Time To Clean Out The Mail

It's 8:38 p.m. I think Starbucks closes at 9:00, maybe 10:00 p.m. I will work as fast as I can. (I just noted the time stamp is still eastern standard time.)

I will simply post the links, perhaps make a short comment and move on. Most of the links will break over time, so if you are interested, you better look at them this week.

First, Steve has sent me links to a series of articles on the huge transmission line folks in New Hampshire are fighting. I posted the link to the first of the three installments earlier. This is the third installment. From the third installment, you can probably find the first and second. I've lost interest in activist environmentalists fighting the energy companies. I've noted a few things. First, the journalists are generally young, idealistic, and looking for a story. Second, the number of activist environmentalists on most issues can probably be counted on one hand. Those are the two or three people the young, idealistic, and naive journalists quote. Third, the vast majority of Americans are probably tired of seeing their energy bills go up, and they know why their utility bills are going up, but they are too busy just trying to survive, hold a job, raise a family to fight the activist environmentalists who have outside, out-of-state, and out-of-country funding. Here's the second installment.

Steve sent me this incredible story: ATT and Verizon capitalizing on the Bakken.

Bloomberg reported that Verizon, which has extensive DFW operations, has hit the oil patch in the northern United States where it has installed 17 new cellular towers in North Dakota and eastern Montana. There aren't many humans in the area, but there are plenty of machines involved in oil exploration and production, and that's where Verizon hopes it can drill into new profits.

"It's amazing, when you look around here and see the massive amounts of equipment," Mark Bartolomeo, a vice president at Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) told Bloomberg.

Bartolomeo said the company is pitching its LTE wireless coverage in North Dakota and eastern Montana as a network for oil companies' Web-capable smart sensors and pumps.

Yes, the operators can control their North Dakota pumps from their headquarters in Oklahoma and Texas. At least that's what I've been told.

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This link will close out the last of three stories sent in this particular note from Steve. Again, a very interesting perspective from The Washington Post: "Energy is gradually decoupling from economic growth."

Here's what this graph is showing: Ever since the 1970s, the world appears to be using less and less energy to produce a given unit of economic activity. Much of that has likely been achieved through technology — more fuel-efficient trucks, more efficient power plants, more energy-efficient manufacturing techniques. That allows us to do more with less.

One question is whether this trend will continue in the future. The analysts at BP are predicting the decoupling will accelerate in the next two decades: "Energy consumption grows less rapidly than the global economy," they note, "with GDP growth averaging 3.5% p.a. 2012-35. As a result energy intensity, the amount of energy required per unit of GDP, declines by 36% (1.9% p.a.) between 2012 and 2035."

Considering that Obama has effectively shut down all job growth in this country outside of energy, I doubt the US will be able to decouple growth from energy any time soon. And he's doing his best to shut down job growth in the energy sector also.

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A reader just sent me this link: Canadian environment groups challenge oil pipeline approvals. No longer interests me. Let Canada do what it wants to do. Let activist environmentalists do what they want to do. I don't have a dog in that fight. See my first entry above regarding the story from New Hampshire that Steve sent me.

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Don sent me this blurb from GE's earnings call:

Our earnings for the quarter were about $31 billion, a record. We also ended the year with a record high backlog of $244 billion. We had growth in both equipment and services. There was real strength in power and water. We ended the year with 125 orders for heavy duty gas turbines. Power gen services grew by 9%, which was actually 16% excluding Europe.

For service, 6% revenue growth was the best quarterly result in 2013. Highlights include 54 advanced gas paths. Aviation spares grew by 17%. The oil and gas services grew by 17%.

(Many US wind farms were granted tax credits for starting construction in 2013, even though they may not produce electricity until late 2014. The one located near Hettinger, ND is one of these.) 

Wind orders were up 63%. We had orders for 779 wind turbines versus 412 in the fourth quarter of ’12, principally driven by U.S. demand. And wind backlog was up 43% for the year.

I no longer care about wind energy: companies are simply buying wind farms for the tax credits. I know longer care about solar energy: after twenty years of investment, solar energy provides 0.1% of the electricity for the US. GE can talk all they want about wind and solar; they are making their money from conventional energy sources.

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Don sent me this link on TPLM in SeekingAlpha. I've posted it at my TPLM web page.

Don also me this link -- the propane story -- I posted a stand-alone post on this one. This is a huge story. A must read.

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Steve sent me this article on SolarCity. A lot of money will be made in the renewable energy niche for nimble traders. I am neither: neither nimble nor a trader. Good luck to those who are.

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I will continue to post global warming stories just to tweak the warmists, but as with solar energy and wind energy, I no longer care about global warming. It's obvious that the warmists belong to a cult; global warming is a religion, and I don't post much on religion on the blog. But for those interested, Antarctic ice has set another record. And for the record, the Arctic ice cap is inconsequential compared to the Antarctic ice cap. Let the Arctic all melt and life will go on. Perhaps not for the polar bears.

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This is probably the craziest story this week -- a company was fined for dumping sand into a river. 

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From The Washington Post, how the oil boom could affect US foreign policy, in six charts. Those charts were linked/referenced from another article/interview.

Oh, yes, I remember this article on solar power. I posted/linked it earlier. It tells me all I need to know about solar energy as a viable energy source for the United States. This article, from among all I've read, pretty much ends my interest in solar, though I will still post articles on renewable energy. But this story has the 0.1% data point.

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Don sent me a number of articles on global warming and the resurgence of the automobile market. Automobile manufacturing will set new records. I won't post the links. Suffice it to say, the global warming cultists will be driving those automobiles next year and for the next 30 years. And many of those cultists will be driving SUVs with gasoline engines. I know Algore has several. SUVs.

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This is probably my favorite story. Proves my point on so many issues. Bloomberg is reporting:

Electricity prices in Boston, which reached record premiums to New York costs last month, are poised to remain at all-time highs through March because of bottlenecks on natural-gas pipelines.

New England’s reliance on the fuel for power generation has grown to 52 percent from about 30 percent in 2001, though there have been no new pipelines transporting gas to the six-state region in 40 years.

In New York, lines from wells in the Marcellus shale deposits of Pennsylvania and West Virginia boosted deliveries by more than 1 billion cubic feet a day this winter, enough to heat about 3 million homes.

Wholesale power in Boston is trading at the highest January premium to New York since at least 2005, according to grid data compiled by Bloomberg.

Prices in New York recovered faster from a blast of arctic cold last week because of the increased gas supplies. The power premium may widen later this year and into 2015 as a Vermont nuclear reactor and one of the region’s largest coal plants are set to close, according to BNP Paribas SA. A new gas pipeline to New England isn’t scheduled to begin operations until 2016.

I have blogged about this extensively. The New England problem is all man-made. Presidents come and go. Governors come and go. Bloomberg might have also noted that New York continues to ban fracking. Let them eat cake. Best story of the week.

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Don sent me this link on Chevron in SeekingAlpha. If I had to liquidate all my holdings, Chevron would be the last one I would liquidate. I would probably fall on my USAF ceremonial sword before I sold Chevron: seppuku. My wife and daughters would collect a lot of insurance. Yes, after holding life insurance for two years, it is my understanding that insurance companies pay out on life insurance even if seppuku is noted by the coroner on the death certificate.

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I have not forgotten about ObamaCare. The only metric worth noting will be the increased premiums in October, 2014. Everything else is background noise.

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And that's it -- turn on the lights, put on the backpack, put on the reflective tape, and start pedaling.

Good luck to all. I hope to be around in the a.m. to post the top stories of the week and quote the Saturday edition of The Wall Street Journal. I see the Democrat-led Senate was unable to pass a bill to extend unemployment insurance. A lot of struggling families tonight; the Senators will be feasting at fundraisers this long weekend. Sad.

By the way, that reminds me. I have a wonderful quote from a German historian from a book on classical Athens. If I remember, I will post it sometime. But not tonight.