Price Of Oil, Characteristics Of Crude Oil; How Fast Does Amazon Deliver? Incredibly Fast

This past week or so I've been flummoxed by the price of oil, why it continues to rise slowly despite a tsunami of shale oil hitting the US storage depots.

For background, I've added three new links to my "Data Links" page:

Crude oil characteristics (Bakken, others)

• Processing shales in FCC; properties of raw Bakken crude -- September 1, 2013
• Crude oil characteristics, EIA -- June 26, 2013
• United States Mars field: off-shore, Gulf of Mexico, 130 miles SE of New Orleans -- 2010?

The EIA provides a wonderful graph of crude oil characteristics at the second of the three links. Take a look at it. Note what's missing. Actually, two "oils" are missing: a) heavy oil; and, b) US unconventional oil (Eagle Ford, Permian, Bakken, and many others.

Heavy oil information at wiki:

According to World Resources Institute, concentrations of remarkable quantities of heavy oil and oil sands are found in Canada and Venezuela.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported in 2001 that the largest reserves of heavy crude oil in the world were located north of the Orinoco river 270-mile long by 40-mile wide Orinoco Belt in eastern Venezuela. At that time Venezuela began authorizing "joint ventures to upgrade the extra-heavy crude resources."

Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) at that time estimated that there were 270 billion barrels of recoverable reserves in the area, the same amount as the conventional oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.

The Orinoco Belt in Venezuela is sometimes described as oil sands, but these deposits are non-bituminous, falling instead into the category of heavy or extra-heavy oil due to their lower viscosity. Natural bitumen and extra-heavy oil differ in the degree by which they have been degraded from the original conventional oils by bacteria. According to the WEC, extra-heavy oil has "a gravity of less than 10° API and a reservoir viscosity of no more than 10,000 centipoise." Thirty or more countries are known to have reserves.

For newbies, place the Venezuela and Canadian oil at the far left of the EIA graph linked above, and place the unconventional US shale oil (Eagle Ford, Bakken) at the far right.

I haven't seen anything being written about Bakken light oil being stored at Cushing affecting the price of oil. WTI is not Bakken light oil -- they are two different oils. Historically WTI was stored at Cushing and Cushing was where WTI was priced. Because Bloomberg removed free access to the site I no longer know, but I believe Bakken crude oil is priced at Clearbrook, MN.

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How Fast Is Amazon Delivery? Incredibly Fast

This morning we slept in late. We got up about 8:30, I suppose.

After breakfast and getting oriented to a new day, my wife mentioned she was going to do a bit of laundry. I re-arranged a few things in the laundry room so she would have more space. I noted that we probably had enough laundry detergent for three or four more loads of wash.

That would have been about 9:30 a.m. I suppose.

At 10:10 a.m. there was a loud knock on the door. A man wearing civilian clothes, no doubt a contractor for the US Postal Service dropped off a heavy package from Amazon.com.

[US Postal Service has contracted with Amazon.com for Sunday deliveries; I've blogged about that before. This is the second time in about three weeks that we've had an Amazon delivery on Sunday; both times the delivery man was in civilian clothes.]

I opened the Amazon box; I had forgotten ordering anything. This was in the box:

My wife broke out laughing. Just ten minutes earlier she had added "Tide" to her shopping list which was posted on the refrigerator.

In her mind, she added "Tide" to her shopping list, and ten minutes later, the USPS delivered her request via Amazon.

If you don't tell her, she won't know. She does not read the blog.