Notes From All Over, Part 2 -- January 15, 2020

Liz Peek: hands down, my favorite Fox Business News contributor.

Biden: proposes to increase the most regressive tax there is -- payroll taxes. Is that all he has to "counter" Trump's economy -- raising taxes? This is not going to fly.

The market close: first time ever, Dow closes above 29,000. S&P 500 also hits all-time high. NASDAQ also rose for the day but did not hit a new high.

Oil closes at a 6-week low. Closes under $58. Diesel supplies "went through roof," gasoline supplies increase.

Peak oil? Bloomberg reports "experts" insist that Permian output is approaching a peak. The "experts"? Amad Waterous at Waterous Energy Fund. Article suggests otherwise or least raises doubts.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

Making Texas great: EPD reports that its isobutane dehydrogenation (iBDH) plant near Mont Belvieu, Texas, is completed and producing. Earlier note back in 2017.

Enterprise stated that market demand is growing for isobutylene – a byproduct of ethylene production plants – amid increased use of low-cost, light-end feedstocks such as ethane rather than more expensive crude oil derivatives.

The firm pointed out the iBDH facility will turn plentiful, cost-advantaged natural gas liquids into a higher-value product using the company’s integrated midstream network.

Ovintiv update: Encana Corp. won investors’ approval to relocate to the U.S. and change its name to Ovintiv, a plan that has dented morale in Canada’s beleaguered energy industry.

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Diridon

I think this is a most fascinating story.

The headline: old complexities of how trains should reach new Diridon station stymie San Jose city council.

Behind a paywall at Silicon Valley Business Journal, but a google search will provide background and story. This is pretty much the story:

The major passenger railroads that serve San Jose’s Diridon Station — or plan to — have talked individually about the complexity of getting to and through the Diridon of the future, envisioned as the West Coast’s greatest transportation hub surrounded by a downtown reimagined by Google.

Now they have the concurrence of a European design partnership with considerable experience in planning this kind of station, which is routine on that continent. And rather than accept all its preliminary recommendations so far, the City Council decided Tuesday to further study how tracks from the north and south get to Diridon at a public study session in January before deciding.

As described to the council by Jessica Zenk, the city transportation department’s deputy director, the options identified by the Dutch architectural team of Arcadis-Benthem Crouwel — especially routing tracks southward from Diridon — are “very challenging” and accommodating the freight requirements of the Union Pacific Railroad render some of them “fatally flawed.”

The council voted unanimously to ratify ABC’s concepts for an elevated station with concourse entrances on the east and west along Santa Clara and San Fernando streets, which were released last month.

The key problem area is where it has always been since high-speed rail became a factor to consider two decades ago — getting through or around the Gardner neighborhood that now is split by Caltrain’s corridor and is adjacent to the I-280 / Guadalupe Freeway interchange. Earlier high-speed rail studies, confirmed by city-hired consultants a year ago, ruled out a tunnel to an underground station.

How big is this going to be?

When the new station opens sometime in the 2030s, ABC expects between 212 and 262 passenger trains a day to run through it, a figure that will increase over the next 20 years to 480 daily trains.

Mayor Sam Liccardo put the price tag for the complex, which will include BART, Caltrain, high-speed rail, VTA light rail, Altamont Corridor Express (ACE), Capitol Corridor and Amtrak trains, at about $15 billion. Funding sources for most of that are still unidentified.

And then you have the freight trains in the area.

Options for getting Union Pacific freight trains from the East Bay through Diridon toward Gilroy or along the Vasona branch line toward the Lehigh Permanente Quarry in Cupertino are a major complication as well, she said. The railroad does not permit its trains to climb steep grades nor share tracks with electric trains, which means tracks used for Caltrain and high-speed rail must cross Union Pacific on tall viaducts.

At the Tamien Station now used by Caltrain, for example, one concept would require elevating the station 70 feet above the ground if Caltrain and high-speed rail share tracks there.

It completed, it sounds like it will become the ninth engineering wonder of the world.