The "Benefits" of $100 Oil
When will we learn? Ex Fed Head Alfred E. Greenspan recently said:
"$100 oil would not be all bad as it would help the U.S. to break its oil dependence."
Seems that $100 oil is having "unintended" effects on coal and corn based ethanol.
While oil and coal cost the same as recently as 1998, West Texas Intermediate crude is five times more expensive after climbing to a record $96.24 on Nov. 1.
Coal use worldwide has grown 27% since 2002, three times faster than crude. Coal prices are now at a historic low relative to oil.
U.S. coal prices are equal to $1.98 for each million British thermal units of energy, compared with $12.51 for fuel oil and $6.91 for natural gas.
U.S. coal exports have increased 37% YTD; to Europe +15% from the same period in 2006, and are projected to grow another 20% next year.
A ton of U.S. coal is so cheap at about $47 that European utilities will pay $50 to ship it across the Atlantic.
Enel SpA, Italy's largest power company, is spending $5.8 billion to convert oil fed plants to run on coal.
More than 1,000 coal fed power plants will be built in the next five years, mostly in China and India.
Kansas regulators last month rejected a permit for a coal fueled plant because its carbon emissions were deemed a health hazard.
Coal currently generates 41% of the world's man made carbon dioxide emissions, and is a major contributor to global warming. When will we learn?
Ethanol Gets A Rise Outta Joe... American farmers planted more corn this year than at any time in more than a half century,
yet cattle ranchers, dairy farmers and other food producers are finding the supply tight.
That's because so many corn farmers are growing their crop for fuel, not food. The rise in corn prices is one reason for the rise in milk prices,
which is one reason for the rise in the cost of a latte at your local Starbuck's.
Corny Ethanol Squeeze...
Archer Daniels Midland #2 US Ethanol producer reported soybean processing and grain marketing offset lower profit from corn processing...
where the company was hurt by higher corn costs and lower sales prices for ethanol.
Ethanol futures in the quarter were 28% lower on average than a year earlier, while prices for corn, used to distill ethanol, jumped 46%.
ADM plans to expand capacity to 1.6 billion gallons by 2008. (Which requires 25 Million hectares of land and 27.2 Billion gallons of water to grow and distill.)
Brazil will produce about 4.6 billion gallons of SUGAR ethanol this year using only about 8 million hectares of land planted with SUGAR cane.
The U.S. will produce about 5 billion gallons from 78 million hectares of CORN. Driving up land, water and food costs even further.
Slim Water Pickens... T. Boone Pickens bought eight acres of Texas scrubland.
The land in Roberts County, a stretch of ranchland outside Amarillo, holds no oil.
With the population of Texas on track to almost double to 40 million by 2020, the water authority now wants more water.
The Texas panhandle rests on part of the 174,000-square-mile Ogallala Aquifer, North America's biggest underground water reservoir .
Pickens's has planned a 328 mile, $2.2 billion pipeline to transport water from the panhandle across the scrubland & prairie to the suburbs of Dallas and San Antonio.
His Mesa Water Inc. has bought 200,000 acres of Texas water rights and talks of doubling his holdings.
Pickens, 79, chairman of BP Capital LLC, says selling water is a business whose time, amid fears of global warming and record droughts in the South, may be at hand.
Sung to the Carpenter's, We've Only Just Begun...
A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century old tortoise in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa.
The photos of these two are a priceless must see, and can be filed under the inexplicable, for much of life, can never be explained.
Hattip to Bloomberg for the snipets, sprinkled with Nattering love, cuz we really do care.
"$100 oil would not be all bad as it would help the U.S. to break its oil dependence."
Seems that $100 oil is having "unintended" effects on coal and corn based ethanol.
While oil and coal cost the same as recently as 1998, West Texas Intermediate crude is five times more expensive after climbing to a record $96.24 on Nov. 1.
Coal use worldwide has grown 27% since 2002, three times faster than crude. Coal prices are now at a historic low relative to oil.
U.S. coal prices are equal to $1.98 for each million British thermal units of energy, compared with $12.51 for fuel oil and $6.91 for natural gas.
U.S. coal exports have increased 37% YTD; to Europe +15% from the same period in 2006, and are projected to grow another 20% next year.
A ton of U.S. coal is so cheap at about $47 that European utilities will pay $50 to ship it across the Atlantic.
Enel SpA, Italy's largest power company, is spending $5.8 billion to convert oil fed plants to run on coal.
More than 1,000 coal fed power plants will be built in the next five years, mostly in China and India.
Kansas regulators last month rejected a permit for a coal fueled plant because its carbon emissions were deemed a health hazard.
Coal currently generates 41% of the world's man made carbon dioxide emissions, and is a major contributor to global warming. When will we learn?
Ethanol Gets A Rise Outta Joe... American farmers planted more corn this year than at any time in more than a half century,
yet cattle ranchers, dairy farmers and other food producers are finding the supply tight.
That's because so many corn farmers are growing their crop for fuel, not food. The rise in corn prices is one reason for the rise in milk prices,
which is one reason for the rise in the cost of a latte at your local Starbuck's.
Corny Ethanol Squeeze...
Archer Daniels Midland #2 US Ethanol producer reported soybean processing and grain marketing offset lower profit from corn processing...
where the company was hurt by higher corn costs and lower sales prices for ethanol.
Ethanol futures in the quarter were 28% lower on average than a year earlier, while prices for corn, used to distill ethanol, jumped 46%.
ADM plans to expand capacity to 1.6 billion gallons by 2008. (Which requires 25 Million hectares of land and 27.2 Billion gallons of water to grow and distill.)
Brazil will produce about 4.6 billion gallons of SUGAR ethanol this year using only about 8 million hectares of land planted with SUGAR cane.
The U.S. will produce about 5 billion gallons from 78 million hectares of CORN. Driving up land, water and food costs even further.
Slim Water Pickens... T. Boone Pickens bought eight acres of Texas scrubland.
The land in Roberts County, a stretch of ranchland outside Amarillo, holds no oil.
With the population of Texas on track to almost double to 40 million by 2020, the water authority now wants more water.
The Texas panhandle rests on part of the 174,000-square-mile Ogallala Aquifer, North America's biggest underground water reservoir .
Pickens's has planned a 328 mile, $2.2 billion pipeline to transport water from the panhandle across the scrubland & prairie to the suburbs of Dallas and San Antonio.
His Mesa Water Inc. has bought 200,000 acres of Texas water rights and talks of doubling his holdings.
Pickens, 79, chairman of BP Capital LLC, says selling water is a business whose time, amid fears of global warming and record droughts in the South, may be at hand.
Sung to the Carpenter's, We've Only Just Begun...
A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century old tortoise in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa.
The photos of these two are a priceless must see, and can be filed under the inexplicable, for much of life, can never be explained.
Hattip to Bloomberg for the snipets, sprinkled with Nattering love, cuz we really do care.
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