Warren Buffett's Burlington Northern Stake Nears 18% As Buying Accelerates

[metalman]

Re: Warren Buffett's Burlington Northern Stake Nears 18% As Buying Accelerates

I like what I see here with the shipping corridor between Canada, the U.S, and Mexico. This is thinking BIG. We "CAN DO" it.

And we can do it with water, with energy, with labour, with the Amero, with defence, and with everything.

One united continent with plenty of opportunity and resources for everyone; this is the future.

what are you thinking, man! you wanna throw away all our foreskin fathers fought and died for! tie a pack of beaners and brahman and hosers into one big happy family? give up the honor of the sacred bonar?



ubra! ubra! ubra!

[Starving Steve]

Re: Warren Buffett's Burlington Northern Stake Nears 18% As Buying Accelerates

Not only do I get bananas, I get black berries from Mexico for my breakfast. Not only do I get little gangstas for my classrooms when I teach, I get daily lessons in Spanish. Not only do I get to laugh when I see all of the baby carriages on the street in Watsonville, I get the hope that a new culture and new politics will bring change to the U.S.

And at night, the little ganstas in elementary schools go out and tag the walls of the gated communities..... And who but a Republican would be angry for that?;)

[bill]

Re: Warren Buffett's Burlington Northern Stake Nears 18% As Buying Accelerates

Is he’s getting ready to move ethanol on rail and or build rail infrastructure.
A closer look at Marmon from a previous post http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...4236#post24236 reveals a large tanker capacity.

http://www.marmon.com/Companies.html

Transportation Services & Engineered Products
Enersul Inc. operates sulphur forming and handling facilities.
EXSIF Worldwide, Inc. is a lessor of intermodal tank containers, suitable for the transportation, distribution and storage of bulk liquids, chemicals and gases globally.
Penn Machine Company manufactures replacement parts for mining equipment.
Railserve, Inc. , provides contract switching services to companies with on-site rail yards.
Trackmobile, Inc. manufactures mobile railcar moving vehicles for in-plant and yard switching.
Uni-Form Components Co. fabricates tank heads and other components.
Union Tank Car Company (United States and Mexico) and Procor Limited (Canada) together are North America's largest manufacturer and lessor of railroad tank cars, with over 70,000 cars in their combined fleets.

Not ethanol,,,OIL!


http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/46466

Obama helps Buffett’s railroad

November 18, 2011 by Don Surber

Crony capitalism is alive and well and occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The latest billionaire donor to cash in on his connections to President Obama is Warren Buffett, who now joins billionaire George “Solyndra” Kaiser and George “Petrobras” Soros in cashing in on Obama’s pay-to-play energy policy. Warren Buffett is about to make a pile of money off the Bakken Oil Shale in North Dakota the old-fashioned way with a monopoly worthy of John D. Rockefeller.

Here is how it works, President Obama put the brakes on the Keystone Pipeline, which would have delivered oil from Canada. That delay means Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad will be shipping a lot of oil (10 times as much as it does today) not from Canada but from North Dakota — American oil for American cars and plastics — and Berkshire Hathaway owns 22% of said railroad and will scarf up the remainder of the company.

http://www.marmon.com/sectors.asp?Me...d=6&trans=true

http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=3930

November 16, 2011

Rail delivery of crude oil and petroleum products rising

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, based on the Association of American Railroads.
Note: Data are weekly average originations for each month, are not seasonally adjusted, and exclude U.S. operations of Canadian National Railways and Canadian Pacific Railway; one carload holds 30,000 gallons.
Download CSV Data

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More U.S. crude oil is being shipped by rail, especially from North Dakota where a lack of pipelines has companies relying on tank cars to bring the state's soaring oil production to market. Pipelines remain the most popular transport option, carrying about two-thirds of U.S. oil and petroleum products, but rail is on the rise.
The Association of American Railroads (AAR) tracks combined rail movements of oil and refined petroleum products. In the first ten months of 2011, nearly 300,000 tank cars transported U.S. oil and petroleum products, up 9.1% from the same period in 2010, according to AAR. The growth in petroleum-by-rail shipments is much stronger than the 1.8% increase for all railroad cargo combined during the same period.
While AAR does not issue separate data on crude oil and product shipments via rail, it notes that anecdotal evidence indicates most of the growth in the crude oil and petroleum products category is likely due to crude shipments. Based on different sources of rail traffic data, the trade group said shipments of crude oil and liquefied natural gas accounted for about 2% of all carloads in 2008, 3% in 2009, 7% in 2010, and about 11% so far in 2011. One carload holds 30,000 gallons of oil.
Tank cars are in strong demand in North Dakota, where oil production has soared from about 343,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) in January to a record high of about 464,000 bbl/d in September, according to North Dakota's Department of Minerals Resources (DMR), due to the increasing amount of crude oil extracted from rock in the Bakken Shale. DMR expects North Dakota will pass California during the second quarter of next year to become the third biggest oil-producing state. Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) and other railway companies are building or expanding terminals and adding tank cars to transport North Dakota's growing oil supplies to Gulf Coast refineries.
On November 7, the first crude oil unit train on the Bakken Oil Express, a newly constructed rail hub near Dickinson, North Dakota, departed via the BNSF Railway carrying its first shipment—70,000 barrels of crude oil destined for St. James, Louisiana. The Bakken Oil Express receives Bakken-area crude oil by both truck and pipeline and has a current takeaway capacity of 100,000 bbl/d. The Bakken Oil Express is already planning a second phase of construction that would significantly expand its takeaway capacity to more than 250,000 bbl/d.
Deliveries of tank cars should total about 8,000 this year, up from only 4,839 last year, and then increase to 11,000 tank cars in 2012, according to Economic Planning Associates Inc., a consulting firm that tracks rail car assemblies. The firm does not have a breakdown of how many of the new tank cars will be devoted to carrying crude oil. Tank cars are also used for shipping ethanol, chemicals, fertilizer, and corn syrup.
Tank cars would also be useful in the major oil hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, where a glut of supply is depressing the key U.S. benchmark crude oil price. Pipelines bringing oil into Cushing from the north are nearly full and there is not enough pipeline infrastructure to move oil south out of the area to Gulf Coast refineries. The Surface Transportation Board (STB), the federal agency that resolves railroad rate and service disputes and reviews railroad mergers, told EIA that it saw little movement in recent months of crude oil out of Cushing by rail. Railway companies send the STB confidential information on their cargo shipments and where they are sending them.

[lektrode]

Re: Warren Buffett's Burlington Northern Stake Nears 18% As Buying Accelerates

no, we wouldnt want an efficient pipeline to screw up this plan, now would we?
but i would also guess most of the construction crews that would be building it _wont_ be unionized,
and its about time for the rail unions to go on strike, so hey!

whats not to luv?

[bill]

Re: Warren Buffett's Burlington Northern Stake Nears 18% As Buying Accelerates

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...l-freight.html

Buffett Railroad Beats Coal Slump With 75% Gain in Oil

By Heather Perlberg - Aug 2, 2012 1:34 PM MT



Warren Buffett’s Burlington NorthernSanta Fe railroad and Union Pacific Corp. (UNP) are combating a drop in coal cargoes by catering to the industry responsible: the hydraulic fracturing of shale formations.

BNSF, Union Pacific and their peers are hauling in energy producers’ gear to extract crude oil and gas from shale, then shipping out petroleum products. BNSF’s petroleum carloads rose 75 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier while Union Pacific saw a 12 percent gain in the unit where it groups fracking-related freight.
“This is a whole industry that just sprung up on all the rail properties,” Jeffrey Kauffman, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc., said in a telephone interview. “It’s a new growth source that helps to mitigate what’s probably a temporary dislocation of an old energy source.”
The dislocation has come with a hefty cost, as many North American utilities stopped generating power from coal in favor of cheaper natural gas released by fracking. Coal cargoes at Class I railroads, North America’s largest, dropped 11 percent in the second quarter. Neither Union Pacific’s chemicals segment nor BNSF’s petroleum shipments rival their coal volumes.
“The shale opportunity has been a double-edged sword for the rails,” Ben Hartford, a Robert W. Baird & Co. analyst in Milwaukee, said in a telephone interview. “The abundance of natural gas domestically has pressured prices, and the resulting degradation to the coal demand has been palpable.”
‘Double-Edged Sword’

Union Pacific’s shale business will probably grow to almost 400,000 carloads in 2012, Chief Executive Officer Jack Koraleski said on a July 19 conference call. That’s roughly double the number of carloads the Omaha, Nebraska-based company moved from the Bakken shale formation in the northern U.S. in 2011.
“While the coal business, which is our largest book of business, has softened, we’ve been able to offset that with strength in crude oil, in frack sand, in automobiles, in pipes and domestic intermodal,” Koraleski said in a telephone interview last month.
The trend holds across the industry. Petroleum-product shipments at major U.S. railroads have gained 40 percent this year from the same period in 2011, while coal cargoes have dropped 9.6 percent, according to a report today by theAssociation of American Railroads.
BNSF and Union Pacific transport most of their Bakken region crude shipments to Oklahoma, California, Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas. The companies are more insulated from risk associated with the abundance of natural gas than eastern rails since coal in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana costs less to mine than in the Appalachian region.
Stock Performance

Union Pacific climbed 0.2 percent to $121.80 at the close in New York. The stock’s advance of 15 percent this year has surpassed gains of 7.3 percent by CSX Corp. (CSX), the biggest eastern U.S. railroad, 0.7 percent by Norfolk Southern Corp. (NSC) and 5.2 percent by the Standard & Poor’s 500 Industrials Index.
Union Pacific, the biggest North American railroad, lacks direct access to the Bakken shale oil field. It benefits from interchanges with traffic originated by BNSF and Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. (CP) bound for Louisiana and Texas terminals.
The largest contiguous oil deposit in the continental U.S., the Bakken includes parts of North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana in the U.S. and Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada.
“People are just getting their heads around how large the opportunity will be for the next year or two,” David Vernon, a New York-based analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., said in a telephone interview.
‘It’s Phenomenal’

BNSF is “seeing strong double-digit type growth” in all markets related to shale fracturing, CEO Matt Rose said in an interview in May. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) spent $26.5 billion in 2010 to acquire the 77.5 percent of Fort Worth, Texas-based BNSF it didn’t already own in the billionaire investor’s biggest takeover.
“Everything to do with drilling, horizontal drilling, frack sand, pipe, oil, it’s phenomenal,” Rose said.
Once more pipeline capacity comes online, in part through the reversal of the 150,000-barrel-a-day Seaway pipeline to carry crude south, rails will be hauling less out of the Bakken region.
“You are seeing a huge amount of growth right now, but as that pipeline capacity increases, the cost advantage of pipe to rail will take some of it back by 2014, 2015,” Vernon said.
Railroads should still see some growth from natural gas drilling, said Lee Klaskow, a Bloomberg Industries analyst in Skillman, New Jersey.
“The pipelines can take out oil but they can’t bring in sand and water,” he said.