Monday, November 2, 2015

Quake swarm in Arizona; I don't think they are doing any fracking in the area reporting these four earthquakes overnight. Link to USGS here. (I don't know if this is a dynamic link.)

Oil could take  until 2018 to recover -- Statoil CFO. Link here.  Bad news for Venezuela.

Metrojet exec says external impact caused Egypt plane crash. Link here. Reported but not linked: the highest altitude incident reported as a collision between an aircraft and a Griffon vulture at 37,000ft off the coast of Africa. The Russian Metrojet was cruising at 36,000 feet above the Sinai. Just saying.

Active rigs:

	11/2/2015	11/02/2014	11/02/2013	11/02/2012	11/02/2011
Active Rigs	70	193	181	187	195

RBN Energy: LNG At The Ready Into New York City?

The incremental pipeline capacity built to move more natural gas from the Marcellus to the New York City region over the past two or three years has reduced—but not eliminated -- delivery constraints and wintertime gas-price premiums at the New York City pricing hub on Zone 6 of the Transco pipeline and other pipes feeding the area.  

Given the Big Apple’s significant and growing gas demand, midstream companies are exploring whether to add still more pipeline capacity, and developer Liberty Natural Gas is lining up approvals for its proposed fix: an offshore LNG terminal that would inject gas when demand spikes.

Today, we begin an examination of the economics of using LNG to supplement wintertime gas supplies, and how Greater New York might benefit from an LNG shot-in-the-arm.

Often new gas pipeline capacity doesn’t permanently solve a takeaway/delivery problem; instead, the new capacity only helps to ease a constraint, or to make things better for a while.  Increasing demand or supply can then make it necessary to add still more capacity —maybe through the installation of new compressor stations or looping (adding a parallel line).

That seems to be the case regarding recent projects in and near New York City and its Long Island suburbs, whose still-rising demand for low-cost gas from close-by Marcellus production has spurred several pipeline expansions. Many of these efforts were detailed in Another Gassy Day In New York City; the most noteworthy may have been Spectra Energy’s $1.2 billion New Jersey-New York Expansion Project (online in November 2013), which augmented the Texas Eastern Transmission Co. (TETCO) and Algonquin Gas Transmission pipelines with (among other things) a 16-mile extension of TETCO’s existing Staten Island line to lower Manhattan, and the replacement of five miles of existing pipeline in New Jersey and New York with larger-diameter pipe. (The Spectra project doubled to 700 MMcf/d the gas-delivering capacity of TETCO-Staten Island.)

More recently (in mid-May 2015), Williams brought online its new Rockaway Lateral Project, a short (3.2-mile) but important new connector (capacity 600 MMcf/d) to the mainland from Transcontinental (Transco) Pipeline’s existing Lower New York Bay Lateral (black line), an undersea line off the southern coast of Brooklyn and Queens, which like Manhattan and Staten Island are among New York City’s five boroughs—‘da Bronx, as it’s pronounced locally, is the fifth borough.) The new Rockaway Lateral connects to a new National Grid pipeline.

Several interesting stories from The Wall Street Journal today. For now just the headlines and the links:

• Health  insurers struggle to profit from ACA plans. Link here.  

• Russian airline rejects human, technical causes for Egypt crash.  Link here. 

• Oil subsidies mean Alaska is losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Link here.

• Season ends on a whimper for the Mets. Link here. 

• Volvo's big bet on the electric-vehicle market. Link here.

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Wages

Do you remember that post about the mystery of vanishing wage increases, reported by The New York Times? It looks like it took the Wall Street Journal 24 hours to solve that mystery. Obviously, it took longer than 24 hours to write the WSJ article but it appeared about 24 hours after the NYT article.

The answer: shift to benefits from pay helps explain sluggish wage growth.

ObamaCare.