Masters Of War

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks. You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly. Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain. You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion' As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud. You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins. How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you That even Jesus would never Forgive what you do. Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul. And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand over your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.------- Bob Dylan 1963

Sunday, January 31, 2016

stored crude and gasoline at record high; why consumption is falling, & a Russian-OPEC oil cartel?

a number of on again, off again, stories that Russia was planning to meet with the members of the OPEC cartel to negotiate production cuts drove oil prices higher this week, but even now it's still not clear if there was any actual communication between any leaders of the countries to bring about such a meeting, or if the entire hullabaloo was just an old idea that gained a life of its own once news bureau foreign energy correspondents started asking questions of officials whose ambiguous responses fed the story as it built on itself...the proposal for an OPEC meeting with Russia had been called for by Venezuelan and Algerian officials and ignored on several occasions over the past year, but what seems to have started this week's spate of stories was a vague comment by Iraq's oil minister that "We have seen some flexibility from the brothers in Saudi and a change in tone from Russia,"..that quickly turned into a plethora of articles to the effect that Russia would cooperate with OPEC in reducing oil supply in order to boost prices...even though both Russian and OPEC officials initially denied the rumors, the articles about a planned meeting persisted, as the price of oil continued to rise in response each day...then on Thursday, Tass reported that Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak indicated he was ready to take part in an upcoming meeting of the OPEC and non-OPEC producers in February, and the price of Brent crude spiked to over $35 a barrel in Europe...but at the same time OPEC delegates denied there was any talk of a meeting with Russia, and Iran went a step further by insisting that they wouldn't consider a deal until their exports rose 1.5 million barrels per day above current levels  (recall last week that Iran's new output is not expect to reach 600 thousand bpd until June)...furthermore, everyone knew the Saudis wouldn't cut their production to benefit Iran, since they broke off diplomatic relations with Iran after their embassy was burnt earlier this month, so by the end of the week serious talk of such a deal had pretty much vaporized.. 
at any rate, that entire sequence of Russia/OPEC news stories never seemed quite kosher to me as it was crossing my feeds this week...here's why: it was already known by most players in the energy markets that oil shorts were at a all time high at the beginning of the week; "oil shorts" are those who've entered into a futures contract to sell oil that they don't own; their hope is that the price would fall further, and they'd be able to buy oil at a lower price at some time in the future to meet their original contract, and hence make a profit...since they're putting a very small percentage down when they enter into such contracts, small price moves against them mean the exchange will demand an additional payment to cover their paper, or should we say electronic, losses, and keep them in the black...if prices rise enough, many of those short sellers typically wouldn't have the funds available to cover their theoretical losses, and they are thus forced to closed out their contract by buying oil back at a now higher price, at a loss to them, which adds to the oil buying and thus drives the price for oil up even more, forcing even more shorts to sell...that's what's called a short squeeze, and what i saw happening this week with the price of oil had all the earmarks of it....with a story like that of a Russian OPEC cartel that drives a large price change was put out on the wires, and continued to be repeated and distributed even though it's been officially denied, it certainly seemed like someone was trying to manipulate the price...the Russian energy minister only chimed in later, when he saw the rumor was moving the price higher...with oil trading of WTI at NYMEX running above 1.2 million 1000 barrel oil contracts each day this week and trading of Brent contracts in London probably even higher, there was a lot of money to be made every day for every $1 per barrel price change...we would not be surprised to hear that Russian oil traders in Europe were among those who profited the most...
New Record High Supplies of Crude Oil and Gasoline
in news that is far less dubious and has more immediate relevance, this week's stats from the US Energy Information Administration showed that our supplies of crude oil and gasoline in storage have both risen to the highest levels on record, even as our oil imports remain well above last year's level...this week's report showed that our imports of crude oil fell by 170,000 barrels per day to average 7,609,000 barrels per day during the week ending January 22nd, down from the 7,779,000 barrels per day import pace of the prior week...while that was 2.5% more than our 7,422,000 barrel per day of imports during the week ending January 23rd a year ago, oil imports are notoriously volatile week to week as 2 million barrel VLCC tankers arrive and are offloaded irregularly, so the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) reports imports as a 4 week moving average...that EIA report showed the 4 week average of our imports remained at the 7.8 million barrel per day level, which was 7.2% above the same four-week period last year... 
production of crude oil from US wells, meanwhile, slipped for the first time in 7 weeks, but still remained above the levels of this past fall....our field production of crude oil fell from 9,235,000 barrels per day during the week ending January 15th to 9,221,000 barrels per day during the week ending January 22nd, which except for the past two weeks, was still at a level higher than any week since August...our field production for January has averaged about 9,228,000 barrels per day to date, which is roughly 100,000 barrels per day more than our average production during September and October, and remains 3.8% above the 9,197,000 barrels per day that was being produced in the same 3 week period a year ago, despite a 70% drop in active oil drilling rigs from the peak of October 2014 since then..
however, our refineries used 551,000 barrels per day less crude than they did last week, which meant there were 8,383,000 barrels more of surplus oil left unused at the end of the week; as a result, our stocks of crude oil in storage, not counting what's in the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, rose by that 8,383,000 barrels to end the week at 494,920,000 barrels, which was up 21.7% from the record inventory of 406,727,000 barrels in storage the same week a year ago, and the most oil we've ever had stored in the 80 years of EIA record keeping....we'll include a graphic here so you can all see what that looks like:
January 29 2016 crude oil inventories
in the graph above, copied from “This Week in Petroleum” from the EIA, the blue line shows the recent track of US oil inventories over the period from June 2014 to January 22, 2016, while the grey shaded area represents the range of US oil inventories as reported weekly by the EIA over the prior 5 years for any given time of year, essentially showing us the normal range of US oil inventories as they fluctuate from season to season....we can see that crude oil inventories typically fall through the summer, when refineries are running flat out, just as they did this year, but we're now heading into the winter period when oil refineries cut back operations and oil inventories rise...note that the large grey wedge on the right now includes the record oil inventories that we were setting last year at this time (ie, it includes the image of the early 2015 inventories) which we are now exceeding by more 20% each week...hence our oil inventories are now exceeding last year's records by an unheard of margin, just as the 2015 global temperature record exceeded the 2014 global temperature record by an unheard of margin...
as noted, the amount crude used by our refineries fell by 551,000 barrels per day to an average of 15,639,000 barrels per day during the week ending January 22nd, as the US refinery utilization rate fell to 87.4%, down from 90.6% last week and down from a utilization rate as high as 94.5% at the end of November, as they're in a normal seasonal slowdown; respective figures for a year ago were 15,256,000 barrels of oil refined and an 88.0% utilization rate...hence, refinery production of gasoline fell a bit, from 9,453,000 barrels per day during week ending January 15th to 9,377,000 barrels per day during week ending January 22nd, which was still 200,000 barrels per day more gasoline than was produced the same week last year...at the same time, refinery production of distillate fuels (diesel fuel and heat oil) decreased by 100,000 barrels per day from the week ending the 15th to 4,452,000 barrels per day during the week ending January 22nd...for gasoline, that production was again more than we could use or export, and hence our end of the week gasoline in storage rose by 3,464,000 barrels to 248,461,000 barrels, which was the most gasoline we've had stored at the end of any week at any time of year in the 25 years of EIA weekly records, which once again merits posting a chart of our gasoline supplies:
January 27 2016 gasoline inventories
the above graph was originally from this week’s weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf), but the screen grab of it we're using here was taken from Reuters oil analyst Jack Kemp because the red arrows he included are instructional…like the crude oil stocks graph above, the blue line on this graph shows the recent track of our gasoline inventories over the period from June 2014 to January 22, 2016, while the grey shaded area represents the range of our gasoline supplies as reported weekly by the EIA over the prior 5 years, showing us the normal range of gasoline inventories as they fluctuate from season to season....the red arrows point to the current week's inventories and the previous record gasoline supply for this week, which was set on January 23, 2015, again giving us a clear picture of how much we beat the old record by; last January 23rd’s gasoline inventory record was 238,335,000 barrels, so we’ve just beat that record by more than 10 million barrels...you can also see that we can expect gasoline inventories to increase seasonally at least until March, when refineries will begin winding down for maintenance and to switch over to produce summer blends of gasoline..
inventories of other refined products are also above normal for this time of year....with the cold weather, our distillate fuel inventories fell for the 2nd week in a row, dropping by 4,057,000 barrels to 160,472,000 barrels, down 3.1% from the 5 year record high 165,554,000 barrels we had stored on January 8th, which came after a warm December when heat oil consumption was minimal…hence we still have 20.9% more distillate fuels stored than the 132,687,000 barrels of distillates we had stored on January 23rd of last year, leaving current distillate fuel supplies still near the upper limit of the average range for this time of year...quickly running through other major refinery products, supplies of kerosene-type jet fuel were at 41,828,000 barrels as of January 22nd, also near the upper limit of the average range for this time of year...supplies of residual fuel oils, which are used to power ships and large boilers, were at 160,472,000 barrels, not a record but the highest since January 2011...and supplies of propane/propylene were at 83,695,000 barrels, down almost 15% since Christmas, but still well above the average range for this time of year...the point is that not only do we have record supplies of crude oil and gasoline, but also have a glut of all the other products refined from crude, suggesting that US refineries will ultimately be force to slow down before they're buried in their own output...
Why Gasoline Demand is Down
over the past several weeks i've been puzzling over stats and charts that showed that our gasoline consumption has been down considerably since the fall, and that it has now even fallen to below the level of last year for the last 4 weeks...those reports from the EIA did not seem to jive with reports from US automakers that 3 out of 4 new passenger vehicles they've been selling are gas guzzlers built on a truck frame, and reports from the Department of Transportation which showed that vehicle miles driven in the US surged 4.3% to a new record in November...this week i realized that what i have been failing to take into account was the fact that the new SUVs and pickup trucks being bought today are essentially replacing vehicles that are 15 or 20 years old that were getting much poorer gas mileage, so i went looking for the stats on that...it seems that even the government refers to data compiled by the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan, and i found a really neat graphic at their website which gives us an excellent picture of what is happening with fuel-economy in  the US light vehicle fleet, which i'm including below...
sales-weighted fuel-economy monthly:
January 28 2016 sales weighted miles per gallon
the above graph shows the average gas mileage for all the cars sold each month since October 2007, divided into mileage years that begin on each October 1st...we can see that the average gas mileage of cars sold in the US hit a peak at nearly 26 miles per gallon in July of 2014, a month after oil peaked at $107 a barrel and 3 months before the infamous OPEC meeting which crashed the price of oil, and it's been falling in an irregular fashion since, as Americans have been buying a greater percentage of SUVs and pickup trucks as passenger vehicles...we can see on the graph that as of December, new vehicles being purchased were still averaging 24.9 miles per gallon of gasoline, despite the fact that more than half of them were built on a truck frame...but the majority of cars that were being junked at the same time were likely sold well before the 2008 model year, and hence were getting less than 20 miles per gallon...so for the present, every new gas guzzler being bought is an improvement in gasoline consumption on the old cars heading for the junkyard, to the extent that we could eventually see a 20% reduction in gasoline consumption per mile driven as the entire fleet turns over...however, the current deterioration in average gas mileage for new vehicles is set to continue for some time, because current CAFE standards favor even heavier, larger pickups and are not due to be changed until the 2022 model year...
This Week's Rig Counts
lower prices continued to drive more drillers to the sidelines during the week ending January 29th as the total number of active drilling rigs deployed in the US fell for the 6th week in a row...Baker Hughes reported that the total active rig count fell by 18 to 619, as the count of active oil rigs fell by 12 to 498 while the count of active gas rigs fell by 6 to 121...those totals were down from 1223 oil rigs, 319 gas rigs and 1 miscellaneous rig that were actively drilling as of the last weekend of January a year ago, and by that time the rig count had already fallen from the peaks in the prior October and November...oil rigs had hit their fracking era high at 1609 working rigs on October 10, 2014, while the recent high for gas drilling rigs was the 356 rigs that were deployed on November 11th of that same year
one platform in the Gulf of Mexico was idled this week, after three were set up & startred drilling there last week, which left the active Gulf rig count at 28, down from 47 in the Gulf and 49 offshore a year ago...13 rigs that had been doing horizontal drilling were also shut down, cutting the horizontal rig count down to 487, which was down from 1168 in the same week a year ago....in addition, the count of active vertical drilling rigs was down by 3 from last week to 74, which was down from the 235 rigs that were drilling vertically on January 30th of 2015, and 2 directional rigs were also removed, leaving 58 active, down from the 140 directional rigs that were in use a year ago..
of the major shale basins, the Permian of west Texas alone accounted for most of the drop, as a net of 17 rigs that had drilling there last week were stacked, leaving 182, which was down from 454 that were drilling in the Permian last January 31st....the Barnett shale of the Dallas area, the Granite Wash of the Oklahoma-Texas panhandle region, the Marcellus of the northern Appalachians and the Williston of North Dakota all saw a net of one rig removed...those cuts left the Barnett with 3 rigs, down from 19 a year earlier, the Granite Wash with 13 rigs, down from last year's 40, the Marcellus with 34, down from 75 a year earlier, and the Williston with 44, down from 148 last year at this time...meanwhile, 2 rigs were added in the DJ-Niobrara chalk of the Rockies front range, which brought the count of rigs drilling in that area up to 21, which was still down from 51 a year earlier, and a single rig was added in the Mississippian of southwest Kansas, where the 11 rigs active this week was down from 54 in the same week of 2015...
the Baker Hughes state count tables show that Texas still had 281 rigs still working, down 13 from last week and down from 695 in the same week last year; New Mexico, which also claims some of the Permian basin, was down 4 rigs to 26, which was down from 87 rigs on January 31st of 2015...Louisiana saw 3 rigs stacked this week, leaving 51, which was down from 108 a year earlier, while Kansas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania were each down 1 rig, leaving Kansas with 9 rigs, down from 22 a year earlier, North Dakota with 44 rigs, down from 143 a year earlier, and Pennsylvania with 22 rigs, down from the 54 rigs that were drilling in the Keystone state at the end of January last year...states adding rigs this week included Alaska, where they were up 2 to 13, which was also up from 10 rigs a year earlier, Colorado, where they also added 2 rigs, bringing their count back up to 22, which was still down from last year's 63, and Oklahoma, where the addition of 1 rig brought their count to 88, still down from 183 a year ago at this time...
NB: more related links can be found here...



















Chamber of Commerce Lobbyist Tom Donohue: Clinton Will Support TPP After Election

Chamber of Commerce Lobbyist Tom Donohue: Clinton Will Support TPP After Election

Japan again denies coercion of sex slaves

Japan again denies coercion of sex slaves

Quotations From Madame Hillary

Quotations From Madame Hillary
“It’s Time for the United States to Start Thinking of Iraq as a Business Opportunity” (2011)
Eight years after the disastrous Iraq invasion that she advance-approved, Hillary spoke as Secretary of State to thirty senior US corporate executives gathered at a State Department Roundtable on Investment Opportunities in Iraq. “Iraq,” Madame Secretary Clinton informed her guests, “has one of the largest customer bases in the entire Arab world. It has one of the world’s largest supplies of oil. And so it’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity. Iraq is projected to grow faster than China in the next two years. I am very excited about what’s possible, and I’mvery hopeful about the future.”

Hillary Clinton’s Iraq War Albatross

Hillary Clinton’s Iraq War Albatross | Consortiumnews
This time around, Clinton supporters have been hoping that enough Democratic voters — the overwhelming majority of whom opposed the war — will forget about her strong endorsement of the Bush administration’s most disastrous foreign policy. Failing that, they’ve come up with a number of excuses to justify her October 2002 vote for the authorization of military force. Here they are, in no particular order:
–“Hillary Clinton’s vote wasn’t for war, but simply to pressure Saddam Hussein to allow UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq.”
At the time of vote, Saddam Hussein had already agreed in principle to a return of the weapons inspectors. His government was negotiating with the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission on the details, which were formally institutionalized a few weeks later. (Indeed, it would have been resolved earlier had the United States not repeatedly postponed a UN Security Council resolution in the hopes of inserting language that would have allowed Washington to unilaterally interpret the level of compliance.)
Furthermore, if then-Sen. Clinton’s desire was simply to push Saddam into complying with the inspection process, she wouldn’t have voted against the substitute Levin amendment, which would have also granted President Bush authority to use force, but only if Iraq defied subsequent UN demands regarding the inspections process. Instead, Clinton voted for a Republican-sponsored resolution to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing.
In fact, unfettered large-scale weapons inspections had been going on in Iraq for nearly four months at the time the Bush administration launched the March 2003 invasion. Despite the UN weapons inspectors having not found any evidence of WMDs or active WMD programs after months of searching, Clinton made clear that the United States should invade Iraq anyway.
Indeed, she asserted that even though Saddam was in full compliance with the UN Security Council, he nevertheless needed to resign as president, leave the country, and allow U.S. troops to occupy the country.

Hillary Clinton’s Own Petard

Hillary Clinton’s Own Petard | Consortiumnews


For instance, Hillary Clinton has told us that none of her Secretary of State emails were classified. Yet on Jan. 19, the intelligence community’s inspector general Charles McCulloughresponded to inquiries from Senate committees overseeing intelligence matters, saying that some of Clinton’s emails contained sensitive information above “top secret.”
“Several dozen additional classified emails have been found,” he reported, “including ones containing information from so-called ‘special access programs.’” The emails about special access programs were so sensitive that “McCullough and some of his aides had to receive clearance” to review the material.
Hillary Clinton’s hair-splitting distinction between what was labeled or marked “classified” at the time and what was in fact so sensitive that it deserved a “top secret” stamp (or higher) is irrelevant, for negligence is not a defense when it comes to national security information.

Waiting for the Perfect Storm by Pepe Escobar

Pepe ESCOBAR - Waiting for Perfect Storm - Strategic Culture Foundation - on-line journal > Waiting for Perfect Storm > Strategic-Culture.org - Strategic Culture Foundation

Sunday, January 24, 2016

the impact of additional crude from Iran on the global oil glut, et al

oil prices have been quite volatile this past week, dropping almost 4% when the market opened Tuesday, and then later soaring 21% from their Wednesday lows...recall that US crude prices for crude had fallen to 11 year and then to 12 year lows last week, when the contract price for February delivery started the week at $33.55 a barrel and fell to $29.42 by the Friday close, breaching $30 for the first time since 2003...US markets were closed Monday in observance of the MLK memorial holiday, but that oil contract price continued falling when the markets opened Tuesday, and ended the day at $28.46...at the same time, Brent oil, the international price benchmark which had fallen 6.3% on the prior Friday to close 48 cents a barrel below US prices, continued falling on Monday to close at $28.55, but rebounded to $28.76 a barrel on Tuesday...on Wednesday, as trading in the February contract for US crude was expiring, that price fell nearly 7% more to close at $27.55 a barrel, when global markets crashed as the greed sentiment indicator swung all the way to fear...meanwhile, while trading in February futures was closing out, the contract price for March delivery of US crude fell more than 4% to close Wednesday at $28.33 a barrel...with the March WTI contract now being quoted as the US price of oil, prices rose slightly to close at $27.88 a barrel on Thursday, and then rallied on Friday to close at $32.19 a barrel after citibank called oil "the trade of the year"...meanwhile, quotes for Brent oil rose over those same two days, rising to close at $29.25 a barrel on Thursday and to $32.18 at the end of the day on Friday, and hence the gap between the US price and the international price had closed to just a penny by the end of the week...so, to once again put this week's oil price changes in perspective, here's a graph of the March WTI contract oil price over the last three months:

January 23 2016 oil prices

once again, the above graph shows the daily closing contract price per barrel over the last 3 months for March delivery of the US benchmark oil, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), as traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange...as we explained last week, this market is where US oil prices are set, since the daily electronic trading of oil on this exchange is more than 100 times the total volume of physical oil produced in the US…looking at the current end of the graph, you can see all the sturm und drang over the past week has amounted to very little in the end, as oil prices have gone full circle and returned to their level of Thursday the 14th...

as we suggested last week, the primary driver for the dive in oil prices over the past few weeks has been the prospect that oil output from Iran would soon be returning to the global markets, exacerbating the ongoing oil glut...it so happens that the deal to end the sanctions on Iran that would allow its exports to flow was consummated last Saturday evening, probably while we were writing about it a week ago...in the immediate consequence of that, Iran will be increasing its crude output by 500,000 barrels per day over the next few months, which would add another half percent to total global oil supply each day....while that doesn't sound like much in the overall scheme of things, it would be adding substantially to the million and a half excess barrels of oil that producers currently need to find buyers for...facing this oil glut on Tuesday, the International Energy Agency warned that oil markets “could drown in oversupply” after three consecutive years over which oil production exceeded demand by more than 1 million barrels per day...to attempt to put that possibility in perspective, we'll include a few graphics from an oilprice.com article  entitled "The World Is Not Running Out Of Storage Space For Oil", which, by the way, isn't very convincing in making the point it's headline asserts...

January 23 2016 oil supply and demand

the above graph shows quarterly levels of global oil production in millions of barrels per day (mb/d, left margin) in green and global oil consumption of that oil in yellow, over the period starting in the first quarter of 2009 (1Q09) to the present, with estimates for both metrics going out to the 4th quarter of 2016 (4Q16)…then behind those ascending supply and demand lines are blue bars essentially showing the difference between the two, or the implied stock change, also in millions of barrels per day (mb/d, right margin); this is the amount of oil that was added to storage for each quarter when the bars pointed up, or the amount of oil that needed to be taken out of storage to meet demand when the blue bars pointed down…you can see that the green supply line has been rising fairly steadily till the recent quarters (end of 2015 is 5th from the right) when it began to turn down…but after the 1st quarter of 2016, green supply begins to rise again as Iranian output is added (as the note at the top of the graph says, they’re assuming Iran’s output will build up to an extra 600,000 barrels per day (600 kb/d) by June, adding to the 32.3 million barrels per day that OPEC countries are already producing)…demand for oil in yellow exhibits quite a seasonal pattern, up in the summer and down in the winter, and hasn’t been rising quite as fast as supply, leading to increases in the quantity left over that needs to be stored, as shown in the blue bars, over the past year and a half, which is projected to continue until the end of 2016…

the next graph we have shows the total amount of oil in storage in the OECD countries (the club of developed countries that are mostly oil importers) over the last two years, as compared to the 5 years prior to that:

January 23 2016 oil supply vs history

in the graph above, the black line shows the track of total stored supplies of crude oil in millions of barrels held monthly by OECD countries during 2015, while the light blue line shows the track of total inventories of crude oil in millions of barrels held by those countries during 2014...the light blue shaded area represents the range of oil inventories held by those same countries over the prior 5 years for the same time of year, essentially showing us the normal range of oil inventories held by the developed capitalist countries as they fluctuate from season to season, while the red line is the average amount of oil that was held in storage by those countries over the same 5 years, from 2010 to 2014...thus we can see that over the past year, a surplus of stored oil has built up in these developed countries that amounted to over 300 million barrels more than normal as of November, apparently the last date where such global data is available..also notice that this year oil supplies continued to build up slowly during the summer and fall, a time of year when oil inventories would normally be drawn down...

This Week's Stats from the EIA

this week's reports from the US Energy Information Administration showed still another small increase in our production of crude oil, a comparatively large drop in our oil imports, and another modest drop in refining of that crude, which nonetheless ended with a much larger surplus of unused oil left over than last week....our field production of crude oil inched up by another 8,000 barrels per day to 9,235,000 barrels per day during the week ending January 15th, up from 9,227,000 barrels per day the prior week, and once again our highest output of crude oil in any week since the 3rd week of August...that's now the 6th week in row that we've seen our oil output increase, even if only incrementally, as US oil wells continue to produce 1.2% more than the 9,121,000 barrels per day average they produced during September, and 0.5% more than 9,186,000 barrels per day than they produced in the same week a year ago, despite a 70% drop in active drilling rigs from the peak of October 2014 since then...

at the same time, our imports of crude oil fell by 409,000 barrels per day to a 7,779,000 barrels per day pace, partially reversing the 678,000 barrels per day increase in imports we saw during week ending January 8th...the pace of imports for the week ending January 15th was still 7.2% more than the 7,218,000 barrels per day we imported in the same week of 2015, and still left our 4 week average of our imports over 7.8 million barrels per day, which the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) tells us is 9.6% higher than our oil imports over the same four-week period last year...

meanwhile, the amount of that crude used by our refineries fell by 233,000 barrels per day to an average of 16,190,000 barrels per day during the week ending January 15th, down from an average of 16,423,000 barrels per day during the week ending January 8th...though that was the 4th consecutive drop in refinery throughput, it was still 8.6% more than a year ago, when refineries processed 14,909,000 barrels per day, and a record for refinery throughput in mid-January, when refineries are normally slowing down for the winter...hence it was no surprise that our refinery utilization rate also fell from 91.2% to 90.6%; by the 16th of January last year, it had already fallen to 85.5%...even so, our gasoline production rose for the 2nd week in a row, surging by 633,000 barrels per day to 9,453,000 barrels per day during week ending January 15th, 2.6% more than the 9,215,000 barrels per day production of gasoline a year earlier...meanwhile, our output of distillate fuels (ie, diesel fuel and heat oil) fell by 208,000 barrels per day to 4,552,000 barrels per day during week ending the 15th, which was also down by 216,000 barrels per day from the same week a year ago...with the increase in gasoline production, our end of the week supply of gasoline in storage rose for the 9th week in a row, increasing from 240,434,000 barrels last week to 244,997,000 barrels as of January 15th...that 4,563,000,000 barrel increase, combined with increases of 10,576,000 barrels and 8,438,000 barrels in each of the last two weeks, made for the largest 3 week increase in our stored gasoline in our history, and left our gasoline inventories well above the upper limit of the average range for this time of year....on the other hand, our distillate fuel inventories finally fell after 3 weeks of mid-winter increases had added 13 million barrels to our distillate stocks, as those inventories fell by 1,025,000 barrels to 164,529,000 barrels, down from 165,554,000 barrels on January 8th…that was still 20.6% higher than last January 16th's 136,579,000 barrels, also putting distillate fuel supplies well into the upper half of their normal range for this time of year... 

finally, in what is slowly becoming an anomalous metric, this week saw a large increase in our inventories of crude oil despite the much lower imports, whereas last week’s surge in imports barely nudged these supply figures at all...the EIA reported that our stocks of crude oil in storage, not counting what's in the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, rose by 3,979,000 barrels to 486,537,000 barrels on January 15th, up from 482,558,000 barrels as of January 8th...that was largely because the "adjustment" on line 13 of the U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet for the Week Ending 1/15/2016, which is Table 1 in the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (pdf) swung from a deficit of -459,000 barrels of oil per day last week to a surplus of 244,000 barrels per day this week, continuing the ongoing need to use an increasingly large fudge factor to balance this important market moving metric...nonetheless, the 482,558,000 barrels we have stored as of this report is still 22.3% higher than the 397,853,000 barrels we had stored the same week last year (when the adjustment was -87,000 barrels per day), and obviously the most we had stored any time in January in the 80 years of EIA record keeping, which had never seen more than 400 million barrels stored before January 23rd of last year...   

The Latest Active Rig Counts

there was just a modest drop in the number of active rigs drilling for oil and gas in the US the week ending January 22nd, as Baker Hughes reported that their count of active oil rigs fell by 5 to 510, and their count of active gas rigs fell by 8 rigs to 127, leaving a total of 637 rigs working at the end of the week, which was down from a total of 1663 rigs that were in use in the same week a year ago, with oil rigs down by 807 from 1317, and gas rigs down by 189 from 316 from that time...those year ago totals from last January 23rd were already well off their peaks; active oil rigs had been as high as 1609 on October 10, 2014, while the recent high for gas drilling rigs was the 356 that were running on November 11th of that same year...  

despite the overall decrease, a net of three Gulf of Mexico rigs were added this week, pushing the offshore count back up to 29, which was still down from 54 offshore rigs, and 53 in the Gulf, a year earlier...a net of 11 rigs that had been doing horizontal drilling were removed, leaving 500 rigs still drilling horizontally active in the US, down from 1229 a year ago...2 directional rigs were also removed, leaving 60, down from the 146 directional rigs that were in use a year ago...the count of active vertical drilling rigs, however, was unchanged from last week at 77, still down from the 258 rigs that were drilling vertically on January 23rd of 2015...

of the major shale basins, Haynesville shale of the Louisiana-Texas border region got rid of the most rigs this week, as they were down by 5 rigs to 18, which was down from the 42 rigs that were deployed in the Haynesville a year earlier...next, the Eagle Ford of south Texas was down 4 rigs to 64 this week, which was down from the 181 rigs deployed there last year at this time..both the Permian basin of west Texas and the Marcellus shale of the northern Appalachian region saw three rigs pulled out; that left the Permian with 199 rigs, down from 481 rigs a year earlier, and left the Marcellus with 35, down more than half from the 76 rigs deployed in the Marcellus the same week last year...two rigs were removed from both the Williston basin of North Dakota and the Mississippian of southwest Kansas; that left the Williston with 45, down from 153 rigs a year earlier, and the Mississippian with 10, down from 63 rigs at the end of the same week a year ago...single rig reductions were seen in the Arkoma Woodford of Oklahoma and the Barnett shale of the Dallas area of Texas, leaving the Arkoma Woodford with 7, still up from 5 a year earlier, and the Barnett with 4, down from 25 a year earlier...basins that saw drilling rigs added this week included the Cana Woodford of Oklahoma, where 2 rigs were added to bring their total to 39, still down from the year earlier 44, and the Utica shale of Ohio, where the addition of one rig brought the count up to 14, which was still down from the 46 rigs deployed in the Utica the same week a year ago..

the Baker Hughes state count tables show that Texas got rid of another 7 rigs this week, leaving 294 still drilling, down from 753 at the end of the same week last year...Pennsylvania saw 3 of its rigs removed, leaving 23, down from 53 rigs working on the 23rd of January last year...Kansas, New Mexico, and North Dakota each saw 2 rigs pulled out and stacked; that left Kansas with 10 rigs, down from 23 a year earlier, New Mexico with 30 rigs, down from last year's 89, and North Dakota with 45 rigs, down from the 147 that were drilling in the state in the same week a year ago...Alabama saw an offshore drilling rig removed from its waters; that left Alabama with a single rig on land, down from 7 land based rigs working in the state a year ago...and California also got rid of a rig this week, which left the state with 7, down from 15 a year ago...meanwhile, Alaska added 2 rigs, bringing their count back up to 11, the same as a year ago, and Illinois, Ohio and Mississippi all saw the addition of one rig...for Illinois, the new rig was the only rig, although they also had one working in the state a year earlier; Ohio's count was back up to 14 rigs, but still down from 44 a year ago, while Mississippi ended the week with 6 rigs, down from 9 on January 23rd of 2015....finally, in Louisiana, 4 drilling platforms went into operation offshore in the Gulf at the same time 4 land based rigs, two in the north and two in the south of the state, were removed; that left the Louisiana rig count unchanged at 54 rigs for the week, but still down from the 110 rigs that were working the state during the same week a year ago...


much more here...

Hillary's Record on Regulating Wall Street Amounts to a Non-Confidence Vote





Former regulator Bill Black and Public Banking Institute founder Ellen Brown say Hillary's track record gives no indication that she will fulfill any promise in her 2016 campaign to implement regulations on Wall Street

State Department seeks extension for Clinton emails release due to winter storms

State Department seeks extension for Clinton emails release | Reuters



Saturday, January 23, 2016

Hillary Clinton Laughs When Asked if She Will Release Transcripts of Her Goldman Sachs Speeches

Hillary Clinton Laughs When Asked if She Will Release Transcripts of Her Goldman Sachs Speeches

Netanyahu: Saudi Arabia sees Israel as an ally

PressTV-Netanyahu: Saudi sees Israel as ally

.............Daesh ideology is rooted in Wahhabism which is widely promoted by Saudi clerics and tolerated by the kingdom's rulers. Both Saudi Arabia and Israel support Takfiri groups fighting in Syria. Meanwhile, there is no known case of a Daesh attack on either Saudi or Israeli targets.................

Hmmmm makes one wonder, doesn't it. TDM



How We Can Overcome Oligarchy Disguised as Democracy

How We Can Overcome Oligarchy Disguised as Democracy



Of Course Clinton Has Foreign Policy Experience, But Her Experience Has Been a Total Disaster

Of Course Clinton Has Foreign Policy Experience, But Her Experience Has Been a Total Disaster

China supports Iran's application for full membership of SCO

China supports Iran's application for full membership of SCO - Xinhua | English.news.cn
IRAN-TEHRAN-CHINA-XI JINPING-VISIT

Color Footage of US Marines at Iwo Jima

Friday, January 22, 2016

Xi signs Egypt deals as China looks to boost Mideast clout

READ MORE

Hillary Clinton Seeks Neocon Shelter

READ MORE

US think tank CSIS recommends THAAD deployment on the Korean Peninsula

US think tank CSIS recommends THAAD deployment on the Korean Peninsula
A prominent US think tank recently published a report explicitly recommending the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system on the Korean Peninsula to Washington.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) also claimed a strong likelihood that the current regime in North Korea will collapse.
While the CSIS is widely recognized as a cradle for conservative security experts in the US - with a number of its Asia specialists having strong backgrounds on and sympathies toward Japan - the report’s recommendations are expected to generate some controversy because of their potentially large impact on the policy decisions of the US and other governments.
Titled “Asia-Pacific Rebalance 2025,” the report was published on Jan. 20 and commissioned by the US Department of Defense. In it, the importance of a THAAD deployment on the Korean Peninsula is stressed as a means of strengthening regional missile defense capabilities under the Asia-Pacific “rebalancing” strategy..........................................


While CSIS presented the report as an “independent” assessment, its content appears to reflect the interests of the US Department of Defense and defense industry, which would like to see an increased defense budget.
A financial report published in 2013 showed business (32%) and the government (19%) to account for a majority of CSIS revenues, not including those of its foundation (29%). Members of its board of trustees include the chairmen of Boeing and ExxonMobil. Many of its projects are studies commissioned by the Pentagon.
Also characteristic of CSIS reports are their emphasis on the China threat and defense of US and Japanese interests. In 2014, the New York Times reported that the institute had received at least US$1.1 million in support from the government-affiliated Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) over a four-year period.
By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

THAAD has absolutely nothing to do with the defense of S/Korea.
It is all about forming a new Pacific/Asia style of NATO.
The MIC must be fed.
Japan's new military policy is frightening and plays into the U.S. containment policy of China.
HERE IS a more in depth showing of how CSIS is an arm of CFR.
Tao Dao Man

Why South Korea has to say no to THAAD

Why South Korea has to say no to THAAD



Cosco agrees to pay 368.5m euros for control of key Greek port|Companies

Cosco agrees to pay 368.5m euros for control of key Greek port|Companies|chinadaily.com.cn

Saudi Arabia's Secret Holdings of U.S. Debt Are Suddenly a Big Deal

Saudi Arabia's Secret Holdings of U.S. Debt Are Suddenly a Big Deal - Bloomberg Business

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Oscars - Remember What Brando Did About Racism?


The Secret Behind the Next Gobal Crash by Pepe Escobar


The World Economic Forum in Davos is submerged by a tsunami of denials, and even non-denial denials, stating there won’t be a follow-up to the Crash of 2008.

Yet there will be. And the stage is already set for it.
Selected Persian Gulf traders, and that includes Westerners working in the Gulf confirm that Saudi Arabia is unloading at least $1 trillion in securities and crashing global markets under orders from the Masters of the Universe – those above the lame presidency of Barack Obama. 


Read more: http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20160121/1033486596/secret-behind-next-global-crash.html#ixzz3xtxAR5x7

Hillary Clinton Declares War on Single-Payer Health Care

Hillary Clinton Declares War on Single-Payer Health Care

Clinton has received more money from the pharmaceutical industry than any other candidate from either party in the 2016 election cycle.

Clinton's statements on single-payer include some myths that have long been perpetuated by the right.


Other "developed" nations spend about half as much on health care as the US and cover everyone.


How to respond to a critique that claims Sanders wants to dismantle Medicare? His plan - and just about every other single-payer bill (HR 676) he co-sponsored in the House of Representatives for years - does the exact opposite. Sanders' plan expands Medicare to cover everyone. Medicare is effectively a single-payer system for people over 65. Because it doesn't have to deal with countless private insurers, it has only 3.6 percent in administrative waste,compared to private insurance, which has about 31 percent in administrative waste. Canadian health care, incidentally, has less than 2 percent administrative waste.


To the Oligarchy, Democracy Is Just a Marionette to Be Manipulated

To the Oligarchy, Democracy Is Just a Marionette to Be Manipulated



Full Text of Chinese President's Signed Article on Iranian Newspaper

Full Text of Chinese President's Signed Article on Iranian Newspaper


China wades into the Iran-Saudi swamp by Pepe Escobar

China wades into the Iran-Saudi swamp — RT Op-Edge

Foreign Policy Diary - Private Military Companies in Iraq: Falcon Security

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Hillary Blames Bernie for an Old Clintonite Hustle, and That’s a Rotten Shame: Robert Scheer

Hillary Blames Bernie for an Old Clintonite Hustle, and That’s a Rotten Shame: Robert Scheer


The Clintons have no shame, that much you can count on. That stupefying arrogance was on full display in the most recent presidential campaign debate when Hillary Clinton countered Bernie Sanders’ charge that she was compromised by her close ties to Goldman Sachs and other rapacious Wall Street interests with the retort: “Sen. Sanders, you’re the only one on this stage that voted to deregulate the financial markets in 2000, ... to make the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission no longer able to regulate swaps and derivatives, which were one of the main causes of the collapse in ’08.” 
Hillary knows that the disastrous legislation, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), had nothing to do with Sanders and everything to do with then-President Bill Clinton, who devoted his presidency to sucking up to Wall Street. Clinton signed this bill into law as a lame-duck president, ensuring his wife would have massive Wall Street contributions for her Senate run. 
Sanders, like the rest of Congress, was blackmailed into voting for the bill because it was tucked into omnibus legislation needed to keep the government operating. Only libertarian Ron Paul and three other House members had the guts to cast a nay vote. The measure freeing Wall Street firms from regulation was inserted at the last moment in a deal between President Clinton and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm, R-Texas, who had failed in an earlier attempt to get the measure enacted. Clinton signed it into law a month before leaving office. 
Sanders soon figured out that he and almost all other Congress members had been tricked into providing a blank check for the marketing of bogus collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps made legal by the legislation, of which a key author was Gary Gensler, the former Goldman Sachs partner recruited by Clinton to be undersecretary of the treasury





Video Shows Earth-Penetrating Capability of B61-12 Nuclear Bomb - Federation Of American Scientists

Video Shows Earth-Penetrating Capability of B61-12 Nuclear Bomb - Federation Of American Scientists
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