Tea Leaves Suggest US Crude Oil Inventories Are Rising -- November 14, 2017 -- The Market And Energy Page, T+297

WTI dropped over 2% this morning. Now, trading below $56.

API: weekly US crude oil inventory data out today at 3:30 p.m. Central Time. I use EIA data which comes out on Thursdays; API and EIA data are often quite different.

Keystone XL: for those who still care, Nebraska regulators will announce their decision next week. I have no less than 1,033 stand-alone posts tagged with "Keystone." One of the earliest posts tagged with "Keystone" was dated September 14, 2010, in which the question was asked: will we see 1 million bopd crude oil production in North Dakota by 2020? LOL. I think we hit that milestone in 2014. And unfettered, we would be well past 2 million bopd by now. But I digress. It's been more than seven years since we first started debating the Keystone XL. I've flip-flopped on the issue more than once; with more data, my feelings about the KXL change. Right now, I no longer care. Canadians should care. [Update: November 20, 2017: Nebraska regulators approve 3 - 2 the "concept" that TransCanada can build the Keystone XL pipeline through their state .. but not where the company had planned. Back to square one. Even if TransCanada agrees to the new route, what's not to say that the Nebraska state supreme court won't step in and stop the whole thing? All this "excitement" that the pipeline has been approved is grossly misplaced.]

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Photo Journalism

The Bismarck Tribune has a photo essay on drilling near the national park in southwestern North Dakota (archived in case the link breaks). Three comments:

• look how absolutely "clean" those pads are
• look how incredibly close the oil rigs (and all drilling activity, for that matter) come to the incredibly beautiful and highly traveled Maah Daah Hey Trail (slide #6 or thereabouts) 
• in the last slide, folks from New York can see a photo of a "North Dakota landowner" -- must be a rare breed -- and the encroaching oil activity on the national park

My biggest concern: once these photographs of the natural beauty of North Dakota goes viral, the state will be inundated with out-of-state tourists and assorted other riff-raff looking to experience a time warp:

Riff-Raff and Magenta show Brad and Janet how to do the Time Warp Rocky Horror Picture Show
The last thing North Dakota needs is another replay of the DAPL protest.