| 5/31/2016 | 05/31/2015 | 05/31/2014 | 05/31/2013 | 05/31/2012 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active Rigs | 28 | 80 | 189 | 187 | 214 |
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and the University of North Dakota (UND) announced today they have signed a three-year cooperative research and development agreement to both examine the beneficial use of unmanned aerial systems/ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAS/UAV) and to mitigate their use for nefarious purposes.Over at "Big Stories/The Next Big Thing," I track the North Dakota drone story.
“Through this agreement, we will develop a better understanding of the capabilities and vulnerabilities of UAS/UAVs and spur the development of technologies to counter the potential threats based upon their use,” said DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology Dr. Reginald Brothers. “A better understanding will spur innovative ideas and approaches to reduce this new threat facing our homeland.”
Saudi Arabia engineered OPEC's policy to kill off U.S. shale oil production. The plan was straightforward: Keep pumping oil, maintain market share and outlast the Americans.
But the plan is also producing casualties within the cartel itself: Angola, Nigeria and a Venezuela that's on the verge of implosion.
Six months after OPEC left its high-production policy in place, some of the cartel members who called loudest for output cuts are feeling the most pain. Inflation is soaring and currencies have plummeted in lesser petro states, as top exporter Saudi Arabia continues to dictate policy.
Update: Bloomberg has a long, long article on Saudi financing US debt through Treasury bonds going back to Richard M. Nixon. This is one more reason why I think Saudi's Supreme Council will be hesitant to go through with the IPO: the kingdom is going to have to divulge a lot of information in exchange for a few billion dollars.Prince Salman's Vision 2030 includes building more refineries in an attempt to diversify Saudi Aramaco which is predominantly an upstream company. It looks like Prince Salman will have some competition. It appears China is already beating him at his own game. This also explains why China has been such a huge importer of oil over the past few years. China may be a "Communist" country but it sure acts like a western company when it comes to oil and gas:
Japan's largest refiner, JX Nippon Oil & Energy, plans to process 769,452 bopd of crude oil in June for the domestic market, down 6% from a year ago.
But JX plans to export an all-time high of 220,143 b/d of oil products in June, mainly to Asia and Australia, up 72% from a year ago amid supportive overseas demand.
JX's monthly oil product exports will rise to more than 210,000 bopd for the first time next month. The boost in exports comes after JX had said on April 27 that it will start exporting gasoil from its 145,000 bopd Sendai refinery in May, following the start of gasoline exports from the Mizushima plant, which has a combined refining capacity of 380,200 bopd, in April.
| 5/31/2016 | 05/31/2015 | 05/31/2014 | 05/31/2013 | 05/31/2012 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active Rigs | 28 | 80 | 189 | 187 | 214 |
The reversal of Shell’s Zydeco Pipeline (formerly Ho-Ho) in 2013 was a big deal. It enabled eastbound flows of a wide range of crude streams from the Houston area to the storage and distribution hub at St. James, LA and from there to a dozen nearby refineries. Soon, though, Zydeco (named for the region’s Creole music) was running full and shippers were competing for space, spurring midstream companies to consider further enhancements. New pipeline capacity being developed is planned to come online later this year and in 2017, but—with ever-changing market dynamics—will it all be necessary? In today’s blog, “Take the Long Way Home—Easing Crude Pipeline Constraints to St. James,” Housley Carr begins a series on new pipeline capacity to St. James, and whether it will meet (or exceed) market needs.
Since the Golden Oldies days of the RBN blogosphere, we’ve paid a lot of attention to how crude oil gets from where it’s produced to where it’s stored and (ultimately) refined because—to put it bluntly—there are few things more important in the world of U.S. hydrocarbons. And, thanks to geology, history and the grace of God, the epicenter of that world is the central Gulf Coast between Houston and New Orleans. As we first discussed three and a half years ago, the flow-reversals of the Houston-to-Houma (LA) pipeline and a connecting pipeline between Houma and the mammoth crude storage complex in Clovelly, LA, was part of a wholesale change in Gulf Coast pipeline infrastructure aimed at facilitating the flow of domestic crude to market from growing shale production basins in the Bakken, the Permian Basin and the Eagle Ford to Houston and from there, to the hub at St. James.
As we said more recently in, St. James (located on the Mississippi 60 miles upriver from the Big Easy) serves as a critical storage and distribution hub. It receives crude by pipeline, by barge and tanker, and by rail; it has more than 30 MMbbl of storage capacity; and it sends crude out to area refineries with a combined capacity of 2.6 MMb/d. St. James also feeds the 1.2 MMb/d Capline pipeline, which transports crude and condensates north to Patoka, IL (but which has been running at far less than full-capacity). Much as Taylor Swift, The Eagles and Dolly Parton each draw a wide range of fans, the St. James hub serves as an oil mixing bowl, receiving regionally produced crudes such as the Gulf Coast benchmark Light Louisiana Sweet (LLS), Heavy Louisiana Sweet (HLS), medium sour crude Mars (produced offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, or GOM), and West Texas Intermediate (WTI), as well as ultra light crude from the Eagle Ford (condensate) that is piped north through Capline, connecting through other Canadian pipes to Alberta for use as a diluent in heavy Western Canadian oil sands.
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 3-2016 | 29453 | 45490 |
| 2-2016 | 1704 | 1268 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 3-2016 | 26840 | 32734 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 4-2016 | 8371 | 6955 |
| 3-2016 | 23257 | 18748 |
| 2-2016 | 10140 | 5909 |
| 1-2016 | 10085 | 6139 |
| 12-2015 | 10390 | 5621 |
| 11-2015 | 315 | 20 |
Since December 2009, the sea levels have declined in both Washington DC and The Battery NY.
In Washington, DC, the decline has been -3.3 mm/year; and, in The Battery, NY, the decline has been more than three times greater, at a rate of -10.7 mm/year.Well, that's good news. Ten millimeters/year = one centimeter/year. The length of an average popsicle stick is 4.5 inches or 11.43 centimeters. I place my popsicle sticks 2.5 inches into the sand, leaving 2.0 inches showing. At this rate, my popsicle sticks will last longer than expected. I thought by now I would have to invest in longer sticks.
They call it The Endless Summer, the ultimate surfing adventure, crossing the globe in search of the perfect wave. From the uncharted waters of West Africa, to the shark-filled seas of Australia.....two California surfers, Robert August and Mike Hynson, accomplish in a few months what most people never do in a lifetime --- they live their dream.
When it first played in theaters, audiences lined up to see it again and again, spellbound by its thrilling excitement and awesome photography.
But in fact, what's most compelling about the film is the sport of surfing itself, and once you've ween it, you'll never forget why.So, we'll see. Later.
The threatened summer of discontent for American travelers got underway Memorial Day weekend as the understaffed Transportation Security Administration struggled to keep its security lines moving in the nation’s airports.
The backups happened at most big airports and some smaller ones, particularly at the choice hours when passengers prefer to fly, and they seemed to occur most often when a particular flight was drawing hundreds of passengers to a single checkpoint.
At Chicago’s O’Hare International that was Terminal 3, surprisingly, at 7 a.m. Sunday. At Boston’s Logan International the crush at B1 came at 4:40 p.m. Saturday. The checkpoint at 4B in New York’s John F. Kennedy International was moving with painful slowness at 12:30 p.m. Sunday. Crunch time came at Atlanta’s north checkpoint at 3:15 p.m. Sunday.
In the next unit to the west [of the Dvirn pads noted above] the Weydahl 4-36H1 has been on production with new enhanced completion technology? With just over 10 months production I would think CLR is happy with that result?From the NDIC:
| Pool | Date | Days | BBLS Oil | Runs | BBLS Water | MCF Prod | MCF Sold | Vent/Flare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BAKKEN | 4-2016 | 30 | 17144 | 17049 | 3823 | 20468 | 20468 | 0 |
| BAKKEN | 3-2016 | 31 | 14285 | 14522 | 2972 | 12821 | 12632 | 189 |
| BAKKEN | 2-2016 | 29 | 14693 | 14855 | 3118 | 13783 | 13519 | 264 |
| BAKKEN | 1-2016 | 31 | 17339 | 17045 | 3763 | 17216 | 17216 | 0 |
| BAKKEN | 12-2015 | 31 | 16956 | 16955 | 3720 | 17099 | 17099 | 0 |
| BAKKEN | 11-2015 | 30 | 19403 | 19644 | 4427 | 19842 | 19842 | 0 |
| BAKKEN | 10-2015 | 24 | 15371 | 15282 | 3506 | 13684 | 13513 | 171 |
| BAKKEN | 9-2015 | 30 | 25156 | 24727 | 6651 | 17575 | 15511 | 2064 |
| BAKKEN | 8-2015 | 20 | 15846 | 16142 | 5332 | 16396 | 16283 | 113 |
| BAKKEN | 7-2015 | 28 | 25131 | 25499 | 8778 | 26250 | 25636 | 614 |
| BAKKEN | 6-2015 | 9 | 4461 | 3718 | 659 | 11892 | 875 | 11017 |
In most recent CLR quarterly earnings conference call Oklahoma activities were the main topics, they didn’t say much about the Bakken. But I did hear the comment that enhanced well completions in the Bakken were turning out better than expected. Proppant for Weydahl works out to about 615# per foot of perforations. When they talk about Scoop completions they talk about proppant in pounds per foot. Like now they are using 2,500# per foot in the Scoop. Four times as much as the North Dakota Bakken Weydahl frac job.That was my impression, also: not much said about the Bakken. A summary was posted here. That's a nice 30-second fracking data point: 650 pounds per foot in the Bakken vs 2,500 pounds per foot in Oklahoma.
Another comment I have heard about SCOOP is that infrastructure and take away capacity is a non-issue. There are several refineries in the state, much gas collection/processing due to a mature environment from previous activity, and they have Cushing. In the SCOOP operators can go balls to the walls in terms of production and not have to worry about over whelming infrastructure.In the current pricing environment, I doubt there are takeaway constraints in the Bakken, but if oil ever gets back to $100+, all bets are off.
Weydahl went on line in June I believe, a few months later the Bridger 4,5,&6 which is a few miles SW went on line (using CLR enhanced completion technology?). There was a big surge of new gas in the pipeline system in that immediate area at that time. If you look a couple miles to the west at the Whitman 2-34H which is still flowing and has produced 1.44 million barrels to date, during September the amount of gas flared was almost ½ the gas produced. So there was a big spike in gas flared for a few months from Whitman at that time.
Which leads me to this rambling point. Even just a few years ago when companies like OneOK were trying to figure out where to put gas collection lines, size them, build/size booster stations, and build/size processing plants to handle gas production they ended up under sizing based on where potential production rates are today.
If you look at each generation of production output in areas that have been producing for 10 years, each new pad and updated completion technology far surpasses the previous generation it appears to me.
The early productivity of the new Bridger wells are blowing away the first and second generation wells of the same time frame. Another interesting point about the last generation of Bridger wells is that the early leader in production was the H1 well but since then the MB and H2 production have passed it.Wow, there is so much incredible information in those last three paragraphs. I was aware of some of the story lines, but not all. It would behoove readers to read closely those last three paragraphs to get a good feeling for the Bakken.
Eder Flag Manufacturing Co. in Oak Creek says it’s having a banner year. Sales are up 15% from a year ago, partly from 2016 being a national election year and political events needing flags.From FreeBeacon:
The FBI processed a record number of firearms-related background checks last year, indicating that more guns were sold in 2015 than in any previous year in American history.From The Wall Street Journal:
U.S. car sales in 2015 jumped to a record, clearing a peak last reached 15 years ago as cheap gasoline, employment gains and low interest rates spurred Americans to snap up new vehicles.From Fortune, another banner year for hot dogs:
Los Angeles residents consume more hot dogs than any other U.S. city, the NHDSC claims, and ballparks sell over 20 million hot dogs throughout their season. Because baseball fans love hot dogs so much, the top ten hot dog consuming cities all host a Major League Baseball team.From National Geographic, record bottled water being sold:
It seems that Americans love their bottled water. According to data recently released by Beverage Marketing Inc., the amount of bottled water sold rose 7.9 percent in 2015. That’s on top of a 7 percent increase in 2014.Later, when I get back from the grocery store where I now need to go to get a newspaper for May, we will post the most important sales statistics for the US. Some readers have probably already guessed what that category is.
The Williams County Syrian community was not the first of its kind in North Dakota, nor was it the largest in total numbers, but it can be classed as the most enduring and self-conscious of all such groups. To this day, an ethnic celebration rarely takes place without Lebanese representation in Williston, the area's major city.
Wonder of Williston, the remarkably complete history of Williams County, tells the story of some, but not all, of the area's first Syrian settlers. According to their family accounts, in 1903 David Kalil, Alex Aboud, Joe Albert, and Abraham Abdo arrived to take up free land. One long-time Williston resident says that David Kalil was working out of Duluth as a peddler. Traveling through, he looked over the Williston area in the later part of the 1890s and subsequently returned to take up a homestead.
The date, 1903, coincides very well with naturalization records ... the list of citizenship applicants reveals a number of things that make the Williams County Syrians unique:
The list also included "William Eattol," a surname that would be changed slightly later on and would be a very, very familiar name in Williams County when I was growing up.
- the rapidity with which such a great number of newcomers sought the status of full-fledged Americans. They filed first papers almost immediately as soon as they reached the Williams County region. This hardly fits the "get rich and return home" generalization found in publications concerning other parts of the nation;
- the presence of such a sizeable number of women, eight out of the total twenty-one. Indeed, several of the women appear to be wives who applied at the same time as their husbands. Again, this does not fit the standard first arrival expectations;
- without exception, the 1903 applicants in Williams County were Christian; and,
- the most famous of all Lebanese North Dakota religious leaders, the pastor of St George's Church near Rubgy, Fr. Seraphim Roumie is on the list of applicants.
The staff of the Maine Public Utilities Commission concluded Wednesday that the state’s electricity and gas customers won’t benefit from a plan to spend up to $75 million a year to help expand natural gas pipeline capacity in New England.
The conclusion of a long-awaited report stemming from 2013 legislation was welcomed by clean-energy advocates, who are pushing renewable energy over fossil fuels in order to fight climate change. It was denounced by businesses that use a lot of electricity and natural gas and are desperate to lower their operating costs.
The PUC staff concluded that low oil and gas prices, new pipelines under construction or being permitted, and other factors could temper winter price spikes in wholesale natural gas without ratepayers getting involved.
The report said, in part: “The record in this proceeding does not support a finding that (a pipeline contract) is reasonably likely to provide net benefits for Maine electricity and natural gas consumers under a sufficiently broad spectrum of future scenarios. Moreover, regional market conditions, rule changes and other events suggest that the price and volatility concerns that led to the (2013 law) may be addressed without (a contract).”And so it goes. We'll see how it all works out.
RBN Energy: New England gas pipeline update.
More than 3,000 MW of new, natural gas-fired generating capacity is either under construction in New England or will be soon, but some of the gas pipeline projects that would ease long-standing constraints into and through the six-state region have hit rough patches. Kinder Morgan in mid-April suspended plans for its Northeast Energy Direct project, a “greenfield” pipeline across Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, and a few days later the state of New York denied the co-developers of the already-delayed Constitution Pipeline—a key link between the Marcellus and New England--a needed water quality permit.
The good folks in western Massachusetts and, for that matter, all of New England might want to read how their comrades in Venezuela are faring. This is from The New York Times published today:The fates of some other major projects in the Northeast are uncertain too. Today, we provide an update on pipelines in the land of Yankees and Red Sox.We’ve written often about gas pipeline constraints to and through New England, a region with less than one-third the area of Texas but nearly 15 million people, the vast majority of whom believe that Fenway Park is heaven on earth.New England has been adding a lot of new gas-fired generating capacity, but only modest enhancements have been made to the gas pipeline network that serves the region.In the unusually cold winter of 2013-14, the lack of sufficient pipeline capacity to meet demand during periods of very high demand sent natural gas prices soaring as local distribution companies (LDCs) with firm transportation contracts took most of the gas and owners of many gas-fired power plants either scrambled for deliverable, high-priced gas or switched to firing their units with fuel oil.
CARACAS, Venezuela — The courts? Closed most days. The bureau to start a business? Same thing. The public defender’s office? That’s been converted into a food bank for government employees.
Step by step, Venezuela has been shutting down.
This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory.
In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week.
But that is only the start of the country’s woes. Electricity and water are being rationed, and huge areas of the country have spent months with little of either.
Many people cannot make international calls from their phones because of a dispute between the government and phone companies over currency regulations and rates.
Coca-Cola Femsa, the Mexican company that bottles Coke in the country, has even said it was halting production of sugary soft drinks because it was running out of sugar.
Wait till they run out of beer.Last week, protests turned violent in parts of the country where demonstrators demanded empty supermarkets be resupplied. And on Friday, the government said it would continue its truncated workweek for an additional 15 days.
So what’s ahead for crude and gasoline as we head into the summer driving season? Scott Shellady, SVP of Derivatives at TJM Investments, told Yahoo Finance’s Seana Smith that he thinks low prices are here to stay.
“The story is lower for a lot longer,” said Shellady. “We’re starting to see some cracks in Saudi Arabia. They might start to unleash more oil on the market… If they really need to start raising some capital and they really start flooding the market, I think that oil up around the $48 to $50 per barrel level is going to be hard to continue.
I expect prices to be around $40 per barrel in August, and I think the new level we’re going to be between is $35 and $50 per barrel.”
ROSS, N.D. — Richard Omar drove his pickup truck through the cemetery gate and pulled to a stop in sight of the scattered headstones. As he walked toward a low granite monument, his running shoes crunched the dry prairie grass and he tilted forward into an unrelenting west wind.At the sidebar at the right, way down at the bottom, under "Trivia," I have a link to a VOA story about this mosque. It was one of the first links I ever put up on the blog.
“These are my parents,” he said beside a carved granite marker. Then he fixed bouquets of fabric flowers into place with metal stakes, hoping they would last until next spring.
Mr. Omar, a retired electrician, was engaged in an act of filial obligation and something larger, as well: the consecration of a piece of American religious history. This cemetery, with the star-crescent symbol on its gate and on many of its gravestones, held the remains of a Muslim community that dated back nearly 120 years. Up a slight hill stood the oldest mosque in the United States.
The original mosque, erected by pioneers from what are now Syria and Lebanon, had been built in 1929. After it fell into disuse and ruin, the descendants of its founders and the Christian friends they had made over the generations raised money to put up a replacement in 2005.
It is a modest square of cinder blocks, perhaps 15 feet on each side, topped with an aluminum dome and minarets. Several hundred yards off the main highway, on the outskirts of a town with barely 200 residents about 60 miles west of Minot, the mosque and cemetery exist much as they always have, surrounded by fields of wheat and corn and grazing lands. In this spot, all the industrial clamor of North Dakota’s fracking boom feels immeasurably distant.
Russia’s long history of involvement—and warfare—in the [Middle East] is largely unknown to Westerners, but it helps to explain President Vladimir Putin’s decision last fall to intervene in Syria’s civil war. Mr. Putin’s gambit on behalf of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad caught many in the West by surprise. Critics have assailed it as a miscalculated bid to replace the U.S. as the dominant outside power in the region.
But when viewed from Moscow, Mr. Putin’s Middle Eastern adventure looks like something very different: an overdue return to geopolitical aspirations that stretch back not only to the Soviet era but to centuries of czarist rule. “The Middle East is a way to showcase that the period of Russia’s absence from the international scene as a first-rate state has ended,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow, which advises the Kremlin and other government institutions.
Oil-supply outages are at their highest level in more than a decade, bolstering the “fear premium” that has helped push crude prices to $50 a barrel.
About 3.5 million barrels a day worth of production is off line because of disruptions such as militant attacks in Nigeria, wildfires in Canada and political unrest in Libya—more than 3% of the global total. That is likely the highest since the Iraq war hit output there in 2003.
At the same time, there is less slack to fill supply gaps. Unused production capacity that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries can bring on quickly has dwindled, and the glut of output from other producers, including U.S. shale companies, has ebbed as companies cut back amid lower prices.
“There isn’t a lot of extra supply out there,” said Ann-Louise Hittle, lead oil-market analyst at energy-consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. “That’s when you start to get a risk premium back in the market. It is absolutely to be expected and it is, in our opinion, just the beginning.”My favorite graphs:
Matthew Cobb tells this story in his latest book, Life’s Greatest Secret. Cobb, a professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, is a working geneticist. He is also a student of the history of science who has written several previous books on the history of biology.
Life’s Greatest Secret is aimed at the general reader who may have only a passing familiarity with biology, much less with the detailed molecular mechanics of how DNA does what it does. The book serves as a useful primer for those interested in the brave new world of genetic intervention made possible by the rise of biotechnology.
But Cobb’s book will also be of interest to professional scientists as it recounts events in one of the most transformative periods in the history of science: the rise of a molecular understanding of life.I would read it, not for the science of DNA, but for the author's history of the race to describe it. It would be interesting to see how it compares to how James Watson saw it.