It's Only A Mater Of Time -- July 27, 2015

Earlier today I posted a link to a contributor's article over at Seeking Alpha, "oil prices will rebound."

Well, of course, it will. The question is when.

If the drillers trust the EIA estimates, the rise in the price of oil could come sooner than some folks think. The tea leaves suggest this autumn, October - December, 2015, will be a most key period to watch.

The graph below was taken from the linked article. There are so many data points / story lines, but I think I noted the most important ones on the graph.

It is interesting to note that prior to the Bakken boom, there was a relative global supply shortage of world liquid fuels. The surplus happened quickly, much more quickly than some folks forecast. I'm not going to look for the source but there was an article out today in which an analyst actually admitted they did not see it coming (they must have been listening to Jane Nielson).

When the Bakken boom hit its stride, global surplus was striking -- look at those high bars between 4Q14 and 2Q15. We had not seen bars that high in years, and I bet we had not seen a string of such bars in decades.

By early next year, we may have a surplus of less than 500,000 bopd -- globally. That's less than half what North Dakota produces daily, and probably less than a quarter of what North Dakota is capable of producing.

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Chesapeake

Another asset sale? 

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A Note To The Granddaughters

I'm working on several "projects" right now. Most of them have to do with reading, reading about the history of Santa Fe Railroad as told in The Harvey Girls; re-reading closely This Side Of Paradise and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and three books on evolution.

With regard to the latter, I think a lot of adults, including me, consider the Dinosaurs interesting, but not compelling; something for pre-teen boys to be interested in, but not much more than that. Having read for the first time one new book, and re-reading very closely two other books, I am convinced that a summer of concentrated study of the dinosaurs by a ninth-grade student would serve that student well for high school biology (generally a high school sophomore class) and Biology 101 and Zoology 101 as a freshman and then sophomore, respectively, in college.

A concentrated study in Dinosauria will result in a better understanding of taxonomy, physiology, anatomy, evolution, and paleontology. The neat thing is that pre-teen boys (and girls?) are already pre-wired to be interested in dinosaurs for some reason. Throw in a couple of the Jurassic Park movies, and maybe even Pixel's Toy Story, and it wouldn't take a lot to keep that curiosity running.

These are some very random thoughts after reading about Dinosaurs for the past two weeks.

On the road from one-celled organisms to humans, there were a few huge forks in the road, some huge events, that made all the difference in the world.

Of course, we start with the Cambrian explosion (Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life).

From my perspective, the next huge evolutionary leap was the ability of animals to lay eggs on dry land, coming out of the seas. That was a huge leap.

The amphibians had their fifteen minutes of fame. They played a critical role getting us from the sea to the dry land, but after that role, their fame was over. Sure, they survive as frogs but their evolutionary purpose has been served.

Once animals could lay eggs on land (amniotes), another division occurred: the synapsids (mammals, for the most part) and the non-synapsids, the largest group being the diapsids ("reptilia" for the most part).

Of the five great chordate divisions (fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal), the "reptilia" division is the messiest. Everyone has trouble with "reptilia." It was the reptiles' great fortune that they continued to evolve; otherwise they, too, would have been like the amphibians, having had their 15 minutes of fame.

It is interesting how long ago he evolutionary split between future reptiles and humans took place: the amniote synapsid-diapsid split took place sometime in the Carboniferous/Permian period, well before the Age of Dinosaurs.

The reptile lineage ultimately led to Dinosuria. Interestingly, the Crocodylia broke off even before Dinosauria. The history of Crocodylia really goes back a long way.

The Dinosauria lineage completely disappeared except for one group of dinosaurs: present-day birds.

So, with just a few huge breaks in the road, among the chordates, it really comes down to fish, mammals and birds today. And if one is not ocean-centered, it's pretty much mammals and birds.

There are / were no marine dinosaurs. Those "things" that look like ocean-going dinosaurs were reptiles, not dinosaurs.

By the way, the "definition" of a dinosaur is any organism, alive or dead, that can trace its history back to the common ancestor of the Triceratops or the birds. I thought that interesting.

If the first big fork in the road was the Cambrian explosion, and the second big break for mammals was the success of amniotes (laying eggs on land), the third huge break for mammals was the demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, when the big meteor is said to have hit and formed the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico), wiping out the dinosaurs.

It turns out that well before the first dinosaur ancestor was even around, little mammal-like reptiles were evolving. When the dinosaurs were at their peak, underfoot and in burrows were more evolved mammal-like reptiles and mammaliaforms.

It appears that their small size and their burrowing saved them from the meteor. Specifically, one Cynodont, very mammalian, that burrowed and survived the meteor was Trinaxodon.

For me, three great events between one-celled organisms and humans: Cambrian explosion, egg-laying on land, and the survival of the burrowing "mammal" when the meteor hit.

Compared to those three events, all the rest of evolution was "easy."