By John Kingston on April 14, 2010 4:04 PM

A few random thoughts from some items that either came into my mailbox today or showed up in Platts stories.

* We run a lot of stories here at Platts, and there was one that was utterly routine...unless it becomes one of the five most important stories in the history of energy. The story notes that ITER, the experimental nuclear fusion reactor in southern France, moved a step closer to reality after a Eur150 million ($204 million) engineering contract was signed. As we reported, "ITER is an experimental nuclear fusion facility designed to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power." Fusion has always been the holy grail of energy, and if this project works where so many fail, maybe we'll look back on April 14, 2010, as a key date in fusion's history. But maybe it will go down in infamy, like all the others.

* Email from ethanol-related entities pours into my mailbox. I follow several ethanol Twitter feeds, and the belief in ethanol is almost cult-like. So today's contribution to the ethanol spin machine came right from the Renewable Fuels Association, the key lobbyist group for the ethanol industry. The release uses a formula citing the difference in the current price of ethanol to gasoline, brings in the federal tax incentive, and then concluded that Americans could be saving 12-19 cts/gallon at the pump if only the federal government would allow 15% ethanol blends in gasoline rather than stopping at 10%. So we're supposed to go from 10% ethanol to 15% ethanol, presumably keep the big tariff on imports, and then we're supposed to believe that you can hit the market with all that new ethanol demand, and the gasoline to ethanol spread -- which the RFA uses as the basic building block in its savings at the pump calculation -- is going to stay the same. You'll be asking the market to increase ethanol demand by 50% -- going from a 10% to 15% blend -- and displacing five percentage points of gasoline demand, dumping that gasoline back into the supply pool. And even in the fact of that, the spread between ethanol and gasoline is going to remain static even with no obvious new source of ethanol supply. My analysis is a bit simplistic, but I still feel confident in making a recommendation to the RFA: brush up on your market economics.

* Platts has been writing a lot recently about how the market is, in effect, putting into place sanctions on Iranian crude sales and gasoline imports all by itself. No need for some big UN regime; it's getting done anyway. In our latest story, Platts reported that Italian refiner Saras has not renewed its term contract to buy Iranian crude for this year. This comes after several similar reports, and the scorecard now lists Lukoil's Litasco, Shell, Vitol, Trafigura, Reliance Industries and Glencore as companies that stopped selling gasoline to Tehran. Additionally, Total CEO Christophe de Margerie told Platts in an interview that his company had received "indirect" messages from Washington about gasoline sales to Iran but has not been asked directly to stop. Meanwhile, there are no reports of shortages of gasoline in the country, and markets do have a way of rebalancing themselves, with new intermediaries presumably buying "straded" gasoline and reselling it on to Iran. But this "mini-boycott" has not gotten the attention it probably deserves.