Steve Bull's Blog, page 204
August 4, 2022
German Oil Refiner Observes “Run” On Diesel & Heating Oil, Halts Deliveries
The latest sign Europe’s energy problems are worsening is that Austrian oil and gas firm OMV AG halted crude product deliveries from storage facilities in Germany amid a “run” on supplies, Bloomberg reported.
OMV Germany said two storage facilities in the southern part of the country “are observing a current run on heating oil and … this is possibly due to crisis-driven market shortages and thus excessive speculation and stockpiling.”
“In order to secure supplies in the short and medium term, loading will now be temporarily suspended until the Burghausen refinery has resumed production,” OMV said in an emailed response, adding Burghausen and Feldkirchen’s storage facilities will restart deliveries on Aug. 15.
A combination of issues has led to diesel and heating oil in southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
First is the energy disruption due to Western sanctions on Russia.Second OMV’s Burghausen refinery maintenance.And third, falling water levels on the Rhine River have reduced deliveries of crude product shipments from the North Sea.The panic hoarding of diesel and heating fuel likely comes from utilities who have had to switch the type of power generation from natural gas to other crude products due to capacity constraints on the Nord Stream 1.
German power prices have soared to a new record of more than 400 euros per megawatt-hour on the European Energy Exchange on Thursday on the prospects of a worsening energy crisis.
With Brent crude prices tumbling below $100 a barrel, it appears the paper oil market is out of touch with the tightness reality of physical markets.
Is a Partial Collapse Possible? — Part 2
Image credit: Himesh Kumar Behera via UnsplashAfter exploring the possible ways the West could (continue to) collapse in Part 1 , let’s turn our mental gaze towards the East, and see what are the global implications of such a shift in centers of power — if there are any…
No single crisis is permanent — it is a series of them which will cease to end. It looks increasingly safe to say, that now we are already knee deep into the ‘long emergency’ — which has raised its ugly head in 2008 then, after a couple of years, went back to sleep… only to return with a vengeance. It is a fast deepening series of crisis though, one, that now threatens the West with the deepest recession in living memory and with a complete collapse of Europe’s economy — together with the West’s global hegemony.However, it will be China who will take the brunt of the damage made to the world’s production facilities, as it was producing a myriad of goods for Europe and for the States to consume and built their products from. Even if the West would enter a decade long depression though, China would still recover after going through its own round of deepest recession in living memory. They would eventually reorganize their economy to fit the needs of the BRICS states, serving them with products instead of Europe and the US. They could do this on the back of a yet to be released common currency of the block (replacing the Dollar in international trade) and based on resources suddenly becoming relatively cheap and abundant, as the West would consume a fraction of what it used to.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
OPEC agrees to produce slightly more oil as recession fears loom
London (CNN Business)The world’s oil-exporting countries have agreed to a tiny increase in output next month amid fears that a global recession will crimp demand.
The Organization of the Oil Exporting Countries and its allies — which includes Russia — also known as OPEC+, said on Wednesday that it would produce an additional 100,000 barrels a day in September.This was the first OPEC meeting since US President Joe Biden visited Saudi Arabia last month. Biden urged the country — which is the group’s biggest oil producer — to start pumping more.For months, prices have climbed as Western embargoes on Russian oil have limited global supply. Those prices have helped the world’s biggest oil companies reap record profits, even as millions face surging fuel bills.A gallon of regular gasoline in the United States surpassed $5 for the first time in June, though prices have fallen back significantly since then.The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark, also hit a high of $139 a barrel in March in the days after Russia invaded Ukraine, but Brent is now trading at around $100 as traders fear a global recession will hurt demand.Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate crude — the North American benchmark — both rose initially on Wednesday after OPEC’s announcement, as oil investors expected a bigger increase in production. But prices fell about 2% by midday.“As a production rise it is a very small percentage of overall production, and much smaller than previous months increases, and thus makes little difference to the overall supply picture,” Hazel Seftor, senior research analyst for global oil supply at Wood Mackenzie, told CNN Business.…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Germany’s Uniper Warns Of Possible “Irregular Operation” At Major Power Plant As Rhine River Runs Dry
Germany’s Uniper SE, the country’s largest utility (recently bailed out by state-owned lender KfW), warned Thursday that plunging water levels on the Rhine River have reduced barge shipments of coal to a key power plant, exacerbating an energy crunch as power prices soar to record highs, reported Bloomberg.
The river at Kaub, Germany, is around 21.6 inches (55 centimeters) on Thursday and is expected to drop to 18.5 inches (47 centimeters) by Saturday, according to the German Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration. Currently, Europe’s most crucial waterway is 5.9 inches (15 centimeters) from being impassible, the threshold where barge traffic is 15.7 inches (40 centimeters).
Uniper said the low water levels could force “irregular operation” at its 510-megawatt Staudinger-5 coal-fired power plant through the first half of September because fewer and fewer barges have been able to deliver coal as stockpiles dwindle. Rhine water levels below 40 centimeters at Kaub would halt shipments via inland waterways to the power plant, forcing shipments by land.
On Wednesday, Riverlake, a vessel broker, said, “fewer and fewer barges can pass through Kaub.”
Uniper’s warning about low water levels impacting operations at a coal-fired power plant is more evidence Rhine troubles are exacerbating Germany’s worst energy-supply crunch in decades as Russia reduces natural gas flows via Nord Stream 1 to just 20% capacity.
Meanwhile, German power for next year soared to a record intraday high of 410.57 euros per megawatt-hour on the European Energy Exchange on Thursday on the prospects of a worsening energy crisis.
Besides Uniper, here’s what other German companies are saying about low water levels on the Rhine and how they seek alternatives for transporting goods (list courtesy of Bloomberg):
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
August 2, 2022
Lying About The Economy Will Only Make The Coming Crash Worse
I don’t know who needs to hear this. Wait, yes I do. The Biden Administration.
I really don’t know how to describe the disturbing trend over the last few months of the Biden administration, along with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, simply lying to the American people about the economy.
Months worth of political spin has culminated in embarrassing recent attempts to redefine the word “recession”: a futile effort to pull the wool over an American public that is growing increasingly suspect both Biden and Yellen’s competence to be overseeing the the country, and the economy, respectively.
By now, the administration’s pathetic falsehood of a narrative about our economy has been called out, ridiculed, dismantled and generally beaten to death by anyone with a shred of common sense.
However, there is something far more important that people aren’t talking about: the administration lying about the health of the economy could wind up exacerbating any financial crisis that we have in the near future.
Put simply, the more you tell people that “everything is fine” when it isn’t, the more surprised and shocked they are going to be when markets start to panic.
I don’t think a market crash is an outrageous scenario that has no chance of happening, either. I noted in my latest portfolio update that I thought the market could have a short-term rally based on the idea of participants thinking that the Fed is preparing to pivot.
But over the course of the longer-term, the rate hikes that have already been put into place are going to eventually make their way to the economic-narrative-foreground in the form of huge forthcoming aftershocks throughout the economy.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bill Gates’ dumbest idea ever
Bill Gates’ dumbest idea everA legendary nuclear whistleblower’s open letter to Bill Gates over his new love of nuclear power.
Dear Mr. Gates,
I am writing this letter to you because I believe you have crossed the line by leveraging your fortune to maneuver state governments and, indeed, the U.S. Government to siphon precious taxpayer funds supporting your latest atomic contrivance in Wyoming. Of course, how you spend your fortune is your decision.
Recently, the media and governors in western states have become enthralled by you and your team at Natrium to build a 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a so-called molten salt-based energy storage system. As a result, you are now asking state and national governments for billions of dollars to bankroll a “fast reactor” concept cooled by liquid sodium.
Your latest “brainchild” ignores 70 years of liquid-sodium-based nuclear failure.
I question your zeal to leverage that fortune by securing additional public funds for an unproductive techno-solution that claims to solve the climate crisis! Your latest technofix will not mitigate the climate crisis.
The fuel is made only in Russia
On the contrary, Mr. Gates, the marketing hype associated with your latest “brainchild” ignores more than 70 years of failures using liquid-sodium-based atomic reactor coolant. It may also unleash a new era of unproductive nuclear spending, increase the risk of nuclear proliferation and put America at risk of becoming dependent on Russia to fuel the reactor. Currently, Russia is the only country in the world that can fabricate this odd high-enrichment fuel. Therefore, your design, if ever built, would make these reactors beholding to Russia for their peculiar fuel unless taxpayers subsidize another massive investment in fuel fabrication facilities. More significantly, the special fuel the Natrium reactor uses is only one-half of one percent below bomb-grade and is called High-Assay Low-Enrichment Uranium, or HALEU…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is a partial collapse possible? Part 1
Image credit: Himesh Kumar Behera via UnsplashCan the East survive the fall (or rather the collective suicide) of the West? Can the center of global power be transferred from the falling Western Empire to its Eastern counterparts? And ultimately: will this shift contribute to or, instead, reverse the end-game of this global civilization…? These are the questions bugging me for weeks now…What follows is an internal dialog, leading to wild guesses and a lot of speculation. Enjoy.
In order to answer the question posed in the title we have to first find an answer for the following: how long will it take for the West to fall? Years? Decades? A century?
Asking such a question presumes, of course, that the West will fall. I have to say, that we must take this as a given — in fact, the West has been falling for quite a while now. Deluded in their powers and by the technologies they wield, ruling elites in these societies did not even notice that they are no longer driving towards a cliff — they have become airborne. While some of them have noticed that we have left the cliff’s edge far behind, they now think and proclaim loudly that we can fly. The inconvenient question, none of them is even willing to ponder, is how much time we have left till we touch the ground, and then how many rollovers will it take till the badly damaged chassis finally stops bouncing and the dust starts to settle on it.
Some of those, who are willing (and capable) to ponder such a question expect a sudden explosion upon touchdown — a nuclear holocaust — as their hopelessly impotent leaders finally hit the red button in their utter frustration felt over the loss of their global hegemony…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Hezbollah Threatens Israel With War Over Disputed Gas Field
Lebanon’s armed Hezbollah group warned Israel on Sunday against drilling at an offshore gas field, renewing a threat that it could escalate the offshore border demarcation dispute to a war.
Hezbollah, backed by Iran, aired a video on its Al-Manar television channel, showing drone footage of Israeli barges at the gas field and their coordinates. The video ends with footage of a rocket with the words “within range” in Arabic and Hebrew. The text on the video message opens with “Playing with time is useless,” also in both languages.
Israel and Lebanon, which do not have diplomatic relations, are in a years-long dispute over the demarcation of their territorial waters in the Mediterranean.
The dispute escalated this summer after UK’s Energean, which has been awarded the right to drill at the offshore Karish field, arrived on the site with a rig, prompting an immediate reaction from Beirut. The Lebanese president and the caretaker prime minister of the country accused Israel of violating Lebanon’s sovereignty.
Karish is the focus of the rift. According to Israel, Karish lies in its territorial waters. According to Lebanon, it falls within a triangle of contested waters because the two cannot agree where exactly the border passes.
Israel has already warned early on that any damage to the drilling rig in Karish—like attacks on any gas drilling rigs in its waters—will be construed as an attack on the state, implying there would be an immediate reaction.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Europe has lost the energy war
After a decade of financial austerity, is Europe now on the brink of a new age of energy austerity? The city of Hanover has recently introduced strict energy-saving rules that include cutting off the hot water in public buildings, swimming pools, sports halls and gyms, banning mobile air conditioners, fan heaters or radiators, switching off public fountains, and stopping illuminating major buildings such as the town hall at night.
Meanwhile, several countries across Europe are considering dimming or switching off public lights, and even adopting “energy curfews”, with early closures for businesses and public offices. And more drastic measures are under consideration — including gas rationing for energy-intensive industries such as steel and agriculture.
These measures are part of an EU-wide Gas Demand Reduction Plan, ominously titled Save Gas for a Safe Winter, to reduce gas use in Europe by 15% until next spring. Among the proposals is a provision that officials in Brussels impose fines for non-compliance if they decide the crisis is escalating dangerously.
All of this comes amid growing fears that dwindling Russian gas supplies may plunge Europe into an energy crisis this winter. Overall, Russian gas exports to the EU are at about a third of last year’s levels, falling steadily since the invasion of Ukraine. While several European countries have been reducing their Russian gas imports, Russia itself has been reducing gas flows to Europe through Nord Stream 1, the continent’s biggest pipeline, citing mainly technical issues. Just the other day, citing equipment repair, Russia announced yet another reduction in the amount of natural gas flowing through Nord Stream 1, which is now operating at only 20% capacity.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
August 1, 2022
‘We live in an Orwellian hell-scape’: Facebook fact-checks top economist for stating America IS in a recession after Biden refused to admit it
Facebook placed a ‘fact-checking’ label on a post written by a top economist stating that the United States is now in a recession – a move he termed ‘Orwellian’.
Two consecutive quarters of negative growth is the standard definition of a recession, and Phillip Magness, the research and education director at the American Institute for Economic Research, posted on Facebook a commentary about the country now being in a recession.
The post – which is no longer visible – was marked by Facebook’s fact checkers as being misleading.
‘We live in an Orwellian hell-scape,’ he tweeted.
‘Facebook is now ‘fact checking’ anyone who questions the White House’s word-games about the definition of a recession.’
Biden on Thursday (pictured) insisted that the country was not in a recession, despite new data showing a second consecutive quarter with negative growth
Phillip Magness, an economic historian, believes the U.S. is in recession – but the White House disagrees
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
