Moderate US Crude Oil Draw -- EIA -- July 17, 2019

Yesterday, US retail sales, beat expectations, consumers making America great:

• forecast: a measly 0.1% growth, month-over-month
• actual: 0.4%
• pundits keep telling us "we're" headed for a recession; that consumers are worn out; that tariffs are "killing" us -- oh, give me a break

EIA: weekly petroleum report out today -- for period ending July 12, 2019:

• US weekly crude oil inventories: declined by 3.1 million bbls
• US weekly crude oil inventories: 455.9 million bbls
• US weekly crude oil inventories: 4% above five-year average and that five-year average is increasing
• refining capacity: operating at 94.4% capacity; at high end of capacity; has been this way for several weeks now
• see comments below and this link to the EIA pdf;

Re-balancing:

• at week zero, 446.9 million bbls in storage
• at week 34, 455.9 million bbls in storage, and I believe this is the second week (or thereabouts) that EIA has changed definition of oil in storage to make it more "realistic":

Week	Week Ending	Change	Million Bbls Storage
Week 0	November 21, 2018	4.9	446.9
Week 1	November 28, 2018	3.6	450.5
Week 2	December 6, 2018	-7.3	443.2
Week 3	December 12, 2018	-1.2	442.0
Week 4	December 19, 2018	-0.5	441.5
Week 5	December 28, 2018	0.0	441.4
Week 6	January 4, 2019	0.0	441.4
Week 7	January 9, 2019	-1.7	439.7
Week 8	January 16, 2019	-2.7	437.1
Week 9	January 24, 2019	8.0	445.0
Week 10	January 31, 2019	0.9	445.9
Week 11	February 6, 2019	1.3	447.2
Week 12	February 13, 2019	3.6	450.8
Week 13	February 21, 2019	3.7	454.5
Week 14	February 27, 2019	-8.6	445.9
Week 15	March 6, 2019	7.1	452.9
Week 16	March 13, 2019	-3.9	449.1
Week 17	March 20, 2019	-9.6	439.5
Week 18	March 27, 2019	2.8	442.3
Week 19	April 3, 2019	7.2	449.5
Week 20	April 10, 2019	7.0	456.5
Week 21	April 17, 2019	-1.4	455.2
Week 22	April 24, 2019	5.5	460.1
Week 23	May 1, 2019	9.9	470.6
Week 24	May 8, 2019	-4.0	466.6
Week 25	May 15, 2019	5.4	472.0
Week 26	May 22, 2019	4.7	476.8
Week 27	May 30, 2019	-0.3	476.5
Week 28	June 5, 2019	6.8	483.3
Week 29	June 12, 2019	2.2	485.5
Week 30	June 19, 2019	-3.1	482.4
Week 31	June 26, 2019	-12.8	469.6
Week 32	July 3, 2019	-1.1	468.5
Week 33	July 10, 2019	-9.5	459.0
Week 34	July 17, 2019	-3.1	455.9

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Best Quote Of The Day

"Occasional-Cortex: the reason there are instructions on the back of shampoo bottles."

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The Biology Page

I've blogged many times on Nick Lane's book, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, c. 2015. This book brought me up to date with regard to current advances in "thinking" about how life originated on earth (or maybe anywhere in the universe for that matter).

It was of interest, then, to have come across Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak and his thoughts on the origin of life and work in their laboratory in Boston/Harvar/MGH. This article is from 2017 but it is almost identical to a more recent article in a 2019 Harvard University publication.

The linked article begins:

With nearly 40 billion potentially habitable Earth-like exoplanets spinning around the solar system, it seems highly probable that astronomers would find life on at least one. Yet they have not.

“The pathway from chemistry to biology could be so hard that life is really rare,” said Jack W. Szostak, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. “In the laboratory, we want to find out if there is a simple pathway.”

Talk about an understatement.

Nick Lane does a great job dispelling the meme that electricity (lightning / thunderstorms) were instrumental in the origin of life on earth. It was interesting to see that Szostak still gives credence to that "theory" -- at least according to the author of the 2019 article.