The "Scarbus" 380: Rolls Royce Engine Explodes Forcing a Quantas Jet to Land In Singapore

Quantas Grounds its A380s

Airbus touts the A380 as the plane of the future. In this News Corp. video you can see the first Qantas airbus A380 touch down in Sydney, October 2008:

Quantas is quite proud of its safety record. What other major airline can brag of never having lost a jetplane? Keen on keeping that reputation, Quantas grounded its A380s after the emergency landing of its "scrabus" flight QF32.

According to News.Com.Au "Qantas made it clear it will keep its six superjumbos grounded indefinitely and has rearranged flight schedules using substitute aircraft.

"'The specific checks mandated by the directive were already being carried out by Qantas in conjunction with Rolls-Royce,' it said.

"'Qantas's A380 aircraft will not return to service until there is complete certainty that the fleet can operate safely.'"

Thus the planes of the future is having problems in the present.

News on Airbus's big one, the A380, first. Singapore Airlines found oil leaking from its Rolls Royce engines (courtesy of News Australia):

And yet more on SKYNews:

The Fallout for RollsRoyce:

In the Financial Times, Pilita Clark, its Aerospace Correspondent, reports "Rolls-Royce is preparing to cannibalise several half-built A380 superjumbos on production lines to obtain more than a dozen new engines to help its stricken airline customers such as Qantas.

"The engine maker has taken the rare step of negotiating with Airbus, the A380’s manufacturer, about raiding engines from three or four superjumbos due to be delivered next year from its Toulouse and Hamburg assembly plants, according to people familiar with the situation."

In an FT video, Pilita Clark, explains how the spotlight will now fall on Rolls-Royce, the maker of the engine.

The Future of Natural Gas

Oil prices make headlines; Solar and wind power are sexy, yet natural gas is the real news.

While U.S. oil production has been declining since the 1970s and the peak of world oil production is continually predicted, natural gas looks like the rabbit we are pulling out of the hat.  And the future is paved with shale.

It took companies like Mitchell Energy twenty years to figure out how to extract natural gas from the Barnett shale formation in Texas.  The technology having been mastered, we now realize that there is an abundance of gas in shale formations around the country and the globe.

Interestingly enough the home of the Whiskey Rebellion and the first U.S. oil rig, Pennsylvania, is home to one of the biggest.  The Marcellus shale formation in western Pennsylvania, west Virginia and western New York has been estimated as having natural gas equivalent to the nation's energy needs for twenty years.

Chevron's 4.3 billion Shale Bet

As iStockAnalyst put it, [C]onsider this number: 4.3 billion.That is what Chevron offered to pay for Atlas Energy.  As Bill Wince of Chesapeake Energy points out the big integrated oil companies are used to dealing with huge fields and negotiating with governments. Unlike America, in many countries the state not the landowner owns the mineral rights.   The independents can field an army of land men who track down tittles and negotiate drilling rights.  The Chevrons of the world have decided if they do not have a distinctive competence, they can always buy it. 


Platts tells us, "Chevron's first deal in a US gas shale play dovetails nicely with the
company's plans to increase its proportion of gas production from 31% of total
output currently to 41% in the next seven years," according to Atlas' Indian joint venture partner, Reliance Industries, CEO John Watson who spoke at a Bank of America
Merrill Lynch's Global Energy Conference.

This is Not the Last Big Buy

Platts further reported, "Watson said he expects Chevron's Marcellus Shale production to grow from Atlas' 63,300 Mcf/d to more than 500,000 Mcf/d in the next decade and that, combined with the play's proximity to premium markets in the northeastern US made it fit into Chevron's plans.


"The cost per well in the Marcellus Shale are about half that in other
major shale plays such as the Louisiana's Haynesville and Texas' Eagle Ford
because vertical drilling distances in Appalachia are about half those in
rival plays.


"Atlas wasn't the first shale producer Chevron looked at and it probably
won't be the last, Watson said."

Heard on the Street: IEA's Energy Outlook Forecast 11/9/2010 5:42:06 PM
Forecasting the next quarter is perilous.  Forecasting the next 26 years is both easier and riskier.  Few will remember your forecast after the twenty six years pass and the fundamentals assert themselves over the long run.  Still, you have no idea where in the crazy commodity cycle you will be nor what the value of a dollar will be.

The International Energy Agency's 26-year forecast for the energy industry

The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street columnist, Liam Denning, talks to the Journal's Lee Hawkins:




Lee Hawkins and Liam Denning also discuss Chevron's "We Agree" Campaign.