Minor Notes -- As Many As Six Air Forces Might Now Be Flying Over Syria -- November 1, 2015

Minor Notes

Mideast natural gas: updating the natural gas fields in Egypt and Israel.

Chinese buying US oil assets: Business Insider has a story on private equity giants selling their shale to China. This may come back to be a story that we see in the Bakken. Just saying. The most recent Chinese - Texas deal was posted on the blog.

Very interesting story unfolding this week in the U.S. energy sector; showing several twists emerging amongst the players in this space, old and new.

The Wall Street Journal broke the story Sunday that a new operator is breaking onto the scene in shale. Namely, billion-dollar Chinese property development company Yantai Xinchao. [Referred to as "Yankee Ka-Ching-Ka-Ching" in Beijing.]

According to filings, that firm has reached a deal to acquire a package of oil assets in west Texas. Few details were given on the properties -- but the price tag for purchase is significant, at around $1.3 billion.

The company did specify that this billion-dollar property package is located within Texas' Howard and Borden counties, an area that would put the assets within the shale oil hotbed of the Permian Basin.

I try to track some of these deals over at "Asian Connections." While the government seems forever to approve the HAL-BHI merger, and killed the Keystone, it has no trouble approving the sale of crude oil assets to China.

Flipping crude oil producing property: at this website, click on the asset to see acquisition date and exit date.

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Downed Russian Jet

Updates

November 2, 2015: Russian airline rejects human, technical causes for Egypt crash.  Link here. 

Original Post

 

First hunch may have been correct. Immediately after news of the downed Russian a/c killing 224 on board, I wrote Don:

• most dangerous aspects of commercial flying, non-terrorist-related mishaps: take-offs and landing
• once at cruising altitude, most likely reason for unexplained crash: terrorists

The plane was 25 minutes into flight; well past take-off and leveling off.

We now learn that the plane was cruising at 36,000 feet when something happened:

The Egyptian officials said the aircraft was cruising at 36,000 feet when contact with the jet was lost. Flight-tracking service FlightRadar24 said the plane was losing altitude at about 6,000 feet per minute before the signal was lost, Reuters reported.

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Wages

The mystery of the vanishing wage increase -- the New York Times -- the jobs market is "a lot softer" than a 5.1% unemployment rate would indicate -- exactly what I've been posting  on the blog for six years:

Amid the global economic turmoil and seesawing markets, millions of Americans have one overriding question: When will my pay increase arrive? The nation’s unemployment rate has fallen substantially since the end of the Great Recession, sliding to 5.1 percent from 10 percent in 2009, but wages haven’t accelerated upward, as many had expected.

In fact, the labor market is a lot softer than a 5.1 percent jobless rate would indicate. For one thing, the percentage of Americans who are working has fallen considerably since the recession began. 

This disappearance of several million workers — as labor force dropouts they are not factored into the jobless rate — has meant continued labor market weakness, which goes far to explain why wage increases remain so elusive. End of story, many economists say. 

But work force experts assert that economists ignore many other factors that help explain America’s stubborn wage stagnation.

Outsourcing, offshoring and imports exert a steady downward tug on wages. Labor unions have lost considerable muscle. Many employers have embraced pay-for-performance policies that often mean nice bonuses for the few instead of across-the-board raises for the many.

Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, noted, for instance, that many retailers give managers bonuses based on whether they keep their labor budgets below a designated ceiling.

In recent years, wage increases, before factoring in inflation, have averaged about 2 percent annually. But real, after-inflation wages have remained dismayingly flat since 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even though real wages did bump up last fall when the drop in oil prices pulled down inflation. (In a minority view, the Heritage Foundation and some other conservative groups say the bureau has underestimated wage increases.)

"After -inflation wages have remained dismayingly flat since 2009." What year did President assume ... office ... oh, that's right. 2009. 

We're gonna need some multi-lingual air traffic controllers (air) and forward air controllers (ground) to deconflict all manned air forces and all the unmanned air forces in Syria (US, Russia, Syrian, Israeli, Iranian, Saudi, Turkey). The Syrian conflict has become a) a free-for-all; and, b) a Turkey shoot. Currently being tweeted:  Israel carries out airstrike on Syrian regime base in Qalamoun, destroying 3 warehouses holding Scud-missiles.

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Wind

800 Slicers And Dicers Coming Down In California

This deserves a stand-alone post, but I'm trying to de-emphasize intermittent energy and stay focused on the Bakken, but it's very, very difficult. This is a most interesting story. Maybe someday when I have time, I will re-post this as a stand-alone. It's a huge, huge story.

The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that 800 wind turbines in the Altamont Pass (California) are coming down. A win for the birds:

A wind power provider that operates about 800 turbines in the Altamont Pass -- where thousands of birds are believed killed by them each year -- is shutting down its operations.

Altamont Winds told the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service in an email Oct. 23 that it is ceasing operations as of Sunday.

The decision was applauded by environmental groups, which for years have been fighting to build awareness around the large numbers of golden eagles, raptors, burrowing owls and other birds that are killed by turbines.

There's a lot more to the story, but that's where I will leave it for now.

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Notes From All Over

Notes from my daughter / son-in-law in Portland, OR, regarding Halloween last night:

We had one little boy about 4, maybe, come through in a group of 4 kids. Anyway, he was a minion, very cute, and he stumbled on our step and hit his head (not hard, just a tap) on the door frame and then nearly toppled into our house. After he left, I told Tim, "He was dedicated to being in character."