Excellent Update On Steam Cracker Projects -- And The Impact -- RBN Energy -- December 28, 2016

Disclaimer: there will be typographical and factual errors on this page. Facts and opinions are interspersed; it is difficult to tell facts from opinions on the blog. There are no fake stories. At least that I am aware. 

First things first: the other day (yesterday?), I was guilty of a huge miss. An eagle-eyed reader caught it. I posted: " They come in threes: George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and ..." The reader noted I completely missed John Glenn. Thank you. Subconsciously, maybe I put John Glenn in a category all by himself. [Update, December 28, 2016: Carrie Fisher's mother, Debbie Reynolds, age 84, dies one day after her daughter dies. Perhaps those were the three: George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds, with John Glenn in a world of his own.]

Tammy, Billy Vaughn

First things first: a huge call-out to RBN Energy. The blog has taught me so much. If you aren't reading RBN Energy every day you're missing a lot. RBN has a great blog again today.

First things first: top of my list -- read one of Carrie Fisher novels. It's too bad that it takes their dying to realize/understand how great someone is.

Now back to the other stuff.

My wife loved The Kennedy Center Honors last night. I missed it. Hopefully I can catch it later. Thank goodness for YouTube. My wife mentioned that Juanes played a double neck guitar. She had not seen a multi-neck guitar before and was curious if I had. I practically "grew up" watching a great guitarist play a double neck guitar:

My Wife Thinks You're Dead, Junior Brown   That is not my favorite song by Junior Brown but because it features his wife, it's one of my favorite videos of Junior Brown. This particular double neck guitar is not the typical double neck guitar and not the type Juanes played at The Kennedy Center Honors.

From wiki:

In 1985, Brown invented a double-neck guitar, with some assistance from Michael Stevens.

Brown called the instrument his "guit-steel."

The top neck on the guit-steel is a traditional six-string guitar, while the lower neck is a full-size lap steel guitar for slide playing.

Brown has two guit-steels for recording and live work. The original instrument, dubbed "Old Yeller," has as its standard six-string guitar portion the neck and pickups from Brown's previous stage guitar, a Fender Bullet. The second guit-steel, named "Big Red," has a neck laser-copied from the Bullet neck; but in addition to electric guitar pickups, both the standard and lap-steel necks use identical Sho-Bud lap-steel pickups. There is a pocket in the upper bout of the guitar to hold the slide bar when it is not in use.

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs: I mentioned yesterday, with the blizzard, I was surprised to see "any" rigs still active in the Bakken. And it looks like we might be seeing something along that line, dropping from 41 to 38 pretty quickly:

	12/28/2016	12/28/2015	12/28/2014	12/28/2013	12/28/2012
Active Rigs	38	61	173	187	186

RBN Energy: steam cracker feedstock selection in changing times. This is another incredible post by RBN Energy. Bottom line: with all the steam crackers coming on line, the demand for feedstock will continue to increase. It begins:

The Shale Revolution has had a profound impact on U.S. NGL markets by vastly increasing production and by lowering NGL prices relative to the prices of crude oil and natural gas. That has been good news for the nation’s steam crackers, the petrochemical plants that have enjoyed low NGL feedstock prices since 2012. But NGL markets are in for some big changes as new U.S. steam crackers coming online over the next two years will be competing for supply with export markets, raising the specter of higher NGL prices—a good thing for NGL producers, but not so for petrochemical companies. How this plays out will be determined by the feedstock supply decisions petrochemical producers make as NGL prices respond to rapidly increasing demand. Today we begin a series on how steam cracker operators determine day-by-day which feedstocks are the most economic, and on the factors driving the value of ethylene feedstock prices.

It ends:

Taking a fresh look at feedstock selection makes sense as 2017 begins because more than a dozen U.S. steam cracker projects that together would add more than 20 billion lb/year of new ethylene production capacity are either under construction or will be soon. As a group, these projects (most of them along the Gulf Coast in either Texas or Louisiana) could increase ethane demand by about 600 Mb/d by the early 2020s. Factor in the possibility of only modest growth in ethane production, continuing ethane takeaway constraints and rising ethane exports (overseas and to Canada) and, well, this could get very interesting.

In between, an incredible discussion of the subject.

Why Not? How About Just Posting An RBN Energy Map With No Comments? -- December 27, 2016

This was from an October 12, 2015, RBN Energy blog:



Related links:

• Enbridge - Spectra deal closes
• another pipeline expansion proposed for the Bakken (sort of)

It's Amazing There Are Any Active Rigs In North Dakota After This Recent Blizzard; Whiting To Report Two Huge Wells -- December 27, 2016

Active rigs:

	12/27/2016	12/27/2015	12/27/2014	12/27/2013	12/27/2012
Active Rigs	40	62	173	187	186

Wells coming off confidential list Wednesday:

• 29692, 2,273, Whiting, P Bibler 155-99-16-31-30-1H3, Epping, Three Forks, 30 stages, 7 million lbs, t7/16; cum 108K 10/16;
• 29693, 2,471,Whiting, P Bibler 155-99-16-31-30-1H, Epping, 39 stages, 10 million lbs, t7/16; cum 131K 10/16;
• 31891, 1,506, Hess, BB-Siverston-LS-151-95-2019H-1, Blue Buttes, 53 stages, 3.7 million lbs, t12/16; cum --

Five permits renewed:

• EOG (4): four Parshall permits, all in Mountrail County
• HRC: one Storhaug permit in Williams County

Three producing wells (DUCs) reported as completed:

• 29610, 3,651, Statoil, Cheryl 17-20 5H, Banks, t12/16; cum --
• 30677, 1,072, Statoil, Bures 20-29 8TFH, Alger, t11/16; cum --
• 30678, 455, Charlie Sorenson 17-8 8TFH, Alger, t12/16; cum -- 

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29693, see above, Whiting, P Bibler, Epping:

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
10-2016	24134	30940
9-2016	27178	39043
8-2016	36751	54021
7-2016	40761	36419
6-2016	1186	604

29692, see above, Whiting, P Bibler, Epping:

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
10-2016	22692	28974
9-2016	26452	33137
8-2016	18307	21841
7-2016	40144	33387
6-2016	26	556

Nothing About The Bakken -- US Consumer Confidence Surges To 15-Year High -- T+47 -- December 27, 2016

US consumer confidence: highest in more than 15 years, highest since 2001. Reuters. Watching MSNBC "Morning Joe" and reading the front page of the The New York Times and then reading this Reuters article suggests to me that "something is happening" and the mainstream media is unable to keep up.

One can argue if all Americans had voted, Trump would have won 72% to 28%. Just saying. Or one can blame the Russians for giving the popular vote to Hillary.

The man who dissed Trump: biggest billionaire gainer of 2016, and much of that came after November 8, 2016.

Buffett was a firm supporter of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, but he scored most of his gains this year, some $7.8 billion, after she lost the election in November. Buffett's fortune rose $3.6 billion in the two days following the election alone when Berkshire Hathaway stock jumped 6%.

They come in threes: George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and ...

Jill Stein: her fifteen minutes of fame are over.

For the archives. The origin of the name for a small, single-sail sailboat originating in the environs of Cape Cod, the "catboat."

For the archives and for the granddaughters who learned to sail on catboats:

A "close" reach is somewhat toward the wind, and "broad" reach is slightly away from the wind (a "beam" reach is with the wind at a right angle to the boat). For most modern sailboats, reaching is the fastest way to travel. On some boats, the beam reach is the fastest point of sail; on others, a broad reach is faster.

For the archives. From recent issue of The New Yorker: "Banned Books and Blockbusters." Key words for google search: Catch-22; Jack Kahane; Sylvia Beach; Shakespeare & Company; Rosset; Robert Gottlieb; Avid Reader -- also reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

Between the wars, Paris was home to many English-language presses. There were two basic types.

The first specialized in modernist writers. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company, which published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, is the most famous, but there were also outfits like Three Mountains Press, which published Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford; the Black Sun Press, run by the glamorous expats Harry and Caresse Crosby, which published Hart Crane and William Faulkner; Contact Editions, which published Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams; Black Manikin Press, which published D. H. Lawrence; and the Hours Press, which published Samuel Beckett.

The other type of English-language press had a different specialty: pornography. Pornographers are the gypsies of the culture industry. They are sensitive to changes in the legal climate, and they generally find it more convenient to move than to fight. In 1857, the British Parliament passed the Obscene Publications Act, also known as Lord Campbell’s Act, after the justice who described pornography as “poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine, or arsenic.” The act authorized the use of search warrants to seize pornographic materials. Subsequent acts of Parliament made it illegal to advertise pornography, send it through the mails, or bring it into the country from abroad.

Poster child for idiocy: Spriha Srivastava -- the market rally has nothing to do with Trump's victory. He obviously didn't look at the market the first 48 hours after the election results in whcih Trump won by an electoral landslide.

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The United Nations Page

The UN General Assembly has wrapped up its annual legislative session. Tally:

• 20 resolutions against Israel; and,
• four against "the rest of the world" -- one each on Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Crimea. 

And that's just this year.

Meanwhile, the UN voted / authorized monitors to oversee the refugee evacuation of Aleppo -- after the evacuation was pretty much over. I don't think UN monitors got into Aleppo at all.

Regardless of one's opinion on Obama's last act with regard to this farce -- actions have consequences.

I would like to see Congress vote on a non-binding resolution supporting the president's action. My hunch is it would be 65 against the president - 24 agreeing with the president and with 11 abstentions. The GOP needs to learn how to play hardball. 

Tesla, Panasonic To Build Solar Panel Factory In New York -- December 27, 2016

Maybe more on this later. Global warmists predicted this:

Re-balancing oil supply in 2017: tea leaves suggest Saudi Arabia will have to do the heavy lifting. Everyone else is increasing production.

Trump making America great again: Tesla, Panasonic to begin solar panel production in Buffalo, New York. Data points:

• construction to begin this summer
• to reach capacity, 1 gigawatt, by 2019
• $256 million, Panasonic investment
• underscores the Tesla-Panasonic partnership: they are jointly building the $5 billion lithium-ion battery gigafactory in Nevada

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

	12/27/2016	12/27/2015	12/27/2014	12/27/2013	12/27/2012
Active Rigs	41	62	173	187	186

RBN Energy: Pipelines. Now its bats. Developers need federal regulatory approval quickly in order to move dead trees out of the path of the construction zone before bat nesting season begins. Any delay and construction could be delayed a full year. It's a natural gas pipeline, Rover Pipeline, to southern Michigan.

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The Literature Page

My focus this week: Henry Beston. See my first note on the subject posted yesterday.

I finished The Outermost House. I am now reading Daniel Payne's biography of Henry Beston, c. 2016, Orion on the Dunes, the first biography of Beston to ever be published.

Introduction: the biographer notes "The number of those who drove ambulances in Europe [during WWI] and subsequently became famous literary figures is astonishing. These literary volunteers included Louis Bromfield, Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and Archibald MacLeish, among many others ... [including Henry Sheahan who wrote The Outermost House under the name Henry Beston]."

Modern writers who were admirers of Henry Beston include Rachel Carson, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Hay.

In 1960, Henry Beston became the third recipient of the Emerson-Thoreau Medal awarded by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences -- the first two writers to be so honored were Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot.

Beston's tour was officially before the great Battle of Verdun, but he elected to stay, saying he was unwilling to leave France during its moment of greatest need. He wrote his parents in half jest, he "was enduring the war for peace of mind."

The Great Battle of Verdun: after several weeks (compare with the length of the battle in Aleppo), the French army succeeded in holding Verdun but at a staggering cost: the French lost approximately 377,000 men in the battle; the Germans lost almost the same number.

That alone helps me understand Beston's outermost house.

the history of Braintree, p. xxx - xxxi

the north precinct of Braintree became Quincy (Beston's birthplace); Braintree was also the birthplace of John Hancock and John Adams (leaders in the American Revolution), p. xxxi

two leading families of Braintree joined: marriage of Abigail Smith to John Adams, 2nd president of the United States; their son, John Quincy (family name of Abigail) became the 6th president, p. xxxi

Quincy granite, p. xxxii

During the Irish potato famine, Maurice Sheahan, the paternal grandfather of Henry Beston, sailed in 1848 from Cobh, Ireland, bound for America and a new life.

Henry Beston, b. 1888, son of a physician, himself from Quincy, but trained in France (Henry's father); Henry's father married a French woman; Henry was fluent in both English and French; and that helps explain his writing style; brother George and Henry loved sailing off Quincy; brother George became a physician; trained at Harvard; 

Further notes will be elsewhere.

shallop, p. xxix
sculling, p. 9
catboat, p. 10; most likely the kind of sailboats on which Arianna and Olivia learned to sail, 2016; very interesting etymology for "catboat"