No Wells Coming Off Confidential List Today -- Wednesday, July 15, 2020

OPEC basket, link here. Drops a bit; priced at $43.02. Another day selling well below what Saudi needs.

***********************************

Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$40.30	7/15/2020	07/15/2019	07/15/2018	07/15/2017	07/15/2016
Active Rigs	11	58	67	58	29

Operators with active rigs:

• BR (2)
• CLR (2)
• WPX (2)
• MRO
• Petro-Hunt
• Hess
• Slawson
• XTO

No wells coming off the confidential list today.

RBN Energy: energy storage's emerging challenge to natural gas in the power sector. And, yes, Tesla is mentioned.

For a few years now, U.S. natural gas producers have benefited from the electric-power sector’s shift from coal-fired plants toward gas-fired ones. The ongoing transition makes sense. Not only is gas-fired generation cleaner, it’s mostly been cheaper than the coal alternative.

Better still, gas turbines and combined-cycle plants are very flexible companions to all those new wind farms and utility-scale solar facilities, whose variable output requires at-the-ready replacement power when the wind’s not blowing and the sun’s not shining.

But with the continued push by many state regulators — and many utilities — for lower-carbon generation fleets, gas-fired plants are facing a growing challenge from energy storage, mostly in the form of very big lithium-ion batteries. Today, we look into the increasing use of large-scale batteries in utility settings and whether they might pose a serious threat to gas-fired power in the 2020s and beyond.