Crude oil market opens at $125

Oil is a particularly sensitive commodity. It swings all over the place. No surprises here.

Yes.

1. Russia is the number 2 exporter of oil, behind Saudi Arabia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_expor...

2. The fact that the US only gets 3% of its oil from Russia is kind of irrelevant - it's largely a global market.

3. The idea that Russia can just switch to selling all of its oil to China, so then the West can then get its oil from someplace else (a) is not feasible and (b) would completely defeat the purpose of sanctions in any case.

4. Prices are always set at the margins. A relatively small shortfall can cause a huge price increase primarily because, when there is a shortfall, the price needs to increase enough for some buyers to just drop out of the market altogether.

If this is the case, then removing a major producer, such as Russia, will create shortages. Demand exceeds supply and prices go up. Even just the fear of bans could drive prices up.

As a commodity, for the most part there is one global price, modulo delivery location. What happened last week is that the normal buyers don't want to transact with Russia, so they're in the unique position of having to sell a global commodity at a discount. What we may be seeing is a thinning out of suppliers on the exchange. I dont think Pussia can transact on WTI given current sanctions (did they in the past?) and intermediaries may not want the ambiguous risk of being stuck with sanctioned oil in the future.

Isn't that why almost everything is priced how it is?

An EV + grid storage world seems safer from geopolitical conflicts, on top of the more commonly mentioned climate change benefits.

I've even had this kind of rig drill for me before. It will not change anything.

On the the mess: The majority of the mess is geology. Water/Sediment control (you hit 100 gallons/minute of water and need to control it) or cuttings. It's possible to be cleaner about cuttings in the ideal case, but it would be a lot more expensive. If you dig a 500 ft hole with a 6 inch bore, that's 100 cubic feet of messy stuff to put somewhere. You are often drilling 3 or 4 of these holes. Using vacuums and other rig would dramatically increase costs (if you are driving a dump truck into the yard, you are going to destroy the yard as much as it would to just bulldoze the cuttings into your soil :P)

Sediment control is similar.

On the economics - these rigs change nothing about the economics. Most drill rigs are already drilling about as fast as it can reasonably be done. They churn through granite quite quickly. The real issue i that they can only do a house a day for a random single family home because they have to go, set up, etc.

The kind of rig you are seeing here doesn't change that.

The economics only get good when they do entire developments that are under construction, because they can just drill, move, drill, move, drill, move much easier. They also often can locate the bores in a single area and extend the piping to the entire development.

I have to replace two oil furnaces and I wish this didn't cost 5x more and wouldn't be compatible with the very small lot (although with very close bedrock)

They say $18,000-$25,000 after incentives for the upfront cost, with annual savings of $1,600. That's still pretty expensive (even just in terms of direct payback time).

We are a long, long way to reducing fossil fuel demand. We've barely even seen a leveling of coal demand and with increasing prices for gas and oil, coal may still be yet to see its peak. Certainly in China, fossil fuel demand will continue to skyrocket for decades. They're perfectly happy to buy from Russia, or Iran, or Saudi, or Syria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Coal_Consumption.sv...

For all the predictions of the demise of coal the fossil fuel industry driven propaganda about the green movement and the triumph of renewables, global coal consumption almost doubled over the past 20 years.

The number one way to put the squeeze on petroleum regimes is to increase production in "friendly" countries. Number two would be massive expansion of nuclear power, which is long overdue for a Manhattan Project (joke intended) to seriously address climate change anyway.

Is Geothermal Heating and Cooling Worth the Cost? Heat Pumps Explained - Undecided with Matt Ferrell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI45yUhUWgk

Seems like closed loop (i.e. basically contained refrigerant in a pipe) seems to avoid the issues with contamination that results from the open loop systems.

Heating scales up for complexity from a potbelly stove up to complex systems, wish cooling did as well.

The heat pumps don't put out enough volume of water at a hot enough temperature (heat pumps at maybe 125F vs 185F for oil/gas boiler). Most radiators / baseboards will radiate about 650BTU/hr per linear foot at 185F and are sized based on the heat loss calculations for the room/house and the ASHRAE design temps for your location. So if a room needs 6500 BTU/hr at 25F outside to maintain 70F inside, then you'll need 10' of baseboard. If you start feeding 125F water instead of 185F water, then you'll get significantly less heat out of the rads/baseboard and you won't reach the design temps indoors unless it's much warmer out.

Generally heat pumps (ground or air source) are forced hot air (since you only need to raise the air temp by a few degrees as long as you have enough CFM of air flowing), or radiant slab where you only need 75-80F water or the slab cracks and/or is uncomfortably hot. A combination of both also works as a radiant floor doesn't help with cooling in the summer.

If you've got an existing forced air heating system, or are building a new house with forced air then either a GSHP or some of the newer air source heat pumps are a fantastic idea (despite the somewhat premium price vs a traditional oil/gas/propane boiler).

Note that for GSHP it'll probably cost you upwards of $15K for the artesian well alone, but maybe you need one anyway (or already have one) if you're not on city-water in which case the only additional cost would be a variable speed pump vs a fixed speed one (assuming that the well is deep enough and has a high enough flow rate to provide enough "tons" of heating/cooling). Finally, not every city or town will give you a permit to drill a 600+' well (assuming the geology supports either an open or closed loop system).

... and you still need a heat source for domestic hot water, probably an on-demand natural gas/propane unit or an electrically heated hot water tank, although the GSHPs have a "de-superheater" feature that lets excess heat be diverted into the h/w tank during the summer/shoulder seasons, but generally not the winter.

... and the GSHP usually needs a backup heater (often resistive electric coils, but a smart design will use a hydronic coil on a zone on a condensing combi-boiler if you have one for hot water). The air source heat pumps definitely need a backup heater as they periodically run backwards to defrost the coils in the winter to prevent ice buildup in the condenser.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_wpsup_k_w.htm

[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

Members of the ruling class also may not join the rest in struggling to afford day to day life, but they certainly cannot be happy with having all their money trapped in a country without the rule of law.

There is a reason they have their children born in the West.

As for the argument that popular opinion will turn against the west: it already has [2] and I think we should not talk about sanctions any longer, but of separate blocks with minimal exchange and interaction. I understand that going back to an iron curtain of some sort may be shocking for some, but at least that will severely limit the risk of miscalculation and nuclear war. Putin is a dictator and we have to act.

[1] Says a former Russian diplomat: "They also thought the EU was weak because of how toothless their sanctions were in 2014" https://twitter.com/andreivkozyrev/status/150061067692600525... [2] https://twitter.com/ABCNewsLive/status/1499449302728462342

I'm not so sure about the official sanctions (based on a quick skim[1] they seem to be mostly banking bans and bans on high tech exports), but the sanctions enacted by western companies (eg. netflix pulling out of russia), are definitely hurting the average citizen more than the oligarchs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during...

Stopping the sanctions to pretect the average Russian would be like refusing arms to Ukraine to protect Russian soldiers. While technically that would do that you are sending a very different message but taking that action.

A country is a collection of natural resources and people. Unfortunately that means punishing a country will nearly always punish the people in it. That doesn't mean it is wrong to do so.

Also Putin isn't invincible and it isn't just ordinary citizens hurt by this. After all if the rich didn't care if they were worth $10m or $100m the world would not look like it does today.

It's hard to say whether any given sanction is "worth it." But the long term trend is a politically advantageous one for NATO: oligarchs now need to keep all of their money within Russia's borders, where it's both unstable and subject to court whims. That should worry them, and the hope is that it worries them enough to unmoor them from Putin.

Normally the US uses them against countries who are not doing such a thing.

In the meantime, we get to accelerate our transition away from fossil fuels and eliminate all kind of corrupt actors in the West that have been keeping us locked into gas. Win-win.

This conversation will go nowhere unless you define "hurting ourselves" vs "hurting everyday Russians" in actual definable terms. What would you say is evidence that would support that we are only hurting ourselves, and what evidence would distinguish that from the view that sanctions hurt "everyday Russians"?

> for nothing?

Also this is a separate point. Whether sanctions work or they don't, there is the separate point of whether sanctions _work_. Do they work? What evidence is there for that?

yes, the sanctions probably aren't impacting Putin's day-to-day quality of life, nor that of any of the other oligarch's. but that's kind of beside the point. they are cutting off a source of funding for the russian military that is currently invading ukraine. that is really not "for nothing".

Sanctions only hurt if you import, look at what they’re importing — it’s not much. What they do import is primarily from trade partners who aren’t sanctioning (China, Belarus, etc).