I’ll Show You Mine if You’ll Show Me Yours
Team Professor Wind v.s. Team Boots-on-the-Ground Oilman
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
— George Orwell.
There was funny little spat between Lion Hirth, er excuse mich, Professor Hirth and Collin McLelland (aka @fracslap) of Digital Wildcatters.
(With going no further, the fact the latter has cat in the name is an automatic win, verdad,
? )Hirth fired the first shot:
For the extra laugh, Hirth is based in Germany, the Anti-Logic Energy Capital of the World.
From the get-go there’s something off though.
Looking at the photo with a photographer’s eye, it’s easy to notice any image taken with a telephoto lens. These lenses, which have a long focal length, are typically used to bring the subject closer to the viewer, but also compress the scene. As in, they make anything far away from the viewer almost as close to them as anything that is actually close to the viewer.
Not familiar with this trick?
Perhaps a little refresher to when the Corporate Press were in a panic about people “crowding” the beaches during the early days of COVID prior to the narrative shift to when it was all the sudden okay to actually form crowds outside as long as it was for a reason approved by The Science™
Hirth, to his credit, did elaborate on the location:
Punch in the location on Google Maps and it’s easy to notice the wells and pads along with other associated infrastructure such as pipelines and road networks make the area look like as if were a browned Steampunk version of a suburb. It does indeed look quite crowded.
It’s not exactly most people’s cup of tea for top Golden State scenery in terms of beauty (at least the brown isn’t literally shit) although in the winter and springtime with a good wet season the hills do green up quite nicely.
The contrast is nice though, almost as stunning as lignite coalfields next to soon-to-be-destroyed farms and centuries-old German villages.
Pretty cool, right?
But this isn’t necessarily the own Prof. Hirth he feels it is.
Wind turbines are not an alternative to oilfields. Full stop.
They depend on oil (and gas) both directly or indirectly, not just for the “lube” but for all the mining of raw materials, their processing into materials such as the steel and concrete foundations, the steel or composite towers, composite blades, generators, the access roads, electric transmission and distribution system, etc.
Wind energy’s low capacity factor means it requires backup electrical generation sources - often natural gas and in some places even oil.
Kern River Oilfield is California’s third largest oil field by production and second in land use area. It’s also old, as in it’s been continuously producing oil (and gas) since the 1890s. Kern River Oilfield had so much oil that often times it seeped out of the ground and formed small ponds on the surface. Putting it another way: Upton Sinclair’s Oil while largely written surrounding the drama of the Teapot Dome Scandal (Natrona County, WY) was also influenced by the oil mecca of Southern California, likely including those of Kern County, this one being one of them.
And of course one of the greatest movies of all time.
The milkshake in this area just northeast of the city of Bakersfield was so abundant that all someone had to do was punch thousands of holes straight into the ground.
And that they did.
Measure the area too (or look it up on Wikipedia): 10,750 acres or 16.8 square miles. That’s 33% the area occupied by the City and County of San Francisco or roughly the largest wind farm in the US, which is not terribly far away from Kern River Oil Field.
Recall from an earlier piece, A Bright Spot for Diablo Canyon
The largest wind farm in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center in Kern County which is so large Wikipedia cites its footprint in square kilometers but converted to acres is over 32,000 acres. Alta’s nameplate capacity is 1550 MW with a 23.5% capacity factor.
32,000 acres is equal to 50 square miles. The area occupied by the City and county of San Francisco - which also includes Alcatraz and Treasure Islands (not that those add much) is 46.9 square miles which is slightly less than the area of all of Alta Wind Energy Center.
Keep this all in mind. We’ll come back to it.
Collin steps in with a rebuttal to the Noble Professor:
For those unfamiliar with what he’s portraying in the image- it has three separate wells all the same area. Each of these wells are likely pulling oil (and gas) from several directions underground with each meeting at this particular point.
Contrast that to the wells in Kern River where each individual plumpjack, er pumpjack, is a well.
Kern River is an old school oilfield where someone basically just punched a straw straight-up milkshake-style into the ground and up he/she/they/ze/zir/attack helecopter gushed.
Collins’s image shows something far more state of the art.
Kern River Oilfield can still be appreciated to this day for providing a nice chunk of California’s oil and occupies a well (pun intended) deserved place in the state’s history. Chevron is the main man in the area, which triggers Imbecile-King Gavin Newsom on multiple fronts. It’s has been producing oil since the late 1800s and by 2006 had produced roughly 2 billion barrels of the stuff with an estimated 476 million left. Those figures are from 2006, before the fracking revolution and other modern extraction technologies became mainstream. (Except in CA where their use is not allowed.)
The amount of energy (and things) produced with all that oil in Kern River alone over the last century and a quarter is likely impossible to quantify. One barrel of oil is equivalent to 1.7 kWhr of electricity aside, the miles of road, millions of acres of crops harvested by diesel tractors, millions of road trips made in automobiles, private jet trips made to Davos, etc made with all that oil is likely astounding.
Kern River Oilfield produces something else too: natural gas.
Now here’s something we can somewhat quantify directly to Team Wind: the natural gas the field produces is used to generate electricity.
So much of it in fact that in the middle of the field sits two natural gas co-generation plants. At a combined nameplate capacity of 600MW, Kern Canyon Cogen and Sycamore Cogen produce arguably the cleanest fossil-based electricity in the state. While that doesn’t necessarily sound impressive, keep in mind geothermal and hydro capacity aren’t likely to go anywhere up, and neither is nuclear.
The capacity factor of natural gas cogeneration plants are roughly double that of the best wind sources at 54% (rounding down). That’s also slightly over double Alta’s, e.g., the larges wind farm not only in the state, but the country.
Some basic math:
Alta Wind Energy Center: 1550 MW * 8766 hours per year * 23.5% cap factor/100 = 3, 193,016 MWhr
Kern River Oil Field Nat Gas. Plants: 600 MW * 8766 * 54% cap factor/100 = 2,940,184 MWhr.
While Alta Wind Energy Center, given these figures generates roughly 6% more energy over one year, it takes almost three times the land area to do so in an area that takes up just a fraction of San Francisco.
It’s also easy to play the telephoto compression game with said area too.
Opinion on whether oil fields (dense or not) are uglier than wind turbines is of course that - one’s opinion. There’s likely a huge overlap of people who don’t want to have to see either from their backyard. But in the “which energy dick is bigger” Olympics, good ‘ol Kern River Oilfield is likely going to beat Team Wind anywhere any day.
Last words from Hirth:
We need as much energy from as many sources as possible to ensure humans flourish. Germany is poster child for what not to do.
Green Energy has never produced any net power to the user. Fossil Fuels have a long history of producing the power that we need.