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Sunday, June 19, 2011

Okay -- Now, It's Getting Serious -- Ethanol Driving Up Price of Ice Cream

Link here.

The article is a human interest story on how the price of ice cream has gone up as a result of numerous global inconvenient truths.

But these two paragraphs caught my eye:
The 700-acre spread, home to 150 cows, mostly Holsteins, is where Toscanini’s ice cream begins. While the prices Hager receives for milk are the highest in more than two years, his costs are increasing faster. Hager supplements the feed he grows — corn and hay — with grain he buys. His grain costs have jumped to $27,000 a month, up $5,000 from a year ago.
Much of the increase is because of the rising price of corn, rooted in soaring crude oil prices and demand for ethanol, the corn-based gasoline additive. Corn exports to China also play a role; US farmers exported about 17 times more corn to China last year than in 2009.
It is not "demand for ethanol." It is the Congressional mandate for ethanol.

Ethanol-formulated gasoline is about a nickel/gallon cheaper. I don't think anyone would miss ethanol-formulated gasoline if it disappeared overnight. Filling a 20-gallon tank costs about $70; shaving off a buck (20 gallon x 5 cents --> $1.00) isn't much of a savings.

Take-Away Capacity -- Oil -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

There is an interesting graphic on Slide 33 of the most recent Whiting corporate presentation.

North Dakota is currently producing about 350,000 bbls of oil per day.

Take-away capacity, based on the Whiting presentation, slide 33:

Existing capacity:
  • Enbridge: 185,000
  • Bridger / Belle Bourche: 120,000
  • Tesoro / Mandan: 60,000
  • EOG (rail): 60,000
  • Plains:
  • Hess (rail):
  • COLT (rail):
  • Quintana:
  • Total existing capacity: 425,000
2011 Additions:
  • Enbridge: 25,000 (Q2)
  • Bridger / Belle Fourche: 30,000 (Q1)
  • COLT (rail): 27,000 (Q4)
  • Total additional capacity: 82,000
2012 Additions:
  • Enbridge: 145,000 (Q4)
  • Bridger / Belle Fourche: 50,000 (Q1)
  • Plains: 50,000 (Q4)
  • Hess (rail): 60,000 (Q1)
  • Total additional capacity: 305,000
2013 Additions:
  • Bridger / Belle Fourche: 100,000 (Q1)
  • Quintana: 100,000 (Q1)
  • Total additional capacity: 200,000
At end of 2013, therefore, takeaway capacity in North Dakota is estimated to be: 1,012,000 bbls/day.

The end of 2013 is not all that far away.

 At the end of this year (2011), takeaway capacity should be slightly more than 500,000 bbls/day.

The Quintana pipeline appears to begin south of Watford City (McKenzie County) and will go direclty through Whiting's Lewis and Clark prospect before hooking up with pipelines farther south.
Quintana Capital Group Ltd. said it wants to build a $250 million, 300-mile-long pipeline system from western North Dakota to eastern Montana, where it would meet TransCanada Corp.'s proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
Terry Cunha, a TransCanada spokesman at the company's headquarters in Calgary, Alberta, said no agreement has been reached with Quintana or any other company wanting to ship domestic crude in its pipeline.
Quintana's pipeline would initially carry 100,000 barrels of crude from the Watford City area to Montana's Fallon County, where it also could be linked with pipelines that carry Montana crude, the company's proposal said.
Of course, this is all on hold while US State Department rules on Keystone XL and, even if approved, has several obstacles. 

Another Lost Decade?

Updates


June 22, 2011: The comments to this article are very interesting. Iit is very, very scary that the Fed chairman was unable to instill any confidence in the investing community. It is clear that he sees a second lost decade, and most of it revolves around lack of a sound energy policy.
Brutally honest, Bernanke admitted that he had no clue what was actually causing the current fragility in the U.S. economic recovery.  While the FOMC statement assigned blame outside of the U.S., pointing at Japan along with rising food and oil prices, Bernanke was put on the spot by a reporter who noted the inconsistency behind that explanation and a lowering of long term forecasts.  Bernanke took the hit, admitting only some of the factors were temporary and that he didn’t know exactly what was causing the slowdown, but that it would persist.  “Growth,” said Bernanke, “will return into 2012.”
June 22, 2011: I think everyone agrees that the phrase "hitting a bit of a soft patch" right now with regards to the economy is being voiced/heard more and more frequently (if any doubts, google "soft patch"). One of the most important things a government can do is keep people calm, doing what it can to prevent panic. Panic can lead to anarchy (something about which the Greeks need to be most concerned right now). To maintain calm, the government will gradually prepare its citizens for worse news yet to come, but in a gradual manner. When government officials start using the phrase "a soft patch" on a more regular basis, one can assume that experts acknowledge there is a better than 50/50 chance that we will fall into a double-dip recession. My hunch is that if we fall back into a recession we will not know it until about six months after the fact. All incumbent administrations would do their best to manage the timing of announcing the onset of a recession. 

June 22, 2011: Mort Zuckerman, US News (& World Report): Unemployment situation is worse than it looks.
The Great Recession has now earned the dubious right of being compared to the Great Depression. In the face of the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policies in our history, we have experienced the loss of over 7 million jobs, wiping out every job gained since the year 2000. From the moment the Obama administration came into office, there have been no net increases in full-time jobs, only in part-time jobs. This is contrary to all previous recessions. Employers are not recalling the workers they laid off from full-time employment.
And based on the administration's animosity toward oil, gas, and mining, it sounds like there is no urgency to correct the situation. Years ago, US News & World Report was the most conservative of the big three (the others: Newsweek and Time Magazine). Based on the little I have seen of Mort Zuckerman on television, he seems as liberal, or at least as somewhat left of center, as the rest of the mainstream media pundits. When the mainstream media starts calling the administration out on this issue, one car argue we are seeing the beginning of the end of this administration. Elsewhere it is being reported that 3 of 10 Americans will vote for Barack Obama in 2012.

June 20, 2011: Missouri River flooding near Omaha. My hunch: bigger economic loss than Katrina. My hunch: less media interest in the flooding than with Katrina. I guess there's no one to blame for the flooding; we had someone to blame for Katrina. Common denominator: US Army Corps of Engineers. My hunch: all this flooding upstream to prevent flooding of New Orleans.

Original Post

I have called the years 2000 - 2010 a lost decade, and have a "lost decade" tag.

I honestly thought we might turn the corner but I'm beginning to wonder. I'm not alone. From the (London) Financial Times:
The stalling of the US recovery raises big, scary questions. After a recession, this economy usually gets people back to work quickly. Not this time. Progress is so slow, the issue is not so much when America will return to full employment but what “full employment” will mean by the time it does.
The administration thinks the pace of recovery will pick up soon. Last week President Barack Obama called the pause a “bump in the road”. Others think the slowdown will persist and might get worse, fears that cannot be dismissed. One alarming possibility is that the traits the US has relied on to drive growth in the past – labour market flexibility, rapid productivity growth – might have become toxic. If the US is unlucky, traits seen as distinctive strengths are now weaknesses, and a “lost decade” of stagnation, like Japan’s in the 1990s, might lie ahead.

Friends in High Places -- Congress Keeps Increasing the Mandate for Ethanol

Link here.

The article is all about the increase in global demand for corn --
Even a fifth consecutive year of record global corn harvests will fail to meet demand for food, fuel and livestock feed, reducing world stockpiles to the lowest in two generations.

Consumption will rise 3 percent in the next marketing year, a 16th consecutive annual gain that saw demand jump 66 percent, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.

Inventory will drop to 47 days of use, the fewest since 1974, the data show. Waterlogged fields in the U.S., the largest exporter, will curb yields, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. says.

Corn may jump 36 percent to a record $9 a bushel if conditions worsen, Morgan Stanley says. 
Meanwhile, deep in the article --
“If oil prices tank and corn prices stay near a high, then ethanol production is going to recede to the level of the mandate. But the mandate continues to go up.” 
I believe the mandate is now up to 15% ethanol in one grade of gasoline, up from 10% last year, and automobiles back to 2007, or thereabouts will be designated safe to use 15% ethanol.

I believe one saves about a nickel/gallon on ethanol-gasoline.

Reminder: An Interesting Website

For those who enjoy photos of the Bakken, scroll through this web site to find some interesting photo links:

http://www.dldebertin.com/

I don't know if this link is on that page, but it's also a great Bakken photo essay:

http://www.dldebertin.com/oil2009/mountrail.htm

Large Passenger Plane Makes Emergency Landing At Williston

Link here.
A large passenger jet made an emergency landing at Sloulin Field International Airport in Williston on Thursday morning.

Airport Manager Steven Kjergaard said a 70-passenger CRJ 700 aircraft from United Airlines landed at approximately 11:45 a.m. Thursday.

The flight was traveling from Chicago to Calgary.

"There was a medical emergency aboard the flight. We were the closest airport that could handle an airplane of that size," Kjergaard said.
Something tells me folks were surprised to see all the building activity outside their windows, with seven motels/hotels within sight of the runway.