BLKNSTY

i can’t see how it isn’t an israeli missile. every single video I’ve seen of a hamas rocket explosion seems like it has barely enough explosive power to light a couple smart cars on fire. like a dozen grenades or so tied together. this one just wiped the whole hospital and a cool thousand people off the face of the map, I know hospitals keep lots of pressurized o2 but damn. i think this is going to be huge turning point, no way the millions of the locally displaced palestinians don’t crank up the pressure in jordan/egypt/lebanon/syria. can’t see israel launching a ground invasion of gaza now.

If VY had a 14 yr NFL career with 2 SBs, 6x First Team All-Pro, 1st Team HOF and I had to choose b/w him and Tom Herman. I’m taking VY 10 times out of 10.

as a person who considers himself fairly rational, i’d like to better understand why a former player would be saying that. and I’d be up there pen and paper in hand if that former player is arguably the greatest athlete we’ve ever seen (only other two that are even in the conversation are MJ and Barry as I think playing in two American pro-leagues while completely and utterly dominating one of the two is a prerequisite). would be willing to include Ohtani on the basis of leading a pro-baseball team in HRs and ERA. maybe Steph Curry cause he has 4 rings, is the best 3 pt shooter ever and can go out and shoot a 72 from the tips is also absurd. but I think he’s even further separated himself from these GOATs because he decided to get into coaching young men at the collegiate level on 8 toes! 8 fucking toes! literally sacrificed his body for his team! Fundamentally though, I think it’s a bit whack when people claim they’re Longhorns w/o actually graduating from the school. I’m a fan of the Buffs, but wouldn’t ever claim to be a Buff. reverse applies too so Deion IMO is not a Nole. FSU fans publicly dying on this hill is just dumb as hell. view from the cheap seats - Deion just needs four to six, 300 to 320 lb 6’2 to 6’6 corn fed IA/LA/TX mfs (maybe a dreadhead or two from Central FL that can cover sideline to sideline) and I think he finds that easily this off-season. also, anyone else who compares Sanders (a mf first team NFL HOFer and is on track to be the 5th person to be inducted into the CFB HOF as both a player and coach) to either aggy (50,000 ppl with delusions of grandeur) and Baker (a journeymen QB playing on his 4th team in 4 years and will most likely never start an NFL SB game) will be reported to the proper authorities.

Shane Gillis special is incredible. Ended up with me watching all his Gilly and Keeves sketches on YouTube. ISIS Toyota, Last White Football Team, Uncle Daycare, Militia Funeral. Had a interview on the JRE podcast and he talks about getting hired by SNL and then immediately getting canceled, gotta give Lorne Michaels some credit on that one.

any chance they said how long they have these deals? If it’s 10-20 years, $RIOT should be a billion dollar company soon.

not at all. the prison system and meat processing (especially in the panhandle) are notorious for exploiting immigrants by taking advantage of their green card status. shut up do your job or the various agencies we have connections with will hold your path to citizenship hostage. the 102 children as young as 13 working hazardous overnight jobs cleaning slaughterhouses is another example.

pretty sure they’re immigrants. no way an American-born wouldn’t just leave.

Sauce vs Wilson with Rodgers slingin’ is about as best of a practice session you could ask for.

yup. just got to do a little song and dance first.

sheeesh. we'll take it.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/ThingsTODoPineIsland/permalink/5699836980048380/?mibextid=kkiIlp seems like the whole of pine island, sanibel island and matlacha are cutoff from the mainland. wonder if they have something equivalent to the cajun navy, lots of elderly with medical issues stayed behind based on the comments.

Might have something to do with this: Six oil and gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico have been shut after a leak at a Louisiana booster station halted two pipelines in the region. Shell Plc on Thursday shut its Mars and Amberjack pipelines which together can move as much as 500,000 barrels a day of oil from the Gulf of Mexico to the coast. That resulted in the closure of Shell’s Mars, Ursa and Olympus fields, as well as Chevron Corp.’s Jack/St. Malo, Tahiti and Big Foot fields, the companies said. Should be back by Friday tho. 500k/day is a lot. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I live in SD and was wondering why it’s been so humid recently so I asked around. Apparently it’s Mexican Monsoon season. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_monsoon?wprov=sfti1

This would doom the D's in 2024 with a lame duck prez the next two years. As much as I want to criticize the Big Guy, but he's absolutely right on how he's playing it now IMO.

The Midwest grid operator approved 18 new high-voltage transmission lines yesterday, setting the stage for adding 53 gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid Nothing to do with ERCOT, but I thought this was relevant.

Under the Banner of Heaven on Hulu? If so, that was all I could think about reading this thread. Highly recommend even though I may be a Lamanite.

I feel like that article goes out of its way to mention that the dogs have not been euthanized yet or even will be. Thats wild.

Not sure if connected.

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/texas-power-grid-woes-hit-toyota-tesla He should probably tell that to Toyota, Samsung, etc… Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Nah, that was the Comanche curse. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I’d argue that these are all fairly moderate positions If you take away the politically charged rhetoric. The extreme “left” on all this is free college for all with a healthy stipend, a mandate the SC be made up of a minimum of 1 person if ethnicity/gender/sexual preference, mandating that each OBGYN/surgeon must perform abortions, no more drone strikes, etc. HRC, Obama, Biden (the mf who championed the fucking 94 crime bill), Kamala (a fuckin cop) are more akin to Collins, Manchin, and Sinema than my homies Beto, Petey B, AYANG. DeSantis/Trump/Pence are on the other end of the spectrum from Mitt and McCain.

From today's RBN Energy, I think the refinery restarts and new builds coming online over the next few months is why crude/refined products are bearish. We often tend to focus on the U.S. refining picture, but, just like crude oil, refined products trade globally, and international closures ultimately have the same effect as domestic ones on the worldwide products market. Recent international closures have been distributed throughout the world — concentrated in developed countries, including several in Europe, as well as Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, but also in some developing economies like South Africa and Sri Lanka. Most of these capacity reductions were driven by the same forces as in the U.S., namely, poor economics as a result of the pandemic-lockdown-driven demand plunge in 2020 and 2021, as well as expectations that margins would take a long time to recover post-COVID. Of course, worries that the energy transition and policies to that end would suppress demand in the long-term also played a key role, as did some fundamental competitiveness issues at individual facilities. In today’s RBN blog, we take a closer look at the more than 2 MMb/d of international capacity closures since 2019. The first blog in this series reviewed the roughly 1.3 MMb/d of North American refinery capacity reductions that have occurred since 2019, and the additional 400 Mb/d planned to be taken offline over the next two years. But unlike in the U.S., where the refining industry had been adding capacity prior to 2019, Europe has experienced a long-term decline in refining capacity due to sluggish demand and decreased competitiveness. Since 1980, the continent’s refinery capacity (excluding Turkey and the former USSR) has fallen by almost 8 MMb/d (a decline of more than a third; stacked bars in Figure 1). Most recently, Europe lost about 3 MMb/d of refinery capacity from 2006 through 2017 (dashed red box), before a brief “European Spring,” inspired by lower crude costs and a bump in demand, led to a few years of better margins. The good times came to an abrupt end with the COVID-related lockdowns, and since the beginning of 2020, Europe has lost an additional 800 Mb/d of refining capacity through complete and partial closures. Figure 1. European Refinery Capacity. Sources: BP and RBN Refined Fuels Analytics Certainly, the negative demand environment in Europe in recent years (shown by the blue line in Figure 2) has been a major factor in the long-term rationalization trend there. Some of this is due to slower economic growth on the continent. Another major factor has been the earlier and more aggressive moves that European governments –– and ultimately even energy companies –– have made on climate change initiatives, which discourage petroleum demand and carbon-intensive industrial activity, like refining. Figure 2. European and U.S. Petroleum Demand. Sources: EIA, BP, RBN Refined Fuels Analytics As we discussed in Part 1, the U.S. refining industry has been able to respond to the slowdown in domestic demand (red line in Figure 2) by tapping into the export markets. Unfortunately, this path was unavailable to European refineries due to a number of factors, including lower size and complexity, more government regulation, and (more recently) higher natural gas and crude oil prices. The higher natural gas and crude costs for European refiners are rooted in the Shale Revolution, with the benefits of each emerging for U.S. refiners around 2008 and 2011, respectively. Further, the U.S.’s relative advantage in this area has grown significantly in the past year with Russian sanctions pushing European natural gas and crude costs even higher. All of the fully shuttered facilities in the latest round of rationalization in Europe were smaller, simpler plants that were already at risk of being shut down before the European Spring extended their lives. These facilities include: Gunvor’s 80 Mb/d and 110 Mb/d refineries in Rotterdam and Antwerp, respectively. TotalEnergies’s 110 Mb/d refinery in Grandpuits, France. Exxon’s 121 Mb/d refinery in Slagen, Norway. Eni’s 84 Mb/d refinery in Livorno, Italy. INA/MOL’s 44 Mb/d refinery in Sisak, Croatia. Neste’s 100 Mb/d refinery in Naantali, Finland. Galp’s 110 Mb/d refinery in Porto, Portugal. Others have closed older and/or less efficient “trains,” while maintaining operations at the more profitable units at their refineries. A train is defined as a single string of units used for processing crude oil into refined products. Most large refineries have multiple trains and/or redundant units and can, in many respects, be thought of as two (or more) refineries located at a single site with shared logistics, infrastructure and utilities. The most important partial closure in Europe was a 65 Mb/d capacity cut at Ineos’s Grangemouth, UK, plant. Still others have decreased crude oil capacity to increase coprocessing capacity for renewable feedstocks (primarily vegetable oils). In the U.S., standalone renewable diesel (RD) plants are more popular than coprocessing facilities because our subsidy regime favors standalone operations –– namely the $1/gal Blender’s Tax Credit (BTC), which applies only to RD produced at a standalone RD unit. In Europe, however, coprocessing and standalone RD production receive roughly the same level of incentives and subsidies, so coprocessing is more popular there. Many of these capacity reductions are smaller and more difficult to track, but companies throughout Europe have increased coprocessing in response to incentives and subsidies, as well as weak petroleum refining margins throughout 2020 and 2021. South Africa saw a considerable number of refinery closures throughout the pandemic — four refineries (including one gas-to-liquids plant) — losing 460 Mb/d of capacity over the past year and a half. South African refining margins have been falling over the past several years as facilities there have been forced to compete with new, larger, more complex export-oriented refineries in the Middle East. Two of the shuttered South African refineries are pursuing a restart in late 2022 or early 2023 (with the government desiring to purchase and restart one), but the likelihood that both will successfully resume operations remains low. In fact, it is entirely possible that neither is able to successfully restart. The country’s 45 Mb/d gas-to-liquids plant, located in Mossel Bay, was also forced to close due to a lack of natural gas feedstock as the reservoir supplying the facility has been depleted. In Asia, significant closures have occurred in Japan, Singapore and the Philippines. (China is a special case and will be the subject of its own blog). The Japanese refining industry has consolidated over the past decade or so and refineries have shut down –– and will continue to do so –– in line with declining domestic demand. Japan has no advantages regarding product exports –– crude has to be imported and fuel/natural gas costs are high –– so refiners see their best option as simply to produce enough fuel to supply the shrinking domestic market. Eneos (the country’s largest refiner) closed its 115 Mb/d Osaka plant in 2020 and plans to close another 120 Mb/d refinery later this year and a 125 Mb/d refinery in the fourth quarter of 2023. Shell cut the capacity of its Singapore refinery by half –– from 500 Mb/d to 250 Mb/d –– in 2020 and permanently closed its 110 Mb/d refinery in the Philippines around the same time. Sri Lanka also closed its only refinery, a 50 Mb/d state-owned facility, in late 2021 due to a shortage of funds. The Sri Lankan government is pursuing a restart, but given the current chaos in the country, success appears unlikely. Australia and New Zealand, combined, lost 371 Mb/d of refining capacity across three refineries during the pandemic, with the most recent of the closures being New Zealand’s Marsden Point refinery, which was shut down in March this year. Australia could also have plausibly seen the closure of its two remaining refineries (combined capacity of 230 Mb/d), but the government stepped in to provide financial assistance to keep them operating for at least another five years. Altogether (excluding China), the U.S. and the rest of the world have experienced more than 3 MMb/d of refinery closures since January 1, 2020, and only about 1.5 MMb/d of new capacity additions over the same time period, meaning current global refining capacity outside China is down by about 1.5 MMb/d when compared with January 1, 2020. Still, some significant new capacity is expected both this year and next, and refining capacity additions over the next 18 months are expected to exceed demand growth over the same period. Outside of China, the Middle East will add the most new capacity. Kuwait’s 615 Mb/d Al-Zour refinery is expected to start up by the end of this year, as is Oman’s 230 Mb/d Duqm plant. India will add nearly 500 Mb/d of capacity by the end of 2023 and ExxonMobil and Valero will add 250 Mb/d and 100 Mb/d, respectively, of capacity on the U.S. Gulf Coast next year. Dangote Group wants to start up its 650 Mb/d refinery in Nigeria by the end of 2022, but given the track record of refining in Africa it’s likely that this project will be delayed until at least 2023, and possibly further. Additionally, the refinery may have trouble maintaining reasonable utilization rates. There’s also the possibility for about 200 Mb/d to 400 Mb/d of refinery restarts, including those discussed above. Further, the pace of closures will undoubtedly slow down compared to what we’ve seen over the past couple years, though as we’ve noted, significant closures are still planned in the U.S., Europe and Japan for this year and next. Figure 3 shows historical and projected refining capacity additions (and contractions) at the beginning of each year as compared to January 1, 2017. The new capacity additions are clearly visible here. Figure 3. Change in Global (ex-China) Refinery Capacity vs January 1, 2017. Sources: BP, RBN Refined Fuels Analytics While these new capacity additions will go a long way towards balancing the market, the outlook for refining margins will also depend on the pace of demand growth, the resolution (or lack thereof) of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, and Chinese policy regarding refined product exports. (Russian and Chinese refineries will be the subject of an upcoming blog.) However, unless we see a complete reversal of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy, it appears that global refining capacity will remain tight compared to 2019 (pre-COVID) levels, but looser than it is today. As we look to 2024 and beyond, the outlook for refining capacity additions looks murkier as new project announcements slowed down during 2020 and 2021, and some planned projects were canceled altogether. Further, many companies are hesitant to make large investments in the space given the uncertain outlook for petroleum demand later this decade, but particularly after 2030. As such, if petroleum demand continues to grow somewhere close to historical rates through the rest of this decade, we could see something of a repeat of the “Golden Age of Refining,” the period of strong global refining margins preceding the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09.

The power outages are fundamentally because we are short dependable and dispatchable power in Texas. We can’t get it from anywhere else because we physically aren’t connected to the other power grids in the US. So our only options are generating more power in Texas (which falls on our nat gas power plant owners like NRG, Vistra, etc.) or joining the other power grids (hah). The responsibility to foresee this and manage this through the numerous tools they have available falls to ERCOT, and ERCOT alone, at the direction of the Governor. There are numerous issues as to why we are short dependable and dispatchable power. NUMEROUS. but those numerous issues all have proven solutions. some of those solutions require tough decisions which you’ll probably be villified over. but if engineering teaches you anything, you can’t keep putting bandaids on issues that can cause catastrophic effects. Which we’ve already seen that once with the lack of weatherization and frozen gas pipes. For the next 60 days between 2-8PM, we are one 2-3 GW power plant failure away from a pretty detrimental situation. That power plant failure could be cause by a number of different issues. The low hanging fruit/bandaid with asking folks to conserve electricity has already been picked. I don’t have any clue what else ERCOT is doing though. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk