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German liner Hapag-Lloyd has earmarked another series of ships for jumboisation.

Alphaliner is reporting seven vessels built around a decade ago have been heading to China where their capacities are being expanded from 9,324 teu to around 10,200 teu. COSCO Zhoushan Shipyard has been tasked with the project.

Two years ago, Hapag-Lloyd carried out a similar refurbishment project at a yard in Denmark on seven other ships, taking their capacities from 8,004 to 9,210 teu.

Among changes to expand capacity the ships will have higher lashing bridges that allow them to carry two extra tiers of containers on deck, while their deck houses are being raised by around5 m to ensure that the increased deck load can also be carried on the forward bays, and their funnels are being extended to ensure exhaust gases are vented clear of the higher container stacks.

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The stock plunged 24% today to lowest since 1997, down 89% from peak, and has joined our Imploded Stocks.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

Shares of department store Kohl’s plunged 24% today to $9.19, the lowest price since August 1997. But that 24% plunge today is barely visible in a 10-year chart. The stock has collapsed by 89% from its all-time high in September 2018, and has been inducted into our pantheon of Imploded Stocks.

The beating that Kohl’s shares took today came after the company reported that total revenue in Q4 fell by 9.4% year-over-year, and by 7.3% for the whole year, the third year in a row of annual revenue declines, to $16.2 billion, a tad above the lockdown low in 2020, and beyond that the lowest in many years.

In the three years before 2020, annual revenues had stagnated at $20 billion. Since 2018, revenues have dropped by 20%. For the current fiscal year, the company today projected another revenue decline of 5-6%, which would bring the decline since 2018 to 25% (data via YCharts):

Net income in Q4 collapsed by 74% to just $48 million. Net income for the whole year collapsed by 66% to just $109 million. Compared to 2017 ($859 million), annual net income has collapsed by 87%.

And all these failing department stores, those that are still around, are blaming their customers, that they’re tapped out or whatever, obviously, not themselves for having failed to switch their business to ecommerce a decade ago, and not ecommerce, which has been eating their lunch for over 25 years.

Department stores are particularly targeted by ecommerce because you can buy anything online that department stores sell at their stores, but a lot more, the whole panoply of products, styles, sizes, and colors, not just a selection, and they bring it to your house, and often for less.

Since the peak in 2000, over those 24 years, department store sales have collapsed by 43%. There is no recovery for brick-and-mortar department stores. As Americans changed how they shop, the business model of brick-and-mortar department stores collapsed under the weight of ecommerce.

But ecommerce is booming, and consumers are holding up just fine: in Q4, while Kohl’s sales dropped 9.4% year-over-year, ecommerce sales jumped by 9.3% year-over-year.

Kohl’s replaced the CEO earlier this year, and the new guy, Ashley Buchanan, quickly announced additional store closings for 2025.

Today, Buchanan blamed his customers. He that customers earning less than $50,000 a year are “pretty constrained from a discretionary standpoint,” and for those earning less than $100,000, “it’s also pretty challenging, and you see that very clearly in the numbers,” he said.

Which was funny, because ecommerce sales are booming, they’re up 9.3% year-over-year, and Kohl’s problem is that its customers are buying online from other retailers, such as Amazon, or Walmart, or Macy’s or Nordstrom, or any of the Chinese outfits that are now selling directly in the US.

Kohl’s new guy is blaming “constrained” customers when in fact they’re buying from the online competition, and Kohl’s is just losing them.

All surviving department stores have ecommerce sites, and online sales growth, if any, partially covers up the demise of their physical stores.

They all have been shutting physical stores for years, and that continues in 2025. Each time a store closes, the nearby stores get to pick up some of the left-over business from the closed store, softening the blow of ecommerce on the survivors, and the rest of that business from the closed store walks off to the internet.

Thousands of stores have closed since 2016, which is when I started calling this relentless process the Brick-and-Mortar Meltdown. Local department stores and regional department store chains are all gone by now. The national chains are down to just a handful, all of them troubled, including J.C. Penney, which was bought out of bankruptcy by the #1 and #2 largest mall landlords fearing for their malls, when the anchor stores close.

Walmart, which is not a department store but a general merchandise retailer, figured this out years ago and spent billions of dollars, including on acquisitions of now scuttled ecommerce retailers, to build a huge ecommerce business that is growing at 20-30% a year. In addition, it focused on groceries and became the largest grocer in the US, because Americans largely still like to buy groceries at the store, though that’s changing too. The rest of Walmart’s retail business is suffering from the brick-and-mortar meltdown too.

Buchanan had been one of the leaders at Walmart’s booming ecommerce business in 2019 and 2020 and knows what’s up: An effort to boost the ecommerce business and closing more brick-and-mortar stores – that’s the only long-term survival strategy there is for department stores.

But it’s a bitter pill to swallow for investors, so it’s better not to explain that to them. And it’s better to dish up some stuff about “constrained” consumers.

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The low point was in September. The Fed faces a scenario of re-accelerating inflation amid a retightening labor market.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

The Fed has cited the underlying dynamics of the labor market that were deteriorating through September as one of the reasons for its rate cuts. But since September, these dynamics of the labor market, and other metrics of the labor market, have U-Turned, with the labor market solid and tightening just a tad, while inflation has been re-accelerating since July. And these underlying dynamics are further backing the Fed’s pivot to wait-and-see:

On a month-to-month and on a three-month average basis, all metrics today tightened up further: Job openings rose, with the three-month average reaching the highest level since May. Quits jumped. Hires rose to the most since July. And layoffs and discharges dropped sharply from already relatively low levels.

The triangular relationship in job openings, quits, and hires shows the churn in the labor market. This churn went haywire during the pandemic, as workers quit in huge numbers to get a better job somewhere else, even jumping to other industries. These quits left gigantic numbers of job openings behind, creating gigantic numbers of hires to fill those openings. The entire labor market got reshuffled and many people ended up with better jobs, better working conditions, higher pay, often in other industries.

Then came the corporate crackdown on the churn with announcements of massive layoff in their global workforce starting in 2022 to scare the bejesus out of workers. Only a portion of these announcements actually happened in the US, while these companies were still hiring at the same time. For companies, the pandemic churn had been costly, in terms of lost productivity and higher wages and all the expenses and inefficiencies associated with onboarding lots of workers. And they put a stop to it by scaring people into not quitting – and also by paying them more and trying to hang on to them in other ways.

Workers settled in and stopped quitting. Quits plunged to very low levels, leaving companies with far fewer job openings to fill, and far fewer hires to fill those job openings. So job openings and hires followed quits down. This is the triangular relationship between quits, job openings, and hires that describes churn in the labor market.

Job openings rose by 232,000 – nearly all in the private sector, with federal, state, and local governments combined just adding 3,000 openings – to 7.74 million in January, seasonally adjusted. The low point was in September with 7.10 million openings (blue in the chart below).

This data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today is based on surveys of about 21,000 work locations, and not on online job postings.

The three-month average job openings rose for the fourth month in a row from the low point in September. But even the September low point was still above the prior historic high point in late 2018 (red).

Job openings as percent of nonfarm payrolls ticked up for the fourth month in a row, to 4.93% of nonfarm payrolls, on a three-month average basis. This shows that the labor market is still historically tight, though not nearly as tight as it had been during the period of labor shortages and maximum churn of the pandemic.

During the employment crisis of the Great Recession, that ratio plunged to 1.5%:

The figure Powell cites a lot: The number of job openings per unemployed person ticked up to 1.13 job openings for each person who was unemployed and looking for a job during the reference period (7.74 million openings for 6.85 million unemployed).

The ratio is the highest since May. The low point had been in September, when the Fed got spooked. It shows a relatively tight labor market compared.

Quits jumped by 171,000 to 3.27 million, the highest since July.

The three-month average rose to 3.13 million, the highest since October, and the second month in a row of increases.

Quits are an indication of how emboldened employees feel to quit a job and go for a better job. Retirements, deaths, etc. are not included in “quits” but in “other separations.”

Hires rose by 19,000 to 5.39 million in January, seasonally adjusted. The low point was in June (5.09 million hires). The three-month average ticked up to 5.36 million.

Hiring is very seasonal. Not seasonally adjusted, hires spiked by 1.32 million to 5.26 million.

When the churn began to cool in the second half of 2022, fewer workers quit, so fewer jobs were left behind, and job openings plunged, and fewer people needed to be hired to fill those left-behind openings, and so hires plunged along with it.

Layoffs and discharges dropped to 1.63 million in January, the lowest since June.

The three-month average dropped for the second month in a row, to 1.68 million, the lowest since August.

They have “normalized” to the low end of the range during the Good Times before the pandemic. Getting fired is a standard feature in the American workplace even during the best times.

Layoffs and involuntary discharges include people getting fired with or without cause. It does not include retirements, deaths, etc., which are in the category of “other separations.”

Layoffs and discharges as percent of nonfarm payrolls fell to 1.06%, the lowest since August, well below any time during the pre-pandemic years in the JOLTS data going back to 2001.

This ratio accounts for growing employment over the years and is the better metric to look at for a long-term view.

It shows that, compared to the size of nonfarm employment, layoffs and discharges are historically low, as employers are hanging on to their workers.

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Daily Standup Top Stories

Highlights of the Podcast

00:00 – Intro

01:30 – The Collapse of the Green Revolution

03:21 – UK Oil & Gas: Too Legit to Quit, Even for Labour

05:10 – The U.K. Pivot to AI Is Doomed From the Start

07:21 – Whitecap and Veren Merge to Create US$10-Billion Canadian Light Oil Producer

08:11 – How Natural Gas Became America’s Most Important Export – A Key export for President Trump’s rebalancing of trade.

11:33 – Outro

Follow Michael On LinkedIn and Twitter

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– Get in Contact With The Show –

Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.

Stuart Turley [00:00:10] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy Newsbeat podcast. My name’s Stu Turley, president and CEO of the Sandstone Group. I’ll tell you what, this is absolutely an amazing day on the news desk. Let’s go through the stories. First one, let’s go to the collapse of the Green Revolution. This was actually on a podcast this morning on the energy realities with Irene Slav, Tammy Nemeth, David Blackman, myself. And we had a special guest, Robert Bryce. It was an outstanding podcast, but the collapse of the Green Revolution. And he’s the man would know UK oil and gas too legit to quit even for labor. We’re going to stay in the UK. The UK pivot to AI is doomed from the start. You can’t buy this kind of entertainment. We’re going to scroll over to Canada, Whitecap and Verdin merge to create a U .S. $10 billion Canadian light oil producer. I always love a good Canadian story. Then let’s go to, we’re gonna end up with President Trump, how a natural gas has became America’s most important export, a key export for President Trump’s rebalancing of trade. Again, you gotta love a good tariff story.

Stuart Turley [00:01:30] So let’s start with the energy realities. Our first guest for today was unbelievable Robert Bryce. Robert has been on the podcast a couple times and he is a true energy legend in the United States and quite honestly known around the world. He’s an author. He’s had two docuseries. He really knows his stuff. And some of the key points that we talked on is Texas and the green hydrogen collapse, the Osage wind farm dismantlement. And this was a huge win for the Oklahoma Osage tribe. But this brings up a very big point that we talked about on the podcast, and that is we are seeing the dismantling of funding and subsidies for the renewable energy sector all across the board. And none of the wind farm folks would actually put in or solar farm land reclamation in the beginning part of their bid because they knew it’d be too expensive. Just watch in the next couple of years, we are going to see a major, I’m talking major problem with wind farms that go out of business, bankruptcies, solar farm and all these things. Who’s going to do the land reclamation? And this Osage tribe was just one of the discussion points that we had there. And so it’s going to be very important. Take a look at BP’s shift away from green energy. And then the green energy collapse was one of them. So it was a wonderful. You can find it on the energy newsbeat .substack .com. So, again, thank you, Robert, for stopping by the Energy Realities podcast.

[00:03:21] Let’s go to the UK oil and gas too legit to quit. The Labor government under Keith Starmer has upheld its promise to halt oil and gas exploration but is now allowing tiebacks, connecting new reserves to existing fields. Seems like a sleight of hand here. When the Labor party, Keith Starmer, won the latest Uk elections, it vowed to stop new oil and gas exploration. But if you’re in the general area and you think that there’s oil, they’re in an energy crisis that you’re going to see this sleight of hand coming around. With the green energy policies, we see deindustrialization. With the green energy policies, I’m just releasing the George McMillan article, and it is on, if you go to energynewsbeat .co and then go to the upper left, search for George McMillan, you’ll see on there, it’s called the 7P plan, how the left got here from the 60s to now. It is all part of the plan. So if you think that you’re a green energy person, you’re actually being manipulated. So it’s pretty cool to see that the government acknowledges that changes to the oil and gas fiscal regime in recent years have led to a period of uncertainty in the sector and its investors. Treasury said in the statement, this is the UK’s Treasury, that part of the consultation part papers. Yet another good sign for the UK’s energy. They’re going to stop the windfall profits tax after 2030. They’re not going to have an oil and gas industry by then. They’re absolutely going to go out. People are going to oil and gas companies are going to be fleeing the UK. Staying in the UK for some entertainment.

Stuart Turley [00:05:10] Let’s go to UK pivot to AI is doomed from the This is by David Gerard, author of the book, Attack of the 50 -foot Blockchain and Cryptocurrency and Blockchain News of the same title. This is pretty funny. Government bureaucracy generates paperwork and even more paperwork when it’s computerized, but human judgment is expensive. What if a computer could go through the paperwork instead? Well, I’m gonna just say this right here. I like the idea. We found that Doge has gone through the United States system, but it’s who is programming the AI. The AI that I’ve seen can be just as corrupt as people. Now, if it’s a tool and it’s a search algorithm, so let’s say that you’re Nancy Pelosi, just as an example, and you go out and you do an investment and you start going through and saying, how does this play in AI can go through and then take a look at your bank account cross -reference and do that of stuff, but it’s who’s driving that that you really have to take a look at to see whether or not corruption is going on. I think that this author has got some really good points on here. Starmer’s press release claims the International Monetary Fund estimates that AI will improve productivity by 1 .5 % per year, but this turned out to be far from an IMF report that was skeptical of Goldman Sachs report making this claim. The Goldman Sachs report says that electricity and personal computers raise GDP by this much. I’m going to throw this squirrel into this argument, and that is when you sit back and take a look at the amount of power that AI is going to take, the amount of cost, the amount of development, the amount of data centers, and UK has been now urged with the left, you know, under the left’s policies and even their right wing, supposedly conservative, have been acting like left and they’ve been deindustrialized. So they are not going to have the money, resources, or the capability of implementing AI credibly. So buckle up for the UK.

Stuart Turley [00:07:21] Let’s go to this story with White Cap and Verne merged to create a U .S. $10 billion Canadian light oil producer. White Cap Resources and Verne entered into a 10 .4 all share merger creating a major Canadian oil condensate producer. Combined company will have an enterprise value of 10 .4 billion and produce 370 ,000 barrels of equivalent per day. This is huge. I think this is absolutely fantastic. The merger will create the largest light Canadian focused oil producer and a significant player in the K -Bob, DuVernay, and Alberta, Montenegro regions. Very significant. I’m very happy for them. And I got this story from oilprice .com.

Stuart Turley [00:08:11] And let’s go to the last story here, how natural gas has become America’s most important export, a key export for President Trump’s rebalancing of trade. I’m gonna give Steve Reese and Reese Consulting a shout out right now. And one of the key things that Robert Bryce, they are a sponsor of today’s podcast, but Robert Bryce, as I mentioned in our first story, brought up a critical point is natural gas. I brought up a key point and that is, natural gas power plants can come online faster and easier than nuclear reactors. But Robert Bryce was saying there is a training issue and lack of training in the United States that is going to hit critical mass very quickly. Well, our folks over there at Reese Energy Consulting are fabulous training organizations. So if you need labor and you need them trained, contact Steve Reese at ReeseConsultingEngineeringConsulting .com and you will get some good answers. So let’s go to this story here. I’ll tell you what, US takes the lead Ripping up old alliances in the post -World War II axis on its head would have been impossible for any previous American president because the insatiable U .S. thirst for imported energy. But the Trump White House is able to lean on increasingly critical made in -America commodity to expert new levels of geopolitical leverage. Let’s take a look at Japan just as a matter of fact. If you’ve got a trade imbalance, there is a trade imbalance with just say Canada. Canada has got tariffs on US products and so we can’t equally trade there. And Tammy Nemeth from the Nemeth report at a very valid point that if they did not do that, they wouldn’t have any manufacturing here, but they should have gotten their LNG and exporting oil and then they would have been able to counterbalance all this kind of thing. So you had the left’s policies cripple Canada’s negotiations on this. But when you want to take a look at how President Trump is going to use LNG as an export, you don’t see any Fords in Europe. You don’t see any Chevys. You don’t see any Dodge Ram pickups anywhere. It’s because they’re tariffed. And so what are people buying? They need LNG. So if they’re going to be putting in long -term contracts, they’re going to turn around and say, wait a minute, we’re buying this amount of energy from you and therefore we don’t need a tariff. That’s okay, but we’re going to have to find out how fast we can ramp, how much money we can export, what’s that going to do for our prices internally to power, how fast? There’s a lot of questions, so you can see I’ve got about nine articles I’m working on right now. And so there’s a lot of questions as we go through here. You can just say drill baby drill, but it’s drill baby drill when fiscally responsible. But we’re also going to have to see how fast we can ramp up. And I guarantee you, though, Doug Burgum, Chris Wright and Lee Zeldin is definitely the team that can ramp this animal up as fast as they possibly can.

Stuart Turley [00:11:33] So with that, like subscribe, go to the energy newsbeat dot substack dot com. Go to energy newsbeat dot com. And if you want to find out how I’m making 30 % on my money, it’s actually 32 % on my oil and gas investments. There’s a form up there says, how’s your portfolio? Anyway, thank you. Like, subscribe, share, read this to your pets. Have a great day. We’ll see you next time.

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In February 2025, Corpus Christi Stage 3, an expansion of the existing Corpus Christi liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility, produced its first LNG cargo, according to the developer Cheniere Energy. Corpus Christi Stage 3 started producing LNG in December 2024. The start of LNG exports from Corpus Christi Stage 3 follows shortly after the start of exports from another U.S. LNG export facility—Plaquemines LNG Phase 1—also in December.

The Corpus Christi Stage 3 expansion facility, located next to the existing Corpus Christi LNG terminal in San Patricio County, Texas, consists of seven midscale trains, with a combined nominal capacity of 1.3 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) and peak capacity of 1.5 Bcf/d.

Project developer Cheniere Energy indicated that the first three midscale trains at Corpus Christi Stage 3 are expected to start up in 2025 and the remaining four trains in 2026. Once all seven trains are operating, the total nominal capacity of Corpus Christi LNG will be 3.1 Bcf/d (3.9 Bcf/d peak), making the facility the second largest in the United States after Sabine Pass LNG, which has a nominal capacity of 3.6 Bcf/d (4.6 Bcf/d peak).

Principal contributor: Victoria Zaretskaya

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Under the SPA, ExxonMobil LNG Asia Pacific (EMLAP) will purchase all of ARC’s LNG offtake from the Cedar LNG project – about 1.5 million tonnes per annum – at international LNG pricing, according to a statement by ARC Resources.

The agreement starts with commercial operations at the Cedar LNG facility, expected late 2028, and continues for the term of ARC’s liquefaction tolling services agreement with Cedar LNG Partners, it said.

In June last year, Canada’s Pembina Pipeline and the Haisla Nation took a positive final investment decision on their $4 billion Cedar LNG project.

Cedar LNG has secured 20-year take-or-pay liquefaction tolling services agreements with ARC Resources and Pembina for 1.5 mtpa of LNG each.

It also signed a 20-year take-or-pay fixed toll contract with ARC Resources.

As part of the agreement, ARC Resources will supply Cedar LNG with about 200 million cubic feet per day of Canadian natural gas for liquefaction at the Cedar LNG facility.

“Today, we have reached a significant milestone in our strategy to diversify and expand margins through participation in the global LNG market. Through this agreement, we have achieved our target of linking approximately 25 percent of our future natural gas production to international pricing,” said Terry Anderson, president and CEO, ARC Resources.

Over the past three years, ARC has entered into three long-term agreements that will provide exposure to international LNG pricing.

In 2022, ARC announced an agreement to supply 140,000 MMBtu/day of natural gas to Cheniere’s Corpus Christi Stage III expansion with pricing linked to Platts JKM.

In 2023, the company announced its second agreement with Cheniere to supply 140,000 MMBtu/day to Cheniere’s SPL expansion project with pricing linked to the Dutch TTF.

Andrew Barry, VP global LNG marketing, ExxonMobil Asia Pacific said this deal with ARC Resources provides ExxonMobil with “advantaged access to Asian LNG markets by establishing ExxonMobil’s first long-term offtake position on Canada’s Pacific Coast.”

“We look forward to working with ARC Resources, one of Canada’s largest and most experienced natural gas producers, as we continue to expand and diversify ExxonMobil’s LNG portfolio,” he said.

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ENB Pub Note: We kind of need the Canadian heavy oil sands more now – just saying. 

(Bloomberg) Venezuela will stop receiving deportees from the US in response to President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke Chevron Corp’s license to operate in the South American country.

Venezuela’s ruling party secretary, Diosdado Cabello, confirmed Monday that Nicolás Maduro had ordered direct repatriation flights from the US be halted. The Andean nation will still receive migrants back from other countries, starting with a group from Bolivia, Cabello said on state television.

Maduro’s officials privately warned the Trump administration they would halt the flights after the US gave Chevron 30 days to wind down operations, the Wall Street Journal reported last week, citing unnamed sources.

The US is also preparing to revoke waivers allowing other foreign oil companies to operate in the country. Maduro’s suspension of flights could potentially trigger even more aggressive measures from the Trump administration.

“With what they did, they have damaged the communications that we had opened,” Maduro said on Saturday, referring to the revoked Chevron license. “I wanted to bring back all the Venezuelans who are imprisoned and unjustly persecuted just for being migrants, and that affected the flights we had already programmed.”

In early 2024, Maduro suspended direct deportation flights after former President Joe Biden threatened to reimpose oil sanctions in response to the Venezuelan leader’s failure to follow through on democratic commitments. The flights resumed in February after Trump’s special envoy, Ric Grenell, visited Caracas and secured the release of six US citizens from Venezuelan prisons.

In total, three flights arrived in Venezuela that month, carrying around 370 passengers either directly from the US or from its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Maduro’s government said the US administration had told them that roughly 5,000 migrants could be subject to deportation.

Source: Bloomberg   and Grok on X

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