The Market And Energy Page, Part 3, T+4 -- January 25, 2018

I"ll get back to the Bakken, energy, and market in a few minutes, but let's start with this screen shot:

Okay, back to the Bakken, energy, and markets.

Disclaimer: Again, remember: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship-related decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here or anything that you were told by someone who said they read something on this site.

Wow, today has been so busy, all I can do, is link the article and then perhaps come back to it later.

So here goes.

The new Baker Hughes: developing its own identity. From The Houston Chronicle:

Baker Hughes said Wednesday that it narrowed its fourth quarter loss to $29 million from $104 million in the third quarter -- its first three months as a merged company.

Baker Hughes revenues, however, fell shy of the $5.9 billion generated by Halliburton as the Houston rivals compete to be world's second largest energy services company after Schulmberger, which has one of its four principal offices in Houston.

These guys are nuts: over at Bloomberg, the "dark side of American rise to oil superpower." I can only assume that Javier Blas is a pseudonym for Andrew Ross Sorkin. Even Andrew Ross Sorkin (who has probably named his first son Andrew Ross Sorkin II) wouldn't want to be associated with this article. One almost wonders if we will see it re-printed in The Economist.

How's the blog doing? Glad you asked:

Buckeled. From The Financial Post, Canadian oil prices buckle after railway refuses to be "swing shipper." Premier (don't you just love the word, "premier" -- slightly higher in the pecking order than "president" -- wasn't Mr Krushchev the "premier of the USSR? -- but I digress -- does anyone under the age of 25 know his first name -- no, it was not Putin) Trudeau is in deep trouble. His lackadaisical attitude toward his country's energy sector (about the only think the country has going for it, except recently opened borders) has resulted in CAVE dwellers stopping economic progress:

With new pipelines at least three years away, transportation capacity is so tight in Canada’s oil industry that every twitch in the system appears to be blowing out the discount. 

World oil prices are recovering, but Western Canadian oil prices are falling back to depressed conditions, the result of transportation capacity so tight every twitch in the system appears to be blowing out the discount.

Western Canadian Select (WSC), the Canadian benchmark, was changing hands for $33.57 a barrel Tuesday, after losing about $8 in two days, while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) was trading for US$64.75, up US$1.35 over the same period.

The latest scare to push down Canadian oil prices came from Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. late last week, which said it has no interest in carrying big quantities of Western Canadian oil while producers wait for pipelines to get built.

“We understand crude is only going to be here for a limited period of time,” CP Rail CEO Keith Creel said to analysts in a conference call Thursday to discuss fourth quarter results. “We are looking for strategic partners with long-term objectives that allows us to have a more stable book of business.”

The railway expects its crude volumes to increase this year, to 60,000 carloads from 48,000 in 2017, but Creel said space would go to those who “appreciate that capacity” and CP will not allow itself to be “commoditized.”

We've talked about this so often I'm not going to say anything else. For now. Except to say this: very cheap heavy oil from Canada is going to replace heavy oil from Venezuela for US refineries optimized for heavy oil.

Buckeled. Tesla ... from CNBC/SeekingAlpha -- let's just put a bunch of phrases together and see if you can put together a coherent story. It shouldn't be too difficult:

• Model 3
• delays
• worsen
• shares fall 2%
• when does SEC get involved?
• Nevada gigafactory problems worse than "owner" previously owned up to
• factory resorting to having some batteries made by hand
• comments suggest that this is a fake CNBC news story 
• here's the CNBC link
• employees also said that quality control workers were not experienced, and two said that some batteries are leaving the factory with a potentially serious defect, a claim that Tesla vigorously denies.
• other comments, probably not accurate
• looking at bringing in donkeys from Mexico to help move raw components to where they are needed (probably not accurate; easier to bring in day laborers)
• borrowing scores of workers from suppliers to assist with manual assembly (okay, that's probably accurate)
• the comments are the best part of this story, or should we say, debacle
• gigafactory..gigglefactory...bespoke factory
• prospective owners can order hand-made batteries lined with custom redwood and leather packagine

The year of the fracker. In China, it's the year of the dog. From The Houston Chronicle:

Oil companies are on track to produce a record 10 million barrels of American crude a day, a milestone that could be reached as soon as February largely due to another record that is expected to fall in coming months.

By the end of the year, fracking intensity is projected to exceed levels reached in 2014 - the height of the so-called shale revolution - as hydraulic fracturing operations use more sand, more water and more pumping horsepower than ever before to free oil and gas from shale rock.

The result: U.S. crude production should reach an all-time high with just half the number of drilling rigs used at the peak of the last energy boom.

Welcome to the year of the fracker. The controversial technology that transformed the U.S. energy industry and reshaped global oil markets has advanced to a new level, becoming more science than art as fracking operations run round the clock, target ever smaller sections of wells with greater precision and greater force, and squeeze more oil out of every well.

"It never stops," said David Adams, senior vice president for completions and production for Halliburton of Houston. "We're pushing the limits."

To infinity and beyond.