Making America Great Again -- Saudi Aramco Looking At Chemical Plant Addition At Port Arthur -- April 7, 2018

From Reuters:

• a multi-billion dollar plan
• subsidiary Motiva Enterprises LLC
• parties involved: 
• Honeywell - an aromatics unit; would convert benzene and paraxylene into feedstocks for chemicals and plastics; would produce 2 million tons of feedstock
• Technip FMC - to produce polymers from ethane; would produce 2 million tons of ethylene from ethane, then used for plastics
• benzene, paraxylene: byproducts of gasoline production

Related news at this link.

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SolarCity: An Albatross

The albatross:

• Tesla owns SolarCity
• the $2 billion purchase came with almost $3 billion in debt
• "huge chunk" of interest coming due soon
• [again, typical article: "huge chunk" not defined; and date coming due was not provided] 
• Tesla doesn't guarantee repayment; SolarCity does (this is called non-recourse debt for Tesla)
• but, the SolarCity debt affects Tesla's overall credit rating and impacts borrowing costs
• Tesla has $10 billion of total debt outstanding; $3 billion is non-recourse, mostly Solar City debt
• without SolarCity, Tesla's borrowing ratings might be closer to 5.9% (single B rating)
• with SolarCity rating, a B- rating/Caa1 rating, closer to 7.2%
• story at Fortune through YahooFinance

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EIA: US Crude Oil Production Grew By 5% Last Year

That Wasn't Supposed To Happen -- Hubbert

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How To Load A Bobcat On To A Dump Truck

For newbies: the Bobcat is a North Dakota product, and still manufactured in North Dakota.