Monday Morning -- Welcome News In The Bakken

Tesoro Logistics LP announces that in response to interest from a higher than expected number of potential shippers, it is extending its binding open season for firm priority capacity on the Tesoro High Plains Pipeline system until Apr 4, 2014 at noon central time.

TLLP also announced that to maximize the number of potential shippers on the system, the size of bid tranches would be reduced to 5,000 barrels per day (bpd), for both Phase 1 and Phase 2. As previously announced, the proposed THPP capacity expansion would be executed in two phases:

• Phase I will provide incremental capacity to transport up to approximately 70,000 barrels per day of crude petroleum from various locations south of Lake Sakakawea, including Johnson's Corner, Keene, Blue Buttes and Charlson Station, to Ramberg Station by July 1, 2014.  
• Phase II will provide incremental pipeline capacity of up to 90,000 bpd from Ramberg to Stampede, with an expected in-service time frame of second half of 2015.  
• The in-service time frames are subject to THPP obtaining sufficient commitments from shippers as well as regulatory and internal approvals. Concurrent with the start of the open season, TLLP also announced its proposal to expand the Bakken Area Storage Hub terminal facility.  
• TLLP is also extending the time for potential customers to submit offers for BASH storage space until April 4, 2014. 

************************************

Speaking of Pipelines

Coincidentally, The Minot Daily News has an update on pipelines relevant to the Bakken. 

Justin Kringstad, director of the North Dakota Pipeline Authority in Bismarck, said in his Feb. 14 report of production and transportation that an estimated 20 percent of the Williston Basin crude oil is transported by pipeline. The report used December 2013 information, the most recent available.
The remainder of the transportation is:

• 1 percent by truck to Canadian pipelines.
• 6 percent to the Tesoro Refinery in Mandan.
• An estimated 73 percent by rail.

Besides the Sandpiper project, the proposed Dakota Pipeline, Vantage Pipeline and Alliance Pipeline are also major pipeline projects in North Dakota.

WBI Energy, the pipeline and energy services subsidiary of MDU Resources Group, Inc. announced on Jan. 30 that it was holding an open season for its proposed Dakota Pipeline, a 375-mile natural gas pipeline from western North Dakota to northwestern Minnesota, according to company information.

*************************************

The Wall Street Journal

The downed airliner: looks like another "Lockerbie."


The West tries to loosen Russian's natural gas grip. Good luck. All that EU investment in renewable energy certainly looks foolhardy in hindsight. I guess it was a choice between supporting the activist environmentalists and "realpolitiks" and the environmentalists won.

Western officials are scrambling to loosen Russia's energy stranglehold on Ukraine, the latest sign of growing pressure on Moscow to end the crisis.

The options being considered by officials from Brussels to Washington include larger exports of U.S.-made natural gas, reversing the flow of natural gas through pipelines from Western Europe back into Ukraine, and accelerating plans across Europe to buy more energy from countries other than Russia.

"If no solution to this can be found," European countries will "recast their approach to energy and economic links with Russia over time," U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague said Sunday. Western officials also have threatened sanctions against Russia if the Kremlin continues its occupation of the Crimea region of Ukraine.

The threats have failed so far, with Russian President Vladimir Putin declaring his support Sunday for Crimea's move to secede from Ukraine. The region could join Russia as soon as this month, a Kremlin-backed leader in Crimea said.

I personally don't think the Obama administration can act quickly enough to help the Europeans with natural gas. It's only been six years for him to make a decision on one pipeline, the Keystone. Oh, that's right, he hasn't made a decision on that pipeline either.

**************************************

It looks like Americans cannot afford to get into the housing market. Developers are turning to building apartments.

The share of new homes being built as rental apartments is at the highest level in at least four decades, as an improving jobs picture spurs younger Americans to form their own households but tighter lending standards make it more difficult to buy.

Residential construction—a pillar of the economy and employment—is starting to ramp up again overall, but in previous years the growth was driven by single-family homes.

Last year, according to census data, construction was started on a little less than one million new residential units, and about one in three of those was a rental in a multifamily building, the highest share since data began in the mid-1970s. Single-family homes accounted for about two-thirds of housing starts last year, down from their peak of 87% in 1993 and about 80% in the years leading up to the recession, the census data showed.

************************************

The EPA may not like fracking and the EPA may not like coal, but the EPA can get along with radioactivity. EIEIO.

An Environmental Protection Agency review board was pressured by officials at the agency to soften its challenges to an EPA plan for dealing with a highly contaminated radioactive waste site in this St. Louis suburb, a former board member and other people familiar with the matter said.

In what some saw as a sign of the intensity of the dispute, the EPA turned a 2012 review of the site from a public process to a confidential one. Some people familiar with that move believe it was done to save the EPA the potential embarrassment of the dispute becoming public.

The EPA, in written responses to questions, denied that pressure was put on the review board or that there were attempts to hide its views. The agency said a nonpublic "consultation" on the plan was more appropriate than a full public "review" because it was determined that more sampling and testing needed to be done at the site. It acknowledged, however, that a switch from a review to a consultation had never before happened.