Industrialized Cyclist Notepad


Colorado Trail Race is On

Live Tracker: http://trackleaders.com/ctr

12 NOON Fri: Passant went to bed on Kennebec Pass last night with about an 8-mile lead over Branham. Branham, who apparently does not sleep, passed Passant in the night and arrived in Durango first. Denver to Durango in under 4 days. Amazing.

12 Midnight Wed/Thurs: It’s turned into a 3 man race — EP, JJ and JB. Kerkove is headed to Saguache, not a good sign.

UPDATE 11:00 AM Wed.: I guess Jakomait is still in it (transponder problem), and riding like a banshee. Branham somehow takes over the lead, Jakomait second, Passant third as they roll through the Cochetopa Hills. Cat Morrison is in eighth overall.

UPDATE 7:09 PM Tuesday: Passant way out front. J.Jakomait is riding not far behind Passant and appears on the leaderboard but I think he’s out of the race, as his transponder was tracked on the highway at 50 mph. If you know what’s up please leave a comment below.

UPDATE 2:47 PM Tuesday: Passant is still killing it after riding from Waterton to the top of Searle Pass in one day, and is about to jump on the nicest portion of the trail (arguably), between Cottonwood and the big Chalk. Jefe B. is staying in it by not sleeping, although he appears to be hanging out in B.V. Cat Morrison is currently 8th but if some dudes don’t get rollin, will be moving up the standings. Jakomait and Taylor are out of it, not sure what happened.

UPDATE 7:11 PM: Passant has a solid lead and is climbing Miner’s Creek. Kerkove has moved into second and is beginning the climb. Meanwhile, back at Georgia Pass, Cat Morrison has taken over the women’s lead.

UPDATE 2:26: Jeez..Neither Passant nor Kerkove appear to have actually stopped…Looks like a transponder problem. Both dots pop up way down the trail. Passant still leading JJ now on Georgia Pass section.

UPDATE 2:12 PM: Passant stopped on the singletrack, now joined by Kerkove and K. Thomas as Jakomait goes into the lead. It’s a marathon not a sprint!
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UPDATE 2 PM: Kerkove appears stuck on Kenosha Pass (285), passed by two riders and about to be passed by somebody named Wendy.
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As of 1:30 PM Monday, race started this morning, Passant with Jakomait pursuing just turned onto the Kenosha-Georgia section. Kerkove is in fourth, still climbing 285. Wendy Skean is in 6th place overall after 50 miles of singletrack and dirt roads and some highway. Cat Morrison is 15th overall.


click to track

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Exxon, Chevron, Total, Statoil Stoke Fires in Kurdistan as Tony Hayward Waits for Pipe

The Kurdish region plans to increase output to 2 million barrels a day by 2019, Michael Howard, an adviser to Kurdistan Natural Resources Minister Ashti Hawrami, said in a June 10 phone interview. It has signed energy agreements with about 50 companies and plans to increase output to 1 million barrels a day by 2015 from about 300,000 barrels a day now, he said.

Kurdish authorities recognize production-sharing agreements, which give investors a share of any oil they may produce, whereas Iraq’s Oil Ministry offers only fee-based service contracts. This has attracted interest from investors such as Norway’s Statoil ASA (STL) that are unhappy with the central government’s contract terms for exploration and production.

Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total SA (FP) are flouting warnings by the government against seeking separate deals with the Kurds, whom Iraq’s Oil Ministry accuses of “smuggling” oil from the country.

via Tony Hayward Loads Trucks With Kurdish Oil Awaiting Pipe: Energy – Bloomberg.



Denver Bike Map 2012

Via Bike Denver. Download: http://www.bikedenver.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/Bike_Map_Final_2012_Final.pdf



More on China Buying Up Canadian “Oil Sands”

Recall that American consumers are (strongly) encouraged to think of Canadian production as domestic production.

CNOOC’s blockbuster deal for Nexen, if nothing else, is a stark indication of how far the goal posts have moved not only for Canada’s oil patch, but also for world oil demand. Only four or five years ago, the notion that a state-owned Chinese company could buy—lock, stock and barrel of bitumen—one of Canada’s premier oil names was politically unthinkable. Any such deal was sure to be turned down by Ottawa under its Foreign Investment Review Act (not to mention the hue and cry that would come from Alberta’s provincial government).

Today, that’s all changed. CNOOC’s $15-billion offer for Nexen follows a number of major foreign transactions in Canada’s energy sector. Among others, Malaysian energy giant Petronas is paying $5.5-billion to get at Progress Energy’s natural gas reserves in British Columbia. Earlier this year, PetroChina completed a two-pronged deal for Athabasca Oil Sands Corp. that tallied $2.5-billion. In 2010, Sinopec paid $4.65-billion for a 9 percent stake in Syncrude, which runs Alberta’s largest oilsands mine.

via CNOOC’s Nexen Bid Shows How Far Goal Posts Have Moved | Jeff Rubin.

See this too.



Bike of the Day: Neil’s Oschner
July 24, 2012, 01:32
Filed under: Bike of the Day | Tags: , , , , , ,

This shiny beauty takes me back to the days when I would drool over catalogs from Cinelli, Zeus, Puch, Graftek — actually wouldn’t drool over the Graftek, just stare as one would at a circus freak — Columbine, Ciocc…


click to engorge



document the atrocities

Go Pro … or Go Paranoid?

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2012/07/20/technology/100000001638549/cameras-on-wheels.html

If you ride bikes regularly: Sickening video clips of car-bike crashes.

If you write Hollywood scripts: Comedy gold!



How Reliable Are the D.O.T.’s VMT Numbers?

I have no idea. Just throwing that out there as a question.

I do know that quantifying the total amount of driving that has occurred on “all roads” by an entire population is necessarily a dark art, prone to wild extrapolations.

Currently not falling off a cliff, according to DOT.

via (pdf) http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/12maytvt/12maytvt.pdf



Cross-country bicyclist wants to ride away from theater shooting
July 21, 2012, 05:00
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , ,

Shot in the neck.

“I have some scars, but I’ll be fine,” said Martin. “I really want to ride.”

Martin could be released from the hospital as soon as Saturday.

via http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/31291807/detail.html



Four reactors shut down on East Coast

Constellation Nuclear Energy Group’s 630-megawatt Nine Mile Point 1 nuclear reactor in New York automatically shut on Tuesday due to high neutron flux — meaning neutrons are not equally spread around the reactor core. Power traders guessed it could have been a faulty sensor and the unit could be back soon.

Constellation Nuclear is a venture between French power company Electricite de France SA (EDF) and Chicago power company Exelon Corp.

A unit at Exelon’s Limerick nuclear plant in Pennsylvania shut early Wednesday, according to power traders. Officials at the company and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission could not confirm the Limerick shutdown.

Constellation Nuclear 855-MW took the Unit 1 at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland offline by early Wednesday due to a small leak in an instrument line. The company said it had already fixed the plant and was ramping up the unit.

North Carolina-based Duke Energy’s 846-MW Unit 1 at the Oconee nuclear plant in South Carolina also shut by early Wednesday. Details about the Oconee shutdown were not immediately available to comment.

via Four U.S. power reactors shut & NYC sweats during heat wave – CNBC.



Stuff in the Middle East

via http://www.zerohedge.com/news/three-us-aircraft-carriers-now-middle-east-fourth-en-route


click to enlarge slightly



Shell Drill Ship Runs Aground in Unalaska

Unalaska?

I don’t know if I’ve never been there, or if I’ve been there my whole life, or both.

The Noble Discoverer appears to have run aground in Unalaska on Saturday afternoon. 

Despite rain and 35-knot winds, more than a dozen residents came to Airport Beach to watch the Shell’s contract tugboat Lauren Foss straining to pull the rig back out to sea.

via Shell Drill Ship Runs Aground in Unalaska.



Structural Decline

Interesting times.

“Demand in the OECD is in structural decline and we’re not expecting that to change,” he said, adding that the IEA’s forecasts do take into account recent weaker economic activity in the Asia-Pacific region.

According to the report, which contains the IEA’s first forecasts for 2013, global oil demand will be 1.1% higher than 2012, averaging 90.9 million barrels a day.

The forecasts are more bullish than reports earlier this week from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, both of whom projected slower global oil demand growth in 2013 of 730,000 barrels a day and 800,000 barrels a day respectively.

via RIGZONE – IEA: 2013 Oil Demand Growth Higher On Muted Recovery.



GOES Magnetometer

via http://www.solarham.net/magnetogram.htm



Horner had cramps
July 13, 2012, 12:02
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , ,

…is the word from the man himself.



Did Radio Schleck pull Chris Horner back to help Frank when Horner was in position for a possible stage win with the best legs of his career?

Sure looked like it to me.



2003 Plutonium Fire at Rocky Flats

That’s right, 2003.

Toward the end of Kristen Iversen’s remarkable book, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, she provides a detailed account of a severe plutonium fire that happened in Building 371 at Rocky Flats in May 2003 in which Rocky Flats firefighters put their lives at risk in order to protect innocent people both on and off the site. By the time of this fire, I had for a decade been attending Rocky Flats-oriented meetings at the rate of two or three per month as a member of a number of advisory and oversight bodies focused on trying to get a responsible cleanup at  Rocky Flats. When the fire happened, those of us engaged closely in Rocky Flats matters were awaiting publication of the final legally-binding Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement by the Department of Energy and the cleanup regulators, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Despite all this close attention to what was happening at Rocky Flats, I and others around me never heard that there was another serious plutonium fire at Rocky Flats in May 2003. No one from the federal and state agencies responsible for day-to-day activities at Rocky Flats, no one from Kaiser-Hill, the cleanup contractor, no one informed us of this fire.

It might as well have been 1957 when a plutonium fire at Rocky Flats resulted in the largest single release of highly toxic plutonium to the offsite environment and the public heard not a peep. Forty-six years later, not a peep.

via Rocky Flats « LeRoyMoore's Blog.



U.S. Oil Production by Region

A historical perspective.

via Econbrowser and James Hamilton: http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2012/07/shale_oil_and_t.html



Hamilton on the future of U.S. shale oil

Throwing a little cold water on some recent, loudly reported unscientific predictions. When you read Hamilton, always be sure to read the comments by Jeffrey Brown for an important Big Picture view.

In addition to the uncertainties noted above about extrapolating historical production rates, the rate at which production declines from a given well over time is another big unknown. Another key point to recognize is the added cost of extracting oil from tight formations. West Texas Intermediate is currently around $85/barrel. With the huge discount for Canadian and north-central U.S. producers, that means that producers of North Dakota sweet are only offered $61 a barrel. Tight oil is not going to be the reason that we return to an era of cheap oil, for the simple reason that if oil again fell below $50/barrel, it wouldn’t be profitable to produce with these methods. Nor is tight oil likely to get the U.S. back to the levels of field production that we saw in 1970. But tight oil will likely provide a source of significant new production over the next decade as long as the price does not fall too much.

via Econbrowser: Shale oil and tight oil.



Prius Stomps Leaf

Americans want to burn that oil.

Sales of the all-electric Nissan Leaf, which can travel about 75 miles on a single overnight charge, plummeted 69 percent in June from a year earlier. Meanwhile, sales of various models of Toyota Prius hybrids are selling as fast as the automaker can ship them.

The Volt is still not an overwhelming success, but sales for the first half of 2012 more than tripled from a year earlier to 8,817.

“I can’t grasp the concept of driving 20 or 30 miles, or whatever the range is on the car, and then having to plug in again,” said Dennis Barrera, sales manager at Suburban Toyota in Troy, where the standard Prius hybrid is “still the most asked-about car (among shoppers) walking through the door.”

via U.S. drivers slow to embrace all-electric vehicles – USATODAY.com.

See also: A QUESTION FOR PRIUS OWNERS from The Industrialized Cyclist Archives.



Iceland Wins

again..

via Krugman: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/the-times-does-iceland/

Here’s an idea: Make the banks, rather than the public, eat the losses that the banks created.