As WTI Drops Below $40 -- My Price Points For Shale -- September 6, 2020

Oil extends drop after Saudi cuts official sales price; previously posted.

WTI; $38.78 -- as reported by oilprice, September 6, 2020, Sunday, Labor Day weekend.

I forget when I first posted these numbers but I assume it's been at least a year:

My price points for WTI:

• $30 - $39: US shale survives;
• $40 - $49: US shale shows life;
• $50 - $59: US shale thrives;
• $60 - $69: US shale does very well;

I was tempted to break that down by two different plays (Bakken vs Permian) and adjust the dollar amounts accordingly but I've decided to leave it as is. Too many variables.  

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Continental Drift

Of the many videos I've seen on continental drift, this is one of the better ones. As you move into the Permian, or thereabouts, the cartoonist has under-laid the continents, and if you look really, really closely you can see where "North Dakota" would have been 300 million years ago. Mostly under water.

Continental Drift

This one is an updated Scotese video but doesn't include the boundaries of the underlying US states. However, the geologic calendar banner is really, really nice.

For mammal evolution, I think the most interesting period was the peri-Permian Mass Extinction event  -- perhaps starting with the swamp in the last ten million years of the Carboniferous period before the PME event and progressing into the desert-like Triassic period ten million years past the PME event.

It's difficult to keep the various groups, classes, and clades straight, especially now that there is a major revision underway regarding mammalian evolution "across" the Permian. So, this may be not entirely correct. 

The two major groups of animals competing for diurnal resources in the Permian were the Sauropsids and the Synapsids. The Sauropsids survived the PME event; the Synapsids did not. The therapsids did survive and this is where it gets confusing for me and where different authorities seem to diverge. Some say the Synapsids did not survive the PME event, but others say the Therapsids, which did survive that event, were an "advanced" group of synapsids. 

I think this is a lot of semantics, but over time, the experts will come to some type of agreement. 

The bottom line for me: the Permian is an incredible transition period from the swampy, hot Carboniferous to the hot, dry Triassic, punctuated with a major extinction event. We're lucky we're here, I guess. 

Again, I may be way wrong on this but I'm learning. I need to keep up with Sophia.