The EIA’s Short Term Energy Outlook

175 thoughts to “The EIA’s Short Term Energy Outlook”

1. “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.”

   ― Victor J. Stenger

2. “OPEC other liquids have been on an almost three year plateau. But the EIA says they are about to start up again, starting next month.”

   Worst Seen Over for Crude Prices as Saudis Cut Production

   By Grant Smith Oct 1, 2014 10:53 AM ET

   The worst is over for global oil prices, according to UBS AG and Barclays Plc. After the biggest quarterly drop in more than two years, Brent is set to recover as Saudi Arabia cuts output and demand climbs, they said.

   “Supply is the important thing and Saudi Arabia is in the process of rebalancing the market,” Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS in Zurich, said by e-mail yesterday. “The weakness in crude oil prices should come to an end.”

   http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-01/worst-seen-over-for-crude-prices-as-saudis-cut-production.html

   Demand weakens b/c customers are flat broke and cannot borrow.

   1. I somewhat doubt Saudi Aramco executives called this guy to tell him anything at all.

      He doesn’t know anything.

      1. In addition to the dollar runup, I’ve been beating the drum for ISIS and Kurd $40/barrel oil dragging price down.

         Reports out today that the bombing is ineffective. The ISIS guys dissolve into urban areas and can’t be hit.

         1. Some other rats are also abandoning ship:
            http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-29/sumitomo-to-probe-1-8-billion-in-shale-and-coal-losses.html

            1. Thanks for that bloomberg link.

               Then there’s this:
               http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-07/shale-boom-tested-as-sub-90-oil-threatens-u-s-drillers.html

3. Thank you for your personal views on Islam, and daring to risk PC attack. Your experience gives your POV credibility. Whenever I see some celebrity rallying up some cause, and being lionized for it, I pretty much want to puke. When Bono comes up on tv, I rush to find the remote and turn it off.

   When John Steinbeck wrote Grapes of Wrath, he did more to right injustice than almost anyone next to Martin Luther King and Ghandi. Mr. Steinbeck did it with his art and ability, and not from a soap box. Ghandi did it by example and personal courage.

   Ask Malayla what she thinks about fundamental Islam?

   In this case who gives a fuck what some Hollywood actor thinks? Because Affleck makes movies he is supposed to have an opinion that matters? In medievel days he would be the court jester or a troubadour. Would we listen to him then? Of course not. I am as moved by Benn Affleck’s comments as I am about Tommy Lee Jones urging me to phone Ameritrade.

   Thanks again.

   Paulo

   1. “Ask Malayla what she thinks about fundamental Islam? In this case who gives a fuck what some Hollywood actor thinks?”

      Two excellent questions Paulo: among your other valid points of course.

4. Ron,

   I spent six months in Muscat, Oman, and during that time I don’t recall seeing a woman; unless you count a body swathed in fabric passing by at a respectable distance. The reason for my being there was to teach Omani technicians techniques applicable to seismic surveys. This involved relatively close personal contact with twenty odd geologists and other geo-types who I could almost count as friends, by the time I left. Fine fellows, all of them.

   When I told these guys my Norwegian wife (who refuses to go near a Muslim country) was far more educated than I and that she traveled freely and dressed however she chose they weren’t particularly surprised — or shocked (at least overtly). In fact, I think most of them had visited places like Paris. Muslim laws for Muslim women I guess.

   I’ve never bothered reading the (translated) Koran but I’ve never read a Bible either, however, the experiences I’ve had have led me to almost exactly the same opinions as you. And, although I’m as far from religious as it’s possible to get, I actually do believe in the do-unto-others thing. If only we, as humans, could adopt this “Rule” but then apply it to all living things………..

5. I am with you all the way Ron.

   PC and such foolishness makes me see red.

   If you want to contemplate the depth of the rot think about this. You are not allowed to mention such unvarnished truths in liberal arts classes at universities in this country these days.

   I mostly gave up even talking to my former liberal friends because of such pc bullshit.

   Some years ago when I was still hanging around the local university (VCU ) in Richmond quite a bit I had to listen to a dumb ass bitch (TODAY I REFUSE TO BE PC FOR THE DURATION OF THIS COMMENT) who happened to be a phd candidate and was headed out to a career as either a teacher or a teacher educator if she didn’t wind up washing dishes and waiting tables forever rant on about how badly women are treated in America for a quite some time. I didn’t leave or say much because the host was a good friend of mine.

   And then she started in on our culture versus Islam and a couple of other (mostly ) eastern cultures and religions and after a few minutes I simply could not take it any more and told her she was so ignorant and dumb she wasn’t even aware of being ignorant and dumb. We have a saying around these parts ” so stupid he doesn’t even know it” concerning such people.

   So naturally she accused me of all the standard heresies and sins beloved of the left until she ran out of breath and the house full of people were all quite silenced.

   Then somebody else asked me why I thougt our culture is superior and I just looked around and said because my sister is a captain in the Army and a medical professional and ”over there” right this minute.

   And lots and lots of men speak to her with great respect and do EXACTLY AND PRESCISELY what she tells them to do. When one of those men fails to do so with proper respect and promptly he suffers a tongue lashing while standing at rigid attention the first time.

   The second time he winds up cleaning latrines.

   A third offense would if it occurred probably result in demotion or worse.

   She just sputtered and got mad as hell but she had nothing to say in reply and therefore probably still hates my guts with a passion.

   NOT as soul out of all these future educators and social workers and other future government employees said a word .

   There were probably fifty feminists on the premises.

   Not a goddamned one of them had the intellectual honesty needed to say anything in my support.They pretty much pretended I didn’t exist from that minute on.

   There are two possible explanations. Cognitive dissonance on the grand scale and the fact that a professor or two happened to be there .

   And for some reason I quit getting invitations to these gatherings.

   I WONDER why.

   My mouth has kept me in trouble all my days. LOL

   The typical PC professor will find a way to fail you for pointing out truths of the sort you have pointed out today.Truth is not much valued in the social sciences departments at universities in this country anymore.

   Incidentally in the school of education there a “B” is a passing grade. Everybody gets at least a “B”. Most of the professors at that time still posted grades on bulletin boards with coded student Id numbers known only to the individual students and I know where of I speak.The primary reason I was hanging in with this crowd was that my significant other was an arts and education major.

   Beyond that I usually took a course in education there in the grad school every few years to maintain my own professional teachers credentials as a fall back plan although I did not make a career of teaching except for seven years.

   VCU is with the exception of those departments a pretty decent university.

   1. That’s funny Mac. When I was in university, eons ago, we used to say, people who couldn’t get into any other faculty wound up in education. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of excellent teachers who make a terrific contribution to society: But, there too many total losers as well. Sometimes my kids brought home report cards with critical comments containing spelling and grammar errors you might expect (and forgive) from some guy who just stepped off a boat. And that used to REALLY piss me off.

      1. I would have taught for decades for the personal satisfaction involved if I had been able to do the job right.

         There are some very good teachers out there. I know half a dozen quite well.
         If I had ever been hired to teach the A track kids headed to selective universities I would have retired as a teacher not being a highly money motivated person.

         But in the schools where I worked doing the job right was secondary to just playing the game. Hardly any of the kids I had were prepared to actually do the work – you cannot teach basic math in a shop class to a kid who hasn’t learned it in math class over the previous eight or ten years as a general rule.You can’t teach him is one hundred eighty HOURS that responsibility and effort count if he has spent the previous fourteen or fifteen YEARS learning that he will never have to do anything for himself or anybody else, that Mommy and Daddy will do everything for him.That nobody is ever going to do anything TO HIM.

         When I was in high school myself there were four of us in our senior ag class of fifteen who got into Va Tech alone , not to mention other colleges and universities. Tech had admissions standards back in those days.

         By the time I was hired some years later in another part of the state the management philosophy was to pack all the problems possible into the ag building at the farthest corner of the campus.

         I never had a student with an academic record good enough to get into a real university-meaning one that turned away more than one or two applicants out of a hundred. The handful that went on to community colleges generally had to take remedial courses there in math and English.

         These kids were not bad human beings but getting thru to them in a large group in the time available just wasn’t possible for me.

         Any body who wonders why good automobile mechanics are so scarce today needs to contemplate the fact that the kids who are encouraged and steered into the auto mechanics programs are precisely the ones who are incapable of learning how to do the work. This is not because they are born stupid but because they have failed to learn to how to THINK over the previous eight or ten years of schooling and learned that no effort is necessary. Automobiles are complicated and if you cannot THINK well enough to master algebra and geometry you are not going to be able to think thru diagnosing problems in computer systems that control engines and brakes etc these days.

         If you fail a bunch of kids in a vocational school THEY GET RID OF YOU because THEY CANNOT GET RID OF THE KIDS until they are old enough to quit or to be sent out with a diploma not even worth using as toilet paper. There will always be another full classroom moving up from the previous grade.

         The insistence that every body graduate has resulted in the degradation of a high school diploma to virtual worthlessness and a college diploma being worth little more or maybe less that a high school diploma was worth back in the forties and fifties.

         The prisoners are not exactly in charge of the prison but the analogy is not as far fetched as it sounds.

         Homework was an impossibility and everybody expected an A just for signing up for my class.I quit three times and went back out of idealism twice.

         In the eighty eighty one school year I made less than fifteen thousand bucks with a twelve month contract.

         I quit and made seventeen thousand bucks at North Anna One in fourteen weeks working a maintenance and refueling shutdown.

         Most people have heard of a little book called The Peter Principle. Anybody who hasn’t read it should most definitely do so.

         And then there is the sequel which most people have not heard of , called The Peter Prescription.

         In a nutshell the Peter Principle says that individuals rise to their level of incompetence and stay there mucking up the works but not quite so badly as to get fired.So in the end whole organizations are staffed by semi competent people supervising semi competent people in a profession such as public education.

         (And for those who are wondering if I am a redneck – sure I am in a lot of respects.I have actually paid for tickets to a Nascar event but you would have to pay me to get me to watch a football game.I not only MURDER Bambi but I also cut her up in little pieces and EAT HER. I own and occasionally actually drive a big old four by four truck but no oftener than necessary.

         But I am not a racist nor even a typical southern bigot as evidenced by my marrying and staying happily married for a long time to my second wife who just happened to be a knock you over good looking Jewish artist from the Big Apple.

         That sort of woman does not marry a real redneck or a bigot.

         I still hire a little help around the place from time to time – local black farm hands mostly. We eat dinner – lunch to you more civilized types-together in my kitchen at lunch on those days.Don’t have a dining room.)

         The Peter Prescription says that THE WAY AND THE ONLY WAY such a profession as education can be made whole is to burn every manual and document and plan of operation and raze the very buildings and get rid of everybody and start over again FROM SCRATCH.

         Theses books are written in the vein of humor and sarcasm but there is a hell of a lot of truth buried in these two very slim little books.

         This extended rant is not an effort to discredit all teachers or schools.

         Any given county or city high school is very likely to have some excellent teachers teaching classrooms full of kids who are doing quite well in learning the subject matter.

         The only likely exception will be a city school located in a city where everything is headed to hell in a hand basket and even then there is some hope of there being a few good teachers doing a good job with well behaved and motivated kids.

         And there are generally a few excellent teachers to be found in the general and vocational track classrooms as well, teachers who in rare cases have the sort of personality that enables them to get results no matter what. But you won’t find more than one or two of these born teachers out of a couple of dozen.I was not one of them.

         A school with forty teachers and forty classrooms can very usefully be thought of as forty different schools.

         The doctors, lawyers ,engineers, business owners, and teachers themselves make sure the typical public school is run on a tracking system although this is often not acknowledged and sometimes denied outright.

         The kids who are motivated to learn and who do not disrupt the learning process wind up in the A track classrooms. Not every one of them will go to college but all the ones who want to will be able to get into a respectable if not highly selective college or university.

         You do not have to be part of the local elite to get your kid into these A track classrooms. All you have to do as a general rule is make sure he or she is well behaved and takes school seriously.

         When his or her test scores on the ever present standardized tests come out in the upper thirty percentile or so ranking he will be enrolled in the A track more or less automatically in most cases.

         If this does not happen a conference with the guidance counselors and administration will fix it every time.

         1. A little more on public school teaching.

            Since my wife had a stellar academic background from glitzy universities, she decided to spend some of her extra energy after our kids had gone in teaching science at the local school. She set her own job definitions and, because of her qualifications, got all of them- part time, hard science/math, only the best students, and extremely demanding performance- do it or drop out.

            People here probably remember the PSSC physics course cooked up at Harvard and MIT right after sputnik.

            Result- word spread that there was a new real teacher there, her classes were immediately over-subscribed, the kids worked very hard and most of them did well, and the parents were proud that their kid could even get into her class- and and even prouder if they could stay.

            A lot of them are now nationally well known- and give her credit for a big boost.

            And, funny, I hear people in this little town identify me only as her husband.

            Moral of story. First, lots of people really want to do well- they just don’t often get much encouragement to do it. And, if you really have the right stuff, you can be pretty demanding in what you demand to do.

            1. There are always some kids that want to learn, I would be the last to dispute that . ” Only the best students” says it all.

               The simple fact is that probably a third of all the kids in high school these days in this country are there because their not being there subjects their parents to getting hauled into court.

               Another good sized fraction are there because they simply have no better place to be. School is after all where the other guys and girls are to be found if you are in that age bracket.

               I usually stayed over a couple of hours and kept my shop open for any student of mine who wanted to get in some intensive practice or instruction.A very small handful took advantage of this opportunity..Usually four or five out of a eighty or so would be there a couple of times a week.

               In order to do well in school a kid generally needs to come from a home and a culture that prepares him to do well. The kids that were in Wimbi’s wife’s class were that sort of kids or I am very badly mistaken.

               Now of course you will run across the occasional ”ittle red headed juvenile delinquent” who for some reason just loves wood or fire and sparks and turns into a great cabinet maker or a certified welder. But these are the exceptions rather than the rule.

               If a boy who is other wise a poor student is passionate about something it is most likely to be automobiles, especially flashy ones that are fast and powerful.That sort of passion can occasionally result in that sort of kid working his tail off in class.

               Some of them dropped into my shop to get some instruction and practice in welding which is a very useful skill if you want to work on modified cars.

               When a kid WANTS to be in school all the other problems will wither up and blow away.

               1. I forgot to mention Wimbi’s ” do it or drop out” qualifier. That is part of saying it all..

                  We are all entitled to equal treatment under the law and that is as it should be.

                  But this old world is a Darwinian place and we are not all equally capable or equally motivated..

                  I will say though that in my estimation at least half of all of us any race or religion or ethnic group are smart enough to make competent professional people and I mean professional people in profession that require actual brains rather than merely scholarship such as engineering or biology. But the ones at the margin would have to be super hard workers in order to make it into these professions.

                  Almost everybody is smart enough to become a competent carpenter or plumber or barber or social worker- or teacher given the unfortunate state of the educational system of this country.

                  We have plenty of ”you can graduate if you can hear thunder and see lightning colleges’ ‘ that are accredited in this country and the professional examinations required to get a teachers license are the sort that require only a modest amount of scholarship and hardly any brains at all.

         2. You said it for me Mac,

            I left being a ‘bush pilot’ and carpenter and taught high school carpentry after returning to University. I started teaching at age 40. Ouch. It pretty much ruined construction and building for me as you can imagine. I moved on to other classes and came to the same conclusions as you did. Although, I did have some future engineers (who actually became engineers) state I was their best teacher because I let them work. (I let the workers work, made the slackers work and if they didn’t I got rid of them asap). I returned to school over summers and did a Masters at Royal Roads University with the idea of going into admin. Of course, not being a conformist or willing to do the lick jobs to get into the field I only applied for one job before I figured out that it would never work for me.

            Before I retired my boss asked me to take over the carpentry apprenticeship program. I had just completed one very good and satisfying semester and thought it was a good note to leave on and said no. It took 17 years. Some were very good years and some were terrible, (just like every job, I suppose).

            When I left flying I was going to either be a shop teacher or become a game warden. I should have picked game warden, to be honest. Oh well. I trapped caribou and black bears when I flew biologists and it was pretty exciting to be involved in tranqing and sampling.

            This PC crap….one thing you learn to do at meetings is sit back and keep your mouth shut. If you speak up the meetings go on forever. I think the fooforah meetings are what finally broke me. I remember leaving one and thinking “this is 1.5 hours of my life I will never get back”. I quit shortly thereafter.

            Paulo

6. There seems to be plenty of iron ore at least available for the easily foreseeable future.
   But just because there is plenty of it doesn’t mean we may not be fighting over it someday.

   http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f42aed42-4e36-11e4-adfe-00144feab7de.html#axzz3FVEB0cyG

   We are seeing more and more mergers of very large companies these days if my seat of the pants impression is correct. After a while industries can get to be so concentrated that the remaining companies are big enough to dictate prices rather than take prices.

   Such monster companies can get a nice extra profit for years simply by going light on the production pedal after they swallow up enough of the competition.

   Short supplies make for higher prices.

   It takes a long time for new competition to emerge in heavy industry.And if the existing companies have managed to tie up all the best raw materials or sources of such materials……

7. “And don’t accuse me of racism. ”

   I’ve always wonder how criticism of Islam can amount to racism. It’s like some people don’t even realize that Islam is a religion (i.e. an idea) and not a people. Any Muslim can just as soon become a Christian, or an atheist or a follower of Thor. Sure there’s some serious hurdles to this (the penalty for apostasy for example), but still. People can change their minds. Evidence of this abounds. Ayaan Hirshi Ali for example.

   It’s a strange world out there.

   1. Similar to how any criticism of Judaism (a religion) or Israel (a state) or Zionism (an ideology) automatically amounts to antisemitism / racism in some circles.

8. Islam is a nasty parasitic meme, that will use all resources available to prevent examination of its essence.

   As Lenny Bruce pointed out:
   “If you can’t say f#ck, you can’t say f#ck the government”

   The meme has control of the minds, (mainly liberals), who “have a belief in the belief in religion” as Dan Dennett has pointed out.
   Until full examination of religious ideas and statements is possible, the toxic memes will be protected.

9. Ron,I am in complete agreement with you on this Islam stuff. Have read the book “On Saudi Arabia”(recommended BTW by Westexas), It is a great read and a good insight of KSA. Happen to be more of a Libertarian and I find it interesting how much I agree with you on this subject.

   1. Ron our worthy host describes himself as card carrying liberal democrat and I insist on describing myself as a true conservative- NOT a republican.

      We disagree about a few details here and there but we have come to almost exactly the same conclusions regarding our society and where it is headed and where we think it should be headed.

      It just might be that this is so because the both of us are able to think and to recognize a fact that is staring us in the face and deal with it.

      Facts are very stubborn things. So called conservatives and so called liberals are apt to deny whole bunches of them as obvious as the noontime sun but denying them will not make them go away.

      As a general rule there are many many times as many unworkable solutions to any given problem as there are workable ones. Sometimes there is only one likely workable solution.

      I some time ago came to the conclusion that the facts indicated our health care system was so screwed up that it threatened the very prosperity and stability of the country and that the health care professionals, the insurance industry, and the lawyers would never fix the problem even if they COULD fix it.

      So- while I detest the very idea of a further expansion of government-I reluctantly support something along the lines of Ocare in principle. It is a badly flawed and worse administered program but it is a START towards a solution.

      And I recognize that only government can solve certain modern day problems. Air pollution for example is one of them.There is simply just about a zero chance that market forces would ever solve the air pollution problem.

      The EPA is less of a threat to me and mine ( and you and yours) than climate change and an elevated risk of stroke and heart attack due to foul air.

10. I’ve always wondered how many Liberals could reconcile their support for women’s rights AND Islam. Although, I have heard some Liberals condemn Islam, and compare Muslims to American Conservatives.

    Political labels aside, any rational thinking person should be concerned about where the world is heading.

    Some news today:

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/isis-graffiti-is-cropping-up-in-washington-dc.html

    A short film on Demographics:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU

    WARNING: The following link contains graphic images. Delete if necessary.

    http://www.catholic.org/news/international/middle_east/story.php?id=56339

11. My neighbors lost loved ones on 9/11. My friend picked up body parts for weeks. He is now disabled because of his exposure to the WTC. I was headed into Manhattan that day, but I left late and avoided the calamity. I lost a coworker over Lockerbie before that. After 9/11, I started reading the Koran and reading experts on Islam. I suggest further reading on the subject by the like of preeminent professor emirate at Princeton, Bernard Lewis, Andrew McCarthy (successfully prosecuted terrorists in 1st WTC bombing), Daniel Pipes, Walid Shoebat, Pam Geller, Raymond Ibrahim and most importantly: thereligionofpeace.com

    The only goal of islam is worldwide conquest. As the famous islamic scholar, Samuel Huffington said, “the borders of islam are bloody and so are the innards”

12. emeritus, not emirate, please

13. Asian futures show a big surge for the dollar, or weakness in the pound, Euro and yen.

    And oil moved with it (note all commodities are, in Singapore this moment), present price $87 and change.

    When the yardstick changes length, the measurement changes, too.

14. Well said, Ron.

    I would enjoy being able to vote for someone like you for President.

    Not that you, or any one person, can ‘solve’ anything, but listening to your talks to the public would be a breath of fresh air!

    Get a spot for OFM…maybe Speaker of the House?

    If I wasn’t so tired I could propose some other folks who posted on TOD, here, and ‘Our Finite World’, and some folks from farther afield.

    Bill Maher would have a spot somewhere…maybe Chief Justice? Elizabeth Warren has a spot on SCOTUS as well…maybe she would be Chief Justice…or A.G. Add in Stephen Colbert and John Stewart.

    And Bernie Sanders…maybe he could be Leader of the Senate?

    OK, now I woke up…back to the real World.

    Now /that/ would be reality-based government!

15. As oil prices tank, new era of abundance seen dawning

    [Excerpt from article]
    For most of the past decade, the oil market has been defined by shortage. Prior to 2008, years of underinvestment, roaring demand from Asia and fears of a looming “Peak Oil” fueled the price rally, and OPEC members have struggled to keep up with demand. Oil soared to nearly $150 a barrel by mid-2008.

    Then, the financial crisis sent prices into a tailspin, forcing OPEC to make two sharp cuts – as it turns out, its last formal measures for at least six years. With demand stunted and the U.S. shale breakthrough, the “Peak Oil” theme faded giving way to hope for abundance.

    Yet oil prices held resolutely above $100 a barrel, with each potential downturn eventually thwarted.

    In 2011, it was the breakdown in OPEC member Libya that fueled gains, cutting supplies by as much as 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd); later that year and in 2012, it was U.S. and European sanctions on Iran that choked off some of supply. Last summer it was Libya again as violence flared anew.

    The same could happen again next year. Growing tensions with Russia are putting supplies from the world’s No. 2 producer at risk. Talks with Iran over a nuclear deal could sour, prompting calls to ratchet up sanctions. Yet the odds for another rebound are growing longer.

    “The fire drill may be real this time,” says Daniel Sternoff at Medley Global Advisors.

    Now, either OPEC agrees to put a floor under prices in the short-term, or a prolonged period of lower prices starts to curb long-term investment or revive demand growth, he says.
    [End of excerpt]

16. I’ve had a good read through the Koran, The Old Testament and The Torah. The Old Testament and The Torah are straight up hate literature. I found the Koran a great deal less bloody. Having said that I’d rather live in Israel than any Islamic Republic. Although Ill probably just stay in North America and continue advocating for the saturation bombing of everything from the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. I’d nuke Mecca Jerusalem and Telaviv if I had ‘the button’. They can all burn.

17. Hells Bells, Charles Martel sent the Saracens packing way back in 732 CE in Tours, France.

    It hasn’t stopped and it is not going to stop. It is a two thousand year war so far and I don’t think it will be anything else for a while. Humans are animals, we wear clothing to not look like one, but we are.

    The Rack or the Iron Maiden? Maybe just a hanging and the horse and saddle are sold to pay the undertaker.

    The Hagia Sophia was an Eastern Orthodox Cathedral and then it wasn’t, it became an imperial mosque. It was stolen and occupied by others, not the original owners.

    For your edification:

    http://www.classicsireland.com/1996/Dauphin96.html

18. Thank You, Ron and all those who comment.
    je suis d’accord avec votre analyse de l’islam qui en accord avec le coran veut asservir la planète.

    the end of oil Is also the end of democraty and the end of school.

    the sharia Is adapted for the new world whitout natural ressources.
    This Is a very serious problem.

    apologies for the formulation.

    1. Sylvie, can you elaborate on your sentence:
       the sharia Is adapted for the new world whitout natural ressources.

       pouvez-vous en dire plus sur cette phrase énigmatique?

       what do you mean?

       1. I’d phrase it this way: The Middle East is dominated by a psychology created by many centuries of poverty. So, if the peoples of the ME become poor again, they’re psychologically ready…

19. Interesting to hear people’s personal experiences of Islam in Saudi Arabia. My experiences and friends have been in Egypt and Malaysia, “Islamic” countries that seemed to tolerate a wide interpretation of what Islam meant. It’s “fundamentalism”, with Christian as bad (nearly as bad as, I don’t know, don’t want to debate bombing abortion clinics vs Taliban and IS horrors) as Muslim, that’s the problem.

    1. Although I have not believed in the KJB or any other religious dogma since I was a rather young child I still occasionally attend a wide variety of Protestant church services as part of my cultural heritage. I will be buried in a Baptist cemetery because my parents and grand parents and dead siblings are buried there.When I intervened once in a dispute between two dangling neighbors I took them separately to the cemetery and counted off the paces between their parents graves and the other parties parents graves. A hundred feet or so. This had a powerful effect on their attitudes.

       Bombing abortion clinics is a very bad sin in the interpretation of every pastor I have ever met. ” Real ” Christians- followers of the teachings of Christ- will not bomb a clinic.

       A ” real ” follower of Islam however will find plenty of justification for taking violence to the ”enemy” in the Koran and on the airwaves and in his local press if he lives in a lot of Islamic countries.He may well have attended a school run by a real fanatic. The school systems seem to have a very large percentage of fanatics in classroom jobs in Islamic countries.

       It is not often mentioned by those who condemn clinic bombings BUT the people who do so -i f religiously motivated – are doing so because they believe they are preventing murder.When you get right down to the nitty gritty of this matter it disturbs me so deeply I have lost a hell of a lot of sleep over it on at least one occasion but the potential child in that case was not my potential child.

       I must admit having a sister who is a specialist in the care of preemies that I have a very hard time myself defining a human being as human being depending on the actual physical location thereof.

       Alive with a heart beat and moving and having brainwaves indicating consciousness in the womb and a piece of meat to be tossed ( respectfully hopefully ) into a bag to be incinerated versus a human being for moving a few inches outside the womb?

       She has kept alive a bunch of kids that were candidates for abortion even though she believes in it herself depending on the circumstances.

       I believe in it depending on the circumstances.

       But I have actually met somebody who has met a woman who survived a saline abortion.That woman as you may imagine does not believe in abortion.

       Those of us who have found the matter of some interest and investigated it know that slavery was rationalized in part in this country by simply defining the victims thereof as nonhuman.

       The Nazis defined the good people they gassed and machine gunned as non human.

       But we know and understand a lot more these days about who and what we are since the time of Darwin and the flowering of evolutionary theory.

       Religion is just another cultural tool people use to enhance their survival. And we long ago passed the point where our own survival depended more on successfully defending ourselves from and attacking other humans than it does on defending ourselves from leopards and lions.I deliberately choose leopards and lions as this choice indicates my acknowledgement that my ancestors were at some point kind of um let us say dark skinned and quite hairy before that even though I am subject personally to sunburn in just an hour of bright sun except if I take care to get a tan..

       I share over ninety eight percent of my genes with chimps. It does not bother me at all that I share all the rest except maybe one ten thousandth of one percent with Blacks and American Indians and Chinamen and Eskimos.

       In order for us to live and work in groups we must first have some glue to hold the groups together and enable us to recognize others as either ” us ” or ”them”.

       This is what religions are all about at the most basic level- us and them.GLUE.

       1. The main problem of religion is that “us” is too small, and “them” is too large.

          IOW, if everyone was the same religion, we’d be ok. Kind’ve like vegetarians, who define as human anything with face.

20. Thanks, Ron. Needed to be said.

21. What is condensate? It’s really a big deal.

    U.S. oil industry’s billion-dollar question: What is condensate?

    Available data is more misleading than helpful, probably dramatically understating condensate production.

    For example, the Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees the Eagle Ford and Permian basins that account for most condensate output, publishes monthly production data, but only counts condensate that comes from natural gas wells. Most states, including North Dakota, do not report it at all.

    The most recent data from the EIA, which also only counts natural gas lease condensate, shows production rose by nearly a fifth to around 750,000 bpd in 2012.

    1. From the article:

       Energy consultancy Bentek Energy estimates current national condensate output at around 1.45 million bpd, with only about a third coming from gas wells.

       It’s interesting to put this number in the context of the increase in global C+C production since 2005.

       As I have periodically opined, the global data seem to be consistent with a peak in actual global crude oil production (which I define as 45 or lower API gravity crude) in 2005, while global natural gas production* and associated liquids, condensate and NGL, have so far continued to increase.

       *From gas wells and casinghead gas

22. An item posted on Drudge, on a topic we have been talking about:

    Some Ebola experts worry virus may spread more easily than assumed

    http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-81607593/

23. Hi Ron:

    I spent 6 years in Saudi the same time as Ron and I didn’t live on a compound. Lived in Al Khobar and then in Riyadh. Our neighbors were Saudis and my children were born in King Abdulaziz Hospital, and in the end my Arabic was pretty good. I would not blame Islam, rather I would blame the people that have hijacked it along the way. What is going on is not what Mohammad had in mind. The contrast between Saudi and a place like Indonesia (88% Muslim) where I have probably been 15-20 times is so immense that you cannot believe they are related by religion. Same goes for Malaysia.

    1. Ed, I cannot agree. It’s the meme not the people. And the fact that the meme has a tighter grip on the people in North Africa and the Middle East than it does in Indonesia and Malaysia proves the point. Just because religion has a tighter grip on different people, in different places and in different ages, only means that circumstances have allowed some people to loosen the grip of dogma while others have not been so fortunate.

       It was the same in the days when the Christian meme ruled the world. It was called “The Dark Ages” and for a very good reason. Whenever religion rises to rule as law then all kinds of atrocities can be committed and justified as being dictated by God.

       I overheard two Baptist friends of mind arguing over whether women should always obey and submit to the will of their husband and be silent in church. One justified it by saying: “Hey, it’s in the Bible and I don’t apologize for it.”

       Almost any atrocity can be justified by holy writ.

       1. “I overheard two Baptist friends of mind arguing over whether women should always obey and submit to the will of their husband and be silent in church.”

          When I read this out loud to my wife she said: “Obviously he’s just making a joke Doug. Either that his Baptist friends live in another century, the 17th Century.”

          1. Obviously your wife is not familiar with a lot of Baptists or Pentecostals in the South. When I was growing up and in those days actually went to church, I heard similar sentiments preached from the pulpit. Nowadays it is a minority opinion among both schisms, but it is still there. In fact a lot of Pentecostals churches actually have women ministers.

             There are as many different interpretations of the Bible as there are churches scattered over the countryside. And that reminds me of a passage I read many years ago. It was so “on the money” that I saved it among my favorite quotations:

             Doing theology is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in which the verses of Scripture are the pieces: the finished picture is prescribed by each denomination, with a certain latitude allowed. What makes the game so pointless is that you do not have to use all the pieces, and that pieces which do not fit may be reshaped after pronouncing the words “this means.”
             Walter Kaufmann:
             Critique of Religion and Philosophy.

             1. That’s good, I’ll remember that. Since no one in my family has ever gone to a Church (apart from the odd wedding or funeral) we’ve never heard ANY biblical interpretations but I like that jigsaw puzzle metaphor which might apply to a few other arguments as well. Actually, when I was in my teens, there were a few guys who went to Church, rarely, but I think that was just to meet girls.

             2. I live in one of the deepest and darkest corners of the Bible Belt and can say with confidence that the ” obey thy husband ” and keep your female mouth shut is effectively dead.

                I have not heard it mentioned from a pulpit in many years. Nor do Baptist preachers who expect to have congregations large enough to support them say anything these days about miniskirts because if there are any young women in the church attractive enough to want to wear one they will come to church wearing it or just not come at all.

                Preachers understand the rules of survival in their profession as well as anybody else.

                This is not to say a few older ministers running churches with a handful of older worshipers- essentially empty churches that will be shutting down soon – don’t still preach such doctrines.

                These doctrines may be more common in the deeper south than around here. My part of the country is fast moving culturally into the twenty first century while skipping over some of the twentieth the same way some countries are skipping the land lines and going directly to cell phones.

                The real thing that held the churches together and kept them alive was that they were the organizations that made the community work. You met your customers there if you were a tradesman and if you got burned out the church made sure you got enough food and clothing and furniture to get established again and the church sent people around to cook and clean for you if you were bedridden. It paid emergency doctor bills.
                If you were without food your neighbors provided some due to being church going people following church doctrines.

                The welfare state is has taken over most of these community functions these days and people are able to travel with cars to jobs farther away and the churches have lost most of their functions.

       2. ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.’
          –Voltaire

          Almost any atrocity can be justified by holy writ.

       3. Ron

          I too had the same reaction as you to this video. I am not sure there is a solution. There will be no peace between secular democracy and islam, I see only war in the future and civil war eventually in the western countries that have a high enough percentage of muslims.

          “Good people normally do good and bad people normally do bad, however if you want good people to do bad things it takes religion.” I am not sure who said this but it is so true.

          1. Oil, no peace. No oil, no peace.

             Communists have an equal or even better record of killing millions of humans for no good reason other than insane politics, so the meme carries into the secular, non-religious doctrinaire.

             Communists are religious fanatics with no god to worship. Apostasy is Verboten in their world too. The chimera constructed by those idiots is hard to beat.

             The Fugs wrote a song about all of this madness, Kill for Peace.

             1. Russia and the USSR, and China were deeply religious countries, just emerging from a feudal past.

                Atheist countries are by far the most peaceful:
                http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/06/atheist-nations-are-more-peaceful.html

          2. Something along this line was said by Weinberg the American theoretical physicist/Nobel laureate in Physics. Steven Weinberg , did major work on the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between particles. My wife, a mathematical physicist, came up with this off the top of her head but added that your quote didn’t sound quite right. If you care it would be pretty easy to look up.

             1. Couldn’t resist; I looked it up: “‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” Steven Weinberg

                1. thanks for looking that up, I know Hitchens like to repeat that quote.

    2. “What is going on is not what Mohammad had in mind.”

       Why the hell should it matter today what some charlatan “had in mind” 1300 years ago?

    3. Here’s what just one ‘grooming gang’ of Pakistanis did in England:
       http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/9299602/rotten-borough/

       This is just one group!!! There are others in England alone.

       Sexual slavery is an absolutely abhorrent crime, and Islamic countries are rife with it.

    4. Mohammad attacked and killed his neighbors, and converted them at the point of the sword with the admonition to convert or die. It’s not correct to say “What is going on is not what Mohammad had in mind.” It’s exactly what Mohammad did. Why would people expect anything different when his is the worst example and is a template for future behavior?

       So it’s not surprising that 20 Muslim countries have the death penalty for apostasy. That a similar number will arrest or execute atheists. That far more have Sharia law, and a very large majority of Muslims want sharia law. That a large number have blasphemy laws, or thought crime laws.
       And yes, I am equally passionate against Christian blasphemy laws.

24. Fairly balanced piece over at Bloomberg this morning.

    Shale Boom Tested as Sub-$90 Oil Threatens U.S. Drillers

    As can be expected, some of the comments are priceless! Got my 2c in.

    Alan from the islands

25. I think those fez wearing wahabi shriners need to be investigated! Granted those tiny cars can’t hold a lot of explosives.

26. Some “We’re about to become major exporters” propaganda in the NYTimes.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/business/energy-environment/reversing-the-flow-of-oil-.html

    Doesn’t the old gray lady care about facts anymore?

    1. Speaking of…. Notice the footer in this image…

       Not to mention that the two headlines directly above the footer might be diametrically opposed amid the juxtaposition of fracking… One is history, note, the Stone Age; and the other, the future, apparently soon to be… The Stone Age…

       1. Here it is

          

27. Iran backs down on OPEC sending Brent oil price tumbling

    Iran’s oil minister says OPEC unlikely to meet until the end of November, sending crude prices into free-fall. Brent oil threatened to crash through the critical $90 per barrel level on Wednesday after Iran’s oil minister signaled there would be no emergency cut in production from the Middle East’s largest producers before the end of November.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/11149412/Iran-backs-down-on-Opec-sending-Brent-oil-price-tumbling.html

    1. There has never been a time, ever, that Iran didn’t advocate higher prices, so this is small potatoes. The mtg in Nov is what matters. ISIS may run out of above ground storage to sell by then.

       1. Watcher,

          Easy man, I’m just passing along some news: Brent moving toward $90 is big news to the guys and gals (I’ve a Petroleum Engineer niece sitting on an oil derrick right now) pumping oil out of the North Sea. This is NOT conducive to profitably.

          1. Nod. Well, that meeting upcoming is a big deal — if prices continue to fall. We’ll get a look at how much power OPEC still has and what their motivations are.

             The shale realities I think manifest themselves in the response coefficients. Output response speed to price is orders of magnitude higher than in the past. Crash price and output crashes immediately. In the past, in a world of pipelines on conventional wells, oil would still flow. Crash the price below truck driver salaries and that’s the end for truck haulage of oil and water. Particularly for wells drilled 2 or 3 yrs ago; not so much for wells 4 months old and still flowing 300 bpd. Crash the price 4 months in duration and you lose those, too.

             What has my particular attention is the response curve is going to be unidirectional. Crash price for 4 months and the truckers have to go find work.

             The contracts get broken. The banks foreclose. The high yield bonds issued default and wait a minute, I wonder how may swaps have been written on those bonds. THAT could be a bigger deal than anyone knows.

             1. Totally in agreement. Conventional oil flow has a huge built in buffer: profits/losses averaged across decades.

             2. Unidirectional meaning if you get 6 mos of $70 oil, the industry is destroyed. If price goes back to $100, it will take a year to re-achieve output growth, let alone the 1 mbpd levels.

                It would take that long to find buyers for bonds (lenders), who will remember what just happened. It will take that long to track down the truckers who could not find work and are willing to come back — at a lower salary than before because the oil isn’t flowing yet.

                The bust is a lot faster happening than a re-boom can be.

                1. Really interesting. Will the KSA play ‘let the price drop and see who’s still standing’ game?, can they carry the rest of OPEC with them? Sheeeeeit this is interesting. What then?, an LTO bust followed but a sharp price rebound, then probs a crash on the inevitable panic? A new volatility…?

                   Or is it that only longer term expensive projects get ditched, Arctic, Ultra Deep etc, but somehow [more debt] LTO crawls on? So the supply curve hits a wall a couple of years down the line; secular price hikes, economy crash, price bombs, rinse and repeat?

                   One thing looks likely; drama returning to oil price.

                2. Hi Patrick

                   Quite a scenarios list: What’s your guess? Mine would be: some combination of the above with price volatility and chaos given the more probable outcome. However, I’m almost never right.

                   And then, as my long ago logic class teacher might have added: “Never assume that you’ve thought of all the possibilities.” That addendum tends to piss people off.

                   Finally, eons ago you remarked that you were expecting a change in NZ government in reference to use of your natural gas resources. How did that play out?

                3. Hi Doug, not sure I would have said I was ‘expecting’ a change of gov rather than hoping for one. Hopes well dashed. NG not a big issue here, fantascist ‘drill baby drill’ gov retuned on a BAU ticket. Foreign companies still here and turning up dry holes [so far] lured on give-away rights deals that are not good for the nation. That Anadarko, Statoil etc are still bothering a sure sign that the bottom of the barrel is being well and truly scraped.
                   Petrobras retreated to own probs at home licking wounds…

                   Predictions? No longer young enough to make them except the fairly safe non-prediction of expecting more volatility. But even that is a little bold given how extraordinarily flat oil price has been for so long. Stuck you could almost say. Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

                   But now that price has broken down [I was calling up] it seems likely it has lost this sideways habit and will remember about up too before long. As forward investment dives [it is?] and especially if current high cost prod starts to fail…

                   fascinating.

             3. A low price will destroy shale oil industry and high cost projects will be cancelled, delayed or postponed. Then the low price should also let the demand increase and prices will go up to very high levels.
                What is the capacity of the US to increase demand (stabilize prices to ~100$) through the increase of SPR? How much time?
                This would avoid a crash of shale oil companies and associated bank, workers…

                1. SPR fillage is a channel of government intervention not often mentioned.

                   I think the Fed buying Euros and Pounds to stop their decline is the more likely path. Make the dollar fall, the “price” of oil rises.

                2. They should fill the SPR – buy low, sell high.

28. Totally off-topic and I won’t be hurt or surprised if this is immediately deleted but since there are a few astronomy buffs here, including Ron, here goes. I apologize if doing this pisses anyone off, especially Ron.

    Impossibly bright dead star: X-ray source in the Cigar Galaxy is the first ultra-luminous pulsar ever detected

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141008133407.htm

    Astronomers working with NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) have found a pulsating dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. The object, previously thought to be a black hole because it is so powerful, is in fact a pulsar — the incredibly dense rotating remains of a star.

    1. Doug, why on earth do you think posting this would piss anyone off? And why on earth would I delete it? This is just a pulsar, the most powerful one ever found, but many have been found. They are commonly called “millisecond pulsars” because they spin, therefore pulse, many times a second.

       They are neutron stars, the remnants of a supernova. When a really massive star explodes into a supernova the remnants collapse into a neutron star just a few miles across. The explosion, and the gravity is so great, that what part of the star that don’t get blown away collapses, the atoms themselves collapse. The electrons are driven into the protons leaving only neutrons. Such neutron stars have Incomprehensible Density with gravity 100 billion times that of the earth.

       The theory is that a powerful magnetic beam shoots out from each pole. It spins is tilted on its axes and as it spins the beam sweeps across the heavens. And if we, the earth, happens to be in the path of that beam we get a pulse every time is sweeps by. There is such a neutron star, a pulsar, at the center of the Crab Nebula. It pulses 30 times a second.

       However this one is very interesting. It is so big it should be a black hole, but it is not. It is a real poser.

       1. Thanks for the vote of confidence. Astrophysics is of special interest to me: In fact, I was sitting in a EE class in the ’60s when our prof rushed in, late, and announced the discovery (confirmation) of pulsars; its all we talked about for the next few classes. I wanted to do my Master’s thesis on some aspect of them but was talked into Alfvén Wave Theory (as in Northern and Southern Lights) instead. Since my wife to be was the one teaching the wave theory course I guess it turned out OK, well better than OK. But, I’ve always followed developments in the understand of pulsars: hence my post.

          1. Doug, sorry I did not realize you were an expert on the subject, else I would have not been so long winded on the subject.

             1. I’m definitely not an expert but after kids/grand-kids and sometimes music (classical) some aspect of astrophysics is a popular conversation topic around our table. That way things remain interesting to me as my wife tends to get carried away with weird/esoteric physics, stuff I should be able to follow, perhaps, but almost never can.

                The main problem(s) to truly understanding pulsars is the interplay between their angular momentum, gravity and the electromagnetic fields. This in analogous to the three body problem: i.e., the math is outstandingly difficult and has never been worked out even in an approximate sense: to my knowledge. Understanding their particle “jets” might go a long way to unraveling several key mysteries. That hasn’t happened yet.

                1. I’m no expert either, and your spouse is obviously a far better source, but I have an inkling that the issue with modeling Pulsars has to do with so much mass (Special Relativity) doing its dance in such a small space (Quantum Mechanics).

                   It is not so much the interplay of various physical factors – angular momentum, gravity, EM fields – but the incompatibility of our mathematics models of the physics of the small (QM) with the physics of the large (SR/GR).

                   Please correct me if I am wrong here, as I am genuinely curious.

                   I’ve thought about this incessantly for many years, and it seems that the incompatability stems from the issue of time.

                   EM waves do not experience time; they “leave” an atom at the same moment they interact with whatever object they encounter. If it takes 5 billion years in a macro (Special Relativity) level, then it took literally 0 time on a micro (Quantum Mechanics) level.

                   Since the basis of Calculus is derivatives and integrals based on time (distance ->speed->acceleration) the models are fundamentally incompatible, and give gibberish answers.

                   A Theory of Everything would bring the conflict between QM and GR/SR into resolution by solving the issue of time – it exists for macro objects, but not for atomic objects. Light that is “10 billion years old” is actually infinitely young until it interacts with an object.

                   In this way EM waves don’t exist in time. Light from a star 5 billion light years away is only 5 billion years relative to the mathematical model of Relativity Physics. According to Quantum Mechanics it is 0 years old; thus the origin of our measurements of the wave/particle duality of EM waves/photons.

                   Measure an EM wave before (or after!) it passes through a double slit and it gives a particle diffraction pattern of two lines – it is a solid object in space and time (Relativity); don’t measure an EM wave and it gives a wave diffraction pattern of many lines (Quantum Mechanics).

                   This is the most telling part. If the measuring device is placed AFTER the double slit the wave/particle knows before it passes through if it will be measured in the future. Before the measuring device measures the EM wave/photon already knew. This seems impossible from a macro perspective, but on the quantum level the EM wave propagates at the speed of light and therefore the measurement comes at the same moment as the slit since time does not exist. For photons there is no “distance in between”; photons are created and ended in the same instant even if that instant is 5 billion years apart in macro “distance”.

                   A Theory of Everything requires a removal of the asymptote that separates “massless” energy conduits (c) from
                   massive” energy conduits (<c). Ultimately, the underlying mathematical model that emerges will revolutionize our conception of space and time just as Relativity did.

                   My whimsical guess is that the "speed of light" is an artifact of the rate of expansion of the universe. The two are one and the same, but appear separate, just as time and space seemed separate according to Newtonian Physics.

                   Light, on the most absolute level, has no speed – photons are created the INSTANT they are destroyed, even if it had to travel 5 billion light years from a supernova to your eye. To that photon it left the atom that created it in that supernova at the EXACT SAME INSTANT that it hit an atom in your eye creating a response on your retina.

                2. Brian,

                   You have touched on some interesting points but I’m not going to answer them in detail because that’s a process which could go on forever. There are relativistic effects going on in pulsars but they (comparatively) minor; we’re not in the realm of Black Holes you know. And, at one level, pulsars are VERY well understood. A pulsar is simply a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation that is similar to a natural radio emission — a dense dying star that rotates. Currently Chebyshev polynomials are often used to formulate a generic analysis of pulsar spin. I prefer this approach because it seems to handle the high magnetic fields best; maybe not so well in the case of magnatars (extreme magnetic fields). The Chebyshev method also facilitates analytic and numeric evaluation of Fourier transforms, something you probably already know.

                   Over the last 40 years I have acquired a library of papers on pulsars, magnatars, etc. Most are “math heavy” but if you’re really interested I’d be willing to get copies of the some classics to you; perhaps you’re using the internet would be more effective; and I’ve no idea what level you would choose to pursue this. My wife knows how to incorporate advanced math into documents, obviously, but it’s certainly not reasonable to use Ron’s Blog for that.

       2. There was also an “Alien Warfare” theory…

          JERRY FISHMAN (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center): The early data for gamma ray bursts were so sketchy. And gamma ray bursts can be produced by any one of a variety of things so that almost anything goes and you get all kinds of crazy ideas.

          The National Enquirer thought that maybe we were seeing alien civilizations warring with each other and throwing nuclear explosions, nuclear bombs at each other. We really couldn’t refute that. Nobody could refute that. They even got some respectable scientist to say, “Well, yeah, I guess that’s a possibility.”

          RAY KLEBESADEL: I complained that that wasn’t at all what I said, but nevertheless, it got published in just the form he read to me.

          1. “We really couldn’t refute that.”

             What the fuck are you talking about? Assuming it was possible to toss nuclear weapons across billions of light years across the universe, which it isn’t: What would be the reason for doing so? Are you suggesting civilization A tossed a weapon X billion light years, misses, than civilization B sends on back? Christ, and I thought I deserved to be deleted. “Alien Warfare” theory my ass. Do you know what the word theory means? And respectable scientist are you referring to?

             1. I’m not really suggesting anything. It was the National Enquirer – the only “journalists” to cover an early conference on the subject. But just for clarification, I suspect THEY were suggesting something like that.

                Having studied the subject, I assumed you would have known about this. I only brought it up, because I thought it was rather amusing.

                The transcript quoted was from the program in the link below.

                http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2901_gamma.html

                1. Sorry John, you were being sarcastic by pointing out this stupid quotation by some idiot. But it did not come across like that. We thought you were serious.

                   Again, sorry about that.

                2. Ditto on that.

                3. No worries. I must say though that you all do post on some interesting subject matter!

                   With regards to potential alien civilizations, I’ve always liked Carl Sagan’s quote, when questioned about UFOs being from outer space. He said:

                   “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

                4. “Extraordinary claims warrant extraordinary evidence”

                   I’m being pedantic because it means the same thing, but that is the true quote.

                   Carl Sagan is one of my idols, so I feel obliged to correct the quote for accuracy.

                   Not putting you down as your quote is basically correct. Now excuse me as I lift my pinky as I sip some hot tea.

                5. I think perhaps you are mistaken. Or perhaps “the old man in the cave” is mistaken.

                   At any rate, I found this wonderful piece of info looking it up:

                   Isaac Asimov described Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own. The other, he claimed, was the computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky

                   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

                6. An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.
                   — Marcello Truzzi, On the Extraordinary: An Attempt at Clarification, Zetetic Scholar, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 11, 1978

                   “We are so far from knowing all the agents of nature and their diverse modes of action that it would not be philosophical to deny phenomena solely because they are inexplicable in the actual state of our knowledge. But we ought to examine them with an attention all the more scrupulous as it appears more difficult to admit them. Laplace, Pierre Simon (1814). Essai philosophique sur les probabilités. p. 50.

                   This is restated in Theodore Flournoy’s work From India to the Planet Mars as the Principle of Laplace or, “The weight of the evidence should be proportioned to the strangeness of the facts.”[92]
                   Most often repeated as “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”

          2. I happened to work at Marshall Space Flight Center for the last 17 years of my working life. I was, before I retired in 2004, very familiar with the gamma ray burst research conducted there. I wasn’t involved in the research, I just worked on their computers. One of the first things they found out about them was they were not concentrated along the galactic plane. They were coming from every direction in the sky. That meant they were extra-galactic. So they were not just billions of light years apart but the burst were some of the most powerful explosions in the universe,far more powerful that a supernova.

             And Doug is right, no one even remotely connected to the program would have been so stupid as to suggest that they might be alien warfare explosions.

             Also pulsars and gamma ray burst are two different things. They are not even remotely connected. About one gamma ray burst is picked up day.

    2. Probably just has a much higher mass feed rate and impact velocity from it’s binary partner than the “normal” pulsar.

       1. This will be my first and only comment about the nature of the universe at the deepest levels.

          While a mere handful of us as a species know a whole lot, what that handful actually knows is going to turn out to be no more than a drop in the bucket of whatever actually IS.

          I am reminded of the quotation about a scholar in some dark corner of India exhibiting his knowledge of California which extended to the fact that California is part of the United States.

          I strongly suspect that as that handful of people who know a little gradually scrape thru another layer of the onion they will just find another layer time after time.Eventually they are going to reach layers which cannot be penetrated with the resources available- their own minds and money for experiments.

          Our minds are so constituted that we can only know things in terms of other things.

          Up means nothing except as opposed to down with the supporting concept of flat or level.We eventually get to the point we have to rely on unexplained assumptions.

          Our brains – some of us have very good ones- are remarkably flexible and powerful but there is no evidence that I am aware of indicating we are capable of solving ANY problem.

          My humble opinion is that the ultimate nature of nature is too deep for our comprehension.

          Ya can’t overhaul a big diesel engine with a screwdriver and a pair of vise grip pliers.

          (This comment may be repeated once in a long while.)

          1. Much of astronomy and cosmology is based on a string of assumptions. Oftentimes a whole branching set of ideas comes from one basic assumption.
             If that assumption is wrong, the whole area of “knowledge” falls apart.
             The idea that the universe is differentially expanding is simply based on red shift at vast distances. Who knows what effects the frequency (energy) of light over that much time and space.
             I was finally vindicated when a high level astrophysicist admitted that dark matter and dark energy have no real scientific basis. They are merely conjectures to explain certain observations.
             It’s nice to try and explain the universe, but since you can’t get there from here it will not be supported by direct observation and evidence.

             1. Allan H,

                You stated that exquisitely. Concise, yet vastly informative.

                I very much agree that our data is correct – specifically in terms of red shift, but also in most scientific pursuits in raw chemistry and physics – but the way in which we interpret that data is based on ideas and assumptions that attempt to explain it.

                This is exactly why we can have a probe travel for 9 months from Earth to Mars and predict with absolute certainty a several hundred foot area where it will land. The amount of knowledge regarding mass, the interplay of gravitational influence from various sources, speed, drag, solar winds, etc. that is needed to calculate that trip to such extreme precision is remarkable.

                We’re able to do this because our mathematical models accurately predict the data to great numbers of significant digits, but this is a completely separate issue from how it is we interpret what this MEANS in terms of the nature of the universe.

                I now realize I basically just restated what you did, but in a much more long winded fashion. I look forward to more posts by you my friend!

          2. My humble opinion is that the ultimate nature of nature is too deep for our comprehension.

             That has been my opinion for many years now.

             1. How will we know?

                If there’s evidence that there’s phenomena that we don’t understand, then there’s information that we can use to figure it out. If there’s something beyond our understanding, but we have no information about it, we’ll never know…

          3. Old Farmer Mac,

             From time to time I’ll do a thought experiment where I think about how everything I see is a complete fabrication by my biology.

             Sure, the desk I’m looking at certainly exists, but not in the way that I perceive it.

             The atoms in any object are releasing EM waves in vastly more wavelengths than my rods and cones are capable of receiving. Even in the very narrow visible range from 0.000004 meters to 0.0000075 meters that I can perceive there is no such thing as brown, blue, orange, or red. These colors are just a biological invention for imparting contrast between common objects in our environment that maximize our ability to perceive threats and pleasantries.

             Red is not common in natural environments, which usually are predominantly emitting wavelengths in the green to blue range. This is why red is often a sign of danger – poisonous thing! Don’t mess with me! – or of when many fruits are ready for consumption – good thing! Eat me and spread my seeds!. Since red wavelengths are rare organisms evolved to use it as a display that can be seen from great distance, and the other organisms that interact with it evolved for that wavelength to stick out like a sore thumb.

             None of that, however, is an accurate reflection of reality outside of our biological perceptions.

             I find this stuff utterly fascinating, so merely thought I’d expand on your excellent point.

29. Expensive oil:

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-08/who-needs-keystone-with-oil-prices-like-these-.html

    1. They should take that trillion dollars earmarked for expensive oil projects and put most of it into solar energy projects, energy storage projects, and upgrading the grid system. Need to feed all those electric cars that will be running around by 2025. The sun is a lot more reliable and cheaper than new oil discoveries.

       1. Allan. Good luck with that topic. Every time I remark on the obvious- that we must get off carbon asap and get on to the one thing that we will always have plenty of- solar, people say. ” Ah yes, solar. The sun. That’s a star. Now about stars—–“. And the rest is– about stars.

          I like astronomy as much as the next guy, but right here and right now, we are madly stoking the coke cooking the one planet we happen to have. When we get done with that, there won’t be anybody left around to be having fun thinking about pulsars, etcetcetc.

       2. Solar City just started an interesting new loan program:

          http://www.forbes.com/sites/uciliawang/2014/10/08/solarcity-offers-its-first-home-solar-loan/

       3. On electric cars.

          There’s an interesting new racing series. Don’t know if you folks have seen this yet.

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK8_63_hlhY

          Also, the traditional F1 series now use Hybrid motors.

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96cHD7H1ZEw

          1. And it’s not just electric either, the new rotary engine is highly efficient and has a great power to weight ration. Combine this as a hydraulic hybrid or in an electric hybrid and very little liquid fuel would be used much of the time. Imagine having a 20 to 40 pound motor running your car! Or a 40 to 80 pound motor running that pick-up truck at 40 mpg or better.
             http://www.gizmag.com/liquidpistol-rotary/24623/

             http://www.gizmag.com/liquidpistol-rotary/24623/

             1. I now modify my little whine about nobody wants to discuss getting all the way off ff’s and go for solar power here and now-instead they go off to the stars.

                Mod–Or, IC engine improvements that just gobble somewhat less ff’s so they fry our nice little planet just a little slower.

                BTW. I have been around IC engines all my life, and have seen rotary miracle machines come and go and come and go. Lots of them have claimed to get that head and tail of the PV diagram, and when they try, they find the unintended consequence is enough to eat all the hoped for gain and more.

                Like, when I was a young guy working at the flight propulsion lab in Cleveland, designing isentropic nozzles, I noticed that the added length increased the efficiency allright, but added more mass than enough to cancel the gain. So I started to chop off the nozzle, and got it a lot shorter before starting to come out behind.

                Yea, puns.

                1. I’m okay with the here and now concept:

                   provided . . . .

                   you show me an all electric 400+ horsepower John Deere tractor priced exactly the same as the current variety with exactly the same duration of operation in the fuel tank.

                   And I’ll even be lenient. You can have not just electric models presently on the market to show me, but I’ll also allow any models planned for release in say, 3 months.

                   If you can’t do that, then you have no leg to stand on.

                2. That doesn’t make sense. Combine-type operation is high power, long duration and far from the grid, so it’s only second to aviation for difficulty of electrification. But, that accounts for a very small percentage of fuel consumption. If it never makes sense to electrify, it won’t matter a hill of beans.

                   Local travel – passenger and freight – is 80% of transportation fuel consumption. Electrifying that will take care of most of the problem.

                3. Watcher I cry bullshit.You know better.

                   Or maybe you are just being sarcastic?

                   We all know that farm tractors must use all or most of their available horsepower most or all of the time and that they must run for hours and hours on end and around the clock sometimes at certain times of the year. I myself have pointed out these facts on numerous occasions here and elsewhere.

                   But tractors taken all together consume only a very small fraction of al l the gasoline and diesel fuel we use in this country or in the world for that matter.

                   But automobiles and light trucks on the other hand generally are used no more than a couple of hours a day- even two hours use day in and day out adds up to at least twenty thousand miles per year even in stop and go city driving which is more than most people drive annually.

                   And a two hundred horsepower car can and does go down a nice smooth highway at typical cruising speeds using only a very minor fraction of that 200 horsepower.

                   Battery electric cars work right now although the batteries are still painfully expensive to be sure.

                   I live well out of town but nevertheless at least four out of every five people I know who commute to work could make their commute and stop for shopping on the way with plenty of mileage to spare driving a Leaf right TODAY.

                   Peak oil in theory at least is a solvable problem. We aren’t going to run out of oil overnight. If we quit wasting so much we will have enough to last for a good long while yet.

                   And during that while we can change a lot of things about the way we live.

                   AND for what it is worth, while I believe that biofuels are the highroad to ecological and economic hell if we try to maintain current day business as usual raising corn and sugar cane etc we COULD produce enough biofuels easily enough to run as much farm machinery as we need to continue to eat well.

                   The possibility of running short on gas worries me more in terms of farming. The customary feedstock for manufacturing nitrate fertilizers is natural gas although nitrates can be manufactured more or less from scratch with electricity and water.

                   Water is cheap since it falls free out of the sky but electricity is hard to come by in huge quantities.

                   We may one day have enough solar and wind to manufacture nitrates with unneeded electricity production which would be in effect a way of storing wind and solar power – as this would free up gas to use at times of peak demand.

                4. Watcher, you usually make sense, one way or another, but when I say something about electric vehicles, every time. EVERY time, you go into a warp like that, Geez!

                   BTW, wife just got back from 80 mile trip to the city to get the Leaf’s one year inspection. They charged it up while she went shopping, she came back. Everybody happy.

                   Maybe you oughta go have a chat with Elon Musk, my kinda guy.

                5. “I now modify my little whine about nobody wants to discuss getting **all the way off ff’s and go for solar power here and now**”

                   So now it’s not all the way, apparently.

                6. Sure, just not right this second. 80% is good enough for the next 20 years.

                7. We are pretty close to “all the way” solar.

                   12 KW of PV on the roof, 2 electric cars (Leaf and Volt, and buy very little gas for the Volt, maybe 1 gallon a month), and around zero net energy with our solar.

                   (and it’s a win-win to use the grid as battery: peak use in Texas is when solar does best, while wind is best at night, so the utility LOVES to take solar from us in the afternoon and give back wind power at night.)

                8. How about an all electric twin disc fertilizer spreader?

                   http://www.farmshow.com/view_articles.php?a_id=139

                9. Now that the new tractor is ready for market, Hahn [, of John Deere,] expects to see new equipment emerge. “We will see the number of uses grow,” he says. “You can drive anything with electricity that you can drive with hydraulics or pto power.“

                10. Why did you post that. It’s a 200 hp engine. The electrics are just for PTO.

                11. The electric transition will be gradual. Remember:

                    The perfect is the enemy of the good.

                12. OK team, we know our job, we gotta answer the challenge of the evil empire or the whole civilization is doomed to enslavement- with no leg to stand on.

                    So, right at the moment, Sy Kim’s idea is leading candidate- the tractor has a closed cycle gas turbine, which for safety’s sake is targeted at 800hp, easy to do with high pressure, high speed, and eats only a fraction of the wheat chaff it normally tosses out on the ground.
                    chaff being of course, just gritty solar energy in temporary storage.

                    The heat transfer rate from the hellish hot combustion gases is plenty high, all we gotta do is pay some of that power to blast it past the heat exchanger.

                    The whole package looks pretty good, and even that banshee scream is ok, given the super-tractor impression it makes on everybody within half a mile.

                    But, as always, we have our trusty psuedo-enemy team, whose role is to think up better ideas, or even ideas that look better superficially, which are hurled with the appropriate insults and insinuations on the design team so as to keep their juices boiling.

                    Now, go for it, you gotta month.

                13. Haaahahh. I’m not too bright today. Great post!

                14. That’s a skillful answer to a difficult question

                15. Thanks for your thoughts. It’s helped me a lot.

30. Pulsars.

    You were discussing that , and asked….. and I do believe…

    So once again.

    As stated earlier, one of the two most obvious choices for an electromagnetic beacon would be a pulsing signal with a fixed repetition rate. A fixed pulse rate would optimize a receiving civilization’s possibility of finding the beacon through the use of adaptive techniques requiring minimal a priori knowledge or assumptions. In situations with moderate signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), the signal would be noticable even without advanced receiving techniques. In these cases, the fixed repetition rate would serve to call attention to the pulse sequence and possibly even suggest artificiality.

    But then again, I do believe that Dr. Laviolette is closer to the truth than mainstream scientists.

    The Sphinx Stargate.

    I asked you – RON P. – The question many posts ago – if you thought Pulsars held a significance for a “others peoples”. You said “NO”.

    I respect your opinion.

    I believe you are wrong.

    1. Just like, I don’t believe Charles White is lying.

       And it is too incredible for most to believe.

       Kinda like peak oil – for us Human Beings on Planet Earth.

    2. I was just over on an extraterrestrial life blog and they were talking about proppant mass and particle size. Controversial stuff.

    3. Tim, right in the center the Crab Nebula is a pulsar, a 30 millisecond pulsar. This is one of the few pulsars that can be seen with an optical telescope. Have a look:

       The Crab Nebula Pulsar

       Now you must explain how these aliens can not only send out a constant millisecond pulse so strong that it can reach our solar system, but also flash a very powerful light 30 times a second. Well actually 60 times a second because it has one strong pulse and one weaker one. And all this from right in the middle of the remnants a star that exploded about a thousand years ago.

       A light that can be seen on earth! Now that is one hell of a bright light, as bright as a spinning star, because that’s exactly what it is.

       And one more thing. There are pulsars in almost every direction, though only a very few can be seen with optical telescopes. Most of the are along the galactic plane of course. But don’t you find it strange that all these aliens would choose the exact same manner to make their presents known to the rest of the galaxy?

       1. Now you must explain…

          Quite a demand Ron, considering that, in my belief I am an Alien engineered product that should be recalled. Mostly because of aging problems related to my lower body.

          Maybe you’d like to reason with Stanton Friedman – OR not…

          From Stanton Friedman:

          UFOS: CHALLENGE TO SETI SPECIALISTS

          (Excerpt):

          4. Why is it that SS take every opportunity to attack the notion of alien visitations without any reference to the many large scale scientific studies? They act as though the tabloids are the only possible sources of UFO data. There are at least six large scale scientific studies 6-11, more than ten PhD Theses, and many dozens of published professional papers by professional scientists. These are all almost always ignored. There are, for example, thirteen anti-UFO books and dozens of pro-SETI books that don’t even mention the largest scientific study done for the USAF. The work was done by the engineers and scientists at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. They found that 21.5% of the 3201 cases investigated were UNKNOWNS completely separate from those cases deemed to provide “Insufficient Information.” They found that the better the reliability of the reports, the more likely to be unidentifiable. Statistical cross comparisons between the UNKNOWNS and the KNOWNS showed that the probability that the former were just missed KNOWNS was less than 1% for six different characteristics.

          The basic rules for the lack of attention to the relevant data by well educated, but ignorant-about-UFOs-professionals, especially SS, seem to be:

          1. Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up.

          2. What the public doesn’t know, I won’t tell them.

          3. If one can’t attack the data, attack the people; it is much easier.

          4. Do one’s research by proclamation. Investigation is too much trouble and nobody will know the difference anyway.

          I MUST EXPLAIN!

          Good LORD in which I don’t believe in – I must now explain why I am HERE , when there should be nothing, and quite frankly, I which I was elsewhere!

          1. I which I was elsewhere!

             Corrected = I wish I was elsewhere.

             But I can’t name “elsewhere” It’s just better there! Otherwise explain drug and alcohol abuse…… Perhaps Human Beings are the cockroaches of the Universe….

             I do believe it is one thing we can agree on – Human Beings have transformed a beautiful Planet into… well, a ghetto neighborhood!

          2. Tim, I really did not expect you to explain anything. But if expect anyone to believe such a screwball theory that the pulses coming from deep space, some of them accompanied by visible light pulses, are sent out by aliens announcing their presence, then yes you MUST explain why so many dozens of alien civilizations, from all over the galaxy, all had the exact same idea.

             Tim, those pulses are extremely powerful, only a solar mass could produce such a pulse and only a solar mass could create a visible light pulse that could be seen half way across the galaxy. God man, think about that. Think about the energy required to send such a pulse of radiation and visible light half way across the galaxy.

             Civilizations all over the galaxy are all sending out massive pulses trying to tell the rest of the galaxy, “We are Here, We are here, We are here”, like Horton the little elephant heard in Dr. Suss’s “Horton hears a Who”.

             Good lord man, do you really believe such a thing? No one could possibly believe such a silly theory.

          3. Explain how Aliens could navigate their ship billions of miles without a hitch, and then accidentally crash into the New Mexico desert.

             Heavy traffic day?

             1. A RATIONAL explanation of why we don’t have definitive proof of alien civilizations runs as follows. (Astronomers seldom display any knowledge of elementary biology.)

                Any fisherman will understand. Go out and drop your hook at random in a huge body of water or even a farm pond and you will find that you can catch a fish in only certain spots. The vast area of a sea has no fish present over most of that area.

                And if fish are present they hide if they can if they are prey fish and they do not advertise their presence if they are predator fish.

                The universe is mindbogglingly large ,even our own galaxy is huge beyond comprehension except in abstractions involving large exponents.

                Any species with the brains god gave a rabbit would not advertise its presence if it really believed there might be predators out there listening for rabbits.

                And given the distances involved ——only a super powerful deliberate signal could be expected to be detectable at powers of ten light year distances.I doubt we could even generate such a signal on purpose but I am not an astronomer and might be wrong about that.

                If some super advanced species eventually comes to eat us it will be because they sent out autonomous listening spacecraft for hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of light years in all directions to listen for rabbits.

                When their space going drone phones home the space armada will sail. If our understanding of physics is correct and they are unable to go faster than a minor fraction of light speed they probably won’t get here for at least ten thousand years or so.

                It might take them a million years to get the signal and get here.

                I am not going to lose any sleep over this possibility.

31. Bakken is going to be getting killed on these prices if they persist for any length of time. Which they probably will with Europe being a mess and China leading a commodity bust. All of this year’s production orgy will lose money, as will the initial months of wells in 2015. You can’t meter drilling and pumping with these things. Gotta gogogogo.

    With how most operators were running losses to start with…yeah.

    1. This is the scenario we were examining here not long ago in the context of government subsidy. But not precisely.

       The differences:
       1) Early in the game. The govt might not be desperate for oil output yet. But it MIGHT be desperate for frantic activity that becomes GDP. So they may not care what comes out of the ground, so long as rail workers and trucks are occupied. Thus, subsidies of the drillers . . .maybe. It’s a lot less clear than it would be were people about to starve from food transport failure via scarcity.

       2) Larry Kudlow says because it is hyper efficient entrepreneurial entities dominating the activity, breakeven is $20/barrel. He’s a bit wacko.

       3) It occurs to me that this could be a fortuitous time for the NDIC to get serious about flaring and anything else they want to get serious about. The companies can blame them for shutting down what they were going to shut down anyway.

       4) It continues to be annoying that we have so much more visibility into NoDak than Texas. It would be very nice to know the equivalent data point for Texas as regards 2000 truck trips req’d in the first year of a NoDak well.

       5) It would also be useful to have one helluva lot more visibility on the marginal player numbers in Colorado and New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Do they die before the bigger fields?

       6) Anyone got a price for NGLs? Do they follow oil? If so, goodbye Marcellus.

       1. Anyone figure out about all the drilling going on in Kansas in the BH Rig count?
          Wonder if there is there an update to that visual drilling graphic posted ~ a months ago?

          1. Some guy said it’s a low flow field that is easy and cheap and therefore profitable.

32. Too many wells drilled in the Bakken these days for a oil price drop to have a negative effect on production.

    Confidential well list:

    https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/confidential.asp

    1. ‘an’ oil price drop.

       energy prices:

       http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=natural-gas

    2. The confidential well list is not a list of wells to be drilled or wells awaiting completion. Most of these wells have already been completed and their production already counted.

       1. At one time, I had a password, but never really used it to garner more info, so I just use what is there anymore. I know the information is old. There are hundreds of oil companies in the Bakken. That’s because there is oil there.

          The numbers change everyday and the daily activity reports are the ‘pay attention to’, the rest of the story.

          It was merely to show that the numbers are not just ten or twenty, there is a plethora of wells out there. Production is going to be there, the oil is going to move.

          1. There are many places where Bakken data can be gathered. A very good weekly source is here: Bakken Blog

             And on that page if you click on: “North Dakota drilling permits issued week ending…..” it will take you here: Week 40: Sept 29-Oct 3.

             This page is updated every Friday at about 6 or 7 PM Central Time. So tomorrow evening it will be “Week 41 …..” But this page gives you a lot more than just permits. It lists all wells “Released from ‘tight hole’ or confidential status”. About half the wells listed here also list the “bopd” or barrels of oil per day for the first 24 hours of full production.

             Also on this page: “Producing wells completed”. This is a list of all wells completed this week not on the confidential list. Here all wells list their “bopd” for the first 24 hours of full production.

    3. “Too many wells drilled in the Bakken these days for a oil price drop to have a negative effect on production. ”

       About 200 a month at $100/barrel. Isn’t this precisely the point? That number falls and everything else falls with it.

    4. You can’t set money on fire indefinitely. Pouring more short-term supply into an already soft market just makes it worse.

       The unique dynamics of fracking – both the overheated finance and the well production curves- are going to blow up hard.

33. A very interesting chart in the following Bloomberg article:

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-09/ceos-tout-reserves-of-oil-gas-revealed-to-be-less-to-sec.html

    1. Powerful article. Explicit layout of why we should not embrace investor presentations.

       I recall a slide in the most recent CLR presentation that quoted reserve potential based on 1P or 10P I think OOIP and 15% recovery. That’s just outrageous.

       1. I have a new post coming out early tomorrow. The OPEC MOMR is due out tomorrow morning.

          In addition to that I am going to cover this article in depth. A lot more people read the posts than follow the comments.

          1. “A lot more people read the posts than follow the comments.”

             Is there a way of measuring that? A scroll counter or something?

             1. No, it’s just a supposition of mine. But it just makes sense. People who click on the post do to read the post. Some of them go on to read some of the comments. Days later a few come back to read further comments but not everyone does.

                1. Nod. I don’t generally read articles anywhere. Particularly ZH. The comments are 95% worthless, but 5% take apart the article and lay out this and that.

                   It’s faster to scroll the comments and find the signal amid the noise than it is to read the articles.

             2. Watcher,

                The last time I looked (3.108 seconds ago) oil was trading at $86.28. Not sure about Brent.

                1. Euro and Pound both in freefall. Yardstick effect and it will hit oil (and S&P earnings, 50% of which are from overseas and thus get smacked by the dollar translation).

                2. CNBC folks are bizarre in this matter. They will spend a 5 minute discussion on the dollar’s strength (as opposed to reference currency weakness), and then transition to talk of supply and demand determining the price of oil.

                3. It is in this context btw that I don’t expect a lot more oil price decline.

                   US exporters will start demanding Fed action. The price of their stuff in overseas currencies will make them non competitive. The Fed will be pressured to intervene in the FX markets and buy Euros or Pounds or Yen.

                   And this will not please our Russian sanctions partners.

                4. I don’t think I would say the euro is in “free fall”. It is still higher than it was when it was created a few years back.

                5. Bloomberg Energy has WTI November oil at $85.73 right now and Brent at $90.10. November gas is $3.85 per MMBTU. That ain’t good for gas either.

       2. Link within : Proven vs Potential :
          http://images.businessweek.com/bloomberg/pdfs/BN_100914_9023.pdf

          The dream multiplier goes ape for some of the larger/well know ones. Only one company commands respect ?

    2. Interesting indeed.

       “No such rules apply to appraisals that drillers pitch to the public, sometimes called resource potential. In public presentations, unregulated estimates included wells that would lose money, prospects that have never been drilled, acreage that won’t be tapped for decades and projects whose likelihood of success is less than 10 percent…”

       And that David Archibald Dude has the gall to present projections to us based “largely on investor presentations”. As Old Farmer Mac might say: Hogwash. I might be inclined to employ harsher words.

       1. I’m reminded of the Monterey Shale Play estimates.

          1. I think it was you that laid out how company book value derived from reserves — but those reserves had to comply with the SEC regs.

             This would seem the formula for explosions in price to book ratios.

          2. The Monterey Shale was never booked as reserves. Though investor presentations often exaggerate on many things, when they use booked reserves they have to comply with regulations. The Monterey resource still exists, and I’m sure with either CO2 or steam injection in horizontals a portion of the resource will be bookable as reserves.

             1. Companies were certainly trying to book reserves. I remember that one independent drilled and completed about 30 wells without ever reporting a successful completion (I suspect that they did not want to report the IP, because it was so low).

             2. You guys wanna hear something unbelievable about the Monterey Shale and all the hoopla a few months back concerning the EIA’s newer, lower estimate? The EIA. Never.Released. An.Official.Estimate.
                That’s right … all the info stemmed from interviews with EIA staff with the explanation that the official numbers were to be released shortly. Never happened.
                A skeptic can contact those guys – like I did – to check this out. Their response? (Quoting from their e-mail dated 9/22/14 “EIA has not made an announcement of the size of technically recoverable reserves in Monterey Shale”.
                Strange stuff.

    3. Pioneer is reportedly shopping their Eagle Ford properties. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall:

       http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/1379427/Pioneer-eyes-Eagle-Ford-sale

       1. Without tracking it down, I’m pretty sure Pioneer has been doing this for some time. Sounds familiar. Suspect this is not new.

       2. The story has also been covered by Bloomberg, not behind a pay wall.

          Pioneer Said to Prepare Eagle Ford Sale With Citigroup, Tudor

          This is the second time that Pioneer has sought to sell the assets, and it has lowered its price expectations from the $5 billion or more that the company was seeking earlier this year, the people said. Even after scrapping an initial sale process, Pioneer remained open to selling the Eagle Ford operations, people with knowledge of the matter said in August.

    4. Here the graphic from the Bloomberg article Jeff posted…

       

34. Absent an (unlikely) large increase in Brent prices in the fourth quarter, looks like we’re going to bust the pattern of no sequential year over year declines in annual Brent prices since 1997:

    http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=RBRTE&f=A

    The previous year over year declines were $13 in 1998, $24 in 2001, $62 in 2009, and $108 in 2013.

    1. Hi Jeff,

       “…looks like we’re going to bust the pattern of no sequential year over year declines in annual Brent prices since 1997…

       …The previous year over year declines were $13 in 1998, $24 in 2001, $62 in 2009, and $108 in 2013.”

       I think it can be intimated from this fact that the global economy may be turning recessionary. It is going to be very interesting to see how price, OPEC, and a host of other variables, responds to reduced demand, combined with the potential for reduced production from expensive plays such as shale and deep water etc. Watching the peak oil story play out over the past decade has been an interesting and at the same time sickening slow motion train wreck that has kept me hopelessly fascinated. It certainly feels to me like we are entering a new act in this real life melodrama.

       Best,
       Tom

35. Ransquawk:

    EU proposes gas talks with Russia and Ukraine in Berlin October 21st.

36. http://rt.com/news/194640-briton-ebola-macedonia-dead/

    ‘The man reportedly suffered from fever, vomiting and internal bleeding. His condition deteriorated rapidly, Dr. Jovanka Kostovska of the ministry’s commission for infectious diseases said.’

    ‘A Macedonian government spokesman told the BBC that a companion of the late Briton told the local authorities that they had travelled straight from the UK and had not visited countries affected by Ebola.’

    If proven true it may be that the genie is out of the bottle and is spreading in mainland Europe.

    BTW I chose rt.com as they mentioned the fact he hadn’t travelled to an Ebola affected country, the independent are also running the same story without that information.

37. I can highly recommend reading the following paper, or at least the first 10 pages
    http://www.voxeu.org/content/deleveraging-what-deleveraging-16th-geneva-report-world-economy

    “The world has not yet begun to deleverage its crisis-linked borrowing. Global debt-to-GDP is breaking new highs in ways that hinder recovery in mature economies and threaten new crisis in emerging nations – especially China. The latest Geneva Report on the World Economy argues that the policy path to less volatile debt dynamics is a narrow one, and it is already clear that developed economies must expect prolonged low growth or another crisis along the way.”

38. Using Energy Efficiency to Push Home Sales

    Tue, 2014-10-07 15:13 — Phil Hall – National Mortgage professional Magazine

    However, Chris Sorensen, director of mergers and acquisitions at Corona, Calif.-based Paramount Residential Mortgage Group Inc. (PRMG) and author of Financial Sense to White Picket Fence, noted that this subject is not without its hiccups.

    “Surveys reveal that at least on paper, buyers want energy efficient homes and to a point, are willing to pay for them,” Sorensen said. “The NAHB survey asserts average buyers are look for an ROI of 14 percent, meaning they’ll pay an additional $7,000 for an annual savings of $1,000. First time buyers require a more robust 16 percent ROI. The Shelton Group did a survey back in 2009 that asked homeowners how they would spend $10,000 on their home if given the money, the majority chose remodeling their kitchen or bath, not insulation, or energy efficient windows. So, while we claim we want energy efficient homes, we’re likely to sacrifice such for beauty.”

    Sorensen added that federal and state intervention will play a key role in driving energy efficiency standards in housing.

    “Because of this, government regulation has become the weapon of choice for environmentalist,” Sorensen continued. “By imposing regulation, homebuilders will be forced to comply and homebuyers will be forced to pay, once again. Most accept this is ultimately a good thing—if not for the environment, then for one’s wallet on a month by month cash flow basis. An extra $10,000 spent on a home spread out over a 30-year mortgage is insignificant by comparison to the monthly savings in energy cost. This fact, coupled by public perception, will indeed continue to have a greater and greater impact on what homes consumers buy.”

    The really discouraging aspect of all this is that the granite counter-tops and swank bathrooms will all be ripped out and replaced every ten years or so.

    The only way we are going to see developers build energy efficient homes is to mandate it… and the developers will fight that tooth and nail.

39. EIA NG report

    Marcellus prices remain low. Prices in the Marcellus Shale remained low and had fluctuations, tracking along with Algonquin Citygate and Transcontinental Zone 6 NY through the week. At the end of the report week, prices at the major Marcellus trading hubs were under $2.00/MMBtu

    Can Marcellus dry gas producers possibly be making any money?

    1. Of course not. But that’s not the product. NGLs are.

       1. Marcellus tends to be pretty dry! Sure, the drillers have been preferentially tackling the wetter spots. But still, it’s not a ‘wet’ play.

          And it’s not like NA isn’t awash in NGLs from the Bakken and Eagle Ford. With WTI down, the price for NGLs must be down too.

40. Hypesters usually show up most aggressively when they are losing money. I should have checked this before.

    EOG is down -18% in the last 7ish weeks.
    CLR about -25% in the same 7ish weeks.

    1. Asia WTI price, $83.50

       1. The dollar is flat in Asia. No particular rise to explain the extra dollar off WTI.

          Airline stocks got hit hard. Traffic may be falling from ebola.

41. The graph belows shows the annual growth of the US crude oil production (the production in the latest month less the production one year ago) from January 2010 to July/September 2014 calculated from the monthly data and from the weekly data (shown in blue curve and green curve respectively).

    The weekly data fluctuate a lot but over the long run, the averages of the weekly data roughly match the monthly data. From the weekly data, the maximum annual growth took place in September 2013, when the annual growth reached 1,575 thousand barrels per day. By September 2014, the annual growth calculated from the weekly data declined to 1,000 thousand barrels per day.

    From the monthly data, the maxium annual growth took place in June 2014, when the annual growth reached 1,304 thousand barrels per day. By July 2014, the annual growth calculated from the monthly data declined to 1,064 thousand barrels per day. Both the monthly data and the weekly data show the US oil production annual growth now is running at the rate around 1 million barrels per day.

    The red curve shows the annual growth of the US crude oil production between July 2014 and December 2015 calculated from the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook (October 2014). Based on the EIA’s latest projection, the US crude oil produciton growth will accelerate between now and February 2015, when the annual growth rises to 1,238 thousand barrels per day. But by December 2015, the annual growth will decelerate to 721 thousand barrels per day.

    Between February 2015 and December 2015, the US crude oil production growth is projected to decline at an average monthly rate of 47.6 thousand barrels per day. At this rate, the annual growth of the US crude oil produciton will decline to around zero after about 15 months. That is, crude oil production in March 2017 may have about the same production level as in March 2016.

    

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