The Value Of An Energy Asset Is Deteriorating Underneath Europe -- Bloomberg -- July 14, 2016

From Bloomberg:

For decades, one of the most profitable parts of Europe’s energy industry was giant, underground reservoirs used to store billions of dollars worth of natural gas. Traders stockpile fuel there during the summer to sell in winter, when the continent’s consumers need to heat their homes.

The trade isn’t working anymore.

As the world finds itself with an increasing oversupply of natural gas, the gap between summer and winter prices has narrowed, making the storage business much less lucrative.

That’s caused RWE AG and SSE Plc to write down the value of gas storage sites by about $200 million each in the first quarter. Other operators from Statoil ASA to Wingas GmbH say they may exit the industry if the slump continues. That could be a problem because storage isn’t just about profits from trading - it also provides security against sudden spikes in demand or unexpected supply constraints.

Data points:

• European storage operators are shutting down storage; storage prices no longer cover operating costs
• 1Q16: three of the 10 largest storage operators in Europe recorded losses due to storage operating costs
• more than 3% of Europe's gas storage has been mothballed since 2010, including two more facilities in 2016
• there was also a permanent reduction in output from Europe's largest natural gas field Groningen, in Netherlands, when production was linked to tremors

Risks:

• Europe has experienced natural gas shortages twice in the last decade during freezing temperatures because of disputes between Ukraine and Russia
• Russia is the EU's largest outside supplier
• this is a security issue for the EU

With regard to Groningen, this is a most opportune time to take us back to this post in early 2014.

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Notes To The Granddaughters

The book to read this week (me, not the granddaughters): Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry, Ian Stewart, c. 2007, the author of Nature's Numbers and Does God Play Dice?

Mesopotamia: between two rivers. Potamia, rivers, potable?

Invention of agriculture, led to city-states. Some of the world's great city-states in Mesopotamia: Ninevah, Nimrud, Nippur, Uruk, Lagash, Eridu, Ur, and above all, Babylon.

Euclid's Elements Of Geometry (generally, just Elements). When printing was invented, this book was among the first to appear in printed form. It  has been published in over a thousand different editions, a number exceeded only by the Bible. Taught, wrote in Alexandria, 325 BCE; died, 265 BCE; exact birthplace unknown. Must have been, at some point, a student at Plato's Academy in Athens.

Euclid's only tools: an unmarked straightedge and a compass.

Regular polygons. The Greeks could construct regular polygons when the number of sides is: 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, or 20. The Greeks could not construct regular polygons when the number of sides is: 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 18, 19. From wiki:

As 7 is a Pierpont prime but not a Fermat prime, the regular heptagon is not constructible with compass and straightedge but is constructible with a marked ruler and compass.

This type of construction is called a neusis construction.

It is also constructible with compass, straightedge and angle trisector.

The impossibility of straightedge and compass construction follows from the observation that ${\displaystyle \scriptstyle {2\cos {\tfrac {2\pi }{7}}\approx 1.247}}$ is a zero of the irreducible cubic x3 + x2 − 2x − 1. Consequently this polynomial is the minimal polynomial of 2cos(2π⁄7), whereas the degree of the minimal polynomial for a constructible number must be a power of 2. 

Within the range of 3 - 20, note that the number "17" is missing. The author will get back to "17" later. 

Omar Khayyam was prominent among Persian and Arab mathematicians who took up the torch that the Greeks had dropped. He went farther than using straightedge and compass, but not much farther. He used "conic sections" because they can be constructed by slicing a cone with a plane.

To be continued, maybe. Probably not.