Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2018 July 20

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July 20

Urgent and very important question

If it is important, he can ask it when he comes back. --Jayron32 11:07, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Goodmorning everybody. I have an urgent and very important questi — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.54.150.41 (talk) 11:03, 19 July 2018 (UTC) Can't wait to hear it. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 11:14, 19 July 2018 (UTC) Ah; last day of term tomorrow and the homework has to be in I gess :D —SerialNumber54129 paranoia /cheap sh*t room 11:33, 19 July 2018 (UTC) I think it might have been about the pain in his chest :-( Richard Avery (talk) 09:12, 20 July 2018 (UTC) Kind of like the scene in Holy Grail where they find cave writing that ends in "Arrrgh!" or something like that. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:46, 20 July 2018 (UTC) And on one of the albums, a caller to a radio programme: "He left me his question in his will. ... One of the conditions of the will was that I myself should not read the question" —Tamfang (talk) 06:53, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

she can inform us of her preferred pronoun when she returns to ask the question. --Jayron32 21:27, 20 July 2018 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Procedural note: really shouldn't use "he" in hatting message like this if you don't know the editor. Appropriate here would be the neutral singular "they". 131.251.254.154 (talk) 12:19, 20 July 2018 (UTC) If they come back, they can correct it. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:28, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

What Are 20 Acres Of Oil, Gas, Coal, Uranium, Thorium Worth At Today's Mineral Prices?

I own 20 acres of oil, gas, coal, uranium, thorium what are these mineral worth in today's mineral prices? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lee Silber (talk • contribs) 20:27, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

@Lee Silber: That depends on how much of those substances are in the land. I highly doubt you have a solid 20 acre slurry of just oil, gas, uranium, and thorium; all pure, with no soil or rock or plants in the way. Ian.thomson (talk) 20:39, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

(EC)You need to give a thickness to allow calculation. In addition for oil and gas you'll need the relative pore volume of the rock and for Thorium and Uranium you'll need the concentration of the mineral in the host rock, unless you're talking about 20 acres of the pure substance in a theoretical fashion. Mikenorton (talk) 20:42, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

You will also need to convert for the 95% of the world that doesn't use acres. HiLo48 (talk) 00:26, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

43,560 square feet. A square that fits inside a 209 foot square but not a 208 foot square, the footprint of one of the Twin Towers, 1 working day of oxen plowing, 1 furlong (=1 furrow long) times (43,560 divided by 660) feet, approximately the smallest amount of land that looks like land, 1 acre-foot divided by 3,048,000,000 Ångstroms (symbol Å), a *lot* of barns Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:42, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Wow! Like wow! What a wealth of knowledge. Interestingly, I recently came across some writings about an ancestor who lived in France 450 years ago, whose grant of land from the crown was measured in days, a day apparently being the area one ox could plough in a day. (Or maybe it was a pair of oxen. Can't recall.) So a bit of a transposition there. HiLo48 (talk) 00:53, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

In all seriousness think of an acre as 4,000 m². Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:07, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, I do actually. One industry that somehow skipped parts of metrication in Australia is real estate agents (realtors). They still tend to use acres to describe rural properties, rather than hectares. Maybe because acres are smaller and you can associate a bigger number of acres with a property. Maybe they think buyers are dumb. But that simple rounded conversion is useful. HiLo48 (talk) 01:16, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Do they ever market in square kilometers instead of acres? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:27, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

No. Hectares are common enough, and Square metres for urban house blocks. HiLo48 (talk) 03:24, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

If you want square blocks you can have 20 per mile, cram 2 lanes, sidewalks and parking. lanes into a 55.289674 foot street and make the block exactly 1 acre (I don't know if anyone does this). Do metric blocks ever fit an integer number of streets per kilometer and have 100x100m blocks (between the property lines) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:46, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

Properties in square kilometers would be like industrial complexes or old-money estates. Square tenths-of-kilometers (i.e. hectares) are something closer to human-scale. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:49, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Australia has only like 3 people per square kilometer and something like 85% are urban so if there's not a ton of government land the Outback probably has lots of areas where lots of people own multiple square kilometers. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:12, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Cubbie Station is 96,000 hectares (240,000 acres). HiLo48 (talk) 05:17, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

That would probably fall into the industrial category. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:40, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

That's more land than Mumbai with 12 million people. Or the "not fake" part of Tokyo with 9.4 million. Or New York City with 8.6 million. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:26, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

There's no accounting for the metric fanatics. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:47, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

According to Metrication in Australia, the Aussies held out until the 1960s. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:49, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Yes. The 1970s in practice. That's why old folks like me still know what a stone and a gallon are. HiLo48 (talk) 22:56, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

How did the stone unit get invented? Isn't it silly to say "my empty car weighs as much as 207 stones, not 206, not 208"? A stone might weigh 1 pound, it might weight 100, it might weigh 41, it might weigh 2 or 13 or 1 carat, why is 14 the most typical stone possible? As you might know America just gives peoples' weight in pounds, no stone. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:50, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

You could have found the answer to most of your questions at Stone (unit). General use of the 14-lb (wool) stone (as opposed to various others used for specialised purposes) was standardised in the UK only in in 1835, hence the already-independent USA not using it. In everyday life, measurements of less than 3 figures are (I suggest) easier to think about, so it's easier for me (say) to conceptualise my (daily fluctuating) weight as "about 14¹/₂ stones" than "203 pounds". Similar considerations may explain various other traditional units of measurement, which over centuries out-competed alternatives because they were found to be more useful and easily relatable to the scales of the human body. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.219.34.253 (talk) 01:29, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

No unit of measure is as silly as arguing about them. As long as they're well-defined and it's easy to look up the conversion factors, any unit is as good as any other. --Trovatore (talk) 23:58, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

I'd say it's better to use stones than solar masses or electron volts for human-scale masses. And galaxies are better measured in solar masses than grams or stone. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:13, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

"How did the stone unit get invented?" Naturally, Wikipedia can tell you. See Stone (unit)#Antiquity. HiLo48 (talk) 00:54, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

At least in Michigan, 20 acres of oil, gas, coal, uranium, and thorium bearing land may be worth nothing. According to this site, you need to lease a minimum of 40 acres else the oil or gas production company won't be able to get a drilling permit.

That aside, the same site gives the example of a company successfully drilling for oil and having a well pump "for 200 days per year, produc[ing] 25 barrels per day and the oil sell[ing] for $60/barrel."

The total revenue for the well is "25 barrels/day x 200 days x $60/ barrel = $300,000/year gross income". A figure of $60/ barrel is reasonably close to the average crude oil price over the past 12 months.

From the first mentioned site, the standard royalty for a landowner is apparently 1/8th = $37,500. To this figure, in the first year only, one can add an average bonus of $2,500 that the drilling company will usually pay a land owner as a further leasing incentive.

Presuming the production figures in the example are neither too conservative nor too presumptuous, the oil on the 20 acres could be worth $40,000, to the leaseholder, at least in the first year.

If I make a gross assumption that the gas, coal, uranium, and thorium on the land have comparable values to that of the oil, an indicative answer to the question might be 5 x $40,000 = at least $200,000 worth or royalties and bonuses in the first year. Or, in gross income terms, close to at least $1,000,000 in the first year, noting that production is likely to taper off thereafter.

I've said "at least" because, at least in the case of the oil, the mining company may choose to place, say, 6 to 8 wells in row and increase production accordingly. Our own oil well article gives a citation-less cost (presumably per 100 days) for an onshore well of less than $1 million to $15 million for deep and difficult wells. With these costs, each of the half-dozen or so wells is going have to produce more than 25 barrels a day to make the whole operation profitable.

All of this presumes that all five types of mineral can be minded concurrently from a patch of land that is equivalent to being about 300 yards wide and 300 yards deep. Sandbh (talk) 04:05, 22 July 2018 (UTC)