Wednesday, The Morning After The Speech, And The Market Plummets; Argus Leader, 1 -- USDA, 0

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on what you read here or what you think you may have read here.

Active rigs:

	1/29/2014	01/29/2013	01/29/2012	01/29/2011	01/29/2010
Active Rigs	190	187	204	163	90

RBN Energy: propane exports exceed 400,000 b/d for first time.

We’ve been talking a lot over the past year about the need for increasing exports to balance the U.S propane market as growth in production from gas processing plants outruns domestic demand.  U.S. propane production from gas processing has increased by over 100 Mb/d since January 2013, and there’s lots more to come.  For the first time U.S. propane exports exceeded 400 Mb/d in October 2013 thanks to growing U.S supply and infrastructure developments including dock expansions by Enterprise and Targa.  But just after exports ramped up, the propane market was hit by a couple of wild cards – a late and very heavy crop drying season and a series of record cold temperature events. In today’s blog, we continue our series covering the record setting 2014 NGL markets.

The Wall Street Journal

Front page, on-line: North Dakota reacts to drilling critics: extraordinary sites. Slippery, slippery slope.

Shell plans boat to tap gas fields.

Shipyard workers in South Korea are building a hull for the Anglo-Dutch company that stretches more than 1,600 feet from bow to stern. The boat will drop anchor in a natural-gas field, chill the gas into liquid and pump it into tankers.

The vessel, christened Prelude, will produce enough natural gas to supply Hong Kong for a year, according to Shell. The company says the giant project will help Shell develop gas fields that are too small or far-flung to justify the pricey pipelines and onshore processing plants needed for offshore gas fields.

Thank goodness for fracking.

Freezing temperatures are creating near-record demand for natural gas in the U.S. as shivering Americans turn up the heat and plug in their electric blankets.

Natural-gas prices have jumped in response, topping $5 per million British thermal units for the first time since 2010 as fuel has been pulled from underground storage vaults to keep furnaces running and electric utilities humming.

But compared with past cold snaps, such as in 2000, the price surge has been muted, according to utilities and other big gas users. That is good news for businesses and consumers. Manufacturers that consume large amounts of the fuel—steelmakers, for example—say they have trouble planning for sharp price changes. And homeowners on fixed incomes can be hit especially hard when utilities raise prices. 

I've mentioned this several times, if not on the blog, in e-mail correspondence, that this is the longest sustained period of "high prices" for oil (if not natural gas). It is a lot easier to manage sustained high prices than extreme volatility. See EIA for natural gas prices going back to 1973.

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I knew they had a good quarter; I just didn't realize it was this good. DuPont 4Q13 profit doubles.  Pundits "blaming" the market's three-digit pullback today on earnings are full ... hot air. It's all about emotion surrounding "tapering," Ben's swan song today. By the end of the week (in two days), it will be forgotten. It's possible that the durable goods report, plunging 4.3% is the real culprit behind the market fall. But I  think it's tapering.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on what you read here or what you think you may have read here. 

 The Los Angeles Times

I was curious how this would turn out.

A jury finds that the Democrat lied about his address on voter registration and candidacy papers in 2007 and 2008 and voted fraudulently in five elections. He could get more than eight years in prison. 

Jail time? Not gonna happen. The courts have told Gov Brown to empty the overcrowded jails. If he does get prison time, six months, then probation.

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The man "who lived in "permanent present tense":

If you know that a small seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain -- the hippocampus -- is crucial to committing new facts and skills to memory, you have not only your hippocampus to thank; you also owe a debt of gratitude to Henry Gustav Molaison, known to brain scientists worldwide as the amnesic patient "H.M."

A new study shows that in death as in life, the man who lived 55 years virtually unable to form new memories deepened our understanding of what it takes to make them. More specifically, it clearly shows that after surgery to remove H.M.'s hippocampus and surrounding tissue as a treatment for epilepsy in 1953, portions of the structure remained in both hemispheres of his brain.

Elsewhere

Politico is reporting:

A federal appeals court has rejected the Obama Administration's attempt to keep secret the government's data on how much individual retailers take in from the food stamp program. 

In a ruling Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit turned down the U.S. Department of Agriculture's arguments that a provision in federal law protecting retailers' application information from disclosure also barred disclosure of how much the feds pay out to specific businesses.

"Because the retailer spending information is not 'submit[ted]' by 'an applicant retail food store or wholesale food concern...' the information is not exempt from disclosure.

The judges acted on an appeal filed by South Dakota's [Sioux Falls] Argus Leader newspaper after the USDA turned down the paper's Freedom of Information Act request for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments to individual retailers on an annual basis from 2005 to 2010. A district court judge agreed with the federal government's argument that part of the food stamp program statute barred such disclosure, making the data exempt from FOIA.

It probably would have been best to get this information out back in 2011 when the president's ratings were sky-high. Now, Argus Leader has opportunity to publish a Pulitzer-winning story just as we go into the election cycle. 

Good for the Argus Leader. I really don't care about the story, but I have fond memories of the Sioux Falls newspaper. Glad to see it's still in the hunt.