Premium gasoline - regular gasoline spread to increase. Platts is reporting:
Gulf Coast alkylate barges on Tuesday matched a record differential to
Colonial Pipeline gasoline in a market reacting to driver demand and
refiners holding onto their blendstocks.
Alkylate is used to
boost octane for premium gasoline and reduce RVP for summer fuels.
High-octane gasoline has seen strength this week in the Gulf Coast and
Midwest gasoline markets on a scarcity of alkylate.
Platts
assessed alkylate at maximum 5.5 RVP at 65 cents over pipeline gasoline
for loading August 5, tying the record set on six days in February 2013.
The assessment was based on a heard Gulf Coast barge trade completed
late Monday.
"... a market reacting to driver demand..." I'm looking for US gasoline demand to set a new record this August, 2015.
When you read these three posts (the current one plus the two linked ones), think Keystone.
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Tweeting Now
Tweeting now: scores of felons and illegal aliens are streaming into local Los Angeles County sheriff offices and Los Angeles City police departments after LA City council bans large-capacity ammunition magazines. Or not.
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Tweeting Not
Tweeting now: they had to shut down the wind turbines because of high sustained winds. Over 50 mph, wind turbines need to be shut down. Thank goodness for coal. Or not.
Russia is a major producer and exporter of oil and natural gas, and its economy largely depends on energy exports. Russia was the world's largest producer of crude oil including lease condensate and the third-largest producer of petroleum and other liquids (after Saudi Arabia and the United States) in 2014, with average liquids production of 10.9 million barrels per day. Sanctions and lower oil prices have reduced foreign investment in Russia's upstream, especially in Arctic offshore and shale projects, and have made financing projects more difficult. However, these sanctions will have little effect on Russian production in the short term as these resources were not expected to begin producing for 5 to 10 years at the earliest. --- EIA
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Intermittent Energy
By the way, take a look at this PDF. In all such presentations, to make renewable energy look "bigger" than it really is, the graphic designers and analysts lump solar and wind energy with hydroelectric power (like the Hoover Dam). The amount of hydroelectric power dwarfs whatever energy that is provided by solar and wind energy. But much more important is this little bit of trivia, an inconvenient truth: hydroelectric power is continuous and dependable. Wind and solar is intermittent and not dependable. Wind and solar energy needs conventional energy back-up; hydroelectric power does not.
By the way, installed capacity of the Hoover Dam: 2,080 MW. At $5 million / MW, it would take only $10 billion to build a solar farm to provide that much energy, assuming one could find enough land to build a solar farm that big, and, oh, by the way, that solar farm would still require the Hoover Dam to back it up during the night and during cloudy days. Renewable energy = intermittent energy = redundant energy = very expensive energy.
U.S. consumer confidence took
its biggest tumble in four years in July on a less upbeat jobs outlook,
while home appreciation in major cities stalled in May, suggesting a
spring pause in housing demand.
The
disappointing data comes as Federal Reserve policymakers meet to
consider whether the U.S. economy is strong enough to warrant an end to
the Fed's near zero interest rate policy, perhaps as soon as September.
The
Conference Board, an industry group, said on Tuesday its index of
consumer attitudes fell to 90.9 this month from a downwardly revised
99.8 in June. It fell far short of a forecast reading of 100.0.
The
latest figure was the lowest since September 2014, while the decline
was the steepest since August 2011. The report's jobs hard-to-get index
rose to 26.7 from June's upwardly adjusted 26.1.
I assume the poll was taken minutes after Hillary's last speech.
Meanwhile, GDPNow: The final GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted
annual rate) in the second quarter of 2015 was 2.4 percent on July 27,
unchanged from July 17.
Accompanying the article is a photo of a family eating in a New York restaurant ... on September 17, 2012. Must have been the writer's family and his birthday.
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A Note to the Granddaughters
After many, many cross-country trips between Texas (either south Texas [San Antonio] or north Texas [DFW]) and Los Angeles, California, in which we made the side trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, only once, Santa Fe is back on my list of things to do next summer.
I haven't discussed this yet with May but she asks about visiting Santa Fe every time we make the trip. So, next summer, I plan to leave a week earlier than usual for Los Angeles, and use that week to make a side trip to Santa Fe. Each month between now and next June, I will put $150 into an envelope marked "Lodging for the Santa Fe Trip, 2015." Let's say that's eleven months, and thus eleven nights of lodging -- but we will only need four or five nights of such lodging, so ....
The decision was made while reading The Harvey Girls (see below).
For those interested in touring the southwest, or the Grand Canyon, this is where I would start:
The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened The West, Lesley Poling-Kempes, c. 1989
Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest, Arnold Berke, c. 2002
Mary Colter: Builder Upon the Red Earth, Virginia L. Grattan, c. 1992
Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civlizing the Wild West, One Meal at a Time, Stephen Fried, c. 2010
Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and The Fate of the West, Judith Nies, c. 2014
Route 66: Main Street USA, Nick Freeth, c. 2001, coffee table glossy hardcover
A Naturalist's Guide to Canyon Country, David B. Williams, c. 2013
I would read The Harvey Girls last. What an incredibly good book.
If I had time to read only two books, it would be The Harvey Girls and Grattan's biography of Mary Colter.
Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest, Arnold Berke
Books on regional "color" are generally "hit or miss." The Harvey Girls is clearly a "hit." It's an easy read, but wow, the amount of history crammed into a relatively small book.
One bit of trivia. Although the destination was Santa Fe, the Santa Fe rail line from Topeka, Kansas, never made it to Santa Fe. From The Harvey Girls:
Coming from the north and Raton Pass, the Santa Fe directed its tracks toward the city of Santa Fe, where it seemed logical enough to create a major stop. But it was not to happen this way. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway never laid its main track into its namesake.
There are to supposed explanations for this: one claims that the citizens of Santa Fee supported a rival railroad before the Santa Fe was established in New Mexico, and that the Santa Fe later snubbed the little city, laying its main line substantially east of her; the other story claims that the the city of Santa Fe made an all-out effort to secure the railroad's consideration, but lost after the railway's surveys showed the route would be too mountainous. When the main line could not be laid into Santa Fe, a spur was promised, completed on February 16, 1880.
In 1880, Lamy, New Mexico, was the site chosen as the junciton from which a spur track from the main line would be laid into Santa Fe. Lamy became a town overnight. Fifteen miles southeast of Santa Fe, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Santa Fe Railway built maintenance yards, section crew housing, and a depot and Harvey House. Lamy never boasted more than three hundred residents, but in 1910, it had the "oasis in the desert," El Ortiz Harvey House.
John Kemp is tweeting some North Dakota data. There are two huge data points (at least) in this graph:
Memo to self: send this graph to Jane Nielson.
John Kemp also provided a breakdown of the IPs for wells completed in North Dakota between June 2014 and June 2015. This would include a very small number of non-Bakken wells which generally have IPs at the far left. The table below: the column to the left is the number of bopd flow, IP; the second column is the number of wells that reported an IP as indicated between June 2014 and June 2015:
It appears that 60% or more of North Dakota wells, including some very small Madison and Spearfish wells, a a few dry wells, had an IP of 1,000 bopd or greater.
Note: the numbers come my reading of the graph. Obviously, my reading is not perfect, and I often make simple arithmetic errors.
Statoil ASA and BP plc revealed Tuesday, through their separate second-quarter results, that they are reaping the benefits of cost cutting programs across their respective operations. In its 2Q statement, Statoil claimed that it has maintained a “strong capital structure” and stated that net debt was reduced in the quarter. The company’s adjusted net income of $881 million was 22 percent ahead of consensus estimates, according to investment bank Jefferies, who also stated that Statoil’s “Norwegian Continental Shelf results were robust while trading once again appeared strong”.
Statoil’s capital spending was reported to be $7.8 billion in the first half of 2015 and this figure is now expected to hit $17.5 billion for all of 2015, instead of $18 billion, due to the effects of an ongoing efficiency program. Statoil also increased its production of hydrocarbons during 2Q 2015 by four percent, compared to the same period last year. The rise, which boosted production to 1.873 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in the second quarter of 2015, was partly due to “lower maintenance compared to the second quarter of 2014”, according to Statoil. As part of Statoil’s cost-cutting measures, the company has previously announced that it could fire up to 1,500 employees by the end of 2016 and stated that it will be streamlining its operating model in order to become “fit for the future”.
For BP:
BP’s results revealed that it too has made “significant strides in reducing controllable cash costs”, according to investment bank Jefferies, which noted BP’s costs were $1.7 billion lower during the first half of 2015 than in 1H14. The savings were a result of BP’s simplification and efficiency programs that were designed to sustainably reduce non-safety-critical cash costs, according to BP’s 2Q results statement. At the end of the second quarter, BP’s net debt was $293 million lower than at the end of the first quarter, which is within the company’s 10-20 percent target band. BP’s upstream segment also reported a profit of $0.5 billion for 2Q 2015.
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Libya, Where Hope Springs Eternal
Platts reports that Libyan crude oil dropped from a paltry 430,000 bopd to an even-worse 366,000 bopd. And, of course, that's Libyan figures, so one wonders what the real number was. However, hope spring eternal:
[NOC chairman] has said that Libyan oil production could be boosted to as
much as 1 million b/d if NOC successfully negotiated a restart of the
fields with protesters blockading the nearby pipeline infrastructure.
