Saturday Morning Links, News, And Views

I have posted several notes already this morning, including the summary of NDIC's August dockets -- scroll down. I have also updated two polls, and added a new link to a new Mike Filloon essay on ceramics vs sand.

[Odds and ends: Platts has an interesting article -- the western Canadian oil is going to displace Canadian's east coast offshore oil --

All the proposed pipelines across eastern Canada are capturing headlines, but are leaving three crudes out in the cold, literally.
Hibernia, Terra Nova and White Rose, the three grades produced from fields offshore Newfoundland and Labrador, have long been a part of the local market for refineries along the North American East Coast and eastern Canada.

Now, with the TransCanada announcing it will proceed on its Energy East pipeline project and Enbridge reversing the flow of its Line 9 pipeline, the three offshore grades are likely to be pushed out of those markets.

If and when these pipelines are completed (likely sometime around 2018), eastern Canada will be flooded with just under 2 million b/d of crudes from the fields in western Alberta. Since the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers expects production from this region to reach 4.61 million b/d by 2020, there should be plenty of oil to go around.

Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, is converting its 88,000 b/d Dartmouth refinery in Nova Scotia into a products terminal at the end of this year. It was one of the main buyers for Hibernia crude, cutting out demand for that grade.

Even if demand remained steady, however, the logistics of providing east coast crudes to area refineries is changing. The east coast crude operators use the 236-mile Portland-Montreal Pipeline to get their supply into the local market. But refiners have essentially stopped using the line in anticipation that it will be reversed along with Enbridge’s Line 9.]

Before I close down for the day, some quick WSJ Links.

The top story: low pays clouds job growth. 

The U.S. labor market's long, slow recovery slowed further in July—and many of the jobs that were created were in low-wage industries.

Employers added a seasonally adjusted 162,000 jobs in July, the fewest since March, the Labor Department said Friday, and hiring was also weaker in May and June than initially reported. Moreover, more than half the job gains were in the restaurant and retail sectors, both of which pay well under $20 an hour on average. 

"These jobs count as jobs in the jobs reports, but there's very little attention paid to the kind of jobs these are," said Arne Kalleberg, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina and the author of the book "Good Jobs, Bad Jobs." "They tend to be low-wage jobs, they tend to be in retail and personal-service-type sectors, many of them are part time.

The drop in the unemployment rate is also the result of a job market that remains too weak to draw back workers who have dropped out of the labor force. Some 6.6 million workers say they want a job but don't count as unemployed because they aren't actively looking, a number that has barely budged in the past year. The number of Americans working or looking for work fell by 37,000 in July; as a share of the population, the labor force remains near a three-decade low.

This is really cool; this was just a matter of time -- Prius tricked out as a lowrider!

Many Prius "pimpers" have followed the lead of comedian Tommy Chong. He turned his hybrid into a black lowrider, with its body lowered to the ground, and added red and gray detailing and tinted windows in 2006. Mr. Chong, 75, who came to fame as half of the Cheech & Chong comedy duo, installed hydraulics to lift the car up and down, blacked out the taillights, and added a loud exhaust.

Maybe I need to visit the Sports Bar earlier than expected this afternoon: Tiger Woods is chasing an elusive 59:

Tiger Woods thrilled golf fans Friday by drawing close to golf's magic number: 59.
A birdie-eagle-birdie start at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational, followed by birdies on No. 7 and holes 10 through 13, pushed Woods to nine-under-par on the par-70 Firestone Country Club course.

But he missed a short birdie putt on 15, miss hit a wedge from 90 yards on 16, and missed another short birdie on 17—a microcosm, perhaps, of his disappointing final rounds while in contention at this year's U.S. and British Opens.

Woods salvaged par from off the green at 18 for a course record-tying 61 and a seven-stroke lead. Only five players in PGA Tour history have shot 59s. 

NASCAR this evening at 7:00 pm CDT.

Whatever happened to Syria. Mexico, Mali, Cambodia, and Bangladesh with headline stories, but nothing on Syria. Nor Benghazi, for that matter.