Dairy-based biogas "RNG" is done at scale in the United States already, there are hundreds of large anaerobic digesters across the country turning cow waste into biogas
It seems unlikely the ratio of (oil consumed by production):(oil production) is greater than 1:1. If it was greater than 1:1 - e.g. 10:1 - wouldn't the production company simply sell the 10 barrels instead of using the 10 barrels to produce and sell 1?
Not really. You need to drill to make any oil.
So if you drilled and spent 10 parts to make it happen (flying people there, energy to drill etc.) and extracted 11 parts, you're selling 1 of those and then using the next 10 to mine the next 11 to get another 1 to sell.
It would still make sense economically as long as you were turning a profit overall (so factoring the total cost into what you're actually selling), although it would be a huge waste in absolute terms.
I do doubt that would be a realistic estimate though.
I see what you mean. That's more interesting than I originally thought.
If a company has a hypothetical 10 barrels of oil on hand, and is given two choices: (1) do no work and sell the 10 barrels; (2) do work, use the 10 barrels, and have 11 barrels left over to sell or use again
Why would the company choose option 2? Option 1 is both easier and results in 10x the immediate value. I suppose over enough cycles (i.e. >10x), the "1 additional barrel per cycle" will add to more net barrels sold to market.
But with any meaningful discount rate, the time value of money would almost certainly be greater for option 1. Maybe fracking was a ZIRP phenomenon.
Aren't you guys just describing how business works?
You have 10 dollars. You can keep the 10 dollars and then have 10 dollars. Or you can invest that 10 and earn 11.
Or, in a real situation:
Walmart had 12B in revenue with 2% profit margin for 2023. It sounds like they started with 11.9B in money, bought inventory and paid their expenses, and after selling everything wound up with 12B.
How is this different to spending oil to make oil?
2 is way way better of an option. You’ve just described a process that grows your resources by 10% each iteration. Unless it was very expensive or high risk, it’s a no brainer.
After you’ve sold the ten barrels, now what? There are no more barrels and no more coming since you chose not to drill. You have to shut down and do something else with whatever money you made from the sale.
ERD wells are very long (laterally) but not necessarily deep (vertically). The vertical component is the important one when assessing geothermal heat gradient. "Total measured depth" includes the lateral component, and so can be misleading when considering vertical depth. The wells you've referenced are very long, but less than 3,000 meters in vertical depth. https://www.drillingcontractor.org/erd-advances-push-limits-...
We have too many to count, but some of my favorites:
-Kabuki Dance
-Coal Face
-KT (Knowledge Transfer)
-Across the Piece
-And my personal Rockstar: Like Putting Socks on an Octopus
Our HR group actually put together a wonderful "Leadership" website complete with a "Leadership Handbook" (Buzzword Dictionary). Of course, it's hidden on an obscure sub-site and is unsearchable. I've never met anyone else who's actually seen this site or handbook, but it's been fun for me!
Ah yes, the knowledge transfer! Two wires running from one person's brain to another, "Battlefield Earth" style.
To be fair though, it is straightforward to understand what it means. On the other hand, it took me a while to adjust to "throw under the bus", "rounding error" (a small amount of money), and "up to one's eyeballs".
Probably quite a while, as NVIDIA currently doesn't mention cryptocurrency mining publicly to keep investors from worrying about the sustainability of their recent revenue growth.
I don't know about the deep learning side of things, but on the mining side of things, over the past month, my calculations are that ~50,000 GPUs are added to mine the major GPU-minable coins every day -- from roughly one million GPUs on April 1 to about 3.5 million GPUs now. At an average of $250 revenue per card, that'd work out to ~$13M revenue per day in GPU sales for cryptomining, split between AMD cards and NVidia cards. This, however, is up about ten-fold from March, and in all likelihood will return to those levels as mining returns inevitably decline.
Source of this data is my own calculations using historical data on mining difficulty for the various coins, plus benchmarks for typical/optimal-ish GPUs used to mine each coin.
Yes, I am assuming that all mining is done with GPUs for ETH/ETC/ZEC/XMR and some others. I'm only including coins which are currently profitable to mine on GPUs, which I take as an indication that those algorithms have seen little/no efficient ASIC implementation yet. I'm thus not including bitcoin, since GPUs are little more than space heaters mining bitcoin; and I'm not including e.g. lbry and litecoin and some others because I don't know enough about the ASICification of those.
It's possible, though, as you suggest, that there are some folks running ASICs or improved hashing algorithms at a small scale, small enough not to overwhelm profitability of GPU mining but large enough to muddy calculations which assume that all mining is being done on GPUs.
Hard to say... most recent quarter had datacenter at $409mm in revenue. Mining falls under gaming, which has grown ~$600mm since 2015 to >$1b per quarter today. Try to buy a gaming GPU today and you won't be able to -- they're all sold out because of cryptomining.
Nvidia 1050 ti is almost untouched for mining purposes and there is 10% price increase in 1060s and 1070s. 1080s & 1080 ti you can get for retail. The GPUs the are in insane demand are AMD RX 580/570/480.
