Saturday, April 7, 2018

Eleven Million Page Views -- April 7, 2018 -- A Shout-Out To Ennis, Montana

"Someone" or "someones" must have been helping me out. The last one hundred pageviews happened very, very quickly. It should have been another couple of hours before we hit eleven million -- but I'll take it -- I was ready to call it a day/night.

It doesn't quite work this way, but counting back from 11,000,005, on this screenshot, all we know about the 11 millionth visitor, someone from the "United States."

So, let's look at Ennis, Montana:
  • near Yellowstone National Park
  • far southwestern part of the state
  • US Route 287 
  • population: 838 (2010)
  • destination for trout anglers
  • at least three fly shops
  • home to Willie's Distillery, known for its bourbon; one of the growing number of micro-distilleries in Montana
Note: US 287 is the shortest route between Denver and Dallas-Ft Worth (for newbies, I live about a miles west of DFW) -- I bike to the perimeter road often); from Denver, US 287 goes north to Choteau, MT, about 100 miles south of the Canadian border.


I Drove All Night, Roy Orbison

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.

**********************************
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
*****************************
EIA: US Crude Oil Production Grew By 5% Last Year
That Wasn't Supposed To Happen -- Hubbert


******************************
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.

VID-20140903-WA0002

The Permian: 8X The Number Of Rigs That The Bakken Has -- Baker Hughes -- April 7, 2018

Link here.

The Bakken:
  • 55 rigs
  • 1 million bopd
  • "all" horizontals; and all greater than 15,000 feet total depth (most between 19,000 and 21,000)
The Permian:
  • 400 rigs
  • 2 million bopd
  • 90% horizontal; only 20% greater than 15,000 feet total depth


Did BTUAnalytics over-think this?

*****************************************
The US: the Southern Wall
China: the Southern Gate

Deng Xiaoping And The Transformation of China
Ezra  Vogel
c. 2011 
951.05 VOG 

Chapter 14: Experiments in Guangdong and Fujian, 1979 - 1984
  • Guangdong: mainland, opposite Hong Kong, Macau
  • Fujian: mainland, opposite Taiwan
The opening paragraphs are remarkable.
  • 1977: Deng Xiaoping, visited Guangdong; there for military conference; briefed on the problem of young men trying to escape across the border from China into Hong Kong
    • Deng immediately saw the problem; saw the solution
    • the problem arose from the disparity of living standards on either side of the border
    • 20-mile fence with thousands of troops: to no avail
    • socialism/communism on the Chinese side of the border not working
    • foreign investment not yet allowed
  • 1978: Xi Zhongxun appointed provincial party secretary
    • of the "old school"
    • the problem was "class struggle" -- he said, sticking to Marxist theory
    • he was schooled by a "brave local party secretary"; Xi Zhongxun fired him on the spot; the secretary said, "too late, I already quit"
    • Xi Zhongxun continued to listen
    • the next day he undertook a self-criticism at his own initiative and apologized to the local official, asked the latter to stay and pledged to enrich the economy
    • over the years, things turned around
    • Xi Zhongxun was originally from Shaanxi province (see map below); he retired in 1989; chose to retire in Guangdong
    • his son, XI Jinping, born in 1953, was selected in 2011 to be come the president of China beginning in 2011 to become the president of China beginning in 2012
  • China's Southern Gate: once Deng allowed Guangdong to open its doors, Hong Kong became a source of investment capital, entrepreneurial dynamism, and knowledge about the outside world
    • Hong Kong was full of entrepreneurs, including tens of thousands who had fled there after 1948 when the Chinese Communist armies began taking over the mainland
    • special economic zones (SEZs) established in 1980; "regulated primarily by the market"
    • during Deng's era, mainland officials in Guangdong and Fujian, especially in the SEZs, learned valuable lessons from the cosmopolitan Hong Kongers -- from their increasingly open television shows, newspapers, personal contacts, and from the factories, hotels, restaurants, and stores that they built in Guangdong
    • by the end of the Deng era in 1992 many mainlanders in southern Guangdong were indistinguishable from the residents who had come from Hong Kong
    • within three decades after Guangdong and Fujian were granted special status, Chinese exports had multiplied over one hundred times, from less than US$10 billion per year in 1978 to more than US$1 trillion, with more than one-third from Quangdong
    • in 1978 there were virtually no factories in Guangdon with modern assembly lines; within three decades, a visitor to southern Guangdong would see skyscrapers, large industrial sites, apartment buildings, world-class hotels, superhighways, and traffic jams
China map:


North Dakota's Legacy Fund Deposits Soaring; Saudi Arabia's Foreign Reserve Assets Plummeting -- Could North Dakota's Legacy Fund Someday Be Bigger Than Saudi Arabia's Foreign Reserve Account? -- April 7, 2018

Tongue-in-cheek, of course, .... except ... for Saudi Arabia, this is an existential issue.

Link here:



Link here:


Meanwhile, North Dakota Legacy Fund deposits, link here:

Week 14: April 1, 2018 -- April 7, 2018

Without question, this is the top story in the energy sector this past week: Saudi Arabia's foreign exchange reserves plummet.

For the archives, a story that is being misread / mis-reported -- the Trump trade war begins in earnest; WTI is dropping.

The Trump administration gave 25 US small refineries a new lease on life by rolling back (with waivers) RIN requirements.

Another big story is all the focus on the Permian in the past week; and here. The biggest story in US shale right now is the severe lack of adequate takeaway capacity in the Permian, affecting both crude oil and natural gas production. Has anyone noticed that we don't get media excitement over the amount of fracking or flaring in Texas, at least compared to the hysteria regarding the Bakken? Perhaps I'm biased, but I doubt it. By the way, this severe lack of takeaway capacity has put Permian crude pricing into a tailspin.

And more on the Permian: comparing rig efficiency in the Permian with that of the Bakken; and, here.

On a non-energy note, but one that will affect the Bakken, Williston set a new all-time "cold" record this past week. It broke the record last set in 1936.

The top Bakken story: SM Energy makes it official -- the company will exit the Bakken.

Operations
A new operator in North Dakota: Challenger Point Energy

Pipelines
A reminder: how important the DAPL was for North Dakota 

Other formations
The Madison -- a workover (a frack of sorts) -- jump in production

Bakken economy
Finally, a breakdown of Legacy Fund investments, ROI

Miscellaneous
The blog will go over 11,000,000 page views sometime this weekend