COP (BR) To Slow Drilling In The Bakken Due To Slump In Oil Prices; The Road To Fukushima -- October 30, 2014

Bloomberg is reporting:

ConocoPhillips became the first major oil company to announce plans to reduce spending due to falling crude prices as drilling in some emerging North American fields becomes less profitable.

The third-largest U.S. energy producer can meet its target to boost production by as much as 5 percent each year even as it reduces annual spending to below $16 billion, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ryan Lance told investors today.

ConocoPhillips plans to scale back drilling in emerging oil regions such as West Texas and the Rocky Mountains. The company’s ability to produce oil at lower costs in more established areas that have fueled the U.S. shale boom make growth sustainable. ConocoPhillips could also reduce exploration spending, he said. 

The "Rocky Mountains" include the Bakken in this context. In the Bakken, BR is COP. 

Later in the article:

ConocoPhillips increased production 33 percent to the equivalent of 212,000 barrels of oil a day in North Dakota’s Bakken and Texas’ Eagle Ford formations, two of the fastest-growing U.S. oil fields. That follows a 41 percent output increase in the second quarter. The company also completed a sale of its interest in Nigeria for $1.4 billion.

More:

The company has gone from a small player in fast-growing U.S. shale regions to a dominant force able to turn a profit at an oil price of $40 a barrel.

“They have plenty of places to put capital, and they can take the time to make sure that when they drill an unconventional well, they are successful and realize a high margin,” James Sullivan, a New York-based analyst at Alembic Global Advisors, said today in a telephone interview.

ConocoPhillips became the second major oil company today to report rising profits in the face of falling crude prices as an asset sale in Nigeria and higher output in Texas and North Dakota boosted returns. 

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New 52-Week Highs

This is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

Wow, what a market. Hitting new 52-week highs: AEP, AMGN, CSX, EW, SRE.

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Fukushima All Over Again

This is an incredible story. I had a different "headline" but I thought it might be a bit too much (LOL).

A huge "thank you" for Don spotting this story. I missed it. Pretty much encapsulates the entire global problem with renewable energy. Even Spain and Germany are mentioned. Newbies probably need to read the entire article to understand the blurb below, but regular readers will understand this, from the AP via Yahoo!Finance:

The utilities say they can't accommodate the flood of newcomers to the green energy business, throwing in doubt the future of Japan's up-to-now aggressive strategy on renewable energy.

Another challenge is that supplies of power from sources such as solar are not reliable enough or easily stored.

"Kyushu electric shock is spreading in a domino effect," said Oba. "It's like fraud on the national level, with utility companies and the government in cahoots with each other."

Traumatized by the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl and encouraged by the highest rates for renewable energy in the world, Japan has been undergoing a green boom. It's now rapidly turning into a fiasco as the cost proves prohibitive and utilities anticipate putting some nuclear reactors, shuttered since the March 2011 Fukushima disaster, back online. The unfolding green glut in Japan echoes similar experiences in Germany and Spain.

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Ebola

I see the state of Maine plans to ask the nurse returning from Ebolaland vis New Jersey to "self-quarantine" herself for 21 days. One would think the clock would have started when she entered the states, which must have been about a week ago. [I see the 21 days is up November 10, 2014.] I see she has not yet been invited to the White House to be hugged by the president. I don't blame him. It's now well confirmed that the virus can survive outside the human body for a lot longer than suspected or first reported. Like on doorknobs and toilet seats.

[Update: I posted that two days ago, October 28, 2014. Today, two days later, October 30, it is being reported that the CDC is, in fact, reporting the same thing: Ebola is more easily spread than we are being told:

Ebola is a lot easier to catch than health officials have admitted — and can be contracted by contact with a doorknob contaminated by a sneeze from an infected person an hour or more before.

And there you have it.]

[This is kind of funny. The other day Mike Savage, talk radio, was upset about folks using the word "catch" when talking about contracting an infectious disease. He often reminds us that he has a doctorate in something, maybe infectious disease epidemiology but I really don't know and I really don't care, but it is interesting that he was upset about the use of "catch." As noted above, almost everyone uses the colloquial "catch" including the NY Post above. The question is: do recognized medical authorities use "catch" in connection with infectious disease? It turns out that the Mayo Clinic does:

An easy way to catch most infectious diseases is by coming in contact with a person or animal who has the infection. 

I can't make this stuff up. Reason #2,387 why I love to blog. LOL. Mike Savage needs to move on.]

The nurse, by the way, is now out and about in the state of Maine, bicycling (photo of her bicycling at this link). CNN update (their words, not mine), October 31, 2014:

Nurse Kaci Hickox recently returned to the United States after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone. She's been in a tense standoff with state authorities, who want her to stay home for 21 days -- the incubation period for the deadly virus.

"Want her to stay .... "

By the way, speaking of Ebola, the CDC has backtracked. After a call from the White House and the Ebolaczar, the CDC has removed posters warning folks that Ebolavirus, like all viruses, can be found in droplets from sneezing and coughing. I can't make this stuff up.  This was noted October 31, 2014, one day after the posters were noted by mainstream media.

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A Note For the Granddaughters

About two months ago we noted a "new" pastry item at our favorite breakfast restaurant in downtown Grapevine. The pastry item was a "Cronut." I had never heard of such a thing until then. It's a "cross" between a croissant and a donut. I asked the folks at the restaurant what that was all about. They have apparently had it for quite some time; it has become very, very popular. While we were talking -- this was a Sunday morning -- a person rushed in to pick up two Cronuts. Unfortunately the pastry shop had sold out; none were left. The proprietor gave the individual a half dozen other pastry items as a gift to make up for the fact they had sold out of Cronuts. The individual had not pre-ordered; we were told that if we wanted to assure ourselves of a Cronut we needed to call ahead and put an order in. Only so many are made each day and once that batch is made, no more are set out for the day.

The reason the proprietor was so happy to give the aforementioned individual half-a-dozen other pastry items was because this customer was a regular. Actually, the person coming in the restaurant-pastry shop was not the customer; he was the chauffeur to the customer who was outside, waiting in the limousine.

Yes, in Grapevine, Cronuts are very popular.

I, of course, would never have posted that except for an Adam Gopnik's article in this week's issue of The New Yorker: Bakeoff: What is happening to our pastry? The first paragraph:

It would probably be going too far to say that there is a war on between Maury Rubin's pretzel croissant and Dominique Ansel's Cronut -- going too far because the two things can and do coexist grudgingly, one at Rubin's City Bakery, off lower Fifth, and theother at Ansel's self-named bakery, in SoHo, and also because, truth be told, Rubin's combinaiton of croissant sweetness and pretzel salt is by now a familiar staple fo the lower-Manhattan breakfast, while the crowd for Ansel's deep-fried croissant-doughnut is still a phenomenon, creating lines that sometimes start crawling aroudn the block at Spring and Thompson Streets at five in the morning.

"....is still a phenomenon in New York"? Apparently we've had Cronuts in Grapevine, TX, for quite some time and they, too, are still a phenomenon.