Baltic Dry Index. 1364 +25 Brent Crude 63.55
Spot Gold 1822
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 16/02/21 World 109,677,246
Deaths 2,418,817
What do you call it when a snowman throws a temper tantrum?
A meltdown.
There was no sign of a freeze in Asian stock prices this morning, though China’s markets remain closed celebrating the Chinese New Year. Stock mania bubbles on but with rising concern about the return of inflation.
While I think inflation is still more likely to be a 2022 issue rather than 2021, I’m concerned about the damage global warming, sorry the US plains states deep freeze is doing to the US economy, especially in energy supplies and to the food chain.
While unlikely, it is just possible that the Great Texas Freeze might turn US inflation into a 2021 problem.
The real concern there is that all the Democrats Biden bailout cash, will leave too much cash chasing too few goods and services due to the Great Freeze and the continuing coronavirus pandemic.
The “no Billionaire left behind” Fedsters will be gun shy to raise interest rates if/when inflation returns out of fears of blowing up bonds and the Great Stock Bubble.
Asia sets up global stocks for extended bull run on economic optimism
February 16, 2021 2:42 AM By Hideyuki Sano
TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares advanced on Tuesday, putting world equities on course to extend their bull run for a 12th consecutive session as optimism about the global economic recovery and expectations of low interest rates drive investments into riskier assets.
Oil prices soared to a 13-month high as a deep freeze due to a severe snow storm in the United States not only boosted power demand but also threatened oil production in Texas.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan ticked up 0.45% while Japan’s Nikkei rose 0.4% to a 30-year high.
In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng Index surged 1.79% to hit a 32-month high in its first trading session since Thursday following the Lunar New Year holidays.
Mainland Chinese markets will remain closed for the holidays until Thursday while Wall Street was also shut on Monday.
Ord Minnett advisor John Milroy said while share markets were positive investors were becoming wary of the future risk of inflation due to central bank and government stimulus programmes in place around the world.
“There is a clear sense with rates staying low for some time yet and investor appetite for equities staying strong we will likely see markets hold up for some time yet,” Milroy told Reuters.
“Gaining traction is the thought that inflation could rise much faster and sooner than the Fed is currently thinking. Then if they do raise rates to combat it what happens to equity markets and of course bond markets.”
The bullish view on the economy lifted bond yields, with the 10-year U.S. Treasuries gaining 5 basis points to 1.245% in early Asian trade, its highest since late March.
More
In other news. The USA better mend its fences with Trudeau’s Canada.
China Eyes Rare Earth Export Curbs for U.S. Defense Sector: FT
Bloomberg News16 February 2021, 05:51 GMT
China is exploring whether it can hurt U.S. defense contractors by limiting supplies of rare-earth minerals that are critical to the industry, the Financial Times reported.
Industry executives said government officials had asked them how badly companies in the U.S. and Europe would be affected if China restricted rare earth exports during a bilateral dispute, the FT reported, citing people it didn’t identify involved in the consultation.
China’s government last month issued draft guidelines for the sector, including a proposal that the nation restrict or suspend exploration and processing of rare earths to preserve natural resources and protect the environment.
Rare earths are used in everything from smartphones to fighter jets, with China controlling most of the world’s mining and having an even tighter hold of processing.
Now back to the Great US plains states freeze aka when Texas became Canada.
So, you really, really, really want to switch to Electric Vehicles, powered by “green energy” solar and wind power. Good luck with that. In Texas for now, the chattering classes are just that.
Don’t say it out loud but it looks like Trump was right about coal and natural gas.
Where do snowmen put their money?
Snowbanks.
Cold snap leaves 8 million in Texas, Mexico without power
February 15, 2021 9:35 AM By Maria Caspani
(Reuters) - A rare deep freeze in Texas that raised demand for power forced the state’s electric grid operator on Monday to impose rotating blackouts, leaving 4 million customers without power even as temperatures dipped to teeth-chattering levels.
The cold snap sweeping Texas reached the northern part of neighboring Mexico as well, where authorities said 4.7 million users lost power early on Monday. Around midday, service had been restored to almost 2.6 million of them.
The PowerOutage.us website, which tracks power outages, said 4,088,064 Texas customers were experiencing outages around 8:30 p.m.
President Joe Biden declared an emergency on Monday, unlocking federal assistance to Texas, where temperatures ranged from 28 to minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 2 to minus 22 Celsius).
“The Texas power grid has not been compromised. The ability of some companies that generate the power has been frozen,” Governor Greg Abbott wrote on Twitter. “They are working to get generation back on line.”
Abbott also deployed the National Guard statewide to assist in the restoration of electricity.
Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport said it would remain closed until at least 1 p.m. CST (1900 GMT) on Tuesday, while the city’s Hobby Airport ceased operations until at least noon on Tuesday due to the inclement weather.
The freeze also took a toll on the state’s energy industry, by far the country’s largest crude producer, shutting oil refineries and forcing restrictions from natural gas pipeline operators.
Apart from Texas, much of the United States was in the grip of bone-chilling weather over the three-day Presidents Day holiday weekend.
The National Weather Service (NWS) said an Arctic air mass had spread southward, well beyond areas accustomed to freezing weather, with winter storm warnings posted for most of the Gulf Coast region, Oklahoma and Missouri.
In Louisiana, where freezing temperatures also prompted power outages and road closures, some parishes imposed curfews to keep residents off the road. Another 110,000 homes and businesses were without power Monday night.
More
Cold Weather Cuts Permian Oil Output by 1 Million Barrels a Day
Javier Blas February 15, 2021
Permian oil production has plunged by as much as one million barrels a day as the coldest weather in 30 years brings havoc to a region that seldom faces frigid Arctic blasts.
Oil traders and company executives, speaking on condition of anonymity, lifted their estimate of supply losses in the region as the temperature in Midland, the capital of the Permian basin, dropped to -1 Fahrenheit (-18 Celsius), the lowest since 1989, according to the U.S. National Weather Service. Traders had previously estimated losses at several hundred thousands barrels per day.
The supply hit is expected to be short-lived, as temperatures are due to start recovering on Tuesday.
“Loss of U.S. production looks substantial,” said Gary Ross, a veteran oil consultant turned hedge fund manager at Black Gold Investors LLC.
The Permian oil outage helped to push West Texas Intermediate, the crude benchmark in the U.S., above $60 a barrel for the first time in more than a year. The shape of the oil market curve also stepped up, a condition known as backwardation that denotes market tightness. The prompt backwardation in WTI reached as much as 25 cents per barrel, the widest since May.
Texas and New Mexico, home of the Permian region, produce about 5.8 million barrels a day in normal circumstances, about half of the country’s total crude output, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The current losses are due to a combination of well shutdowns, flow-line outages, and disrupted road transport, all due to the extreme cold weather. Small Permian producers pick up crude every few days using trucks, but bad weather is making it hard for vehicles to get out, forcing companies to close wells.
While oil production continues in many regions despite the cold, including the Bakken basin in North Dakota, the kit used in the Permian isn’t built to withstand extremely low temperatures, executives said. For example, flow lines, which link individual wells to gathering centers, are laid overground, rather than buried, as in colder regions.
The low temperatures have already caused equipment failures at multiple natural gas processing plants in the Permian basin and in the Anadarko basin in Oklahoma, sending regional natural gas prices to record highs.
Biggest U.S. Oil Refinery Shutting Because of Frigid Weather
Jeffrey Bair February 15, 2021, 12:50 PM EST
The largest oil refinery in North America is shutting down because of Arctic conditions that have disrupted power, water and fuel supplies across Texas.
Motiva Enterprises LLC is halting operations at its refinery in the Port Arthur, Texas, according to an email from the company. South of Houston near Galveston Bay, Marathon Petroleum Corp. shut its refinery in response to the chill, Reuters reported.
Millions Lose Power in Texas as Deep Freeze Sows Market Chaos
Meanwhile, oil pipelines, electricity generators and wind farms have been paralyzed by record-setting cold in the nation’s top crude-producing state.
Icy weather chills Texas wind energy as deep freeze grips much of U.S.
(Reuters) - Ice storms knocked out nearly half the wind-power generating capacity of Texas on Sunday as a rare deep freeze across the state locked up turbine towers while driving electricity demand to record levels, the state’s grid operator reported.
Responding to a request from Governor Greg Abbott, President Joe Biden granted a federal emergency declaration for all 254 counties in the state on Sunday, authorizing U.S. agencies to coordinate disaster relief from severe weather in Texas.
The winter energy woes in Texas came as bone-chilling cold, combined with snow, sleet and freezing rain, gripped much of the United States from the Pacific Northwest through the Great Plains and into the mid-Atlantic states over the weekend.
An Arctic air mass causing the chill extended southward well beyond areas accustomed to icy weather, with winter storm warnings posted for much of the Gulf Coast region, Oklahoma and Missouri, the National Weather Service said.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s grid operator, issued an alert asking consumers and businesses to conserve power, citing record-breaking energy demands due to extreme cold gripping the state.
“We are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units,” the agency said.
Wind farms in West Texas, stricken by weekend ice storms, were particularly hard hit.
Of the 25,000-plus megawatts of wind-power capacity normally available in Texas, some 12,000 megawatts was out of service as of Sunday morning “due to the winter weather event we’re experiencing in Texas,” ERCOT spokeswoman Leslie Sopko said.
Wind generation ranks as the second-largest source of energy in Texas, accounting for 23% of state power supplies last year, behind natural gas, which represented 45%, according to ERCOT figures.
Forecasts call for heavy snow and freezing rain to spread across a larger swath of central and eastern sections of the country through Monday, with a storm front in the West likely to dump 1 to 2 feet of snow in the Cascades and northern Rockies through Tuesday, according to the weather service.
https://www.reuters.com/article/BigStory12/idUSKBN2AF066
A Deep Green Freeze
Power shortages show the folly of eliminating natural gas—and coal.
Feb. 15, 2021 12:43 pm ET
Gas and power prices have spiked across the central U.S. while Texas regulators ordered rolling blackouts Monday as an Arctic blast has frozen wind turbines. Herein is the paradox of the left’s climate agenda: The less we use fossil fuels, the more we need them.
A mix of ice and snow swept across the country this weekend as temperatures plunged below zero in the upper Midwest and into the teens in Houston. Cold snaps happen—the U.S. also experienced a Polar Vortex in 2019—as do heat waves. Yet the power grid is becoming less reliable due to growing reliance on wind and solar, which can’t provide power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
While Texas is normally awash in gas and oil, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the state’s wholesale power market, urged residents this weekend to conserve power to avoid power outages. Regulators rationed gas for commercial and industrial uses to ensure fuel for power plants and household heating.
Texas’s energy emergency could last all week as the weather is forecast to remain frigid. “My understanding is, the wind turbines are all frozen,” Public Utility Commission Chairman DeAnn Walker said Friday. “We are working already to try and ensure we have enough power but it’s taken a lot of coordination.”
Blame a perfect storm of bad government policies, timing and weather. Coal and nuclear are the most reliable sources of power. But competition from heavily subsidized wind power and inexpensive natural gas, combined with stricter emissions regulation, has caused coal’s share of Texas’s electricity to plunge by more than half in a decade to 18%.
Wind’s share has tripled to about 25% since 2010 and accounted for 42% of power last week before the chill set in. About half of Texans rely on electric pumps for heating, which liberals want to mandate everywhere. But they use a lot of power in frigid weather. So while wind turbines were freezing, demand for power was surging.
Gas-fired power plants ramped up, but the Arctic freeze increased demand for gas across the country. Producers couldn’t easily increase supply since a third of rigs across the country were taken out of production during the pandemic amid lower energy demand. Some gas wells and pipelines in Texas and Oklahoma also shut down in frosty conditions.
But enormous new demand coupled with constrained supply caused natural gas spot prices to spike to nearly $600 per million British thermal units in the central U.S. from about $3 a couple weeks ago. Future wholesale power prices in Texas for early this week soared to $9,000 per megawatt hour from a seasonal average of $25.
Prices jumped in the Midwest too, though less dramatically because there are more coal and nuclear plants. Illinois and Michigan have more gas storage than Texas, which exports much of its shale gas to other states and, increasingly, around the world in liquefied form.
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-deep-green-freeze-11613411002?mod=mhp
What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?
Frostbite.
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
U.S. Cases Slow; Tokyo Case Count Remains Low: Virus Update
Bloomberg News16 February 2021, 00:04 GMT Updated on 16 February 2021, 06:23 GMT
The U.S. recorded the lowest daily number of new coronavirus infections since Oct. 25, before a holiday season surge sent case numbers soaring. The New York City subway system, meanwhile, is getting closer to resuming its 24-hour service on Feb. 22.
Tokyo reported 350 new coronavirus cases, bringing the seven-day average to about 370 people per day. Malaysia has secured enough vaccines to cover almost 110% of the population and will begin its nationwide Covid-19 vaccine rollout from Feb. 26, starting with front-line workers, Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said Tuesday.
In Europe, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is aiming to draw up plans to lift national pandemic restrictions on socializing, shopping and traveling to work, including possible target dates for when the curbs will be eased.
Key Developments:
- Global Tracker: Cases exceed 109 million; deaths pass 2.4 million
- Vaccine Tracker: More than 176 million shots given worldwide
- Covid’s puzzling decline sparks a shopping spree in India
- Rise of variants sets off push for all-in-one Covid vaccines
- What we know about the impact of Covid-19 on children: QuickTake
More
The Unlikeliest Pandemic Success Story
How did a tiny, poor nation manage to suffer only one death from the coronavirus?
Story by Madeline Drexler February 10, 2021
On January 7, a 34-year-old man who had been admitted to a hospital in Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, with preexisting liver and kidney problems died of COVID-19. His was the country’s first death from the coronavirus. Not the first death that day, that week, or that month: the very first coronavirus death since the pandemic began.
How is this possible? Since the novel coronavirus was first identified more than a year ago, health systems in rich and poor countries have approached collapse, economies worldwide have been devastated, millions of lives have been lost. How has Bhutan—a tiny, poor nation best known for its guiding policy of Gross National Happiness, which balances economic development with environmental conservation and cultural values—managed such a feat? And what can we in the United States, which has so tragically mismanaged the crisis, learn from its success?
In fact, what can the U.S. and other wealthy countries learn from the array of resource-starved counterparts that have better weathered the coronavirus pandemic, even if those nations haven’t achieved Bhutan’s impressive statistics? Countries such as Vietnam, which has so far logged only 35 deaths, Rwanda, with 226, Senegal, with 700, and plenty of others have negotiated the crisis far more smoothly than have Europe and North America.
These nations offer plenty of lessons, from the importance of attentive leadership, the need to ensure that people have enough provisions and financial means to follow public-health guidance, and the shared understanding that individuals and communities must sacrifice to protect the well-being of all: elements that have been sorely lacking in the U.S.
America has “the world’s best medical-rescue system—we have unbelievable ICUs,” Asaf Bitton, executive director of Ariadne Labs, a Boston-based center for health-systems innovation, told me. But, he said, we have neglected a public-health focus on prevention, which socially cohesive low- and middle-income countries have no choice but to adopt, because a runaway epidemic would quickly overwhelm them.
More, much more.
Next, some vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines. https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford Website. https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some other useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
Covid19info.live
Centers for Disease Control Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
The Spectator Covid-19 data tracker (UK)
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.
A scalable method for the large-area integration of 2D materials
Date: February 10, 2021
Source: Graphene Flagship
Summary: Researchers report a new method to integrate graphene and 2D materials into semiconductor manufacturing lines, a milestone for the recently launched 2D-EPL project.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials have a huge potential for providing devices with much smaller size and extended functionalities with respect to what can be achieved with today's silicon technologies. But to exploit this potential we must be able to integrate 2D materials into semiconductor manufacturing lines -- a notoriously difficult step. A team of Graphene Flagship researchers in Sweden and Germany now reports a new method to make this work.
The technique, just published in Nature Communications by researchers from Graphene Flagship partners RWTH Aachen University, Universität der Bundeswehr München and AMO GmbH, in Germany, Graphene Flagship Associate Member KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden, in collaboration with Protemics GmbH.
The integration of 2D materials with silicon or with a substrate with integrated electronics presents a number of challenges. "There's always this critical step of transferring from a special growth substrate to the final substrate on which you build sensors or components," says Arne Quellmalz, researcher at Graphene Flagship Associate Member KTH and lead author of the paper. "You might want to combine a graphene photodetector for optical on-chip communication with silicon read-out electronics, but the growth temperatures of those materials is too high, so you cannot do this directly on the device substrate."
So far, most of the experimental methods for transferring 2D materials from their growth substrate to the desired electronics are either non compatible with high-volume manufacturing or lead to a significant degradation of the 2D material and of its electronic properties. The beauty of the solution proposed by Quellmalz and co-workers is that it lies in the existing toolkits of semiconductor manufacturing: to use a standard dielectric material called bisbenzocyclobutene (BCB), along with conventional wafer bonding equipment.
"We basically glue the two wafers together with a resin made of BCB," explains Quellmalz. "We heat the resin, until it becomes viscous, like honey, and press the 2D material against it." At room temperature, the resin becomes solid and forms a stable connection between the 2D material and the wafer, he says. "To stack materials, we repeat the steps of heating and pressing. The resin becomes viscous again and behaves like a cushion, or a waterbed, which supports the layer stack and adapts to the surface of the new 2D material."
The researchers demonstrated the transfer of graphene and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), as a representative for transition metal dichalcogenides, and stacked graphene with hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and MoS2 to heterostructures. All transferred layers and heterostructures were reportedly of high quality, that is, they featured uniform coverage over up to 100-millimeter sized silicon wafers and exhibited little strain in the transferred 2D materials.
"Our transfer method is in principle applicable to any 2D material, independent of the size and the type of growth substrate," says Prof. Max Lemme, from Graphene Flagship partners AMO GmbH and RWTH Aachen University. "And, since it relies only on tools and methods that are already common in the semiconductor industry, it could substantially accelerate the appearance on the market of a new generation of devices where 2D materials are integrated on top of conventional integrated circuits or microsystem. This work is an important step towards this goal and, although many further challenges remain, the range of potential applications is large: from photonics, to sensing, to neuromorphic computing. The integration of 2D materials could be a real game-changer for the European high-tech industry."
More
I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Rudyard Kipling.
No comments:
Post a Comment