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MORNING ENERGY NEWS  |  09/14/2020
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The recipe for getting back to normal is to LET people get back to normal.


Bloomberg (9/10/20) reports: "The rush-hour traffic jam has returned to Europe and Asia as workers make their way to offices in their cars and children start school, providing a boost to gasoline demand in an otherwise weak oil market. London, for example, suffered its heaviest traffic jams in more than six months on Wednesday, with congestion 8% above the average 2019 level, according to data from navigation company TomTom International BV. The surge in European commuter traffic offers some relief to the oil market, where worries about weak demand sent Brent crude, the global benchmark, to a two-month low below $40 a barrel this week. It’s also a potential indicator of economic activity creeping back. Still, it’s a different picture in the Americas, where driving levels in rush hour remain low as more companies have told employees to keep working from home and fewer schools have reopened. And because of the outsize role the U.S. plays in the global gasoline market, accounting for three times more consumption than No. 2 user China, worldwide demand for the fuel remains weak."




"Everyone should care about a healthy oil and gas economy."

 

– Todd Staples,
Texas Oil and Gas Association

No one to blame but themselves.


ProPublica (8/28/20) reports: "What a week. Rough for all Californians. Exhausting for the firefighters on the front lines. Heart-shattering for those who lost homes and loved ones. But a special 'Truman Show' kind of hell for the cadre of men and women who’ve not just watched California burn, fire ax in hand, for the past two or three or five decades, but who’ve also fully understood the fire policy that created the landscape that is now up in flames...The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up...There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”...Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."

A workout for for me, but not for thee. I'm noticing a pattern out in San Francisco.


Foundation for Economic Education (9/11/20) blog: "For months, most gyms in San Francisco have been closed, the result of a city order preventing them from opening their doors as a public safety measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. But not all gyms. It was recently revealed that some gyms—city-owned ones—have been open for months, allowing city employees to take full advantage by exercising during these stressful times. Local gym owners, understandably, sounded a bit unhappy when the discovery was brought to their attention. 'It’s shocking, it’s infuriating,' Daniele Rabkin from Crossfit Golden Gate told a Bay Area network. 'Even though they’re getting exposed, there are no repercussions, no ramifications? It’s shocking.' The episode drives home the banality of hashtags that say 'We’re All in This Together.' As one gym owner pointed out, there are clearly separate rules for some."

The perfect(ly preventable) storm.


Wall Street Journal (9/11/20) column: "The wildfires sweeping through California and the Pacific Northwest are terrible to behold, with some 10% of Oregon residents forced to leave their homes and 20 times more land in California burned than this time last year. The fires again underscore the need for active forest management, as they also expose the weaknesses of green-only energy policies. On the forests, we’ve often written about the need for controlled burns and other methods to limit the buildup of dead trees and brush that are the fuel for wildfires. This has finally sunk in with California politicians, as even Gov. Gavin Newsom last year signed an agreement with the federal government to thin overgrown and dried brush on one million acres of land each year for the next five years...Meanwhile, in California the smoke and ash have created a solar-power eclipse that is raising the risk of more electric-power blackouts. State regulators in recent years have been ordering shutdowns of nuclear and natural-gas plants that can provide power around the clock and ramp up quickly when demand surges or other electricity sources wane." 

Energy Markets

 
WTI Crude Oil: ↓ $37.04
Natural Gas: ↑ $2.36
Gasoline: ~ $2.19
Diesel: ~ $2.41
Heating Oil: ↓ $108.31
Brent Crude Oil: ↓ $39.51

 
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