Wednesday, June 6, 2018

June 6, 1944: the Normandy invasion -- the largest air, land, and sea invasion in history.

Color me surprised: I was surprised the market wasn't up yesterday. I expected the Dow to move up about a hundred points, so I was surprised to see it flat (to slightly red). Today I see futures suggest the Dow might open up well on the green side. So we'll see.

Color me surprised: I was also surprised that WTI did not move more yesterday on news that Venezuela failed to meet its crude oil contracts, and then had the nerve to threaten a force majeure. The government can call it that if they want, but it doesn't meet "my" criteria.

Color me surprised: I am very, very surprised the number of active rigs in North Dakota has not increased by now. Certainly we've moved into the height of the drilling activity by now, but still the number of active rigs remain at 61. Reminder to newbies: the number of rigs correlates somewhat to the state's overall production but that's not the only reason I follow the rig count. For me, the importance of the rig count is that it reflects the activity in the Bakken.

Bernie Sanders' Marxism: speaking of Venezuela, this is as good a time as any to remind millennials who love Bernie that if they want to see his Marxism in "axtion" take a vacation to Venezuela. The millennials should be reminded that Venezuela sits on the world's largest reserve of oil, way ahead of what Saudi Arabia has.

Apple: shares should move higher again today.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here.

Robot: sometimes I think my blog has turned into a vehicle that a well-programmed robot could produce. Same format. Same "stories" being told over and over. I'm sure if Peggy Lee were alive she would ask, "Is that all there is?"

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$65.28→	6/6/2018	06/06/2017	06/06/2016	06/06/2015	06/06/2014
Active Rigs	61	52	26	82	194

RBN Energy: Permian drilling activity drives diesel demand and projects to supply more of it. And based on what I saw during the Bakken boom it means that truck manufacturers are also being hit with huge demand.

Drilling and completion activity in the Permian Basin doesn’t only produce vast quantities of energy, it consumes a lot of energy too, mostly in the form of diesel fuel to power the trucks, drilling rigs, fracturing pumps, compressors and other equipment needed to keep the oil patch humming. And while refineries within or near the Permian meet a portion of the region’s needs, rising demand for diesel there is spurring the development of new infrastructure — and the repurposing of existing assets — to bring additional fuel into the Permian from refineries along the Gulf Coast. Today, we discuss efforts to move more diesel to the oil fields of West Texas.

Texas consumes far more distillate — most of it ultra low sulfur diesel (ULSD) — than any other state: an estimated 485 Mb/d (or 20.4 million gallons a day) in 2016, the most recent year that state-by-state statistics are available from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). That was 82% more than California, and more than triple the distillate consumption of other high-population states like New York, Pennsylvania and Florida. Four-fifths of Texas’s distillate/diesel consumption is by the transportation sector, the vast majority of it by tractor trailers and other trucks that transport everything from petrochemicals to corn chips across the Lone Star State. In the past few years — and especially in the past two or three — diesel consumption has been on the rise in the red-hot Permian Basin in West Texas, and in neighboring counties in southeastern New Mexico. There, diesel is the king of fuels. It powers almost everything: the trucks that haul oilfield equipment, frac sand and water to well sites, the trucks that haul produced water from the lease to disposal wells, and, increasingly in recent months as takeaway pipelines out of the Permian have filled up, the trucks that transport crude oil long distances to downstream pipeline injection points (and sometimes all the way to Corpus Christi and Houston).