Fourth Day In A Row -- No Wells Coming Off The Confidential List -- October 21, 2020

The Pioneer - Parsley tie-up: who caught this? It's a father-son deal. Amazing how "everyone" knows this but it's very rarely being reported. From Bloomberg yesterday, behind a paywall (we'll sort that out later). Here's the story, when times were good, from The WSJ back on August 5, 2016.

The shares have made [Bryan] Sheffield, a 38-year-old, third-generation oil man, one of the youngest billionaires in the energy business at a time when falling crude prices have bankrupted more than 85 North American energy producers, erased profits at oil giants and stung investors. [His grandfather, Parsley; and father, Scott, in the photo at The WSJ link.]

Parsley, with a stock-market value of about $6.4 billion, possesses the qualities investors have sought amid collapsing oil prices: It operates in West Texas’ prolific Permian Basin, has relatively little debt and aggressively hedges its output to lock in above-market prices.

OPEC basket, link here, we have the beginning of a triple dip: trading at $41.38.

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$40.90	10/21/2020	10/21/2019	10/21/2018	10/21/2017	10/21/2016
Active Rigs	15	62	71	54	34

No wells coming off the confidential list.

RBN Energy: major changes in crude oil imports as requirements of US refineries shift. US imports from Saudi Arabia hit second lowest on record for the month of July going back to 1987. Link here.

Much has been written about the run-up in U.S. crude oil exports over the past five-plus years, and rightly so. Who would have guessed a dozen years ago that the U.S. would soon be producing as much as 13 MMb/d, and exporting one-quarter of it? Exports are only half of the story though. In fact, for every barrel of crude shipped or piped out of the U.S. today, two barrels of crude are shipped, piped, or railed in. Put simply, the U.S. refining sector still needs imported oil — or, more accurately, it can’t use all of the light, sweet crude that’s produced in the Permian and other shale/tight-oil plays in the Lower 48, and it still requires large volumes of the heavier crude that’s produced in Canada, Mexico, and overseas. Today, we begin a blog series on U.S. oil imports with a big-picture look at how crude sourcing for the refining sector has morphed in the Shale Era.