North Dakota County Votes Down Wind Farm; Visual Pollution Near "The Park" -- November 17, 2016

Hoping Those Tipis-Tepees-Teepees Have Central Heat

Early? Huge blizzard, major snowstorms predicted for upper midwest from Rocky Mountains east through Minneapolis to entire state of Minnesota. The weather pattern appears to "miss" North Dakota except the far southeast corner. Blizzard warnings are for northeastern South Dakota / southwestern Minnesota. It's going to be close but the big question is whether the Standing Rock Reservation will be hit.

Overstayed their welcome: speaking of the Standing Rock Reservation -- the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council voted unanimously to ask Red Warrior Camp to leave. Something tells me if the blizzard hits, "they" will have no trouble shutting down the camp. Unless you've been there, you have no idea how remote, how dangerous this area can be in the winter. And, then, of course, those pesky grizzly bears. 

Paid protestors: the ad has now been removed, but Craigslist had an ad offering payment to folks who would assemble at West Acres Mall in Fargo to shut it down in support of DAPL.

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Speaking of Cold Weather

From AccuWeather:

Temperatures in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Morgantown, West Virginia, and Buffalo, New York, will plummet from the 60s and 70s on Friday to the upper 20s and lower 30s during Saturday night. Then, temperatures may recover by only 10 degrees or less on Sunday.

Dispatchable energy from solar farm and wind farms will be needed to keep all those homes cozy. Oh, that's right. Solar and wind energy is not dispatchable.

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NIMBY

Proposed Wind Project Shut Down

From The Dickinson Press, data points:

• Charlie Creek Wind Farm; Orion Renewable Energy Group; would have been their first wind farm in ND; had been working on the project for two years; 25,000 acres
• Billing County, southwest North Dakota; near ND Highway 95
• would have begun three miles north of Fairfield and would have extended to one mile south of ND Highway 200
• 114-turbine, 383-megawatt wind farm proposal
• sounds like only the surface owners wanted; otherwise no one else wanted it
• too near Theodore Roosevelt National Park; "visual pollution" issue; park visitors would be able to see 75 wind turbines
• three commissioners; one recused himself due to conflict of interest; other two voted down the project
• huge, huge amount of mailbox money involved: from this site, $5,000 to $8,000/turbine

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Back to the Bakken

North Dakota September, 2016, crude oil production: lowest since February, 2014.  The state issued 82 drilling permits in October, a large increase from 63 in September, although down from 99 in August.

Active rigs:

	11/17/2016	11/17/2015	11/17/2014	11/17/2013	11/17/2012
Active Rigs	38	64	184	183	187

RBN Energy: Texas natural gas pipeline capacity, flows, and basis -- the fretboard model.

The natural gas pipeline grid in Texas is undergoing a historic transformation as interstate pipelines designed to move gas north and east from the Gulf Coast region are being reversed, enabling Marcellus/Utica gas to flow to LNG export markets in Louisiana and Texas, and via Texas for pipeline export to Mexico.  

With a history of oil and gas production going back more than 100 years, no region in the world has a more convoluted network of pipelines than Texas.  The state can be viewed as a dense “spaghetti bowl” of interconnected interstate and intrastate systems that defies traditional gas market analysis, in part because intrastate pipelines do not post receipts and deliveries on their systems as required by federally regulated interstate pipelines. 

However, it is possible to assess the dynamics of regional flows and capacities by examining the morass of flow data available from interstate pipelines in the region that connect to the intrastates. To help make sense of this data, RBN has developed a simplified model that facilitates an understanding of Texas natural gas flows and capacities that we call (unsurprisingly since it’s RBN) the Fretboard Model because the region’s interstate pipelines and capacity constraints look (with just a bit of artistic license) very much like a guitar fretboard.  In today’s blog, we introduce this model.

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The Political Page

It is absolutely incredible how fast MSNBC has come with regard to the new Trump presidency. Mika did clearly say Morning Joe  is of the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Warren came under a significant amount of criticism which really surprised me. Bernstein said world leaders respected Obama but no one feared him. And so on, and so on. Joe, himself, was absent from the set. The first hour was as good as anything I've heard anywhere (I don't watch Fox News at all and only visit the website if a link sends me there).

Steve Bannon's assessment -- read on Morning Joe -- sounded like something Bernie Sanders could have written. Amazing.

Payback is hell. Connect the dots. Jared Kushner. Chris Christie. Elevator: Jared is Trump's son-in-law. Jared's father prosecuted for fraud. Prosecutor: Chris Christie. Chris Christie out of Trump's inner circle.

And their point would be? A crawler at MSNBC: US ranks dead last among the ten wealthiest nations when it comes to health care despite spending the most per capita on health care. Let's see? ObamaCare was passed in 2010. Six years ago. 

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?

From Investopedia, data points:

• Musk Melon wants to deploy 4,425 satellites 
• to provide high-speed, global internet coverage
• has asked the Obama administration for permission to move forward