Monday Morning Links, News, And Views

Active rigs: 187

Wells coming off the confidential list have been posted.  Murex has a gusher.

RBN Energy: great article on WTI-Brent spread.

Crawling out from under the Geico rock?

While in the search for a promising, profitable, small energy company, I discovered Northern Oil and Gas. The company is an $873 million small-cap producer of crude oil and natural gas in North Dakota and Montana. It is one of America's fastest growing oil and gas energy companies. Northern holds interests in the Bakken and Three Forks formations in the Williston Basin. The company is fundamentally undervalued with the potential for significant stock gains.

The city nearest the sweetest spot in the Bakken -- Watford City -- will see school enrollment double. The Bismarck Tribune is reporting:

The future will be here in no time and Watford City school officials got a startling look at how quick and how big it will be.

The school hired a consultant to help map that future, and the data that came in recently is nothing short of mindboggling: In three more school years, the current enrollment is expected to double to 1,600.

WSJ Links

I generally don't read The Journal Report, Section R on Mondays, but this might be a nice one to keep: how states tax IRA withdrawals. Actually, lots of good news.

Not much in Section C, Money & Investing today. Ditto, Marketplace. Nothing.

The Front Section goes with the San Francisco plane crash as the lead story: this was a "practice flight" for the command pilot. He was "upgrading" to a new aircraft; had less than 50 hours in this aircraft; and this was his first flight into SFO.

But, finally, we get the crude oil unit train that destroyed a Canadian town story as the second story in the on-line edition. 

The deadly weekend explosion of a runaway crude-carrying train in Quebec threatens to ratchet up scrutiny of rising crude-by-rail shipments on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, amid a boom in North American oil production.

In both countries, shipments of crude by rail have shot up sharply, as producers race to get all their new oil to market and as pipeline companies scramble to build new lines or reconfigure old ones to handle the growing volumes. Meanwhile, uncertainty over several big pipeline projects—including approval delays for TransCanada Corp.'s Keystone XL, which would connect Western Canada's booming oil sands development to the Gulf Coast—have sent some oil companies looking to rail as a longer-term solution.
That accident was the fifth derailment of a CP train in three months. The city's mayor publicly questioned whether the company, which is responsible for its own track and bridge inspections, put profits ahead of safety. CP officials denied cutting corners on inspections and said the derailments aren't connected to any underlying trend.

But the accident early Saturday is on a whole different scale. The train's operator, Montreal Maine & Atlantic Railway Inc., a unit of privately held U.S. railroad operator Rail World Inc., said the runaway train was loaded with 72 carloads of crude bound from North Dakota to a refinery in New Brunswick. 

Two additional stories on this mishap in the WSJ: Canadians probe the disaster; and, A night out turns inot a nightmare: 5 dead, 40 missing.

This is an important story: Saudi Arabia has gained the upper hand amid Islamist setbacks.

Saudi Arabia has gained the upper hand in a series of new power struggles in the region, strengthening the kingdom against the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist political movements emboldened since the Arab Spring revolutions.

Just as swiftly as popular uprisings have brought to power the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic political blocs in several Middle East and North African countries since 2011, "what happened in Egypt...could be the beginning of the end of political Islam in the region," Khalid al-Dakhail, an assistant professor of political sociology at King Saud University in Riyadh, predicted Sunday.

Op-Ed: another O'BamaCare tax that is dangerous to your health. This is another piece of the Train Wreck that will be repealed.