,This post is a review and commentary on the book Dictionary of Petroleum Exploration and Drilling  by Norman J. Hyne, PennWell Publishers. March 2014 978-1593703134, 778 Pages, Hardcover

Sure, we could hit the kill switch on fossil fuels, and 1/3 of the world would starve. ​

Gas and oil are fundamentally different. Most individuals do not completely comprehend just how different they are and how gas projects (particularly with respect to LNG) are a completely different economic ball game. 

When it comes to crude oil, you find it, produce it and sell it. Possibly the market price is lower than anticipated but finding crude buyers is not an issue, also crude oil is fairly cost effectively bunkered.

For LNG: sell first, produce it later. 

A industry joke is there three LNG permits you must have:  DOE, FERC and Adam Smith Permit. The first two are easy to get because they authorize your LNG project to lose money in a environmentally sanctioned manner.

Note that a FERC permit alone cost $100 million dollars and the US Government is happy to accept that check in the spirit of American laissez faire without inquiring to the interest of would-be buyers. You have to actually be able to sell the LNG to make money. Financiers, banks, venture capitalist and private investors will not lend money or put capitol into a LNG project without buyers. 

Alaska's political spirit animal has been a natural gas pipeline for many many years. As in since the Carter Presidency.
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99% of Alaskan’s (and unfortunate Canadians in the Yukon territory) have heard about it for so long that sentences containing: “Governor”, “Natural Gas Pipeline”, “Alaska’s Gas”, “Gas Line Initiative” actuated a mental auto mute or at least a change of channel. Mis-information abounds and facts seem to have the flexibility of Russian gymnast and the latter's drug testing regiment. 

When something has been discussed for 20+ years....... we. stop. caring. 

But because interesting things are happening, it's worth paying attention to, if for no other reasons - it's an E&P thing. 

Governor Walker is the newest face of the gas line and has not disappointed on the drama front. The Republican sector of the Alaska legislature has traded reams of irate letters and press releases with the Governor. 

Americans have unique ways of doing things that strike non-American's as distinctly weird. Examples would be drug marketing, calling the World Series the World Series and soda cup sizes large enough to baptize a harbor seal oh and us being THE ONLY COUNTRY BESIDES THE UK (a country that has yet to decide on a dental plan....) TO NOT USE THE METRIC SYSTEM. ​

"Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot." - Truman Compote, Breakfast at Tiffany's.

If confidence is the oil sector and the price of crude receiving a boost with a record high inventories and record low crude prices, that confidence may be owed to rumors of Russia coordinating a production cut with OPEC. ​It's ironic for market's to respond to this rumor. Russia is a major producer and OPEC is OPEC. Russia will never join OPEC for reasons I'm not going to get into here. This is an interesting development and telling signal of OPEC's strength.

This post contains the TI-89 code for a program that calculates a gas' z-factor using the Hall-Yarborough correlation.