Gasoline Prices May Not Drop As Fast As Some Had Hoped; Will Put Damper On Political Talk To Export Oil -- September 29, 2014

Hearing dockets for October, 2014, should be out today

RBN Energy: Third in a 5-part series on the tsunami of condensate coming out of the Eagle Ford.

By Q2 of 2015, the Plains and Enterprise joint venture pipeline in the Eagle Ford will carry up to 470 Mb/d of crude and condensate to market in Houston and Corpus Christi including barrels shipped from the Permian Basin on the Cactus pipeline.

This pipeline expansion will easily make the two-midstream operators the largest players in the Eagle Ford market.

On top of that, Enterprise already has a leg up in the race to crank up condensate exports – having recently won one of the coveted BIS letters. Today we describe recent expansions in these two company’s Eagle Ford networks.

In our series updating an analysis of Eagle Ford infrastructure. In Part 1we described a five-fold increase in Eagle Ford crude oil production over the past three years to 1.5 MMb/d.

We explained that unlike other basins such as the Bakken in North Dakota, takeaway capacity has not been a big challenge for Eagle Ford producers. Instead the varying quality and in particular the high percentage of condensate in liquids output (about 45 percent) has caused headaches for producers and refiners alike. We also noted that two main pipeline routes to market have developed from the Eagle Ford – south to the Port of Corpus Christi and East to Houston area refineries.

In Part 2 we described the growth and continuing expansion of the crude takeaway systems developed by Magellan Midstream Partners and Kinder Morgan that provide producers and shippers multiple destinations for condensate and crude. This time we focus on the competing midstream takeaway infrastructure developed by Plains All American Pipeline (Plains) and Enterprise Product Partners (Enterprise). These two companies built out separate crude and condensate gathering systems in the Eagle Ford that are now joined by a 350 Mb/d joint venture pipeline.

Bloomberg reports that gasoline prices may not come down as fast as some had hoped; issues with refineries:

Speculators increased wagers on higher U.S. gasoline prices by the most since February as refinery closures constricted supply.

The net-long position jumped 45 percent from a four-year low as hedge funds pared record short bets and added long wagers for the first time in six weeks, weekly U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data through Sept. 23 show.

Refineries in eastern Canada and Texas shut gasoline units for unplanned repairs as others began seasonal maintenance. Futures contracts for October traded at the highest premium to November since 2012, reflecting heightened concern about supply. The closures threaten the retreat at the pump that has drivers paying the lowest late-September prices since 2010.

“People have covered their positions or moved away from short to long,” Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd. in London, said by phone Sept. 26. “There’s a huge amount of FCC outages in North America at the moment,” she said, referring to fluid catalytic crackers that make gasoline.

And, then, of course, we now have ObamaWar in the Mideast. It's always something.

Speaking of which, this is the most ill-conceived war I have seen in my short lifetime, the C-130 War on Ebola. From the linked article and the photograph, it looks like the US weapons of choice will be a) hand sanitizer' and, b) thermometers. I can't make this stuff up.

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Paglia 

Some say Paglia is a provocateur, but if she is, she is one of my favorites. I knew nothing about her when I first read her Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Wiki describes the book as such: a 1990 work about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia.

At Time.com, Paglia writes:

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder.

Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

I would not have posted/linked this, but I happened to catch a segment on NPR this morning which took the Obama view. As their only first-person example, NPR interviewed one woman who complained that her university failed to investigate her rape. She said that she went to her "boy friend's" dorm room, engaged in consensual sex, but after "it" was over, and she decided to say "goodnight," he would not let her leave. She was thrown back on the bed, injuring her head. No more specifics were given; she says she reported the incident to campus police "some" days later but nothing ever came of the investigation. Something tells me there is more to the story.

By the way, if you don't feel inclined to read the several-hundred-page Sexual Personae, Paglia published a "Reader's Digest" version of sorts called Glimmering Images: A Journey Art From Egypt To Star Wars. I believe there were 20 pieces of part that she discussed in the book (I forget; I have it on the shelf but I'm not home write now to check): one page with the reproduction of the art work (generally a painting) and then two to four pages of essay on the work of art. It might be a good book for a high school senior to read during the summer if attending a liberal arts college in the autumn.