Active rigs: 183
Wells coming off confidential list have been posted. OXY USA with a nice well.
RBN Energy:
Bakken crude logistics favor pipeline over rail
Earnings surprise: MHR reports earnings of 5 cents/share, easily blowing past analysts' consensus of an eleven-cent loss. Wow.
WSJ Links
Interesting:
NYMEX crude to climb back to prominence --
As new pipelines winnow down a glut of crude in the U.S. Midwest, oil
futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange are starting to better
reflect world prices, increasing the contract's appeal to investors.
Nymex crude settled at $103.14 a barrel Monday, less than $5 below
Brent, the global benchmark. A month ago, the gap was more than twice as
large; in February, it was $23. Historically, Nymex futures typically
traded within a few dollars of Brent oil from the North Sea, a rival
contract offered by IntercontinentalExchange Inc.
The market's return to its old structure is luring some investors
back to Nymex oil and signals an end to a trade in which investors bet
on whether the gap would widen or shrink.
"Whenever I've traded oil in the past year or two, I've always taken
Brent. Now, I'm more open-minded," said Jeffrey Sherman,
commodities-portfolio manager at DoubleLine Capital LP, which manages
$57 billion. "The markets are reconnecting…the [Nymex] market is coming
back to being the barometer."
Then this, from "Heard on the Street":
Europe's oil majors should focus on shareholders.
New [European oil company] projects are looking less profitable. A further 18% of European oil
majors' capital investment is going on projects that need an oil price
at $80 or above to avoid making a negative return, Goldman estimates.
For Total and Royal Dutch Shell, nearly a quarter of their investment is
going on projects that need oil prices to remain relatively high.
Who wudda thought? One of the
nation's world's top business schools is selling its campus to a for-profit college operator due to financial stress.
Thunderbird, which was founded in 1946 on a former Air Force base in
Glendale, Ariz., has long identified itself as a training ground for
global business leaders, even requiring its full-time students to
display proficiency in two languages. But that claim carries less weight
as more schools tag their own programs as "global" and open outposts
across Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
Applications to Thunderbird's two-year, full-time M.B.A. have tumbled
by nearly 75% in the past 15 years, and less than half of job-seeking
students from last year's class landed positions within three months of
graduation. Despite adding a number of short and Web-based programs, the
student body shrank by 8% from 2007 to 2012.
Thunderbird's woes reflect the existential crises that many business
schools now face as demand softens for full-time, two-year M.B.A.s.
Graduate business programs historically fared well during economic
downturns as workers sought to beef up their resumes in a tough job
market, but the prolonged recession gave many prospective students pause
as they worried about taking on debt without seeing clear return on the
investment.
Utilities take a hit from regulators on solar-power systems. A very slippery slope indeed.
Regulators in two states recently sided with the solar-power industry
and homeowners who have solar-energy systems, marking defeats for
electric utilities faced with a fast-growing constituency that is
cutting into their revenue.
The Idaho Public Utilities Commission last week rejected a proposal
to raise monthly fees paid by homeowners and small businesses who
install solar panels, denying a petition from Idaho Power Co., which
serves Boise and other parts of southern Idaho.
Fracking firms face new crop of competitors.
So many companies have jumped into the hydraulic-fracturing business
that the price of performing the key part of the oil- and gas-drilling
technique has plunged in recent years, forcing fracking's pioneers to
play up new technologies to stand out.
Schlumberger Ltd., Halliburton Co.
and BJ Services, a company that is now a subsidiary of Baker Hughes Inc.,
once did nearly all the hydraulic-fracturing work in the U.S., helping
energy companies unlock previously unreachable oil and natural gas in
shale formations and ushering in a boom in domestic energy production.
But
their profits attracted competition and spurred the construction of new
fracking fleets by independent companies. Now their share of the market
for pressure pumping—the main step in the fracking process, in which
water and other materials are injected into a well to break apart rock
formations and unleash oil or gas—has dropped off as smaller, cheaper
competitors have proved they could do similar work.
The Front Section: what happened to Syria? What happened to Afghanistan? What happened to Yemen? Amazing. Every week it's a different country, a different revolution, a different crisis. This week it is Egypt.
Many stories starting to come out about the "runaway freight train."
The operator of the runaway train that derailed and exploded in
Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, this weekend recorded an accident rate far higher
than the U.S. average over the past 10 years, federal data show.
A train operated by Montreal Maine & Atlantic Railway Inc., a
subsidiary of U.S. train operator Rail World Inc., is at the center of a
Canadian probe after the train was left unmanned at a crew rest stop
and slammed into the small town early Saturday, triggering a deadly
explosion and fire.
Rail World is controlled by a Chicago-area railroad veteran, Edward
Burkhardt, who has put together an empire of small railroads around the
world. Mr. Burkhardt, Rail World's chairman and chief executive, has
spent a lifetime in the industry, earning the respect of many fellow
rail executives.
But the 74-year-old Yale graduate has also faced criticism for a
bitter battle with one of his boards and for championing the
controversial use of remote-controlled trains in rail yards and
one-person crews. The deadly Quebec derailment has put MM&A's safety
record under a microscope.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada, the country's main
investigator of rail accidents, doesn't publicly post safety records of
individual operators, but does make that data available upon request.
MM&A didn't turn up in a basic record search of Canadian accidents. A
spokesman for the safety board said late Monday that a fuller record
wasn't immediately available.
Op-Ed: can environmentalists think?
As environmental disasters go, the explosion Saturday of a runaway
train that destroyed much of the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, about 20
miles from the Maine border, will probably go down the memory hole.
It lacks the correct moral and contains an inconvenient truth.
Not that the disaster lacks the usual
ingredients of such a moral. The derailed 72-car train belonged to a
subsidiary of Illinois-based multinational Rail World, whose
self-declared aim is to "promote rail industry privatization." The train
was carrying North Dakota shale oil (likely extracted by fracking) to
the massive Irving Oil refinery in the port city of Saint John, to be
shipped to the global market. At least five people were killed in the
blast (a number that's likely to rise) and 1,000 people were forced to
evacuate. Quebec's environment minister reports that some 100,000 liters
(26,000 gallons) of crude have spilled into the Chaudière River,
meaning it could reach Quebec City and the St. Lawrence River before too
long.
Environmentalists should be howling. But this brings us to the inconvenient truth.
The reason oil is moved on trains from
places like North Dakota and Alberta is because there aren't enough
pipelines to carry it. The provincial governments of Alberta and New
Brunswick are talking about building a pipeline to cover the 3,000-odd
mile distance. But last month President Obama put the future of the
Keystone XL pipeline again in doubt, telling a Georgetown University
audience "our national interest will be served only if this project does
not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution."
Yes, this was obvious from day 1 but yet another editorial is needed, I guess.
President O'Bama suspends the law.
President Obama's decision last week to suspend the employer mandate
of the Affordable Care Act may be welcome relief to businesses affected
by this provision, but it raises grave concerns about his understanding
of the role of the executive in our system of government.
Article II, Section 3, of the
Constitution states that the president "shall take Care that the Laws be
faithfully executed." This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While
the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so.
This matter—the limits of executive
power—has deep historical roots. During the period of royal absolutism,
English monarchs asserted a right to dispense with parliamentary
statutes they disliked. King James II's use of the prerogative was a key
grievance that lead to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The very first
provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689—the most important
precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that "the pretended power of
suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority,
without consent of parliament, is illegal."
If Congress does not address the abuse of power, it reveals how far we have moved toward a monarchy form of government.
