It is becoming a rather crowded space the last few years [1] [2] [3]

[1]: https://www.kpler.com/

[2]: https://www.spinergie.com/

[3]: https://www.refinitiv.com/en/products/eikon-trading-software...

Yep. Every oil trader and company is monitoring trade routes for insights. It’s almost a rite of passage for new analysts and interns to start playing with vessel data to look for new patterns.

hi, I'm Kpler CTO. Indeed the space is crowded. To succeed you not only need strong algorithm on top of AIS data (ML, Operational research) but also lots of hard facts coming from partners in the supply chains (brokers, ship agents, ports authorities) that you need to extract with NLP and other strategies. Having a strong team of analysts with expertise in each commodity market is needed to interpret and complement the automation. Last piece is also to have a strategy not only to cover shipping transportation, but also storage, production, consumption of the commodities, so you can deduce more interesting intel. We for example use satellites and drones images as well to know the crude oil inventories onshore.

I come from that side (analyst) and am more of an enthusiast on the technical side- so I have always watched Kpler and some of the other newcomers with a lot of interest as you seem to be pushing the envelope compared with a lot of the more traditional commodity research houses which have been doing this for more years (the likes of Eikon, etc).

Curious, there seems to be a 'center of gravity' in new upstarts in the space in France- why is this?

Floating storage levels for crude are already double what they were a week ago [0]

[0] https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-tankers-storage...

and the prices of storage as well.[1] ( Article quite old, but argument stays )

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-shipping/oil-t...

"Our baseline forecast does not see GDP reverting to its pre-virus levels until late 2021 in the US and Europe." [0]

[0] https://www.fitchratings.com/research/sovereigns/deep-global...

And yet, their operating margin before any growth spend (or G&A) is a meager 20%.

I suppose this has to do with relatively low average occupancy rates? I wasn't able to find occupancy rates on their existing locations in the S-1.

I think it was actually true- I am signed in to two workspaces -- one paid plan and one free -- and only the latter has been unavailable so far.

For me it was actually the opposite. I was thinking that only paid workspaces were impacted, which would be mildly funny

Land acquisition costs are very low in the US (this is done through a competitive bidding process when new tracts are offered).

Royalties to the government are in the 20-30% range on a revenue basis, plus standard CIT.

This is for new land for exploration- e.g. no proven reserves at the time of the sale. If there are known reserves, then the price would be much higher but the government is not typically in the business of proving reserves themselves.

I seem to recall reading government reports about proven reserves. I thought we had a geological department that investigated all sorts of mineral / oil / natural gas resources.

Yes, there are tons of geologic maps produced by the government that are used by oil & gas companies. Most states require data from well logs to be reported too.

I think what parent is possibly talking about is when the BLM puts up tracts for mineral lease auction that nobody wants (no economically recoverable reserves). https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060099219

coal is at 12%(on BLM land), depending on who you lease from, Gold can be under 1%. What is as high as 20-30?

You are right- I am thinking of the typical royalties paid to private land owners onshore (either 1/8th or 1/4th).

Offshore federal royalties are typically ~12.5-18.5% [1]

[1] https://www.boem.gov/note07062017/