Thursday: Fast-Tracked?

The AP is reporting via Rigzone:

A Canadian company on Wednesday started delivering oil through the Texas portion of a proposed cross-border pipeline that has stirred controversy and tension between the United States and its northern neighbor. TransCanada began delivering oil from a hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, to customers in Nederland, Texas, early Wednesday, Alex Pourbaix, president of energy and oil pipelines, said at a news conference.

The company expects to complete a smaller pipeline that will transport oil from Nederland to refineries near Houston later this year.

The $2.3 billion pipeline from Cushing to Texas is the Gulf Coast — or southern portion — of TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline. This shorter leg will begin transporting on average about 300,000 barrels of oil daily and should end the year at an average of about 520,000 barrels, Pourbaix said.

The longer Keystone XL, which would transport heavy tar sands crude from Canada and oil from North Dakota's Bakken shale, requires a permit from President Barack Obama because it crosses an international border. That $5.4 billion segment has not yet been approved. Obama fast-tracked the shorter, southern portion of the pipeline with the hope of relieving a bottleneck in Oklahoma.

Active rigs in North Dakota:

	1/23/2014	01/23/2013	01/23/2012	01/23/2011	01/23/2010
Active Rigs	187	190	203	165	87

RBN Energy: first in a series on royalties for mineral owners. 

There has been a great deal of publicity around royalties involved with the shale gas—stories of instant millionaires (or “shaleionaires,” as 60 Minutes called them in 2010), stories of producers reducing or even eliminating some royalty payments as the vast oversupply of natural gas took hold in the last couple of years, stories of long, excruciating negotiations to reach a royalty/lease agreement, only to find out that the seller’s side of the table didn’t actually contain the owner of the rights, and stories of neighbors turning on each other when they got radically different deals based on timing or whom they were dealing with, and so on.  

Unless you have been directly involved in leasing and royalty work, a lot of it can be confusing.  So today we begin a blog series to illuminate the world of mineral rights, oil & gas leases and royalties.

 The Wall Street Journal

Cheating probe roils Philadelphia school system.

Nearly 140 teachers and administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of the nation's largest cheating scandals, according to district officials, who also said Wednesday that they will spend the next few weeks disciplining or firing dozens of employees.

The Pennsylvania attorney general's office also is conducting a criminal investigation into the allegations, according to a person familiar with the matter. Three principals were fired late last week as part of the probe, which grew out of a 2009 state analysis of questionable erasure patterns on test booklets on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment math and reading exams. 

Shock! Shock! I'm shocked to learn there is cheating in Philadelphia! Shocked! Round up the usual suspects. It's gonna be a slow news day if that was in the front section of The WSJ.

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If the jury doesn't like a law, they can acquit an otherwise-guilty individual through a process known as "nullification" in New Hampshire. Live free or die. There's something inherently wrong with that but it is not surprising. The judge who ruled that probably went to same law school as the president.

The debt-ceiling deadline is now "put" at late February. With some smoke and mirrors, "we" can easily get this deadline out to April, and then the income tax revenue starts rolling in .

The EU's suicide plan: it forges ahead with climate plan. Neither side likes the plan, so it must be perfect.

Boeing adds workers at South Carolina plant to address Dreamline "hiccups."

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Elsewhere

MarketWatch is reporting that California is close to meeting ObamaCare's enrollment targets.

Halfway through the process, officials running the Obamacare program in California said Tuesday they are close to reaching the minimum expected enrollment for subsidy-eligible consumers and have surpassed the half-million mark in overall signups.

That should end the discussion on success/failure of ObamaCare.