Wednesday, April 23, 2014; Existing Home Sales Fall Three Months In A Row, Lowest Since July, 2012 (NO JOBS); Obama Stalls Drilling On Federal Lands (NO JOBS)

Active rigs:

	4/23/2014	04/23/2013	04/23/2012	04/23/2011	04/23/2010
Active Rigs	187	188	212	175	109

RBN Energy: LPG exports; part 4.

Exports of liquefied petroleum gases (LPGs – propane and butane) from the U.S. to international markets - are expected to nearly double from 460 Mb/d in 2014 to 915 Mb/d in 2019 as production from gas plant processing exceeds domestic demand. Available Very Large Gas Carrier (VLGC) vessels to carry these increased overseas volumes are limited. As a result spot freight rates have reached record levels recently. In today’s blog “Stayin’ Afloat With the LPGees – Part 4 Freight Voyage Calculation Model” Sandy Fielden walks through a voyage cost calculation. Today we walk through a voyage cost calculation.

The Wall Street Journal

Top story: Supreme court backs racial preference ban.

Cold War II heats up. Nobel-Peace-Prize-President moves US troops to Poland.

Unions blast US Postal Service alliance with Staples. Why does this not surprise me.?

Big business supports Mary Landrieu in Louisiana.

Pilots at JetBlue vote to unionize. Not unexpected.

The Los Angeles Times

ObamaCare pushing insurance rates up; where to take your gripes. Good luck.  Let me know how it works out. If you thought signing up through the website (the easiest part of the process), wait until you have an issue that needs to be resolved.

Sweeping clemency guidelines for drug offenders are announced, just in time for the fall elections.

ATT sales rose to start the year, as the carrier added more subscribers and increasingly sold mobile devices like the iPhone at full price.

McDonald's plans marketing push as profit slides. Hey, I may go there for lunch.

Coming on the heels of ObamaCare, this is not good for those who like monopolies: a federal appeals court ordered a major health system in Ohio to unwind its merger with a local hospital as antitrust authorities step up scrutiny of hospital deals.

BNY Mellon says "goodbye" to NYC; may move to where it was founded in 1784.

USA Today

Existing home sales fall three months in a row; seasonally adjusted rate is lowest since July, 2012. No jobs? Keystone killed.

Front page: two stories, one on background checks, guns, and felons; and, one story on "killer asteroids bigger threat than believed." This one caught my eye because I'm reading The Mistaken Extinction, in which the authors spend a fair amount of time on the "theory" that it was a meteorite that ultimately led to the demise of the dinosaur.

I've always said "1969" was the best year for music. USA Today polled readers on "most resonant rock's' roll moments. Of the top ten, three were from the 1967 Monterey International Pop Music Festival -- one of the best music DVDs ever, by the way: Jimi Hendrix (1), Janis Joplin (2), Otis Redding (6). The Woodstock Music & Art Fair, 1969, had two top ten:  Santana (4), and Sly and the Family Stone (8). Queen at Live Aid, 1985, ranked #3 and Bob Dylan, #5, at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965. The other three: Nine Inch Nails, Woodstock Music & Air Fair, 1994, #7; U2, Live Aid, 1985, #9; and, Muddy Waters, Newport Jazz Festival, 1960, #10.

Movie review: the documentary "For No Good Reason" which profiles artist Ralph Steadman. Steadman broke into the "big time" when he was hired by Scanlan's Monthly editor Warren Hinkle to illustrate Hunter S Thompson's article "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." This is one documentary I won't miss. I assume it will play at local fine art museums where art documentaries are shown.

Rigzone

Reuters columnist John Kemp out of London is reporting:

The White House likes to claim a share of the credit for the drilling revolution that has transformed North America's energy production and security.

Except the revolution has largely taken place on private rather than public land, and energy producers feel frustrated about the numerous obstacles and long delays in obtaining permission to drill in areas directly controlled by the administration.

"Crude oil production has grown each year President Barack Obama has been in office to its highest level in 17 years," the Council of Economic Advisors wrote back in the summer of 2013. "Over the past four years, domestic oil supply growth has accounted for over one-third of global oil production growth."

"Government-funded research supplemented private industry's work to develop the technology that sparked the boom," the council explained ("Reducing America's dependence on foreign oil", Aug. 29, 2013).

The theme has often been taken up by the president himself to underline his commitment to an "all of the above" approach that embraces fossil fuels such as oil and gas, renewables like solar and wind as well as measures to reduce wasteful energy consumption while increasing efficiency.

"We are drilling," the president told an audience in Maryland in 2012. "Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. We've quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs to a record high."

He might have added, "And we did this all on private land. We have not done anything on federal land that might upset my activist environmentalist base. And there's no need to. Guys like Harold Hamm and Mark Papa have done what I couldn't do. I've asked Joe Biden to head a fact-gathering commission to see why those guys are succeeding in the face of all the EPA regulations I've spearheaded."

This is just the first page of a four-page article. Again, the Brits have it right.

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Seeing a weakness and a void, Putin looks to increase its presence in the Arctic. Reuters is reporting:

President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Russia should step up its presence in the Arctic and challenge other nations in exploring the world's largest untapped natural reserves, days after it started shipping its first oil from the region.

Russia's ambitions in the Arctic have for some time been raising eyebrows among other states vying for a presence there, but the Kremlin's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula is likely to put its Arctic plans under greater scrutiny.

Russia has staked its future economic growth on developing the Arctic's vast energy resources and reviving a Soviet-era shipping route through the ice.

The United States, Denmark and Norway are also pressing for access to what they consider their fair share of the Arctic's massive oil and natural gas reserves.

Russia loaded its first crude tanker from an oil platform in the Pechora Sea last week.

I honestly was not aware that President Obama was looking to increase oil and gas activity in the Arctic. Everything I've read, and I've posted much on the subject, of all nations interested in the Arctic, the United States Under Obama has opted out of the Arctic.  What's gasoline selling for in California these days? $4.75/gallon?