Month: May 2016

When Texas DUCs Go Quack, Quack, Frack

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The “DUC” in this case being _D_rilled but _U_n_C_ompleted shale oil & gas wells

I ran into this article by Seeking Alpha energy analyst Gary Bourgeault over on Real Clear Energy which gave a figure for how many drilled but ‘unfracked’ wells are available for the new extended oil flow fracking technique I mentioned in May 15th 2016 post Texas Fracking and the Death of Big Oil.

The key passage from “U.S. Shale Oil Boom Over Says CSMonitor – Hahahahaha” below —

DUC wells waiting in the wings
 
Another major reason the shale boom isn’t over is the large number of drilled but uncompleted wells waiting to be brought into production. There is an estimated 5,000 in the U.S. which can be quickly brought to market when the price of oil is high enough to reward it. Some companies have been completing them for some time, and more are being completed in 2016.

There are a lot of implications in that number. Starting with the fact that new oil & gas rig counts are going to be minimal for some time. And the hard economic fact that major politically event driven oil price spikes are going to be extremely short and will drop below 50 dollars a barrel within weeks to three months, given how fast these North American “DUC” wells can be fracked to bring product to market.

This new age of “banked” cheap oil plays, and the resultant oil price stability, will see off both the “Big Oil” economic model and the political/corporate elites that live by it.

Update May 27 2016:

It looks like Zerohedge has come to the same set of conclusions about the “Big Oil” economic model with his post “Peak Petro-State – The Oil World In Chaos”

State Department IG’s Report: Fallout

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Hillary2016

What now for Hillary? Was the IG’s report just the precursor to the FBI’s hammer dropping?

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4911270408001/napolitano-audit-faulting-clinton-on-emails-is-huge

Judge Napolitano:

I think it’s huge. It goes to the heart, it disputes the heart, of Mrs Clinton’s defense.

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She knowingly and willfully violated her own State Department requirements that she put in place for all other employees…

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She diverted 100% – one hundred percent! – of all digital traffic coming to her through her home server… She was also harshly criticized for keeping some of the email traffic from the State Department, which to this day she believes she wiped clean – I happen to believe the FBI found what she believes she wiped clean…

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As we speak, our colleague Katherine Herridge is in a federal courtroom in Alexandria Virginia listening to this Romanian hacker tell a federal judge about the deal his lawyers cut with the Justice Department. The quid pro quo is: ‘Don’t send me to jail for a long time and I’ll tell you – I’ll tell a jury! – how easy it was for hackers in Europe to get in to Mrs Clinton’s emails.

Why was the report released now? Has the DNC decided Hillary cannot beat Trump and decided to throw her under the bus? If so, who’s up to replace her? Biden-Warren? Sanders? And will Debbie Wasserman-Schultz get the boot too?

Presidential Poll Snapshot

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Statistically, we have a tie. The trends tell a different story.

PollSnapshot

Part of this is explainable by who’s getting criticized the most. Trump is the Republican nominee so he is no longer taking much flak from the right. Clinton, on the other hand, is still locked in battle with Sanders, who is only now, a the campaign becomes bitter, calling the DNC selection process rigged (it seems to be) and questioning Hillary’s competence and honesty (she has neither). Trump has also begun hammering Hillary and prefaces all his references to her with terms like ‘crooked’ and ‘corrupt’, which, amusingly, is trending the hashtag #CrookedHillary. What a difference a few months makes in politics. And we still have six months to go.

What Trump needs to do is go scorched earth. Lay out her history of destroying the women abused, molested and raped by her husband in order to protect her power and income and call out her as the vicious hypocrite she really is. And keep calling her out. Lay out her history of incompetence and ask the country if we can tolerate that incompetence in the Executive Mansion. Call out her long history of ethics violations and her never ending embroilment in scandals. Hammer her down like it’s the most important battle facing America. Because it is.

Will Trump win this thing? What is the best strategy?

What has happened to Venezuela?

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venzuela

Venezuela is in the news as the country cannot even buy paper to print money.

This all goes back to 1998 when Chavez was elected by the people.

He was an army officer and had previously attempted to overthrow the government, a coup that failed.

in the early 1980s. Chávez led the MBR-200 in an unsuccessful coup d’état against the Democratic Action government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992, for which he was imprisoned. Released from prison after two years, he founded a political party known as the Fifth Republic Movement and was elected president of Venezuela in 1998.

Venezuela is an example of The Curse of Natural Resources.

The idea that resources might be more of an economic curse than a blessing began to emerge in debates in the 1950s and 1960s about the economic problems of low and middle-income countries.[3] The term resource curse was first used by Richard Auty in 1993 to describe how countries rich in mineral resources were unable to use that wealth to boost their economies and how, counter-intuitively, these countries had lower economic growth than countries without an abundance of natural resources. An influential study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner found a strong correlation between natural resource abundance and poor economic growth.

Venezuela is only the latest and worst example. The history is depressingly familiar.

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