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Questions on the WTI/Brent spread
I’m looking at something in the oil market and can’t make sense of it. Possibly someone could straighten me out.
The Brent/WTI spread hit $10 today. I can’t remember that happening
before. The spread has been widening for some time. It jumped $4
recently.
The excuse offered is that the Cushing Oklahoma facility that is the
settlement for the WTI contract is flush with oil. Not only is it full,
a new pipeline is coming.
I find this interesting. It would appear that the US has a cheaper
source of oil than does Europe. Yet we import more than half of what we
consume. How do we save $10 over Europe? Do we really save that $10?
A significant amount of crude comes to the Gulf coast. That is priced as
Light Louisiana Sweet (“LLS”). The LLS is trading at a premium to WTI
of $8.50 LLS tracks Brent, at least it is now.
My questions are:
I) Is WTI a good measure of what the real cost of crude for the US is?
II) If the real cost is closer to Brent and therefore pushing $100 does it mean that we are about to see a big bump in gas?
III) Many (like Southwest Airways) hedged their fuel cost. Are “they” long WTI but paying LLS and therefore losing on their hedges?
IV) Is there a two-tiered energy market? If so, which region is paying LLS and which is paying WTI?
My answers, but I’m open to a better interpretation:
I) It used to be. But much less so today.
II) I think so. We will find out in 30 days or so.
III) I think some folks are getting creamed.
IV) I don’t know.
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smoking whacky weed and methane usually equate to a large explosion....
Bruce...you were half crazy before you got snowed in...and that's what we love about you:-)
Half price sale coming up in Santa Monica, Bruce. Get 'em while they're hot!!
www.doctorhousingbubble.com
Great story Bruce. Is your tractor powered with WTI or Brent?
Fucking bio diesel. That's all I can get. I have a 65 horse backhoe/loader. It now smells like burnt french fries.....
Curious if you have a farm Bruce? For a cheap, standby toilet:
http://www.cabelas.com/showers-toilets-accessories-luggable-loo-bucket-lid-toilet-seat.shtml
that, a 5 gallon bucket and a bag of sawdust gets you an odor free toilet. Throw on the compost pile when full. We have been using them on the farm for years. Enjoyed the story!
No more smart aleck posts from me. You've had a full day.
Erm, unless you and yours can use the commode you're tolerance is beyond anything I would be able to muster under the same conditions.
Lots of grocery store plastic bags...
Lots...
Don't call roto rooter, they are terribly expensive. They just do marketing and hire locals and charge you a freakin fortune. They got time/gps tracking of the workers down to a science on smart phones. Actually a good business to be in, rape homeowners for last minute stuff. Try craigslist to hire locals directly for much much less.
Sounds like you made a great memory there. Thanks. :D
yeah bruce.
Who cares, all one really needs to know is
a/ Oil doesn't come from fossils
b/ Big oil interests have suppressed supply and inflated prices by collusion with conservationists to limit the building of refineries.
c/ Here are links to research that shows one of Saturn's moons that has never supported life, has an unbelievable amount of hydrocarbons.
Now I will sit back and wait to be attacked by BOT's.. (Big Oil trolls)
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMCSUUHJCF_index_0.html
Saturn’s smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today.
The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan.”
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080213-titan-oil.html
Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth
Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/14/titan-oil-cassini.html
Yes, we are fucking saved! Far away places that we can not get to never mined work on have oil!
It's all true. But getting there would take years, as in multigenerational mining operation. Since most people can't pay attention to a commercial on TV, I don't see that happening.
By the time the "fleet" got back from Titan it wouldn't matter much. The people your grandchildren (theory here) would meet would be riding horses and the human population scaled back to around a billion.
Y..... but my point was, that as evidenced by Titan, oil does not come from fossils........
and why do the reservoirs in the Eugene field keep replenishing........why did the russian deep well drilling program find oil in 2 billion year old layers, when life only began a billion years ago.......etc ad nauseum....meanwhile the saudis continue to enjoy life at 12 cents a litre, whilst Raofltao at the infidels paying many times more.....
Oil doesn't come from fossils, it comes from carbon molecule chains which are all over the place. The labrea tar pits is a great example of oil that just is. It's a held geek theory it's one fo the reasons why we haven't explored past the moon, the concept that oil could be found on the moon to make a "moon base" to refuel on hops from planet to planet. Since we don't manufacture anything remotely close to planet hoppers or for that matter understand how basic physics on our own planet work in deep water(cough BP) other than theory and grainy documentries of hag fish eating dead whales.
I doubt we could get a pipe into a fissure without it melting in a day. The Russians were just as successful as BP btw, except they had the option of using a nuke to close the hole because public opinion of nuking a mistake was overlooked.
The Saudi's also have a common saying.
My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode in a car, I rode in a car, my son rides a camel.
The Saudi's aren't retarded, look at the amount of terraforming they have been doing in the last fifty years and the heavy investment into desalination. The folks producing the oil know exactly what the end looks like and have told people.
Sorry again here, but you can't burn oil in space. There's no air. Oil is not what we need for space travel. Even solid rockets doesn't really cut it since the faster you want to go, the bigger the rocket has to be>the heavier it is>the more inertia it has>the bigger it has to be....
Nature is efficient. Inorganic chemical formation of carbon bonds is incredibly inefficient in nature. By far the easiest source of carbon material as a basis for oil is organic, carbon-based life. You're right, it is not fossils or dinosaurs, the carbon comes from plankton, by far the most abundant carbon source on the planet. Massive, massive accumulation over time is orders of magnitude greater than any other life form on the planet, and, constantly renewing..
If I may interject a theory. Oil is like the water in a sponge, only in "solid" rock. Remember, the earth is under tremendous pressure from itself even though it exists in a vacuum.
So if you had a soaked sponge and spun it in space, the water would eventually come to the surface via centrifugal forces. That explains replenishment and that also explains the type of rock (young and porous...) that would be the path of least resistance for the oil to travel.
Where does it come from? My hunch is that it is the result of tectonic movements in some process I couldn't even begin to understand. Not from dinosaurs. I always thought that was such a bullshit idea anyway.
Good try Orly but gravity is much stronger than the centrifugal force. This is due to a somewhat slow planetary rotation. Better explanation is: Buoyancy explained by Acchimede in 250BC. Wiki Hydrostatics if interested. You see gravity squeezes the planet and the less dense matter slowly migrates to the surface. I assume internal heat pressure plays a role as well.
I'm with ya stewie. The Power Elite meme's are all starting to fall apart.
Then there ya go. Thanks, stewie.
The center of the earth is actually made from an old leprechaun who pisses wild turkey bourbon.
Interested to know which Big Oil's CEO's crotch you're currently sucking on.
I'll see if I can find the paper, but plankton is the primary carbon source for oil. Makes sense, it is by far (orders of magnitude) the most abundant biomass on the planet.
You may be interested to try these links:
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=45838
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/07/27/oil-earth-mantle.html
I believe too in the squeezing effect, that is somehow causing initially seperated building blocks of crude in the earth's mantle, under heat and pressure and the centrifugal effect, to compose together and form crude, which as you point out is then pushed through the least points of resistance to underground reservoirs.
Hey, thanks. I appreciate that.
People don't understand that all of this stuff is nothing more than carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms (hence the name, "hydrocarbons" ;) forming all these different configurations that happen to all do different things. They each have a unique way to get consumed.
So, if you start with the same building blocks, what changes? Atmospheric pressure, friction and the amount of time they can surface, relative to their chemical viscosity.
A light bulb should go off at that point and you say to yourself, "Self, I bet all these things are coming from the same place and there ain't no way there was enough dinosaurs or marine plankton to form all this stuff."
Methane gas, found at the thinnest part of the crust, if I am not mistaken, in seabeds, surfaces most rapidly and easily as it only has to travel through so much rock.
(It forms ice way down there, too, which should theoretically be able to be scraped off the ocean floor and pumped to the surface. No need for really expensive natgas compressors if you get it already compressed and frozen. Of course, it would be a mighty dollar to bring it up at first...)
Anyway, it only makes sense that it is the earth itself that is the engine for petroleum products because...it only makes sense.
Now you have me thinking (imagine sparks flying and a lot of smoke ) . When you said " earth is the engine ." It made me think, maybe oil is lubricant for earths gears . Scary thought when you think about how much we have pulled out of the ground or how an engine seizes up when you run it it with not much oil in the engine .
Just some smoke and sparks .
Orly, I like your thinking. That was simple enough for even me to understand.
Thanks.
Hey, did you hear that the Japanese are going to resurrect your long-lost cousin? No kidding.
They say he'll be walking around in like three years.
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/scientist-close-to-cloning-extinct-woolly-mammoth-20110118/
Y...that "Bullshit " idea spun up originally by JPM in the late 1800's and subsequently pushed into education curriculums has managed to fool nearly all of the consumers most of the time, and made the authors an incredible amount of loot.....
Rrright.... it's merely coincidence that all known oil fields are in sedimentary rocks no more than about 500M years old.
Please let me know any significant oil reservoirs that are igneous or metamorphic rock.
Under your theory, the biggest oil-producing areas on earth should include Yellowstone, Hawaii, and Iceland. How much oil is currently extracted in those areas? Anyone? Bueller?
" it's merely coincidence that all known oil fields are in sedimentary rocks no more than about 500M years old."
Wrong, try researching Russian deep well drilling and finding oil at 2 billion year old levels....
Hope you're not going to try and convince us that life used to exist on Titan lol.
you will probably just be ignored.
No way! I love science fiction!
Hello Troll
Take your foot out of your mouth and wait a few months before you insert another token.
why wouldn't Brent consumers switch an buy WTI for delivery? Seems like rational thing to do
Only oil is exported to refineries in places like Canada and most likely re-imported into the US. Thus some of the US export numbers are BS. Alaska no longer exports oil to Japan...just Nat gas.
Doesn't matter, Suez Canal is hosed with the power, phones and ...well... anything that runs a lock system...including people. Whole reason that canal was built was to shuffle portable energy around on boats (coal/oil)
WTI is going to go apeshit in an hour.
China and India are fucked if this doesn't get straightened out.
"Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have been a key means of communications for the protesters. Egyptians complained Facebook and Twitter were subsequently blocked, but many accessed them via proxies. The government denied any role."- via Reuters
Also, "Prominent reform campaigner Mohamed ElBaradei, who lives in Vienna, has decided to return to Egypt on Thursday, his brother said."
So a stooge from the United Nations is going to show up there on Thursday. Sounds like that's when the SHTF.
Where's Brzezinski?
From background chatter he better get a bullet proof everything. Appearently soldiers have been captured, set on fire, people are dancing and ex-soldiers have a couple of the tanks and military guns. Plus they have the soldiers guns...tommorrow the revenge of the mob is going to interesting.
Kind of reads like the spanish civil war, except the spanish didn't control the docks to fill oil tankers with on the Suez canal and nobody but hemingway gave a shit.
Jesus Tyler, How about giving CPL a field commission to write a story on what the hell is happening in Egypt from his tech/engineering perspective? This shit is hot!
Hell no it's midnight here and I have to get to bed.
This shit will come out in the wash tommorrow. I'm reporting third hand over an IRC channel with a guy flipping between twitter and IRC because the egyptians have turned off Twitter...then the anon goes hunting for a proxy in the channel to get his feed back up. Then gets shut down...twitter is LOUD as a medium but it's really an application on top of a protocol, like someone being polite in a conversation with tea. IRC is nerds pushing the most basic element of TCPIP communication protocols, in human terms the conversation it more like "tea?" "Fuck yeah!". It's Umberto Ecco versus Caveman grunts.
4chan has a thread going...couple of them it looks like nobody knows where our brave anon has gone. Leave it up to anonymous to keep a candle burning in the /int/ernational group even /b/tards are doing their best to keep the thread from 404.
Looking in the irc channel we're up to 340k worth of people loaning their computers to bully the government of egypt back and give the folks of the Suez that don't need to fight a chance to split before the thick of it happens.
I have no capacity at all to differentiate between reality and bullshit with what you are saying. Half of the technospeak I kind of understand but I know is largely over my head and the other half might as well be written in Old Gaelic.
What I will say is, if this is not some bizarre nerd hoax, it makes me yearn to be one of the 340K. Never seen a set of comments on ZH to match it for the capacity to light a fire in the belly. It's all well and dandy to post hymns to revolution on ZH, but to actually be able to support the kids out there, well, I would give my left nut to know how to do it.
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/LOIC
Some information on LOIC
This is serious shit and has been known to cause drama and IRL Ban Hammers. Actually using this might get you v&. The information on page is provided for entertainment purposes only.
Translated to plain english
This is serious shit and will get you in trouble, thrown in jail or just disappear if you hit hte wrong target. The page takes no responsiblity for your dumb actions.
You can download it here.
sourceforge.net/projects/loic/
Do not use it until you figure out how to use proxies and cover you ass. best way to practice. Figure out how you use proxies and make a successful post on 4chan.org which is completely anonymous however Moot (the guy that owns it) is very effective at figuring it out and throwing out a ban which block you from the site. If you can sneak through, post then you are allowed to use LOIC without getting in trouble, thrown in jail or dissappearing.
In cases like egypt, the volume is so high and severe that it's a needle in a haystack routine. Now 670k of people in the LOIC, times 1000, there isn't a logging service in the universe with enough space to capture it all. Collectively we are noise.
Europe is online. Now that the NordicGuys are online we should be seeing some decent online firebombing. Go figure go with computers, math and on welfare. They make the worlds best crackers and hackers.
http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&prmdo=1&tbs=mbl:1&q=suez&aq=f...
If you want to see the twitter feeds. They are getting flushed and the original twits posting are long gone. In the anon channel we are assuming they are dead as stones because we stopped hearing from them in any way shape or form along with the photos they were snaping with their phones. The only people on the twitters feeds are people passing the information. Last thing we got back was the ex-soldiers killed the soldiers and took the tanks and mounted guns.
They might have gone silent otherwise to sneak up on Cairo to kill the head, Cairo is appearently under martial law. But that only my speculation. With the communications being hammered, it opens the idea that a platoon of four hundred ex-soldiers could drive straight into Cairo and level things bit by bit.
Nobody knows though because it's silent on our end now.
Man, this stuff is insane.
I suppose the communications are instant, like an IM and you can get them directly from their phones (or other communication device...), or do they have to first link to their host servers? How are you able to receive these messages if their host servers are down?
______________
Is there some legal application for what you're doing? I mean, if one were to learn to do what you said to do and you pass the Moot test, is there a job in corporate America doing this?
I'm not being funny. I know someone interested in computers and she likes all the stealth and spy drama, too.
For the host servers, we have the host. They are just using a client. Let's put it this way if they/them/powers that be/whoever wanted to shut down IRC as a port (how it gets in and out of a server, the doorway if you will). They would shut off all cell phones and bank transactions in the same stroke.
The thing is most of all this telecom crap was built 40 years ago, some idiot stick (and you only need one) decided that is how it's going to be done. So suddenly you have government agencies adopting technology (I'm not even in the 90's yet btw), but they see it as a cheap method of throwing files to one another. It's a hack job, they pound square peg into a round hole, make it fit. Everyone forgets about it period. 92' rolls around CERN develops the idea of web pages, sells the idea of a unmutable bulletin board. 92' and a half, some guy buys porn.com and puts naked pictures up. He gets an amazing 1200 that day. Some asshole at the University of Ottawa releases a newsletter (remember those) three seconds later called the "Internet Business Journal". People go apeshit for nonsense like that. It's an 8 page news letter sold for 20 bucks on how awesome the internet is.
The whole world explodes into an awesomeness called the internet. It costs less than 10 bucks to buy a domain name (gasp!!!) and hosting to practically free.
What didn't happen in all that awesomeness was the fixing that needed to occur...not just on desktops that cheap shit script kiddies use. There are four holes in every OS that is networked that can never be patched. Ever. Patch one of them. Everything you see shuts down. Life support in hospitals, traffic lights, even internet connected fridges. That's what StuxNet hunts. Those four holes with a specific UPC code (like gets scanned at a super market) in the BIOS (when you boot up your computer). However the retards in israel failed to understand how the idea of internet communication works. If you send it out, someone is always listening. Always. So on similar IRC channels people sell the US/Israeli worm for a pretty penny to target whatever you want within spec. If you know the MAC address, plus the UPC and the BIOS serial number for around a million you can buy a custom piece of attack software that will slice, dice and set whatever that company is working on back fifty years.
That's a single aspect of being an asshole online and with computers.
As most of us drop out, retire and die eventually, those four holes will eventually be forgotten on how to use them. And how to protect from them without bring down nuke silos, banks and gummi bear distribution. And as strange as it is to mention this.
What you are using right now isn't a protocol. HTTP, DNS, HTTPS even the code developed by the makers of your internet browser. While it's understood that they are what we use. They actually sit on top of these four protocols to push information back and forth and display it in some meaningful way. It how we pull a sneaky pete. It how I made my money as an engineer. People give me a big bag of money, literally, to explain to them how I cannot help them for 90% of the problem which is systemic, but I offer solutions for the annoyances like browser redirection or documents that have been rewritten with the word fuck in them.
For most IT security is a package off a shelf for a subscription or a flat rate of 49.95. I see it as the handjob after AIDS has been contracted. And when all the old techies and engineers are dead or not interested, Stuxnet will be there to fill the void of the only one that remembers.
IT security isn't that hard to grasp. It's human on all levels, plastered with wall paper then properly ignored until someone notices that their are no walls or foundation under the wall paper.
Wow. Fascinating stuff.
Thanks.
:D