Update On Permian Natural Gas Processing -- Part 2 -- RBN Energy -- August 7, 2017

Active rigs:

$49.11↓	8/7/2017	08/07/2016	08/07/2015	08/07/2014	08/07/2013
Active Rigs	58	34	73	192	181

RBN Energy: Permian natural gas processing plants and NGL pipelines, part 2.

WTI: down 1%; but 10-year Treasury bonds up sharply. But is that the reason. Over at Reuters, oil slide from nine-week high as traders take another look at OPEC's cuts (wink, wink).

Oilprice: "nothing to see here" -- frackers ignore rising well decline rates. Oilprice.com notes what is going on in the Permian; mentions something similar in the Eagle Ford; but, interestingly, the Bakken is not mentioned.

Boom and bust: macroeconomic risks for the oil industry -- John Kemp, Reuters oil analyst. Long article; doesn't say much but does suggest, to the newbie, how an oil sector recovery begins.

Cramer (CNBC): WTI to remain at $50 for years (not 2, 3, or 4 years, but at least five years).

Boom and bust: canceled LNG project casts shadow over Canada's biggest shale play.

Petronas' decision to cancel its Pacific NorthWest LNG project is a blow to the growth outlook for Canada's largest shale play, eliminating a potentially huge source of future gas demand.

Gas from the Montney shale play in western Canada would have supplied the C$36 billion ($28.7 billion) project in northern British Columbia. The project, majority-owned by Malaysia's Petronas, would then have shipped 12 megatonnes per year of liquefied natural gas to Asia.

Instead, state-owned Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas) subsidiary Progress Energy will keep developing and selling gas from its vast Montney position into a North American market where prices have been languishing at historically low levels.

The Montney is linked at the sidebar at the right.

Coal: I'll be posting this as an update to an earlier post, and may re-post it as a stand-alone post. This is a big story over at notalotofpeopleknowthat.com: German's long goodbye to coal despite Merkel's green push.

Tesla: this tells me all I need to know about Musk Melon lowering the price of the Model X. Tesla is planning a $1.5 million bond offering to support Model 3.

And yet another article on the downside of EVs: Electric vehicle realities in the Financial Times.

In the spirit of non-consensus thinking, it’s time for FT Alphaville to ask just how green electric cars really are. Are policies to ban diesel and gasoline cars at some arbitrary point in the future likely to unleash a barrage of negative externalities that no one’s yet even thought about?

Brian Piccioni and team at BCA Research offer a good starting point to our questions on Thursday, in a report entitled Electric Vehicles Part 1: Costs of Ownership.

The bad news for EV fans is their work determines that the cost of ownership of an EV still far exceeds that of an internal Combustion Engine Vehicle (ICEV), even after subsidies are accounted for.

With numbers crunched, a comparison between the Chevy Bolt EV and two equivalent ICEVs, the Chevy Sonic and the Open Astra, over 100,000 miles, shows that there’s no denying EVs are still more expensive than ICEVs.

Three points come up in particular.

1) Excluding subsidies, the net expense difference is about $16,000 in the US, $18,500 in Germany and $13,200 in France.

2) After subsidies, the difference is about $6,600 in New York State, $13,900 in Germany and $6,000 in France.

3) Even if electricity were free (which of course it isn’t), after subsidies, the difference in cost of ownership in NY would be $3,400, $3,200 in Germany and $600 in France.

With respect to the Bolt specifically, the analysts note GM believes it’s losing some $9,000 with every Bolt it sells. The automaker would need manufacturing costs to be cut by about $14,750 — 34 per cent — to make the vehicle competitive with GM’s Opel Astra in France.

Do the dots connect?

• Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway reports a loss on it insurance division
• new "attitude" by millennials as evidenced in car insurance commercials: "What good is car insurance if you can't use it?"

Solar: This will test the grid -- will be interesting to observe ...