Global Crude Oil Suppy And Demand -- Platts -- December 21, 2015

Several story lines in this graphic:

Note: by "Bakken" I mean tight oil exploration and production in the Lower 48 states.

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Greenergy To Open Diesel Storage Facility On The Thames

Platts is reporting:

The UK's new Thames Oilport terminal will open for diesel storage by mid-2016, Greenergy, the UK's biggest road fuel supplier, said Monday after acquiring the stake in the project owned by Dutch tank storage company Vopak. Greenergy said work is under way to complete engineering and commissioning needed to bring into use an initial 175,000 cu m of tankage at Thames Oilport -- to the east of London -- to be used for diesel storage from the second quarter of 2016.

Greenergy: provides about 1/6th of the UK's "petrol" and diesel.

Data points:

• $447 million
• following the deal, Greenergy will double its stage in the terminal to 67%; Shell holds the remaining third
• three additional terminals under control of Greenergy / Macquarie Capital (Australian)
• Vopak Terminal London
• Vopak Terminal Teeside
• Vopak Terminal Windmill 
• newly created "Navigator Terminals" will control the three largest Vopak terminals and Greenergy's North Tees storage terminal, creating UK's largest independent bulk liquid storage provider with an initial storage capacity of 1.5 million cubic meters (9.4 million US bbls)

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Disobeying The CINC's Intent

Seymour M. Hersh is a credible source. It will be interesting to see the fallout from this. The article is way too long to read on-line (at least for me). I will wait to read it when my issue of The London Review shows up in my mailbox. The article begins:

Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.

Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin.

In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya.

A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups.

By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria.

The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.