Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Oil Crash Risks $19 Billion Wave of Junk Debt Defaults

Climate: the Conversation

MISSION STATEMENT: As conversations of weather occurrences and suggested anomalies become  more frequent and mainstream in the scientific community, as well as at the grass-roots-level, the need to embrace and index substantive information into an authoritative conduit to encourage more research and development~~~IS IMPERATIVE.                                                          


As conversations of weather occurrences and suggested anomalies become more frequent and mainstream in the scientific community, as well as at the grass-roots-level, the need to embrace and index substantive information into an authoritative conduit to encourage more research and development~~~IS IMPERATIVE.


Pertinent themes as Global Warming, Climate Change, and Melting Ice Caps has stimulated discussions, seeded forums, and spawned additional research, all to foster consensus, and recommend courses-of-action.

The intent of CLIMATE; THE CONVERSATION, is to be The Bulletin Board, The Platform, The Podium,  and The Credible Source & Bibliography for such astute, sincere, and scholarly considerations.

Sincerely;

Administrators:

Andrew M. Marconi

Lou Marconi


Oil Crash Risks $19 Billion Wave of Junk Debt Defaults




 jodixu
Updated on Will the Price of Oil Only Go Higher    


   
  • At least eight oil and gas producers nearing default
  • Deadlines within days for SandRidge, Energy XXI, Goodrich

Investors are facing $19 billion in energy defaults as the worst oil crash in a generation leaves drillers struggling to stay afloat.
The wave could begin within days if Energy XXI Ltd., SandRidge Energy Inc. and Goodrich Petroleum Corp. fail to reach agreements with creditors and shareholders. Those are three of at least eight oil and gas producers that have announced missed debt payments, triggering a countdown to default.

"Shale was a hot growth area and companies made the mistake of borrowing too much," said George Schultze, founder and chief investment officer of Schultze Asset Management in New York, which has been betting against several distressed energy companies. "It’s amazing that so many people were willing to lend them money. Many are going to file for bankruptcy, and bondholders and equity are going to get wiped out en masse."

Bondholders are paying dearly for backing a shale boom that was built on high-yield credit. Since the start of 2015, 48 oil and gas producers have gone bankrupt owing more than $17 billion, according to law firm Haynes and Boone. Fitch Ratings Ltd. predicts $70 billion of energy, metal and mining defaults this year, and notes that $77 billion of energy bonds are bid below 50 cents, according to a note Thursday.
A representative at Energy XXI declined to comment. Representatives for SandRidge and Goodrich didn’t respond to requests seeking comment.
“Absent a material improvement in oil and gas prices or a refinancing or some restructuring of our debt obligations or other improvement in liquidity, we may seek bankruptcy protection,” Energy XXI said in a March 7 public filing.

Restructuring Plan

Goodrich Petroleum is asking shareholders and bond investors to approve a restructuring deal that would convert its unsecured debt and preferred shares into common stock. For the plan to work, shareholders must approve it at a March 14 meeting and enough bondholders need to participate by the March 16 exchange deadline.
"Absent a successful completion of the recapitalization plan, the company will have no alternatives other than to seek protection through the bankruptcy courts," Walter Goodrich, chairman and chief executive officer, said on a March 9 conference call.
Missed interest payments and potential defaults include:
  • Energy XXI, with $2.875 billion in debt, and SandRidge Energy, which owes $4.131 billion, both failed to pay interest due Feb. 16 and will default unless they reach agreements with their creditors by March 17. 
  • Ultra Petroleum, which owes $3.197 billion, said last week it has until April 30 to hammer out a deal with its lenders.
  • Goodrich Petroleum, which owes $455 million, said this week that it won’t pay interest due March 15 and April 1, and that it’s asking bondholders and shareholders to participate in a restructuring plan.
  • Chaparral Energy Inc., with $1.798 billion in debt, missed a payment on March 1, starting the clock on a 30-day grace period.
  • Pacific Exploration & Production Corp., with $5.428 billion in debt, likewise has until the end of the month under an extension granted by its creditors.
  • Venoco Inc., facing $708 million in debt, skipped an interest payment last month. The company must cut a deal with creditors by March 17.
  • Warren Resources Inc., which owes $453 million, said last month that it may file bankruptcy without a creditor deal. The company faced a default on March 2, when a 30-day grace period for a missed interest period had been set to expire.
A representative at Pacific declined to comment, and one at Warren Resources said the company would release more information about its restructuring at a later time. Representatives for Ultra Petroleum, Chaparral and Venoco didn’t return calls and e-mails requesting comment.
"Asset managers bought the story that we’d have $100 oil forever," said Tim Gramatovich, chief investment officer with Peritus Asset Management in Santa Barbara. "Bondholders are left holding the bag."







A very insightful essay bringing to the surface the very very delicate balance that exists on our planet between flora & fauna.  The Earth  must maintain this balance so that the  Earth's very poignant beauty and purpose and function~~~~is SUSTAINED.
Its impact on the economy, pollution, and the focus on Climate; The Conversation---makes this worthy substance, for continued enthusiasm, and consideration

Lou Marconi (SuiteLou0819)


HICKOK
---{-=@
HICKOK
Posted by at 1 comment:

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Fuzzy Nautilus Rediscovered and Filmed After 30 Years


Fuzzy Nautilus Rediscovered and Filmed After 30 Years

 A detailed shot reveals the fuzzy texturing of Allonautilus scrobiculatus as well as the visible spiral in its shell, and the pinhole eye and thin flexible tentacles emerging from the harder tentacle sheaths shared by other nautiloids as well. (Photo by Peter Ward)

















  Lou Marconi By Peter Ward, National Geographic/Waitt grantee

 t’s really nice to see an old friend after a long absence.

Thirty years after the discovery of the fuzzy, slimy, Allonautilus scrobiculatus, I returned to Papua New Guinea to see if this remarkable living fossil had survived the decades of shell hunting and environmental degradation that have driven these living fossils and their closest relatives to the brink of extinction.

We not only found them, we captured the first digital images of them alive in the wild, and attached tracking devices that are revealing some of the oldest and deepest secrets of their survival.

A Name Like No Other

“Nautilus.” The name conjures images of Jules Verne and the United States Navy with its first atomic submarine, and hidden between them, the name-giving animal itself.

Among biologists it is this animal that inspires most, for the simple reason that it appears to be one of the great survivors on Planet Earth: a living fossil.

 Coming from stock that first appeared near the end of the 530-million-year-old Cambrian Explosion, when animal life first appeared in our planet’s global ocean, the nautiloid cephalopods have endured through both good times and bad, including times very, very bad indeed: the great mass extinctions, short intervals of time when most species on Earth died out. Thus survivors such as the nautilus are revered by science.

Unfortunately, it is the very popularity of their beautiful, iconic, spiraled, and internally chambered shells that threatens them most, more than meteors from space, atmosphere-polluting global volcanoes, or even long-enduring ice ages ever did. Surviving mass extinction events is one thing. Surviving the global spread and increasing numbers of humans and our desire for shells and cheap trinkets made from those shells is something else entirely.

Now nautiluses must face another challenge: humans’ desire for metals found most abundantly on the sea beds these ancient survivors call home. And despite all these threats, and the nautiloids’ long history, fascinating discoveries are still being made about them.















 A chambered nautilus’s shell reveals its bright red colors when viewed in shallow water from above. (Photo by Peter Ward)

 The Other Nautilus

At most sites around the Earth, nautiluses can be found at depths between 300 and a thousand feet. They live singly (never in schools), they grow slowly (taking up to 15 years to reach full size and reproductive age), and they are never overly abundant as they slowly swim over the deep sea beds searching for carrion on the bottom.

In all but one place on Earth, only a single nautilus species can be found at any one site.

Northeast of the main island of Papua New Guinea however, along the coast of Manus Island, made famous by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead in the earlier part of the twentieth century, not only can you find the well-known chambered nautilus (genus: Nautilus, species: pompilius) but south of Manus there is a second species as well. It was first seen alive in 1984, and was found to be so astoundingly different in shell and soft part anatomy that it was, in 1997, give a wholly new genus name: Allonautilus (and species name scrobiculatus). And then, for the next 30 years, it wasn’t seen again.
















  Gregory Barord releases two Allonautilus scrobiculatus with ultrasonic transmitters attached to the dorsal sides of their shells. (Photo by Peter Ward)


  • Recently, National Geographic and the US National Science Foundation (Polar Programs) sponsored an expedition back to the site where Allonautilus was last seen, and the team succeeded in finding it anew.

    The Mission: Snap Pictures, Snip Samples, Leave     ‘Em Alive

    The goals of this trip were to most broadly ascertain if they still existed at all. I was the organizer of the trip, but could not have gone forward without Greg Barord, whose recent PhD on nautilus biology is changing our understanding of this animal; Rick Hamilton of The Nature Conservancy, who spends much of his life doing conservation science in Melanesia; and Manuai Matuwae, local chief of conservation for the Manus Island area, and the real mover and shaker of our field work.
    • My prior field work in the Philippine Islands, done with Greg on four trips from 2011 to early 2014, has already shown that local populations of Nautilus in the Philippines have been fished to extinction, and the fear was that perhaps the same happened to Allonautilus in PNG in the thirty years since it was last seen alive. But beyond that, if found, the goal was to get the first digital photos, the first live videos, and most importantly, get small snips of flesh, taken in non-lethal fashion, so that the new and powerful DNA techniques of modern genetic science could better understand these animals.

    A further goal was, almost ironically, to use bits of shell taken from living nautiloids in a very warm tropical setting, to better understand ancient nautiloids that lived right before and after the great Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction in Antarctica, a very cold setting indeed for us field workers when down there now.

    Living Fossils and Fossil-Fossils

    On four extended field trips sponsored by Polar Programs, I pondered the problem of why the fossil nautiloids so common at our Antarctic field sites survived the catastrophic mass extinction of 65 million years ago ending the Cretaceous, while their near look-alikes, the ammonites (also cephalopods with chambered shells) utterly died out. One group lives, one dies. As the great, and sadly recently deceased paleontologist David Raup famously asked, “Was it good genes? Or simply good luck?”

    The question was made partially tractable by our Antarctic field work, and it was the generosity of National Geographic and the Waitt Foundation as well as NSF Polar Programs that allowed this current trip to be possible, the leadership scientists there understanding that the present is indeed the key to the past; that we also needed to study the living descendants as well as the Cretaceous dead, which took us to this study of extant Nautilus and its cousin, Allonautilus, at the sole known place where both can be found.










Swimming with nautiluses in the wild is a great joy. (Photo by Andy Dunstan)

 Sending Their Secrets Up From the Deep

Additionally, two other techniques not available in 1985 were brought to the field site: deep water video cameras and small acoustic transmitters that could be attached to the shell. If monitored overhead day and night from small boats fitted with appropriate electronic receivers, these transmitters would obtain priceless information on the habits, depths, and even temperatures at which Nautilus and Allonautilus live on the same shared, deep reef environments.

Which led to our day-to-day life. We worked around the clock, with Rick, Manuai, and Greg taking turns with me as we sat in small boats day and night to retrieve the signals of our tagged nautiluses, living their lives far below but informing us of their depths, position, and temperatures of habitation for six days and five nights straight. The heat was a force—oppressive, the afternoons barely breathable; and it is in such times that companions can make the hardship bearable—others living the same hardships and not complaining.

The great joys were the moments we retrieved our traps to find nautiluses, the times we would swim with them, and especially when we pulled our giant, heavy deep-water video systems from the sea and spread out on the lawn on our small island. We’d bring our entire, 40-person clan together and watch the premiere of each 12-hour movie of the night before (played back faster than normal) to watch the nautiluses, deep-water sharks and other fish, and invertebrates of every stripe march into the camera’s field of view in search of the rich fish bait attached to its bright light.


















 Nautilus pompilius (left) and Allonautilus scrobiculatus (right) floating together, like nowhere else on Earth. (Photo by Peter Ward)

 
Happily (and in spite of the rigors of working from small boats in equatorial heat and humidity, the latter playing havoc with all electronics, computers, and cameras), all goals were met. None of the nautiluses we saw or briefly collected were “sacrificed for science” (i.e., killed and put in alcohol for eventual existence on a museum shelf).

The data and photos tell us that both of these nautiloid cephalopods exist still. The possible bad news is that their habitat—this part of Papua New Guinea where uniquely in the world two genera of nautiloid cephalopods live—is slated soon for large-scale, deep-water mining that will dredge the sea floor, a seafloor above which these ancient survivors still live.

But for how much longer?

































A very insightful essay bringing to the surface the very very delicate balance that exists on our planet between flora & fauna.  The Earth  must maintain this balance so that the  Earth's very poignant beauty and purpose and function~~~~is SUSTAINED.

Its impact on the economy, pollution, and the focus on Climate; The Conversation---makes this worthy substance, for continued enthusiasm, and consideration


Lou Marconi (SuiteLou0819)


HICKOK
Posted by at 1 comment:

Friday, July 24, 2015

Penguins have only two types of taste genes; no wonder they gulp their food.

 

Penguins have only two types of taste genes; no wonder they gulp their food

 Penguins, infamous food gulpers, may be unable to taste many thingsPenguins may look tastefully attired, but they lack the genes for two types of taste that other birds have, according to a new study. (Lee Hotz / Los Angeles Times)

By contact the reporter
 t may not be worthwhile taking your penguin to Umami Burger, but it might do fine at a Seder.Penguins don't have the genetic ability to sense the meaty, savory "umami" taste, and they wouldn't flinch at a peck of bitter herbs either, according to a new study.
The only taste genes left to the flightless tuxedoed birds are salty and sour, according to the study, published online Monday in the journal Current Biology.

It's still not clear whether penguins actually do taste anything, given that scientists have been unable to find taste buds in their tongues. But it remains rather curious that they would have lost two types of taste that in other species can help differentiate good food from a potentially toxic meal.
The genetic mystery started when scientists in China sequenced the genomes of two penguin species, as part of a massive international project that cataloged the genetic code of 45 bird species.

No birds have the "sweet" taste gene anymore, so its absence was no surprise. But the researchers could not find two taste-related genes that other birds seem to have, and worried that their genome might have been poorly analyzed. So they emailed Jianzhi Zhang, a University of Michigan molecular biologist and longtime connoisseur of animal taste.
Zhang confirmed that the genome work was fine. "The genes that are supposed to be neighbors of those taste receptor genes were all there," he said. "It’s just those specific taste genes that are missing."

When Zhang looked at genomes from other penguin species, "We either couldn’t find those genes or we found genes but they were so-called pseudogenes, the relics of formerly functioning genes,” he said.
But among closely related tube-nosed sea birds such as albatrosses and petrels, "we were able to find umami and bitter receptor genes,” Zhang said.
That implies that the genes became dysfunctional sometime after the last common ancestor of both groups, about 60 million years ago, and before penguins radiated into separate species 20 million years ago, according to Zhang.

The loss of genetic sequence has had no apparent consequence, though. In fact, not only is there little evidence of taste buds on penguin tongues, the organs appear to be adapted more for catching and holding slippery fish, according to the study.
It's not clear whether the tongue changes came before the loss of taste or as a result of it, the study noted.
Researchers believe the most plausible explanation for the flavor deletions might be that they simply don't matter in the extreme cold of Antarctica.

A coding sequence called Trpm5 is known to help transduce several types of taste signals from buds to the brain, including umami, bitter and sweet - but not sour and salty, according to the study. Trpm5 signaling, however, fails as temperatures drop.
So maybe penguins were genetically able to "sense" umami and bitter, but were environmentally thwarted. Either way, it makes little difference in evolution. If random shuffling of the DNA doesn't matter for survival, then these changes can accumulate enough to lead to pseudogenes that no longer work like their ancestral code once did.
Still, no one is sure if the remaining flavor genes matter to birds that gulp their food without chewing or pausing.
“It would be interesting to do a behavioral study to see if penguins have at least two tastes," Zhang said.
Got a taste for science? Follow me on Twitter: @LATsciguy
Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times

A very insightful essay bringing to the surface the very very delicate balance that exists on our planet between flora & fauna.  The Earth  must maintain this balance so that the  Earth's very poignant beauty and purpose and function~~~~is SUSTAINED.

Its impact on the economy, pollution, and the focus on Climate; The Conversation---makes this worthy substance, for continued enthusiasm, and consideration


Lou Marconi (SuiteLou0819)
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)