Monday, April 9, 2018

Nothing About The Bakken -- For The Granddaughters -- Mother-In-Law / Wife -- April 9, 2018

Two of the most beautiful women in the world.

This is not just a Monday night whim. I think about this often. If God granted me three wishes, one of the three wishes would be to bring my wife's mom back to see her great-granddaughters. She was -- and they were -- fortunate enough to see her granddaughters and spend a fair amount of time with them, especially when we were stationed in Germany. But she never saw the granddaughters (her great-granddaughters).

This photo:


Above, probably about 1950 or 1951, my mother-in-law -- about 19 years old -- I suppose I could find her actual age; I could ask my wife, but it doesn't matter. My future mother-in-law -- the mother in the picture above -- was in Japan when the US dropped the two atomic weapons on her country. She was very close to "ground zero" at the time. She would have been about 14 years old at the time.

A few years later she married a Hispanic from America. He spoke no Japanese; she spoke, I suppose, a little English. Perhaps enough to say, "I do" and not really knowing what she signed up for.

She was ostracized from her Japanese family for marrying an American -- and a Hispanic was the worse kind. But after Mayumi (the little girl in the photo above) was born, the daughter was welcomed back into the family with open arms. At least that's the story.

Her husband was a Hispanic whose father was a "wetback" and deported back to Mexico. His only child, a son, grew up to join the US Army, fight in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Along the way, he married the woman in the picture above, and their first child, a daughter, ended up marrying me.

This is a "colorized" photograph of my wife when she was one year old, I suppose. She was born in Japan and emigrated with her Hispanic father and Japanese mother to the US when she was two years old.


Except that her hair is a bit longer, she has not changed a bit -- as beautiful as ever.

My mother-in-law lived her entire life in the United States -- except for a couple of years in Germany. She loved the United States but kept her Japanese heritage. She tried to visit Japan at least once every couple of years in later life, but she never wanted to return permanently. Her home was California.

I appreciated her a lot when when she was living; I appreciate her even more now and truly wish she was (were) still here to enjoy her granddaughters (two) and her great-granddaughters (three).

Eight DUCs Reported Completed -- April 9, 2018

Active rigs:

$63.284/9/201804/09/201704/09/201604/09/201504/09/2014
Active Rigs58493193191

Two new permits:
  • Operator: CLR
  • Field: Larson (Burke); Juno (Divide)
  • Comments:
Two permits renewed:
  • Whiting: one Kaden TTT permit and one Westin TTT permit, both in Mountrail County
Eight producing wells completed:
  • 29069, 177, BR, CCU Audubon 21-27MBH, Corral Creek, t3/18; cum --
  • 29070, 182, BR, CCU Audubon 31-27TFH, Corral Creek, t3/18; cum --
  • 32930, 3,066, Whiting, Koala 31-2-2H, Poe, t2/18; cum 15K after 20 days;
  • 32931, 1,980, Whiting, Koala 31-2TFH, Poe, t2/18; cum 7K after 8 days;
  • 32932, 1,161, Whiting, Koala 31-2H, Poe, t3/18; cum --
  • 33619, 1,277, WPX, Arikara 15-22HA, Reunion Bay, t3/18; cum --
  • 33653, 1,270, Hess, GO-Vinger-156-98-12116H-5, Wheelock, t3/18; cum --
  • 33655, 1,087, Hess, GO-Vinger-156-98-2116-3, Wheelock, t3/18; cum --

The List Keeps Growing -- Jump In Production Among Wells Coming Back On Lline In The Bakken

This post is for newbies.

The list keeps growing.

A Slawson PIke Federal well has been updated.

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The Travel Page

I was looking for a good travelogue on Spain but I stumbled across this book first, and because I'm still in my China/Chinese phase, I will look at this book today.

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, Peter Hessler, c. 2001. DDS: 915.1 HES.

The author writes about his "life in Fuling." All of the sketches were written while he lived in Fuling. Arrived in Fuling, August, 1996 -- I had completed 20 years in the USAF; most of it overseas; I now had ten years of being "retired on active duty."

Part I

Chapter One: Downstream

Arrived Fuling, coming downstream from Chongqing, on the Yangtze River.

From an earlier post: 
Today's there's a headline article over at Yahoo!Finance about Nanking, China, a "second-tier" city in that country with a population of over 8 million, similar to that of NYC. The best thing I ever did with regard to geography on the blog was "fix" a picture in my mind of what China "looks like." Nanking? Where is it? If it were on the US map, it would be a suburb northwest of Charleston, SC, (Shanghai) up the Yangtze River. Maybe similar to Summerville, SC, where we lived for several years. 


Back to the book.

Two traveling together; the author was 27 years old; his colleague, Adam Meier, was 22.

Fuling: part of the city would be flooded by the new Three Gorges Dam; for years Fuling had been closed to outsiders.

No American had lived there for half a century.

No railroad in Fuling; to go anywhere, one went by boat.

The author would live two years in Fuling.

The City

There are no bicycles in Fuling because the city is full of steps because it is squeezed close on the mountains that press against the junctton of the Wu and Yangtze Rivers.

Chapter Two: Shakespeare with Chinese Characteristics

Textbooks: started with Beowulf and continued through twelve centuries and across the ocean to William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily."

Hamlet in October.

Raise the Flag Mountain

The mountain has two names: Peach Blossom Mountain and Raise the Flag Mountain; rises above the college and the junction of the rivers.

The Great Taiping Rebellion was started in the mid-1840's by Hong Xiuquan, a poor man from Guangxi province  who, frustrated by failing the Chinese civil service examination four times (we've talked about the Chinese CSEs before), decided that he was the Son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. By 1851, Hong Xiuquan was leading 20,000 followers, and he declared that he was the Heavenly King of a new dynasty; a sort of bastardized fundamentalist Protestantism; based loosely on foreign missionary tracts. In 1853, they captured the city of Nanking, and in time Hong Xiuquan ruled half of China; the Heavenly Kingdom; the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace -- Taiping Tianguo -- opposed to opium, foot binding, prostitution, gambling, and tobacco ... and we stumbled into the Opium Wars!

Chapter Three: Running (think Forrest Gump)


Author arrived in China able to recognize about 40 characters, all of them simple: people, middle, country, above, below, long, man, woman.

Peace Corps had given them an intensive course during two months of training in Chengdu. The emphasis was on learning enough spoken Mandarin to function.

One of the author's reasons for going to China to teach: to learn Chinese.

Mandarin Chinese has a reputation as a difficult language
  • in Sichuan, things are further complicated by the provincial dialect, which is distinct enough that a Chinese outsider has trouble understanding the locals in a place like Fuling
  • the variations between Mandarin and Sichuanese are significant
  • in addition to some differences in vocabulary, Sichuanese slurs the Mandarin reflexive sounds
  • certain consonants are reversed, so that the average person in Sichuan confuses n and l, and h and f
  • a word like "Hunan" becomes "Fulan"
  • more differences described
  • Sichuan is an enormous province
  • bottom line for the author: for learning, Chinese, a hell of a mess
  • author: there is no such thing as "Chinese"
  • educated people usually speak Mandarin; but majority of Fuling's population spoke the dialect
  • so, Mandarin and Sichuanese
  • learning Chinese, at first, almost drove him insane; incredibly difficult for many reasons
  • after about a month of classes, he read aloud a paragraph from his book, recognizing all of the characters smoothly except for one; highly satisfied;
  • multiple tones
  • Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. In order to differentiate meaning, the same syllable can be pronounced with different tones. Mandarin's tones give it a very distinctive quality, but the tones can also be a source of miscommunication if not given due attention. From chinesepod.com --
    • Mandarin is said to have four main tones and one neutral tone (or, as some say, five tones). Each tone has a distinctive pitch contour which can be graphed using the Chinese 5-level system.
  • the Chinese way: success was expected; failure criticized, and promptly corrected
Running -- his form of stress relief; something those in Fuling had not seen before

The White Crane Ridge

The White Crane Ridge is an 80-yard long strip of sandstone that sits like a temporary island in Fuling's harbor; when it emerges in the heart of the dry season: 22 pictures and over 300,000 characters are engraved on its surface
  • the "fish" pictures first used to help sailor navigate the river
  • various dynasties left their own engravings on the ridge
Chapter Four: The Dam
  • a nice history of the Three Gorges Dam
  • there were always voices of dissent
  • even in the 1980s, as Deng Xiaping and Premier Li Peng moved closer to beginning actual work on the dam; debates continued until 1987
  • China's first environmental lobby group was formed in response to the dam, and careful criticism continued even as work began in 1993 (my first year in Turkey; I completely missed Asian news at that time)
Mao Zedong's Third Line Project:
  • triggered by the American atomic bomb
  • Mao sent Deng Xiaping to the southwest so he could research the feasibility of moving Shanghai's military industry to remote mountain areas in Sichuan and Guizhou provinces
  • the Korean War accelerated the project, and eventually three-quarters of China's nuclear weapons plants were incorporated into the Third Line, as well as more than half of its aeronautics industry
  • the project was "something like that of picking up the whole California's high-tech industry and moving it bodily to the wilds of Montana as they existed, say, in 1880." -- The New Emperors, Harrison Salisbury
  • in comparison, it was a small matter to turn the river into a lake
  • much of Fuling's economy had originally come via the Third Line Project, which accustomed the locals to change
  • Deng Xiaoping started dismantling the Third Line Project in 1980
  • China's foreign relations improving; American threat seemed less serious
  • the Third Line Project had always been a huge drain on the economy
  • in some years as much as 50% of China's capital budget was spent on the project (sounds like the US military budget)
  • even Stalin's first Five-Year Plan couldn't compare -- according to some estimates, the Third Line Project did more damage to China's economy than the Cultural Revolution
The author describes his trip through the gorges - this is one of the most lasting, important reasons for this book, in my opinion -- begins about page 118

The Wu River
  • everything seems slow next to the current of the Wu, as it enters the Yangtze -- which seems to stand still where the Wu enters
  • the Wu is a mountain river
  • not wide enough for big river cruisers; navigable channels narrow to 30 or 40 feet during the dry season
  • the character for Wu is shaped vaguely like a bird; echoes part of the meaning of "crow." Also means black, or dark; nobody in Fuling seemed to know the origin of the river's name
Chapter Five: Opium Wars
  • there had been no other Chinese leader quite like Deng Ziaoping
  • appearance was unassuming; he was short; had not been handsome as a young man like Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong
  • he had grown up in the countryside northeast of Chongqing; acquired the habits of a peasant
  • his spitting was famous, at least overseas
  • but he had a practical, hard-headed intelligence; why he was able to turn China away from the disaster of a state-run economy
  • blunt; one reason why the pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 has been suppressed with such violence; much of what was good and bad about Sichuanese could be seen in the character of Deng Ziaoping
I will stop at page 133

CLR Fracked A Ryden Three Forks Second Bench Well With 71 Stages -- April 9, 2018

The well:
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No Longer Following These Wells

January 17, 2018: #17181 -- recent increase in production, but a stripper well; and not re-fracked; might be interesting to follow --
  • 17181, 395, MRO, Kevin Benz 24-31H, t1/10; cum 141K 2/18; recent production data --
PoolDateDaysBBLS OilRunsBBLS WaterMCF ProdMCF SoldVent/Flare
BAKKEN2-2018281023113513759016262
BAKKEN1-20183112371176171210617450
BAKKEN12-20173114661427221612979590
BAKKEN11-2017301777173529281444105323
BAKKEN10-201726737588235161732364
BAKKEN9-20170000000
BAKKEN8-20170000000
BAKKEN7-20170000000
BAKKEN6-20170000000
BAKKEN5-20170000000
BAKKEN4-20170000000
BAKKEN3-20174021761100
BAKKEN2-2017194003865542851423
BAKKEN1-201731776753102057827336

January 18, 2018: #20459. This well has to show a significant bump in production based on huge fracks nearby, but as of two months after the new neighboring fracks, no bump. Check back in, in a few months.
  • 20459, 1,443, Oasis, Lawlar 24-14H, North Tobacco Garden, t9/11; cum 216K 2/18;
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The Literary Page

I'm not going to spend much time on this book but Dorothy Parker has always intrigued me. I have a copy of "essays/theater reviews" on the shelves next to my bed. I occasionally read one of her essays. I often wonder if the "critic" in Birdman was modeled to some extent on DorothyParker.

The book:
Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? Marion Meade, c. 1987.

Some background to Dorothy Parker that I posted a couple of years ago.

I was unaware of this: Dorothy Parker herself left no correspondence, manuscripts, memorabilia, or private papers of any kind. Wow.

Throughout her life she was secretive about her origins and gave the impression that she had no family ties whatsoever, even though her close relationship with her sister, Helen, lasted a lifetime.

This biography was written with the cooperation of Lel Droste Iveson, Dorothy Parker's niece.

Introduction: The Algonquin Hotel, Summer 1927
  • West  Forty-fourth Street; bathed in Edwardian gloom
  • the summer of 1927 marked the 8th anniversary of the day she first brought Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood to the Algonquin Hotel, all of them working together down the street at Vanity Fair; poorly paid editors back from the war (1919)
  • in the intervening eight years, Dorothy Parker had been dubbed the wittiest woman in America
Chapter 1: The Events Leading Up To The Tragedy, 1893 - 1903
  • paternal grandparents: from Prussia; in the wave after the abortive 1848 revolution
  • Samson and Mary Rothschild; settled in Selma, AL; Dorothy's father, Henry was born in Selma, in 1851; a few Jews lived in the area, but none in Selma; wow; embroidery business; Henry was originally "Jacob" but changed his name over time;
  • saw the war coming; Samson moved his family to NYC in 1860; lived next door (in the same house) to large family, the Marstons
  • Henry (ne Jacob) Rothschild (18 years old) fell in love with Eliza Annie Marson, 19 years old)
  • 1880: Eliza, nearly 30 years old, marries Henry 
  • 1894; No. 214 West Seventy-second Street; Dorothy was Eliza and Henry's fourth and last child; their second daughter; her older sibs when she was born, ages: 12, 9, and 6
  • Eliza was 42 when Dorothy was born; Grover Cleveland was president
  • 1898: Dorothy's mother died; cause of death: "diarrhea with colic followed by weakness of the heart"
  • Dorothy never rid herself of the guilty suspicion that she somehow had caused her mother's death
  • Henry re-marries; Eleanor Frances Lewis, age 48; none of the children ever liked her; one gets the feeling of the evil step-mother; Dorothy hated her; remember, Dorothy would have been about five years old at the time
To be continued, page 14

The Energy, Market, and Political Page -- T+40; April 9, 2018

Updates

Later, 2:20 p.m. Central Time: see first comment. The article below refers to KML.TO (a subsidiary/affiliate of Kinder Morgan). I missed that. An eagle-eyed reader caught it. I have removed the previous screenshot and replaced it with a new screenshot.

Original Post

KMI Canada threatens to abandon Trans Mountain Pipeline project.



To the winner, go the spoils. From the AP via The Bismarck Tribune --
Forget about bike-share stations in Chicago or pedestrian walkways in Oakland. That's so Obama-era.
In the Trump administration, a popular $500 million transportation grant program is focused more on projects in rural areas that turned out for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
That means more road and rail projects in GOP strongholds such as Idaho, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, and fewer "greenways," ''complete streets" and bike lanes.
The latest round of these grants has nothing for New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago. Money in those Democratic heavy states went instead to projects in Trump-friendly regions: repainting a bridge in New York's North Country, contributing to a highway project in Modesto, California, and upgrading an interstate highway in southern Illinois.
Federal transportation grant program: $500 million / year?

This is hard to believe. Need to fact check. Federal government gives $500 million / year to Planned Parenthood.

One would think with research and sales, Planned Parenthood would be self-supporting.

At least we know the federal government's priorities.

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China-US Trade War

For those who think China can play the "US-Treasury" card, think again

Bakken Production Up 24% Year-Over-Year --- April 9, 2018


Zuckerberg: bans another data mining company. But only after NBC brought it to public attention. No link; story easily found.

Again: Permian bottleneck could impact global oil market -- oilprice.com 

Enough is enough! KMI ready to call it quits. Trudeau tested. From The WSJ -- KMI ready to call it quits on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion -- says politicians can't get their act together.
KMI threatened on Sunday to scrap its proposed expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline if Canada’s provincial and federal governments cannot resolve their differences over the project by May 31.
The ultimatum, in which the energy company also declared it was halting all “nonessential” spending on the project, raised the stakes in the dispute over the pipeline expansion, which has been opposed by British Columbia, angering neighboring Alberta.
“We have determined that in the current environment, we will not put KML shareholders at risk on the remaining project spend,” said Kinder Morgan Chief Executive Officer Steve Kean in a statement.
The company cited “continued actions in opposition” to the project by British Columbia in pushing the company to making the ultimatum.
The company said it would consult with stakeholders until May 31 but would find it difficult to move forward if progress hasn’t been made by then, company spokesman Dave Conover said.
How much is the delay in completing the Trans Mountain pipeline costing the faux environmentalist Trudeau? I don't know, but to put it in perspective, the DAPL, much smaller than the Trans Mountain, from an earlier post:
DAPL adding $10 million / month to ND coffers; DAPL alone would have paid for schools in Williston in less than a year
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Back to the Bakken

Bakken boom: year-over-year (2017 vs 2016) -- production up 24% -- Filloon.

Active rigs:

$62.484/9/201804/09/201704/09/201604/09/201504/09/2014
Active Rigs58493193191

RBN Energy: Permian natural gas is increasingly headed to somewhere in middle America.
Permian Basin natural gas production is growing at a torrid pace. After starting 2017 just below 6 Bcf/d, production is set to breach the 8-Bcf/d mark soon on its way to 10 Bcf/d by the end of 2019. Pipelines flowing out of the basin are coming under increasing strain, and just about every single gas pipeline leaving the Waha hub in West Texas is now being utilized at levels not witnessed in years — if ever. Even routes north from the Permian to the Midcontinent and Midwest markets, traditionally only attractive on the coldest winter days, are starting to look viable year-round. Today, we look at recent gas-price and flow trends in the Permian natural gas market.
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The Trade War Page


The mainstream media might fact check this, but they won't report what they find.
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The Tesla Page

From twitter --



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US Health Page

Clearing out my inbox.

Cost of Narcan. Link at Business Insider.