Showing posts with label Petroleum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Petroleum. Show all posts

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Subsidiarity Economics 2024. The times more or less locally, Part I. And then the day arrived (part two).

Our lifestyle, our wildlife, our land and our water remain critical to our definition of Wyoming and to our economic future.

Dave Freudenthal, former Governor of Wyoming/

 

January 2, 2024

The Energy Information Administration’s Short Term Energy Outlook Report states that combined generation from wind and solar will overtake generation from coal by more than 90 billion kilowatt-hours this year.

US coal production will drop to its lowest amount since the 1960s, with it taking more miners per ton to produce in the 60s than it does now.

Pennsylvania's Flying Fish Brewing Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

January 11, 2024

January 17, 2024

From the Trib:

According to a report put out by the Wyoming State Geological Survey this month, the state’s oil production has not yet surpassed its 2019 high, while nationwide oil production has surpassed pre-pandemic levels.

More than 95 million barrels of oil are expected to be produced in Wyoming in 2023, which is about 3 million more barrels than in 2022. The drilling of new oil wells has helped greatly.

In the first half of 2023, a total of 110 newly drilled oil wells were completed, most of them in the Powder River Basin. This is in line with the first half of 2022, when 118 oil wells were completed.

January 22, 2024

Flying Fish Brewing has declared bankruptcy.

January 23, 2024

U.S. oil production has been holding at or near record highs since October, topping the previous peak from 2020, even though the number of active domestic oil drilling rigs is down by nearly 30% from four years ago.

New technology is the reason why there is higher production with fewer rigs.

And also:

The U.S. set a new annual oil production record on December 15, based on data from the Energy Information Administration. Although the official monthly numbers from the EIA won’t be released for a couple of months, we can calculate that a new record has been set based on the following analysis.

Prices at the pump have been declining.

January 25, 2024

In spite of repeated Republican declarations about how bad the economy is doing, the economy grew 4.9% in the third quarter of 2023, for which the latest figures are out.  This grossly exceeds expectations.

This is interesting for a lot of reasons, one of which the "bad economy" is a consistent theme of Republicans in the current election cycle, when in fact this is a classic "good economy".  It's frankly bizarre.

Some of that might reflect, however, an ongoing retention of a return to the 1945-1975 economy by Rust Belt voters, and anxiety over an inevitable decline in the fossil fuel economy in the West.  The post-war economy is of course never returning, and the change in the direction in the energy economy cannot be arrested, although it too is doing well right now.

January 28, 2024

The Administration plans on providing billions for microchip subsidies for US producers to assure production can be made in the US.

It's worth noting that with war looming with China, there's more than one reason to do this.

The Biden Administration has paused all pending export licenses for liquified national gas (LNG) to consider the climate impacts.

February 8, 2024

Getting Wall Street out of our houses

February 10, 2024

US Credit Card debt is at an all-time high.

World's Foremost Authority On Solar Sheep Advising Wyoming $500 Million Solar Farm

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs


February 11, 2024


It is estimated that over 10% of Canadian craft brewers will close this year.

February 13, 2024

The city of Gillette and BWXT have agreed to work together to look at the possibility of having nuclear facilities and operations in Gillette 

February 15, 2024

While this should be no surprise, given what we earlier reported here:


Remington, in its new form, will close its facilities in Ilion, New York, in March.

Colorado has filed suit to stop the Kroger Albertson's merger.

February 21, 2024

Japan's Nikkei stock index soared to an all-time high.

Rivian, the electric truck maker, is laying off 10% of its salaried staff.

This will cause piles of cackling from those who are convinced electric vehicles, which have taken off, will never take off.  Rivian was an automotive start-up, something that's really tough to do.  Basically, their business model depended on getting into the saturated truck market before other maker went to electric, a real gamble.

Wyoming Gets a Big Win in Court for Coal 

 

CHEYENNE, Wyo. –Wyoming’s coal industry’s earned a long-awaited legal win today, as three Ninth Circuit judges unanimously sided with Wyoming’s arguments in support of the continuation of the federal coal-leasing program. The decision vacated a lower court order that reinstated Obama-era coal-leasing restrictions and required federal officials to perform duplicative National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis. 

“This ruling is an unequivocal win for our coal industry and a reminder that the Biden Administration has to follow the law,” Governor Mark Gordon said. “The Department of Interior now has one less excuse to thwart its federal coal leasing responsibilities. I appreciate the Attorney General and her staff for their excellent work on this case.” 

The complicated case spanned seven years and involved conflicting orders issued by former Interior Secretaries, in which Secretary Jewel issued an order to cease federal coal leasing and conduct a Programmatic Environmental Statement on the entire coal leasing program. Before that review was complete, Secretary Zinke rescinded the Jewel Order so coal leasing could resume; lastly Secretary Haaland rescinded the Zinke order. The district court ruled that the Department of the Interior needed to conduct additional NEPA analysis before resuming coal leasing under its existing authorities.  Wyoming argued that the case was moot, because the Zinke order was rescinded by Secretary Haaland.

Litigation costs for Wyoming were covered by the Federal Natural Resource Policy Account as directed by Governor Gordon.   

-END-

March 15, 2024

Nippon Steel proposes to take over U.S. Steel.

March 17, 2024

Tyson, the giant chicken corporation, announced that it's closing a plant in Iowa in June which will result in 1200 people, 15% of the entire town, losing their jobs. Simultaneously, the company is working with an asylum advocate group to hire 2,500 asylum seekers who are cleared to work elsewhere.

Um. . . we've been running a series on our companion blog entitled An Agrarian Manifesto. . . might be worth reading, perhaps particularly these:

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 2. Distributism


A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 5. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? The Distributist Impact

Last Prior Edition:

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XVI. And then the day arrived.


Recent Related Threads:



Friday, February 23, 2024

Saturday, February 23, 1924. Electric Trucks.

The Saturday magazines hit the stands, including this issue of Colliers:
The issue had some good articles on it, including one that would still be considered timely.

Politics and oil were a topic.

On oil, the issue had an Autocar Truck advertisement advertising gas and electric trucks. . . the latter being something that locals now insist just can't happen.


And Colt had an advertisement on handguns in a national magazine, something that wouldn't happen now.  While the government is referenced, it's really home protection, a theme we still see, that is being suggested.

The Royal Navy intervened in the ongoing dockworkers strike to move 4,500 bags of mail from the United States.

Albanian Prime Minister Ahmet Zogu was shot twice by an anarchist would be assassin, but survived.

Thursday, February 8, 2024

Friday, February 8, 1924. Nullifying the Teapot leases.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 8: 1924 President Coolidge signed a resolution ordering the Doheny and Sinclair petroleum leases to be nullified due to the Teapot Dome scandal.

And also:



The first execution by lethal gas was carried out in Carson City, Nevada.  Gee Jon, a Chinese national, was the subject of the execution for a gang slaying.

Texas executed five prisoners on the same day, all African Americans, in the first use by Texas of the electric chair.

The Soviet Union created the Nakhchivan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within Azerbaijan.  On January 20, 1990, it became the first part of the USSR to bolt.

Monday, January 29, 2024

Tuesday, February 29, 1924. Air assisted victory.

Secretary of the Navy Fall was so struck by the Teapot Dome Scandal, which took place, of course, on the Naval Petroleum Reserve, that he had fallen ill.


Mexican Federal forces took Esperanza in Puebla in a hard fought battle.

The counter-attack featured strafing runs by Mexican-born American pilot, Ralph O'Neill.


O'Neill had distinguished service with the US Army as a pilot in World War One and held three Distinguished Service Cross citations.  He lived until 1980, dying at age 83 in California.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

Sunday, January 27, 1924. Lenin's funeral.

Entertainer Mary Bay driving a miniature car, Janaury 27, 1924.

The murderous Communist state held a state funeral for the chief gangster, Vladimir Lenin. Temperatures were brutally cold.

Action was pledged on the Teapot Dome scandal


The murderous Communist state held a state funeral for the chief gangster, Vladimir Lenin. Temperatures were brutally cold.

Representatives of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes signed the Treaty of Rome, providing that Fiume would be annexed to Italy and Susak to what would become Yugoslavia.

Fiume today is in Croatia, as is the island of Susak.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Thursday, January 24, 1924. Different reactions to the use of power.


Oilman Edward L. Doheny testified that he had loaned Senator Albert B. Fall $100,000, when Fall was Secretary of the Interior under Harding, breaking open the Teapot Dome Scandal.

New Mexico Senator Albert B. Fall.

Fall's political career would soon come to an end, and he'd serve a year in prison.

Doheny would be indicted, but acquitted.

Khiva fell to the Red Army.



Sister Marie of the Poor, the former Grand Duchess Marie-Adélaïde of Luxembourg, died of ill health and influenza at age 29.  She had been the last royal of that country to wield real power, which caused her to abdicate after World War One due to her decision to try to steer the country clear of active resistance to the Germans.  Following that, having never married, she had become a nun.

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

What's the matter with Wyoming (and Iowa)?


The other day Robert Reich, whose writing I have a love/hate relationship with, wrote this article:

What’s the matter with Iowa?

I'll admit that I was prepared to dismiss it when I started reading it, but I can't. It's a well reasoned article.

I don't think it sums up everything that's "wrong" with Iowa, but it gets some things right.  This could just as easily be said, about Wyoming, however:

I saw it happen. When I was helping Fritz Mondale in 1984, I noticed Iowa beginning to shift from family farms to corporate agriculture, and from industrialized manufacturing to knowledge-intensive jobs.

The challenge was to create a new economy for Iowa and for much of the Midwest.

I didn’t have any good ideas for creating that new economy, though — and neither did Mondale, who won Iowa’s Democratic caucuses that year but lost the general election to Ronald Reagan in Iowa and every other state, except his own Minnesota.

Yet not until George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 did a Republican presidential candidate win Iowa again.

When Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa in the early 2000s and flirting with the idea of a presidential run, he told me he worried that Iowa’s high school valedictorians used to want to attend the University of Iowa or Iowa State, but now wanted the Ivy League or Stanford or NYU. Even Iowa’s own college graduates were leaving for Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York.

Vilsack wanted to know how to keep Iowa’s talent in Iowa — a variant of the question I couldn’t answer for Mondale. By this time I had a few ideas — setting up high-tech hubs around major universities, blanketing parts of the state with free wi-fi, having community colleges supply the talent local industries needed — but they all cost money that Iowa didn’t have.

As The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman noted recently, Iowa continues to lose more than 34 percent of its college graduates each year. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more college grads than it produces.

This talent migration has hastened America’s split into two cultures, not just in Iowa and the Midwest but across the nation.

But not entirely.

The thing people like Reich don't get is that much of the country doesn't want to become an upper middle class urban cesspool.  Places that people like Reich worship are largely abhorrent in living terms.  There's a reason that people look to rural areas and an idealized past.

But people also lash themselves to a dead economy as if it'll come back, even if it means losing track of reality at some point, or even if it means becoming something they claim to detest, welfare recipients. This has happened all over the US.

Something needs to be done to revitalize the main street economy, and people like Reich don't have the answers because at the end of the day, all American economists see things the same way.  Everything is corporate, the only question is how much, if any, restraint you put on corporations.

Distributism would cure a lot of this.

If we had a more Distributist economy, we'd have a more local one.  For rural areas, that'd mean much more local processing of locally produced goods.  There's no reason for the concentration of the meat packing industry, for example. Beef could be packed locally.  At one time, my family did just that. And that's only one example.

If the economy was reoriented in that fashion, local industry would expand a great deal.  The thing is, of course, not all of those jobs would be the glass and steel mind-numbing cubicle jobs that all economists love.

But here's the other thing.  As long as the economy is oriented the way it is, rural states are going to be colonies of urban areas, just as much as, let's say, French Indochina was a colony of France, or Kenya a colony of the United Kingdom.  Exploitative, in another word.  It's not intentionally so, it is an economic reality.

The problem there is that in those sorts of economies everything is produced for export alone, and everything is precarious.  That gets back to my Distributist argument above.

But it also gets to a certain cultural thing in which those deeply aligned with the economy, which includes most people, can't see anything thing else. As long as the economy keeps working, that's okay. But when changes come, that can be a disaster.

Wyoming's very first economy was the fur trade, if we discount the native economy (which is a real economy, and accordingly should not be discounted).  Contrary to the popular belief, the fur trade was not displaced, it just was never really very large, and therefore it diminished in importance when other things came in.

The other things were 1) agriculture, which came first, followed by the 2) extractive industries.  Both are still with us.  Agriculture has suffered to a degree as the naturally distributist industries that support it have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate economics and consolidation.  The state, for its part, did nothing to arrest that trend and simply let it happen.  In part, that's because the state has always deeply worshiped the thought that the extractive industries will make us all rich and nothing is to be interfered with, including losing local production of the raw resources that are first produced here.  I.e., we don't refine the oil as much as we used to, we don't pack the meat, we don't process the wool. . . . 

And the extractive industries certainly have made a lot of people and entire communities rich, there's no question of it.

But the handwriting is on the wall.  Coal is declining and will continue to do so.  And a massive shift in petroleum use is occurring, which Wyoming cannot stop.  Petroleum will still be produced far into the future, but its use as a fuel is disappearing.  Petrochemicals, on the other hand, are not.

We seemingly like to think we can stop those things from changing in any form.  We've tried to through lawsuits and legislation.  And yet it turns out that people buying EV's don't listen to our litigation or legislation, any more than they do to Nebraska's Senator Deb Fischer's whining about recharging station funding.  Like some who can't face death due to illness, we'll grasp at what we can, rather than adjust.

Part of that is listening to people who tell us what we want to hear.  A lot of politicians have tried to gently tell us the truth of what we're facing.  Governor Gordon did just recently. When they do that, they're castigated for it.

In 1962's The Days of Wine and Roses the plot follows a man who is a social drinker and introduces alcohol to his girlfriend. They marry, and over time they become heavy drinkers.  He finally stops drinking, his wife having left him, and finds her in an apartment, where she is now a hardcore alcoholic.  He resumes drinking then and there, in order to be with her.

In the end, however, he reforms and quits. She doesn't. We know how that will end.

That's a lot like Wyomingites in general.  We've received the hard knocks and blows.  Some of us are going to put the bottle down and face the day, some are not going to under any circumstances.

For some, it's easier to believe that a "dictator for a day" can order the old economy restored and reverse fifty years of demographic change, while reversing supply, demand, and technology to sort of 1970s status.  In other words, go ahead and have another drink, it won't hurt you.

But in reality, it might, and probably will.

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Thursday, January 10, 1924. Soaring oil prices.


The sort of headlines that Wyomingites love to read, at least until they go to buy gasoline at the pump.

Wyoming, as we've explored here before, crossed over from being primarily an agricultural economy to an oil one due to World War One, with 1917 really being the demarcation point.  From that point forward the state drank so deeply of petroleum that it has never been able to see itself as anything but a petro state, even while keeping Steamboat as its symbol.  A century later, to suggest that the evolution of technology and other factors mean that this industry will decline is nearly regarded as treasonous.  Perhaps as a result, the state has neglected its other industries.

The Cohn-Brandt-Cohn film company (CBC) changed its name to Columbia Pictures.

France imposed a curfew on the Rhineland and closed its borders, save for railroads and food transportation.  The move was due to the murder of Franz Josef Heinz the prior day.  The French were so strict on the matter that they refused to let British officials in to investigate separatist movements connected with the incident.

Related Threads:

1917 The Year that made Casper what it is. Or maybe it didn't. Or maybe it did.

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Wednesday, January 9, 1974. Oil.

OPEC voted to freeze oil prices for three months.  Saudi Arabia had been willing to reduce them, but Algeria, Iraq, and Iran, had not been.

Ronald and Nancy Reagan upon Reagan's 1966 Gubernatorial victory, and one decade away from his first run for the GOP Presidential ticket.

Actor turned politician Ronald Reagan delivered California's State of the State address, noting the oil crisis but asserting it was an opportunity to develop resources, freeing the US from foreign petroleum.

Wednesday, January 9, 1924. Oil.


 Oil in Mexico, oil at Teapot Dome, Oil prices.

Oil.

The intersection of N40th St and Meridian Ave N, Seattle, Washington, January 9, 1924.

The market capitalization of Ford Motor Company exceeded $1 billion for the first time. 

Palatine seperatist Franz Josef Heinz was murdered by member sof the Viking League with the permission of the Bavarian government.

The Bishop of Speyer, Ludwig Sebastian, would refuse to give Heinz a church burial.

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Monday, January 7, 1974. Sweden rations gasoline.

Gas rationing began in Sweden, the first Western nation to do so in response to the ongoign crisis caused by the Arab Oil Embargo.

The four-year-long Gombe Chimpanzee War broke out in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park.

Margaret Queen Adams.

Margaret Queen Adams, née Margaret Queen Phillips, the first female deputy sheriff in the United States died at age 99. She had served in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department from 1912 to 1947.  She worked in the evidence department.

Saturday, January 6, 2024

Sunday, January 6, 1924. Frigid weather and Rebel offensives.

A cold wave was causing grief, and rebels were trying to take the offensive in Mexico.


A story that would repeat many times in Casper was playing out, with oil companies moving their headquarters from Casper to Denver.  By 2000 it had pretty much set in that headquarters were no longer in Wyoming, with Marathon being perhaps the last major producer to relocate.  Denver remains a major oil headquarters city, but Houston has eclipsed it.  Presently, all that really remains of the major petroleum headquarters that were once in Casper are three office buildings, The Ohio Building, the Pan American Building and the Consolidated Royalty Building. 

Atatürk survived a bomb attack on his home by an uninvited visitor which did, however, injury his wife Latife Uşşaki. 

The Catholic Church in France was allowed to reoccupy former Church property under the "diocesan associations" system.

On the same day, the flood of the Seine peaked at over 7 meters.

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Wednesday, January 2, 1974. 55 MPH.

The National Maximum Speed Law reduced the speed limit on the nation's highways to 55 mph.


While ultimately hated, the law had an immediate impact in reducing highway deaths, which of course was not its actual intent.  Reducing the consumption of petroleum was.

The first Supplemental Security Income (SSI) checks were mailed in a program designed to address those disabled but unable to qualify for Social Security. The law allowing for this to occur had come into effect the prior day.

The People's Republic of China announced that eight senior military figures were being reassigned in an apparent attempt to disrupt their ability to form a base of power.

Early country music pioneer and actor Tex Ritter died at age 68 of what was believed to be a heart attack.  His son, John Ritter, would die in 2003 at age 54 of aortic dissection and its likely that this was actually the cause of his father's death.

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XVI. And then the day arrived.

Our lifestyle, our wildlife, our land and our water remain critical to our definition of Wyoming and to our economic future.

Dave Freudenthal, former Governor of Wyoming/

 

December 3, 2023


Oil field, Grass Creek, Wyo, April 9, 1916

Snippets of news articles from this morning:
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Fifty oil companies representing nearly half of global production pledged to reach near-zero methane emissions and end routine flaring in their operations by 2030, the president of this year’s United Nations climate talks said Saturday, a move environmental groups called a “smokescreen.”

 Smokescreen it doesn't seem to be. That's a major commitment.  But not as big as this one:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The United States committed Saturday to the idea of phasing out coal power plants, joining 56 other nations in kicking the coal habit that's a huge factor in global warming.

U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry announced that America was joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which means the Biden Administration commits to building no new coal plants and phasing out existing plants. No date was given for when the existing plants would have to go, but other Biden regulatory actions and international commitments already in the works had meant no coal by 2035.

None of this should be a surprise.  This is where we've been heading for some time, and it's inevitable.  Indeed, I touched on this back in 2017 here:

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

And I cautiously dipped my toe in the water, wondering if Wyoming should ponder a fossil fuel free future here:

Lex Anteinternet: Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (a). The Economy again. . . the extractive industries


And here:


Well, now it's coming.

Not that we'll accept it. We'll do anything but.  Our senior Senator in Washington will claim its part of Joe Biden's "radical green agenda", a radical agenda now sought after by the majority of people in the United States, and in the World.  He doesn't believe that, but it sells back home.  With a Republican Party in the state that was ready to boil Governor Gordon in WD40 for daring to say that Wyoming needed to look at a carbon-neutral future, he doesn't dare say anything else as it would imperil his position.  Our junior Senator will likely say nothing at all.

Well, the voices are getting too loud to ignore, and they include people in the oil industry and now even entire nations that depend on petroleum.  From the President, to the Pope, to the Governor of the state, the message is getting pretty clear.  We're going to have to figure out a post fossil fuel economy here.

Quickly.

But, we'll choose not to.  We'll pretend that somehow we can force others to consume the product that we wish to produce, as we've produced it for over a century and a half, and it's our economy.

That, however, isn't the way economies work.
Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
Kurt Vonnegut


On another topic, the current owners of Remington are closing the doors this week to its Ilion, New York factor.  The company had been headquartered there since 1816.

It'd gone through hard times in the past.  It nearly went bankrupt after World War One when the United States Government cancelled contracts for M1917 Enfield rifles overnight, leaving them with a large stock of unfinished and partially finished rifles.  The Wilson Administration proved to be quite bad at demobilizing.  

Remington, while profitable, had the very bad fortune to be bought by the aptly named Cerebus which focused on AR15 production and drove the company under. Our prior thread on it is here:


Cerebus is virtually a symbol of all that is wrong with corporate capitalism.  Named for the three-headed dog that mythologically guards the gates of Hades to contain the dead therein, it might well be recalled, at least since Dante included it, that the creature is in Hell and of it.

Remington's history was mostly associated, over its long existence, with hunting rifles.  That's what the company was founded on in 1816.  It did manufacture military arms on occasion, however.  For example, it was a large scale supplier of contract rifles for the Union during the Civil War.  It's widely admired by riflemen rolling block rifle had a military variant that was purchased by some states in preference to the Trapdoor Springfield series of rifles, and it was in fact better than the Trapdoor.  The rolling block was widely sold overseas as a military rifle.

By and large, however, it never invested heavily in military sales until the Great War, when the British first contracted with it to produce the rifle that had been intended to replace the SMLE, but adapted to .303 British.  The P14 was a major British rifle of the war, but its production ceased in 1917 when the US entered the war, and the same rifle was adopted to the .30-06 and used by the U.S. as the M1917 Enfield.  Remington's production capacity was so vast that somewhat over half of all U.S. troops in World War One carried that rifle, rather than the M1903, and it continued to be used into World War Two.  But the experienced badly burned Remington and nearly left it bankrupt. After that it was extremely reluctant to make military arms, and it only reluctantly took to producing, ironically, M1903s during the Second World War when the government again needed help.  No original Remington arms were invented for the war as Remington didn't try to undertake that as a project, although it did make a continual series of changes in the M1903 which resulted in the M1903A3, nearly a new rifle in some ways.

After the war and into the Cold War, Remington didn't bother with military arms.  It wasn't a contractor to the M14 like H&R was.  It didn't try to enter a rifle into light rifle contests, like Colt did with the AR15 and Winchester did with its M1 Carbine derived competitor.  That all changed when Cerebus bought the company in 2007.

Cerebus also bought the AR15 manufacturer Bushmaster, which was highly regarded in that field.  By 2012 Remington was making M4 Carbines for the Army.  It leaped wholesale into the "America's Rifle" baloney with a hunting variant of the AR15.  It reentered the pistol market, which it had not been in since a brief foray after the Civil War, with a version of the M1911 pistol.  Cerebus didn't seem to understand what it was that Remington actually made.

Indeed, it was telling that a brilliant move by Remington to introduce a fairly cheap 98 Mauser hunting rifle, the 798, came in 2006, the year before Cerebus bought the company, and it quit offering it in 2008, the year after.

In name, it still exists, but now it's headquartered in Madison, NC.  It was the oldest manufacturer in the United States at the time of its bankruptcy, and it died a victim of American capitalism.

December 13, 2023

Governments gathered in Dubai agreed to the:

transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science."
and; 
accelerating efforts towards the phase-down of unabated coal power" and for "tripling renewable energy capacity globally and doubling the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030.

This is a major action, if the committing countries are able to stick to it.  Environmentalist will complain that it is too little, too late, but as economists have shown in the past once efforts are made to really commit to a goal, it tends to be reached much more rapidly than anticipated. 

In Wyoming, where the Governor has been taking flak by noting that Wyoming will have to transition away from a carbon based economy, this is going to result in howls of derision, including claims that its part of a "radical green agenda" and "impossible".  It's neither.

December 14, 2023

We can’t reverse market trends, but we can be prepared. Blaming OSMRE — or, more ridiculously, President Biden — only provides another distraction as Wyoming politicians continue to whistle past the graveyard, averting our attention from planning for our future — a new lower-carbon economy that is coming whether we like it or not.

Bob LeResche former Alaska Commissioner, former Executive Director of the Alaska Energy Authority, in the Casper Star Tribune, December 14, 2023.

I used the same phrase, "whistling past the graveyard" here recently at least twice.

But some, it would appear, are not:


This will likely spark outrage in certain quarters of Wyoming, particularly in the GOP far right.   There were howls of derision concerning Governor Gordon's statements that Wyoming needs to plan for a carbon neutral future.  But that future is coming.  Moreover, what this demonstrates is that there are quarters of Wyoming, and Wyomingites, who see things much differently.  

Fremont County does have an interesting mix of residents, people who have retired there, people who have moved there (which includes everywhere else in Wyoming now), people who work in oil and gas (and live mostly in Riverton), people involved in outdoor industries, and residents of the Reservation.  Lander is the county seat, and borders the Reservation, but it is not an oil town.  The same resolution would likely pass easily in Jackson, maybe Pinedale, and Laramie. Cheyenne?  It might.

What about Evanston?

Well, probably, maybe, not, but Evanston is mad at the Wyoming Department of Transportation's plan to put in a semi tractor/trailer parking lot that will hold over 350 trucks and trailers during emergencies.  They don't like it, even though not all that long ago, almost any Wyoming Interstate highway town would have just shrugged their shoulders and figured that some of those truckers would at least order pizzas while stranded.

December 15, 2023

Global coal demand, on the other hand, was at an all-time high last year, due to use in developing countries.

General Motors is closing two plants and laying off 1,300 workers.

Closer to home, it's clear that Governor Gordon, who will not be running for office again (too bad) feels himself free to speak what he really believes.

Gov. Gordon Agrees Climate Change is Real, Says Decarbonizing the West is Possible

On national TV and in Idaho workshop, Gordon promotes his ‘all of the above’ energy strategy

This is of course going to get him a lot of criticism, including the class "he's a RINO" by people not realizing that they're the ones who are departing from the traditional Republican mindset.

December 18, 2023

All new cars in Canada must be zero emissions starting in 2035.

December 27, 2023

10,000,000 Americans will receive raises with boosted state minimum wages on January 1. The new rates apply in 22 states.

December 28, 2023

From the AP:

MEXICO CITY — Mexico launched its army-run airline  Tuesday when the first Mexicana  airlines flight took off from Mexico City bound for the Caribbean  resort of Tulum.

Also, from the AP:

So far in 2023, Americans have bought a record 1 million-plus hybrids — up 76% from the same period last year, according to Edmunds.com. As recently as last year, purchases had fallen below 2021’s total. This year’s figures don’t even include sales of 148,000 plug-in hybrids, which drive a short distance on battery power before a gas-electric system kicks in.

Last Prior Edition:

Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XV. The 2% solution?

Saturday, December 9, 2023

Sunday, December 9, 1923. Fighting over and amongst oil.

 


Bill Donovan, age 47, a former major league baseball player, was killed in a train accident in New York.

The Convention and Statute on the International Régime of Maritime Ports is a 1923 was signed in Geneva providing for open ports.  It's still in effect.

Sunday, December 3, 2023

Address of His Holiness Pope Francis to the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28)

Pope Francis released this statement yesterday:

Mr President,

Mr Secretary-General of the United Nations,

Distinguished Heads of State and Government,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Sadly, I am unable to be present with you, as I had greatly desired.  Even so, I am with you, because time is short.  I am with you because now more than ever, the future of us all depends on the present that we now choose.  I am with you because the destruction of the environment is an offence against God, a sin that is not only personal but also structural, one that greatly endangers all human beings, especially the most vulnerable in our midst and threatens to unleash a conflict between generations.  I am with you because climate change is “a global social issue and one intimately related to the dignity of human life” (Apostolic Exhortation Laudate Deum, 3).  I am with you to raise the question which we must answer now: Are we working for a culture of life or a culture of death?  To all of you I make this heartfelt appeal:  Let us choose life!  Let us choose the future!  May we be attentive to the cry of the earth, may we hear the plea of the poor, may we be sensitive to the hopes of the young and the dreams of children!  We have a grave responsibility: to ensure that they not be denied their future.

It has now become clear that the climate change presently taking place stems from the overheating of the planet, caused chiefly by the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activity, which in recent decades has proved unsustainable for the ecosystem.  The drive to produce and possess has become an obsession, resulting in an inordinate greed that has made the environment the object of unbridled exploitation.  The climate, run amok, is crying out to us to halt this illusion of omnipotence.  Let us once more recognize our limits, with humility and courage, as the sole path to a life of authentic fulfilment.

What stands in the way of this?  The divisions that presently exist among us.  Yet a world completely connected, like ours today, should not be un-connected by those who govern it, with international negotiations that “cannot make significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their national interests above the global common good” (Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’, 169).  We find ourselves facing firm and even inflexible positions calculated to protect income and business interests, at times justifying this on the basis of what was done in the past, and periodically shifting the responsibility to others.  Yet the task to which we are called today is not about yesterday, but about tomorrow: a tomorrow that, whether we like it or not, will belong to everyone or else to no one.

Particularly striking in this regard are the attempts made to shift the blame onto the poor and high birth rates.  These are falsities that must be firmly dispelled.  It is not the fault of the poor, since the almost half of our world that is more needy is responsible for scarcely 10% of toxic emissions, while the gap between the opulent few and the masses of the poor has never been so abysmal.  The poor are the real victims of what is happening: we need think only of the plight of indigenous peoples, deforestation, the tragedies of hunger, water and food insecurity, and forced migration.  Births are not a problem, but a resource: they are not opposed to life, but for life, whereas certain ideological and utilitarian models now being imposed with a velvet glove on families and peoples constitute real forms of colonization.  The development of many countries, already burdened by grave economic debt, should not be penalized; instead, we should consider the footprint of a few nations responsible for a deeply troubling “ecological debt” towards many others (cf. ibid., 51-52).  It would only be fair to find suitable means of remitting the financial debts that burden different peoples, not least in light of the ecological debt that they are owed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to speak to you, as brothers and sisters, in the name of the common home in which we live, and to ask this question: What is the way out of this?  It is the one that you are pursuing in these days: the way of togetherness, multilateralism.  Indeed, “our world has become so multipolar and at the same time so complex that a different framework for effective cooperation is required.  It is not enough to think only of balances of power… It is a matter of establishing global and effective rules (Laudate Deum, 42).  In this regard, it is disturbing that global warming has been accompanied by a general cooling of multilateralism, a growing lack of trust within the international community, and a loss of the “shared awareness of being… a family of nations” (SAINT JOHN PAUL II, Address to the United Nations Organization for the Fiftieth Anniversary of its Establishment, New York, 5 October 1995, 14).  It is essential to rebuild trust, which is the foundation of multilateralism.

This is true in the case of care for creation, but also that of peace.  These are the most urgent issues and they are closely linked.  How much energy is humanity wasting on the numerous wars presently in course, such as those in Israel and Palestine, in Ukraine and in many parts of the world: conflicts that will not solve problems but only increase them!  How many resources are being squandered on weaponry that destroys lives and devastates our common home!  Once more I present this proposal: “With the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures, let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger” (Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti, 262; cf. SAINT PAUL VI, Encyclical Letter Populorum Progressio, 51) and carry out works for the sustainable development of the poorer countries and for combating climate change.

It is up to this generation to heed the cry of peoples, the young and children, and to lay the foundations of a new multilateralism.  Why not begin precisely from our common home?  Climate change signals the need for political change.  Let us emerge from the narrowness of self-interest and nationalism; these are approaches belonging to the past.  Let us join in embracing an alternative vision: this will help to bring about an ecological conversion, for “there are no lasting changes without cultural changes” (Laudate Deum, 70).  In this regard, I would assure you of the commitment and support of the Catholic Church, which is deeply engaged in the work of education and of encouraging participation by all, as well as in promoting sound lifestyles, since all are responsible and the contribution of each is fundamental.

Brothers and sisters, it is essential that there be a breakthrough that is not a partial change of course, but rather a new way of making progress together.  The fight against climate change began in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and the 2015 Paris Agreement represented “a new beginning” (ibid., 47).  Now there is a need to set out anew.  May this COP prove to be a turning point, demonstrating a clear and tangible political will that can lead to a decisive acceleration of ecological transition through means that meet three requirements: they must be “efficient, obligatory and readily monitored” (ibid., 59).  And achieved in four sectors: energy efficiency; renewable sources; the elimination of fossil fuels; and education in lifestyles that are less dependent on the latter.

Please, let us move forward and not turn back.  It is well-known that various agreements and commitments “have been poorly implemented, due to the lack of suitable mechanisms for oversight, periodic review and penalties in cases of non-compliance” (Laudato i’, 167).  Now is the time no longer to postpone, but to ensure, and not merely to talk about the welfare of your children, your citizens, your countries and our world.  You are responsible for crafting policies that can provide concrete and cohesive responses, and in this way demonstrate the nobility of your role and the dignity of the service that you carry out.  In the end, the purpose of power is to serve.  It is useless to cling to an authority that will one day be remembered for its inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so (cf. ibid., 57).  History will be grateful to you.  As will the societies in which you live, which are sadly divided into “fan bases”, between prophets of doom and indifferent bystanders, radical environmentalists and climate change deniers…  It is useless to join the fray; in this case, as in the case of peace, it does not help to remedy the situation.  The remedy is good politics: if an example of concreteness and cohesiveness comes from the top, this will benefit the base, where many people, especially the young, are already dedicated to caring for our common home.

May the year 2024 mark this breakthrough.  I like to think that a good omen can be found in an event that took place in 1224.  In that year, Francis of Assisi composed his “Canticle of the Creatures”.  By then Francis was completely blind, and after a night of physical suffering, his spirits were elevated by a mystical experience.  He then turned to praise the Most High for all those creatures that he could no longer see, but knew that they were his brothers and sisters, since they came forth from the same Father and were shared with other men and women.  An inspired sense of fraternity thus led him to turn his pain into praise and his weariness into renewed commitment.  Shortly thereafter, Francis added a stanza in which he praised God for those who forgive; he did this in order to settle – successfully – an unbecoming conflict between the civil authorities and the local bishop.  I too, who bear the name Francis, with the heartfelt urgency of a prayer, want to leave you with this message: Let us leave behind our divisions and unite our forces!  And with God’s help, let us emerge from the dark night of wars and environmental devastation in order to turn our common future into the dawn of a new and radiant day. 

 Thank you.

I'll be frank that I've gone from being cautious about Pope Francis to being in the "non fan" category.  I do not, however, by that mean that I'm in the flirting with sedevacantism category like Patrick Coffin and the like.  He's the Pope.   I tend to think, however, that as the Pope he represents his generation of Westerner to a very large degree, which has retained a view it formed in its youth that things need to change in a "progressive" direction and be more "inclusive".  The better evidence is that this is in error and we see a strong trend in the young Church in the other direction. The ultimate irony of that is that the mantilla wearing young women at Mass may be much more representative of the future than the young man this state sent to the Synod.

And it's been hard to ignore that while the Pope struggles with his racing into oblivion and potentially apostasy European contingent and some of their American allies, he hasn't suppressed them.  He's done just that with his critics on the right. The recent actions against Cardinal Dolan are shocking, particularly while the leadership of a German church with lots of Euros but emptying pews are given verbal warnings but are not otherwise checked.  

But he continues to surprise in ways. Contrary to what people assert, he's never endorsed things long regarded as sins, even though he seems increasingly willing to tolerate them.  And on greater issues, he certainly remains both catholic and Catholic.

This is one of them.

The Pope here is indeed acting both very catholic and Catholic.  This is going to receive howls of protests in some quarters, including in those quarters of the West where populists assert they are acting on Christian principles.

Some of those howling will be Catholics, but as noted here earlier, in the United States, Catholics are often heavily Protestantized.  Not all Protestants will object to this statement, of course, and I'd be surprised if any serious "main line" Protestant body does.  But people like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will, and others will object to it along similar lines as he's likely to, assuming he says anything (which he's not likely to, as 1) taking on the Pope is a bad idea, and 2) it's definitely a bad idea if you are from a state with a lot of Catholics).  Other politicians will of course oppose this, and will do so openly if they're in a place that's safe to do it.

And as noted, some rank and file Catholics in the U.S., and I imagine in the increasingly MAGAized Canadian West, will as well.



Lex Anteinternet: Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry. A Timely Rerun

I ran this back in 2017.  It was clear where things were headed then:

Lex Anteinternet: Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry:     

Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-utU_3YDqvNo/TsRwzROAFUI/AAAAAAAACGA/m0VnuweE7UQ/s1600/scan0004.jpg  
Me, third from right, when I thought I had a career in geology, and probably in coal.

There is a lot of speculation about a revival in the future of coal around here.  I'm skeptical.  This doesn't mean that I come from the outside where coal is simply a freakish oddity.  No, I'm pretty familiar with coal. . . personally.  At one time, coal, I thought, would fuel my career. When other students in the UW geology department of the early 1980s were planning on becoming petroleum geologist, I focused on coal, which wasn't suffering. . . at first, the way oil then was.  Of course, it came to, and I went from the geology department into under employment so my plan failed.

The irony of that is that my choice on coal as a focus was intentional.  I could see the handwriting on the wall in regards to employment in the oil industry.  Others seemingly couldn't, or having entered onto that set of railroad tracks they just couldn't get off.  Coal, on the other hand, was doing fine in the early 1980s. . . at first.  There were coal mines operating at that time which aren't now.  Indeed, there was an underground coal mine in Hanna, a continuation of a situation that had existed well into the early 20th Century.

Well, that didn't work out the way I'd panned and by 1985, when I approached graduation from the University of Wyoming, after five years of effort (five was typical for geologist, that was five full semesters) I graduated into being an . . . .artilleryman.

Yup.  Artillery. The rescuer of my economic fortunes.

I'd joined the National Guard right out of high school and was still in it in 1985 when I graduated.  The Guard basically employed me on a semi full time basis for a year while I tired to find a job.  I couldn't, of course, so I ended up going back to school to obtain a JD.  Indeed, relating back to the Guard, I've felt guilty ever since as I let my enlistment expire in 1986 just before I went back to law school as I believed all the propaganda I'd heard about how hard law school is.  Hah!  It's nothing compared to obtaining a bachelors in geology. 
  photo 2-28-2012_097.jpg 

My main employer, right after receiving my bachelor's degree.

Anyhow, in that period of time between my general geology studies at Casper College (during which I really picked up a love of geomorphogy) and my graduation, the first time, at the University of Wyoming by which time I'd picked up a focus on coal, I learned a lot about coal.  At the same time I nearly obtained enough credits for a BA in history, which perhaps reflects a natural interest that reflects itself back here.

 So, perhaps in some ways, I'm uniquely suited to ponder the long decline of coal.   Or at least I have.
And indeed the path of coal, and its long slow decline, is highly relevant to where we find ourselves now.  Lots of people in the coal states believe that the election of Donald Trump is going to revive the fortunes of coal.  Here in Wyoming quite a few people are so acclimated to coal paying the bills that they can't imagine anything else.  Indeed, just this past weekend I was at a public event, wearing my shabby (truly) Carhartt coat and my Stormy Kromer cap, probably looking like a guy who had shoveled a lot of coal (and indeed I have shoveled a little) and was accosted by a person sitting under a banner proclaiming something about a "return" to liberty and the Constitution who started off on a speech about would I like to sign a petition in opposition to any kind of new taxes.  No, I won't sign that as I just don't see coal being able to pay the Wyoming freight in the future anymore.  Maybe some other mineral or minerals can, but coal isn't going to be able to the way it once did (and besides, I'd be unlikely to sign anyway as I tend to find that people are always opposed to new taxes but not bothered by demanding that the things taxes pay for are really good).

I think the path of coal, being familiar with it, might be best illustrated by a few rough dates and illustrations.  Its something that should be considered.

So let's start around 1900.  That was a world fueled by coal (and by wood).  Sure, kerosene was around, and it had replaced whale oil to a large extent.  I have around here a draft post, now months and months old, building on a George F. Will column that noted:
As I will note, I don't dispute the details that Will recites here, but I do doubt the "more medieval than modern assertion in a major way.  Indeed, some of these things argue, I think, the other way around and I think that misstates the nature of the Medieval world.

But noting what Will states about lights, we note what he said, and further note that it was accurate.
  • "No household was wired for electricity"
This is quite true.
  • "Flickering light came from candles and whale oil,"
Whale oil chandelier, photo from the Library of Congress.  Up until the Will entry, I'd never even considered there being such a thing as a whale oil chandelier.

And so, in many places it did.  But coal fueled a lot of other things.

But let's consider coal in 1900.

It fueled the ships.

 USS Ohio, approximately 1898, as the USS Maine, which sank in a coal explosion in 1898, is in the background.


It fueled the trains, the only significant interstate transportation that existed.

New Your central yard, about 1907.

It heated the homes, where wood did not.

And it fueled industry, particularly the steel industry.

Blat furnace, about 1905.

And then things began to change.

It really started with navies in some ways, although some might argue that it started with hydroelectric.  We'll start with navies.

Navies had been powered by sail up until the mid 19th Century but already by the time of the American Civil War that was changing.  The U.S. Navy may have had its grandest ships under sail during that war, but coal fired wheels were being introduced even then.   And the scary smoke belching squat "monitors"  that signaled the end of the age of sail were coal (and perhaps wood) burning beasts.  Slow, hardly seaworthy, but iron clad.  It was pretty clear by 1865 that the age of militarized wind was ending.

And indeed the Naval reformation that occurred after the American Civil War is incredibly stunning.  Everything about navies soon changed.  By the 1890s every major navy in the world was building ships that look odd to our eyes, but which still look familiar .  Big guns on big ships powered by coal replaced sailing vessels, and the general purpose yeoman sailor was replaced by the specialist.  At about this time, in fact, the U.S. Navy started to switching from a navy drawing its recruits mostly from port towns, and which was in fact an integrated navy, to one which was segregated which drew its recruits from the interior of the country.  A wood and sail navy required men who had grown up near, or even on ships, and who knew the ins and outs of sail. That was a multi ethnic, polyglot group of men who in some way resembled the men in every port town around the world more than they did the men in the interior of their own countries.  It's  no accident that the first Congressional Medal of Honor to go to a foreign born serviceman went to a sailor, in action during the American Civil War fighting a naval battle in. . . . .Japan.

The naval battle in Shimonoseki Straits where an English sailor serving on board the USS Wyoming won a Congressional Medal of Honor.  Note that these ships already featured coal fire steam, in addition to sail.

While there was a sail and steam age, i.e., an age that combined both, for navies it wouldn't last long. For commercial shipping it lasted longer, and indeed the age of sail itself lingered on until after World War Two, amazingly enough, in some usages.  But for big ships, coal fired boilers were the norm before the turn of the century.  Sail lingered, but only lingered.

And so we entered the coal fired world. The degree to which coal fired everything, almost, is stunning.  If we take the world of 1900 heavy long distance transportation of all types was coal fired.  Trains and ships, that is.  Local transportation was seeing the beginnings of the Petroleum Age, but only the beginnings.  Locally, it was very much a horse oriented world, and indeed the railroads themselves caused a massive boom in heavy hauler horses around the turn of the prior century which gave us the really big draft horses, rather than farms as we so often imagine.  Something had to hault hat weight from the railhead to the warehouse.

And heat was going the way of coal. Coal fired, well fires, heated homes all around the country everywhere.  Boilers for apartment buildings, furnaces in homes.  Wood remained, but it was coal that was the oncoming fuel.

A World War One vintage poster of the United States Fuel Administration.  This period poster nicely illustrates how coal fit in.  Homeowners were being urged to buy coal early in the year.  That coal wasn't delivered, in this poster, by a truck, but rather by a dump wagon drawn by heavy draft horses.  Given the light dress of the laborer and the depiction of foliage the poster must have been released during the summer.

It is, in short, impossible to overestimate the importance of coal around 1900.  It was called King Coal for a reason.

But things were beginning to slowly change.

For one thing, petroleum was creeping in.  Not in a massive way, but in a way that was clearly predictable.  George Will spoke of whale oil lamps, but by the second half of the 20th Century kerosene lanterns were very common and their advantages very obvious.  Following in their wake came gas lanterns and by necessity, piping for natural gas.  It wasn't long after that in which the first gas stoves were introduced. Already by the early 20th Century, therefore, there was gas lighting and gas stoves.  

And gasoline was already making its appearance in the internal combustion engine by 1900.

Very early internal combustion engine.

We've dealt with automobiles elsewhere, but we've become so acclimated to them that we rarely think of their history.  Automobiles were a 19th Century invention, albeit a very late 19th Century invention, not a 20th Century one.  That doesn't mean that they replaced the horse right away, that would hardly be true, but they do go back aways.  And they were not, and we should not pretend, that they were any sort of a threat to coal at first.  Not at all.  Cars, trucks and motorcycles were competition for the horse, not the train and certainly not the ship or even the barge.

Truck waiting in line with big long line of coal wagons, some time prior to World War One.

Which takes us back to ships.

And, more specifically, the Royal Navy.

For decades, indeed centuries, the world's biggest and best navy was the Royal Navy.  This does not mean, however, that there was ever a day in which some other navy wasn't contending with the Royal Navy for that position.  And given that, the British basically engaged in a naval arms race that lasted well over a century.  And that mean that it needed to always be on the alert for a technological advantage.

And coal had given one.  Steam meant that large steel ships were able to be constructed, fired by coal fueled boilers.  They had two significant disadvantages however.

Smoke and spontaneous ignition.

Let's talk about smoke first, the disadvantage that was always there.

Their smoke was visible all the way over the edge of the horizon.

This is something that people who are more familiar with ships of the World War Two era don't instantly recall about earlier steel ships, but coal fires smoke and hence coal fired boilers likewise smoke, or rather the coal fires smoke

 The Great White Fleet, and great clouds of black smoke, December 16, 1907.

Prior to the advent of air reconnaissance and radar the spotting of enemy fleets, or for that matter friendly forces, was done by the naked eye.  And it was a matter of absolutely vital concern.  In the vastness of the ocean ships at sea had always scoured the horizon for signs of enemy ships, and even clues that seem slight to landlubbers were picked up by trained sailors.  Sailors looked, in prior eras, for sails and masts on the horizon, with the assistance of spyglasses.  By the time of dreadnoughts, however, they were looking for the faintest hints of smoke, and coal fired boilers provided plenty of it.  Teams of sailors searched the horizon with massive binoculars looking for that wisp of smoke, which was often more than a wisp.

The next danger was rarer, but not so rare as to not be a serious problem.  Spontaneous combustion.

Coal has a well known propensity to self heat and to make it worse, the better the coal grade the bigger the problem.  Exposed to air and moisture coal begins to engage in an exothermic reaction and can relatively easily self heat to the point where it ignites.  Moreover, as it self heats and heads towards ignition it drives off highly flammable hydrocarbon gases. Indeed, heating coal intentionally in a controlled environment is a means of producing those gases and has sometimes been thought of as a method of producing them, although its never proven to be an efficient means of doing so.

Coal is so prone to spontaneous combustion that coal self ignition is a natural phenomenon.  It simply happens where coal gets exposed to sufficient oxygen and moisture. Anyone who has ever spent any time in an open pit coal mine has seen coal simply burning on its own, as I have.

There are ways to combat this, of course, but the problem is uniquely acute for ships.  Ships must store coal in large bunkers and must taken on a lot of coal at certain points.  Ships are wet by their very nature. So any coal burning ship has, at some point, a lot of coal with just enough oxygen and moisture to create a problem.

This proved to be a real problem for ships and of course there were extreme catastrophic occurrences, the most famous of which is the explosion of the USS Maine.  The Maine is an extreme example of what could occur, but any coal burning ship could experience what the Maine did.  Basically, in the case of the USS Maine, the coal self ignited and the coal bunkers had sufficient liberated gas to create a massive explosion.  Not quite as dangerous, but still a huge problem, a simple self ignition of the coal without an explosion was a disaster, quite obviously, of the first rate requiring sailors to put the coal fire out under extreme danger.


Coal's detriments on ships would have had to be accepted, and indeed they were, but for the existence of alternatives.  Indeed, coal survived as a naval fuel for an appreciably longer time than a person might actually suppose, so impressive were its advantages in general.  Measures were taken in ship design to try to combat the dangers, such as having the coal bunkers placed near outside ship's hulls such that the coolness of the water would translate to them, and placing sailors bunks along the bunker's walls so that the sailors could tell if heat was building, but the dangers were real and known. Also known was that there was an alternative, oil.

By the turn of the century naval designers were aware that oil could be used to heat boilers just as coal could, and they began to study it in earnest.  Indeed, not only could it be used, but it had numerous advantages.

Unlike coal, petroleum oil for ships fuel did not result in much smoke.  It resulted in some, but not anything like that which coal put out.  The smoke from a single ship was much less visible and suffice it to say the smoke from a fleet of ships was greatly reduced.  Again, there was smoke, but not smoke like that put out by coal fired boilers.  Indeed, it was so much reduced that to a large degree detection of ships over the horizon by the naked eye was approaching becoming a think of the past.

And petroleum does not spontaneously self ignite.  A big vat of petroleum can sit around forever and never touch itself off.  This does not mean, of course, that its free from danger.  It isn't.  But some of the dangers it poses were already posed by coal, but in lesser degrees.  Petroleum burns more freely than coal by quite some measure and once it ignites putting it out is extremely difficult.  Sparks, other fires, etc., all pose increased dangers for petroleum over bunkered coal, but they existed to some degree for bunkered coal already.

And petroleum is more efficient and easier to use for ships.  Coal was basically stoked by hand, a dirty laborious job.  But petroleum wasn't.  Petroleum burning boilers were fueled by what amounts to a plumbing system involving a greater level of technical know how but less physical labor.  And oil had double the thermal content of coal making it a far more efficient fuel which required less refueling.  And on refueling, ships fueled with oil can be refueled at sea.  Ships fueled with coal cannot be.  Indeed, the maintenance of coaling stations in the remote parts of the globe was a critical factor in naval planning prior to the introduction of oil.

Which isn't to say that there weren't some unique problems associated with petroleum for ship.

For one thing, the fact that it spreads out when leaked and can more easily ignite meant that petroleum added a unique and added horror for a stricken ship.  Coal fired ships that were simply damaged and sinking were unlikely to cause a horrific sea top fire.  Petroleum ships are very likely to do that.  And the risk of a munitions caused explosion is increased with petroleum fueled ships.  A torpedo into a coal bunker might blow a coal fired ship to bits with an explosion or might just sink it.  With a petroleum fueled ship the risk of an explosion in such a situation is increased as is the risk that oil on the water will catch on fire or otherwise kill survivors.

A huge factor, however, was supply.

By odd coincidence all of the major naval powers, save for Japan, had more than adequate domestic supplies of coal.  Some had very good supplies of coal, such as the United States, United Kingdom and Imperial Germany, within their own borders.  Japan nearly did in that it obtained it from territories it controlled on the Asian mainland, although that did make its supply more tenuous. At any rate all of the big naval powers of the pre World War One world had coal supplies that htey controlled.  That's a big war fighting consideration.  Of the naval powers of that era, in contrast, only the United States and Imperial Russia had proven petroleum sources they controlled, and Imperial Russia had proven it self to be a second rate naval power during the Russo Japanese War.

Switching from coal to oil did not occur in the Royal Navy, or any navy, all at once. The decision was made somewhat haltingly and it was an expensive proposition to convert an entire navy to oil.  Britain started to convert prior to World War One but it didn't complete the process until after the war.  Still, its decision to start constructing capitol ships as oil burners in 1912 was a huge step for a nation that had the world's largest navy but which had no domestic oil production at all.  The United States followed suit almost immediately, with its first large ship to be converted to oil, the USS Cheyenne, undergoing that process in 1913.

 The USS Cheyenne in 1916 while it was a submarine tender.  The Cheyenne was the first oil burning ship in the U.S. Navy, following the lead that the British had started.

The USS Cheyenne was illustrative of something else that was going on, however, that being the increased presence of heavy internal combustion engines for various uses.  The USS Cheyenne had been built as a monitor, a type of proto battleship (and had been named the USS Wyoming originally) but after its conversion to oil it would become a submarine tender in a few short years.  Submarines of the era were light vessels and, like a lot of light naval fighting ships ,they were diesels.  Marine diesel engines were replacing boilers completely in lighter vessels and of course diesel fuel is a type of oil.

Diesels in that application show that industrial diesel engines had arrived.

By World War Two every navy in the world was an oil burning, not a coal burning, navy.  And it wasn't just navies.  Merchant ships had followed in the navies' wakes.  They were now oil burning too for the most part.  Coal at sea had died.

 Giant marine diesel engine circa 1920.


The demise of coal at sea did not equate, of course, with the universal demise of coal, and this is very important to keep in mind.  Entering into the period of history we've been discussing, roughly 1900 to 1920, coal may have lost its crown at sea, but it remained hugely important, arguably increasingly important, elsewhere.  It continued to be the fuel of heavy transportation, IE., for trains, it continued to heat homes and it fired an ever growing  number of power plants.  Indeed that last application can't be overstated as in this same period the Western world was electrifying.  So whatever position it may have lost on the waves it was likely more than making it up on land.

Still, the trend line had been set.

And it would next show itself with transportation.

At least according to one source written in 1912 coal fueled 9/10s of all locomotive engines at that time.  The other 1/10th would have been fired by wood or, yes,  oil.

This photograph will appear again in a series of photographs on the centennial of their having been first taken, in January 1917, but these teenagers are stealing coal from a rail yard.  They are probably taking it home for heating fuel or are selling it to Bostonian's who probably knew darned well these kids had taken it illegally from the yards.  For that matter, the railroad likely knew they were taking it too.  Even today, decades after the end of the use of coal for locomotives the paths of old railways can be found by the coal ash and coal that the trains dropped as they passed by.  I've walked the path of the old UP here and there down by Laramie doing that.

Wood, I should  note, may seem strange for a locomotive engine of that era, but it really shouldn't.  The goal of any fuel used in a locomotive engine is to produce steam and burning wood will produce steam.  Wood isn't an efficient fuel for that but it was a common one very early on.  Most locomotives were switched to coal after the Civil War, assuming that they were not burning it already, but where wood was locally plentiful and the engine had a local use, as for a small engine associated with a timbering operation, wood was kept in use.  

Indeed, as a total aside, during World War One some small German engines were made that burned trash.  Coal is a military fuel, Germany's (and Poland's) coal is very good, but as a military fuel conservation was the rule of the day.

At any rate, in 1912 less than 1/10th of all steam engines were burning oil, but what is telling there is that some were.  So here too a trend line had started.

In following years more and more steam engines became oil burning engines.  The reasons may not be entirely clear and are somewhat subtle, but some of them have been touched upon already above.  Oil is a more efficient fuel. Not so much so, however, that all locomotives were switched to it. The famous Union Pacific Big Boys, for example, were coal burning to the end.

Union Pacific Big Boy. These were coal burning their entire career.

What did the coal burning locomotive in, in the end, or more properly the steam engine in, was the diesel.


Diesels Electric trains proved to be a better and more efficient option for train engines in the end. Contrary to what some may think these locomotives do not work like a diesel truck in that the engine does not power the drive wheels. Rather the diesels are big generators and the trains are essentially electric.   By the same token, in the proper settings, trains run from overhead electric lines.  Either way, this type of engine did in the steam engine.

Now then, looking at it, we see that coal went from the main fuel for ships and trains to a remnant fuel for both in a fifty year period. Hardly overnight, but clearly observable.  A person living in the era, if they cared to notice the trend, would have noticed.  Certainly, for example, if you lived in Rawlins Wyoming and looked out towards the Union Pacific Railroad yard over the course of an average life, if you'd lived in this period, you would have seen it gone from a busy smoky and sooty yard to one which had only the blue haze of diesel fuel above it.  And given that Rawlins is just seven miles from Sinclair, where a refinery is located, but also is surrounded by coal deposits and actually had its origin as a coaling location for the Union Pacific, the change would have been pretty obvious.  If you worked in the big underground mines in Hanna you might actually be slightly worried.

Which isn't to say that coal stopped being used.  Not hardly.  It was still heating homes all over, including in Wyoming, and it still was the fuel for power plants.

Let's turn to domestic coal use, as we haven't really touched on that much.

 
Lennox "Torrid Zone" coal furnace

Now, as we've seen above, coal was a basic heating fuel early in the 20th Century, having replaced wood in that role to a large extent.  During World War One Americans were urged to stock up on heating coal early, which meant filling their coal rooms full during the summer rather than waiting until winter.  Coal soot was such a prominent part of big city life that it came to be an accepted part, even contributing to the legendary concept that London was foggy.  It wasn't so much foggy as it was sooty.  This use of coal continued on for a very long time, and indeed here in Wyoming, which switched to gas early, people still ordered coal for heating fuel at least as late as the 1940s. 

 
Coal furnaces in the Library of Congress, 1900.  Shoot, and Washington D. C. isn't even all that cold.

But over time this changed to where heating oil, yes another use of petroleum oil and natural gas began to replace coal.  By the 1970s at least the price of heating oil became a major factor in annual fuel price concerns, but nobody really thought much of coal for the same purpose.  You can still buy a coal furnace today, if you are so inclined, but very few people do.  So yet another use of coal yielded to petroleum. And here, over time, petroleum has yielded to natural gas and electrical generation.

 Workman converting coal furnace to oil during World War Two.  Oil was more plentiful and efficient which sparked a government move to convert home heating to oil

Of course electrical generation also became a major use of coal in the early 20th Century, and it remains one today.  But, as has been seen from the trend line above, coal isn't the only option, and here too its a declining one.  While oil did make an appearance in the electrical generation field oil powered power plants are more or less a thing of the past and coal has outlasted them.  There are no oil fired power plants left in the United States and less than a dozen major ones left on Earth.  They're yielding, however, to natural gas, which powers quite a few power plants and which as been replacing coal.  And there are other means of generations electrical power, including wind power which now is cheaper than other forms of electrical generations in some regions of the United States.

 
Dave Johnston Power Plant, 2015.  U.S. Government photograph. 

Okay, so what's the point of this? Well, just this.  Coal has been on a long, slow, decline for over a century.  It isn't that it doesn't work, it's that it can't compete economically with other fuels that do the same thing in an increasing range of uses.  Only in terms of coking for steel production is it indispensable.  Indeed, perhaps signalling an international increase in manufacturing, high grade coal for coking has experienced a sharp recovery in recent months. That doesn't do anything locally, however, as our coal is Bituminous Coal, not Anthracite, and therefore can't be used for coking.

This isn't the view of some green fanatic world view.  It's dollars and cents, and coal producing regions, such as Wyoming, have to consider this. Without a way to address coal's defects, and soon, its diminished share of the fuel market will be considerably smaller irrespective of any environmental or regulatory concerns.  It's been a long trend running back over a century.