I greatly enjoyed this and you will too. Particularly the bit about where LFP batteries will or won’t lead us. But the whole thing is great.

Today was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Did anyone complete a full lecture in pirate voice? I said “avast” and “briny deep” and “yo ho” a few times. Ye scurvy landlubbers.

I get that this is an Elder Millennial thing but I just want to turn on PBS at 6 pm and hear “Good evening, I’m Jim Lehrer” with the original trumpet theme and know that everything is under control. That’s what the post-9/11 years were like for those of you too young to remember.

Group project #1 presentations in my class this week. One option was to research incentives etc that different countries are taking to decarbonize. Some great content and discussion! #energysky 1/x

I just finished responding to the most reviewer-2iest of all reviews (and it was literally reviewer 2!) and the rebuttal was longer than the actual manuscript. Please clap. 1/5

Many of you have seen the recent Nature article on limitations on the amount of CO2 that can actually be stored in the subsurface. You’ll not be surprised that I have thoughts! Which I detail here. #energysky 1/6 lhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09423-y

Talking Heads first identified submarine hydrogeology as a research area back in 1981. Get David Byrne as a co-PI on your next grant.

Hey y’all, just a reminder that rare earth elements and critical minerals are different things. The former are mainly lanthanides, which are radioactive, while the former are defined by the USGS as important for energy security.

Bad news guys - I’ve already been informed by a Retired Scientist™ that this is too expensive. Pencils down I guess! It was fun while it lasted.

This is awesome and Equinor has established themselves as a leader in carbon storage. Problem is, this cost almost $2 billion and we’ll need like 1000 more of them. But the expertise in the oil and gas industry is necessary to make it happen & reduce costs. jpt.spe.org/northern-lig...

1st class of the semester today & I showed this plot from Carey King’s book of world energy percentage by source since 1800. Note how increasing energy demand has always been met by increasing diversity of energy sources. We should let diversity expand to meet projected demand growth. #energysky

Whewph, guess the energy emergency has been solved, good job everyone

Well, there it is folks, I got an associate editor full house this morning.

Interesting to think about the 1930s dust bowl and ensuing New Deal in contrast to who’s really feeling climate change this time.

Got this banger by @vermontgmg.bsky.social to read on vacation. Fun fact: I’m pretty sure Garrett was a year ahead of me in Winthrop House and bought a keyboard and mouse from me that I had advertised on the house listserv, around 2002ish. Looking forward to reading the atomic bomb book!

My post-dinner lecture on finding the roots of second-order polynomials went over about as you might expect with the wife and kids.

Doesn’t look like much but this is pasta puttanesca (Chrissy Teigen’s recipe). Made this every week during COVID - I would shop Thursday bc shorter line to get into the store, make it that night. Ah memories. (1/2)

Philosophical questions from my 10-year-old tonight: “Would you rather be a crocodile or a snake?” “Would you rather be dead or extinct?”

I'm writing up some carbon mgmt stuff and I found this banger of a paper from last year by Ruud Weijermars that looks at challenges in geologic carbon storage. I loved this passage bc of (1) calling out reviewers and (2) we need to move faster if this is ever going to work. doi.org/10.1016/j.es...

Is Trump going to fire the rig count folks at BakerHughes or what

Fireflies in our front yard in Austin on August 1! Never seen this before. #atxwx

At this point if you’re not making investment decisions based on this I dunno but here we are. Taco Thursday?

Y’all, I regularly comment on gasoline prices on the radio and stuff and this is just not true and I don’t get why he keeps saying it.

Oh, you know, just normal congressional district boundaries in the Austin area (proposed D10 stretches way to the east of I-45)

Actually, when you look at the top 10 largest earthquakes recorded, the only 2 that we've done a good job probing with scientific ocean drilling are Sumatra 2004 and Tohoku 2011. Kamchatka, Alaska, Chile - not well constrained. I'll leave this here but write more tomorrow.

The 5th strongest? M=9.0, also offshore Kamchatka (1952). If you’d taken Richard Gordon’s class in grad school you’d know this trivia too!

Revised to M=8.8, now among top 6 ever recorded.

This is a VERY large earthquake, possibly/probably among the 10 largest ever recorded. A clear subduction zone megathrust event. And it is another M>8.5 event with a notable foreshock (the recent M7.4 in same location), like Tohoku in 2011.

I agree with Tim here - I have students in our sustainable energy minor who are greatly interested in geothermal and looking for jobs/internships!

Olin Carty successfully defended his PhD dissertation today! He investigated whether dissociating gas hydrates can cause large submarine landslides on both passive and active margins. TLDR: hydrates alone cannot cause large slope failures. Here we are pictured with Profs. Pyrcz and Song.

RIP. Favorite of my father-in-law, who died before I even met him, but was also a Harvard math major. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a...

We let the kids pick 1 item from the MIT museum gift shop and now we are the proud owners of a Theremin. The kids built it themselves; at least I got to teach them how diodes have to be oriented correctly!

Back from a visit to the home country, where we visited this seat of the 4th largest lower house in the English-speaking world. And you can just walk in! No security or anything.

Caught this full-arc double rainbow over Beacon Hill from the Longfellow Bridge. Y’all have a good weekend.

Brahms clarinet/viola sonata #1 op 120 is so wrapped up in the Klavierstücke op 118/119 - we hear the same harmony progressions, even left-hand licks in the piano part. 1/2

do good news posts even go here

Another 2” of rain just from today in Hyde Park. On top of 6”+ over the weekend- forgot to empty the gauge and it was overflowing Saturday afternoon. #atxwx

I don’t really care what this place is or isn’t. Alls I know is it’s been great for the business of The Onion and that both Zuck and Musk have experience cooking and/or hiding the books on their own traffic. Doesn’t really matter if there are more page views if they’re not real people.

I literally fell asleep last night thinking that I should start a Substack. Good news - I won’t. But maybe we can start trying by submitting provocative AGU abstracts? Deadline is at the end of the month.

In case anyone is wondering, the El Camino does not get “truck” license plates in Texas. Got one parked in front of the house this evening.

I was revisiting this IEEFA analysis of Petra Nova and was struck by how the success (or lack thereof) was a function not just of capture efficiency, but also pipeline downtime, EOR injection downtime, etc. We need to treat these projects as whole systems! #energysky ieefa.org/resources/il...

The last time all gates of the Starcke Dam had to be opened was October 2018, when Austin ended up under a boil water notice for 7 days. #txwx #atxwx

All 10 gates of Starcke Dam (upstream of Lake Travis) might be open tonight per LCRA. #txwx x.com/averytomasco...

Thread on WPC efforts since last night on the catastrophic flooding event in Central Texas. We need to fund NOAA. #txwx

“AI iS ComInG fOR oUR JObS!” And a Waymo got stuck in the alley behind our house for 30 mins bc there’s a new dumpster with a different color

Austin folks (of a certain age) - rainy early July, but do you remember 2007? “Lake Travis crested July 6 at 701.52 feet…” This was the same year Marble Falls saw 18” of rain in 6 hours a few days earlier. 1/2 #atxwx hydromet.lcra.org/Documents/20...

What is Aaron Copland’s best composition and why is it his clarinet concerto.

It's Dallas Fed day! I love reading these, especially the special comments. Some highlights from Q2. 1/4 #energysky www.dallasfed.org/research/sur...

I was on a really interesting PhD committee today for a student who did inverse modeling of downhole fiber optics during enhanced geothermal stimulation (data from FORGE). Great example of oil&gas expertise crossover to low-carbon energy. #energysky 1/2

Well, I guess at least it’s GoFest this weekend