There are already pipelines in the Arabian Peninsula. None of those help - on the contrary, they are more vulnerable than tankers. The Houthis have already targeted the Saudi pipelines in the past.
The only possible solution would be underground pipelines but a.) sunk costs into existing pipelines, b.) capex needed is much higher, c.) you can't transport all of the oil and gas, or even a significant fraction of it through standard sized pipelines.
Saudi Arabia will invest into a port on the Jeddah side, that's for certain.
Not sure which world you're in, but Iran has put forward a 10-point demand plan, and it looks like the US (or rather Trump) will likely accept all of them instead of getting stuck in a quagmire before elections.
Yeah, they did. Did you compare to their original 5 point plan? Their 10 point plan sounds like they've given up removing US bases, taxing Hormuz AND the safety of their proxy armies. No "right" to nuclear bombs (sorry "power stations"). No reparation payments. No removal of US bases.
Any agreement with Iran doesn't matter anyway, because Iran hasn't held up it's previous agreements, so there's no real long term point to any agreement. I wonder if they'll let the US clean up their nuclear stockpile and their centrifuges. That is the real question that matters to the west: does the US (or someone trustworthy) get to go in and remove that shit? Does the US (or someone trustworthy) get to go in and demine Hormuz?
(oh sorry, did propagandists claim Iran didn't mine Hormuz? Well, they lied. And we could point out that that is yet another islamist warcrime ... but what's the point? Frankly it's a pathetic warcrime compared to what they do to people in Iran itself, Syria and Yemen)
> According to state media, Iran will only accept the war’s conclusion once details are finalised in line with a 10-point peace plan reportedly submitted to the White House via Pakistani intermediaries.
> The list of 10 points, published by Iranianstate media, include a number of conditions the US has rejected in the past. The plan requires:
> The lifting of all primary and secondary sanctions on Iran.
> Continued Iranian control over the strait of Hormuz.
> US military withdrawal from the Middle East.
> An end to attacks on Iran and its allies.
> The release of frozen Iranian assets.
> A UN security council resolution making any deal binding.
> In the version released in Farsi, Iran also included the phrase “acceptance of enrichment” for its nuclear program. But for reasons that remain unclear, that phrase was missing in English versions shared by Iranian diplomats to journalists.
Just happened with my dad, with one of his rental tenants. One of them lost his job (didn't get the job after the probation period), so he had booked a flight back home. Except because of the war in the Middle East, the flights were delayed constantly so he couldn't go back - and given that his flight was on a budget airline, it would take ages until normal operations resume (they still haven't resumed). The guy kept telling my father that he would pay once his ticket was booked, up until the very last minute when he revealed that he was broke and could not pay, burnt bridges and all. He incurred a significant expense after booking a flight with a non-discount carrier airline.
The irony was that had he revealed that he was broke from the start, my father wouldn't have minded as much about the rent (he has forgiven rent in such cases in far too many situations), but would have also helped him get the ticket for cheap.
Fertilizer shortages worldwide resulting in massive famines all over the developing world, energy shortages that are affecting critical utilities supplies in the developing world... Sounds good, amirite?
The upshot is it could accelerate the development of smaller local fertiliser factories running on solar power. There’s a few that have been built and demonstrated. If we start to build them in large numbers hopefully the costs will become reasonable.
That’s for nitrogen. Sulphur is another matter. I suppose in the long term we should just adapt food production to what can actually be sourced sustainably and locally.
7 million people per year die prematurely from air pollution alone. Are you suggesting we should just keep killing those people indefinitely instead?
Those 7 million lives were apparently never worth fixing things for; now maybe we can shift away from a fossil fuel-driven economy and cut back on a lot of that pollution, and maybe save a ton of lives in the long run.
Yes it is horrible that people are going to die from famines, no one is arguing against that, but maybe it will result in shifting our economy to something where people don't die of famines and also don't die of air pollution.
We have to evolve ways -- or bring back ways -- of making our agriculture less petroleum dependent. But short of a shock of this nature, we are not going to do any research in that direction because of trillions of dollars of investments in that way of doing business and in their vested interests. The oil will start flowing soon enough, but this is the defibrillation that the world needed, even if it didn't want it.
They can also sell it in the US, buy it in Europe, as France did. It's also the preferable route because IIRC the Chinese have had suspicions about the quality of their gold holdings held in the US for sometime now. That is, US-stored gold is not of the same quality grade as in the rest of the world.
The usual claim, which is difficult to prove without physical access to the bars, is that some bars were made by melting and casting the confiscated gold coins that FDR gathered in the 1930s.
Such bars would not be to the 99.9 percent gold standard set by the London Bullion Market Association. They would instead be at about 90% purity, since American gold coins had 10% copper added, which makes the gold harder and more wear-resistant.
The Deutsche Bundesbank has a long list of every single gold bar in their possession (including those currently stored in GB and USA), including their weight (to 0.1 gram) and purity (at least 995/1000 as far as I can tell).
I don't read German well and don't care to run this through a translator, but this is fascinating. I wonder how this list was compiled, by whom, and when it is used (is the gold audited)? You could randomly sample bars from the list to check the status of the gold periodically. I'm curious if other countries maintain similar lists.
I don't think they regularly audit the gold bars. But according to an article I read, the German Bundesbank used these lists to check off each of the bars transferred between 2013 and 2017 (when they transferred ~ 300 tons each from Paris and New York¹).
Back then, they brought the gold bars to Germany, weighed them at multiple checkpoints, and melted them here. AFAIK, no discrepancies between list and actual weight/fineness were found.
I think this list is not only used for internal audits but also to assure the public and banks that Germany indeed knows in detail where its gold is stored.
They had gold worth X to the market but X minus 11 billion on paper. So when France accounted for its gold in euro terms they would say they have X minus 11 billion Euros worth of gold.
Now they still have the same amount of gold but they "realized" a gain of 11 billion. They don't have that much cash left after the repurchase but now they say they have X Euros worth of gold which is 11 billion more than before.
So no they didn't make a profit from this as gold is higher on both sides of the Atlantic than last time they did their accounting updates.
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