Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- Synchronising electric with political power
- Chevron ups stake
- Ethanol producers seek to clear pipeline bottlenecks
- NWAnews.com :: Northwest Arkansas’ News Source

Synchronising electric with political power
Jamaica Gleaner – Nov 25, 2007
In the interim, the demand continued to grow, lack of generating capacity became acute, and JPS was forced to invest in diesel and gas-turbine generating plant, which would not have been economic choices had the investment plan proceeded as initially developed. For the next major investment in generation JPS again selected a coal-fired steam plant. However, the company did not confine its planning to generating capacity, but extended its horizons to encompass an industrial park – complete with a cement factory, a cold storage facility, and other economic activities. In this instance, the company itself must take responsibility for the delay in finalising its plans, a consequence of its high-flown ambitions. Before any concrete steps were taken to implement the plans, control of the company was sold to Mirant, which concurred in the selection of a coal-burning station in principle, but because of the associated long gestation period, moved to install a diesel-fuelled combined-cycle plant to address the urgent need for new capacity. Coal-burning facilityPlans by Mirant-owned JPS to install the coal-burning facility were being developed when the Government asked the company to reconsider. JPS was told that the Government would arrange for low-cost liquefied natural gas (LNG) to be supplied from Trinidad to provide fuel for public power supplies and for the Jamalco alumina plant in Clarendon, whose production capacity was about to undergo major expansion.

Chevron ups stake
Petroleum News – Nov 25, 2007
On the natural gas side, the Happy Valley well is geared to the Enstar Market, as is planned drilling at Steelhead. In the second quarter of 2008 Chevron plans a gas well off the Anna platform, targeting a large structure never drilled in the shallow gas horizons. Chevron is also continuing to expand its Cook Inlet natural gas storage, he said. Currently the company can deliver 70-80 million cubic feet a day from storage to meet peak demands on a cold day. Partnership with stateZager said partnership with the state is essential. The industry provides teams, prospects, skills, technology, capital and people, he said, but needs a return on people employed, not just capital. Its very hard to come by teams to do the work now, he said.

Ethanol producers seek to clear pipeline bottlenecks
Charleston Post Courier – Nov 25, 2007
-based trade group that represents about 50 pipeline companies, is studying whether gasoline blends containing up to 20 percent ethanol can be transported safely in existing pipelines to break the bottleneck. The study will focus on stress corrosion cracking and design requirements for new ethanol-only pipelines, said Mike Mears, chairman of the pipeline group and vice president of Magellan Midstream Partners of Tulsa, Okla. The company operates an 8,500-mile pipeline network from Texas to North Dakota, and from Colorado to Illinois. The study will cost about $800,000, about 10 percent funded by a federal grant, Mears said. Pipeline companies are paying for the bulk of the research, he said. “The pipeline industry sees some opportunity here,” Mears said. “But the research being done is very much in its infancy…
Ethanol is not shipped in existing pipelines because its high-oxygen content makes it too corrosive, and it also absorbs water and impurities in pipelines. Ethanol pipelines have been used successfully in Brazil. Lamberty said moving ethanol by pipeline would help the industry, “but it’s a chicken-and-egg argument: The infrastructure needs to be in place before there is enough volume to pay for it. ” Shipping ethanol by pipeline would be cheaper and faster, said Mears. It also would eliminate the need to build offloading infrastructure for rail and truck shipments and ethanol storage tanks at blending terminals, where ethanol is mixed with gasoline. If blended ethanol can be safely moved through a pipeline, it would reduce the need for more multimillion-dollar blending terminals, he said. Million-dollar milePaul and Mears estimate a dedicated pipeline would cost about $1 million per mile to build, about $2 billion from the Midwest to the East Coast.

NWAnews.com :: Northwest Arkansas’ News Source
Arkansas Democrat Gazette – Nov 25, 2007
— If the fortunes of the Power Curbers company were tied solely to business in the United States, these would be grim days at its factory on the fringes of this Piedmont town. The small, family-owned company makes machines that turn cement into curbs, and with the American construction industry in distress, domestic sales are expected to drop at least 10 percent this year. But fortunately for Power Curbers, and indeed for the national economy, the company has transcended geography. Aided by the falling dollar, which makes American goods cheaper on world markets, Power Curbers, like thousands of other firms in the United States, is tapping rapid growth abroad to compensate for sluggish sales at home. “It just overlapped as if you’d scripted it,” said the company’s president and chief executive officer, Dyke Messinger, the third generation to head the company launched by his grandfather in 1953…
And that could in turn limit demand for the Americanmade chips at the heart of DVD players and the American-made machines used to build them. More broadly, if China’s exports slow as a result of diminished spending in the United States, that could cool the exuberant wave of real estate development remaking China’s cities. And that might limit demand for Caterpillar’s earth-moving machines, for computer software developed in Silicon Valley to manage such projects and for American architectural services. “The United States is the ultimate engine of growth in the world, still,” said Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. For now, though, and much to the relief of corporate America, the cycle is working in reverse: Healthier overseas markets are propping up American balance sheets. The United States has been roiled by the housing downturn, but the rest of the world has, at least for now, mostly skated clear. High energy prices have exacted a toll on Americans, because oil is priced in American dollars.