Member Info for romaron

https://www.nhbcfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/NF87_The-Future-for-Home-Heating-%E2%80%93-life-without-fossil-fuels-1.pdf
The above is pretty recent (16 Sept) but only continues the negative narrative which is seldom challenged but imo paints a false reality. I know quite a lot about this business but continue to learn. This for example:
"Heat pumps are much more widely used in Scandinavian countries, for example, than in the UK. With little natural gas available, Sweden has 1.7 million heat pumps installed in its total stock of 10 million homes, and sales of heat pumps
have doubled over the last 14 years. This is partly due to regulation (e.g. the banning of oil boilers), partly because the electricity supply grid has long been relatively low-carbon (including hydro, geothermal, wind and nuclear generation),
and partly because consumers are demanding running costs lower than those of direct electric heating."
With due respect to our Swedish readers they are hardly typical and you can rule out India and Africa for a start. Heat pumps aren't taking off in the UK either and really only work in new-builds. And in new-builds the usual standard is "cheap" and easy to install. Government grants are the only way. What self-flagellating rich western economies indulge in is only part of the narrative but going forward developing countries are going to drive the world economy imo. Meanwhile: "Some boiler manufacturers are developing hydrogen boilers, and a major Government-sponsored project is underway to explore the many issues[25]. It is nevertheless considered unlikely that pure hydrogen heating will become mainstream in the newbuild sector in the near future."
So - they use Sweden as an example yet India has a paucity of universal electricity and a population 135 times the size (and growing) whilst crazy ideas about hydrogen are decades away (certainly not in my lifetime).
You can do anything if you throw enough money at it and ground all the world's aircraft. Neither of which will happen. Back to hitman. There is an industry that can solve most of the world's energy problems and it is partly on our doorstep.
People will still want cheap and reliable energy for decades yet but the CGE lobby thinks it will be listened to by sovereign nations that have missed out on cheap energy?
There's a lot of tokenism going on and the majors are using CGE as an excuse for getting out of mature basins/fields. To me that's boll*cks as they've been doing it for years. Driven by economic reasons (scale), passing the buck and dressing it up as 'climate action'.
We'll probably never get ahead of the narrative but we are being given an opportunity to be part of the "Energy Transition", whatever that really means.

Our time is coming.

Excellent post hitman. We're coming at it from slightly different directions but it makes sense. All the hand wringing and lamenting won't make us popular with events and the strong narrative wind against us. There are though others that see this as a time of opportunity and watching the price of the share or oil daily isn't gonna change that. I just glanced at CNE and see that they have a mc of £875m against our £171m. Fair enough with our debt but we aren't under any covenant deadline and our production is around three times theirs. I know they may get an award from India but here's a question for L7 who follows CNE closely. Could the business that hitman proposes be more easily done by CNE?
Anyone else can answer but I get the feeling that we have far more experience in the NS and ambition.

I did listen to the zoomcast and you can find it somewhere recorded. Two things. The book went into July so covers a fair bit of Covid. Also in it DY mentions that the target for net zero carbon for China is 2060 whereas I think it's 2050 for most others? If I'm right that kinda weakens the whole concept as China will be the largest producer of carbon yet gets more favourable treatment. The book also helped me understand majors better. They really have/need scale that makes only giant, long term projects fit their business plans. At the level they deal government agencies often interfere or they deal direct with governments that are after reliable long term energy. That is why pipelines and shipping lanes are so important.
The North sea is fragmented now and smaller companies fill the space that the majors vacate. An example could be that Kraken production doesn't help the UK oil shortfall because they [UK] probably have contracts in place and we have to sell on the speculative world market with best prices coming from the Far East.
The book makes me feel a lot happier about Bressay. A certain stubbornness and self-belief is necessary to develop untried fields and technologies which the majors tend to leave to the next level down and that level has been winnowed down of late. Many that have survived so far are holding on by the skin of their teeth because of debt deadlines. I think AB has a point and agree with hitman. We are definitely still in the game.

The book covers Covid to about Mar/April so is pretty current. He doesn't purport to know the new landscape but with all the conflict and new alliances being formed there will be a landgrab (or seagrab) before long. Turkey has been playing with its bullworker (troops in Bahrain) whilst China is getting very territorial about the South China seas. Russia as always is enigmatic but even more ruthless than the U.S. The Malacca Strait may become problematic for us.

Hi NM - not bored at all. The lack of posts allowed me to "take over" the message board for a while and my aim was to get people interested. I've gained a lot from other posters here and wanted to put something back. The quotes are taken from a recently released book called "The New Map" by Daniel Yergin.
As you can see he writes in a non-intellectual way but is formidably bright and a Pulitzer prize winner. He also works closely with MIT professor and former U.S. energy secretary Ernest Moniz. They collaborated together on a new study "Advancing the Landscape of Clean Energy" for the Gates Foundation and the Breakthrough Energy Coalition.
I read it to challenge any 'confirmation bias' that I will have picked up. None of us are immune. I didn't jump straight to the conclusion called "The Disrupted Future" and my heart sank as I read the shale stories. Many pioneers have gone bust or merged due to weakness and I worried they may have been a harbinger for the North Sea.
I would say the book doubled my knowledge and anybody reading it will find something new. I was particularly drawn to the Investment apathy toward energy (c.2% of index) when they hold the key to global advance and geopolitical strife. Fossil fuel may be toxic for some in the West but tokenism has overshot imo and it is only a matter of time before the investment community will be unable to ignore the attractions of energy.
I started reading the book with the mindset that it might have something within that gave me a reason to sell (a technique I never lost - sometimes late but I will never hold if I sense there is no relief). So I actually read it with a negative mindset.
I'm hoping to listen to a zoomcast that is being led by DY at 5p.m. tonight. https://www.rff.org/events/pls/policy-leadership-series-daniel-yergin/
Reading the shale story it helped me understand what is happening to us. Covid is Darwinism on steroids but much of what is happening would have happened anyway. The U.S. is a bully boy that decides the narrative and unashamedly persecutes and abuses other nations to get its own way. This book makes it clear that the world is now split in two energywise and their time of hegemony is being challenged and probably overthrown. There will be wars have no doubt because energy is too important to the human race.
To paraphrase Mark Twain - "the reports of the death of oil have been greatly exaggerated."
DY also puts EV in a much more detailed perspective.

Sell Tesla.

means different things to different nations, especially in the developing world. A billion people lack access to electricity; three billion do not have access to clean cooking fuels. Instead they burn wood or charcoal or crop waste or cow dung indoors impairing their health. This leads to a different perspective.
The game changer here is gas. Coal is still a mainstay for the world's two most populous countries. Asis is on trackto substantially increase its coal consumption.
80 percent of the world's people have never been in an airplane. "Flight shaming" may be a social mode in Sweden (pop. 10m), but China (pop. 1.4bn) , is building 8 new airports a year.

The Chinese economy will not grow as fast as in the past, but it will be growing off a much bigger economic base, and increasing quantities of energy will be required to assure that growth. This is why energy is a key element for China both in the South China Sea - which some see as the "accident" waiting to happen - and in the Belt and Road and the drive to rebalance the world economy.
In one three year period , 2011-13, China consumed more cement than the United States did in the entire twentieth century.

As they grow, wind and solar and EV's will need "big shovels" to meet their increasing call on mined minerals and land itself. It is estimated that an onshore wind turbine requires fifteen hundred tons of iron, twenty -five hundred tons of concrete, and forty-five tons of plastic. About half a million pounds of raw materials have to be mined and processed to make a battery for an electric car.

The global network of supply chains will be under pressure, as governments and companies reevaluate their dependence on those chains - more complex than many realised (post Covid) - and instead put mmore emphais on security and resilience and "localisation" - and creating local jobs. "Just in time" manufacturing and inventory management will make room for "just be sure".

is largely not in the developed world. The U.S. generates less than 1 percent of the plastic waste in oceans. About 90 percent of river-sourced plastic pollution in the oceans comes from uncontrolled dumping into ten rivers in Asia and Africa.

The modern solar industry really began in 1973, with the launch of two ventures. One was a unit of Exxon. The other was by two scientists who had worked on the U.S. space program - Joseph Lindmayer and Peter Varadi - both of them refugees.
China ended up overproducing solar panels and some of their companies went bankrupt. To mitigate they then developed a new market within China to install panels to meet the critical national need for electricity and reduce pollution. By 2017 it had overtaken Germany for installations and represented half of the entire global market.

In a speech in 2015 to Lloyd's of London said that Climate had become a "a defining issue for financial stability" and created "systemic risk" for the world's financial systems. He warned investors that oil and gas reserves could remain in the ground and become "stranded" over thirty years. He called for a sweeping reallocation away from traditional energy companies to finance "the de-carbonization" of economies.
Some, in response, pointed out that companies' oil and gas reserves are not valued over thirty years by investors, but only about ten years. In any event, most of the world's oil and gas reserves are owned by national governments, and not shareholders in Britain or the US.

China has about 160 cars per 1,000 inhabitants compared to 867 in the US. China has 240 million cars. India with a similar but much younger population has 48 million cars.

George Mitchell the father of shale was almost alone in believing in shale. The other person was Larry Nichols of Devon Energy who bought Mitchell's company for $3.5bn in 2002. EOG was another company that was an early investor in shale but this time in oil. In 2010 they quietly bought up acreage in the Eagle Ford region at $400 an acre. The price eventually rose to $53,000 an acre. Shale was not only a US game changer; it became a global game changer.
Noble energy discovered one of the largest gas fields in the world in the Eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Israel in 2010. In 2008 natural gas reached a high point of $9 per thousand cubic feet.
Where are they now?

It is good news. Coincidentally I received a request for volunteers for Novavax Phase lll Covid-19 Trial yesterday. I filled in the form but not so sure now about participating as a confirmation came from Acurian Health who are US based and not known for their transparency. Its base is St. George's again though.

142/78 not perfect but then neither am I

Today from Cairn Energy (CNE). They share a field with us and their message board went crazy (perspective - normally zero posts)

from the RNS: Catcher

The Catcher area fields remain on plateau and cumulative production to 30 June was more than 47 mmbbls. In H1 2020, average gross production from the Catcher Area was ~ 54,500 bopd (~10,900 bopd net to Cairn). Following the planned shutdown and maintenance work in Q3, Catcher production has returned to 66,000 bopd with the gas plant fully reinstated and able to export gas. Drilling operations at the Varadero infill well (VP1) were completed post period end and the well has been brought on-stream in Q3 to help maintain plateau oil rates from the Catcher Area into 2021. The JV continues to mature a programme of high return investments to maximise economic recovery from within and around the Catcher Area. Further opportunities in the Catcher Area include satellite targets and infill opportunities; the latter will be de-risked by 4D seismic which is being considered for 2021. The drilling of further production wells originally planned for 2020 has been deferred.

Be Lucky

Hi devonplay - I only posted because some people may have read it as an investment return of 68% which you suggested. If I bought £10 worth of bonds for £6.8 and they reached maturity without any haircuts or the like I would receive £10k plus interest of c.£433 (6.5 divided by 12x8). Still high but more like a 53% return. YTM is a bit like APR and uses annual rates for a picture. It is useful to traders more than investors but for some it is a good indicator. Thank you for pointing out that the bond is junk debt. I never would have guessed.
I don't trust the LSE site and the wrong coupon is indicative. Information that costs nothing often has the same value as do most posts on a message board. Like the share price I treat them as snap shots and both are often wrong. We should know something more concrete shortly. I only have a modest interest in the share price but with the refinancing ongoing there is sure to be manipulation in the trading of debt and much is in the hands of those who trade in these scenarios. It is encouraging and discouraging depending on my mood. PMO will survive but unsure of how many ounces of flesh the debt-holders can get away with.

Hi devonplay - I'm not splitting hairs only questioning how you could invest today and earn 68% (or even 65.672%). I don't think you've really grasped this but points for trying.

Thank you Jennifer but I already knew the coupon price on the LSE was wrong.

Hi devonplay, you wrote regarding the Retail Bond "Hold them to May 21 and you get a return of 68% on redemption. Honestly.
68%!"

No you don't, honestly!

Imaginative hitman until another buyer comes up with the cash. However, that is currently a small coterie (assuming they still exist) so you have an argument.
"The oil price collapse of March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting crash in the global financial
markets have presented us with a unique set of challenges. However, we have moved swiftly to reduce our operating cost
base, have put robust protocols in place to both maintain operations and keep our people safe and have sufficient liquidity to weather this perfect storm." This is the latest I can find from Martin Houston the Chairman in March this year and is corporate speech.
I only mention it because I know next to nothing about him and what his influence is within the company. You can have weak and YES men chairmen which is not something you'd say about Jim Buckee whilst Jock Lennox was (imo) more a professional NED with an accountancy background. The team in my eyes is AB, JS and BD. AB & JS fight their corner and come over very competitive whilst BD comes over more urbane but they are all tested, experienced and competent. MH is vastly experienced too and I'd like to know what he's doing. A strong personality is essential in his role for us and I hope MH has it in spades as well as contacts.
As for leaks:
“Journalists are never hungry. They swallow everything.” ? Ljupka Cvetanova

On paper we have close to a dream team.