While
troubled companies may not be saved by $45 oil, some of the better
operators will turn profitable at $50, said Subash Chandra, an analyst
with Guggenheim Securities in New York. Companies best able to take
advantage will be those with with acreage in North Dakota’s Bakken
shale, the Permian in Texas or the Scoop and Stack prospects in
Oklahoma.
"If oil is at $50, fortunes turn dramatically," Chandra said. "But
the problem is they turn so much that the service companies come in and
raise prices and take a share of it, or if production responds so
quickly that oil has a hard time staying at $50."
While some of the best operators in the most prolific acreage may
boast well break-evens of $35 a barrel, that only includes the cost of
drilling, said Spencer Cutter, a credit analyst with Bloomberg
Intelligence. Expenses like overhead, salaries, taxes and interest
expenses easily add another $10 to $15 a barrel, he said.
"The short answer is $45 a barrel doesn’t save anybody," Cutter said.
"Anyone who was going bankrupt at $30 is still going bankrupt at $45.
You need to see oil sustained at $60 to $65 before you see a real
turnaround in profitability for the sector."
Highway 61 Revisited, Karen O & The Million Dollar Bashers
My team is being was blown away by the OKC Thunder.Link here for the gory details. In case the link breaks, the San Antonio Spurs were ousted in six games -- an the sixth game was a blowout.
Active rigs:
5/12/2016
05/12/2015
05/12/2014
05/12/2013
05/12/2012
Active Rigs
27
85
193
185
209
No new oil and gas permits; a couple of permits for salt water disposal wells, but no new oil and gas permits today.
One permit renewal, Resource Energy, Grays State, in Divide County, #28351.
One producing well completed:
30616, 10, Noah Energy, BP North Haas 1-4-20-163-82, a Madison well, North Hass oil field, Bottineau County, t2/16; cum --
After months of no new investments, I finally went to my three on-line accounts today and took all the cash that has accumulated over the past year and invested in shares in one company. I've never invested in this particular Blue Chip company before but with its emphasis on energy, it was time to invest. On an up day for the market, shares in this particular company actually pulled back. Great.
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Ah, The Hypocrisy Of It All
Mr Trudeau: Your Thoughts
As much as I hate wind energy, this story actually warms the cockles of my heart. Fox News is reporting:
Blame Canada.
A U.S.-based company that accused the Canadian
government of using phony environmental concerns to keep wind turbines
off the Great Lakes could be close to a ruling in its $568 million suit.
A panel of international law experts could rule any
day now on whether Ontario's open-ended "temporary ban" violated the
North American Free Trade Agreement, as alleged by Windstream Energy.
In creating the moratorium, Ontario said it needed
more time to study the environmental impact of the turbines, but
documents obtained by Windstream seem to show the real reason was
aesthetic, not environmental.
Indiana-based Windstream's 100-turbine offshore
windfarm near Kingston on Lake Ontario was key to a deal the company had
struck with Ontario's power authority. The company claims a $6 million
security deposit was illegally seized and all its investments in the
project rendered a loss.
Windstream's attorneys argue that under NAFTA,
investments by U.S. companies in Canada cannot be arbitrarily scuttled. A
decision is due imminently from a three-member panel convened by the
Netherlands-based Permanent Court of Arbitration and consisting of
international law experts from Finland, Spain and the United States.
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I Don't Know How She Does It
On our walks to the park, I often give Sophia my Samsung clamshell cellphone (bought back in 2000, or thereabouts) to keep her occupied on the walk home.
Today, she managed to change the settings on the cellphone: she turned the "ringer" off and I'm not even sure "vibrate" was even on.
I swear, it took not less than 15 minutes to figure out how to get the the settings back to "normal."
Some days she drives me nuts, but she is the sunshine of my life.
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
*********************** 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.
I did not read the article and I probably won't but Yahoo!Finance has a story on "what kind of president Michael Bloomberg would have been." This speaks volumes about Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump. One carried his convictions to the national level; one was content with where he was in life. But talking about "what kind of president someone would have been" is quite a bunch of chicken manure, I suppose.
The reason we are not seeing a story on "what kind of president Hillary will be" is because we all know. LOL.
A huge "thank you" to the reader for alerting me to this site.
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Note to the Granddaughters
So, I'm sitting here in Starbucks, the new one on Tate, Grapevine, Texas. A young father -- blue-collar type -- has just sat down, and across from him are his two children (I assume, unless I'm witnessing an "amber alert" in progress) -- a son about four years old, a daughter about three years old.
They both have their snacks and they are thrilled.
The boy got a large pastry from a little Starbucks paper bag and he seems to be in "seventh heaven," as they say.
His sister, meanwhile, is even more thrilled. She got one of those clear plastic containers with multiple items to choose from. Like I have seen so many times before, she looked at the plastic container for several long seconds before opening it. She was studying what was in it. Then she opened it and is now selecting which snacks to eat first. I think the first item she chose was a cheese slice. Now she has a red-skinned apple slice and a yellow-skinned apple slice, one in each hand, trying to choose which one to eat first. She now has the red-skinned apple slide across her mouth, making it look like one large set of lips -- which all kids do. Her dad just took a photo with his iPhone.
I should have him send me a copy of the photo. LOL.
A reader sent a long e-mail regarding India after the note yesterday, which included a small snippet about Indian (sub-continent India Indians) physicians-in-training in Canada:
One of the more [insightful] students is a native of India, and he
returns [to India] at least twice a year. According to him, the growth in
car traffic alone is staggering, and astonishes him anew at each visit.
Their middle class is expanding rapidly and everyone gets a car as soon
as possible. He says that any prediction he's seen about India's
economic/consumer growth is a vast underestimation.
That's the feeling I'm getting, also -- a vast underestimation. I see this all the time. Bean counters fail to understand the "human psyche."
Along that same line: after the first Iraq war and all those burning oil fields, mainstream media estimated years before the fires would be put out. US-oil-well-fire-fighters had the fires out in weeks, months. Likewise, early reports were that Canadian oil producers would not get back on line for six months or more due to the current wildfire in Alberta. Now we are getting reports that some producers will be back on-line in days, many in weeks.
By the way, I reported this a long, long time ago. In the US, the #1 "ethnic" group measured by financial wealth are those categorized as Jewish. So, who is #2? Regular readers know. At least this is what I'm being told. Based on wealth, the #2 ethnic group in the US are sub-continent Indians. For those interested, they like gold.
By the way, this gives me an opportunity to clarify something that the reader above also noted. Going back to yesterday's graphic on the amount of oil consumed per capita. In general, I think most agree that oil consumption correlates with economic growth. But that doesn't mean there are not some outliers or some qualifiers. The reader pointed out that with regard to Saudi Arabia's oil consumption, they are using oil to run their air conditioners -- a most wasteful use of oil. Based on what little I know, they would do better to use natural gas from one of their neighboring countries, including Iran (like that will ever happen -- LOL).
In addition, they use a lot of oil to run their huge desalinization plants.
Saudi made
a huge mistake decades ago not going to solar, and now they don't have
the money to fund huge solar projects (previously blogged, for example, this post). There has
been an occasional report that the legendary sandstorms wreak havoc on
solar panels. If that's correct, that may explain a lot.
Obviously the poll just posted will be up less than six hours.
The Director's Cut should be out at 2:00 p.m. Central Time. Lynn Helms has telegraphed that it will be a "dismal" report. I can't remember the exact word he used. "Dismal" is the word I seem to remember.
Will North Dakota crude oil production drop below one million bopd in today's report regarding March, 2016, crude oil production?
The Bakken oil and gas field emits 275,000 tons of methane each year, says a new study.
The results of the
study published Wednesday in the Journal of Geophysical Research:
Atmospheres found that the Bakken is leaking a lot of methane, but less
than some satellites have reported.
According to wiki when asking the question, what gas is flared from oil wells?
Improperly operated flares may emit methane and other volatile organic compounds as well as sulfur dioxide and other sulfur compounds, which are known to exacerbate asthma and other respiratory problems.
Other emissions from improperly operated flares may include, aromatic hydrocarbons (benzene, toluene, xylenes) and benzapyrene, which are known to be carcinogenic.
Natural gas is a naturally occurring hydrocarbon gas mixture consisting primarily of methane, but commonly including varying amounts of other higher alkanes, and sometimes a small percentage of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide, or helium.
Flaring can affect wildlife by attracting birds and insects to the flame. Approximately 7,500 migrating songbirds were attracted to and killed by the flare at the liquefied natural gas terminal in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada on September 13, 2013.
Never mind eagle-killing wind farms. But I digress. Back to The Dickinson Press story.
Researchers found the emission rate was significantly less than
estimates generated by satellites for the Bakken between 2006 and 2011.
The rate of methane emissions also was less than scientists expected to
find based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s inventory for
petroleum systems, Peischl said.
There will be a lot of stories coming from Saudi-backed "news outlets" and websites regarding the new EPA rules, but the rules won't amount to a hill of beans for the Bakken.
By the way, those aforementioned satellite photos of flaring in the Bakken were also hyped and manipulated.
Granite owns and operates a 30-mile-long fairway producing oil from the Alberta Bakken. The heart of the pool is under gas injection enhanced oil recovery, with a long-term development and infill drilling inventory. It is complemented by a large, recently discovered pool area providing years of delineation and development opportunities.
Posted a long, long time ago:
November 18, 2012: if these numbers pan out, the Alberta Bakken will be much bigger than the Williston Basin Bakken:
Alberta’s emerging shale and/or siltstone formations could ultimately yield 423.6 billion barrels of oil, 58.6 billion barrels of liquids and 3.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, says a long-awaited report by the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board and the Alberta Geological Survey.
EOG has been injecting cheap natural gas into some of its existing wells
as the shale producer looks to extract more oil at low costs amid the
prolonged slump in crude markets.
The top oil producer in Texas said in its first-quarter conference
call Friday that it had successful trials of its natgas process in 15
mature horizontal wells in the Eagle Ford in south Texas. EOG plans to
add another pilot project later this year that includes 32 producing
wells.
Management expects the method to increase recoveries from oil
reservoirs and reduce the rate of decline in production, while keeping
operating costs low. But the company cautioned that the new method may
not work in other shale plays with different geologic properties.
Then this:
The company has been working on the new process for three years but
management wouldn’t go into detail about how exactly it works.
But:
James Williams, an economist at WTRG, said that the enhanced recovery
process is likely similar to a water or CO2 flood, where liquid or gas
is pumped in a well, mixes with oil to add pressure, and pushes oil
toward wells at the other end of a field to be pumped out.
“What they are effectively doing is using natgas to push more oil out
to the surface, which is more valuable than the gas,” he said.
Natgas is three and a half to four times cheaper than oil and enjoys
low transport costs, because it’s already produced near oil wells.
Water, meanwhile, is more expensive, and water floods don’t work that
well in shale formations, Williams said.
Even when natgas comes off its historically low prices, EOG thinks it
would still see “incremental benefit and good economics” up to $5
per million BTUs for natgas, which is currently trading at about $2.10
per million BTUs.
By the way, is there a typo in this sentence?
Natgas is three and a half to four times cheaper than oil and enjoys
low transport costs, because it’s already produced near oil wells.
Did the writer mean to say that natural gas is three and a half to four times cheaper than water and enjoys
low transport costs, because it’s already produced near oil wells. Maybe I misread it.
Takeaways regarding EOG's new fracking technique:
natural gas is cheaper than water for fracking; probably cheaper than CO2
water probably gums up shale
EOG is taking a page from nature's playbook: using natural gas to "over-pressure" oil formations
there is more communication among wells than previously believed
if accurate, great news for drought-stricken Texas
environmentalists will have trouble arguing against injecting natural gas back underground
Regular readers are aware of EOG permits in the Bakken to test "gas" injection.
Every so often I am overwhelmed with "stuff" that needs to be posted, This is one of those days. On top of everything else, the Director's Cut should be out later today.
When I get overwhelmed, sometimes the best thing I can do is simply turn off the computer and come back later in the day (or even "better," wait a day, come back tomorrow, and start posting again) once the dust has settled.
We'll see.
The jobs report really blew me away -- that's probably what has overwhelmed me. Look at the history of the unemployment claims over the past few weeks. The numbers are bad enough, but the fact that analysts have been surprised suggests to me there is a huge disconnect between Wall Street and what is going on in the real world. Look at the history of these recent unemployment claims:
most recent week: unexpectedly surges 20,000
last week: unexpectedly jumps 17,000
week before that: up 9,000
March 31, 2016: surge unexpectedly; up 11,000 from previous week
Global oil consumption is growing much faster than most analysts expected at the start of the year but increases in demand remain very uneven geographically and by fuel.
World oil demand increased by 1.4 million barrels per day (bpd) in the first three months of 2016 compared with the same period in 2015, the International Energy Agency said on Thursday ("Oil Market Report", IEA, May 2016).
First-quarter consumption grew faster than the agency predicted at the end of last year, when it forecast growth of 1.2 million bpd between January and March.
For the time being, the IEA has left its forecast for average consumption growth this year at 1.2 million bpd, noting "headwinds" as a result of sluggish global growth, which implies a slowdown later in 2016.
But coupled with large crude supply interruptions from Canada, Nigeria, Libya, Iraq and Venezuela, and a slowdown in U.S. shale, the agency predicts the "the direction of travel of the oil market (is) towards balance".
The agency expects the global supply-demand surplus to narrow sharply from 1.3 million bpd in the first six months to just 200,000 bpd in the second half of 2016.
As the number of earthquakes in
Oklahoma exploded into the hundreds in the last few years, nearly a
dozen insurance companies moved to limit their exposure, often at the
expense of homeowners, a Reuters examination has found.
Nearly 3,000 pages of documents from the Oklahoma
Insurance Commission reviewed by Reuters show that insurers and the
reinsurers who cover them grew increasingly concerned about exposure to
earthquake risks because of heightened frequency of seismic activity,
which scientists link to disposal of saltwater that is a byproduct of
oil and gas production.
Even as they insured more and more properties against
earthquakes in the past two years, six insurers hiked premiums by as
much as 260 percent and three increased deductibles. Three companies
stopped writing new earthquake insurance altogether, state regulatory
filings obtained by Reuters show. Several insurers took more than one of
those steps.
GE's Marine Solutions department recently signed a deal to provide
electric systems to the world's largest container shipping business, Maersk Line.
The deal, announced Monday, is yet another sign that GE's CEO, Jeff
Immelt, is pulling out all the stops to return GE to its more industrial
roots as the company scraps the final remnants of GE Capital, leaving
only a handful of financial operations integral in supporting GE's
central businesses.
Data points from Rigzone without links or excerpts:
EIA sees Brent oil prices rebounding to $76 per barrel in 2017
bulk of Canad's oil sands plants will be back up in days to weeks
Husky nears deal to sell five (5) E&P packages for almost half-billion dollars; assets in southwest Saskatchewan to be sold to Whitecap Resources. There are additional Husky deals also. In all, the deals approach $1 billion in value. The five (5) aforementioned deals involve Crescent Point Energy as well as others. The latest rond of disposals would bring Husky's total gain from all three sales processes to about C$2.86 billion. The controlling shareholder in Husky is Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing.
Wow, two weeks in a row, a horrendous job number. Last week's number was really horrendous. This week, Bloomberg is reporting:
Applications for unemployment benefits unexpectedly increased last
week to the highest level since February 2015, a sign progress in the
U.S. job market is moderating. Initial jobless claims rose by 20,000 to 294,000 in the week ended
May 7, a report from the Labor Department showed Thursday. The median
forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for a decline to
270,000.
The figures signal a more modest recovery lies ahead as companies
adjust headcounts after a first-quarter slowdown in demand. Economists
will continue to monitor claims data in the coming weeks before
concluding that the labor market is taking a bigger step back.
Wow, look at that spin.
unemployment benefits unexpectedly increased
second week in a row for a horrendous report
highest level since February, 2015
analysts really, really missed the forecast
analysts expected a decline
in fact, the number rose ... and by a lot
And how does Bloomberg describe this? They call the jobs report today "a sign that progress in the US job market is moderating.
Had this happened under a GOP administration, the media would be falling all over itself to tell us how bad things are.
It should be noted that employers are looking forward to the new ObamaCare premiums that will be announced later this autumn -- probably after the election.
A bit more from the article:
The figures signal a more modest recovery lies ahead as companies adjust
headcounts after a first-quarter slowdown in demand. Economists will
continue to monitor claims data in the coming weeks before concluding
that the labor market is taking a bigger step back.
Continuing claims: increased to 268,250 from 258,000.
I understand that at least one truck manufacturer is shutting down for one week in the near future due to slow demand. Workers will be able to apply for unemployment insurance for this week.
Note recent weekly unemployment claims:
most recent week: unexpectedly surges 20,000
last week: unexpectedly jumps 17,000
week before that: up 9,000
March 31, 2016: surge unexpectedly; up 11,000 from previous week
March 17, 2016: jumps another 7,000
March 4, 2016: 242,000 vs 190,000 forecast
How is the market reacting. Before the announcement, Dow futures were up 75 points; after the announcement, not much movement, up 81 points. This suggests that a) the movers and shakers knew the number before it was released; b) the movers and shakers on Wall Street know the real state of the economy and don't need to wait for the weekly jobs report; c) everyone knows the weekly jobs number is bogus anyway; and/or, d) this makes it unlikely the Fed will raise rates any time soon.
Having said that, with the headwinds facing the US and the global economy, if the Fed raises rates, it is simply because the Fed feels it has to do something. Speaking of which, what does the Fed really do?
The Reuters lede seems to be a bit more realistic in its assessment:
The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits unexpectedly
rose last week, touching the highest level in more than a year, which
could raise concerns about labor market health in the wake of the
slowdown in job gains in April.
On another note, US crude hits six-month high after IEA sees tighter supply. Data points from this article as well as others:
global production is forecast to decline by 200,000 bopd
output from Nigeria, Libya, and Venezuela is down 450,000 bopd from a year ago
US crude inventories fell by 3.4 million bbls to 540 million bbls last week, surprising analysts who had expected an increase of 714,000 bbls
analysts anticipate North American inventories will fall by as much as 12 million bbls through June
Canadian oil sands production will drop 1 million bopd (from 4 million bopd to 3 million bopd)
Canadian oil sands production will be back on line much faster than analysts earlier thought
IEA raised 2016 global oil demand growth estimates from 1.16 million bopd to 1.2 million bopd (40,000 bopd)
For newbies: not one of these numbers is remarkable or noteworthy. It is the trend that is important. To put these numbers in perspective,
global production is around 90 million bopd; an increase of 40,000 bopd doesn't even reach the threshold of a rounding error
that US inventory? Look at the EIA graph from yesterday
the IEA admitted about a month ago or so that on a regular basis, it cannot account for 800,000 bopd -- that's the amount that is probably sloshing around in ocean-going tankers; stored in unused railroad cars in Omaha, NE; what ISIS is selling Turkey; and the amount Americans are storing in their SUVs as they keep their gasoline tanks full
