Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Notes From All Over -- Part 1, July 17, 2019

Hunch: Chicago police chief will probably be fired. Murders in Chicago now exceed those of New York, Detroit. In Chicago, year-to-date, 251 shot and killed; 1,171 shot and wounded; total homicides, 276. A person is murdered every 17 hours in Chicago.

Netflix: no longer "the next big thing." NFLX falls 11%; misses subscriber growth.

Yup:


Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, relationship, or travel decision based on what you read here or what you think you may have read here.

Music: looks like a night of music. Slow, very slow, news day. Losing energy.

Smartest guys in the world, it appears, answers for everything. Although I can count on one hand the number of covers The Economist has devoted to Brexit.


Coal. Adani, headquartered in the country of India, will open one of the world's largest coal mines in the world. Wiki even has a stub on this coal mine, it's that big. It almost appears the "Carmichael" is the "Bakken" of Queensland, but coal instead of oil. India is on the road to being coal-free; they will simply open coal mines in Australia. LOL. See more at this post.

XTO With Seven New Permits In Heart Butte Oil Field -- July 17, 2019

Active rigs:

$56.787/17/201907/17/201807/17/201707/17/201607/17/2015
Active Rigs5669592973

Seven new permits, #36744 - #36750, inclusive.
  • Operator: XTO
  • Field: Heart Butte (Dunn County)
  • Comments: XTO has permits for a 7-well FBIR Lawrence pad in section 26-149-92, Heart Butte oil field
And that was all.

Fight Is On! Nightly News -- Nothing To Do With The Bakken -- July 17, 2019

The fight is on! So much for Norah O'Donnell,  link here.

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The Book Page

Probably my next purchase:
  • The Weil Conjectures, Karen Olsson, c. 2019
Review in The Wall Street Journal, weekend edition, July 13 - 14, 2019.

A surprisingly good book: Hamlet: Globe to Globe - 193,000 Miles, 197 Countries, One Play, Dominic Dromgoole, c. 2018 (paperback edition).

Chapter 5, page 83: the touring company is just an hour or so from playing Mexico City. Most of the company is ill due to bad chicken (?).
You can do a show without designers and producers; it is harder to bring one off without actors. With only an hour to go, Tommy, who is playing Horatio, has announced that he will not be appearing. He disappeared the night before, hasn't been seen since, and point-blank refuses to open his door. Noises have been erupting from his room, and they don't sound healthy.
A long queue is already shaking around the makeshift theatre our hosts, the National Theatre of Mexico, have thrown p for us, and we are an actor down. The whole company has that febrile uncertainty that precedes a hefty burst of illness, that distant roar you sense within your body before the tsunami hits.
Two nights ago, we had all sat together for a company meal high above the same square, eating the Mexican food, living the Mexican dream, and congratulating ourselves and each other for our all-round Mexican chillaxness. Now we are paying for it. Well, everyone who had the chicken is.
Chillaxness.

A google search is fairly unhelpful.

Chillax: "chill out" and "relax."

Moderate US Crude Oil Draw -- EIA -- July 17, 2019

Yesterday, US retail sales, beat expectations, consumers making America great:
  • forecast: a measly 0.1% growth, month-over-month
  • actual: 0.4%
  • pundits keep telling us "we're" headed for a recession; that consumers are worn out; that tariffs are "killing" us -- oh, give me a break
EIA: weekly petroleum report out today -- for period ending July 12, 2019:
  • US weekly crude oil inventories: declined by 3.1 million bbls
  • US weekly crude oil inventories: 455.9 million bbls
  • US weekly crude oil inventories: 4% above five-year average and that five-year average is increasing
  • refining capacity: operating at 94.4% capacity; at high end of capacity; has been this way for several weeks now
  • see comments below and this link to the EIA pdf;
Re-balancing:
  • at week zero, 446.9 million bbls in storage
  • at week 34, 455.9 million bbls in storage, and I believe this is the second week (or thereabouts) that EIA has changed definition of oil in storage to make it more "realistic":
Week
Week Ending
Change
Million Bbls Storage
Week 0
November 21, 2018
4.9
446.9
Week 1
November 28, 2018
3.6
450.5
Week 2
December 6, 2018
-7.3
443.2
Week 3
December 12, 2018
-1.2
442.0
Week 4
December 19, 2018
-0.5
441.5
Week 5
December 28, 2018
0.0
441.4
Week 6
January 4, 2019
0.0
441.4
Week 7
January 9, 2019
-1.7
439.7
Week 8
January 16, 2019
-2.7
437.1
Week 9
January 24, 2019
8.0
445.0
Week 10
January 31, 2019
0.9
445.9
Week 11
February 6, 2019
1.3
447.2
Week 12
February 13, 2019
3.6
450.8
Week 13
February 21, 2019
3.7
454.5
Week 14
February 27, 2019
-8.6
445.9
Week 15
March 6, 2019
7.1
452.9
Week 16
March 13, 2019
-3.9
449.1
Week 17
March 20, 2019
-9.6
439.5
Week 18
March 27, 2019
2.8
442.3
Week 19
April 3, 2019
7.2
449.5
Week 20
April 10, 2019
7.0
456.5
Week 21
April 17, 2019
-1.4
455.2
Week 22
April 24, 2019
5.5
460.1
Week 23
May 1, 2019
9.9
470.6
Week 24
May 8, 2019
-4.0
466.6
Week 25
May 15, 2019
5.4
472.0
Week 26
May 22, 2019
4.7
476.8
Week 27
May 30, 2019
-0.3
476.5
Week 28
June 5, 2019
6.8
483.3
Week 29
June 12, 2019
2.2
485.5
Week 30
June 19, 2019
-3.1
482.4
Week 31
June 26, 2019
-12.8
469.6
Week 32
July 3, 2019
-1.1
468.5
Week 33
July 10, 2019
-9.5
459.0
Week 34
July 17, 2019
-3.1
455.9

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Best Quote Of The Day

"Occasional-Cortex: the reason there are instructions on the back of shampoo bottles."

****************************************
The Biology Page

I've blogged many times on Nick Lane's book, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, c. 2015. This book brought me up to date with regard to current advances in "thinking" about how life originated on earth (or maybe anywhere in the universe for that matter).

It was of interest, then, to have come across Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak and his thoughts on the origin of life and work in their laboratory in Boston/Harvar/MGH. This article is from 2017 but it is almost identical to a more recent article in a 2019 Harvard University publication.

The linked article begins:
With nearly 40 billion potentially habitable Earth-like exoplanets spinning around the solar system, it seems highly probable that astronomers would find life on at least one. Yet they have not.
“The pathway from chemistry to biology could be so hard that life is really rare,” said Jack W. Szostak, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. “In the laboratory, we want to find out if there is a simple pathway.”
Talk about an understatement.

Nick Lane does a great job dispelling the meme that electricity (lightning / thunderstorms) were instrumental in the origin of life on earth. It was interesting to see that Szostak still gives credence to that "theory" -- at least according to the author of the 2019 article.

An ArgusMedia Line Re: Pipelines -- July 17, 2019

A reminder. Some weeks ago I received this comment from a reader:
If you click through to ArgusMedia and register, ther is a free half hour presentation on export pipes, grades, and prices. Really good explanation of stuff the MSM tends to mess up in discussion. 
The comment was in reply to this post: https://themilliondollarway.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-bakken-revolution-and-pipeline.html.

At the same time:
Here's the link for Argus webinars. Note there's a FEB19 webinar on Bakken flaring:
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/webinars?page=1
Other recent links that came in among the comments, previously posted:
The commenters at PeakOilBarrel (one of the successor sites to The Oil Drum) are already speculating that the Bakken is over.

http://peakoilbarrel.com/world-oil-production-as-of-march-2019/

It seems like every winter slowdown draws them like a moth to a flame. No memory of all their previous mistaken negative predictions. No comprehension of how winter affects ND. 
And:
A lot of talk about the percentage of the corn crop that got planted, but even where there's been decent emergence there wont be much of a crop in those areas where the fields have been flooded...my corner of NE Ohio had 10 inches of rain over the first three weeks of June and by the time my freshly tilled garden dried out, the soil had packed down to an impenetrable hard pan..

a good site for keeping track:
https://water.weather.gov/precip/
I seldom visit the site, but Peak Oil Barrel is perhaps one of the most entertaining sites out there. Talk about being out of touch with reality.

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Memories
Women's Soccer -- World Cup -- Summer, 2019
Lyon, France





Notes From All Over -- Part 1, July 17, 2019

Boom: oil companies to donate almost $20 million to help open 14 schools in Midland and Odessa by 2025. From Rigzone I have yet to hear of even one solar farm / wind farm donating  similar amounts of money to their communities. Or providing that number of permanent jobs that support that many families that need that many schools.
A total of 14 schools will be opened at seven sites across Midland and Odessa by the 2024-25 school year. First will be IDEA Travis Academy and College Prep in partnership with Midland ISD in August of 2020. The following year, IDEA will expand to Odessa
EIA: weekly petroleum report out today -- pending:

API: crude draw yesterday --
  • forecast: 2.69 million bbls (note the false precision)
  • actual: 1.401 million bbls (the false precision is even worse --- 0.001 million bbls = a thousand bbls
Pipeline sale? ETP considering sale of its 33% interest in the Rover pipeline, the pipeline that carries Appalachian natural gas west to folks in the Midwest. RBN Energy had many, many blogs about the Rover pipeline some years ago. ETP could use the cash to expand footprint in Corpus Christi crude oil export terminal. Rover:
  • 713 miles
  • 3.25 billion cubic feet per day (550,000 boepd)
BofA to raise dividend 20%. Continue/increase share buybacks.

Railroads: slump due to Chinese trade "war."

Boeing: as predicted -- now the talk is what Boeing will be worth if the MAX 737 never flies again. Boeing survives through its military contracts; will take years (decades?) to recover in the civilian sector.

Health insurance: Congress to vote on the "health care Cadillac tax" to go into effect in 2023. This is now all about "The Squad" -- will be fascinating to watch. This is one vote I may actually follow. I assume the bill will need to be veto-proof if it is to survive.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

Not to be outdone, future king of England, on global warming:
  • Occasional-Cortex: 12 years
  • Beto: 10 years
  • Prince Charles: 18 months (his previous prognostication -- 100 months --- that "deadline" came and went; back in 2015, he extended the 100-month tipping point to 35 years; now it's back to 18 months; and, this, folks, is the future king of England. Another doofus.
Whatever:


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The Book Page

I've just completed Valerie Hemingway's Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, c. 2004.

The book gets a bit tedious with all the trivia but it's obvious this journalist kept an incredibly good journal during her lifetime.

For hardcore Hemingway fans, it's a must read.

Of all things, Valerie ended up making Bozeman, MT,  her home. Hemingway had four wives. Valerie certainly was not a wife, but her life was certainly as interesting as any of the four Hemingway wives, and in some respects, one might consider her the fifth "wife" in Ernest's life. And because she married one of Hemingway's sons, she was obviously as much of the Hemingway family as any of the others.

Unless I missed it, I was most frustrated not learning why Mary Hemingway (and maybe Ernest) decided that the Kennedy Library in Boston would be the sole recipient of Hemingway's papers. My hunch is it had to do with the fact that President Kennedy interceded personally with getting Mary and Valerie back to Cuba to retrieve his belongings after he died. At that time Americans were not allowed to travel to Cuba. Perhaps that was part of the agreement. 

Only Two Wells Coming Off Confidential List Today -- Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Wells coming off confidential list -- Wednesday, July 17, 2019: 28 for the month; 28 for the quarter;
  • 35581, 770, Petro-Hunt, Dolezal 146-97-31C-30-4H, Little Knife, t6/19; cum --;
  • 33538, 1,415, CLR, Hendrickson Federal 14-25HSL, Elm Tree, t1/19; cum 103K 5/19, see production profile below;
Active rigs:

$58.307/17/201907/17/201807/17/201707/17/201607/17/2015
Active Rigs5669592973

RBN Energy: the challenge of new crude pipeline operations.
The next wave of Permian crude oil pipeline infrastructure is getting completed as we speak. In West Texas, several new pipeline projects are either finalizing their commercial terms and agreements, wrapping up the permitting process, or actually putting steel in the ground. In the Permian alone, there is a potential for 4.3 MMb/d of new pipeline takeaway capacity to get built in the next two and a half years. Along with those major long-haul pipelines, there are also crude gathering systems being developed to help move production from the wellhead to an intermediary point along one of the big new takeaway pipes.
While we often like to give pipeline projects concrete timelines with hard-and-fast online dates, the actual logistics of how producers, traders and midstream companies all bring a pipeline from linefill to full commercial service are never clean and simple. There can be a lot of headaches, learning curves, and expensive — not to mention time-consuming — problem-solving exercises that come with the start-up process. In today’s blog, we discuss why new pipelines often experience growing pains, and how market participants navigate the early days of new systems.

33538:
PoolDateDaysBBLS OilRunsBBLS WaterMCF ProdMCF SoldVent/Flare
BAKKEN5-2019312001419996962129045220336779
BAKKEN4-2019302021720349943030350228507320
BAKKEN3-20193126180262741132236956298646867
BAKKEN2-20192823090228501010534827329881839
BAKKEN1-2019151339013095490918864161972667