WTI Breaks Below $70 At Height Of US Driving Season; Talk Of Opening US SPR -- July 16, 2018; Oasis Reports A Nice Well With Only 4 Million Lbs Sand/Ceramic -- Less Than Half Commonly Used In The Bakken

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.

Bear market? From Market Watch --

SPR talk: over at Twitter, from the Reuters oil analyst based in London --

Russia: the real reason WTI is coming down is this story -- Russia is considering bringing on even more production. The interesting thing is that Trump wants the price of oil to be brought down, and going to Russia now to talk to Putin gives them something to talk about.

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Wells coming off the confidential list over the weekend, today:

Monday, July 16, 2018:

• 33995, SI/NC, Hess, BB-Burk-151-95-1807H-7, Blue Buttes,

Sunday, July 15, 2018:

• 33996, SI/NC, Hess, BB-Burk-151-95-1807H-6, Blue Buttes,
• 33961, SI/NC, Crescent Point Energy, CPEUSC Bennie 4-20-17-157N-99W MBH, Lone Tree Lake,

Saturday, July 14, 2018:

• 33048, 614, Oasis, Patsy 5198 14-17 12T, Siverston, 50 stages, 4 million lbs, mesh, large sand, medium sand, medium ceramic, t1/18; cum 124K 5/18;

Friday, July 13, 2018:

• None.

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Active rigs:

$69.41↓↓	7/16/2018	07/16/2017	07/16/2016	07/16/2015	07/16/2014
Active Rigs	67	58	29	74	192

RBN Energy: Texas fractionation capacity beyond the Mont Belvieu Hub, part 5.

Mont Belvieu may be the epicenter of NGL storage, fractionation and distribution along the Gulf Coast, but the rest of Texas offers almost half as much fractionation capacity — about 1 MMb/d of it — and a good bit of storage and pipeline connectivity too. These are particularly important facts in the summer of 2018, when demand for fractionation services in Mont Belvieu is at or near an all-time high and increasing volumes of NGLs are headed toward the hub. So what else has the Lone Star State got on the fractionation and NGL storage front? And are these assets experiencing the same strong demand as their counterparts in Mont Belvieu? Today, we continue our review of fractionators and key NGL-related infrastructure.

With 2.1 MMb/d of existing fractionation capacity, more than 250 MMbbl of salt-cavern storage, a spaghetti bowl of incoming and outgoing pipelines, and ethane and LPG export terminals nearby, Mont Belvieu is to NGLs what the Beatles — the group behind this blog series’ title song — are to the era of rock and roll bands:  the undisputed king.  And like Sir Paul McCartney’s bank account (he’s rock’s only billionaire), Mont Belvieu keeps growing; another 465 Mb/d of fractionators are under development and scheduled to come online over the next couple of years. But NGL production has been rising fast, and so has the need for more fractionation capacity — the mixed NGLs that come out of gas processing plants aren’t of use to anyone until they are fractionated into purity products (ethane, propane, normal butane, isobutane and natural gasoline). The problem is, new fractionators in Mont Belvieu haven’t been coming online as quickly as the need for them. Until recently, producers had been reluctant to commit to building new fractionation capacity, so existing plants have been running flat out to keep pace.