Non-Bakken News And Comments -- December 13, 2016

Verizon considering acquiring CBS?

Beats headphones? Awesome.

Needles and Pins, Smokie
How the frackers beat OPEC. From The Atlantic. Huge "thank you" to a reader for sending me this. I haven't read the article yet, but if the writer doesn't mention the other half of the story, I will be disappointed. The full title should be: how the frackers beat OPEC and the green lobby in the White House.

Fracking, it turns out, is a remarkably nimble industry—which perhaps, in retrospect, should not have been such a surprise. In the early years of the fracking boom, a Harvard Ph.D. student, Thomas Covert, studied records related to wells fracked in the Bakken shale formation. Wells that were newly tapped in 2005, he found, captured on average only 21 percent of the profits they could have produced if they’d been fracked in the most optimal way—that is, with the best mix of water and sand. By 2012, though, newly fracked wells were capturing 60 percent of maximal profits.

This is what the article does not mention. The oil industry was incredibly lucky. I wrote about this back in 2009. By the time fracking was a success, the barn doors were open; the horses were out. There was no way to get the wild horses back in. The oil industry caught the green lobby, the environmentalists off-guard. The frackers had a three-to-four year headstart. Had the greenies been paying attention, they could have keystoned the frackers in 2010.

The frackers had another bit of luck. Hillary had promised to ban fracking, start a war on fracking, just as Obama had started a war on coal. It's hard to say what Hillary could have done, but one can be sure she would not have been a friend of the oil and gas industry. The frackers dodged a silver bullet. The frackers can thank the rural voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And Jill Stein who stole enough votes from Hillary to give Donald Trump the election.

No one has talked about frackers' luck. But they probably missed being keystoned by a very small margin. If a handful of out-of-state agitators can stop the Keystone, the Sandpiper, and the DAPL, the weight of the Democratic machine certainly could have stopped fracking had it been paying attention. 

Before it's all over, the environmentalists will probably blame the Russians.

Rick Perry. Over at Investor's Business Daily. Regardless of what many think of him, he's going to drive the Sierra Club nuts.