Monday, Monday -- April 7, 2014 -- Last Day That Starbucks Coffee Is On Sale (This Cycle)

Tea leaves suggest geo-politics will be big story this week: from China to the Crimean.

Active rigs:

	4/7/2014	04/07/2013	04/07/2012	04/07/2011	04/07/2010
Active Rigs	192	187	208	171	103

RBN Energy: the four barriers to ethane export.

• Terminal infrastructure: There is little or no trading of waterborne ethane today
• Shipping: For the same reason there are no ethane unloading docks today, there are no ethane ships.
• Pricing:
• Petrochemical demand:

The Wall Street Journal

Top story: Hillary's phantom campaign squeezes other candidates; by the way, all photos of Hillary suggest a "Thatcher" look

Phony calls from ObamaPhones plaguing 911 centers

Some dems fight Obama over Medicare: worried about higher premiums for seniors

Investors clamoring for dividend-paying companies

News From Readers

Cove Point, MD, to become first operational natural gas export facility on east coast; Chesapeake; 2015. Huge story, reported in BuffaloNews.  

Regarding the new transloading facility east of east Fairview (on the ND side of the state line):

This property starts north of Hwy 200 just out of Fairview, MT and runs north for approximately  1 3/4 miles with acreage on east and west of existing railroad track. Google Northstar Loading. They have a site map you can view.

15 billion bbls of recoverable oil in the Monterey Shale -- LA Times. Might as well be on the moon. Three obstacles:

• activist environmentalists against Big Oil
• fear of earthquakes by "everyone"
• tectonics resulting in very, very confusing geology; ground constantly shifts

I can never get this site to load, but there are "two burgeoning markets that stress rail": wheat and ethanol competing for CBR space.

I think this is a much bigger story than many folks realize. AirProducts completes the $1 billion hydrogen pipeline running from north Louisiana to south Louisiana. I remember talking about the hydrogen shortage just two years ago. Hydrogen, in addition to all its other uses, is used for cooling high-tech equipment.

This is another huge story not on the radar scope of many folks: Texas will benefit as Pemex monopoly comes to an end. The San Antonio Express-News is reporting:

As Mexico moves forward to allow foreign investment in its energy industry — including shale development — the change will be a great economic benefit to Texas, Railroad Commissioner David Porter said Tuesday.

The state's booming Eagle Ford Shale formation doesn't end at the border; it continues into Mexico. As it and other shale plays in Mexico are tapped, “there is potential for U.S. companies and technologies to go there to work,” said Porter, who spoke at a meeting of the Eagle Ford Task Force in San Antonio.

The Los Angeles Times

Security holes in power grid have federal officials scrambling. So the LA Times will do its part in shouting the alarm to terrorists: you better move fast. The feds are tightening security.

Perhaps the top story of the day: "Captain America" sequel shatters records with $96.2-million debut. BloomsbergBusinessweek has an excellent cover story / five-page story on the man who saved Marvel Comics. This story alone might entice me to renew my subscription to BloomsbergBusinessweek; I wish it wasn't filled with so much fluff. Two regular columns that irritate the heck out of me: "How I became a billionaire"; and, "How I dress for work." Who cares?

Another Obama re-election ad looking like a news story: number of Americans without health insurance reaches new low.

Mickey Rooney dies at age 93; he ruined "Breakfast at Tiffaney's," though George Peppard was about as cold a fish as one sees in a chick flick. Audrey beautiful to look at, but not much chemistry. "Casablanca" remains in a league of its own.

George Strait takes entertainer trophy at 49th ACM Awards. By the way, the resurgence of country music was a front page story in the New York Times yesterday.

I am not sure why the LA Times continues to print stories on the Los Angeles Lakers.

I love the spin on this caption of a teaser-photo: "The slain journalist who did her best work in George W. Bush's war." Haven't heard a thing about the four or five wars that Obama is waging / has waged. Cognitive dissonance. Nobel Peace Prize. Five wars in six years.

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A Note to the Granddaughters

The NASCAR race -- just a few miles to the west of us -- was rained out yesterday -- Texas Speedway.

Today, a beautiful day but light rain predicted this afternoon.

I'm still sore from all the physical activities we did this past weekend.

The cakes we baked last evening are incredible.  Arianna pretty much did all the mixing, though Olivia used the electric mixer to complete the porject. They each frosted half the cake, and then we brought it over to their house. When I got back home, I made another cake to use up the other half of the frosting. The granddaughters came back at 8:00 p.m. to watch Cosmos. It was the second best in the series so far, of the four shown. The topic was "light." Much yet needs to be discussed/shown on Cosmos regarding "light." I understand another 1% about light bringing my understanding of light up to about 4% of what probably needs to be understood. I could be wrong, but I think the narrator said physicists understood what moved an electron from an inner shell to an outer shelling (heat) giving off a photon (light) but said that physicists did not understand what "caused" the electron to fall back from the outer shell to an inner shell. I could be wrong, but I think that's what he said. I find that interesting if that is true. I find it interesting that light bends when it hits a prism, and thus a rainbow. I assume neutrinos go straight through. If light did not bend going through a prism, one wonders how much longer it would have taken scientists to figure out the science of light. I told the girls that Newton was very, very interested in optics, but he got it wrong. The narrator on Cosmos didn't actually get optics "wrong." He merely said that Newton failed to make the discovery that was within his grasp. He was probably interrupted by a call for dinner just as he was about to ....

The Dickinson Press

I normally don't link these stories; there are just way too many of them. Regular readers can find "faces of the Bakken" at The Dickinson Press on a regular basis.  But just to remind folks:

POWERS LAKE, N.D. – When Carolynn Robinson and her husband moved from Washington state to North Dakota to work in the oilfields, they thought it would just be a summer gig.

But the move worked out so well, they decided to stay.

“We’re getting more and more attached to North Dakota,” said Robinson, who moved to the state about two years ago.

Lack of work in their home state prompted them to move to North Dakota.

Robinson’s husband, Travis, came to North Dakota first, and now works as a pipeline welder.

For the granddaughters:

The International Space Station (ISS) returns this week to highlight the evening sky. Outside of Venus and the moon, the ISS is the brightest, star-like object in the nighttime sky. It orbits from west to east, the same direction the Earth rotates, and crosses the sky in about five minutes. At an altitude of about 250 miles, the station orbits above most of the auroras we see which is why astronauts get such cool photos of the northern and southern lights from orbit.

The new evening observing season begins for many locations across the northern hemisphere with passes happening once or twice a night. To watch the space station, og out a couple minutes before it's expected to appear and look for a pale yellow "star" bright than any other moving form west to east across the sky.

The best way to see these events: go on a cross-country drive, and drive all night. I have had some spectacular views doing just that over the years.