Tuesday Links

From Yahoo!Financial In-Play: Murphy Oil announces plan to separate U.S. Downstream Business into independent co and authorization of a $2.50/share special dividend and $1 bln share buyback program: Co announced that its Board of Directors has approved a plan to spin off to its stockholders its U.S. downstream subsidiary, Murphy Oil USA, into an independent and separately traded co, and has also authorized a special dividend of $2.50 per share for a total dividend of ~$500 million and a share buyback program of up to $1 billion of the company's shares of common stock. 

Best natural gas play may be WMB. [Disclaimer: this is not an investment site; do not make any investment decisions on anything you read at this site.]

RBN Energy: a look at the economics of natural gas processing plants

Natural gas processing plants are being built or expanded at a feverish pace.  At least 90 projects are in the works around the U.S., expected to add more than 15 Bcf/d of capacity according to the latest Bentek NGL Facilities Databank numbers. 

How do the economics of these investments work? We know that it is a lot more complicated than a simple frac spread.  But does that mean the calculations must be exclusively the purview of engineers armed with gas plant optimization models? 

Heck no.  Anybody, even an MBA with a spreadsheet, a few standard factors and a gas analysis can figure out how a gas processing plant makes money.  So to prove that point today we’ll dive one more time into natural gas processing economics to understand how the composition of an inlet gas stream is converted to outlet streams of natural gas liquids and residue gas.

WSJ, p. A17: Infostructure is the new infrastructure. Excellent piece of writing.

In today's economy there are three big problems with the conventional case for infrastructure spending ...

... the first is that nothing is shovel-ready any more ... NIMBY ... by the time a project is approved, the recession is ancient history...

.... the second problem ... government contracts are gold-plated ... drives the cost ... to levels at which potentially sensible projects make no sense ....

... and third problem is more fundamental ... the challenge isn't to move more meat; it is to move more information more effectively, and to re-engineer business practices and social organization to take full advantage of the extraordinary efficiencies that the Internet affords...

... Gov Jerry Brown defends California's indefensible high-speed rail boondoggle by arguing that without it, increased demand for travel along the Los Angeles-San Francisco corridor will lead to choked highways and hopelessly congested air corridors.

That's not where the 21st century is taking us. The faux-environmentalists in California should have defeated this boondoggle; the money would have been better spent on info-infrastructure.