How Much Lignite Does North Dakota Have: Only Australia -- A Continent -- Has More Than North Dakota -- And Not By Much; Australia And North Dakota Sharing Secrets?

The Dickinson Press is reporting:

North Dakota state geologist Ed Murphy said there are 150 billion tons of proven lignite reserves worldwide. Only Australia, with 37 billion tons of proven lignite reserves, has more than North Dakota's 25 billion tons.

Lignite is sometimes called brown coal and is usually geologically younger than other coals, Murphy said. Lignite can contain up 30 to 60 percent water, making it inefficient to burn and heavier and more costly to transport. Drier coal creates more energy and lessens the amount of power needed to process and burn it, reducing pollution from factory stacks.

North Dakota has seven coal-fueled electric power plants and a factory that produces synthetic natural gas from lignite coal. The state's lignite mines in west-central North Dakota produce close to 30 million tons of fuel annually.

Almost 70 percent of electricity produced from North Dakota's lignite-fired power plants is exported to surrounding states to more than 2 million customers, Van Dyke said.

There are about 280 power plants in the U.S. that burn lignite and other high-moisture coal, and those factories generate about a third of the electricity produced by all coal-fired power plants, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

And so the collaboration:

The Lignite Energy Council said it formed a partnership late last month with Melbourne-based Brown Coal Innovation Australia. An agreement signed by the groups said the intent is to “harness their complimentary resources and expertise to develop and pursue cooperative activities associated with coal.”

Plus all those neat trips to Australia during the North Dakota winter to see what they're doing in Australia.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

Today has been such an incredibly awful day with regard to what is going on in Washington (ObamaCare), the only way I will get through the rest of the evening is by playing this song very, very loudly with headphones.

Loaded, The Velvet Underground

It's very surreal. I'm sitting at the top of the viewing area in a huge swimming pool complex, playing the album very loudly with headphones, and watching, through binoculars, the older granddaughter swim laps in the pool below. With the binoculars one sees the splashing of water and you jump back thinking you are going to get wet when you realize it's the binoculars and they are half a football field away.

I don't know what could beat this moment: sitting in a lounge chair, watching our granddaughter swim, and listening to great music from another century. Incredibly relaxing, rewarding.

Well, That Didn't Take Long -- Not Only "No, But Hell No"

Washington State insurance commissioner took less than an hour to make his decision assuming it takes an hour to digest the news, write the memo, discuss it with his staff, revise the draft, and then call a press conference to announce his decision.

The Seattle Times is reporting:

State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler has rejected President Obama’s proposal to allow insurance companies to extend health insurance policies for people who have received notices that their policies will be cancelled at the end of the year.

Within two hours of President Obama’s news conference announcing the proposed administrative fix for Americans upset by their policy cancellations, Kreidler issued a statement rejecting the proposal.

“I understand that many people are upset by the notices they have recently received from their health plans and they may not need the new benefits [in the Affordable Care Act] today,” he said. “But I have serious concerns about how President Obama’s proposal would be implemented and more significantly, its potential impact on the overall stability of our health insurance market.”

For those not following this story (and don't identify yourself, at risk of being named a nominee for the 2013 Geico Rock Award), the key phrase is this: "... its potential impact on the overall stability of our health insurance market."

That phrase alone will put terror in the heart of every state insurance commissioner. I can almost bet that not one state insurance commissioner is going to open this bag of worms. 

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The 2014 rates were based on "x" percent of Americans signing up for ObamaCare, and an algorithm adjusting for "low-risk" enrollees and "high-risk" enrollees. The insurance companies bet on a good to excellent roll-out, based their premiums on those formulas and sent them to insurance commissioners to review and approve.

Now that the insurance companies have seen the incredibly bad roll-out, and the likelihood that only the "high-risk" will enroll, if they (the insurance companies) were allowed to have a "do-over," to re-set their premiums, they would raise those premiums. The state-run exchanges already know they will have a tough sell; they cannot "afford" to have premiums increased at all. [By the way, that's why the government military health care system, Tricare, has been helped by all this. For years, Congress and senior officers have stressed the need to increase the incredibly crazy, low premiums active duty and retirees pay for their insurance coverage (which, by the way, was exempt from ObamaCare -- I cannot make this stuff up); but now, there is no political stomach to consider raising anyone's insurance premiums, not even the military's.]

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Krauthammer, November 15, 2013, in The Washington Post:

For four years, this debate has been theoretical. Now it’s real. And for Democrats, it’s a disaster.

It begins with the bungled rollout. If Washington can’t even do the Web site — the literal portal to this brave new world — how does it propose to regulate the vast ecosystem of American medicine?

Beyond the competence issue is the arrogance. Five million freely chosen, freely purchased, freely renewed health-care plans are summarily canceled. Why? Because they don’t meet some arbitrary standard set by the experts in Washington.

For all his news conference gyrations about not deliberately deceiving people with his “if you like it” promise, the law Obama so triumphantly gave us allows you to keep your plan only if he likes it. This is life imitating comedy — that old line about a liberal being someone who doesn’t care what you do as long as it’s mandatory.

Lastly, deception. The essence of the entitlement state is government giving away free stuff. Hence Obamacare would provide insurance for 30 million uninsured, while giving everybody tons of free medical services — without adding “one dime to our deficits,” promised Obama.

I think that's what middle America detests most: the arrogance and the deception. "Arrogance and Deception" -- sounds like the title of a book?

For The Archives: Article Helps Explain The Sudden Drop In Oil Price; Will Correct; Before The Flood -- Preview Of A US Market Drowning In Oil -- Reuters

Reuters is reporting:

The U.S. oil market is getting its first real taste of a remarkable phenomenon that may soon become a permanent reality: an excess of light sweet crude oil.

With a swath of refineries shut down for routine seasonal maintenance this month, the unyielding gusher of crude from U.S. shale wells and Canadian oil sands plants has temporarily overtaken demand from refiners, say analysts and traders. 

This is a very, very long article. I doubt most folks will read it to the end; I did not. I will come back to it. But it's filled with interesting data points.

RBN Energy's Rusty  Braziel is quoted:

Oil priced at St. James is now so cheap that BP is sending it to Canada, shipping data show. While cargo shipments from Texas to Irving's refinery in St. John's, Newfoundland, have become relatively common this year, oil shipments from the Port of Louisiana are rare.

Even the premium for Alaska North Slope on the West Coast, a market that typically bears little relation to the domestic U.S. market, has been affected. The crude has hit discounts of more than $7 a barrel to Brent for the first time since late 2012. 

"If continued, this trend would suggest that ANS prices are being driven more by U.S. domestic crude rather than by competition from imports. That would be a startling development," since only a limited amount of shale crude is moving West, RBN Energy analyst Rusty Braziel wrote this week.

By the way, this quote from the President today ...

“What we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” President Obama, November 14, 2013. Link.  ...

... explains a lot. It explains to me why he has not made a decision on the Keystone XL. If he thinks buying insurance is complicated, imagine what it's like for him to try to figure out why "we" need pipelines. I wonder if he thinks buying car insurance is complicated. I know a 15-minute phone call to Geico can save you $500 or something like that.

Disclaimer: this is not an endorsement for Geico. Do not make any 15-minute phone call to Geico, Progressive, or Nationwide based on what you read here or what you think you may have read here.

LNG And The Railroads

Updates

January 23, 2014: The AP is reporting:

Natural gas "may revolutionize the industry much like the transition from steam to diesel," said Jessica Taylor, a spokeswoman for General Electric's locomotive division, one of several companies that will test new natural gas equipment later this year.

Any changes are sure to happen slowly. A full-scale shift to natural gas would require expensive new infrastructure across the nation's 140,000-mile freight-rail system, including scores of fueling stations.

The change has been made possible by hydraulic fracturing mining techniques, which have allowed U.S. drillers to tap into vast deposits of natural gas. The boom has created such abundance that prices dropped to an average of $3.73 per million British thermal units last year — less than one-third of their 2008 peak.

Over the past couple of years, cheap gas has inspired many utilities to turn away from coal, a move that hurt railroads' profits. And natural gas is becoming more widely used in transportation. More than 100,000 buses, trucks and other vehicles already run on it, although that figure represents only about 3 percent of the transportation sector.

The savings could be considerable. The nation's biggest freight railroad, Union Pacific, spent more than $3.6 billion on fuel in 2012, about a quarter of total expenses.

Original Post 

Investors.com is reporting:

General Electric and CSX will begin field testing liquid natural gas-fueled locomotives, adding momentum toward a potential transformation in the railroad industry.

In trials set for next year, CSX — the third largest North American railroad by market value — will run trains pulled by compressed LNG-powered locomotives manufactured by GE.

Drilling techniques such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have freed oil and gas deposits in shale fields like the Bakken formation, creating a glut of cheap natural gas that U.S. industry is increasingly adopting.

Using LNG would give railroads a cleaner, lower cost, more abundant fuel, GE Transportation CEO Russell Stokes said in a statement, adding that the impending use of LNG is part of "a new era of energy sources and what's possible for rail transport."

Warren Buffett is doing it, too:

In March, Berkshire Hathaway's BNSF Railway announced plans to test natural gas locomotives. BNSF CEO Matthew Rose said in June the railroad is working with GE and EMD, a unit of equipment maker Caterpillar, to develop technology for using LNG in locomotives.

Carpe Diem's Fact Of The Day

US oil production surged last week to the highest level since January 1989, almost 25 years ago.