Some Idle Musings

Updates

October 1, 2013: another "Debbie Downer" story for Statoil.  

Original Post

One gets a general feeling that Norway/Statoil is "anxious" about how their oil industry is going.

There have been a number of stories about Statoil/Norway suggesting all is not perfect in the land of the midnight sun. I generally do not post those articles. But the stories have to do with taxes, Norway's new government, carbon capture costs, challenges in the Arctic, etc.

The Chinese oil companies are in everyone's rear view mirrors.

Yesterday, The Dickinson Press posted a story about a group of Norwegian officials traveling to North Dakota for a weeklong study of the Bakken.

There have been several articles recently about possible merger and acquisition activity in the Bakken.

In the past week, both WallStCheatSheet and Bloomberg had an article about a possible takeover candidate in the Bakken.

Some Bakken operators have said pretty clearly they would be interested in talking M&A activity.

Some data points in the table below. I left some columns empty in case I want to add something later.

Disclaimer: all data comes from Yahoo!Finance and or MWD databases. The former may be somewhat outdated (I assume Yahoo!Finance depends on quarterly data); and, MWD databases may be completely inaccurate, but they are what I have. I also make a lot of typographical errors. This entire post is for my benefit to help me keep track of things going on in the Bakken. I am posting it FYI only. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read at this blog or think you may have read at this blog.

Company	MkCap	Debt	Total	Acres/Bakken	OperCashFlow
STO	72.15 B	24.10 B	96.25 B	258,000*	17 B
WLL	6.67 B	2.25 B	8.92 B	697,000	1.51 B
OAS	4.24 B	1.20 B	5.44 B	492,000	600 M
KOG	3.01 B	1.45 B	4.46 B	196,000	392 M
TPLM	0.891B	1.05B	1.95 B	144,350	30 M

* STO: 378,000 acres in the Williston Basin Bakken (258,000 in North Dakota; the rest in Montana). This is the acreage that MWD last recorded that BEXP had before it was bought by Statoil; since then I do not know how much the acreage has changed.

All acreage figures rounded to nearest thousand.

Some idle chatter.

It's hard for me to deal with "billions," so dropping some zeroes, if the decision to buy a house that cost $544,000 or another house that cost $446,000 spread out over 30 years would almost be moot. At 5% over 30 years, the first house wold have a monthly payment of about $2,900; the the second house would cost about $2,400/month. (And if the second house was in a jurisdiction with higher property taxes, the difference becomes even less. But I digress.)

Both Oasis and Kodiak are pure E&P Bakken operators.

WLL does much more than just E&P; and, it has operations throughout the west and south United States. A buyer could sell off non-E&P assets and get a toehold in more than just the Bakken.

Doing some simple division yields some interesting numbers.  

Again, there could be some huge errors in the numbers above. But that's where I'm starting.