April 2009 Archives

Volatility is a term that gets thrown around a lot around the petroleum markets, especially in times like these, as NYMEX futures reach its monthly expiration.

In a brief report, "Intra-Day Price Volatility: A Look at the Face and Potential Implications," DTN's Laurence Cohen says with increased volatility, the amount of intra-day price changes from gasoline suppliers jumped as they began to sharply increase the frequency of 6pm effective times for rack prices, accelerating a trend away from the once-a-day midnight price change that has been going on several years.

What exactly is E15 and what does it mean for transportation fuels here in the US?

The Environmental Protection Agency's review of a possible hike in ethanol blend levels for conventional vehicles has called into question the use of what many are calling "E15," a term commonly misconstrued as a 15% ethanol-gasoline blend.

When members of the Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America gather each fall and spring, meetings of the legislative affairs committee always draw a crowd. The forum covers a broad spectrum of topics - from global warming to renewable fuels to tobacco regulations - and it gives members a chance to learn about government actions that might affect them and an opportunity to weigh in with opinions.

This year was no exception. Members packed a ballroom at SIGMA's spring meeting in San Antonio for a three-hour briefing Friday by outside counsel Tim Columbus. On the agenda:

Counting of votes has ended in South Africa's elections and Jacob Zuma, the mercurial leader of African National Congress, is on his way to becoming the republic's fourth president in the post-apartheid era.

The ANC was racing against itself Friday afternoon, leaving its opponents far behind and closing in on the much sought after two-thirds majority.

House Republican Leader John Boehner, Ohio, talking with ABC"s George Stephanopoulos on April 19, was absolutely spot-on when he said, "Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide." Who can quarrel with that?

But Boehner strayed into the realm of make-believe when he said, "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical."

For the last several months, Platts' Hong Kong correspondent Winnie Lee has been pulling together the disparate flow of data out of China to put together a single Chinese demand figure.

Up until about a year ago, that figure might have been the most significant one in the entire oil industry, as it was Chinese demand that was one key factor in propelling prices to their record levels of last July.

It's not clear when the American Petroleum Institute expanded its mandate to represent the baked goods industry, but in a statement responding to the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed greenhouse gas endangerment finding it warned that the proposal could result in complex and costly requirements on bakeries.

The API also raised the possibility of those requirements falling on restaurants, colleges, schools, shopping malls, and many other businesses and institutions, presumably including the oil and gas industry. The proposed finding poses a danger "to the American economy and every American family," API said.

Antarctica is a frozen continent, but in a world riven by warfare and strife it may be the only truly peaceable kingdom. It is, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week, "one of the few places on Earth where there has never been war."

Of course, Antarctica is inhabited by sea birds and marine mammals and has no permanent human habitation, just visitors bent on scientific research.

A year ago, it was conventional wisdom everywhere: the US needed to build new refining capacity. The fact that it had not was a national disgrace, according to numerous pundits.

Take, for example, the June 2, 2008 posting by Dr. Mark J. Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan at Flint. He writes on the widely-read Carpe Diem blog.

It's one thing for House Republicans to estimate the cost of cap-and-trade legislation based on a report from the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It's quite another thing to stand by the estimate when you're told by one of the report's authors that you have it wrong.

It looked like the opportunity of a lifetime.

The April 3 email from a director at London-based oil major BP sought my help in redirecting 65,000GBP ($92,287) to a "non-resident" account so the company could more easily work on a "specified Industrial Project at the Middle East."

And the director, Andrew Inglis, offered 40% of the total as compensation for my troubles. All I had to do was reply with "a brief information about you and your your business."

Nigeria's oil industry already in the spotlight over the last few years owing to incessant militant attacks and crime, narrowly escaped the fallout from a clumsy bureaucratic blunder that would have delayed the delivery of a total 6 million barrels of crude to the international markets.

Local reports said state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation's plans to export six tankers of 1 million barrels of crude on Wednesday from various terminals across the country may have been jettisoned after the oil regulatory agency failed to get an export permit from the ministry of commerce in time.

The study announced by Cambridge Energy Research Associates last week, laying out what it sees as a projected cutback in production due to ongoing cutbacks in capital spending, gets a little more support in the real world every day.

What CERA is writing about hasn't stopped. The CERA report came out Friday, March 27. In the 7-day period surrounding that release, the following developments have been recorded, to help support CERA's theory: