China Signs Deal For Stake In Huge Kashagan Oil Project; US Meanders And Dithers

Reuters is reporting:

Chinese President Xi Jinping struck a deal with Kazakhstan on Saturday giving China a stake in its giant Kashagan oil project, a highlight of his tour of Central Asia to secure hydrocarbons for the world's largest energy consumer.

The $5 billion deal further increases China's rising clout in post-Soviet Central Asia, once Russia's imperial backyard, and blocks an attempt by global rival India to get a stake in the oilfield, the world's largest oil discovery in five decades.

"The two countries have agreed on China's shareholding in the development of the Kashagan deposit," Xi told a news briefing after talks with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. "The two governments hail and support this agreement."

Oil and gas deals, including on building an oil refinery in Kazakhstan, are among 22 agreements worth some $30 billion reached during Xi's visit, Nazarbayev said.

Meanwhile, the US continues to dither on a) meaningful oil and gas energy policy; b) the Keystone XL; and, c) the Arctic.

The US will move ahead with Federal fracking regulations to slow down / stymie US oil and gas industry.

On the other hand, the Kashagan hasn't turned out all that successful to date.  Maybe the Chinese will have better luck.

IBM Moving Retirees Off Its Health Care Program -- They Will Move To O'BamaCare

Wow.

FoxNews is reporting:

International Business Machines Corp. plans to move about 110,000 retirees off its company-sponsored health plan and instead give them a payment to buy coverage on a health-insurance exchange, in a sign that even big, well-capitalized employers aren't likely to keep providing the once-common benefits as medical costs continue to rise.

The move, which will affect all IBM retirees once they become eligible for Medicare, will relieve the technology company of the responsibility of managing retirement health-care benefits. IBM said the growing cost of care makes its current plan unsustainable without big premium increases.

IBM's shift is an indication that health-insurance marketplaces, similar to the public exchanges proposed under President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul, will play a bigger role as companies move coverage down the path taken by many pensions, paying employees and retirees a fixed sum to manage their own care.

Just in time for the 2016 elections. 

I Won't Be Updating Any More Bakken News For Awhile

Scroll down, scroll sideways, or go to Bakken Shale Discussion Group for a particularly lively discussion. The discussion-master has closed the topic. It got too lively, I guess. And just when it was getting good. Sad face.

I'm going to a soccer game.

Good luck to all.

Another Failed Department of Energy Enterprise -- Only $50 Million, Fortunately

Remember that list of 38 solar companies that went bankrupt or were likely to go bankrupt? All financed by the US Department of Energy. I guess I sort of thought the DOE could only lose money on solar companies. Apparently not.

It's a convoluted story with lots of capital letters and acronyms, and I didn't spend much time on it, but apparently DOE provided a $50 million loan to some natural gas minivan company to build a wheelchair-accommodating minivan. The company went broke. Some other company bought the company that went bankrupt, paying DOE $3 million for the $50 million asset.

I'm sure I got it wrong, but you can read it at the link. Bottom line: US taxpayers got $3 million back for a $50 million loan.

And they say Bank of America took advantage of home buyers with their loans. I can't make this stuff up.

Greenland Ice Melt Adding 0.59 Millimeters To Sea Level Per Year -- NASA, The Folks Who Crashed A $125-Million Climate Orbiter Due To Simple Math Error

This may be the best story of the day to put things into perspective when you think about Syria.

Get out your metric rulers, folks. Find the centimeter mark. Yes, the mark that is about half-an-inch. (I need to use a magnifying glass at my age.)

Now, if you squint really hard, you can see the ten little hash marks that make up one centimeter. Each of those little hash marks is one millimeter. Yes, those little things. Millimeters. Ten of them in about half-an-inch.

Back in 2011 (most recent data), sea levels rose by about half of one of those millimeters from the ice that melted from Greenland. Yes, I know you can't see it, but believe it. If Bloomberg and NASA said Greenland ice melt contributed 0.59 millimeters to global sea levels then it must be true.

Not reproducible. The only place they can measure 0.59 millimeters is in computer modeling: garbage in, garbage out. So, we will cap and tax our American businesses, ignore China's contribution to "global warming," and worry about 0.59 millimeters -- half of one of the ten little hash marks on a metric ruler.

I can't make this stuff up.

Hidden in this article was this data point. The amount of ice in Greenland and the Arctic is a small percent of the total ice in Antarctic. Over the past decade the Antarctic probably increased in size by as much as 2 percent.

By the way. Who are some of the folks measuring this 0.59 millimeter rise in the sea levels? NASA. Aren't they ones that forgot to convert feet to meters and snowballed a $125-million Mars Climate orbiter into Mars? LOL:

NASA lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched, space agency officials said Thursday.

A navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet and pounds.

$125 million. Forget to convert feet to meters. I can't make that up either.