NDIC Hearing Dockets -- April, 2018

Dockets are posted at the NDIC site here.

Dockets are tracked here. 

The usual disclaimer applies.

Highlights in bold.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018 -- 9 pages

26499, Petro Harvester, spacing unit for #9892, W/2 SE/4 of 32-162-81, Bottineau County
26500, Luff Exploration, Amor-Red River, vertical well; Bowman County
26501, Bruin E&P, Antelope-Sanish, establish an overlapping 2560-acre unit; 2 wells; McKenzie County
26502, Whiting, Corinth-Bakken, establish a 160-acre unit; 1 well; Williams County,
26503, Hess, Blue Buttes-Bakken, estalbish an overlapping 2560-acre unit, one well; McKenzie
26504, Foundation Energy; define field limits for Rojic well, #29720, Golden Valley
26505, NDIC, consider the termination of the Southwest Starbuck-Madison Unit, Bottineau County
26506, Crescent Point, Church and/or Little Muddy-Bakken; establish three overlapping 2560-acre units; one well each; Williams County
26507, Crescent Point, Lone Tree Lake-Bakken, establish three overlapping 2560-acre unit; one well each, Williams County
26508, Crescent Point, Marmon-Bakken; establish three overlapping 2560-acre units; one well each, Williams County
26509, Crescent Point, Winner-Bakken, establish five overlappign 2560-acre units; one well each; Williams County
26510, Crescent Point, Burg-Bakken; establish two overlapping 2560-acre units; one well each; Williams County
26511, Crescent Point, Ellisville-Bakken; establish seven overlapping 2560-acre units; one well on each unit; Williams County
26512, Crescent Point, Dublin-Bakken, establish four overlapping 2560-acre units; one well each, Williams County
26513, Crescent Point, Rainbow-Bakken, establish an overlapping 2560-acre unit; one well; Williams County
26514, Petro Harvester, pooling;
26515, Petro-Hunt, pooling
26516, Petro-Hunt, pooling
26517, Oasis, SWD
26518, Bruin, Antelope-Sanish, fifteen (15) wells on an existing 1280-acre unit; McKenzie County
26519, Bruin, Spotted Horn-Bakken, fifteen (15) wells on an existing 1280-acre unit; McKenzie County
26520, MRO, pooling;
26521, MRO, pooling; 
26522, MRO, pooling; 
26523, MRO, pooling;  
26524, MRO, pooling; 
26525, MRO, pooling; 
26526, MRO, pooling; 
26527, MRO, pooling; 
26528, MRO, pooling; 
26529, MRO, pooling; 
26530, MRO, pooling; 
26531, MRO, pooling; 
26532, MRO, pooling; 
26533, MRO, pooling; 
26534, MRO, pooling; 
26535, MRO, pooling; 
26536, MRO, pooling; 
26537, MRO, commingling;
26538, MRO, commingling;
26539, Hess, Blue Buttes-Bakken; twelve (12) wells on an existing 2560-acre unit; McKenzie County26540, Hess, Blue Buttes-Bakken; eleven (11) wells on an existing 1280-acre unit; thirteen (13) units on a 1280-acre unit; McKenzie County
26541, Hess, Blue Buttes-Bakken, eleven (11) wells on an existing 640-acre unit; McKenzie County
26542, Hess, pooling;
26543, Hess, pooling;
26544, Hess, commingling;
26545, Hess, commingling;
26546, Crescent Point, Burk-Bakken pool; 7 wells in an existing 1280-acre unit; 30/31-159-99; Williams County

Thursday, April 26, 2018 -- 11 pages

26547, Resonance Exploration, Westhope-Spearfish/Madison; re-define the field limits; Bottineau County

26548, Armstrong Operating, Moraine-Silurian; re-define the field limits; Divide County

26549, WPX, Spotted Horn-Bakken; establish an overlapping 1280-acre unit; one well; McKenzie County

26550, Slawson, Big Bend-Bakken; establish an overlapping 640-acre unit; two wells; Mountrail County

26551, RimRock, Heart Butte-Bakken, establish an overlapping 2560-acre unit; two wells; Dunn County

26552, Statoil, Todd-Bakken; establish an overlapping 2560-acre unit; one well; Williams County

26553, Statoil, Banks-Bakken; establish two overlapping 2560-acre units; one well each; McKenzie, Williams counties

26554, Statoil, Williston, Stony Creek, Catwalk, and/or Avoca-Bakken; establish an overlapping 2560-acre unit; one well each; Williams County

26555, Hunt Oil, Wolf Bay-Bakken and Werner-Bakken; 4 wells on each of two existing 1280-acre units; Dunn County

26556, Zavanna, Stoney Creek-Bakken; establish an overlapping 2560-acre unit; two ells; Williams County

26557, CLR, flaring;

26558, Enerplus, Mandaree-Bakken; establish an overlapping 1280-acre unit; ten (10) wells; Dunn County
26559, Enerplus, South Fork-Bakken; establish an overlapping 1280-acre unit; ten (10) wells; Dunn County
26560, PetroShale, Lost Bridge and Eagle Nest-Bakken; establish a standup 1280-acre unit; establish a laydown 1920-acre unit; establish a laydown 1280-acre unit; unspecified number of wells; Dunn County
26561, Nine Point Energy, Eightmile-Bakken; establish an overlapping 3,485.10-acre unit; one well; McKenzie, Williams counties
26562, commingling;
26563, Nine Point Energy, pooling;
26564, WPX, commingling;
26565, WPX, commingling;
26566, Liberty Resources, White Earth-Bakken; 8 wells in an existing 1280-acre unit; Mountrail County
26567, RimRock, Heart Butte-Bakken; fourteen (14) wells on an existing 1280-acre unit; Dunn County
26568, XTO, Heart Butte-Bakken; two wells on an overlapping 2560-acre unit; Dunn County
26569, Hunt Oil, commingling;
26570, Hunt Oil, commingling;
26571, Hunt Oil, commingling;
26572, Hunt Oil, commingling;
26573, Hunt Oil, commingling;
26574, Hunt Oil, commingling;
26575, Hunt Oil, commingling;
26576, Hunt Oil, commingling;
26577, Hunt Oil, commingling;
26578, Zavanna, Stockyard Creek-Bakken; two wells on a overlapping 2560-acre unit; Williams County;
26579, CLR, Temple-Bakken; seven wells in an existing 1280-acre unit; Williams County
26580, CLR, Northwest McGregor-Bakken; fourteen (14) wells on an existing 2560-acre unit; Williams County
26581, CLR, commingling;
26582, CLR, commingling;
26583, Hydra Services; SWD

Thursday, April 26, 2018, Supplement -- only one case

26498, SWD 

Active Rigs Down; WTI Down; WPX Reports Three Nice DUCs-- April 4, 2018

Active rigs:

$63.37↓	4/4/2018	04/04/2017	04/04/2016	04/04/2015	04/04/2014
Active Rigs	56	49	30	94	192

Four new operators:

• Operators: NP Resources (3); Oasis
• Fields: Tree Top (Billings); Tyrone (Williams)
• Comments: NP Resources has permits for a 3-well Gracie State pad in SESE 21-142-100;

No permits renewed.

No permits canceled.


Three producing wells (DUCs) reported as completed:

• 23964, 2,712, WPX, Arikara 15-22HB, Reunion Bay, t3/18; cum --
• 23965, 2,528, WPX, Arikara 15-22HW, Reunion Bay, t3/18; cum --
• 33642, 2,183, WPX, Arikara 15-22HQL, Reunion Bay, t318; cum --

Making America Great Again -- 25 Small Refiners Given New Lease On Life -- April 4, 2018

Link here at ArgusMedia:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has so far granted 25 small US refiners exemptions from federal fuel blending mandates for 2017, dragging down the market for compliance credits and infuriating biofuels groups.

EPA did not comment on the associated number of renewable identification numbers (RINs) associated with small refinery exemptions to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). The number of approved waivers — more than double the previous year and all but four of the applications received for 2017 — surged after Congress and federal courts told the agency last year it had overstepped its authority by limiting the number of waivers.

"It appears the agency has initiated a fire sale on RFS demand," Renewable Fuels Association chief executive Bob Dinneen said. [Yup, that is how it appears. LOL.]

RFS requires refiners, importers and other companies to each year ensure minimum volumes of renewables blend into the fuel they add to the US transportation supply.

Companies acquire RINs needed to prove compliance by blending approved renewable and conventional fuels. Obligated parties that lack infrastructure for that activity purchase RINs from blenders.

Congress created a hardship waiver for refineries with less than 75,000 b/d of capacity. Facilities must convince the Department of Energy and EPA that compliance creates an economic hardship. The waivers apply to individual facilities, rather than an overall company.

EPA does not adjust a year's minimum volume after waiving a small facility's obligation. Such waivers instead effectively reduce obligations for all obligated parties and increase the supply of available RINs, cutting costs.

Much more at the link.

And from Platts: RINs crash.

Prices for Renewable Identification Numbers tumbled to their lowest level since 2015 in early trading Wednesday on worries that the US Environmental Protection Agency will grant more Renewable Fuels Standard waiver credits to refiners.

Ethanol RINs for 2018 compliance were last heard trading at 30 cents/RIN Wednesday, their lowest level since September 2015. S&P Global Platts assessed them Tuesday at 40 cents/RIN.

Biodiesel RINs for 2018 compliance hit their lowest level since October of 2015, after they were last heard trading at 54 cents/RIN after Platts assessed them Tuesday at 62 cents/RIN.

Huge US Crude Oil Draw -- April 4, 2018 -- Re-Setting The Goal Posts It Will Still Take Sixteen (16) Weeks To Re-Balance -- April 4, 2018

Weekly petroleum report, link here:

• US crude oil inventories decreased by almost 5 million bbls; down 4.6 million bbls, now at 425.3 million bbls in storage
• refinery operable capability: at 93%  -- pretty much unchanged, and not bad going into the US driving season
• gasoline demand: flattens out week-over week; barely exceeds that of same period one year ago

Re-balancing (changing the methodology): if the weekly drawdown were to continue at a rate of 4.6 million bbls /week, it would take 16 weeks to get back to 350 million bbls in US crude oil inventory. It is interesting to note that US crude oil inventories, at 425.3 million bbls, is about where it was at the beginning of the year (2018).

My current spreadsheet is now almost a year old, 49 weeks of tracing. I may start over next week at "week zero." Not sure yet. Bottom line: it appears that it is very unlikely US crude oil inventories will ever come back to historical norms. If analysts suggest that US crude oil inventories have re-balanced, they have re-set the "goal posts."

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Fake Headline

It's been my impression that most of these stories -- on economic data that is going to be released on any given day -- are written in advance, along with the headlines. Once the data is released, then the writer fills in the economic data, and has little time to change the story. The headline, written by someone else earlier, is not "corrected." Ultimate example of "confirmation bias." In this case, the economic data was released at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time. By 9:50 a.m. -- only twenty minutes later -- Ms Irina Slav was able to download the data; read the data; analyze the data; write a story on the data; have the story proofread; edit the story; upload the story to the website. All in less than 20 minutes.

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Yahoo Finance

Bricked: on a side note, there are now reports from four separate Model 3 owners that their cars completely shut down unexpectedly. In computer parlance: the Models 3 "crashed."

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The Literature Page

A History of the Jews: Paul Johnson, c. 1987.

I'm only going to read the first chapter, a very long chapter, The Israelites.

• Hebron: 20 miles south of Jerusalem; the Cave of Machpelah, the Tombs of the Patriarchs --
• Abraham, founder of the Jewish religion; ancestor of the Jewish race
• his wife Sarah 
• son Isaac and his wife Rebecca
• his grandson Jacob and his wife Leah
• his great-grandson Joseph
• Hebron: first recorded acquisition of land
• Book of Genesis, chapter 23 -- Abraham purchases the Cave of Machpelah for burying-place for him and Sarah
• it is perhaps the first passage in the Bible which records an actual event
• bought the land from a West Semite, Ephron the Hittite, of Habiru descent, for 400 shekels
• the Jews are the only people in the world today who possess a historical record, however obscure in places, which allows them to trace their origins back into very remote times
• the "Bible-writing" Jews actually felt they could extend their history back to Adam
• the Flood: no doubt some kind of huge inundation occurred in Mesopotamia
• geologic proof
• in 1956, two tablets, referring to the Flood, written in Babylonian city of Sippar int he reign of King Ammisaduqa, 1646 - 1626 BC
• the saviour -figure of Ziusudra, presented in the Bible as Noah, provides the first independent confirmation of the actual existence of a Biblical personage; Ziusudra, a priest-king, said he was warned of a flood by the water-god Enki, and thus built an ark and so survived
• Noah is the first real man in Jewish history: his story foreshadows important elements in Jewish religion -- there is the notion of one righteous man; even more important, there is the Jewish stress on the supreme importance of human life, because of the imaginative relationship of man to God, which occurs in the key verse 6 of Genesis 9: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image o God made he man." This might be termed the central tenet of Jewish belief; it is significant that it occurs in conjunction with the Flood, the first historic event for which there is non-Biblical confirmation
• the passages dealing with the Flood also contain the first mention of a covenant and the earliest reference to the land of Canaan
• the reference to the Chaldees is anachronistic (page 10)
• the story of Abraham, and the city of Ur
• the list of Mesopotamian kings, difficult to sort out, in contrast to the list of Egyptian kings
• evidence suggests that the Genesis patriarch narratives belong to the period between Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi, the outside limits being 2100 - 1500 BC, the Middle Bronze Age
• they cannot be later, in the Late Bronze Age, because that would date them to the Egyptian empire of the New Kingdom, and the patriarchal sections make no mention of an Egyptian imperial presence in Canaan
• to put this in perspective: Helen of Troy, Late Bronze Age; her death coincides with the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age (see: Helen of Troy: The Story Behind the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Bettany Hughes,c. 2005)
• we can now put Abraham and his descendants in their true historical context: at the end of the third millennium BC, civilized international society was disrupted by incursions from the East; these invaders caused great trouble in Egypt; and in settled Asia, archaeology reveals an absolute break in continuity in towns such as Ugarit, Byblos, Megiddo, Jericho, and old Gaza, indicating pillage and abandonment
• the peoples, moving from Mesopotamia towards the Mediterranean, spoke West Semitic languages, of which Hebrew is one
• a particular group is referred to, in Mesopotamian tablets and inscriptions, by the ideogram SA.GAZ, or as Hapiru, Habiru
• Late Bronze Age Egyptian sources also speak of Abiru or Habiru
• by this term they were referring to Bedouin or desert-dwellers, who existed than as now, for they had a different term for this category
• Habiru seems to have been a term of abuse used of difficult and destructive non-city dwellers who moved from place to place 
• they were not regular tribes, migrating regularly with the flocks according to the cycles of the season, as they still do, in parts of Asia Minor and Persia
• their culture was superior to most desert tribes
• precisely because they were not easy to classify, they puzzled and annoyed the conservative Egyptian authorities
• the author then goes on to describe these people in great detail
• the author talks of the moral development of these people and their relationship with God
• still more remarkable is the attention devoted to women, the leading role they often play
• Abraham's wife, Sarah, is the first person in history recorded as laughing
• the story of Rebecca, the first tale in the Bible to move us;
• the Book of Ruth; the Song of Deborah
• the author discusses the question whether Abraham was the first monotheist
• the author's conclusion: Abraham may perhaps be most accurately described as a henotheist -- a believer in a sole God, attached to a particular people, who nonetheless recognized the attachment of other races to their own gods
• with this qualification, Abraham is the founder of the Hebrew religious culture, since he inaugurates its two salient characteristics: the covenant with God and the donation of The Land
• the notion of the covenant is an extraordinary idea, with no parallel in the ancient Near East
• it is true that Abraham's covenant with God, being personal, has not reached the sophistication of Moses' covenant on behalf of an entire people
• Jacob-Israel: father of the twelve tribes
• Song of Deborah: only ten tribes are listed
• Greeks called them amphictyons: "to dwell about"
• discussion regarding the relationship among the tribes
• emergence of the concept of Yahweh; dominance of Yahweh
• Shechem: in a sense, the original central shrine and capital of Israelite Canaan; the point is important, since the continuous existence of a sizeable Israelite population in Palestine throughout the period between the original Abrahamite arrival and the return from Egypt makes the Biblical Book of Exodus, which clearly describes only a part of the race, and the conquest narrated in the Book of Joshua, far more credible
• Exodus; Rameses II successor, Merneptah fought a battle with the Israelites outside of Egypt, 1220 BC; by this date the Israelites had already left Egypt; first non-Biblical reference to Israel
• Exodus: occurred in the 13th century; completed by about 1225 BC
• the story of Moses
• page 29; the first chapter ends on page 79

The Market, Energy, And Political PageT+36 -- April 4, 2018

Tesla bonds are selling off again today. 

This is why Tesla is not yet selling convertibles: when it rains, it pours.

"Growth" slows for the first time in more than a decade as installer pull back.  Link here; the comments will be fascinating.

Residential solar had been on a tear, averaging 48.6% annual growth between 2010 and 2016, but the number of megawatts added last year dropped by 15.6% compared to the year before, according to new data from GTM Research, a firm that tracks renewable energy.

It was the first annual decline since at least 2000, as far back as GTM keeps figures.

Solar-panel-installation still reminds me of the "aluminum siding" fad back in the 1960s.

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Counter-Intuitive

After much soul-searching, with the right safeguards put in place, and heavy penalties placed on Mexico,

• I would like to see dreamers (DACA) fast-tracked; and,
• I would like to see the "Honduran caravan" welcomed into the US

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Not An April Fool's Joke

WTI Dropping -- Trade Wars Begin In Earnest -- April 4, 2018

Jobs: huge.

Will Trump's tariffs result in US manufacturing layoffs? Possibly. My hunch: Trump knows what he is doing. But Steve Liesman, et al, are all concerned too many folks are being hired (wage inflation and where are all those workers coming from?) so maybe Steve Liesman, et al, will welcome some job losses.

Jobs: private payrolls grow by 241,000 vs 205,000 forecast -- ADP. 

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$62.26↓↓	4/4/2018	04/04/2017	04/04/2016	04/04/2015	04/04/2014
Active Rigs	56	49	30	94	192

RBN Energy: western natural gas markets whack Rockies producers.

Wells coming off confidential list today: CLR with two huge wells (one well with almost 150K in three months); Whiting with a huge well; two more DUCs -- so, somewhere between 20 and 40% of all new wells coming off confidential are going to DUC status. Takes us back to the BTUAnalytics story.

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BTU Analytics Methodology

The wells being reported today:

• 33829: 0 bbls
• 32823: 127,203 bbls over 148 days; 859 bopd
• 32809: 26,816 bbls over 39 days; 688 bopd
• 32584: 144,789 bbls over 114 days; 1,270 bopd
• 31126: 0 bbls

Just the three producing wells without the DUCs:  298,808 bbls over 301 days = 992 bopd
With the DUCs (using only 30 days per DUC, which of course, begs the question) = 284 bopd

This makes me question whether BTU Analytics is accurate on the methodology.

I'm back to square one on this whole issue.