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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: quehubo who wrote (22614)	5/15/2003 7:56:40 AM
From: Ed Ajootian	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206325

Que, Boy, that Andy really likes to write! I _tried reading both parts of the article last night after having just skimmed it during the day. He seems to go over the same points 2-3 times. Reminds me of a saying, I believe by Mark Twain: "I woulda written a shorter letter but I didn't have the time!" For those that didn't make it to Part II I would suggest looking at that, where, toward the end, he gives some very helpful metrics by which to measure how we are doing over these next 10 very critical weeks of storage fill, and he also provides a fairly cogently written conclusion. The only thing that he is failing to give enough weight to, IMO, is the very substantial increase in gas rigs that began drilling over the last several months, the earlier of which will be starting to get into production any week now. This extra supply will go a long way toward getting things back in line IMO.

To: quehubo who wrote (22614)	5/15/2003 8:31:57 PM
From: russwinter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206325

Both of the must read Andrew Weissman "shock and awe" commentaries are here: energypulse.net

To: quehubo who wrote (22614)	5/19/2003 7:03:43 AM
From: Ed Ajootian	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206325

Recognizing Experts of Merit Amongst Idiots 102 5.16.03 Jack Duckworth, CEO, Expert Systems Programs and Consulting, Inc. I just finished reading Andy Weismann's great article "Days of Shock and Awe About to Hit the Natural Gas and Power Markets" here at Energy Pulse and can only shake my head in profound sadness. That is because I am regularly finding myself disgusted and even distraught from the realization that this great country of ours is lead by regulators who can't seem to keep their whits about them long enough to prevent coming disasters. In this country we reward people who help pull us out of crises but totally ignore or even berate people who have the foresight and expertise to keep us out of potential crises in the first place. Even with Andy's very detailed and clear outline of the coming disaster, this country and, sadly, this government will do nothing and take no action in an attempt to avert the coming natural gas shortage disaster. The greatest of all human faults is our failure to use our God-given intelligence to protect mankind from obvious future crises. Man is the only creature with the intelligence and foresight to change the future to its own advantage and we habitually fail to act. We berate those who foresee and predict coming disaster and take no action to prevent it. We then reward those who extricate us from the crisis, but fail to acknowledge those who predicted the coming crisis–those whom we ignored in order to bring the crisis into full bloom. The sad thing is I can see no way that the situation can or will change. The situation won't change because too many people with too little knowledge regularly muddy the water with stupid predictions and those in power can't tell the experts from the amateurs. When Andy Weismann says that there's a coming crisis of shortage in natural gas, those in power in our government fail to recognize the quality of the source and instead picture a bearded old man standing on the street corner with a sign that says "The end of the world is at hand." Our leadership doesn't have the brains to determine which predictions have merit so they ignore all predictions and run headlong into walls, fall into deep holes, and find themselves asking "How did we ever get into this mess?" It was about five years ago that I was at a hydroelectric power meeting at the FERC building with Chair Elizabeth Mohler. I say Chair, rather than Chairman, because she was hung up on the little things and wanted to be a Chair rather than a Chairman. Anyway, at the end of the meeting I told her that we had a coming crisis of shortage in natural gas. I told her that very little of the nation's electric power generation was currently fueled by natural gas but that with the advent of the high-efficiency, natural-gas-fueled combined-cycle combustion turbine generating units, every utility and independent power producer was planning to install nothing but such units in the future. I told her that such an increase in demand for natural gas would create a shortage and we needed to start planning for the additional demand to prevent a crisis. Chair Mohler said, dismissing me with the wave of her hand, "The natural gas market is deregulated and in a free market there are no shortages because supply always expands to meet the demand." At that moment I thought, "Oh, brother, are we in trouble." It was suddenly and totally clear to me that the ones in charge of the keys to the kingdom had no real understanding of the operation of the kingdom and could only repeat platitudes and rules of thumb that they had been taught in their short course–Kingdom Leadership 101. This country will continue to find itself bumping into walls, falling into deep holes, and otherwise screwing up, until it forces all of its regulatory leaders to attend that very valuable course–Recognizing Experts of Merit Amongst Idiots 102.