The Market, Energy, And Political Page, T+38 -- September 20, 2018

Weekly jobs report: unexpected plunge.

• consensus, new claims: 210,000
• actual: 201,000
• last week: 204,000
• so, analysts forecast a jump of 6,000 in new claims
• note: the four-week moving average of 208,000, last week, hit 50-year lows for the second straight week
• Trump is being given no credit for any of this, of course 
• not reported above the fold:
• finance.com
• foxnews.com
• wsj.com 
• at cnbc.com: at 201,000, this is the lowest level since November, 1969. 

The market: two days of 3-digit jumps in the Dow (irrelevant). So, what's the market doing today. Futures:

• Dow, up another 113 points
• S&P: solidly above 2,900 at 2,919
• NASDAQ: up almost 40 points
• WTI: unchanged at $71.12
• UNP: down
• AAPL: up
• TSLA: up
• SRE:
• COP: down
• XOM: up

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

OPEC in disarray. Over at Bloomberg via Rigzone. An excerpt:

From 2011 onward, OPEC enjoyed years of riches and relative stability as oil traded near $100 a barrel, but a threat was emerging. A new generation of wildcatters from North Dakota to Texas was deploying innovative fracking technology to tap previously inaccessible shale oil deposits. OPEC was blind to the danger at first, then downplayed the risk even as some members raised the alarm -- reasoning that shale was an expensive business and the cartel simply had to bide its time. By mid-2014, U.S. production had jumped more than 50 percent, crude prices were teetering on the brink and it was clear this new industry was reshaping the global market as OPEC stood by and watched.

UK sees the light: Cuadrilla granted fracking consent for second horizontal shale gas well.

Canada, where hope springs eternal: battered oil-sands servicers pin hopes on Shell's LNG project.

Fracking: oil giants use size to overcome fracking challenges; Chevron employs "factory model" to manage shale-drilling operations in remote Canadian region. Williston's own Rollefstad used the phrase "manufacturing phase" years ago, anticipating this. I don't think there is anything of consequence in this article. The Bakken is way ahead of this. CLR led the way in pad drilling and Harold Hamm put a copyright/trademark on "Eco-Pad."

Chevron Corp. is laying the groundwork here for what it calls a “factory model” for shale drilling, master planning an entire region of small shale wells by locking up labor, building infrastructure and securing sand and other needed materials, all at once.
Shale drilling, once the province of small, scrappy operators, has run into growing pains in places such as the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, as producers struggle with pipeline bottlenecks and rising labor and material costs.

Big oil companies seeking to re-create the U.S. shale boom in countries such as Canada and Argentina are trying to avoid these problems by managing shale sites in concert to prevent logistical hurdles and streamline operations, similar to the way they run traditional oil megaprojects.

Already in Texas, there is evidence that larger companies such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil Corp. are weathering the bottlenecks and rising costs there better than smaller rivals—and continuing to ramp up production—because they have the economies of scale and wherewithal to develop their own solutions to these problems.

Universal Life Insurance backfires. At The WJS. Interesting article. Many story lines. Seems to be as much fault with the industry as with the consumer. This story is not new; it's been around for years. The question: what prompted this story to be featured again at this time? It's not at google, so "follow the money." I would start with Ken Fisher. LOL.