CLR To Halt Bakken Production -- April 24, 2020

From SeekingAlpha contributor: CLR to halt Bakken production -- link here, but no additional story other than what's posted below --

• Continental Resources the company controlled by billionaire Harold Hamm, has ceased production in North Dakota and shut in most of its wells in the state's Bakken shale field.
• According to Bloomberg, the producer also declared force majeure on at least one of its contracts this week after crude went negative.
• Betting economic growth would lift prices, Continental is more exposed to weak prices because it did not hedge future production with derivatives, a common strategy within the industry.

Active rigs:

$17.03	4/24/2020	04/24/2019	04/24/2018	04/24/2017	04/24/2016
Active Rigs	29	62	62	48	29

Only one well coming off confidential list today -- 

Friday, April 24, 2020: 37 for the month; 37 for the quarter, 291 for the year:

• 36904, loc, PetroShale, Bridger Federal 1TFH, Bear Den,

RBN Energy: how the futures market impacts physical crude oil.

On Monday, front-month WTI at Cushing cratered to a negative $37.63/bbl. On Tuesday, the same futures price rose by nearly $48 to close at about $10/bbl — a positive $10, that is. As for WTI to be delivered in June, it lost well over a third of its value on Tuesday, ending up at less than $12/bbl, but over the past two days it has roared back to over $16/bbl. No doubt the WTI futures market will see more wild times in the days and weeks ahead as traders look to avoid the traps that ensnared the market as the May contract approached expiry. If there’s a lesson to be learned from the past week, it’s that it really helps to understand the ins and outs of the futures market — especially when it is so volatile. Perhaps the most important thing to wrap your head around is that while the futures market mostly involves financial players who will never take physical delivery of oil, the two markets — financial and physical — are fundamentally linked. Prompt-month futures converge on spot prices over time, while physical contracts are settled in part based on NYMEX futures, so producers will feel the sting of Monday’s negative prices when physical April deliveries are invoiced. Today, we begin a two-part blog series examining U.S. spot crude pricing mechanisms.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) NYMEX (formerly New York Mercantile Exchange, or “Merc”) WTI is the most liquid (widely and actively traded) commodity futures contract in the world. So far this year, the market has traded more than 1.5 billion barrels per day of crude across all delivery months for the contract and on Tuesday that volume spiked to over 4 billion barrels. The NYMEX WTI crude price is so ubiquitous that it also underpins the domestic U.S. crude spot market. At the same time, futures traders must be mindful of what happens in the spot market. In a strange symbiotic relationship, not only do cash crude prices heavily influence futures prices, but the cash price for most U.S. crude is indexed to the futures price. Sort of a “do-loop”, for you programmers. Differences between futures and physical trading, as well as the delivery mechanism that links the two markets, make pricing physical WTI complicated.