If This Is Wednesday, It Must Be The Bakken - May 20, 2015

There are a lot of stories today; I don't whether to put them altogether in one post or split them up. I will probably put a lot of them together.

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Watford City's $83 Million Event Center

The Dickinson Press is reporting:

Watford City breaks ground today on an $83 million event center, marking three years of work and planning backed by a public vote to increase the city’s sales tax after the Stenehjem family donated the land on which to build.

The Watford City Event Center — adjacent to the new high school project in the Fox Hills Subdivision — will house arenas for hockey, turf and hard-floor sports, a 1,000-capacity convention center, a 3,000-seat auditorium, plus a lap pool and swim-play facility.

It will connect directly to the new high school for athletic practice, competitions and some physical education classes and will be an off-campus venue for the University of Mary.

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California Gasoline

This may be my favorite story for the day. Regular readers know all this but it explains a lot about the price of California for newbies. Bloomberg explains why gasoline in California is almost a dollar more per gallon than in the rest of the country. Californians are once again approaching $5-gasoline. Yes, I know it's closer to $4.35 than $5.00 but ... So here's the story why gasoline is so expensive in California:

There’s plenty of blame to spread around. An Exxon Mobil Corp. refinery explosion near Los Angeles in February and a fire at a plant in Washington state reduced supply at the same time two other California sites make repairs.

Refiners sent five cargoes in one week to Mexico. Since there are no pipelines to bring in gasoline from elsewhere in the U.S., tankers are delivering fuel from Asia and Europe.

Add the strictest clean-air policies in the nation and you get the most expensive gas in the country.

Exxon hasn’t said when its Torrance refinery will be back to normal. Repairs will continue through June.

Less than 10 miles up the road from Torrance, Chevron Corp. shut units at the El Segundo refinery this month for repairs and Phillips 66 is doing work at its Los Angeles plant.

In Tacoma, Washington, a complex owned by the TrailStone Group remains shut after a May 6 fire.

It doesn’t help that the West Coast is cut off from pipeline supplies in other parts of the U.S. Kinder Morgan Inc. runs a network of lines that send fuel out of the state to Arizona and Nevada, but it doesn’t bring supplies in. So the only way refiners can deliver fuel to California is by tanker.

So few refineries produce gasoline that can be used in California’s cars that tankers come from thousands of miles away in Asia and Europe to deliver the specialized fuel.

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Is  Baghdad Next To Fall?

Fox News is reporting:

A full-blown humanitarian crisis has developed from ISIS takeover of Ramadi, as an estimated 25,000 Iraqi refugees are now making their way east toward Baghdad, seeking food and shelter wherever they can and facing the prospect of being blocked from the capital city amid fears their ranks could include militants.

The United Nations and other aid agencies were handing out food, water and medical supplies along the 60-mile route between the cities, but the situation was worsening amid dwindling supplies and reports the Iraqi army was blocking the refugees from reaching the safety of Baghdad.

The flight was a repeat of a wave of refugees who poured out of Ramadi in April, when fighting between ISIS and the Iraqi army flared up. Many had returned, only to be again driven out of the city, some 60 miles west of Baghdad.

Now, the crisis could be coming to a bloody head, as the black-clad jihadist army is moving east just behind the refugees, who are now stuck on the bank of the Euphrates River, unable to cross to safety. And those left behind in Ramadi, where ISIS was reportedly going door-to-door to root out government sympathizers, were braced for more fighting as Shia militias were summoned by Baghdad to help mount a counter-offensive to retake the city, once home to 750,000.

Even the decision to launch a counter-offensive to recapture the largely Sunni capital of Anbar province was fraught with peril. The Iraqi Army’s humiliating defeat there has left Baghdad with little choice but to make a deal with the devil – the battle-hardened and Iranian-backed Shia militias that offer the best chance of retaking the key city, say experts.

 It was noted that the ISIS forces staged a huge military parade to celebrate their victory. This was a target-rich environment for the A-10 or the F-16 or the Apache helicopter. Did President Obama direct the military to take out these ISIS forces? Nope. Speaks volumes about his war strategy. 

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 The New York Times Report On The Fall Of Ramadi -- It Began With George W. Bush

NYT Headline: Iraq's Sunni Strategy Collapses in Ramadi Rout

The New York Times reports:

The collapse of Anbar has also set in sharp relief the continuing tragedy of Iraq’s Sunnis, beginning with the American invasion in 2003, which almost instantly upended the old social order of Sunni prominence. With the majority Shiites thrust into power, the Sunnis were sidelined, many banished from public life for good because of their ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

Some of those Sunnis joined the insurgency, and many fight today for the Islamic State. Other Sunnis boycotted elections. A great number even deny the demographic fact that they are a minority in Iraq.

Most, though, wanted to get on with their lives and find a place within the new order.

Now, with the rise of the Islamic State, that has become nearly impossible. The Sunni militants of the Islamic State have declared war on those they consider apostates — Shiites, Christians, Yazidis — but it is Iraq’s Sunni Arabs who have arguably suffered the most.