a crane using an attachment bonded with just a few drops.
“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily”*…
All the old rites and superstitions that once warded off mystical evils have been condensed into one single command, so vast and monolithic we’ve forgotten that it’s even possible to disobey: Don’t look directly at the sun.
Not to look directly into the sun is (at a guess) one of the first lessons everyone is taught by their parents. As unquestioned ideological precepts go, it’s enormously effective. You learn it, you internalize it, and never really think of it again until you have kids of your own. And then you say it once more, repeating your parents’ words, and theirs, in an unbroken tradition going back God knows how many millennia. No, honey, never look directly into the sun… But people do it. And our world is the better for it, because staring directly into the sun is our moral and political duty…
Question authority: “What happens when you stare at the sun.”
* François de La Rochefoucauld
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As we put down the smoked glass, we might spare a thought for the creator of the object of another set of taboos, Harry Wesley Coover, Jr.; he died on this date in 2011. A chemist working for Eastman Kodak, he accidentally discovered a substance first marketed as “Eastman 910,” now commonly known as Super Glue. Coover was a prolific inventor– he held 460 patents– but was proudest of the organizational system that he developed and oversaw at Kodak: “programmed innovation,” a management methodology emphasizing research and development, which resulted in the introduction of 320 new products and sales growth from $1.8 billion to $2.5 billion. In 2004, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame; then in 2010, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
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