In A Really, Really Bad Mood -- May 12, 2016; The Director's Cut Is Out -- March, 2016, Data

I cannot articulate how angry I am; how bad my mood is. It's a personal issue. It has nothing to do with the Bakken; it has nothing to do with national politics; it has nothing to do with anything outside my personal orbit.

So, I am going to forget about the Bakken for awhile and just blog with no direction, see where I end up. I will update/re-fresh periodically, but the post will not be completed until you see the phrase: ALL DONE in caps.

All that pessimistic talk about the Red Queen and the Bakken: wow, what a bunch of crap. Month over month, North Dakota crude oil production fell by less than 1% and that is in the middle of a North Dakota winter. Give me a freakin' break. Red Queen. Ha. A huge shout-out to the roughnecks. Unfettered, they could produce 2.2 million bopd for North Dakota in the dead of winter.

And we move on.

How many active wells in March and the delta, month-over-month?

• March, 2016: 13,024 active wells
• February, 2016: 13,017 active wells

Now, remember, "they're" drilling 100 new wells each month. During the boom, they were drilling twice that many.

And North Dakota is doing that with less than 30 rigs; incredible. It used to take 200 rigs to produce one (1) million bopd in North Dakota; operators are doing that with less than 30 rigs now.

DUCs? 920. That's up 13 from the end of February to the end of March. Almost a thousand DUCS. Incredible.

Inactive wells? 1,523, up 84 from the end of February to the end of March. Over fifteen hundred inactive wells; these are "better" than DUCs. They have been completed; they have been fracked; they have been paid for; they are just sitting there waiting to produce. Sort of like grain silos full of grain.

Utilization rates for the big rigs? About 30%

Permit inventory? Lynn Helms says the inventory is "significant." Really? It would take five years to drill the current permit inventory.

Natural gas? The operator of the exploration well (file 27235) in Emmons County has received Temporary Abandoned status on 8/31/15 and cancelled all other permits in the area. The well appears to contain 2 pay sections totaling about 80 feet thick with very good gas shows.

It just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?

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Definition Of A Perfect Evening

A jar full of M&M's -- regular and peanut.

Watching a Bee Gee documentary.

Reading about lighthouses in the US in the New York Review of Books.
 
Reading about Blanche Knopf in the New York Review of Books.

A bottle of Sambuca.

A block of cheddar cheese.

Later: the Sam Kean book on DNA.

Only one thing could make the evening better, but she died in December, 2006. Or thereabouts.

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How Cn U Mend A 💔

How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, The Bee Gees

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 News From My Alma Mater

From The Los Angeles Time, #1 story, above the fold, front page: how tech mogul Larry Ellison's friendship with a USC physician led to a $200-million cancer research gift:

Oracle founder Larry Ellison never finished college, much less attended USC.

But he donated $200 million to the school — matching the largest gift in Trojan history — to fund a cancer research center because of a relationship he developed with a USC doctor who treated his nephew and several other close friends, including Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Ellison first met Dr. David B. Agus when the tech mogul accompanied his nephew for his initial prostate cancer consultation nearly eight years ago.

Agus, an oncologist who was working at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at the time, recalled being nervous when he heard Ellison was arriving. It didn't help that Agus was also late to the initial meeting.

"When you hear Larry Ellison is coming, you don't know what to expect," he said.

So many story lines on so many levels.

If I had my life to live over, I would have never left USC. I would have gladly worked for minimum wage for the rest of my life at USC-LA County Hospital.

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ALL DONE