Almost a year ago Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s long-serving former oil minister, emerged from a tense meeting of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) looking red faced and furious.
Within the privacy of OPEC’s steel-clad secretariat building in Vienna’s quiet Helferstorferstrasse,
Ramirez had remonstrated angrily with his counterpart from Saudi Arabia, Ali al-Naimi, about the urgent need for the group of major oil producers to push up the price of crude back to a level around $100 per barrel.
The two men couldn’t be more different in appearance or world view. The diminutive Al-Naimi is a rarity in Saudi Arabia, having risen to arguably the country’s most important job from humble origins as a Bedouin shepherd boy.
However, Al-Naimi stands as a titan in the global oil industry and wields the real power within OPEC, a group that controls 60 percent of the world’s oil ...
... Heading into the meeting in Vienna, Ramirez, who is now Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, has already signalled his country’s intention to press for a change in policy. Lower oil prices have crippled Venezuela’s economy, where a 22 percent spike in food price inflation in August has meant the country is even struggling to feed itself.
Ramirez said he wants OPEC to cut production by introducing a series of price bands starting at $70 per barrel. The proposals he said would be formally presented for discussion at a meeting of “technical experts” which OPEC is convening on October 21.
This has potentially put Venezuela and its close allies within OPEC, including Algeria, Nigeria and Iran, on a collision course with Al-Naimi and his Gulf Arab clique who still appear determined to maintain their current strategy.
According to OPEC’s former president, Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, a change in policy is unlikely without any cuts in production being matched by countries outside the group such as Russia and Mexico.
“OPEC has no choice because they no longer have the tools to be a global “swing producer” anymore,” Al-Attiyah said. The former Qatari energy minister points to OPEC’s falling share of the world market, down to just over 30 percent from almost 60 percent 20 years ago.
Saudi Arabia’s power within Opec comes from its vast oil reserves and production, which it has increased significantly since last November. It pumps around 10.5m barrels per day (bopd) of crude and has the capacity to increase output by 12.5m bopd if it so chooses, which gives it tremendous power alone to influence world oil markets.
Much more at the link.
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Photos For The Granddaughters
Sophia: maybe we should cut the watermelon into smaller bite-size pieces. (She is not crying as some folks thought; she was laughing and having a great time; she is simply straining to get her mouth open wide enough for the watermelon.)
Arianna: preparing for her audition.
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Martha Gellhorn
By 1945, Gellhorn's relationship with Hemingway had come to an end. She had moved on, serial relationships, and had adopted an Italian 19-month-old boy. In a letter dated February 3, 1950, written from Cuernavaca to her new beau she asked if he had read Hemingway's latest book, Across the River and Into the Trees.
But just now I have to write you about Ernest's new book; have you bought your February copy of Cosmopolitan? If not, do so now.
I have just read this first installment, with a whiskey to help me, and curiosity to spur me on. I know I am biased and unjust; but I find it revolting. I also realize he will never have to write his autobiography because he has been doing it, from the first novel, chapter by chapter, each book keeping pacing with his calendar years, building up this dream vision of himself.
Now he is a fifty-year-old Colonel of Infantry with high blood pressure, a great education, and a passion for duck shooting. The women get younger and younger; so that now the woman is an olive-haired Italian (perhaps Princess, by the next installment) of nineteen.
And I feel quite sick, I cannot describe this to you. Shivering sick. I watch him adoring his image, with such care and tolerance and such accuracy in detail....
.... And I feel sick, and you know what else: I weep for the eight years I spent, almost eight (light dawned a little earlier) worshipping his image with him, and I weep for whatever else I was cheated of due to that time-serving; and I weep for all that is permanently lost because I shall never, really, trust a man again.
You must read it and tell me, if anyone not me, not knowing who sits for the portrait, (with an expression of reverent self-love on his face) will accept this and find it fine. Perhaps it is. To me, it has a loud sound of madness and a terrible smell of decay.
I am re-reading Islands In The Stream and that was also my first thought: this is simply an autobiography, chapter by chapter of the author's life. It's not bad; it's just not good.
With regard to this next poll, let me say upfront: "I have absolutely no idea." I don't know if anyone does.
This is the question: At what rate could DUCs be fracked during first six weeks of next turnaroud?
These are a few parameters and miscellaneous comments:
right now the "average" number of wells coming on line each day: about one new well and three DUCs / day -- 4 / day or about 28 wells/week (I may be way off on that)
there may be no turnaround for several years (though I bet the industry looks a lot better in 2017 than it does in 2015)
a turnaround in fracking won't occur during the winter months regardless of the price of oil
the earliest we might see any turnaround in fracking would be early next spring / next summer (2016)
I don't think anyone has any good handle on "capacity" of fracking in the Bakken right now (fracking companies have disappeared, cut back, in the middle of mergers)
the effect of high volume proppant on the rate of fracking
If the operators in North Dakota are to complete 1,600 wells / year (out of about 2,000 permits), that works out to about 30 new wells each week, so one would think the minimum number of wells coming on-line in the next turnaround would be well above 30.
So, I'll throw it out there just for "grins."
I suppose there's a corollary, but I won't ask for now: if/when there is a turnaround, will DUCs or newly-drilled wells take precedent in fracking? This may be a no-brainer; I don't know.
The other big story may be a wildcat natural gas well east of the Bakken that has produced one million boe in the past three years. The other big story, of course, is that despite record low activity in the Bakken (since the boom began in 2007) daily production in August, 2015, exceeded that of daily production one year earlier (linked below). Along that line, the Bakken fracklog hits a new record (linked below). North Dakota received some nice national exposure in Forbes, which suggested that the state, due to a diversified economy, is poised to thrive.
Compare these top stories with the "top five" stories at Bakken.com: http://bakken.com/news/id/246291/top-5-bakken-stories-of-the-week-33/. I like my selection better. Just saying. It's hard to believe the OXY story did not make the Top 5 at that site but an HBO comedy video did.
The oiliest county in Texas has seen its new natural gas production capacity more than double as drillers hone in on their most profitable acreage.
The peak output rate from new gas wells in Karnes County has surged 134 percent since January, estimates from Drillinginfo show. The only other county in Texas’s Eagle Ford shale patch where new gas capacity’s gaining is Live Oak, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Karnes, the Austin-based energy data provider said.
Gas producers are focusing on the most prolific parts of their plays as they grapple with the worst price collapse since 2008, and Karnes County has long been a sweet spot in Texas’s Eagle Ford shale. The 20,000-square-mile shale formation supplies about one-sixth of the nation’s crude.
Karnes County, southeast of San Antonio, is home to “top- tier acreage," Chris Smith, senior research analyst at Drillinginfo. "In this pricing environment, a lot of the rigs still active would be moving toward that core area."
The retreat to core fields, known as high-grading, is occurring in oil and gas fields across the U.S. Drillers are eager to cut costs amid low prices and focus their rigs on sweet spots that produce the most.
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"Full-Blown Ice-Age" In Great Britain's Immediate Future? It's Just The Weather
Crippling blizzards, snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures threaten a yearly dose of Arctic misery for the next FIFTY YEARS at least - and possibly decades more.
Climate experts warn a rare pattern of water cooling in the north Atlantic will trigger a chain reaction of events leading to a “fully-blown ice age”.
Britain faces an 'all but unprecedented' situation thanks to a cocktail of climatic changes all happening at once to affect the weather.
The northern Atlantic has been cooling steadily over the past few months leading to a colossal area of icy water to form off the UK coast.
This is thought to be the result of changes in wind flow and salinity and could lead to lower than average temperatures in Britain all year round.
The phenomenon has already raised fears this winter will be un usually brutal with months of sub-zero temperatures and heavy snow on the way.
Long-term accumulative effects could be that parts of northern Europe, including Britain, will cool dramatically.
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Martha Gellhorn
I am enjoying Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, edited by Caroline Moorehead, c. 2006.
Written from Cuba, shortly after being married to Ernest Hemingway (his third wife), this is a portion of a letter Martha Gellhorn (wartime correspondent) wrote to a friend, a literary critic. The letter mentions Igor Cassini (1916 - 2002), a journalist and gossip columnist, who wrote for the Hearst newspaper chain under the name of Cholly Knickerbocker. In the late 1950s Cassini claimed a readership of almost 20 million. Here is the excerpt:
However, as a philosopher (this morning) I think parties are really the last refuge of the empty and shrivelled brain, and are more destructive to the body than cocaine and more destructive to the spirit than jail. I have such a good time during them for a while, going about showing off in the cheapest and most repugnant manner, shocking citizens whose emotions (whether of shock or otherwise) surely should not concern me, and making a kind of belligerent tough-joking conversation which is found amusing only by the maker.
I had a fairly pleasant interlude last night with a little man named Igor Cassini who earns his living writing poisonous and painful things about fashionable or famous people in some second-rate Washington paper. He is a little man with a mouth which I like to think looks like a hog's ass in fly-time though I never saw that phenomenon but only imagined it. He has a great deal of matted waving hair and a little short doughy body and perfectly flat black little eyes, calculating and about as warm as ball-bearings.
He has also a wife who looks like a Russian mannequin formerly employed by Patou until she opens her mouth and then I do not know exactly where she comes from as I do not get around much but she asked me if I was American and was terribly surprised to find I was.
I went to this party with Bumbi, Ernest's oldest boy who is four days this side of the army. Bumbi is blonde and very good to look at and 18 and sweet and six feet and one inch tall. (Ernest, canny to the last, put himself to bed before the party with a sore throat; he seems fine today.)
So I told Igor Cassini [gossip columnist] that Bumbi was my son and that I had him when I was twelve, an act which had startled the medical world internationally and been very painful but rewarding for me. I also said that of course the boy had not been legal at the time but we had since given him a name. Igor was horrified to hear anyone breezing skeletons around like that (he evidently thought I was Bohemian and knew no better) and the little ball bearing eyes gleamed with pleasure at this item. So I was happy for a bit.
Her writing on the wars she covered was much more serious, of course.
