Starting The Day With 30 Active Rigs -- June 29, 2016; BLM Ready To Okay 6,000 More Wells In Utah -- Moab/Paradox Basin

Active rigs:

	6/29/2016	06/29/2015	06/29/2014	06/29/2013	06/29/2012
Active Rigs	30	77	191	189	215

RBN Energy: evaluating economics of a new natural gas pipeline - part 4.

Strippers: from the EIA today --

Stripper wells, or wells that produce small volumes, represent an important but decreasing share of total U.S. oil and natural gas production. These wells are characterized as producing no more than 15 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d) over a 12-month period.

EIA estimates that there were about 380,000 stripper oil wells (so called because they are stripping the remaining oil out of the ground) in the United States operating at the end of 2015, compared to about 90,000 nonstripper oil wells. --- EIA

Moab, Utah: BLM poised to okay almost 6,000 new wells for Newfield over 16 years; directional and vertical wells.

Under the BLM's preferred alternative, Newfield Exploration Co. would, over a period of 16 years, drill all 5,750 oil and gas wells it proposed. That plan relies on directional drilling to reduce the project's footprint in an already affected field covering 119,000 acres south of Myton.

The infill project is needed to recover remaining oil and gas with new wells and by injecting water into hydrocarbon-bearing formations to coax further production over the 40- to 50-year life of the project.

Utah's largest oil producer, Newfield already operates about 3,400 wells there, on 40-acre spacings. By drilling many new wells from existing pads, the infill project would concentrate its impacts to spots already served by existing roads and pipelines. These provisions are needed to protect habitat and the Pariette Wetlands.

Other data points:

• no sage grous in this particular are
• two rare species of cactus
• prairie dogs (which have been doing directional burrowing without BLM permission) 

I track the Moab / Paradox Basin here.

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Iran's Rate Of Growth In Crude Oil Production Is Slowing

From a SeekingAlpha  contributor (archived):

Summary:

• A major part of the fall in oil prices last year was driven by concerns over the rising production levels of Iran.
• Analysts reassured the markets that it would take a couple of years for Iran to get production back to pre-sanctions levels.
• Iranian oil production has rebounded much faster than many analysts ever anticipated as the chart below shows.

Iranian oil production has rebounded much faster than many analysts ever anticipated as the chart below shows. At this point, Iran is roughly back to pre-sanctions production levels. Score one against analysts who expected the process to take years.

The result is that there's probably very little additional crude that's going to come online from Iran. The country already is pumping as fast as it can, and frankly its post-sanctions export program has been at best minimally successful. Again, this is a ding on conventional wisdom that suggests Iran's production would have a significant impact on the market share of other major oil producers.

This is probably a large part of what has driven Saudi commentary that the oil glut has disappeared.

Iran believes it can move from producing 3.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) in May to 4.8 mb/d by 2021, but to do that the country needs $70 billion in foreign capital to hit the target.

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Update On The Khurais Oilfield In Saudi Arabia

The Tea Leaves Continue To Swirl 

From the June 27 - July 3, 2016 issue of Oil & Gas News:

Saudi Aramco is expected to make a decision in June whether to go ahead with the $3- billion Khurais oilfield expansion project in the Eastern Province under the present market conditions.

The company is currently locked in negotiations with Saipem, the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor for the $2-billion central processing facilities (CPF) package, with a view to lowering project costs, decelerating construction works and better cash flow management.

However, Aramco has also said that if substantial cost savings are not possible after the engineering phase is completed, it could cancel the whole project. The engineering work is now being undertaken by Saipem. The current slow-down in works has also extended the completion deadline to late 2019.

The Khurais Arabian Light Crude Increment project, as it is also known, is an onshore oilfield development which was initially discovered in 1957. By 2009, the central procession facility at Khurais had a processing capacity of 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil and 320 million cu ft per day (cfd) of associated gas, as well as 80,000 bpd of natural gas liquids. 

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In Politics As In Sports, Timing Is Everything

Peaking Too Soon

At least one poll shows Trump and Hillary in a dead heat.

From The New York Times, an op-ed by Bernie Sanders: Dems need to wake up.

Surprise, surprise. Workers in Britain, many of whom have seen a decline in their standard of living while the very rich in their country have become much richer, have turned their backs on the European Union and a globalized economy that is failing them and their children.

And it’s not just the British who are suffering. That increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite, is failing people everywhere. Incredibly, the wealthiest 62 people on this planet own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population — around 3.6 billion people. The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the whole of the bottom 99 percent. The very, very rich enjoy unimaginable luxury while billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.

Could this rejection of the current form of the global economy happen in the United States? You bet it could.

During my campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, I’ve visited 46 states. What I saw and heard on too many occasions were painful realities that the political and media establishment fail even to recognize.

In the last 15 years, nearly 60,000 factories in this country have closed, and more than 4.8 million well-paid manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Much of this is related to disastrous trade agreements that encourage corporations to move to low-wage countries.

His "facts" may or may not be accurate. His plan for fixing the problems are dead wrong.