Maximum Driller

Hockey and Energy

[Greg Revak, CFP® @CoachRevak]

Send along videos of dev camps that could be added to this year’s thread

[Charlie Mahoney @chasmahoney]

This is absolutely priceless.👇Drew sums up beautifully where everything is leading as the concepts up free play and EcoD merge.👀🧵🔥

[Matthew Auchincloss @matthew_auch]

A great preview for Michigan fans. I don’t think DuPont’s numbers will be quite as eye-popping as in the WHL, but so many of these skills will translate well to the college game.

[Jennifer Streeter @JennyStreeter3]

A six-month "exploration phase" will determine which market, Houston or Austin, is best suited for a #NHL team.

Here's my latest, an all to know from the NHL's recent news on being ready to explore their 33rd franchise.

https://t.co/KdpqaDCsgd

[Hockey Day in Houston @HockeyDayInHTX]

Just wanted to share.... Only 6,000 Houston, Texas hockey fans celebrated hockey by watching @NHL games on TV for the 3rd annual Hockey Day In Houston powered by @MyMainEvent this past March at @SaintArnold showing why #HoustonIsAHockeyTown!

We are ready for year 4! Are you?

@NateGriffFOX26 @McClain_on_NFL @GregRajan

[Maximum Driller @DevoutDriller]

@HoustonBulls @MCHockeyPodcast Wen Ice?

[Justin Nolan @chi2phi]

@emilymkaplan @PatMcAfeeShow

[Maximum Driller @DevoutDriller]

@ClankoMedia Xander can do better. Hopefully this is a wake up call for him.

[Nayib Bukele @nayibbukele]

The key to saving the environment is not looking backward, it’s moving forward.

I realized this the first time I visited Italy twenty years ago. Everything was clean and green. The rivers sparkled. The lesson for me was obvious: the answer is not underdevelopment. The answer is progress.

When China was poor, the air was so polluted that people could barely see the blue sky. Today, blue skies have returned to their cities. Development does not only create wealth, it also provides the resources needed to restore and protect the environment.

Some environmentalists want us to preserve every aspect of our biodiversity, including the mosquitoes for example, so that researchers can fly in once every ten years from their universities (which build particle accelerators and billion-dollar laboratories with their pocket money), study our ecosystems, and count how many people died from dengue outbreaks.

They want to buy our air through carbon credits. If carbon credits were such a great deal, they would be selling them to us, not the other way around.

Cleaning every river, lake, and water source in El Salvador, and ensuring they remain clean and sparkling, would cost roughly $12 billion. Where is that money supposed to come from without economic development? Carbon credits?

The path forward for our country is the path of Japan and Singapore, not the path of the Congo.

[Maximum Driller @DevoutDriller]

@ReviewOfHockey @2112hockey 🎯

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

To understand the European mindset, you must consider that 20 generations ago an entire new world opened up for the taking, and everyone still in Europe is descended from 20 generations of people who shrugged and said "Nah, not for me."

[tetsuo @tetsuoai]

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.

Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.

And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor.

You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

[Maximum Driller @DevoutDriller]

@worldhockeyrpt Ouch, this is embarrassing for you.

[Maximum Driller @DevoutDriller]

@MNHockeyDog Quality Learing

[Maximum Driller @DevoutDriller]

@Drew22Shore @MikeGrinnell_ 🎯

[De La Rosa @Tejanobrown]

Perforating and Hydraulic Fracturing exhibit located in Midland, Texas.

[Maximum Driller @DevoutDriller]

@clintbarnette You're welcome!

[JH @CRUDEOIL231]

I’ve been grinding away trying to map out China’s recent crude plays, but after going through today's report, I have to hand it to OIES—they scripted the plumbing way better than me.

Here is my quick breakdown after running through their print, alongside the Chinese refinery throughput chart to help connect the dots.

-

Three months into the Hormuz crunch, and Beijing is completely blindsiding the market with its crude playbook. A heavyweight that easily sucked in 11mb/d over the last five years just saw its import prints plunge to 9.3mb/d in April. Now, the forward data says May and June seaborne arrivals are about to crater straight into the gutter at 6.5mb/d.

Instead of running its usual playbook of panic-dumping the SPR to backstop the market during a supply crisis, Beijing just completely cock-blocked refiners from touching the strategic vaults, only greenlighting commercial stock draws.

To make it worse, refiners aren't even willing to bleed their own commercial inventories, while state traders are acting like total penny-pinchers—happily flipping premium WAF cargoes back into the market and hoarding dirt-cheap Russian barrels instead.

This is a complete 180 from the 2021 power crunch, when Beijing panicked and ordered everyone to grab supply 'at any cost.' The heavyweights and policymakers in Beijing clearly think they can outmaneuver this supply shock and keep the economic damage locked down by playing a few smart, tactical micro-levers.

China’s true red line for freezing out imports is hardwired to the scale of their run cuts. If they try to copy-paste their five-year average throughput of 14.1mb/d, the exact moment seaborne arrivals drop below 9.2mb/d, they’re trapped—they either have to open the strategic taps wide or start chasing expensive market barrels. Instead, chopping runs by 5% down to a 13.4mb/d baseline is hands-down their most realistic, long-term survival play.

In this setup, if domestic crude extraction and pipeline taps keep humming, they can easily coast for a few months without taking a single economic hit, even with seaborne prints scraping a measly 7.9–8.5mb/d, because transportation fuels like gas and diesel will still be taken care of.

However cranking run cuts to a nuclear 10% scenario means they could survive without chasing a single market barrel even if seaborne flows dry up to 7.2mb/d—but they'd have to throw petrochemical feedstocks like naphtha and LPG under the bus just to keep gas and diesel flowing, a desperate move that runs on borrowed time and stalls out after a few months unless the whole economy is in a total tailspin.

To micromanage this whole run-rate circus, China's refining complex is pulling a highly responsive lever: the yield shift.

Beijing explicitly told state majors like Sinopec and PetroChina to ditch chemical feedstocks and prioritize flooding the market with gas and diesel, and these plants immediately saluted by shifting their product yields by several percentage points on a dime.

As a result, the real bloodbath isn't happening at the refining gate—it's completely decimating the downstream petrochemical chain. With Hormuz blocked, their seaborne naphtha inflows were already sliced in half, but a 5% run cut is about to bleed domestic naphtha and LPG supplies by tens of millions of tons a quarter, sending a compounding, fatal shock straight through the petchem feedstock backbone.

They are keeping wheels turning by guaranteeing gas and diesel, but the squeeze on industrial chemical feedstocks is completely running on borrowed time.

To paper over the massive raw material hole in the petchem chain, Beijing is shoving its massive 'Coal-to-Chemicals' complex into the spotlight, branding it as a strategic shield against volatile crude under the 15th Five-Year Plan.

Thanks to dirt-cheap, stable domestic coal, inland plants churning out olefins and methanol are running hot to boost volumes, but this quick fix hits a hard ceiling when it comes to replacing lost barrels at scale due to structural bottlenecks.

The core infrastructure is trapped deep in the northwestern sticks like Inner Mongolia, meaning slamming those products down to the massive manufacturing teeth on the southeastern coast comes with a punishing logistics and freight premium.

Most importantly, coal gasification routes physically cannot clone key aromatics or specialized LPG chemical chains—the feedstock deficit is mathematically locked in.

On top of that, the fact that Beijing is sitting on a massive 1.1-1.3 billion barrel pile without tapping it proves that institutional red tape is locking up the plumbing.

The 100 million barrels buried deep in dark underground rock caverns—completely invisible to satellites—are almost entirely SPR, requiring endless red tape like complex auctions and market disclosures, so Beijing is hoarding it as a nuclear option.

Even for the commercial barrels that are accessible, refiners are terrified to draw down because plotting out the repayment timeframe to replace that crude is a total mathematical nightmare in this chaotic macro environment.

Beijing is pulling off a highly calculated micromanagement script here: they are completely freezing out the inventory draw requests from state-owned heavyweights like Sinopec, who are nakedly exposed to global benchmarks and were the first to aggressively slash throughput.

Instead, they are using the Shandong teapots as a human shield—handing these independent refiners tax breaks and strict run-rate mandates because they have the flexibility to stomach toxic, illicit Iranian and Russian barrels to cushion the margin bleed.

Bottom line, this entire web of macro levers—starving imports, shifting yields, hunting for distressed barrels, and burning through coal-to-chem assets—will keep the lights on and protect the economic skeleton through the peak of summer, but only under that tight 5% run cut baseline that keeps seaborne arrivals pinned at roughly 8mb/d.

But with May and June seaborne prints already locked in at a subterranean 6.5mb/d, the expiration date on this makeshift band-aid play cannot stretch into autumn.

Short of letting their entire national refining infrastructure suffer a catastrophic meltdown, Beijing is running straight into a hard physical wall.

Before late summer wraps up, they will be forced to either open the strategic floodgates and dump their massive stockpiles or make a frantic U-turn right back into the international physical market, chasing heavy volumes aggressively at any price.

#oott #iran

[Maximum Driller @DevoutDriller]

@Mariucci_Guy 🎯💯... Not sure why thinking through second and third order effects is so difficult for some of the big hockey twitter accounts but I'm sure they'll eventually come around.