Panama v England is the World Cup’s only group-stage match where both countries have seen disastrous attempts at Scottish expansionism.
Scotland tried to colonise what is now Panama in 1698 (Darien Scheme), but bankruptcy followed. Scotland invaded England in 1513, but King James IV was killed at the battle of Flodden.
Stay tuned for more cutting-edge, geography(ish)-based World Cup analysis.
(I hope my fellow Scots will forgive this painful trip into the past, but I couldn't find one geographic similarity between them.)
@Cmdr_Hadfield Last year I finally made it to Bayeux to see the tapestry in real life. It is beyond fabulous. The depiction of Halley's Comet is one I've seen in books since I was a child, but to see it in the linen and wool so to speak, was breathtaking.
Here is what PetroGirl is missing
Gulf Coast refineries absolutely can run Venezuelan crude, but what they ran in the 1990s and early 2000s was upgraded synthetic crude at API 25 to 30 coming out of Venezuela's Jose upgrader complex. That's not what's available today. Venezuela's upgraders have collapsed. They're running at a fraction of capacity when they're running at all. What's actually coming out of Venezuela now is raw dilbit blended to API 16, which is significantly heavier and nastier than anything these refineries have been optimized for in the past twenty years.
During that time, as Venezuelan supply degraded, Gulf Coast refineries systematically reconfigured their units for Canadian WCS at API 20 to 21. That's where the billions in capital investment went: coker optimization, desulfurization balancing, hydrogen systems, metallurgy upgrades. To switch back to processing API 16 Venezuelan crude would require billions more in retrofits, three to six months of downtime per processing unit, and accepting the operational headache of exporting diluents to Venezuela just to get importable crude back. And for what?
Industry sources say the margin improvement would be maybe a dollar or two per barrel. Meanwhile, Canadian supply is reliable, arrives ready to process, and the infrastructure is already paid for.
When Exxon's CEO calls Venezuela "uninvestable" and ConocoPhillips points to the billions they lost there, they're not making political statements. They're telling you the capital allocation math doesn't work. The refineries are locked in by twenty years of sunk investment in Canadian grade optimization, and no CFO is going to blow billions reconfiguring for a heavier, less reliable crude that barely moves the margin needle.