Fuel back in the fuel truck? How about gas flaring?

One of the first things I teach my flying students is that fuel that you leave back in the fuel truck won't do you much good.

Flying requires a completely different level of AWARENESS when compared to other human activities, like driving a car.

It may seem like flying is just driving in the sky. I can assure you it is not.

Last time I checked, they still didn't have any gas stations in the sky.

You can't just buzz around town doing errands and then push the OnStar Button when you run out of fuel in the sky.

Not paying attention to your fuel status is not just stupid, it is unacceptable.

It is not reasonable to go flying if you don't understand that running out of fuel can kill you.

Peak Oil is routinely misunderstood to mean "running out."

Running out is not the concept.

Insufficient production is the issue. The world needs more oil and gas than the amount we can produce everyday.

So, given the fact that Peak Oil is happening right now, today, you have to wonder how we could be so stupid to continue flaring gas?

Russia and Nigeria flare lots of gas. So does the USA. Click here to read the latest.

Flaring means burning off excess gas from a well.

See, when you drill an oil well, it sometimes doesn't turn out to be an oil well. It might be a gas well. There might be mostly gas that comes up. Or brine.

The engineers make some calcs and decide what horizons to produce from and then let er rip.

Sometimes an oil well will produce mostly oil, but it will also produce a lot of what used to be called "casing head gas." Sometimes called "associated gas."

This means that not only does oil come up the well, but a lot of natural gas does too.

But it takes money to build pipelines. A lot of money. So if you are already spending money to pipe the oil to market, you sometimes don't want to spend the money to also pipe the gas to market.

Now, you have to ask yourself. If about 93% of the oil and gas in the world is controlled by governments, and not the oil companies, why is it not a condition of a government granting an oil and gas lease that the lessee must collect and pipe the gas out of the field and off to market in addition to the oil? Long answer....................

So, here we are in January 2009 and my friends in Ukraine are wearing their snowboarding suits indoors tonight because the natural gas from Gazprom in Russia got shut off in another political squabble. 

At least they have some nice new snowboarding suits to wear. A lot of Babushkas are sitting under 5  layers of blankets tonight instead.

Is this necessary? Why is Russia flaring so much gas every day and there is no gas getting to Ukraine, Slovakia or Greece? Politics.

Met any cloud huggers lately? You know, a cloud hugger is somebody who used to be a tree hugger but now they smoked the Al Gore Inconvenient Truth bong and they spend all day thinking about hugging clouds and global warming conspiracy theories. ;-)

Why don't the cloud huggers head over the the scenic Niger delta and spend some of their trust fund money negotiating between the oil companies, the government and all the residents who were promised schools and jobs?

Maybe they could figure out a way to stop flaring all the gas and cranking up the carbon credit machine?

20 years from now when Peak Oil is absolutely crushing human civilization, all that gas we are flaring is going to be about as useful as fuel back in the fuel truck.

Walk the Earth, 2030

WHAT WILL THE WORLD BE LIKE AFTER THE PEAK-CRASH?

Plato: "Hey man, you got anything to eat?"

Aristotle: "No way dude. I scarfed down the last of those MRE's we found in that cave in Colorado, you know, the place they named "Not-Rad!"

Plato: "No-Rad you dimbus, No-Rad. It was called No-Rad"

Aristotle: "Yeah whatever dude."

Plato: "I guess those guys couldn't skate man. Get it? No-Rad. Ha ha ha. I still think it was sad the General refused to share the food stash with the gangs and they barbequed the whole place! It was amazing they didn't go Hannibal the Cannibal like all those senators and congressmen did in that salt mine in Missouri! I guess putting their own names on "The List" after the PeakCrash didn't work out so swift for them, eh?"

Aristotle: "Yeah man. I tried forever to get one of those black stickers on my smart car before the crash. I was getting so tired of sitting in those gas rationing lines. But you know, once they privatized the Gas Rationing Administration, it just was a lot harder to pay somebody off! It was all porno queens that got the privileges. Man, I would have given anything to get one of the VIP passes they gave out to all the celebrities and politicians! Well, at least it would have been cool before the mobs started workin' over all those "beautiful people" when they tried to cut in line with their little passes. You know, I never really understood that SuperPatriot Act that they passed."

INTERMISSION: LITTLE PINK FLUFFY CLOUDS GENTLY FLOAT ACROSS A SKY FREE FROM JET CONTRAILS

Aristotle: "So, what's the call man? Do ya wanna watch the Mad Max video again or should we go back to that lot with the 50,000 abandoned Prius' and see if we can siphon another gallon like we did when we rode the mopeds from LA to Vegas last winter?"

Plato: "Nah man, that's beat. Those things don't even have fumes in 'em. We probably won't get much and we'll have to pedal all the way back here. How 'bout if we pretend that some hot chicks are texting us?"

Aristotle: "What are you kidding man? What are you, some dinosaur? Texting was ages ago, back in 2015 or whatever when the cell networks crashed! Like, I can't even remember what it was like to send a text. My blackberry callouses wore off years ago dude!"

Plato: "Yeah, You're right. Texting is burnt. I just miss the Chicas now that they evacuated the ones that survived the crash to Costa Rica after that virus got out of control. The good ol' US of Boys Club just doesn't seem the same without 'em. The government probably should have allocated more fuel to the Department of Virology instead of burning it all to protect that Green Zone in Iraq that they lost anyway, huh? Oh, well. At least there's no more government to bug us about growing our own dope!"

Plato: "Oh, oh! I got it man! What say you, we cruise down to that camp in Crawford, in what used to be Texas? Remember where the "bluebloods" and all those agency dudes starved to death after the PeakCrash because they refused to believe that raising beef used too much water? I bet we could find a few pairs of jungle boots for next winter!"

Aristotle: "Hey, that sounds not half-bad Einstein! Maybe on the way we could stop by that PeakFreak compound and do the 'participate-in-the-community-workforce-to-get-a-meal' thing again for a couple days! Maybe they have another batch of those solar spirulina biscuits done up by now. Do you have your PeakFreak-Sustainable-Living-Labor Certification Card where you can find it so we don't have to do that course they make all the newbies do?"

Plato: "Irie mon! I bet we'll run into some more of those Chinese metal scavengers and we can barter them that map of all the oil pipelines. They'll be stoked to find some more rust generating material to hack up and ship home on their little sailboats. I wonder if they have any more of those cases of McDonald's Fries they confiscated after Wall Street crashed and they didn't get paid? Those fries will keep for 20 years! Great road trip rations. Can you believe that people used to spend so much valuable fuel to refrigerate perishables when all they had to do was switch to fries?"

Aristotle: "Hey, don't forget to bring the Ham radio this time, I wanna listen to Hanoi Jane's voice at night when we camp. And remember, it's your turn to work the crank on the dynamo this trip."

Plato: "Sure man. Are you gonna trade some more homebrew to those Indian dudes from the casino before we go? It would be cool to have some travelin' wampum. But make sure to get Roubles this time and not those shitty Euros! At least Sergey and those crazy Gazprom jokers will trade Roubles for some of that biofuel they're cooking. It's too hard to find collectors that want those Euros. Thank God Vladimir Vladimirovich was able to keep the Rouble from crashing when everything else went down the toilet! You gotta admit he made the right call buying up so much gold and diamonds with his oil revenue while everyone else was workin' those worthless derivatives."

Aristotle: " Ok, ok. Roubles. Hey, remember when Sergey tarred and feathered those fools that used to work for the old Currency Authentication Administration? Can you believe that they tried to pass those worthless old US Dollars off on him to pay for what they owed him on those water filters? What a bunch of boneheads!"

Plato: "Oh Lord, won't you buy me, a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porsches.....well, at least they ride Porsches. Hey, you remember when all those trophy wives used to drive the huge Cayenne SUVs before the crash? I bet they wish they had some tanks of gas saved now for their Porsche mopeds down in Costa Rica, huh?"

Aristotle: "Yeah. Maybe we'll get lucky and find one of those babies this trip and we can cut the leather seats out and make us up some badass road-jeans! I bet if we check at one of the abandoned truck stops we'll find a sweet Cayenne that got stalled looking for a last tank. You know those chicks always had a Juanes CD in the stack while they were lead-footing it around town to get their nails done. I think you could trade a Juanes to one of the Indians at the casino for a coyote trap or something else useful."

Plato: "Yeah Buddy! I bet we do find a Cayenne. I'm hoping for a nice light tan interior to give me a new set of rags that won't get so hot in the desert. We should bring the stainless crucibles in case there are any 18 wheelers rolled off the highway and we can poach the tires and cook up some rubber-juice to mix with the biofuel!"

Aristotle: "Do you mind if I borrow your Donald Trump autobiography? I always like daydreaming 'bout how much fuel that dude used to burn flying around in his coche-in-the-sky. Man, wouldn't you like to have just like one flight's worth of  jet-fuel now to run a roto-tiller for about 20 years instead of hacking away with that shitty hand powered hoe we traded from Pedro?"

Plato: "Yeah, the roto-tiller would be sweet, but just imagine what it used to be like with an actual combine to harvest a field, instead of that pathetic scythe we have to use now! I hate that thing. My shoulders get tired after a few days of swinging that thing back and forth all day. It seems like so Stalinistic or something. Retro-Soviet it is!"

Aristotle: "Dude! Instead of Trump we should bring that book on roadkill. I bet I can hit a squirrel again like I did riding those S-curves along the Arkansas river last year!"

Plato: "No way Jackson! That was like an act of God. You ain't gonna hit another one like that. Roadkill is dead man. That would be like winning the lottery three times in a row. There's no more roadkill in the entire world now that everybody is on mopeds!"

JOIN US AGAIN NEXT TIME FOR MORE REAL-LIFE ADVENTURES AS OUR HEROES "WALK THE EARTH" (or "ride the earth on mopeds," as the case may be) IN SEARCH OF FOOD AND ESSENTIALS IN THE POST-PEAK WORLD OF THE YEAR 2030!

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