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Saturday, April 23, 2022

250,000-Bbl Crude Oil Pipeline Proposed -- Bakken Oil To National System In Lieu Of Keystone XL -- April 23, 2022

Link here.

Bridger pipeline:

  • 147 miles long
  • capacity:
    • initial: 105,000 bbls
    • max: 250,000 bbls
  • origin: Eighty Eight Oil Company's existing Johnson's Corner Terminal (east of Watford City; center of the Bakken in many ways)
  • terminal: Bridger's existing Sandstone Station, 8.5 miles west of Baker, Montana
  • intercconnection: Bridger facilities at the Bicentennial Stations and Wilson Station
  • cost:
    • 81 miles inside North Dakota: $61 million (rule of thumb: $1 million / mile)
  • trivia: Baker, Montana, is where TC Energy has proposed an on-ramp for about 100,000 bbls of Bakken crude on its now abandoned Keystone XL pipeline

Stocks To Watch Next Week -- Every Saturday At Seeking Alpha -- This One Particularly Interesting -- AAPL, Dividends; Big Oil On Tap -- April 23, 2022

April 23, 2022: next week, stocks to watch --

  • Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), and Intel
    • Thursday: AAPL earnings
    • Friday: earnings -- XOM, CVX, PSX
  • Fed rate hysteria sinks the markets
    • predicted:
      • 50 bp-increases at next three meetings;
      • 25 bp-increases until final rate of 3.50% in May, 2023
  • dividend increases being forecast:
    • AAPL: 24 cent from 22 cents (yawn)
    • MRO: 8 cents from 7 cents (yawn)
    • XOM: 92 cents from 88 cents (okay, a bit better, perhaps, but not much)
  • why the recent transportation service issues? UNP says "congestion on tracks was hurting its ablity to meet shipping demand.”
  • Boeing earnings preview: EPS with a loss of 21 cents/share; revenue of $16.16 billion; a lot of headwinds; but some bright spots: commercial deliveries rose 24% and defense shipments were up 5%.
  • Apple: analysts still confused; look at all the possible partners analysts have suggested:
    • Porsche; Tesla; Volkswagen; Hyundai; XPeng; Nio; Magna International; Stellantis; Foxconn; Nissan; Toyota; and .... drum roll ... more.

Bakken Snow Accumulation -- Winter Storm Greta 2.0 -- April 23, 2022

Link here.

  • today (daylight hours): total daytime snow accumulation of 8 to 12 inches possible.
  • tonight (dark): new snow accumulation of 5 to 9 inches possible.
  • Sunday (daylight hours tomorrow): less than an inch of new snow accumulation.

Pretty late in the season for all this snow, but my dad often told the story of a much worse winter back in 1936, if I recall correctly.

How Much Oil Did The Government Release From The SPR? April 23, 2022

So much oil is going to be released from the SPR that the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (the LOOP) is designating segregated storage capacity for crude deliveries from the US SPR beginning in May. I guess this is being done to make bookkeeping easier and to facilitate exporting oil from our strategic reserves to China and India. 

It took decades to fill the SPR and now in six months, half of it will be gone. 

Link here

Having said all that, the release is a non-issue. Even after the release there will still be more in storage than required by law, and Congress can change that requirement any time. 

************************
DisneyWorld

All of a sudden we're seeing a lot of stories how much this could cost Florida taxpayers. I wonder who might be writing those stories?

My hunch: any tax shortfall will be covered by an increase in property taxes on theme parks where incorporated out-of-state. Ticket prices will be increased to pay the increased property taxes. 

Already the governors of Georgia and Colorado have extended offers to Disney to move DisneyWorld to their states. 

Probably not gonna happen. 

On another note, things like this don't just come out of thin air. Something tells me there were a lot of folks in Florida who were very unhappy with the "special arrangement" Disney had with Florida even before the recent dust-up. These folks were simply looking for a "tipping point." This "tipping point" seemed to be incredibly nebulous (as in "hazy") but it was enough to get a governor to go along with the plan.

Watching this unfold will be fascinating. I have no dog in this fight.

Idle Rambling On "Streaming Wars" -- April 23, 2022

I apologize for all the time spent on "streaming wars" in the past few days, but with CNN+ being thrown overboard in less than a month, and the Netflix debacle, all of a sudden the whole story became interesting again. 

Coincidentally, last night my wife came to me, almost afraid to tell me, she just signed up for HBO Max, because there was a single "show/series" she could not live without. She thought I would be upset that we are paying for yet another "streaming service." I could / couldn't care less. It's $10 / month and I'm now spending more than that on eggs each month. LOL. 

She watched "the show/series she cannot live without" with her closest friend while out visiting in California. I checked out the series on wiki and have to agree, it appears to be "must-see" television. 

But I doubt I will watch it. LOL. I guess it's "must-see" for others, not for me.

We'll see.

But back to the "streaming wars."

When I started blogging about the Bakken revolution, one of the things that surprised me was how complicated oil company organization charts were, with an umbrella "holding" company, several wholly-owned subsidiaries, one of which was 99% of the entire mess in terms of number of employees, and two or three "LLCs" that actually made the money. Some threw in a limited partnership or two. There was upstream, midstream, and downstream. And, invariably, many filed for bankruptcy protection, coming out of a pre-packaged deal in less than six months with nothing different, except no debt and a new company name. Same individuals running the new company.

But looking at the organizational charts of "streaming" companies makes the oil companies look incredibly "clean," streamlined, transparent. 

Check out the "HBO" and "HBO Max" entries over at wiki to see how confusing this gets. 

The first paragraph on HBO is just the beginning of a rabbit hole that could take weeks to run, and one still wouldn't be done. 

Home Box Office is an American pay television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc.; itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery

Which, up until recently, was owned by Time Warner (2016), which, in turn, was acquired by ATT (2018), which in turn was renamed WarnerMedia (2022).

In 2020, WarnerMedia reorganized in which Home Box Office, Inc, and other WarnerMedia assets were consolidated with Warner Bros Entertainment to form a new content division with a name so long it won't fit on this page. 

Fast forward to 2021, a with a definitive Reverse Morris Trust agreement, WarnerMedia would spin out from AT&T as an independent company and in turn would acquire Discovery's assets. 

HBO and all other assets of WarnerMedia would be combined with the Discovery assets and the company renamed Warner Bros Discovery.

And that summary left out a lot of stuff. 

But the wiki entry for HBO is nothing compared to the entry for HBO Max. Here, we start with this: 

As of April, 2022, HBO Max became a sister of Discovery+, following the merger of Discovery with WarnerMedia. 

A sister. 

I'm not even going to begin looking at all the HBO Max "subsidiaries" around the world.  

Oh, by the way, back to my wife signing up for HBO Max. I'm thrilled she did that. I am very, very impressed she knew how to sign up, pay for the service, and not even require any assistance from anyone. This tells me how easy it is to sign up / cancel whenever one wants. This tells me that "streaming" is only going to get more and more attention, if it's this easy to access, even if one doesn't understand how these companies are organized.

One last bit of trivia I learned by doing this: I thought that HBO Max would include everything related to "HBO" including the "original" HBO, just like Disney+ would include everything related to Disney. Not true: two completely different "animals," and each require a subscription. 

I wonder where all the CNN+ content will go. It will show up somewhere with a new name.  

If you want another take on the "streaming wars" this is a link to a very, very long thread on this whole issue.

Suprise Dividend Increase -- Russian Isolation Spurring Driilling Elsewhere -- Schlumberger -- April 23, 2022

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

Link here.

The world’s biggest oilfield-services provider announced a surprise dividend increase and surpassed Wall Street profit forecasts on Friday. The 40% dividend hike was Schlumberger’s first payout increase since 2015.

This was so unexpected -- and apparently overlooked / missed -- that this dividend increase has not yet been noted by MarketBeat/dividends

The quarterly dividend has been increased from 12.5 cents to 17.5 cents. Whoo-hoo.


First-quarter profit of 34 cents a share, excluding certain items, was a penny higher than the media of analysts’ estimates. 

Sales climbed the most since late 2017 to almost $6 billion as Schlumberger reaped the rewards of a sweeping, post-pandemic revival in energy consumption and production. The sales bonanza was driven by work in the U.S. and Canada, where the company saw revenue surge by almost one-third.

Not ready-for-prime-time, in an e-mail to a reader:

Most amazing for me: Schlumberger increased its dividend by 40%. I've accumulated a lot of Schlumberger over the years. Probably one of my worst performers in the past ten years but dividends were always re-invested.

But good, bad, or indifferent, I have a lot of shares with cost basis so low compared to current value it would be crazy to sell, I suppose, and then on top of that, the dividend stream.

When the portfolio is passed on to the two daughters / five grandchildren I doubt anyone will criticize me for how much I paid for shares. And if they do, I won't be around to hear them. LOL. They will have a very nice dividend revenue stream.

I stopped all automatic dividend reinvestment about a year ago to give me more flexibility. The bad news: the automatic dividend reinvestment forced me to be very disciplined. But I still reinvest all dividends.

But the real reason I assume folks enroll in DRIPS in the old days, no commission fees. Now, that's no longer a reason for DRIPS.

I guess the "D" in DRIPS reminds investors to stay "disciplined."

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