TGIF And Free Speech; And A Big Jump In Active Rigs In The Bakken

Active rigs: 190 -- wow, that's a surprise.

RBN Energy: Ethane and North American LNG exports.

The U.S. can make a lot more ethane than it can consume.  Producers are drilling for ‘wet’ shale gas, high in natural gas liquid (NGL) content – with ethane making up more than half of that NGL volume.  Unfortunately there is not enough U.S. petrochemical cracking capacity to use all that ethane.  And for a whole variety of reasons the product has been notoriously difficult to export.  Consequently, over 250Mb/d of ethane is being rejected – sold as natural gas instead of being processed into liquid ethane.  What if there were a ready market for all this surplus ethane supply, just waiting to open its doors?  Well, there just may be.  The emerging U.S. LNG export market may be able to absorb a big portion of the supply imbalance, and make LNG buyers happy at the same time.  In this blog series we will explore that possibility and consider the implications for the ethane market in North America.

Public service announcement: this happened to one of my wife's friends -- locked out of her computer files. Read the story. Be particularly careful with iPads. It sounds like there are situations in which iPads will momentarily open attachments during the process of deleting an unopened, spam e-mail. I don't know if that can happen, but according to this individual that's how it happened. 

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That last note came from a DrudgeReport link that is no longer there; Drudge has outstanding "search" capabilities, however. As long as I'm at the Drudge site, I'm glad to see Camille Paglia weighed in on this.

The suspension of Phil Robertson from A&E’s Duck Dynasty is outrageous in a nation that values freedom, according to social critic and openly gay, dissident feminist Camille Paglia.

“I speak with authority here, because I was openly gay before the ‘Stonewall rebellion,’ when it cost you something to be so. And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech,” Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Thursday. I've enjoyed Paglia's writings ever since reading (twice) her Sexual Personae. 

Again, I could care less (or couldn't care less about the Duck Dynasty -- I've never watched it; never will), but it's hard for me to believe that some folks still believe in "free speech" as long as it fits their personal beliefs. It's somewhat ironic that it's the private sector, and not the government, that is doing the censoring today.