90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Something Very Strange Is Taking Place Off The Coast Of Galveston, TX

Having exposed the world yesterday to the 2-mile long line of tankers-full'o'crude heading from Iraq to the US, several weeks after reporting that China has run out of oil storage space we can now confirm that the global crude "in transit" glut is becoming gargantuan and is starting to have adverse consequences on the price of oil.

While the crude oil tanker backlog in Houston reaches an almost unprecedented 39 (with combined capacity of 28.4 million barrels), as The FT reports that from China to the Gulf of Mexico, the growing flotilla of stationary supertankers is evidence that the oil price crash may still have further to run, as more than 100m barrels of crude oil and heavy fuels are being held on ships at sea (as the year-long supply glut fills up available storage on land). The storage problems are so severe in fact, that traders asking ships to go slow, and that is where we see something very strange occurring off the coast near Galveston, TX.

FT reports that "the amount of oil at sea is at least double the levels of earlier this year and is equivalent to more than a day of global oil supply. The numbers of vessels has been compiled by the Financial Times from satellite tracking data and industry sources."
The storage glut is unprecedented:

Off Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, Asia’s main oil hub, around 35m barrels of crude and shipping fuel are being stored on 14 VLCCs.

“A lot of the storage off Singapore is fuel oil as the contango is stronger,” said Petromatrix analyst Olivier Jakob. Fuel oil is mainly used in shipping and power generation.

Off China, which is on course to overtake the US as the world’s largest crude importer, five heavily laden VLCCs — each capable of carrying more than 2m barrels of oil — are parked near the ports of Qingdao, Dalian and Tianjin.

In Europe, a number of smaller tankers are facing short-term delays at Rotterdam and in the North Sea, where output is near a two-year high. In the Mediterranean a VLCC has been parked off Malta since September.

On the US Gulf Coast, tankers carrying around 20m barrels of oil are waiting to unload, Reuters reported. Crude inventories on the US Gulf Coast are at record levels.

A further 8m barrels of oil are being held off the UAE, while Iran — awaiting the end of sanctions to ramp up exports — has almost 40m barrels of fuel on its fleet of supertankers near the Strait of Hormuz. Much of this is believed to be condensate, a type of ultralight oil.

And unlike the last oil price collapse...

Girls With Guns

An End And A Beginning...

If You Skipped This, Go Back And Read It. It Will Be Worth It.

Australia Sees Spike in Gun Crime Despite Outright Ban

Australia has seen a rise in gun crime over the past decade despite imposing an outright ban on many firearms in the late 1990s.

Charges for crimes involving firearms have increased dramatically across the island nation’s localities in the past decade according to an analysis of government statistics conducted by The New Daily. It found that gun crimes have spiked dramatically in the Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania. In Victoria, pistol-related offenses doubled over the last decade. In New South Wales, they tripled. The other states saw smaller but still significant increases.

Experts said that the country’s 1996 ban on most semi-automatic firearms has actually driven criminals to those guns. “The ban on semi-automatics created demand by criminals for other types of guns,” professor Philip Alpers of the University of Sydney told The New Daily. “The criminal’s gun of choice today is the semi-automatic pistol.”

Gun control advocates in the country insist that the problem is too little regulation. They said, while most modern firearms are illegal and all legal firearms owners must obtain licenses from the government, ammunition is not controlled tightly enough.

“There is very little regulation of ammunition purchase,” Samantha Lee, a spokesperson for Gun Control Australia, told the publication. “In most jurisdictions you can purchase ammunition because you have a firearm licence and there is no restriction on...

Girls With Guns - Veteran's Day Edition...

Scores Of IT Workers Laid Off, Forced To Train Foreign Replacements

Another business is laying off American tech workers and forcing them to train their foreign replacements, joining the ranks of Southern California Edison, Disney, Fossil Group and Catalina Marketing.

Cengage Learning, a multinational education content producer, told 75 of its tech workers in October they would be out of their jobs in January, reported Computer World. In the meantime they’re training their foreign replacements, and if Cengage finds out they’re talking to the media they’ll lose their severance pay.

“I was so furious,” one of the laid off workers told Computer World.

Those laid off are now being shadowed and recorded for training purposes by their replacements working for the contractor, Cognizant, which appear to be foreigners on work visas. Cognizant is a top user of the H-1B visa, according to government data cited by...