Sempra Energy and IEnova say their ECA Liquefaction joint venture has signed an equity investment agreement for Total to acquire a 16.6% equity stake in the Energia Costa Azul Phase 1 liquefied natural gas export project; terms are not disclosed.
Sempra and IEnova will each retain 41.7% ownership stakes in the project to be located in Baja California, Mexico.
Last month, ECA LNG announced it reached a final investment decision for the construction and operation of the ~$2B facility, making it the only LNG-export project in the world to have reached FID so far this year.
Earlier this year, Total signed a 20-year sale and purchase agreement for ~1.7M metric tons/year of LNG from the facility.
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.
Hope no one missed this one:
*********************************** Apple
Link here. TSMC. There are three chip companies / SoC companies that intrigue me -- TSMC, AWS, and Apple. Apparently Apple is continuing to work on a self-driving car.
Link here. Tim Cook teases the future of Apple Watch: "Think about the amount of sensors in your car."
Link here. AirPods Max development took four years.
U.S. crude oil imports averaged 6.5 million barrels per day last week, increased by 1.1 million barrels per day from the previous week.
Why would this happen? US crude oil inventories increased by a whopping 15 million bbls of oil last week. The last thing the hubs needed was more oil. And yet, the price of oil hardly moves.
December 10, 2020: See first comment. Reader cites builds in crude oil inventories back in April, 2020. The reader is so correct. Look at the builds in crude oil in those five weeks during the month of "April." It was during this period that WTI crashed and on April 20, 2020, actually "went negative."
Week 67
March 4, 2020
0.8
444.1
Week 68
March 11, 2020
7.7
451.8
Week 69
March 18, 2020
2.0
453.7
Week 70
March 25, 2020
1.6
455.4
Week 71
April 1, 2020
13.8
469.2
Week 72
April 8, 2020
15.2
484.4
Week 73
April 22, 2020
15.0
518.6
Week 74
April 15, 2020
19.2
503.6
Week 75
April 29, 2020
9.0
527.6
Week 76
May 6, 2020
4.6
532.2
Week 77
May 13, 2020
-0.7
531.5
Week 78
May 20, 2020
-5.0
526.5
Original Post
Vince Lombardi
This confirms my suspicion that no one knows what is going on. [Assuming the EIA report is not in error and that I'm reading it correctly.] Link here.
Did anyone see this coming?
From the EIA today, holy mackerel:
U.S. commercial crude oil inventories (excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) increased by 15.2 million barrels from the previous week.
At
503.2 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are about 11% above
the five year average for this time of year.
Total motor gasoline
inventories increased by 4.2 million barrels last week and are about 5%
above the five year average for this time of year.
Finished gasoline
inventories decreased while blending components inventories increased
last week.
Distillate fuel inventories increased by 5.2 million barrels
last week and are about 11% above the five year average for this time of
year.
It will be interesting to see "Focus on Fracking" this Sunday.
Re-balancing (many rows are hidden to keep the spreadsheet short enough to fit on the blog). When I re-started this spreadsheet back in 2018 there was much talk about "re-balancing." US crude oil inventories were at 447 million bbls. Today, a huge, huge inventory build, and US crude oil inventories are now over 500 million bbls.
Based on recent OPEC+ action, they didn't see this coming either.
But someone must have seen it coming: WTI/OPEC/Brent prices barely move.
