Story Lines As We Approach The End Of The Year: Natural Gas Fill Rate Not Keeping Up; Running Out Of The "Right" Kind Of Oil -- September 30, 2018

Natural gas: becoming the big story of the year. Now this from Platts via oilprice:

Europe’s natural gas and electricity markets are heading into the winter heating season with prices at record highs amid various supply outages in already tight markets and uncertainty over how much flexibility in gas and power generation there will be.

Forward prices for natural gas are factoring in a winter risk premium in the currently tight market, highlighting the concern that another supply outage could strain the market further and send prices even higher.

Yet, the key factor determining Europe’s gas and power demand this winter will be something that no market can control—weather. Forecasts suggest that the start to the winter in Europe would be mild.

Last winter’s start was also mild, before the Beast from the East swept through Europe at the end of the season, causing one of the coldest winters this decade, squeezing natural gas supplies across Western Europe, and sending prices soaring.

Refiners struggle to adapt to the shale boom -- from Forbes via oilprice -- we've talked about this often -- it's not a shortage of oil, it's a shortage of the "right" kind of oil --

U.S. shale production is at record highs and the momentum is still not over. A lot has been said about the energy self-sufficiency implications of this trend, but there’s something that has not garnered a lot of attention: U.S. shale is light crude, great for making gasoline and other light fuels, but not so great for products such as middle distillates. Why this is important? Because gasoline demand is stagnating while demand for middle distillates is set for a serious boost ahead of the new IMO regulations on maritime vessel emissions.

In a recent article for Forbes, Wood Mackenzie’s VP for Chemicals and Oil Markets, Alan Gelder, warned that U.S. refiners may very soon find themselves struggling with excess production of gasoline that exceeds demand for the fuel.

At the same time, to make matters worse, the production slump in Venezuela is reducing the availability of heavy crude needed for middle distillates, not to mention that not all U.S. refiners have upgraded their facilities to produce more low-sulfur bunkering fuel products.
The problem concerns Asia as well, Gelder notes. Most refineries there need heavy sour crude to function, and there could be a shortage of this particular type of crude on the horizon because of the situation in Venezuela.

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This Week's Book

Atom Land: A Guided Tour Through The Strange (And Impossible Small) World of Particle Physics, Jon Butterworth, author of Most Wanted Particle, c. 2017, 2018.

Jon Butterworth is a professor  of physics and astronomy at University College London of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

The discipline: the study of the very smallest things goes by many different names; none of them is perfect:

• particle physics: most commonly used
• elementary particle physics
• high-energy physics

The Standard Model

• more of a theory than a model
• compares with "the Curry Mile," in Manchester, England, where the author grew up. Indian and Pakistani restaurants on "the Curry Mile" called themselves "Standard," but they were anything but Standard: they set the bar for "Indian food" and the bar was very, very high.
• likewise, the the "Standard Model" that summarizes the current state of our knowledge of the fundamental forces and constituents of matter is a very, very excellent model
• the theory (or "Standard Model") was further validated with the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012

Eight expeditions:

• this book will take the reader on eight expeditions deep into the heart of material universe
• the exhibitions will examine the smallest constituents of matter and the forces that bind and break them

First expedition

• glass
• silicon dioxide: for every atom of silicon, two atoms for oxygen -- 14 electrons
• it's interesting: the writer says the nucleus has a positive electric charge of fourteen time that of the electron (that is why fourteen electrons are attracted to it -- but the author has not yet used the word protons or neutrons
• science of particles
• science of waves: light, sound, radio, X-rays, and more esoteric waves
• the physics of waves is in many waves more interesting and more complex than the physics of particles

And we will stop here; rest of notes, if any, elsewhere.

Waves vs particles: think about this: while bullets fired from different directions may collide, there is no way that firing more shots could reduce the number of bullets. But making more waves might indeed make part of an ocean bay calmer. -- p. 12.

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The Dinosaur Exhibit