Look At All That Crude; Look At Verizon's Free iPad Data Plan

First, a reminder -- one of two nominees for the 2013 Geico Rock Award.

Second, a reminder -- for me the "Bakken" represents three things: a) the physical entity, the North Dakota oil patch; b) the fracking revolution laboratory for the world; and, c) a philosophy or rugged individualism of the midwest (which, by the way, is the subject of a new book, due out tomorrow: The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters).

But I digress.

Look at all the oil that will reach the Texas coast in the coming years, starting next year. RBN Energy reports that the Texas gulf coast will soon be flooded with crude oil:

If you add up the numbers since the start of 2012 just under 2 MMb/d of transport capacity has been added to bring crude into the Texas Gulf Coast refining region. In the next two years (2014 and 2015) we expect another 2.1 MMb/d of crude pipeline and rail transport capacity to be added. In total that is over 4.1 MMb/d of potential incoming crude – to a region with just under 3.7 MMb/d of nameplate refining capacity.

This is a huge, huge story. Can you imagine if the Keystone XL had been built! Where would all that oil have gone. Crude oil prices would have plummeted! Gasoline prices would be 65 cents/gallon. Saudi would be bankrupt. These are incredibly, incredibly exciting times.

Hey, speaking of oil and oil prices. Yesterday, I happened to talk with a BNSF executive who had been with the company for 25 years. I told him how excited I had been with BNSF all these years. BNI was the first individual stock I ever bought (maybe it was MDU; I forget, but BNI was one of the first) and loved it. And then Warren bought it. On the good side, Warren has saved me a lot of money. I used to pay a lot of federal taxes on BNI dividends. Not any more.

I never post anything I hear from the industry directly unless I can corroborate it independently in the "public" media, so no more about that conversation.

On another note. Back to the RBN Energy story. As regular readers know, I regularly feature YouTube music videos (I do that to get around iPad peculiarities). In the past week week or so, I've been adding "Underground Velvet" videos. Today I see RBN Energy has a short note on the Underground Velvet and Lou Reed. Very, very nice. There are many, many ways to thank folks. Thank you.

Oh, one last thing. Speaking of iPads, which I happened to mention above. I have the oldest version, iPad 1. I pay $15/month for a 250 MB of data which is about four webpages/day. I really don't need a new iPad, but I lust after a new version. But I don't want to pay more than $15/month for data. And then I see this: Verizon will provide 200 MB for free if one signs up with Verizon when buying any model of the iPad. That's exactly what I need. No strings attached. I plan to buy a new iPad by the end of the week and will cancel my existing ATT plan. Wow. I love free market capitalism.