Back To 199 Active Rigs In North Dakota -- September 12, 2014

	9/12/2014	09/12/2013	09/12/2012	09/12/2011	09/12/2010
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Apple Hysteria

I get a kick out of this: the Apple website has crashed; the iPhone 6 Plus has sold out; new iPhone records are being set, and AAPL shares have surged .... 24 cents. LOL.

Talk about a) iPhone 6 sales baked into the AAPL share price before the presentation; and, b) folks really, really underestimating what Apple will report this quarter and next.

This is not a investment site. Don't make any financial decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here. I have never owned AAPL and have no plans to ever own AAPL. I missed that train.

Yahoo!Finance is reporting:

The iPhone 6 became available for pre-order on Apple's online store Friday morning -- though "available" is a relative term.

Eager customers encountered lengthy delays, and others couldn't even access the website.

Some customers were reporting that the larger iPhone 6 Plus had sold out.

Apple wouldn't comment on that.

Pre-order snafus are commonplace for the iPhone, though they have been minimized in recent years after Apple opened its massive data center in North Carolina. Still, the iPhone 6 is widely anticipated to be the best-selling iPhone of all time, so it's not surprising that demand overwhelmed the company's servers.

Apple critics will say Apple engineered this shortage -- just as they have said every time in the past -- but Apple shipped something like 75 million ahead of time just for this event, and did not include China in the initial release. 

This is simply another Apple story for the ages. I assume Apple does the "release" thing on Fridays so their employees can really look forward to those great TGIF parties. Another huge celebration in Silicon Valley and in North Carolina.

A comment from one observer:

By my own observation, the top-of-the-line 128GB Plus model sold out the quickest. I had the AppleStore App on my iPhone and the Space Grey was sold out at 12:30 AM. A couple of refreshes, mis-clicks, time-outs, the Silver went out later at 12:40. Then the Gold.

I was able to get one thru AT&T with a ship date of October 28.

They seriously under-estimated demand for the top-end model. Plenty of regular 6s and lower GB Pluses. 

A ship date of October 28? Wow. That's well past the 3 - 4 weeks ship date Apple is suggesting.

Another observer notes this ship time:

My ship time through AT&T is showing November.  

Slawson Has A Rare Frack Failure -- September 12, 2014

Wells coming off the confidential list today have been posted. Note this well:

• 27635, 137, Slawson, Matilda Bay 1-15H, Stockyard Creek, 8 stages; planned for 24, mechanical problems; 600,000 pounds proppant; single section spacing, t6/14; cum --

Something tells me they will re-frack this well.

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For Investors Only 

A reminder: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on what you read here or what you think you may have read here.

Trading at new highs: CFN, MSFT, RAIL.

Everything suggests the west will cut off its nose to spite its face with regard to more sanctions on Russia. Germany has enough economic problems without self-immolating. The Scottish referendum has folks nervous also; I see there's a report suggesting a Scottish separation could be huge trouble for Spain. The headline even suggested the "end of Spain," I guess, as we know it.

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Global Warming

Climate Change

Extreme Weather

Ice Age at 400 PPM

Whatever you call it, 400 PPM apparently is bringing unseasonably cold weather to the northeast. Accuweather is reporting:

Following a chilly rain during part of the weekend, the coolest air since the spring will settle over the Northeast Sunday night into Monday morning.

Temperatures are forecast to dip into the 50s from Boston and New York City to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The last time readings were this low was during the first couple of days of June in most cases and in late May in others.

The northern and western suburbs of the Interstate-95 cities will dip well down into the 40s. Cities forecast to drop into the 40s this weekend include Pittsburgh, Buffalo, New York, and Burlington, Vermont.

Some locations from northern Pennsylvania, upstate New York and northwestern New England will dip into the 30s. Provided skies remain clear and winds diminish, there is a risk of scattered frost for a few hours late Sunday night into Monday morning.

By the way, when you get to the link, scroll down to look at all the temperature and precipitation records that have fallen.

A couple of additional points might be noted. First, this unseasonably cold weather has to be putting pressure on propane supply in the northeast.

Second, it looks like the 18-year-old warming pause will be extended at least one more year.

Update On Cape Wind -- Only Thing Taking Longer Is Keystone XL -- September 12, 2014

Updates

December 2, 2017: dead, RIP. 
 

Original Post

Boston Bz Journal is reporting:

It looks like Cape Wind Associates LLC is going to stay closer to home after all: The developer has reportedly signed a lease agreement with the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to use an industrial terminal that the agency is building on the New Bedford waterfront, presumably for staging and assembly of Cape Wind's 130-turbine wind turbine project that would go up in Nantucket Sound.

Cape Wind, the paper reported, will file paperwork next week to modify its permit with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to allow extensive construction work for the Cape Wind project to take place in New Bedford. The federal permit, as it stands now, requires the bulk of the on-land work to take place at a marine industrial park in North Kingstown, R.I. In July, the overseers of the Quonset industrial park in North Kingstown approved a lease option with Cape Wind for 14 acres there.

At the time, a Cape Wind spokesman was cagey when I asked him about what Cape Wind would be doing in North Kingstown and if the Quonset lease option meant New Bedford was off the table. Cape Wind President Jim Gordon is well aware that the Patrick administration has long made it a priority for the work to be done in New Bedford instead.

They hope to get started sometime in 2015.

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A Note to the Granddaughters

We spent some time in New Bedford over the past four years when the granddaughters were living in the Boston area.

New Bedford was the "whale oil capital" of the world at one time; it was known as the city that lit the world. The city supplied the oil that lit the gas lamps. Moby Dick and Herman Melville started there; we visited the church where Melville sat.

Today, New Bedford looked to be in a deep economic depression. My hunch is that the wind turbine manufacturing there will help, but not much. It was a very, very depressing city to visit because of the history it was, and the present it is. The whaling museum was incredible. I would go back to New Bedford just for the museum. And the quaint little coffee shops across the street. And the US National Park Service in the immediate area.

Trucking Industry, Slowly But Surely, Switching To Natural Gas -- September 12, 2014

From Forbes earlier this week:

Last week Anheuser-Busch announced that it was going to replace all 66 of the heavy duty trucks at its Houston brewery. This was no obvious business move. The trucks in its existing fleet are not old or falling apart. Like the Clydesdale horses of yesteryear, these are tough, reliable diesel-powered workhorses that pull 53-foot trailers loaded with 50,000 pounds of beer.

Yet A-B is putting all these diesel workhorses out to pasture — and replacing them with 66 new trucks, that intead run on compressed natural gas.

It’s significant that A-B feels comfortable swapping for an entire fleet that runs on CNG.

The intention of shifting to natgas, says James Sembrot, A-B’s senior transportation director, is to reduce carbon emissions and fuel costs, while doing something green(ish). 

The Houston brewery is among the biggest of the 14 that A-B operates nationwide. The closest breweries to this one are in Fort Collins, Colo. and St. Louis. Each truck rolls virtually around the clock — putting in an average of 140,000 miles in a single year hauling beer to wholesalers. They move seventeen million barrels of beer each year.

In other words: if Texans want to put Bud Light in their mouths (and hell yeah they do) then these trucks gotta haul.

RBN Energy: new liquefaction plants to serve US truckers and frackers.

Many exploration and production (E&P) companies have indicated their sincere interest in at least partly weaning themselves away from diesel—and onto natural gas, much of it from LNG—as their fuel of choice for the engines that power their drilling rigs and hydrofracturing pumps. But there has been some hesitance in making the switch, in part due to concern about whether the LNG-supply infrastructure is sufficiently reliable.

The same is true for railroads, trucking companies and ship owners—they too see potential savings in moving to engines fired partially or entirely by LNG, but they need assurance that their new fuel source will be plentiful and at hand. Today we detail all the new liquefaction capacity being developed specifically to serve these new markets

In Part 1 of this series, we explained why diesel’s dominance as the engine fuel for the E&P and heavy-duty transportation sector may be threatened over the next few years by natural gas. It comes down to economics and environment.

Diesel prices are based on the price of crude oil, and US natural gas is selling at roughly one-quarter the price of crude on a per-BTU basis these days. Even when the costs of liquefying gas and transporting LNG to customers are factored in, natural gas from LNG is consistently less expensive than diesel. Also, rules regarding diesel and shipping fuel emissions are tightening.

The key question becomes, how quickly can fuel-cost savings justify the investment required to retrofit diesel engines to burn a mix of diesel and natural gas (or buy new engines that burn only gas), as well as the cost of adding LNG storage and re-gasifiers?

In Part 2, we pointed out several calculators that can help address the should-we-switch conundrum, noted some pretty big E&P names already testing the potential for dual-fuel and gas-powered engines, and listed the seven existing liquefaction plants (totaling about 580 Mgal/d) that are not utility-focused “peak-shaving” facilities.

This time we examine the far greater amount of liquefaction capacity being planned to provide LNG to the domestic E&P, mining and heavy-duty transportation markets—and, with Canadians being so friendly and all, we are including their projects in this as well. A reminder: As we said in our last episode, a 100 Mgal/d liquefaction plant—pretty typical for what is being planned—would require about 8.3 MMcf/d, or about 3 Bcf a year of natural gas.

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400 PPM

During that short period between a very hot summer (high a/c - electricity - natural gas use) and the very cold winter (high natural gas heating use), the natural gas industry takes an opportunity to fill natgas storage tanks. With this highly unusual early cold snap a lot of natural gas is going to be burned, instead of being stored.

Apple iPhone Pre-Orders Are "Amazing" -- Better Than Previous Models -- ATT -- September 12, 2014

Updates

September 12, 2014: update here. AAPL shares are surging ... up 24 cents. LOL.

September 12, 2014: .... on, one more thing ... Apple can't keep up; shipping of the iPhone 6 Plus already out to a full month (and I'm sure that's optimistic marketing ... but there's one more thing: the iPhone 6 Plus is not yet available in China.

September 12, 2014: Noted:

When Apple opened its website to pre-order the iPHone 6 Plus, the stated time was as expected 7 - 10 days for delivery.Three hours later, at 3:00 a.m. PT, the stated time for delivery for the iPhone 6 Plus was out to 3 - 4 weeks.

That gives you an idea how huge the demand is. The time for delivery of the iPhone 6 was still 7 - 10 days suggesting folks want the much bigger iPhone 6 Plus.

Macrumors is reporting:

AT&T executive Ralph de la Vega addressed the iPhone 6 launch in comments at the the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference this morning, citing "amazing" volume with hundreds of thousands of orders taken according to Fierce Wireless.

"It's amazing to see the volume," he said, adding that the "systems are rocking" and "everything is going well." He said demand for the new phones is "better than last year and they're better than the prior year [before that]."

"Every time there is a change in [iPhone] design, there's an uptake," he said. "I think this design is particularly good."

Carriers are battling fiercely for iPhone 6 customers, with many touting trade-in offers to help keep customers on board or attract new ones. Carriers are also pushing hard to convert customers to newer plans that uncouple device and service pricing, financing the device over a period of 12 months or more rather than offering outright subsidies.

Macrumors is also reporting:

Apple has timed its rollout perfectly. As highlighted by Pando Daily, Apple is taking advantage of regulatory changes that essentially require merchants to deploy new payment hardware in their retail stores over the coming year. This mass upgrade by over nine million merchants is the result of an updated credit card liability policy adopted by major credit card companies.

As of October 2015, any merchants that do not support EMV credit cards – smart cards with integrated circuits that enable point of sale authentication and help prevent fraud – will be liable for the fraudulent use of counterfeit, lost, and stolen cards. [...]

These EMV cards and the resulting transactions are far more difficult to counterfeit than what Americans consider "standard" credit cards. While EMV is the norm around the world, only about 14 percent of US merchants support this technology today and very few consumers own credit cards incorporating these chips.

As a result of this change in credit card liability, merchants are upgrading their payment processing hardware to support EMV credit cards and other payment technology. With Apple now on board with NFC, a greater number of merchants who are in the middle of this decision-making process may choose NFC-capable POS hardware so they can process payments via Apple Pay.

Original Post

 

Posted at 12:17 a.m. CDT; pre-orders at Apple.com start at 12:00 midnight, PDT.

Apple won't be the source, but I assume analysts will come up with an estimate of how many phones are pre-ordered over the weekend, and we will see stories of estimates on Monday.

Previously:

September 23, 2013―Apple® today announced it has sold a record-breaking nine million new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c models, just three days after the launch of the new iPhones on September 20. 

Maybe worthy of a poll.

Pre-orders begin at midnight, Thursday night/Friday morning. The first half of this complicated poll is how many iPhone 6's will be pre-ordered by Monday (over the weekend). Pre-orders will continue through the week.

On Thursday midnight/Friday a.m, September 19, orders of iPhone 6's will be available for purchase. The second half of this complicated poll is how many iPhone 6's will have been ordered/purchased by Monday morning, September 22?

The choices:

• 5 million / 10 million
• 10 million / 20 million
• 20 million / 30 million
• 10 million / 50 million

These numbers may be ridiculously low ... I have no idea. We may not even know the "real" numbers until many weeks from now. But it is what it is.