Who will be the winners of the shale gas boom?

Ultra Petroleum, pipeline company Williams and Quanta Services, a $6.3 billion market cap company that builds out both pipelines and electrical transmission lines.

Chicago, Bridge & Iron  remains one of the best positioned E&C to benefit from the investment in the energy infrastructure space.

Fluor is another bright name in the E&C industry. In fact, some believe that this company has the best earnings visibility among E&C players. The company remains a potential winner for many North American petrochemical and gas-to-liquid projects

Another stock that has not yet experienced growth is KBR Co. KBR remains another favorite in this space to benefit from the shale gas boom

Some of the direct beneficiaries of the shale boom in the US include oil and gas companies such as EOG Resources which has operations in the Eagle Ford, Barnett, Marecellus and Bakken shales.

Oil service companies that supply hydraulic fracturing technology and drilling services are also beneficiaries of shale development; these include Schlumberger, National Oilwell Varco and Halliburton.

 Valero Energy Corp, with a reputation as one of the US’s lowest cost and most profitable refiners is benefiting from surging oil output from the Bakken shale in North Dakota

US chemical producers who have become more globally competitive by switching to cheaper ethane feedstocks. Among the biggest beneficiaries of this is Dow Chemical, which after a decade of moving its production facilities out of the US to Asia and elsewhere, is now investing billions of dollars on new domestic production plants in order to take advantage of cheap domestic shale gas supplies.

Reducing the Competitiveness of the American Student and Society!

The US government is facing unprecedented debt. The levels are unsustainable and all the politicians in this country can do is to kick the can down the road. Each party claims to have plans that would cut the deficit by trillions but independent reviewers say that all they do is cut 20 to 40 billion dollars over 10 years. Ideologically these guys cannot agree upon defense, Medicare, Social security, union benefits, taxation, abortion, BUT – they certainly agree upon cutting student aid.

See this extract from a NY Times article.

“One of the few areas in which Mr. Boehner and Senator Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat and majority leader, agree is student aid. They both propose eliminating subsidized federal loans for students in graduate and professional schools — about 1.5 million borrowers who do now pay interest on their loans while they are in school. Graduate students could still take out unsubsidized loans. But they would be obliged to pay interest accumulated while they were in graduate school, so they would owe more to the government.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that this change would save $18 billion over 10 years.”

Any way I don’t care as I’m not eligible for student loans. No doubt this country is going bankrupt – one reason lack of education!