WPX Buys Into The Permian -- July 14, 2015

Bloomberg/Rigzone is reporting:

WPX Energy Inc., the oil and gas explorer spun off from Williams Cos., has agreed to buy closely held RKI Exploration & Production LLC for $2.35 billion.

WPX will also assume $400 million of debt to acquire RKI, which has liquids-rich fields in the Permian Basin, WPX said in a statement Tuesday. The majority of RKI’s leaseholds are located in Texas and New Mexico, where the company operates four rigs, it said.

The Permian Basin is the most active oil play in the U.S. and showed the biggest improvement in last week’s Baker Hughes Inc. weekly report, with eight rigs brought back to work. The deal is WPX’s largest since spinning out from Williams in 2011 and its first foray into the Permian, a large swathe of oil-producing rock beneath West Texas and southeastern New Mexico.

WPX is buying leases in the Delaware Basin, the less- developed western half of the Permian.

No mention was made of the EPD hostile takeover of WMB.

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At Least They Are Not Blaming George W. Bush For This

This is laughable. Bloomberg blaming fracking as the reason why students drop out of high school. LOL. I'm a step away from banning Bloomberg articles from the website. At some point, things are beyond the pale. The comments, fortunately, are better (and more honest) than the article. The study is laughable. The industry is unlikely to hire any one under the age of 16. We are talking such a minuscule number of high school students that would have taken fracking jobs that the statistics are meaningless.

The study found that in the absence of fracking, the male-female gap in high school dropout rates among 17- to 18-year-olds would have narrowed between 2000 and 2013. Instead, it was unchanged at 1.4 percentage points at the end of the period, with males posting a 5.4 percent dropout rate versus 4 percent for females.

Really? This is bizarre, is more than ridiculous. And this is the last we will hear of this. It's so bizarre that it won't even become a talking point.

I wonder if the authors of the study referenced are aware of the brand new $7.5 million training center east of Williston?