Locator: 48547WHITTEN.
Vern Whitten would love to hear from you. Vern has sent a wonderful collection of "farm" photos from North Dakota. Something we can think about during the middle of winter!
www.vernwhittenhotography.com.
Vern Whitten
1518 7th Street South
Fargo, ND 58103
Locator: 48546CHIPS.
There is so much packed in these two (which I divided into three) paragraphs:
On the surface, it might seem logical that a large tariff would incentivize domestic production of advanced chips.
But the reality is that there’s no way to divert production domestically over the next few years given a lack of capacity. Advanced chip factories can’t be created out of thin air. It takes roughly four years to build a new fab at the cost of $10 billion to $20 billion.
Money and time aren’t the only factors, though. Technical expertise is also needed. Only Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), has proven it can make chips that meet the requirements of top chip designers like Nvidia and Apple (AAPL).
Tell that to Jeff Bezos, AWS.
Tell that to whomever is running Intel (INTC). now.
Once tariffs on chips are imposed, there are going to be winners and losers.
[An aside: is there any difference between Biden choosing winners among EVs and non-EV carmakers; and, between Trump affecting winners and losers among chip manufacturers?]
Which brings us to Amazon and Rivian.
At one time it looked like a no-brainer for Amazon, which had an exclusive arrangement with Rivian, to buy Rivian outright.
That exclusivity arrangement ended in 2023 (?) and Rivian is now hoping to sells its products to all comers.
Some still suggest that Amazon might / should acquire Rivian.
Comments and observations:
If acquiring Rivian does move the needle, the needle will move in the wrong direction for Amazon if Jeff Bezos buys Rivian.
What would Amazon gain from buying Rivian? Headaches.
The most recent App Economy AMZN graphic suggests that Amazon competes with:
Tesla, Rivian, Lucid do not show up on that list.
Drilling in on Amazon, Amazon's revenues, most recent quarter (some numbers rounded up):
AWS is growing 20% year-on-year. Retail? About 7%. Last-mile delivery is not Amazon's Achille's heel. Amazon delivery is doing just fine with its current business model and is way ahead of whomever is in second place.
Buried in AWS: Amazon is making its own custom chips at its Annapurna Labs, an Israeli microelectronics company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon, reportedly acquired by AWS for less than $500 million.
That line about taking four years and billions of dollars to build a fab factory:
Amazon logistics:
And then there's the owner. A lot of folks / investors just don't see Jeff Bezos interested in owning a trucking company, even if it's Rivian.
Bezos seems much more interested in AI and space. In fact, it's now becoming obvious that the fourth industrial revolution (which I call the sixth industrial revolution) is becoming more and more a "marriage" of "terrestrial AI" and "space AI." From a recent post update:
AI: catch-all for sixth industrial revolution.
I don't see "trucking" in that mix.
And Trump's tariffs on chips? This will be a huge win for a handful of companies.
Bottom line:
Locator: 48545B.
If his adversaries can't laugh at this, they have no sense of humor.
So, let's see, if his adversaries try to find some judge / court to stop this appointment. LOL. A felon has now been elected chairperson of the Kennedy Honors.
This is what the weaponization of politics leads to. A felon in charge.
Trump replaces billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein as chair of
the Kennedy Center, one of the leading arts organizations in the country
that has enjoyed bipartisan support for years. It will be interesting to see if there are empty seats at the Honors' next event.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $71.37.
Active rigs: 35.
Four new permits, #41607 - #41610, inclusive:
Two permits renewed:
Locator: 48544TARIFFS.
Gabbard confirmation! Wow, that was fast. Reported at 12:18
p.m. CT, February 12, 2025. Yesterday, it was reported the vote would be
held this evening. The RFK, Jr., nomination moves forward. Only Mitch
McConnell broke ranks with the GOP. JD Vance not even in town to
provide the tie-breaking vote if needed. That's how sure John Thune was
about the vote.
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Of Interest
Timeline of the Far Future: wiki.
Locator: 48543ARCHIVES.
Breaking: will Trump "out-Reagan" Reagan?
Calling all DC attorneys, link here.
Memories: my primary a/c, 1986 - 1989. Libya: April 15 (tax day), 1986. Quite an introduction for me.
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Arrived Today
Locator: 48542ARCHIVES.
Inflation: I sure hope this "inflation thing" lasts another two months. Stocks are on sale and February and March, every year, are my best two dividend months for the year. And all dividends are re-invested.
INTC: Intel is up 4% today. Whoo-hoo!
AMD:
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The Book Page
I read this book -- or at least parts of it, can't remember how much I read -- it was one of several Brontë biographies. I've been to the Brontë Museum in Haworth. Time to get it back out and look at it again. Purely serendipity that I stumbled across this book again.
From an earlier post: 1994 biography, The Brontës by Juliet Barker. Great reference book; should be the last biography of the Brontës – unless something new in the Brontë archives turns up. The author suggests that Wuthering Heights follows Rob Roy too closely to be a coincidence. (April 21, 2007).
Emily Brontë: 1818 - 1848. Dies well before the US Civil War.Elizabeth Gaskell: 1810 - 1865. Died during the last year of the US Civil War. Was eight years older than Emily Brontë.
Jane Austen: 1775 - 1817. Was alive during the global war of 1812.
Fifteen famous women writers in history, link here. In order, listed:
Of note:
Brontës (the first of the 19th century Yorkshire women authors: Brontës, Austen, George Eliot)
a. Much preparation [prepared myself well before reading the Brontës]
b. Re-read Wuthering Heights, Cliff’s Notes, Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Brontë; Jane Eyre, Cliff Notes
c. The 19th Century Female Authors: represents the “renaissance
in female writing, see The Madwoman in the Attic by SM Gilbert and SM
Gubar
d. 1994 biography, The Brontës by Juliet Barker.
Great reference book; should be the last biography of the Brontës –
unless something new in the Brontë archives turns up. The author
suggests that Wuthering Heights follows Rob Roy too closely to be a
coincidence. (April 21, 2007)
From The Brontës:
Locator: 48541B.
Gabbard confirmation! Wow, that was fast. Reported at 12:18 p.m. CT, February 12, 2025. Yesterday, it was reported the vote would be held this evening. The RFK, Jr., nomination moves forward. Only Mitch McConnell broke ranks with the GOP. JD Vance not even in town to provide the tie-breaking vote if needed. That's how sure John Thune was about the vote.
Cbevron to slash employee count! Wow.
Doing less with less. Link here. I don't think I've heard of a 20%-cut -- ever. Something tells me the Hess deal isn't going to close. Could be wrong. Chevron has 45,600 employees. Does this give Chevron an opening to leave California completely? Maybe the Hess deal is working out perfectly and Chevron no longer needs California. LOL!
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $72.03.
New wells:
RBN Energy: Guyana may have a head start, but Suriname making strides with its offshore blocks. Archived.
Suriname has been a very minor crude oil producer over the past few decades, with minimal output from its onshore reserves. But with more than a dozen offshore blocks already awarded for development and production set to spike in the coming years, the small South American nation looks primed to follow in the footsteps of its next-door neighbor, Guyana, which is amid an oil-production boom. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at the status of Suriname’s offshore developments, the major players involved, and what we know about the crude grades to be produced there.
In the first blog in this mini-series, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, we highlighted how Guyana has been a rising star (see Break My Stride and My Guy) in the global crude market, even if it’s only a recent entrant. The offshore Stabroek block (gold-shaded area in Figure 1 below) is churning out more than 650 Mb/d of oil from three projects in the reserve-rich Guyana-Suriname Basin (area within dashed-green line), with the possibility that production in Guyana’s territorial waters (area within dashed-purple line) could double by the end of 2027. But Guyana isn’t the only country planning to develop the basin’s reserves.
Figure 1. The Guyana-Suriname Basin and the Stabroek Block. Source: RBN
Note: Map does not reflect disputed onshore border areasThe Guyana-Suriname Basin stretches across three countries on the Atlantic coast of South America: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Suriname has been extracting crude oil from the onshore portion of the basin since the 1980s but the former Dutch colony wants to raise its profile as a petroleum supplier, mirroring its neighbor’s success. According to Suriname’s state-owned Staatsolie, authorities struck oil in 1965 but commercial oil production only began 17 years later, in 1982. Flows of the country’s Saramacca grade started at 200 b/d and now stand at about 20 Mb/d.
Offshore E&P activity in Suriname perked up after ExxonMobil made a significant find in 2015 in Guyana’s portion of the Guyana-Suriname Basin. Five years later, joint-venture partners TotalEnergies and APA Corp. (owner of Apache Corp.) made an extensive deepwater discovery in Suriname’s territorial waters (area within dashed-pink line of Figure 1). That same year (2020), Staatsolie created a subsidiary, Staatsolie Hydrocarbon Institute (SHI), to steer coastal E&P activities like setting up policies and procedures for acreage development, negotiating with oil and gas companies to unearth deposits, evaluating resource potential, and getting independent evaluations of hydrocarbon potential.
