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Setting up an Apocalyptic Summer

IMAGE: Nation and State

‘I don’t use diesel, so this won’t affect me.’ — Pajama People Everywhere

Those who’ve been following our key points from the posts “Globalist Crime Syndicate’s New Charade” and “The Great Culling” are aware of the set ups that the kakistocrats (aka sub-zeros) are utilizing to collapse the United States and Europe from within.

The first step that we described was cognitively impaired Dementia Joe’s announcement that he was going to draw on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to “counter Putin inflation.” Since then, year-to-date reserve draws total 43.7 million barrels. We are now nine million barrels away from having the lowest SPR crude storage since 1988.

Next, with sufficient oil stock available — thanks to the SPR — the sub-zeros process it at the refiners into distillates. Then, despite the abundant capacity of the Colonial Pipeline to deliver the refined distillates to the East Coast, the sub-zeros instead export the refined product to Latin America and Europe. Likewise LNG is being shipped to Europe.

Citing Vortexa tracking data, Bloomberg said that up to 2.09 million barrels per day of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel shipped out of the Gulf Coast in April.

This in turn leaves the East Coast high and dry. Although the East is nearly bone dry, distillate inventories nationwide are also at unprecedented lows. This sets up full blown robbing Peter to pay Paul transport activity right as diesel runs low. Perfect storm would be bulleyes from hurricane season.

East coast refining capacity has been halved over the last thirteen years.

May 4 update: 

MAY 4 UPDATE: Another very large drawdown. Crude -3.479MM; gasoline -4.50MM, distillates -4.457MM.

Not surprisingly, as we enter the “driving and growing season,” diesel prices are surging rapidly.

Among all Class 8 trucks (the big ones), 97 percent use diesel.

Almost every train in the country depends on diesel for energy.

Eighty percent of the ships that transport products via the ocean are powered by diesel, ditto river barges.

Diesel engines power more than two-thirds of all farm equipment, transport 90 percent of its product and pump one-fifth of its water in the U.S. Diesel dominates the entire “farm supply chain” – planting the product, tending the crop (watering, fertilizers and pesticides), harvesting the product and even bringing it to market, whether by truck, rail or ship.

Nearly every fishing vessel around the world uses diesel for power.

Trucks loaded up on with fuel in Wesseling, Germany, last month. Credit…Martin Meissner/Associated Press

Meanwhile, the sub-zeros in Europe have made their bed.

At the conclusion of its Monday meeting (May 2), the European Union has said it will not heed Russian demands to pay for gas in rubles, with a mid-May deadline for payment looming. The bloc also warned its member states to prepare for Russia to cut off gas to all members. Failure to meet Russia’s demands on this point already resulted in gas being cut off last week to Poland and Bulgaria.

European distillate inventory

There’s unrelenting inflation in fertilizer prices.

6 Comments on Setting up an Apocalyptic Summer

  1. What exactly is the worry? Your own myriad graphs above show that these trends are highly cyclical over the decades. They go up and down, war time, peace time, every time … This piece comes across as fear porn.

    • Distillate inventories are at new lows in the US, and yet they are exporting it abroad. That’s different and alarming. In Europe inventory is near new lows, and Russian energy is being cut off. That’s quite different as well.

      Maybe they can wave a magic wand.

      • I have been following various alternative news sources for about 12yrs now (since 2010). Although I’m extremely skeptical of the fake news garbage like CNN, New York Slimes, BBC, etc … I have also developed a prudent and healthy scepticism of the so-called “alt” news sources of information.

        I have no doubt you are sincere in your writings and views. However, in the past six or seven years alone, I can list you a dozen such dire “predictions” (from various outlet, some reputable) of impending economic collapse … none ever panning out! And curiously each source that makes it forgets about, or is completely unaware, that someone else has made such claims just a couple of years or so before.

        I’m starting to think it’s human nature: whether you believe in the standard evolution model or not, i believe there’s an deep instinctual mechanism in our psyche, serving an evolutionary survival instinct, to always see doomsday on the horizon. Across history and cultures, we see the same pattern of “the end is near”. The story is the same, only the content changes: i.e. rather than saying a comet will destroy us (Haley comet scare of the late 1800’s as one among dozens of examples), it’s “derivatives market will implode and supply chain disruptions will cause societal breakdown” … none of these ever seem to happen though.

        • They won’t ring a bell though, and that’s the problem. People have also become accustomed to the central banks printing extraordinary amounts of money to distort and avert Minsky moments. In the scenario I addressed I provided the datapoints and the geopolitical realities.

  2. Thanks – it looks chaotic, uncontrolled (or more likely controlled to cause the chaos), with no-one having any power to stop what’s happening.This is certainly not normal cyclic patterns – for a start, oil is not a product that has anything but economics and finance at the root of its availability and pricing. We know that the 1973 crisis was engineered against politically, regardless of who was ultimately behind it. This is no different.
    One small point – marine engines on anything but the smallest vessels (recreation or coastal) uses heavy crude, which is different from road/rail fuel. According to my source, heavy is almost like a waste product of the catalytic cracking that gives us all the other fuels. How this affects its price I don’t know, but I’m guessing it will resist shortages better than the other petroleum products, and is less likely to be exported for better profit. International shipping needs to be refueled wherever it makes port, regardless of its endpoints are in the world.

    • I caught that too. As a salient example, the Japanese Navy bunkered up in the last year 44/45(eg: Battle of the Phillipine Sea) on heavy crude straight out of the wells in Brunei before sailing off into eternity. RIP, dudes. Dirty crude is hell on your engines over any length of time. But they knew they were marked men anyway.

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