Does This Man Ever Sleep? December 26, 2018

President Trump and Melania in Iraq.

North Dakota 3Q18 Taxable Sales

Link at The Bismarck Tribune.  Full report here. Data points:

• almost 20% higher, year-over-year
• $5.6 billion for the quarter (July, August, September)
• highest year-over-year increase since 3Q12
• best taxable sales and purchases report of any quarter in several years
• many sectors showed an increase; year-over-year:
• utilities: a 202% increase
• mining and oil: almost 50% increase
• wholesale trade sector: up 23%
• by city
• New Town (Parshall oil field): up 72%
• Watford City: up almost 50%
• Williston: up 29%
• Dickinson: up 18%
• Minot: up 9%
• Fargo: up 5%
• Bismarck: flat
• Grand Forks: a decrease of almost 9%
  

Memo to self: note to Art Berman and Jane Nielson.
 

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Alexa

Truly incredible. Most frustrating? Apple completely missed this. Well, Apple has Siri and can apparently do what Alexa can do but Amazon beat Apple out the gate on this one.

China Setting New LNG Import Records -- December 26, 2018

Over at "the big stories" I note that with regard to nuclear energy, it is ... going ... going ... gone. Then, by country, headlines for a post-nuclear energy world, including China (same as first link below).


December 27, 2018: Chinese LNG imports setting new records. 

December 26, 2018, added:

• LNG demand forecast to surge, Wood Mackenzie, December 14, 2018.
• Chinese crude oil demand insatiable, October 22, 2018.
• Global imports, by country, October 19, 2018.
• LNG demand will post strong growth to 2027, October 17, 2018.
• Story of the year, natural gas, SeekingAlpha, September 29, 2018.
• It's all about LNG, September 11, 2018.

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Virgil's Aeneid: A New Translation by Frederick Ahl

I've talked about this a couple of times, either on this blog or another blog. I forget.

I had never read Aeneid before. I am reading a few pages at a time. It is absolutely incredible. It will probably take a me a year to read it from start to finish. It's been several weeks now and I'm only on page 17 of a translation that is 327 pages long. LOL.  

While reading the scene in which Aeneas meets his mother Venus in Carthage I was struck by the allusions to the New Testament. Mind you, I had just seen the Virgin Mary at the top of the alter at the church in Taos Pueblo and had just observed the Christmas Eve procession so the Virgin Mary was certainly lurking in my conscious/sub-conscious boundary.

It was Virgil's reference to incense and myrrh that caught my attention. Virgil certainly suggested a relationship between the cult of the Virgin Mary and the cult of Aphrodite/Venus. I was curious if others had noted this.

A quick google brought me to this from wiki:

Early Christians frequently adapted pagan iconography to suit Christian purposes.

In the Early Middle Ages, Christians adapted elements of Aphrodite/Venus's iconography and applied them to Eve and prostitutes, but also female saints and even the Virgin Mary.

Christians in the east reinterpreted the story of Aphrodite's birth as a metaphor for baptism; in a Coptic stele from the sixth century AD, a female orant is shown wearing Aphrodite's conch shell as a sign that she is newly baptized.

Throughout the Middle Ages, villages and communities across Europe still maintained folk tales and traditions about Aphrodite/Venus and travelers reported a wide variety of stories.

Numerous Roman mosaics of Venus survived in Britain, preserving memory of the pagan past.

In North Africa in the late fifth century AD, Fulgentius of Ruspe encountered mosaics of Aphrodite and reinterpreted her as a symbol of the sin of Lust, arguing that she was shown naked because "the sin of lust is never cloaked"and that she was often shown "swimming" because "all lust suffers shipwreck of its affairs." He also argued that she was associated with doves and conchs because these are symbols of copulation, and that she was associated with roses because "as the rose gives pleasure, but is swept away by the swift movement of the seasons, so lust is pleasant for a moment, but is swept away forever."

Eight Wells Come Off The Confidential List Today: Six DUCs and Two Are Placed On DRL Status -- December 26 2018

Wells coming off the confidential list over long weekend, through today: Wednesday, December 26, 2018 --
34486, SI/NC, XTO, Nelson Federal 21X-5BXC, Antelope, no production data,
34151, SI/NC, Hess, SC-TR Slette-153-98-1819H-8, Truax, no production data, 
32277, drl, Slawson, Goblin Federal 1 SLH, Big Bend, no production data,

Tuesday, December 25, 2018:
34150, drl, Hess, SC-TR Slette-153-98-1819H-7, Truax, no production data, 
34149, SI/NC, Hess, SC-TR Slette-153-98-1819H-6, Truax, no production data, 

Monday, December 24, 2018:
34148, SI/NC, Hess, SC-TR Slette-153-98-1819H-5, Truax, no production data, 

Sunday, December 23, 2018:
34485, SI/NC, XTO, Nelson Federal 21X-5F, Antelope, no production data, 
34147, SI/NC, Hess, SC-TR Slette-153-98-1819H-4, Truax, no production data, 

Saturday, December 22, 2018:
None.

Active rigs:

$45.41	12/26/2018	12/26/2017	12/26/2016	12/26/2015	12/26/2014
Active Rigs	68	53	41	62	173

RBN Energy: large-scale pad drilling in Appalachia. Archived. At the link, the writer shows why Hubbert's peak oil theory is dead.

Dominator. Showboat. Brass Monkey. These are not player names in the re-established XFL; these are project names given to colossally proportioned drilling pads in the Permian and Appalachia. A single one of these well pads can be home to 20, 30, even 60 or more permitted well spots, each with miles-long laterals branching out in multiple directions. In today’s blog, we begin a series exploring the motivations that sparked this trend to larger pads and discuss the impact they’re having on the upstream and midstream sectors. 

Following the price crash in 2014-15, the U.S. oil patch weathered the storm, in part by reducing costs. Then, when prices started to recover, the major basins rebounded with a renewed focus on efficiency. Industry observers who had been skeptical as to the longevity or resilience of the shale boom prior to that had to concede that it wasn’t a flash in the pan but a foundational shift, and that wasn’t going away anytime soon. It was during that time — when prices were recovering but survival was still a battle — that more and more of the smaller independents who initiated the Shale Revolution began to flip their investments to larger producers with deeper pockets. These new owners then sought to exploit the innovations developed by the independents but also to use their substantial balance-sheet strength to fund large capital projects. They also used their economies of scale to transform what had been a bespoke creative endeavor for getting the most out of each well into a large-scale, assembly line-like manufacturing operation

It was in this environment that truly large-scale pad drilling projects started gaining traction. Pad drilling itself is nothing new. It’s the practice of drilling multiple wells from a single surface location. Though it was originally developed on the Alaskan North Slope in the 1970s, modern pad drilling techniques more closely trace their development to offshore platforms, where multiple directional wells needed to be drilled from a single structure. Producers recognized that by centralizing drilling efforts on the surface, pad drilling could help solve challenging production conditions such as rough terrain, environmental constraints, or urban restrictions.

That’s one reason why pad drilling has represented a growing proportion of total wells drilled since the Shale Revolution kicked off in the Barnett Shale and then in the Rockies in the mid-to-late-2000s. There, the advancement of horizontal drilling techniques synergized well with the drilling multiple wells from a single location and made apparent the economic incentives of pad drilling — namely, splitting the substantial infrastructure, logistical, and rig-mobilization costs among multiple wells. In its current context, the goal of pad drilling is to increase each rig’s productivity by decreasing cycle times while simultaneously reducing costs. But prior to the past few years, the scale of pad drilling projects was generally more conservative than what we’ve seen reported recently.

Ten years ago, it was a big deal when Chesapeake Energy publicized an eight-well pad in the Haynesville. What has changed in the past couple of years is the scale of these projects. The biggest of these “super-pads” now are expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop over periods of several years. They can be home to dozens of wells, with laterals ranging in length from 1 or 2 miles, with some reported to be pushing 4 miles, depending on the play.

So what’s driving the trend to ever-large pads? As hinted at above, the name of the game is producer economics. Producers’ economics are dependent on, among others, three primary factors: commodity price, drilling and completion costs, and well productivity. With commodity prices largely outside the control of any single producer, pad drilling horizontal wells takes aim at the second and third factors. Done right, pad drilling can reduce the costs associated with drilling, including rig mobilization, production facilities, water and sand, trucks and roads, and pipeline takeaway.

Flashback: President Obama's Plan To Take Out ISIS -- September 17, 2015

From September 17, 2015:

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No Link, Being Reported Everywhere

President Obama's DOD training program to take on ISIS;  "4 or 5" soldiers; $500 million.

Just kidding, here's one of the links:

Gen. Lloyd Austin, who leads the U.S. military’s Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday there are only four or five Syrian fighters left out of 54 who were trained as part of a [$500 million] U.S. program.

Another 100-120 fighters will be trained in the program’s three remaining classes, NBC News reported Wednesday.

Obama said in September that assisting Syrian rebels was “the best counterweight” for combating the Sunni radical terror group’s control over large swathes of Iraq and Syria, NBC reported.

I can't make this stuff up. This general even admits he doesn't know whether it's four or whether its five "Syrian" fighters. Whatever happened to $60 hammers and $600 toilets or whatever it was. Don't even talk to me about rent seekers in corporate America.

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For The Granddaughters

Irony

Examples of irony:

Prohibition of alcohol in the US, 1920 - 1933: actually accomplished the opposite of what was intended -- more alcohol produced than ever; cheaper than ever.

From Camille Paglia:

“The Greek gods are sharp personalities, interacting in dramatic space [the stage]. Their visualization was first achieved by blind Homer [why great authors are great authors], in his epic arcs of cinematic light.

Previously Posted 

Irony

I wrote the following some years ago after reading Harold Bloom's The Book of J. Harold Bloom introduces a fourth "definition" or example / type of irony.

First type of irony: Socratic irony. Irony as first used by Socrates. "A feigned ignorance and humility designed to expose the inadequate assumptions of others, by way of skilled dialectical questioning."

Second type of irony: common irony. "Use of language to express something other than supposedly literal meaning, particularly the opposite of such meaning, and also the contrast or gap between expectation and fulfillment."

Third type of irony, how J used irony: dramatic irony or tragic irony. "The incongruity between what develops on adjacent words and actions that are more fully apprehended by the audience or readers than by the characters." J was a master of such irony. I wonder if playwrights like Neil Simon or Oscar Wilde aren't good examples?

Fourth type of irony, invented by J: her irony was "the representation of what happens when altogether incommensurate realities juxtapose and clash." For example, a god wrestling with a human is J's type of irony (gross incommensurate beings, god vs mortal). How can Abram haggle with Yahweh? How can Jacob wrestle with a nameless one among the Elohim (angels)? How can we be persuaded that a masculine rough hunter like Esau would give away his birthright for a bowl of soup? I would think there are many, many examples of this type of irony in the Odyssey.

An aside: In the movie, “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” the events between Johnny Depp and an unnamed boy may be examples of both the third and the fourth types of irony.  As an example of the third definition of irony: when Johnny Depp said he didn’t want to see the boy again. Later in the movie when they cross paths, Depp has been blinded and cannot see the boy.  The same event can represent the fourth definition of irony:  an unnamed, untrained boy saves the life of a trained killer.]

Of the four "types" of irony, Harold Bloom says J created her own form, the fourth form.