Why I Love To Blog: Reason 4,359 - The Links, October 31, 2014

Over the years I have collected a number of links that readers have sent me.  One can find all this data by googling, but there are advantages to maintaining a data link list.

The data link / metric that I think will be one of the most interesting to follow for the next 14 months is "gasoline demand."

When you get to that link, scroll immediately to the bottom of the page (I have no idea why this graph is not the first thing one sees when one gets to that page): the graph on gasoline demand. Two things should drive gasoline demand:

• dropping price of gasoline
• recovery of the economy

Of course gasoline demand driven upward by those two factors will be offset by better gas mileage, but I doubt average mileage in fourteen months will not be all that different than gasoline mileage today.

After you check out the gasoline demand graph, take a look at the rest of the page. For example, gasoline stocks and days of supply. Note that most of those graphs have multiple graphs "behind" the one you may be looking at. There are links to related graphs to the right of the graph you are looking at.

After you finish reviewing this page, then go back to the narrative, this week in petroleum. This is essentially what the talking heads at CNBC do. The producer downloads the report, highlights the key phrases with a yellow highlighter and then hands it to guys and gals like Bob Pisani or Sharon Epperson.

The other graph to follow, but of much less interest to me, is the graph on crude oil imports. Crude oil imports will never drop below 6 million bbls/day, much less go to zero, for several reasons. Because the Keystone XL has been killed, US gulf coast refiners cannot get the heavy oil they need; they will get heavy oil from OPEC countries, like Venezuela. A second reason is that the country's largest island, California, gets its oil from three sources: the Bakken (a very minor percent at this point); Alaska (not exactly a good news story); and OPEC. The third reason is Motiva: the Port Arthur refinery, owned jointly by Saudi Arabia and Shell, is the largest refinery in North America and the fifth largest in the world.

It is interesting to look at US crude oil exports but it's pretty meaningless.

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Global Warming

Climate Change

Extreme Weather

Ice Age Now

Headlines today suggest an earlier winter than some had expected with CO2 levels exceeding  400 ppm:

• freeze warning in all of northern Alabama
• Chicago snowfall record for Halloween; 300+ cancellations at O'Hare
• record cold temperatures along the East Coast

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Boots On The Ground

I think the big question for President Obama with regard to "boots on the ground": where will he deploy troops first: Anbar Province (west of Baghdad) or Ferguson (west of east St Louis)?