THEY ARE COOKING THE BOOKS

Submitted by Dirtperson Steve

Remember when there was a surprise jobs data release when Obama was President right before an election? Then, a month after they found a “clerical error” had overstated jobs data by a lot. Now they are understating gasoline use which drives down prices in the open market and the pump, just in time for the election. Even Bloomberg reported on this since the numbers don’t add up.

After their correction prices will skyrocket.

Oilprice.com

Dodgy Demand Data? The Oil Price Collapse Conspiracy

  • WTI oil prices have given up nearly all their gains since Russia invaded Ukraine, falling roughly 9.5% over the course of the week amid fears oil demand is collapsing.
  • Some oil pundits are now claiming that the Biden administration has been fabricating low gasoline demand data in order to drag prices lower.
  • While Gasbuddy claims there was a 2% rise in gasoline demand last week, the EIA reported a 7.6% drop in demand.

Continue reading “THEY ARE COOKING THE BOOKS”

$8 Per Gallon Gasoline Is On The Way: Bring Back The Wild Cats And Ditch The Mad Dogs

Via Blue State Conservative

The term wildcatter is seldom heard anymore, seldom used. It has (or had) a romantic ring to it once-upon-a-time. Probably, today, it is better left among its own: That ownership of the term is wherever the spirit of men like Michael Halbouty or Glen McCarthy (both of Texas), or The Hughes brothers, Dan and Dudley (Texas and Mississippi), or perhaps the granddaddy and most colorful of all wildcatters, Columbus (Dad) Joiner, an old Alabama country boy who at the ripe old age of 70 promoted and sold (and oversold) The East Texas Field, the largest in the world at the time.

Continue reading “$8 Per Gallon Gasoline Is On The Way: Bring Back The Wild Cats And Ditch The Mad Dogs”

HOW MANY SHALE OIL PLAYS MAKE MONEY AT $37 PER BARREL?

I’m tossing you a softball. Now think carefully. The choices are:

A. Zero

B. Zero

C. Zero

D. Zero

I know Americans are math challenged and need a calculator to subtract 10 from 20, but I think even a CNBC bimbo or Princeton economic professor could get this one right.

Last year there was much banter from the Wall Street shysters and Bakkan shale oil experts about the true breakeven price for shale oil not being $80 (which is the truth) but actually being as low as $58 a barrel. They were spreading this lie in order to keep idiot investors buying the stocks and bonds of these fly by night shale oil companies.

 

Well, we are now six months further down the line and Bakkan shale oil this morning is selling for $37 per barrel. Where are the babbling baboons of bullshit with storylines of shale oil breakeven prices of $30? I guess even corrupt lying scum can’t work up the gumption to try and convince the ignorant masses of that doozy.

Think about this for a minute. What business in their right mind would start a project that is guaranteed to lose $43 per barrel produced? How long will these small shale oil companies with gobs of junk bond debt last at these prices? The answer is easy. Not long. The bankruptcies have begun. The rig counts are collapsing at the fastest pace in history. And the number of layoffs is increasing exponentially. It’s like watching a devastating car crash in slow motion. And it has only just begun.

And as OilPrice.com’s Andrew Topf explains it’s going to get worse…

100,000 Layoffs And Counting: Is This The New Normal?

This time a year ago, the oil industry’s biggest problem was finding a way to deal with the “retirement tsunami” about to crash down on it as older oilfield workers hung up their cork boots to enjoy freedom-55. Now, with oil prices still in the doldrums, many of those same workers are lucky to be hanging onto their jobs, while others have been booted from the payroll as an ugly wave of layoffs takes hold.

One of the worst-affected areas is the Canadian oil sands, where a higher per-barrel cost of production than conventional sources has oil companies scrambling to cut capital expenditures and in several cases, put long-term projects on ice.

On Thursday one of the region’s big players, Husky Energy, announced that about 1,000 construction workers employed by a contractor at its Sunrise oilsands project, would be issued pink slips. The bad news for the workers came a day after Husky said that it had started to produce from the $3.2 billion, steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) Sunrise operation, which it co-owns with BP.

The layoffs by Husky followed Suncor’s decision in January to cut 1,000 employees and Royal Dutch’s Shell’s announcement that it will shed close to 10 percent of the workforce at its Albian sands project – around 300 workers.

The Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors, which closely tracks drilling activity, said in February that up to 23,000 jobs could be lost as the number of rigs fall. Since the price started dropping last September, about 13,000 positions in the Alberta natural resources sector, mostly oil and gas, have been eliminated, according to Statistics Canada.

The bloodletting among the oil majors and their vast web of ancillary services has of course extended to the United States – which appears to be taking far more casualties than Saudi Arabia in the battle for marketshare. In January oilfield services giant Baker Hughes said it will lay off 7,000 employees, about 11 percent of its workforce; that number was rivalled only by its competitor, Schlumberger, which let go 9,000 workers. Shell, Apache, Pemex and Halliburton are among major oil companies to issue recent pink slips to the growing army of unemployed oil workers. In the U.S., the worst pain is, not shockingly, expected to be felt in Houston. Assuming a one-third reduction in oil company capital expenditures this year and 5 percent in 2016, the hydrocarbon capital of the world could lose 75,000 jobs, in a city that has added 100,000 new positions every year since 2011, said a professor at the University of Houston.

The oil jobs nightmare is in fact spreading like a cancer. According to Swift Worldwide Resources, “the number of energy jobs cut globally has climbed well above 100,000 as once-bustling oil hubs in Scotland, Australia and Brazil, among other countries, empty out,” Bloomberg reported recently. Examples include foreign-trained engineers whose promise of employment at LNG plants in Australia have evaporated as projects get delayed; development projects halted in Brazil resulting in the closure of international schools and the relocation of workers; and 8,000 Mexican workers left without paycheques after Petroleos Mexicanos slashed contracts and purchases, Bloomberg said.

Of course, industry defenders say the oil and gas business is boom and bust by nature, and most veteran oilmen have gone through many a cyclical downturn and lived to fight another day. The question of whether or when the oil price will recover and all those laid-off workers are rehired is best left to the prognosticators. In the meantime, there is a danger in oil companies cutting too deep, according to oil and gas industry recruiters. They say firms that lay off too many workers will put pressure on older workers who may opt for early retirement. That could leave companies in the same situation as the 1980s, when an oil downturn meant few businesses hired and new graduates went into other more promising fields, leaving a serious talent gap.

“They will be very careful about reducing staff, because they’ve seen cycles like this before where commodity prices are weak for a certain period time, they lay off employees and they’re not well-positioned to get access to high-quality talent,” said Mike Rowe, vice president of exploration and production research at Tudor Pickering Holt, an energy investment and merchant bank, in a story run by CNBC on how the layoffs could come back to haunt the industry.

By the time this plays out, North Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma, and parts of Pennsylvania will be in smoldering ruins of unemployment and dramatically reduced tax revenues. These energy jobs were high paying. Maybe they can get themselves an Obama job – waiter, bartender, hotel room cleaner, social worker, or government drone.

HMMM. HOW CONVENIENT – DEBT, DRONES & DEMAGOGUES

So Iran shoots down one of our drones. Now the questions. Are we flying spy drones over Iran in order to provoke them into doing something stupid? Did we purposely allow it to be shot down? Will Iran’s blustering and threats to retaliate allow the U.S. to create a foreign conflict in order to take the focus off our imploding economy? China declared last week that they would be willing to go to war in support of Iran. Are we approaching an Archduke Ferdinand moment when countries are forced to choose sides in order to not lose face? Could our Fourth Turning War be just over the horizon? If conflict starts with Iran, what will happen to the price of oil? How many more liberties and freedoms will be sacrificed when the oligarchs lead us into another undeclared war of choice?

If you don’t fly spy drones over foreign countries that we are not at war with, they can’t get shot down. How would we react if China or Russia was flying spy drones over the U.S.?

The ignorant masses will be convinced that Iran is at fault and deserves to be obliterated. Comfortably numb.

Iran Military Shoots Down US Drone, Threatens Response

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/04/2011 10:05 -0500

From PressTV:

A senior Iranian military official says Iran’s Army has shot down a remote-controlled reconnaissance drone operated by the US military in the eastern part of the country.

The informed source said on Sunday that Iran Army’s electronic warfare unit successfully targeted the American-built RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft after it crossed into Iranian airspace over the border with neighboring Afghanistan.

He added that the US reconnaissance drone has been seized with minimum damage.

The RQ-170 is a stealth unmanned aircraft designed and developed by Lockheed Martin Company.

The US military and the CIA use the drone to launch missile strikes in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region.

The unnamed Iranian military official further added that “due to the clear border violation, the operational and electronic measures taken by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Armed Forces against invading aircraft will not remain limited to the Iran’s borders.

The report comes as the United States has beefed up its military presence in and around the Persian Gulf region in recent months in the wake of popular uprising in Bahrain.

The US Department of Defense says Washington is closely monitoring the developments in Bahrain, which is the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet and holds some 4,200 US service members.

From Reuters:

Iran’s military said on Sunday it had shot down a U.S. reconnaissance drone aircraft in eastern Iran, a military source told state television.

“Iran’s military has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran,” Iran’s Arabic-language Al Alam state television network quoted the unnamed source as saying.

“The spy drone, which has been downed with little damage, was seized by the Iranian armed forces.”

Iran shot down the drone at a time when it is trying to contain foreign reaction to the storming of the British embassy in Tehran on Tuesday, shortly after London announced that it would impose sanctions on Iran’s central bank in connection with Iran’s controversial nuclear enrichment programme.

Britain evacuated its diplomatic staff from Iran and expelled Iranian diplomats in London in retaliation, and several other EU members recalled their ambassadors from Tehran.

The attack dragged Iran’s relations with Europe to a long-time low.

Washington and EU countries have been discussing measures to restrict Iran’s oil exports since the United Nations nuclear watchdog issued a report in November with what it said was evidence that Tehran had worked on designing an atom bomb.  

And from AP:

Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency says the country’s armed forces have shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane that violated Iranian airspace along its eastern border.

The report says the plane was an RQ170 type drone and is now in the possession of Iran’s armed forces. The Fars news agency is close to the powerful Revolutionary Guard.

Iran is locked in a dispute with the U.S. and its allies over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program, which the West believes is aimed at the development of nuclear weapons. Iran denies the accusations, saying its nuclear program is entirely peaceful.

It appears Iran plans to retaliate:

Iran’s response to the downed U.S. drone’s violation of its airspace will not be limited to the country’s borders, a military source told state television.

“The Iranian military’s response to the American spy drone’s violation of our airspace will not be limited to Iran’s borders any more,” Iran’s Arabic language Al Alam television quoted the military source as saying, without giving details.

Iran said in July it had shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane over the holy city of Qom, near its Fordu nuclear site.

As a reminder from Stratfor, here is how the US navy was deployed most recently as of Wednesday. Looks like life for the Stennis boys is about to get exciting.