I live in a small town in southeast Alaska, where there's only a few small yachts; most boats in the harbors are either fishing boats or small boats for personal use. There's one yacht in the harbor next to the school I teach at.
I clicked on a random icon near Seattle, and it was the one yacht I see every day on my walk to school:
I just watched a tug come around an island in the app, then saw it out my window irl. Very cool!
I work with a lot of fishing vessels in the Gulf and Bering Sea; it is very cool to see a picture of the boat and get an idea of where they are hanging out.
Wow, I just looked at your website and I'd love to get in touch. I studied physics in undergrad but went into teaching and now I'm spending more time programming.
I'd love to chat about a landslide-prediction model I've been toying around with. I'll send you an email in a moment.
edit: It looks like the website either hides the locations of ships off the Somalia/Yemen coast, or the ships can choose to turn off their transponders there.
Most likely the captain choosing to turn it off. If you look at Coast Guard & Pilot boats they'll usually leave it on as they leave the dock and make their way out. Then it's off. Not very effective at interdiction if you're broadcasting your location.
It's definitely flaring. Just look at the other images. Due to the way the flare is placed it just looks like it's on fire. It's still an emergency flare and looks like a pretty bad situation. I've worked on similar drill rigs and i would not want to be on one that is flaring that much.
Definitely a fire, yes, but also definitely an intentional one. Look at the images others have posted in the thread: http://imgur.com/FTFgz5U. It has a flare at platform level sticking out one side.
Offshore and relatively remote crude rigs commonly flare off natural gas because of the cost involved in attaching them to collection pipelines (and infeasibility of condensing it to LNG). That is why the Bakken fields can be seen from space at night: http://www.ceres.org/industry-initiatives/oil-and-gas/gas-fl...
Excessive amounts past what is needed for local heat and electricity. North Dakota did recently pass legislation requiring more efficient/environmentally friendly storage/processing/usage of natural gas that would've previously been flared, regardless of how economically viable it is.
EDIT: I'm mistaken. North Dakota gave the industry an extra 10 months to meet these requirements.
> Governor Jack Dalrymple and the two other members of the North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC) voted unanimously to change the date when companies must capture 85 percent of natural gas produced from their wells to Nov. 1, 2016.
Because it's a massive safety risk, and believe it or not, the cost is not with doing that. There is a lot of the gas. You must control it.
Methane is heavier than air and it will pool down and make a potential FOOOOM!!! event. Unscheduled release of energy bad. Asphyxiation by methane bad. There's no odorant and you
can't smell it.
This is a drill rig and does not have any oil/gas production facilities. The pressure in a well can be very unpredictable and is very dangerous to connect directly to generators/heaters. I's much safer to flare it off for the short period when plugging the well.
It's also interesting to see how busy the waterways in / around the North Sea / European west coast are compared to the US. But then, the US is a large landmass and probably has a lot more ground transport (e.g. trains)
If you want to move 100 tank cars of crude oil, or 100 cars of coal, then a freight train will accomplish that pretty easily. You can even move a truck trailer via rail, that's called intermodal.
But if you want to deliver 50,000 pounds of freight across the country in three days, you can't do it by rail. You pay a tractor trailer "team" (e.g. often a husband and wife)* to pick up your load on the West Coast on Thursday and deliver it on the East Coast on Monday. They'll take turns driving all weekend to accomplish that.
Bulk stuff moves by train or barge, relatively heavy relatively time sensitive stuff moves by truck, light and time sensitive stuff moves by air.
*Edit: that sounds complicated or risky, but it's not. Manufacturers use logistics companies to handle these details. Logistics companies are also good at quickly moving LTL (less-than-truckload) loads across long distances by consolidating multiple shipments into one trailer.
I've also heard our freight rail infrastructure described as excellent through, so maybe if you compared it to other countries in cost per ton/mile it would come out well.
Zero Hedge had a good piece on this yesterday and goes a bit into contango, where future prices are higher than spot prices, essentially incentivizing these tankers to just sit in the water.
what I don't get is that if there are future contracts, they have to be fulfilled when the time comes, wasn't all this oil bought in advance with future contracts? I guess actual users of the oil have actually ordered it before as opposed to speculators, they need it now don't they?
The game is great because the economy develops with each player taking on different levels of responsibility in different roles: production, storage, and shipment.
And it's not at all uncommon to watch players keep fully-loaded ships at sea while they wait for the opportune time to sell the goods on board.
It's amazing, but at the same time it's OOP with a reprint anytime soon being unlikely. It would probably be very easy to rig up a print-and-play copy however.
And here I was expecting a news article or press statement! It was an incredibly pleasant experience to see the facts from the headline firsthand, no spin attached. Thank you, OP!
This sort of phenomenon can be seen lots of times throughout the past decades. Anytime oil falls below a certain price, it becomes cheaper to pay to keep the ships running offshore under the assumption that oil prices will increase in the near term.
It does seem that that would be the pertinent question.
If you look at the density map layer option, you can crossfade between 2013 and 2014. I didn't sign up for an account, but it looks like in 2014 at least they saw an increase in traffic where the tankers are now parked.
But, last year there was also significantly more traffic through that port in general, so it may not be that the percentage of temporarily held ships as a function of total traffic changed?
So am I right thinking these ships are fully loaded?
If so, I guess the implicit assumption is that the price will rise back faster than the costs of having an idle ship sitting in the water? If the market was efficient, wouldn't it be irrational for the holders to assume this?
If suppliers don't want to trade at current prices, the ship is going to be sitting idle somewhere - and it's more profitable to sit idle near America while full than to sit idle in the Gulf of Oman while empty.
Often ships sit loaded for months on end (sometimes due to customs or duties / ownership issues). There's also a proximity issue. If a loaded ship is sitting close to the states but in international waters, it's easier to get the load back into the states. If you leave the cargo in a storage facility somewhere you still have to pay for the storage, and in addition the transit + time when you actually want to use/sell/offload it.
The market is efficient, but only on the long run. People making decisions like this make the market efficient by storing oil when it is cheap (or when it appears to be cheap).
It's obvious that moving oil in space helps, right? You move the resource from a place it's relatively plentiful to a different place where oil is relatively scarce. Say, from the Persian Gulf to Australia.
The same thing is happening here:
These ships are trying to move oil from a time when oil is relatively plentiful to a time when it's relatively scarce. It's riskier, but if they succeed, everybody wins: they make money, and they do it by lessening that future scarcity.
This is a great point. Operating a tanker ship might appear expensive (hundreds of thousands per day), but when you spread that cost across the cargo it holds, it's actually pretty cheap.
I remember hearing that shipping something from China to the US can be under $1 per pound.
The Shanghai Containerized Freight Index (SCFI) has it at $1102 to ship a forty-foot container (FEU) from China to the US west coast [1]. A 40' container has a 61,200 lb payload capacity [2]. That's 1.8 cents/pound. How close the cost gets to this depends on the payload density, but $1/pound seems high.
I didn't know the exact number that's why I put "less than $1/pound".
You are correct though. If you look at some of the products like fruit that we get from Asian, the cost per pound would have to be pennies or else they couldn't charge $2/pound for the produce in the US.
According to the recent earnings report from North American Tanker [0], their cost per day is $12K, while they charge $35K/day on the spot market. This is for their Suezmax, which can hold 1M barrels of crude.
Thanks for this link! I'm in Amsterdam, and I really wish I knew about this web site during Sail from August 19-23! It happens every four years. It would have been a great way to identify all the ships we saw, especially when they were all moored in the IJ during the fireworks. Is there any way to replay historic information? https://vimeo.com/141042923
During the oil 'crisis' in the 70's, when there were long lines of cars at the gas stations, my dad remembers seeing fully loaded tankers stacked up at Tampa for a long period of time. The speculation ranged from (a) the president wanted to use the crisis to drive a different energy policy, to (b) the oil companies were waiting to offload as the price kept climbing.
Yeah, there's also 50% of the US' refining capacity along the Gulf Coast, as well as a massive new surge of crude and therefore products in the area. They simply can't get enough dockspace or pipeline takeaway capacity to make a meaningful dent.
So is the risk of an tsunami so low there that it is considered safe to have fully loaded oiltankers idle off the coast, or would this be not a problem for those tankers?
The way tsunamis affect different locations is quite interesting! The wave length (distance between two peaks/troughs) at sea can be hundreds of kilometers long, a tsunami could pass under your tiny boat while out at sea and you wouldn't even notice it. It's only as they approach land that the shallow depths force the wavelength to shorten, forming the giant waves we usually associate with tsunamis.
So i looked at this map http://www.charts.noaa.gov/OnLineViewer/11323.shtml and the water depth seems to be about 60 feet if i'm doing it right, i don't know if this is considered safe in such cases or how long they would take to reach a safe depth. Guess it just makes me uncomfortable to have them idle there fully loaded to make a better buck.
I don't think there's ever been a Tsunami in Galveston Bay. Now hurricanes... Like another poster said, they're safer out there than closer in, and having them inside the actual Galveston bay would be incredibly dangerous due to congestion.
About 66 million years ago there was probably quite the Tsunami in Galveston Bay. Courtesy of the Chicxulub impactor.
But you might be right, I'm not really sure what the landmasses looked like so long ago. Also I don't think the place was actually named "Galveston Bay" at the time. :)
For big ships, idling off the coast is exactly where you want them during inclement weather. They're big enough that waves aren't really an issue - it's getting battered against land that's the problem.
Edit: My favourite so far is a oil rig who's description photo is them on fire: http://imgur.com/9VpE78V