Shell Chemicals announced Tuesday that it will pay $69 million to relocate a western Pennsylvania water source that's currently on the site of the company's proposed ethane cracker plant.
The company said it's funding nearly all of the $72 million project in Beaver County, and the Center Township Water Authority will pick up the rest of the tab. The project will replace existing drinking wells and create a new water intake site and treatment facility for the authority.
Shell could end up using the water facilities if it moves forward with a multibillion-dollar petrochemical plant at the former Horsehead Corp. site in Potter Township, but that amount would be less than 10 percent of the total water sold by the system.
“Based on this new information, we now estimate that Treasury is likely to exhaust its extraordinary measures on or about Thursday, November 5,” Lew wrote in a letter to Boehner.
“At that point, we could be left to fund the government with only the cash we have on hand, which we currently forecast to be below $30 billion. This amount would be far short of net expenditures on certain days, which can be as high as $60 billion.”
Lew said the date could still fluctuate somewhat from Nov. 5, but the letter makes clear that the situation is more urgent than anticipated by lawmakers and staffers who expected to be able to bundle a debt limit increase with an early-December spending package.
“Without sufficient cash, it would be impossible for the United States of America to meet all of its obligations for the first time in our history,” Lew wrote.Under this administration, I assume military retirees are at the top of the list not to get paid.
The campus employs at least one security officer, and several faculty members at Umpqua are retired law enforcement personnel, according to campus. But none of them are allowed to be armed, she said.
“We have a no-guns-on-campus policy,” Calvin said.School policy bans guns on campus, including BB guns, water guns (squirt guns) and paint guns.
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According to official U.S. trade data, the United States exported 21,000 barrels per day (b/d) of condensate derived wholly from natural gas (CDWFNG) to Brazil in July 2015.
Under the current U.S. export classification system, CDWFNG falls under the general heading of crude oil within the 2709 Schedule B category.
Consequently, these exports are counted as crude oil in the U.S. Energy Information Administration's (EIA) Petroleum Supply Monthly released yesterday. EIA made inquiries regarding the July shipment to Brazil and understands that the reported shipment actually consists of processed lease condensate. --- EIA
The expanded gas plant now produces ethane, a new product for North Dakota. The ethane is transported by pipeline to a plastics plant in Alberta, Canada.
The production of ethane is significant for North Dakota, with several companies looking at petrochemical manufacturing opportunities in the state, said Director of Mineral Resources Lynn Helms.
“It really starts a whole new era for North Dakota,” said Helms, one of several state officials who attended the event. “With the growth in gas production in North Dakota, petrochemical manufacturing out of ethane is right on the doorstep.”
North Dakota Commerce Commissioner Alan Anderson said the possibilities are exciting for the state.
“The question becomes, Why not have a plastic plant in North Dakota instead of shipping it all the way to Canada?” Anderson said.Now back to the Forbes article linked above:
In the meantime, producers in the region have suffered through a long, hot, and expensive summer. The NGL revenues which provided a nice boost to producer cash flows in earlier years have dwindled as increased production necessitates moving barrels farther away from the producing area for storage or export during the summer. Figure 2 illustrates the pain level experienced by a producer who must remove some of the ethane in the gas stream to meet pipeline Btu requirements. Since there is currently no ethylene market in the Northeast, the Enterprise ATEX ethane pipeline to Mont Belvieu provides assured flow, but at a cost – for now.
Given this scenario, the prospect of exporting ethane later this year on Mariner East 1, to a different target market in Northwest Europe, makes moving additional barrels east to Marcus Hook more attractive. The new Mariner East 2 line will expand capacity to move other NGLs as well, adding more propane and butane to the volumes that can move to an East Coast port via pipeline in summer 2017.Bottom line: Some operators are planning to ship ethane all the way to Europe.
General Electric Co., which is actively selling GE Capital assets to focus more on core industrial activities, announced two deals for railroad services operations that have been part of GE Capital.
The conglomerate agreed to sell its tank car fleet assets and railcar repair facilities to Marmon Holdings Inc., with part of the deal closing on Wednesday and the rest slated for a fourth-quarter closing. Diversified industrial organization Marmon is part of Berkshire Hathaway Co.We'll just tag this under "PCPBR" -- petrochemical products by rail.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Government requirements for the use of solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy by Ohio power companies would be suspended indefinitely under recommendations being prepared for release Wednesday by a legislative panel.
The Energy Mandates Study Committee's draft report was obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its release.
The panel is reviewing an Ohio law requiring utilities to generate 25 percent of electricity from alternative and advanced sources by 2025. It was created as part of a compromise brokered by Gov. John Kasich amid efforts to repeal the targets outright.
The report cites legal uncertainty and a need for "greater clarity" surrounding proposed federal clean coal rules among reasons that proceeding with Ohio's state-level mandates would be imprudent.
Ohio is among states that have sued over the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan, which sets targets for carbon dioxide emissions for existing power plants as a means of reducing emissions from 2005 levels by 32 percent by 2030. Kasich has also written to President Barack Obama asking him to hold off on implementing the plan until questions are resolved by the courts.
Foyle's War is a British detective drama television series set during and shortly after the Second World War, created by screenwriter and author Anthony Horowitz and commissioned by ITV after the long-running series Inspector Morse came to an end in 2000. It has been broadcast on ITV since 2002. Simon Shaps, then ITV's director of programmes, cancelled Foyle's War in 2007, but numerous complaints and positive public demand prompted the next ITV director, Peter Fincham, to revive the programme after successful ratings in series five, which was broadcast in 2008.
On 12 January 2015, ITV announced that no more episodes will be commissioned due to the high costs of production and its intention to broadcast original drama commissions. The last episode was broadcast on 18 January 2015.
Just thought I would let you know Abraxas will be fracking three wells this upcoming week, most likely Tuesday or Wednesday. They are pulling all adjacent wells right now for frack protection. All three had failed liner hangers that prohibited the completion earlier last month.The reader did not provide any more details. But possibly,
After five years, two midterm disasters, and a rollout that reminded Americans why they fell out of love with big government in the 1970s, reality has finally begun to dawn on some Democrats about Obamacare. With open enrollment about to start and a third straight round of premium spikes about to hit voters’ pockets, the Democrats’ leading presidential candidate has offered a “major break” with the Obama administration on its signature domestic policy achievement.
Hillary Clinton will speak out against the so-called Cadillac tax on high-coverage health care plans, as early as this week, according to The New York Times. The politics on this are complicated, and not entirely focused on health care; in fact, this has more to do with the health of Clinton’s struggling and scandal-plagued campaign. Even so, the Cadillac tax on high-coverage plans is a key to Obamacare, both fiscally and philosophically, and Clinton’s coming attack on it shows just how much of an albatross the entire system has become for her party.
The nature of this strategic decision becomes plain from Maggie Haberman’s report. Clinton reached out to Randi Weingarten to inform her of this decision. Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers and an important player in the labor movement. Unions have long opposed the Cadillac tax, having spent decades demanding top-notch coverage for their members. The tax applies a 40 percent fee on benefits above a certain level, potentially costing labor unions hundreds of millions of dollars that they would rather spend elsewhere – say, on Democratic presidential and Congressional campaigns.
Why make this particular sop to Big Labor now? Clinton recently announced her opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project backed by unions in anticipation of the skilled labor required to build it. Clinton needed to take that position to defend her left flank from Bernie Sanders, whose opposition to Keystone has been consistent and vocal. That forced Clinton to placate labor leaders by pushing back on Obamacare, which until now Democrats have defended in its entirety – even from unions.
Union opposition arose during the drafting of the Affordable Care Act, with unions demanding either the removal of the Cadillac tax or an exemption from it, but the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress resisted. In part, the decision to oppose the unions came from the desperate political need to produce a Congressional Budget Office review that would show Obamacare as deficit-neutral in its first decade. Under the static tax analysis of Democrats, the Cadillac tax was expected to raise $32 billion in that first decade.This is a huge trainwreck. Not only are they going to keep (and probably expand) the benefits, the Dems are cutting the ways to finance ObamaCare. Watch for demands for the middle class to pony up for money to support ObamaCare.
Jobless claims climbed by 10,000 to 277,000 in the week ended Sept. 26. The median forecast of 48 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for 271,000.
The four-week moving average fell to the lowest level in almost two months and the total number of people receiving benefits was the smallest in 15 years.I'm somewhat surprised this was not the lede:
The four-week moving average, a less volatile measure than the weekly claims numbers, decreased to 270,750 last week, the lowest since early August, from 271,750.Let's see, early August -- what was that? Six weeks ago? Whatever.
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The deluge of light (and super light) sweet crude from U.S. tight-oil plays like the Permian Basin, Bakken and Eagle Ford has had many effects, including a push by refiners to rework facilities designed for heavy-crude processing to handle an excess of lighter oils. Many of these projects are underway and expected online in the next two years. Today, we consider refinery infrastructure investments that might not pan out in a low crude price world.
Everyone--even those whose interest in the oil industry extends only to how much they pay for gasoline or heating oil—knows that U.S. oil production has risen significantly over the past few years (from 5.6 MMb/d in 2011 to 8.7 MMb/d in 2014, and 9.3 MMb/d as of June 2015). You need to be something of a petro-geek, though, to know that almost all of the increase in domestic production the past few years has come in the form of lighter, sweeter crudes, especially very light oil with American Petroleum Institute (API) gravity of between 40 and 50 degrees. (Crudes with API gravity between 32 and 40 degrees are typically categorized as light, while heavy crudes--say, diluted bitumen from the Alberta oil sands--have gravities below 22 degrees, and medium oils have API gravity of between 22 and 31 degrees.) Refineries are designed and built to operate most efficiently when processing a certain type or mix of crudes, and a lot of refinery upgrades in the years leading up to the Shale Revolution were intended to accommodate a world where lighter crudes were thought to be running out, to be replaced by heavier (lower API gravity) crudes – particularly on the Gulf Coast. There is still plenty of heavy crude out there that comes to the Gulf Coast – from Mexico and Venezuela for example and also Western Canada. But with the U.S. producing a surfeit of light crude and with prices for that light crude being discounted – refiners began to consider investing in functionality to improve their light crude processing capacity.
Production in “light tight” oil plays like the Permian, Bakken and—most pertinent to today’s blog—Eagle Ford (which produces the lightest crude of them all) has grown exponentially since 2011 and is expected to remain high even under a pessimistic oil-price scenario according to the Energy Information Administration.