The Long View -- December 3, 2014; North Dakota Crude Selling Below $50 At The Well-Head

Top story right now over at Yahoo!Finance: North Dakota oil sold for under $50 on November 28, 2014. Bloomberg is reporting:

Oil market analysts are debating if oil will fall to $50. In North Dakota, prices are already there.

Crude sold at the wellhead in the Bakken shale region in North Dakota fell to $49.69 a barrel on Nov. 28, according to the marketing arm of Plains All America (PAA) Pipeline LP. That's down 47 percent from this year's peak in June, and 29 percent less than the $70.15 paid for Brent, the global benchmark.

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Crude Oil -- US

US crude oil stocks declined slightly week-over-week (dynamic link), in millions of bbls, rounded:

• 11/28/14: 379
• 11/21/14: 383
• 11/14/14: 381

A single swallow doesn't make a summer.

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A reader sent me the link. From the press release:

Kinder Morgan, Inc. today announced its preliminary 2015 financial projections. KMI expects to declare dividends of $2.00 per share for 2015, an approximately 16 percent increase over the 2014 dividend budget of $1.72 per share.

Chairman and CEO Richard D. Kinder stated, “We believe the recently closed transaction merging the Kinder Morgan companies paves the way for superior growth at KMI for years to come. We anticipate strong growth in 2015 across our pipeline and storage businesses and currently have a backlog of approximately $18 billion in expansion projects and joint venture investments that have a high certainty of completion. We are generating strong growth even though we have revised our projected West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price to $70 per barrel. As our track record demonstrates, we own and operate a large, diversified portfolio of stable, primarily fee-based energy assets across North America which produce substantial cash flow in virtually all types of market conditions, regardless of commodity prices.” 

This certainly suggests to me that CEOs who have been in the oil and gas business for many decades are taking the long view on the current price of oil.

By they way, XOM CEO suggested the same thing. MarketWatch is reporting:

Exxon Mobil Corp. has tested the profitability of its oil plays against crude-oil prices as low as $40 a barrel and as high as $120 a barrel. 

Exxon makes decades-long investment decisions, and its exploration and production projects have been tested to accomodate price swings, Tillerson said. 

Shares of Exxon rose on Wednesday, and crude-oil futures also gained after a weekly supply report showed a surprise decline in inventories. Crude futures have plunged in recent sessions after OPEC dashed hopes of an output cut that would help boost oil prices, which have fallen nearly 40% since June.

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ObamaCare

The Los Angeles Times headline asked the right question (whether ObamaCare destroyed the Democratic Party), but this long-time Obama apologist never answered the question; he completely avoided the obvious answer. He sure spent a lot of time bad-mouthing his party, blaming the messenger, not the message. He said the messenger failed to deliver the message.

As Shakespeare would say, this guy protesteth too much. Two facts he conveniently left out.

• the author mentions the Koch brothers, etc, lying about ObamaCare; in fact, Obama has the entire mainstream media on his side (CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and the list goes on); "comparing" the Koch brothers to the entire mainstream media is a bit much
• the writer fails to mention that most of ObamaCare has been delayed, deferred, or waived until 2015, or 2016, and so folks have not yet experienced the brunt of this trainwreck

The facts of ObamaCare are pretty much well known: the high premiums, the higher deductibles, and the fact that men now have breast cancer protection.

Even the unions don't like ObamaCare but I think they have a waiver; if not, ObamaCare won't kick in until 2015 or 2016 for them. I could be wrong on that but I certainly have not read any news stories to suggest otherwise.

The really interesting story regarding this article: it sure took a long time for an Obama apologist to come up with a response to Schumer's Silly Speech.

I don't know if ObamaCare destroyed the Democratic Party, but the shellacking the party got in the most recent mid-terms certainly suggests Americans had plenty of time to think about ObamaCare.