Tuesday, January 6, 2015; QEP Has Another Huge Well In The Grail

Still traveling; minimal blogging.

I believe I read recently that any day now, warmists will be releasing data suggesting that 2014 was the warmest year on record. And now I'm watching some of the coldest weather ever in Chicago, and going east to Washington, DC. I guess it depends where you put your thermometers.

I've updated the wells coming off confidential list today. QEP in the Grail has another huge well. Also, RBN Energy's top five prognostications for 2015 also posted.

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Chevron announces a significant oil discovery at the Anchor prospect in the deepwater U.S. Gulf of Mexico : Co announces a significant oil discovery at the Anchor prospect in the deepwater U.S. Gulf of Mexico. Anchor is CVX's second discovery in the deepwater Gulf in less than a year.

• The Green Canyon Block 807 Well No. 2 encountered oil pay in multiple Lower Tertiary Wilcox Sands. The well, which was spudded in Aug. 2014, is located approximately 140 miles off the coast of Louisiana in 5,183 feet of water and was drilled to a depth of 33,749 feet.
• Appraisal drilling will begin in 2015.
• CVX subsidiary Chevron U.S.A. is the operator, with a 55 percent working interest in the Anchor prospect. Anchor co-owners are Cobalt International Energy, Inc. (20 percent), Samson Offshore Anchor (12.5 percent); and Venari Resources (12.5 percent).

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Crescent Point Energy announces a $1.45 bln capital expenditures budget for 2015 : Co announces a $1.45 bln capital expenditures budget for 2015. The capital expenditures budget is expected to generate average daily production of 152,500 boe/d, a 9% increase over 2014 guidance. With benchmark oil price volatility currently at elevated levels, Crescent Point's 2015 budget assumptions are conservative and disciplined. "When oil prices rebound, the Company expects that it will increase capital spending."

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Other links received in past 24 hours:

New England folks shocked by high utility rates this winter.

Oil falls again; stock market plunges 331 points. 

New reality television show to film in Williston. From The Bismarck Tribune:

Filling rooms hasn’t been hard for the Missouri Flats Inn in Williston since oil production started booming in the western part of the state. 

Just as the area’s black gold drew many new workers to the area, it also garnered attention for the inn from the Travel Channel’s “Hotel Impossible.”

The small hotel’s makeover will be featured on the show this evening.

The premise of the show is to make over struggling hotels across the country. Host Anthoney Melchiorri implements staff retraining and building renovations to make the hotels more competitive.

Nicole Ross, Missouri Flats’ general manager, said she had sent an email to the show hoping to get its help on a hotel the company owns in Oregon.
After the show’s organizers found out about the hotel in Williston and the area’s booming economy, they asked to do the show there.

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Chickens Coming Home To Roost
We Won't Know What's In It Until It's Passed

This is quite an incredible story. The New York Times reporting on Harvard's reaction to ObamaCare. As I've said for the past couple of years, we would see the full impact of ObamaCare starting in 2015:

For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.

The faculty vote came too late to stop the cost increases from taking effect this month, and the anger on campus remains focused on questions that are agitating many workplaces: How should the burden of health costs be shared by employers and employees? If employees have to bear more of the cost, will they skimp on medically necessary care, curtail the use of less valuable services, or both?

“Harvard is a microcosm of what’s happening in health care in the country,” said David M. Cutler, a health economist at the university who was an adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But only up to a point: Professors at Harvard have until now generally avoided the higher expenses that other employers have been passing on to employees. That makes the outrage among the faculty remarkable, Mr. Cutler said, because “Harvard was and remains a very generous employer.”

In Harvard’s health care enrollment guide for 2015, the university said it “must respond to the national trend of rising health care costs, including some driven by health care reform,” in the form of the Affordable Care Act. The guide said that Harvard faced “added costs” because of provisions in the health care law that extend coverage for children up to age 26, offer free preventive services like mammograms and colonoscopies and, starting in 2018, add a tax on high-cost insurance, known as the Cadillac tax.

Richard F. Thomas, a Harvard professor of classics and one of the world’s leading authorities on Virgil, called the changes “deplorable, deeply regressive, a sign of the corporatization of the university.”

Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France and has led opposition to the benefit changes, said they were tantamount to a pay cut. “Moreover,” she said, “this pay cut will be timed to come at precisely the moment when you are sick, stressed or facing the challenges of being a new parent.”

The university is adopting standard features of most employer-sponsored health plans: Employees will now pay deductibles and a share of the costs, known as coinsurance, for hospitalization, surgery and certain advanced diagnostic tests. The plan has an annual deductible of $250 per individual and $750 for a family. For a doctor’s office visit, the charge is $20. For most other services, patients will pay 10 percent of the cost until they reach the out-of-pocket limit of $1,500 for an individual and $4,500 for a family.

Full story at the link.