Buyers of my new oil report will remember Repsol. Here’s some good news …

Repsol Chases Breakthrough Technology as Offshore Oil Politics Heat Up

Spanish-Argentinean
oil major Repsol and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s Kaleidoscope
Project team at the World Petroleum Congress in Madrid on July 1
announced early research results that lead them to believe a major
breakthrough in offshore oil exploration is within reach. Working
with IBM BladeCenter QS22 supercomputers — built around IBM’s
PowerXCell 8i processor, originally developed for use in Sony video
game consoles — Repsol and BSC researchers believe they now have a
methodology, “Reverse Time Migration”, and the tools to speed up
exploration and development of deep oil and gas fields on- and
off-shore up to six times compared to the technology currently employed
by the oil and gas industry.

Here are some charts …

Up, up and away!

From Calculated Risk …

Using the

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As a cheerful Bloomberg headline reminds us, equity investors are facing their worst June since the Great Depression. And sure enough, most major markets (the Hang Seng, Dax, CAC, S&P 500 … ) are down more than -8% this month, pulled lower by a number of concerns including a) the health of Western banks, b) the rise in oil prices, c) deteriorating economic growth and d) worsening inflationary pressures.

If the current month ended today the Dow Jones Industrial Index would be down 9.4% and have locked in the worst June since 1930. Check the following chart, coursey of Paul Kedrosky, for the painful picture.

“Granted, June 2008 is not in the top 30 bad months of all time, so let’s keep our

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Paul Kedrosky over at Infectious Greed has one of those graphs where truly the saying “a picture is a worth a thousand words” speaks volumes. It truly is amazing how China dwarfs everyone – they are doing 10x more than any peer. In fact if I eyeball it, if you add every other country in the world together as one entity; it appears China would be consuming more. As I keep repeating, this economy is like an out of control Ferrari racing on oil slick mountain roads. How to keep control of the steering while is not something I’d wish on anyone.

(click to enlarge)

One name I’ve followed for a long time, is Mexican cement maker Cemex (CX) which is one of the world’s giants (#3 in the world). Unfortunately they are so intertwined with the US market, the …