How Low Can We Go? Gasoline Below $1.20/Gallon; Jobless Claims Surge; ONEOK Delays ND Gas Plant Expansion -- March 19, 2020

Airlines: most of the world's airlines could by bankrupt by May, 2020. I did not read the story or check the source. 

Link here.

Jobless claims, link here:

• prior: 211K
• revised: --
• forecast: 220K
• actual: 281K

We'll have to go back to the Obama-day charts for comparisons. This is bad; not that this was unexpected but that the analysts so misread this. This is quite amazing they were so wrong on the "low" side -- I would have been less surprised had they been wrong on the "high" side. Makes me wonder about their tools?

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Back to the Bakken

ONEOK delays expansion of Demicks Lake gas plant expansion and the Elk Creek pipeline. Link here.

Active rigs:

$22.54	3/19/2020	03/19/2019	03/19/2018	03/19/2017	03/19/2016
Active Rigs	54	66	58	47	32

Wells coming off confidential list today -- Thursday, March 19, 2020: 44 for the month; 215 for the quarter, 215 for the year:

• 36944, drl, CLR, LCU Jessie 4-24H1, Long Creek,
• 35777, 2,160, Whiting, Anderson 34-21H, Glass Bluff, t9/19; cum 77K 1/20; 40 stages; 8.1 million lbs;
• 31794, drl, Petro-Hunt, USA 153-95-7C-31-1HS, Charlson, 

RBN Energy: crude oil market vaporizes; contango and storage plays take center stage. Archived.

Well, now we all know how it feels when the bottom falls out. In fact, it seems there is no bottom, with WTI crude at Cushing settling on Wednesday at $20.37/bbl, down $6.58/bbl.

There is no point in belaboring the sad story here.

You can read about pandemics, OPEC price wars and collapsed markets in every periodical on the planet. Likewise, there is no point in trying to predict what will happen next. Any pundit who tries to predict future prices in this environment is picking numbers out of the air at best.

But at RBN, we are energy market analysts. As such, we are compelled to analyze something. And in these market conditions, there is one thing we can hang our hat on: No matter how bad things get, hope springs eternal.

Thus, the market consensus is that things will be better a year from now, and even better a year after that. The implication? In a flash, crude is in steep contango, and that has repercussions for pipeline flows, regional price differentials and for storage — in production areas, at refineries, in VLCCs on the water, and especially at Cushing, OK, the king of oil storage hubs. Today, we examine one aspect of the chaos that now envelopes all aspects of energy markets.

Seventeen days ago — eons in COVID-19 time — we noted that CME/NYMEX WTI Cushing crude oil for April 2020 delivery had closed at $44.76/bbl, a decline of more than $16/bbl, or about 27%, since New Year’s Day. Well, prices have done a lot more free-falling since then. Figure 1 puts the earlier decline and more recent nosedive in historical context, showing daily WTI front-month futures prices since 1998.