Archive for June 17th, 2005

Friday garden blogging

Friday, June 17th, 2005

Lupines


This hillside along US Rt 2 in Veazie is covered with Lupinus perennis.

Channel 2 (WLBZ) teased us tonight with a story that they were cutting down lupines in Acadia National Park. I can’t find an internet reference. The explanation from a Park spokesman was that they feel lupines are invasive and crowd out native plants. There goes my romance with this venerable late-spring flower that dots roadsides everywhere around here this time of year.

Update: The Bangor Daily News has the Acadia story here.

Fear grips oil market

Friday, June 17th, 2005

Bloomberg: “Oil Rises Above $57 as Demand Growth May Outpace Production”

Here is how one analyst puts it in this story:

“There is no question that the market is going to $60,” said Kyle Cooper, an analyst with Citigroup Inc. in Houston. “There is a lot of fear and hype about the possibility of us running out of oil and it has stuck, attracting investment.”

An earlier Bloomberg story suggests that meeting summer gasoline demand in the thirsty US will be nip and tuck:

“This is the time of year when everyone is going to be freaking out,” said Mark Waggoner, president of Excel Futures Inc. in Huntington Beach, California. “It’s going to take six weeks for any of OPEC’s oil to actually get here and by then it will be the end of July.”

And it may be a long, cold, expensive winter in 2005-06:

World oil consumption peaks in the fourth quarter when refiners begin producing distillate heating fuels for the northern hemisphere winter.

“We’re not in bad shape on crude and we’re not in bad shape in terms of gasoline,” Excel’s Waggoner said. “The distillate stocks are looking a bit low”, said Waggoner, who said oil will reach $60 by the end of next week.

Heating oil futures, a proxy for diesel and jet fuel, surged 19 percent the past month on concern rising trucking and aviation demand will strain refiners’ ability to store heating fuel for winter.

Are you enjoying life at the point in history near the peak daily petrol production rate?