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| Friday Nov 6, 2020 | |
| With the passing of Sean Connery this week, I've had James Bond on my mind. One of my favorite Bond films is Diamonds are Forever. Diamonds have been in our local headlines around here this past week, so why not write about the interplay between electricity and diamonds. A couple of years ago I received an intriguing, inbound inquiry about a potential consulting project – a man representing “a major player” in the diamond industry wanted to know if we could research claims being made by synthetic diamond manufacturers about the renewable content of the electricity they were using to produce synthetic diamonds. My healthy imagination went to work as I envisioned I was being cast into a remake of the James Bond movie, Diamonds are Forever. It would somehow involve a ... » read more | |
| Thursday Nov 5, 2020 | |
| As many Americans wake up this morning, they will most likely be turning on their televisions/radio or picking up their phones to check the latest news on the Presidential election. Any friends or relatives in other parts of the world are either ahead on the news or pinging to check in on where things are at. The ups and downs across the current swing states has the attention of many including the two candidates, who in their own right are sitting inside closed quarters crunching the numbers. So where is their focus you ask, it is all about Pennsylvania and Georgia as they carry a level of electoral votes that are a must have for Trump and a nice to have for Biden who sits ahead in AZ and NV. If you have been following the path to this point, you can recall ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Nov 4, 2020 | |
| I am writing this blog prior to any voting finalized across the country so this is not about who the next president of the United States is, it is about what is going on all over the country as everywhere you turn it seems like there is some sort of destruction of personal property, demolition of buildings and/or graffiti on the side of walls that were once painted a solid color or have some sort of Portland Art Tax money going to good use. A good example of this was on my daily morning trip to the local Starbucks on Tuesday morning. I placed my order on the mobile app and walked up to the corner where the store was located. It did not take long to notice the plywood board that was placed where a glass pane once divided the indoor space with the sidewalk. As I got ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Nov 3, 2020 | |
| Over two years ago, the Westcoast Pipeline suffered a catastrophic rupture just south of the Station 4 compressor. Enbridge, the owner/operator of the pipe, was forced to take the T-South segment capacity down from 2 to 1 BCF while the section was repaired and tested. By cutting that capacity from the British Columbia foothills down into the Huntington/Sumas demand areas, the entire Pacific Northwest had to readjust gas pipeline flows. Without access to the Vancouver and Northwest Pipeline deliveries, British Columbia natural gas producers were forced to shut down operations. Total production in the region fell as the supply was islanded off from the main source of demand throughout the 2019 Winter Season. Over the past year, there has been changes that have altered ... » read more | |
| Monday Nov 2, 2020 | |
| We are now transitioning into the 11th month of 2020, which might just go down as one of the most memorable periods of our recent history. We started off the year with a robust economy that was eventually met with the COVID-19 pandemic that essentially shut down the world with the likes of Italy, France and Spain locking down their borders for over a month. Here in the United States, the situation seems to have start in a retirement community in Kirkland, WA only to gather momentum to the vast majority of the country by the end of March. Once April rolled around, states were in lockdown mode as well which meant that students were sent home from their university/local schools, businesses were not open and families were trying to establish some new routine that would allow ... » read more | |
| Friday Oct 30, 2020 | |
| This weekend, we’re celebrating two occasions—Halloween on Saturday, and, on Sunday, the unfortunately temporary end of Daylight Saving Time (DST). Daylight Saving Time is always at the forefront of our minds at EGPS as it is a scary time as new data sources might break, datasources do some spooky things and a report that has been working has a chance of breaking. It is this time of year that brings up memories to another problem that we run across frequently, which is matching multiple time series data sets that were given to us to analyze. The issue is simple, each data set could be in any time convention (standard, which does not observe DST, or prevailing, which does) or time zone. In fact, it’s such a recurring problem that one of the first ... » read more | |
| Thursday Oct 29, 2020 | |
| The end of October is right around the corner but that does not give much hope to the residence in California that are fighting off more fires that have started over the past fews days. Places such as Orange County are now being evacuated after several areas in Northern California have been running from the flames for weeks now. If you recall, the Pacific Northwest got into the fray in September while Colorado was brought in a couple of weeks ago. The former was such a rare occurrence as the skies were filled with ash for over a week while firefighters were out in the battle field trying to keep the flames from entering the Portland metro area. The latter has created a similar situation near Fort Collins and the north side of Denver prior to the winter chill moving ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Oct 28, 2020 | |
| The 1990's movie "The Hunt for Red October" is a spy-thriller where a senior Lithuanian submarine captain, played by Sean Connery, has a plant to defect but is met with strong opposition from his Soviet Navy and a misconception from the US Armed Forces. It depicted the tensions of between the Soviet Union and the United States during late Cold War era. As you work through the movie you can feel the tension as well as the direction the captain wants to go and where the director wants the audience to take their mind. Some of the critics' reviews were such that stated the movie was colorful and exciting but nothing takes you by surprise as you process what is happening to each country at the time. This is a resemblance of the natural gas market this past month as we ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Oct 27, 2020 | |
| One month ago there was talk in the industry that the storage capacity issues would cause cash prices to trade at a steep discount to the futures. Prior to the October settle the Henry Hub cash was trading at a $1.38 discount to the November futures reflecting the injection limitations particularly in the Gulf. The assumption was that without a big demand shift there would be little chance for cash strength prior to a ramp up in winter heating load. In prior years it was not unusual to see storage injections in the Gulf run right through the middle of November. But this year has been a very different track. Pipeline maintenance, hurricanes, LNG sendout increases, cold weather and gains in Southeast power burns have tightened the physical cash market. Not only is the storage ... » read more | |
| Monday Oct 26, 2020 | |
| Doing my daily Sunday scanning of the professional football games and the weather conditions, you could not help but stop and pause where they were showing the Denver Broncos home stadium Sunday morning. They were preparing to play host to the Kansas City Chiefs later in the day by having the crew take their snow blowers to the advtisement banners that were replacing the crowd in the first section of seats around the stadium's actual field. Yes, snow blowers as the temperatures were dropping and the precipitation in the metro area was that of snowflakes. It was a stark reminder of just how loyal sports fans are as the stadium would have been full of people prior to the game where they would have been bundled up for the most part (a few shirtless with some painted symbols ... » read more | |
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