Reminder: Wells Coming Off Confidential List Over The Weekend, Monday Have Been Posted -- November 30, 2014

Active rigs:

	11/30/2014	11/30/2013	11/30/2012	11/30/2011	11/30/2010
Active Rigs	185	191	182	198	163

Reminder: wells coming off the confidential list over the weekend, Monday have been posted with their IPs.

Updating 3Q13 wells: it really is incredible all the wells that are reaching 100K in the first year. This is an example of a nice Fidelity well, for example:

• 23913, 1,223, Fidelity, State 30-31H, Stanley; t3/13; cum 191K 10/14;

Slump in oil price continues: futures down $1.60 to under $64.

War of words: The Telegraph (link here).

Saudis risk playing with fire in shale-price showdown as crude crashes A deep slump in prices might heighten geostrategic turmoil across the Middle East

Saudi Arabia and the core Opec states are taking an immense political gamble by letting crude oil prices crash to $66 a barrel, if their aim is to shake out the weakest shale producers in the US. A deep slump in prices might equally heighten geostrategic turmoil across the broader Middle East and boomerang against the Gulf’s petro-sheikhdoms before it inflicts a knock-out blow on US rivals.

Caliphate leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has already opened a “second front” in North Africa, targeting Algeria and Libya – two states that live off energy exports – as well as Egypt and the Sahel as far as northern Nigeria. “The resilience of US shale may prove greater than the resilience of Opec,” said Alistair Newton, head of political risk at Nomura.

Chris Skrebowski, former editor of Petroleum Review, said the Saudis want to cut the annual growth rate of US shale output from 1m barrels per day (bpd) to 500,000 bpd to bring the market closer to balance. “They want to unnerve the shale oil model and undermine financial confidence, but they won’t stop the growth altogether,” he said.

There is no question that the US has entirely changed the global energy landscape and poses an existential threat to Opec. America has cut its net oil imports by 8.7m bpd since 2006, equal to the combined oil exports of Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.

The country had a trade deficit of $354bn in oil and gas as recently as 2011. Citigroup said this will return to balance by 2018, one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in modern economic history.

“When it comes to crude and other hydrocarbons, the US is bursting at the seams,” said Edward Morse, Citigroup’s commodities chief. “This situation is unlikely to stop, even if prevailing prices for oil fall significantly. The US should become a net exporter of crude oil and petroleum products combined by 2019, if not 2018.”

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Non-Bakken

St Louis: the "universal" posture for Ferguson protestors has been "raising arms/hands, signaling 'don't shoot.'" It looks like the new posture will have to include holding hammers.  

Reason #24,560 Why I Love To Blog -- The Real Cost Of Electricity -- November 30, 2014

A few days ago a reader provided a great link and some really good research on the real cost of electricity, as provided by the provincial government of Ontario, Canada. That source is about as un-impeachable a source as one can find. If you can't believe a provincial government, whom can you trust?  So, before reading further, go back and look at at that post.

Now, Forbes is getting in on the act. Here's the link.

The concern is that the Obama administration is now trying to re-define how we determine the cost of electricity:

In the most recent Annual Energy Outlook, the EIA began using the “levelized avoided cost of energy” (LACE) as an alternative to the LCOE for assessing the economic competitiveness of different generating technologies. The LACE metric estimates what it would have cost the grid to generate the electricity otherwise displaced by a new generation project. (wow, sort that one out)

The LCOE is like a bad line of code in a software program used to develop other software programs. It has dangerously skewed investors’ understanding of the economics of generating electricity from renewable energy resources. It has also had perverse and difficult to undo impacts on local, state and federal energy policies.

This Forbes story would have made less sense to me had another reader not sent me the Ontario, Canada, study. And that's why I love to blog. 

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A Note To The Granddaughters

One of the most fascinating books I have ever read is Brenda James' The Truth Will Out: Unmasking The Real Shakespeare, c. 2005.

It is nice to have google at my side to help me cross-reference some of the data points Brenda James provides. Her book is absolutely fascinating.

In my freshman year at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, my courses were pretty much all required courses, to get them out of the way. One of the courses was western literature; the professor was perhaps one of the most interesting, most striking professors I ever had in college. I hardly recognize him in this picture taken way too late in his life. He was tall, and had the most striking red hair of anyone I can recall: perhaps a descendent of Eric the Red.

I assume we studied Shakespeare for about two months during that freshman year but I recall nothing else about his class. The only think I recall was studying Shakespeare. Dr Huseboe was incredibly animated and obviously very, very passionate about the dramatist and poet. I remember, very well, the paper I wrote for that subject; it was definitely out of the ordinary, which Dr Huseboe recognized, and, I suppose, appreciated, after reading scores of papers with the same theme. It was a mediocre paper at best, but the thesis at least was different.

My Shakespeare library is extensive, but if I had to narrow it down -- to share with the granddaughters -- it would be several of his plays; one or two books on Shakespeare by Harold Bloom; W H Auden's lectures on Shakespeare; and, Brenda James' book.

Oasis Picking Targets South Of Williston? POTUS Picking Targets South Of Kabul? -- November 30, 2014

Updates

Later, 10:12 a.m. CT: see first comment. My original post identified the wrong "waste water plant." I was unaware of a waste water plant south of the depot. The post has been updated.

Original Post

A small story coming out of the Bakken to start the day. The Dickinson Press is reporting that Oasis will buy water from Williston's wastewater plant to use for fracking an Oasis well-pad site just west of the wastewater plant.

The Oasis site is just west of the wastewater facility. More than 440,000 barrels of water is expected to be sold to Oasis and bring in approximately $110,000 of revenue to the city. 

“This will help with our volume issues,” said Public Works Director David Tuan. “We have far too much wastewater coming into the plant that we can deal with.”

According to a reader, the "wastewater plant is south of the Amtrak depot."

At risk of being wrong again, this looks like the four-well Oasis pad, currently with a rig on site:

• 29264, SI/NC, Oasis, Harrier 5401 44-23 T2, Todd, 2nd bench, Three Forks; background gas was "very low"; 
• 29265, drl, Oasis, Harrier 5401 44-23 3B, Todd,
• 29266, loc, Oasis, Harrier 5401 44-23 4T, Todd,
• 29267, drl, Oasis, Harrier 5401 44-23 5B, Todd,

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Non-Bakken Stuff

Tongue-in-cheek: I posted this back on October 15, 2014, as a bit of tongue-in-cheek stuff:

The younger generation won't remember how the Vietnam War ended for US: a) the president was picking bombing targets; and, b) US loyalists were air evacuated out of Saigon on helicopters.

I don't know if I should be surprised or dismayed to see that we were repeating the past. The AP is reporting that apparently POTUS was picking the bombing targets in Afghanistan, but this time, even the Pentagon did not know:

On a trip to Afghanistan during President Barack Obama's first term, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was stunned to find a telephone line at the military's special operations headquarters that linked directly back to a top White House national security official.

"I had them tear it out while I was standing there," Gates said earlier this month as he recounted his discovery. "I told the commanders, `If you get a call from the White House, you tell them to go to hell and call me.'"

On another note, this headline ("new momentum to stop global warming") made no sense to me last night, so I left it to come back to it this morning. It still makes no sense. The AP is reporting:

Abbott tried and failed to keep the issue off the agenda of the annual G-20 summit of wealthy and emerging countries that was hosted by the Australian city of Brisbane in mid-November. An agreement between Washington and Beijing to curb emissions, announced days before the summit, suggests he had misjudged the international mood on the issue.

Next week, attention turns to the next round of international climate change negotiations in Lima, Peru. For a nation of just 23 million, Australia has played a significant role in past talks, but this time it's unclear what kind of role its delegation, led by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, will play.

Abbott's conservative coalition won a landslide election victory last year over the Labor Party, which had grown unpopular in part because it had approved one of the world's highest taxes on major carbon gas polluters. Abbott not only ended that tax but years earlier helped scuttle an effort by his own Liberal Party to reach a bipartisan deal on a carbon-trading scheme, intended to encourage industries to produce less emissions.

Let's see:

• Canada rejected the Kyoto Protocol
• China gets to keep doing for the next 20 years what is has been doing for the past 20 years (on an Obama handshake)
• Germany is going brown (burning lignite coal)
• "Global Warming" is the last thing on their list of things Americans worry about

I don't see the momentum. I see AP spin.