Odds And Ends

Venezuela falters.

North Dakota training diesel refinery operators -- fast tracking -- maybe President Obama will come out to see this job training, the kind of job training he keeps talking about. Jobs that pay starting wages three to four times minimum wage. With benefits.

Kansas to Maine: global warming to impact 100 million.  A major winter storm with heavy snow, ice and a wintry mix will reach from the central Plains to the Midwest and Northeast spanning Tuesday night and Wednesday. It will hit barely after some people had time to dig out from two prior storms in the Midwest and the Monday storm in the Northeast.

Another national pipeline and MLP in the news. Yahoo!Finance is reporting:

Texas Eastern Transmission LP, a unit of Spectra Energy Partners LP, filed with U.S. federal energy regulators to build a pipeline extension that would allow it to move natural gas from Ohio to the Gulf Coast.

In the past, most gas flowed from the Gulf Coast and the U.S. and Canadian West to the heavily populated U.S. Midwest and Northeast. But with record gas production in shale plays like the Marcellus in Pennsylvania and Utica in Ohio, pipeline companies like Texas Eastern are now looking to reverse the direction of some of their pipelines to move gas out of the Midwest and Northeast to meet growing industrial on the Gulf Coast.

Texas Eastern proposed in its filing last week with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to spend about $468 million to build 76 miles of 30-inch pipeline from the Kensington processing plant in Columbiana County, OH, to interconnect with Texas Eastern's existing hub in Monroe County, OH.

The project would turn a large segment of the Texas Eastern system into a bidirectional pipeline, the company said. The so-called Ohio Pipeline Energy Network Project would be capable of transporting 550,000 dekatherms of gas per day from Ohio to the Gulf Coast, the company said in the filing.