Arbitrage is easy to define. It is a buying/selling strategy that involves taking advantage of price differences between different markets, assets, or time periods to generate profits.

So there are lots of implications (in this context, and in most other contexts) about moving from potential to actual, including ethical implications – which Aristotle certainly appreciated.

Bottom line of Aristotle’s thinking here? Actuality brings forth new opportunities and developments, but even more so when you understand the potential accurately and earlier.

Building transmission lines requires lengthy and costly environmental assessments and permits. Regulations may require additional equipment or engineering to minimize environmental impacts.

Building and maintaining transmission lines require highly specialized skills, including welding, rigging, and electrical engineering. This specialized labor increases the cost.

All in all, the process of using vessels to move crude from offshore production further into the supply chain, is yet again, a marvel of engineering, operational intelligence, risk management, and capital planning. And it is all done so that we have easy access to refined products and can fill our cars with gasoline.

We must remember that modern energy and data storage/retrieval is not magical, supernatural, or alchemical. Rather, it is the result of human ingenuity, scientific discovery, capital, hard work, time, trial and error, patience, perseverance, and ambition.

Every industry has its own process, but it will involve these four irreducible elements, necessarily so. The cotton, cattle, and oil industries are just examples that I like to think about. Production, processing, transportation, distribution. Earth, water, air, fire.

The idea of four irreducible, basic elements is a useful construct for understanding the world, even still today.

The offshore oil and gas industry is a remarkable feat of engineering, capital planning, advanced technology deployment, and intricate logistics mastery. All of this comes together for a global industry which for the most part operates profitably, safely and efficiently.

Ultimately, the interdependence and mutual reinforcement of our energy infrastructure highlights the need for a holistic and integrated approach to energy investment and energy policy. Which means incentives need to be aligned and win win win solutions continually crafted.

All in all, despite facing headwinds such as capital constraints, environmental concerns, and constantly changing global energy markets, the oil and gas infrastructure in North America has demonstrated significant resilience. The extensive and complex network of pipelines, refineries, storage facilities, and other infrastructure types has shown its ability to adapt to changing market conditions and maintain stable supply chains.

Wakanda is an energy Utopia and its energy infrastructure empowers everything else. The Marvel writers are truly brilliant in emphasizing that materials science and energy infrastructure are the keys to everything else in civilization.

While Vibranium doesn’t exist in the real world, there are some materials which do have some similarities, albeit in modest doses, in absorbing energy.

I noted that you could even do this for a hypothetical or fictional civilization. And this is what Marvel Comics brilliantly did beginning in Fantastic Four #52, in 1966 when it introduced Wakanda to the world. Wakanda is best understood as a civilization with incredibly advanced energy infrastructure, built upon the nation’s rich natural resources, including, and most importantly, an abundance of Vibranium, a rare and powerful fictional metal with unique energy properties.

In the most basic terms, the smokehouse is a form of a processing plant or refinery, where work is performed on an energy commodity to allow it to move into further distribution and storage and eventual use.

So every civilization – that is, any time and place where human beings are surviving from one generation to the next – has energy infrastructure. Every civilization has its own way of generating, processing, transporting and storing energy. And the quality of that civilization will depend upon its improvement of these basic concepts.

It seems all too often that the importance of energy infrastructure is not fully appreciated by policymakers or the general public – myself included. In the next few articles we will be taking a look at energy infrastructure.

1. Conduct research on biogas production and its application to generate electricity.

2. Conduct a site survey and assess the feasibility of building a small biogas plant.

Southeast Texas is an ideal location for carbon capture and sequestration due to its being home to several deep saline formations which could serve as effective storage sites for carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from industrial processes and power plants in the area.

Forestry and lumber are prominent industries in Texas, the United States, and around the world to this day.

The inevitable change then happens, problems get redefined, skills and knowledge acquired by doing things in the (now) old way are retooled, updated and applied to a (somewhat) new situation, and the cycle continues.