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On a more serious note, I think Barron's gives too much weight to the moderating influence of a GOP House. Obama has set the standard of 'rule by regulatory edict, litigate later'. Obama's SC appointees have shown that they r quite willing to go along with regulatory agency rulings regardless of legislative language. Assuming Clinton has the usual Democratic success at appointing compliant justices, Congressional power will be neutered even if the GOP holds both houses. In principle, they would have the fiscal lever but they haven't shown much inclination to really use it and as Obama has shown, it's easy to reallocate funds. Again, do now, litigate after the fact (fait accompli).
Agreed with the addition of a host <pun> of liability problems to make for a terrible investment thesis
And now the news....
I thought Marriott was involved in this game. Just a pick at the 1st national player. Turning old hotels with lower traveler traffic into 'old folks homes' seems logical, cynical, and somewhat ironic
the author of that story is a nutcase and obviously possesses no technological knowledge.
some picky points: vanadium is not a rare metal. It occurs in such annoyingly high concentrations in some oils that people have considered 'mining' the refinery ashes.
batteries or other energy systems using HBr and HI will not achieve utilization beyond pilot-scale (if that) and anybody that thinks ferrocyanide compounds will be economically competitive with hydrocarbons is out of his mind.
molten glass? I think he's referring to thermal storage rather than batteries. again, not a large scale solution.
of the 8 ARPA projects linked in the story: only 2 are active. Also note that 6 of the 8 projects funded MIT and Harvard. That's what Ernie's job really is - to raise money for the home team and he's one of those guys that spells team with an 'i'.
in the long list of things Ernie has been wrong about, having a decarbonized US economy by 2050 is going to be a big one.
Very artful exposition. Thx
lol. i dont think that's where the author was going but a feedback loop is not unreasonable. I think the real problem was on the front side. Some of those producer countries sited as growing oil consumption were doing so on borrowed money, e.g. Venezuela and Brazil both of which have reverse mortgaged their reserves but the the payment plan had a floating value and there isnt much value now. Canada and Mexico are not much better.
edit: i never took econ101 so i have no idea what was taught in it but i'd bet what gets taught now is different than 30 yrs ago.
COLUMN-Why is oil market rebalancing taking so long?
http://in.reuters.com/article/oil-global-kemp-idINL8N1AK2BG
U.S. Shale Gas Shaking Up Global Markets as LNG Supply Surges
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-27/u-s-shale-gas-shaking-up-global-markets-as-lng-trading-surges
u should choose higher quality reading material. the claim that "oil companies almost always refuse to divulge the chemical soup they use for fracking is complete bullshit.
1. oil companies are generally not the entities doing the hydraulic fracturing; a service company does that. So people that make such claims can make the Clintonian argument that the claim is true because an oil company wont divulge the information but the truth is that it's not their information to divulge. Most people if asked to divulge a strangers tax information would say something like "I dont have that information and if I did, I wouldnt give you the information". In the conspiracy theory world that is translated as "refusing to divulge information"
2. Service companies do divulge the information. It might even be a federal requirement now.
http://www.halliburton.com/public/projects/pubsdata/Hydraulic_Fracturing/fluids_disclosure.html?
most of the ingredients in the list you provided are not scary at all. Many are in toothpaste and a lot of food you consume and even the chemicals that are toxic are no more so than the stuff that comes out of the ground with the oil and gas. None of it is intended to be ingested by humans and anybody that did so intentionally is probably intent on harming himself. It would generally be just as unhealthy to go to your local farm pond, gutter, or drainage ditch and drink a cup full of that water.
Were u referring to crude or refined oil storage? The problem I've heard mentioned most recently is with the latter.
Export refined product to US. Sell in $US. Take home $US and get nice exchange. I've heard that Chinese and European refineries are dumping refined product in the US so that's my guess as to what's going on.
might they be trying to avoid attention as to why the previous GC departed? it hasnt been unknown for a lawyer who has done something nefarious or incompetent to be quietly ushered out the door and replaced without fanfare.
edit: just saw jbog's post apparently posted near simultaneously - feel free to delete
not joking. I'll use the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act as an example (FCPA - another Jimmy Carter special). O&G and service companies know that they are targets for violations of this Act by the obama administration and likely would be by clinton.
As a consequence of the FCPA, oil industry companies are super-paranoid about any kind of transfers that might go thru, to, or from disallowed countries like Sudan. Iran is a complete mess now because nobody knows whether they're good or bad anymore. By transfers I mean anything from an email to drillbits (even talking to an Iranian at an offsite conference is a problem). However, the folks oil industry companies must hire to prevent things from going thru, to or from disallowed countries practice their trade as if EVERY shipped item may go thru, to or from the bad guys. It doesnt matter if an item is going between Canada and the US (either way).
So let's say some vendor in the US mixes up your order with another customer in the Middle East and you happen to be in Canada. The item arrives by FedEx but the genius at the vendor realizes he screwed up and calls before the FedEx truck arrives. So you (really meaning me) go to the wonderful shipping department to tell them that the order was screwed up and you want part of the order to go back to the vendor (as it were it would've been simpler to refuse delivery on the entire order but live and learn).
It took me 1.5 months and 10s of emails and phone calls involving various SLB shipping and trade compliance people and even the CEO of the vendor to get 3 small cylinders returned to the US and get my items. The vendor's CEO got involved because the customer in the Middle East was getting really unhappy (the cylinders had a 2-3 month lead time to manufacture).
When my calorimeter was moved from Boston to Edmonton it took over 3 months (and 100s hrs of scientists' time) to get approval from the trade compliance folks. When I tried to ship some enzymes across the border it became a research project (the last trade compliance person i dealt with pronounced enzyme as EN-zy-ME). As far as I know the biologic pristane I extracted from several kg of copepods has never made it out of Canada and that process started 8 months ago.
The theme here is that companies dealing with international shipments are forced to hire trade compliance people because of the FCPA. But the geniuses setting the hiring qualifications see those people as cost preventers rather than revenue producers so the qualification bar is really low. Consequently, those people are less knowledgeable and skilled than a Walmart stocker but wield enormous power. For every hour one of those people works you can bet they are costing 4-6 hours of other people's time (minimum) and those other people are way more expensive. If the items being shipped are common items, then the trade compliance people check off a box on form and things may move more smoothly but anything out of the ordinary, i.e. fits under the 'other' category is viewed with suspicion and requires an investigation. There are a lot of 'out of the ordinary' things that happen in the oil business.
nope. i think the wisdom in oil company boardrooms is betting on Hillary being elected and O&G E&P becoming more difficult in the US. It's not just a fear of additional taxes. Anybody that can hold up and eventually kill Keystone XL and needs the climate changers and anti-frackers to get a 2nd term will do to O&G E&P companies what obama did to US coal companies.
EPA reviews will tie permitting up forever. Every drilling pad will suddenly have a potential impact on a navigable waterway whether it's an offshore rig or one in central Wyoming. Emissions associated with every engine or leak associated with drilling and production will need to be monitored. Fracking will be killed by a combination of requirements on obtaining the injected water and produced water will have to be treated so extensively that the process becomes uneconomic. And then there will be absurd bonding requirements for groundwater contamination.
It'll just be a variation on Jimmy Carter's policies with similarly bad results.
final edit: oil companies know how to deal with 3rd world dictators. dealing with US gov't bureaucracies can be more difficult.
before i saw your 'hand waving' sentence i was thinking "some of this doesnt make any sense"
however, i think it's implicit that much of what is making their economics work is 1. counting on making the project work longer - partially because of less hardware & 2. negotiation of long-term contracts at very favorable current rates (this is why i don't think the major service companies will recover as quickly as the E&Ps and lower level suppliers).
I'm not sure what the 5% price realization to Brent is but Tengiz oil is very high sulfur so I'd expect a steep discount to Brent. The kinda good news i suppose is that i think it's light oil (~45 API). Again, that wont fair well against Brent but it's not like high-sulfur Venezuelan or Canadian crudes.
"banning fracking can't be a serious policy insofar as it would significantly increase oil imports and the price of gasoline/diesel/heating oil."
While that is the logical evaluation, rational, logical thoughts haven't always carried the day. If it did we wouldn't have the presidential candidates we have.
Jimmy Carter's oil policies were completely ill conceived yet they were enacted and it took many years to get past them.
If the anti-fracking crowd get their way, not even the chemicals side of the business will prosper
OT fair enough and something i'm generally more than happy to help with but for folks like me it would be counter-productive since i'll turn around and leave rather than unlock a cart in the store. I'm more than happy to harvest a cart from the parking lot. I do that to help with paint job preservation and just cuz it's a considerate and painless thing to do.
I mentioned theft reduction becuz that's how the grocery stores near me in Berkeley and Edmonton sold it. Cart theft in the bay area was epidemic and given that the carts supposedly cost ~$300 each (store claim), it would've made economic sense to put a human in the parking lot full time to prevent theft. In Berkeley many people didnt care about recouping the $0.25.
i don't know how 'high-end' Aldi's is but i find the $0.25 deposit for a grocery cart to be extremely annoying - not because of the $0.25 - i simply hate having to deal with it. It's particularly annoying in countries where cash is not commonly used. I havent noticed that cart deposits stop bums from stealing carts which is the primary purpose for the deposit game.
Unless i'm only going to a store for 1-2 items, i'll go to any store other than the one with the locked carts.
As for Whole Foods: I used to go to them solely because they were the only store that routinely had fresh orange juice and unhomogenized milk. When the orange juicer in the Oklahoma City Whole Foods broke and they didnt fix it - i stopped going. Strangely enough that was about the same time that Aubrey McClendon was fired from CHK and he was the reason why there was a Whole Foods in OKC. Most of the boxed stuff that WFM sells tastes like the container so i'd never buy anything boxed from them.
Soylent Green. One step closer.
Wegman's was one of the few things that i liked in NJ.
~10% dilution being sold at ~9% discount to prior close and the stock goes up 3%. seems rather bullish.
1st i heard of it but anything that the IMF and Columbia Univ economists are for, i'm against
going slightly tangential, if we call oil's heyday 2007, then i think the associated technological developments put the stake in a recovery to that level (probably for decades). However, a lot more people will have to go back to bicycles to avoid a rather steep recovery to $80ish. It's gonna happen sometime in the next 2 yrs just because the Saudis cant carry the world and lots of countries and companies are gonna break at current prices.
see this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Goddard
i did find the Al Gore comment in the presentation to be quite humorous. He's definitely more of a problem than a solution. I really dont like the wine and cheese climate change crowd and anybody with a plastic water bottle in their hands while they shout about climate change can be summarily ignored.
it's worth noting that the temperature anomalies of the mid-1930s were accompanied by extreme drought that brought on the 'dust bowl'. The increase in atmospheric dust probably reinforced the thermal anomaly.
Just from a timing perspective, this was a good buy and will probably also help CAT in the long run
That and a progressively larger chunk of the supply chain infrastructure necessary to restart exploration and production is being removed. There will b a self-sustaining bidding war for everything associated with running rigs and wells. I don't think the well service companies will benefit as much as the folks selling the equipment and materials and the production companies.
The wider it gets, the steeper it'll be on the trailing side
the "as much as" comment should actually underscore how bad things are. That is "as much as 40%" when companies are seriously cherry picking. If costs were cut by 80% I might be impressed.
a big chunk of the costs are service companies and they are in a weaker position than they were in 2009. I wasnt in the business in 1999 and 1986 so i dont have a comparator but I dont think the service companies recovered their leverage from 2009 and it's far worse now. That will enable production companies to maintain lower costs for another 5 yrs after prices start to recover.
As things currently stand, I'd bet in many cases HAL, BHI, SLB, WFT etc are taking many jobs at a loss just to maintain market share and their service labs are almost certainly operating at a loss.
Materials costs are also in the toilet so costs for tubing, cement, drilling fluid components, and transportation costs are probably a fraction of what they were 2 yrs ago and they werent high then.
Strangely enough some service companies and presumably production companies appear to be following the oil industry equivalent of zebra's law - continuing to pile money into unconventional resources. I suspect part of the reason being that countries such as Argentina currently have laws which artificially support unconventional oil production. That cant last so seems like a bad plan to me. In addition, if the democrats gain control of the Congress and the presidency, then US unconventional and deepwater drillers can look forward to an environment which is no better than than what currently exists.
Not intended as a jab. Just my observation that government infrastructure spending rarely if ever goes as originally sold to the public or under budget. As for private/public collaborations we can look at the splendid failure of Solyndra as an example of the general case.
As a counter example we have Bezos, Musk etc venturing personnel or private funds for rocket and satellite projects that have historically been government projects due to their complexity and capital costs and they appear to be doing things better and more efficiently than government operations. In the end they'll suck up a lot of government $s but I won't complain a bit about that or the path to it.
further on your perhaps overly subtle post 8^)
i'm aware of several rather large govt projects funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that have only started spending in the past 2 yrs because of regulatory/licensing/permitting barriers precluded earlier expenditures.
The government is hardly an efficient developer. [says the preacher to the choir]
agreed that $37B is a lot of money and that's part of the reason why i made the comment. I think the big $ (and me) see the next election as one for the record books in terms of big flushing sounds.
i'll make a bold 'analysis': oil and gas companies are preparing for an increasingly hostile operating environment in the US. think "windfall profits" tax circa 1979 with the more depressing feature that the responsible people are not on their way out the door but are just getting started.
you can see the adjustments for temperature scale i referred to here:
http://www.omega.com/temperature/z/pdf/z186-193.pdf
that shows the difference between a thermometer calibrated according to the 1968 standard vs 1990. At 50 degC the difference between those scales would be ~0.01 deg. Not big differences at Earth surface conditions but each scale involves a shift. So if you simultaneously measured the boiling point of pure water in a single container at 1 atm using 3 different thermometers calibrated in 1930, 1970, and 1990 you could very well end up with 3 different numbers for the boiling point of water. Those differences would be due to differences in the respective thermometer calibration standards rather than other measurement error. I suspect differences between scales increases with age. Most people tend to ignore those differences (including me) but for very temperature sensitive phenomenon or temperatures far removed from 0 degC that neglect can cause apparent discrepancies between data that dont really exist or conversely, cause data to appear to agree when they really don't.
couple comments on the video:
1. finding research scientists in the oil industry who dispute climate change is more the exception than the rule. Maybe those that dispute just keep silent but my experience is that the scientists in that community mirror those in the academic community.
2. corrections to temperatures is not fraud. Adjustments to temperature scales have periodically been made by standardizing bodies, e.g.
ITS-27 International Temperature Scale of 1927
ITS-48 International Temperature Scale of 1948
ITS-90 International Temperature Scale of 1990
IPTS-48(60) International Practical Temperature Scale of 1948; text revision of 1960
IPTS-68 International Practical Temperature Scale of 1968
consequently, for extremely rigorous reporting of temperature dependent measurements the specific temperature scale and sensor should be stated. In addition, if data are obtained from different sources which utilized different scales, then those data should be reconciled to a common basis. Over the past 100 yrs or so, those scales have shifted by roughly the same magnitude as what people are worried about with regard to climate change. From what I saw in the video, the correction seems to shift in favor of the climate change hypothesis. Back when i was working in the CO2 sequestration business i frequently mentioned that folks werent adjusting for the T scales which could've destroyed a lot of conclusions. Apparently, some folks wised up and it is supportive.
Personally, i don't have a problem with the physics and chemistry of human contributions to climate change but i'm skeptical that anything can or will be done to address it. Since i am fully confident that Nancy Pelosi will do as she says, i think taxes raised in the US to address climate change will be spent on social welfare programs that have nothing to do with climate change and on 'green energy' programs that will actually be counter-productive.
lol. I suspect it would be a trivial exercise for the enterprising and skeptical grad student to collect some rice from the local grocery, digest it an appropriate solvent and analyze it with a handy ICP-xx. I'd be shocked if this hasnt been done and consequently if there really was a problem, then it would've been published.
When i was a grad student one morning a bunch of us arrived at our bullpen style office to find it blocked off with crime scene style tape because some university environmental sort had 'discovered' that the ceiling covering material contained asbestos. So having little regard for plastic tape and having an abundance of analytical equipment and ladders, we collected our own samples and did our own analyses. We found exactly 1 asbestos fiber in the many 10s grams of samples we collected.
In contrast I lived in a Manhattan Project era house in Oak Ridge TN which was constructed of a wonderful material called 'cemestos'. The cemestos walls (and i'm assuming floors) were composed of asbestos-based cement and corn fiber. Those houses were perceived to be completely harmless unless they were bulldozed. Lots of asbestos in those houses (probably lead paint too).
I can understand why rice is tagged with the arsenic concern because of the way rice is farmed and proximity to chicken farms (with the chicken poo also being used as fertilizer). However, i think the arsenic drugs have been discontinued. Frankly, I'd be more worried about the protozoa than the arsenic.
you keep mixing analogies. There's nothing new about heavy metal poisoning.
http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/chickenarsenic.asp
If you ate mg quantities of cobalt everyday, then that would be bad for you but if you didnt ingest some cobalt, you'd die (vitamin B12). For chickens and other organisms susceptible to nasty protozoa arsenate compounds inhibit the metabolic functions of the protozoa and consequently the protozoa don't live and the chickens do. In oxidized environments arsenic is quite soluble so unless somebody is stupid enough to get their drinking water from a source close to a pile of chicken poop, the arsenate will be quickly diluted. Human ingestion of trace quantities of arsenic is harmless and inevitable (as wikipedia terms it, arsenic "is ubiquitous" in drinking water). Since arsenate is quite soluble, it also is not retained in the bodies of chickens or humans.
As for "huge quantities": the number of acres or mass of a chemical used is irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that scientists have been looking at the toxilogical effects of glyphosates for ~50 yrs.
The fact that some countries have banned GMOs does not render GMO foods harmful. Mass hysteria seems many times more dangerous to me than GMO foods. Democracy has a fatal flaw that was identified about 2500 yrs ago: giving people the right to vote does not mean that they have a clue about what they are voting for or against.
You also imply that universities are 'on the take' from Monsanto to publish favorable studies. I would argue that it is much more likely that academic researchers will feed into public hysterias because much of their funding comes from government and the government results from voters. Anti-GMO countries will certainly have no shortage of researchers seeking to produce results which support the societal perception. If those results are not found, I guarantee that it's not for lack of trying. And as for climate change: that is exactly what is going on. A researcher trying to get government funding for a hypothesis perceived to contradict climate change will have a much more difficult time obtaining that funding versus a researcher seeking to support the converse hypothesis.
so your concern is RoundUp not GMO. If you live in in the US, then it will be difficult for you to eat without consuming food engineered to be resistant to RoundUp. According to Wikipedia: "In 2015, 89% of corn, 94% of soybeans, and 89% of cotton produced in the US were genetically modified to be herbicide-tolerant." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate
I wouldnt be shocked if the numbers are similar in other countries given the patent expiry and Chinese production volumes.
According to the same wiki article, RoundUp has been on the market since 1974 so there has been plenty of opportunity to trace long term effects. As for the presence of glyphosate in groundwater, it looks to me like many of the analyses could be attributable to detergent breakdown products. But even if there were high doses of glycophosate in groundwater, i dont see how it could be a mutagen in mammals. It might not be healthy but so would swigging a solution of sodium EDTA (and EDTA is in lots of materials that humans put in their mouths).
there has been no shortage of rigorous examination of toxilogical and carcinogenic effects of glyphosates on humans. The results, as i would expect are that there isnt a relationship.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4819582/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1253709/
Conversely, there could be an indirect effect, e.g. thru shikimate-3-phosphate; however, i don't know if that's been examined. That molecule apparently does have some toxicological effects but apparently cooking is sufficient to degrade/hydrolyze the molecule.
As for yields of GMO crops: farmers are not dummies - at least in the US. Many of the existing generation of farmers have college degrees and many of those have graduate degrees. They are quite savvy in economics, land use planning, agricultural technology, risk management as well as having some knowledge of biology and biochemistry. Farmers would not use any technology that didnt offer a benefit. They arent gullible rubes that fall for the wiles of scheming ag-chemicals and seed salesman. Those that are gullible are like any other poor business practitioners: they fail.
As for RoundUp being found in air samples: that is ludicrous. Glyphosates not surprisingly are strongly sorbed onto clay surfaces so I can see it being found on airborne particulate matter; however, to say it is in air is ambiguous and misleading at a minimum. Breathing the insoluble particulate matter will be more unhealthy than the ingestion of minute traces of glyphosate.
Glyphosates have fairly high solubilities in aqueous fluids so if it werent broken down in the body, then it would be excreted. That would also imply that simply washing foods would remove any glyphosates lingering about on the surface of a fruit or vegetable. However, given the stage in plant growth where RoundUp is applied, I suspect that mother nature has already taken care of that problem.
no argument about products produced with good intentions that turn out to be harmful to humans but I don't see how changing the DNA of a corn plant could possibly lead to mutations in mammals. But I'm not a biologist so any feedback to dispel my beliefs and support the anti-GMO arguments would be informative.
i could certainly live without Bloomberg style food control and over-labeling. Lobbying seems to be a necessary evil.
What i don't get is the paranoia about GMO foods. My perception is that many anti-GMO people think that GMO foods will put them at risk of cancer. I don't see how eating a GMO food could anymore cause cancer than eating almost any other food. Almost nothing consumed today is the same as the same organisms that existed 100-1000 years ago. Almost all foods consumed by humans have been selectively bred to improve yield, flavor, heartiness, etc. so almost all foods are GMO foods already.