Kashagan Back On Line -- October 5, 2016

Wow, this story is finally ready for prime time: Kazakhstan's Kashagan ships first oil for export. I track this "never-ending" story here.

Reuters reports these data points:

• first oil from Kashagan shipped yesterday, Friday, October 14, 2016
• shipped via two pipelines
• four wells at Kashagan were producing a total of 90,000 bopd (staggering) -- that's more oil in one day than what an average Bakken well would produce in several months
• has cost $50 billion to develop
• first output in 2013 was suspended due to technical problems with the pipelines
• consortium: China National Petroleum Corp; XOM; Royal Dutch Shell; Total; Inpex; and, KazMunai Gas
• production estimated to be between 150,000 to 180,000 bopd by end of year

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

Dante's Inferno

In this week's issue of The New York Review of Books: Dante: He Went Mad in His Hell, an essay / review by Robert Pogue Harrison on Marco Santagata's biography of Dante, The Story of His Life.

Some have compared ObamaCare to Dante's Inferno. If so, this paragraph in that essay is remarkable:

Anyone reading The Divine Comedy for the first time knows how it comes at you with overwhelming strangeness, drawing you into its dark wood of confusion, down into the entrails of Hell, then up the terraces of the Mountain of Purgatory in the Southern Hemisphere before lifting off into the heavenly spheres of Paradiso, the canticle that ventures into “waters that have never yet been sailed,” stupefying those few readers who manage to make it this far into the journey. Who could have written such a poem, and how?

Wow, does that describe ObamaCare, or does that describe ObamaCare?

Of course, we have yet to see the heavenly sphere of Paradiso. That will be up to Mrs Clinton.