Wednesday Morning News, Views, And Links -- Part I

Active rigs: 186 (steady)

RBN Energy: another excellent analysis of the natural gas glut and what the industry is doing about. One has to chuckle: elsewhere folks are frustrated by the "waste" of natural gas that is flared. Wait until they start choking back Bakken wells because of the flaring. Most folks probably don't recall that natural gas dropped to five cents/million BTU back in the nineties and traded for as little as a penny.  Operators won't pay for service lines when natural gas is trading for a nickel. With the reversal of REX, the Rocky Mountain region is going to see another influx of natural gas, from the Marcellus/Utica.

WSJ Links

US refiners don't care if Keystone XL gets built. We've been saying that for quite some time:

U.S. companies that refine oil increasingly doubt that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline expansion will ever be built, and now they don't particularly care.

Railroads are carrying soaring amounts of crude from Canada down to refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast, reducing the need for the TransCanada Corp. project, which is still awaiting approval from the U.S. government after two years of delays.

Meanwhile, a rival pipeline company, Enbridge Inc., is expanding existing pipes to carry Canadian crude south—and it doesn't need federal permission because it's using existing pipeline rights of way. In addition, so much oil is sloshing around the U.S. from its own wells that refiners don't need lots more heavy crude from the north to keep busy.

"Keystone XL has been back-burnered for so long that any relevant parties have been able to make plans as though the project never even existed in the first place," says Sam Margolin, an analyst at Cowen & Co.

TransCanada designed the proposed conduit to ship 830,000 barrels a day of heavy crude from western Canada, as well as lighter-grade oil from North Dakota shale fields, to the U.S. refining complex along the Gulf of Mexico.

Collateral casualties/unintended consequences. I guess the House just doesn't have time to consider immigration now that the debate over the Syrian missile crisis begins a new chapter. The House GOP signals it won't bring any immigration bills to the floor.  Folks can thank President O'Bama; there simply isn't room on the agenda, what with the Syrian thing now.

Op-Ed: we've been saying this for months -- the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" continues to wide. Obama's economy hits the poor, single women, and minorities the most (as in worse). At least they have their O'BamaPhones.