No plans for February? Give your future self a gift and pre-order The World for Sale, the “eye-opening story of the most powerful and secretive traders”.
On a personal note: if you’re interested in the book, please consider pre-ordering. Here’s why 🧵1/4 smarturl.it/lwefbl
In publishing, pre-orders are critical (even more during covid)! Pre-orders can make or break a book. They help massively with bestseller lists, which are crucial for first time authors like @jfarchy and me | 🧵2/4
Everyone in the books industry pays attention to pre-orders. Publishers spend more energy promoting a book that gets lots of pre-orders. And booksellers feature it more prominently | 🧵3/4
Orders via Amazon feed directly into the all-important algorithm. But all pre-orders are valuable.
⚡⚡JAPAN ENERGY CRISIS⚡⚡: In case you missed it, Japan is suffering its worst energy crisis since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, with very tight supply of both electricity and natural gas. Domestic wholesale electricity prices have spiked to a record high 🇯🇵🧵1/5
Multiple reasons behind the crisis: a) low nuclear availability, b) low gas stockpiles which limit gas-fired plants d) surging demand due to cold weather and covid (double-heating at home for WFH, and also offices, open windows), d) east-west grid lack of inter-connectivity 🧵2/5
Japanese utilities, for one reason or other, had been wrong-footed by the extra demand, and despite eye-watering electricity prices, some cannot run their gas-fired power plants harder because they simply don’t have enough gas/LNG supply at hand right now to respond 🧵3/5
SHUT-INS (A THREAD): US and Canada combined shut-ins appear to have been running higher than what listed companies have disclosed, perhaps peaking as high as ~4.0 million b/d (the figure quoted by Plains All American Pipeline - below from their 1Q conference call) | #OOTT 1/6
Canada likely saw at least 1m b/d in production shut-ins this month, and perhaps even a little more (multiple listed companies announced large cuts). That has triggered a rally in Western Canadian Select crude, with the WCS-WTI spread (chart) narrowing sharply | #OOTT 2/6
For the US, @EIAgov is pegging crude production at 11.6 m b/d (based largely on mathematical model), down ~1.5m b/d from peak. That's in-line with announced cuts, but probably not capturing all, considering the known shut-ins in Bakken and Alaska alone (~600k b/d) | #OOTT 3/6
Saudi Arabia says it has contained a fires after two large #oil facilities were attacked with drones: the Abqaiq processing center and the Khurais oilfield (video is Abqaiq) | #OOTT#SaudiArabia 🇸🇦 ⛽️🛢 bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Abqaiq is perhaps the *world’s most important* oil installation. According to the @EIAgov, the plant has a capacity of >7 million b/d. “Most of the oil produced in the country [Saudi Arabia] is processed at Abqaiq before export or delivery to refineries” eia.gov/beta/internati…
This what @Aramco says about the Abqaiq plant: “As the company's largest oil processing facility and the largest crude oil stabilization plant in the world, Abqaiq plays a pivotal role in our day-to-day operations.”