WTI Flirting With $75 -- July 3, 2018 -- Farmers/Ranchers Are Managers, Not Agricultural Workers -- CDC

Suicide: North Dakota had the largest suicide rate increased from 1999 to 2016 of any state in the nation. It's a complicated story. See the note down below the RBN Energy entry.

EpiPens: the 2016 post about EpiPens, for some reason, trends #1 at the blog. I mentioned that last week. It is still trending #1 -- see sidebar at the right. Now an update: a competitor set to release an "equivalent, alternative" to the EpiPen.

Help! We're gonna need more than an additional 2 million bopd from Saudi Arabia.  Just looking at overnight price of WTI.

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Bakken

Wells coming off confidential list today:

• 33941, SI/NC, MRO, Rue USA 44-19TFH, Reunion Bay, no production data,
• 33905, SI/NC, Petro-Hunt, USA 153-95-9A-4-1HS, Charlson, no production data,

Active rigs:

$74.74↑	7/3/2018	07/03/2017	07/03/2016	07/03/2015	07/03/2014
Active Rigs	66	57	30	76	190

RBN Energy: the Conway vs Mont Belvieu propane/NGL differential blowout. Another metric I've never followed. What's this all about?

For 10 years prior to 2018, the differential between propane prices at the Conway, KS, hub averaged less than a nickel per gallon below Mont Belvieu. In fact, between 2013 and 2017, the price spread was only 3.5 c/gal — excluding a winter 2014 Polar Vortex aberration — which basically reflects the cost of moving barrels 700 miles north-to-south. Not this year, though. After starting 2018 at 3 c/gal, the propane price spread took off, and has averaged 18 c/gal since April, some days moving above 26 c/gal, far above the per-bbl cost of transporting propane 700 miles south to Mont Belvieu. Is it pipeline capacity constraints? In part. But there is a much more significant factor driving this differential wider, not only in the propane market, but across all five of the NGL purity products. What is this mysterious factor? To find out, read on. But here’s your first clue: the problem is not in Kansas anymore.

The propane market is a frequent topic here in the RBN blogosphere. For the most part, our blogs have tended to focus on the NGL super-hub in Mont Belvieu, TX, with only occasional references to Conway, the second most actively traded U.S. NGL market with reliable, transparent market price indices covered by industry trade publications. For that reason, the next couple of paragraphs provide a bit of background on the Conway hub and NGL product flows south to Mont Belvieu.

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The Suicide Story

The suicide story. First, from The Williston Herald. Didn't quite explain why farmers and ranchers are not considered "Triple F."

Now, the full story:

It turns out the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) widely cited 2016 study showing farmers with the nation's highest suicide rate was wrong.

The agency on Friday retracted the data, which showed that people working "in farming, fishing and forestry" had suicide rates of 84.5 per 100,000 people, four times the national average.

What happened: CDC spokeswoman Courtney Lenard wrote in an email to New Food Economy that the agency incorrectly included farmers and ranchers with agricultural workers in the farming, fishing and forestry (also known as Triple-F) category.

Lenard explained that farmers and ranchers should instead have been classified as managers.

Triple F workers now have the third highest suicide rate behind "construction and extraction" workers and people working in "installation, maintenance and repair."