The Million Dollar Way (The Bakken Oil Blog): 05/13/20

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

ND Rig Count Drops To 16; Four New Permits; Four Permits Renewed -- May 13, 2020

Gasoline demand, link here --

OPEC basket: $22.83.

MDU: maintains its dividend payout.

California Resources: in talks for $600 million bankruptcy loan?

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$25.65	5/13/2020	05/13/2019	05/13/2018	05/13/2017	05/13/2016
Active Rigs	16	64	60	51	27

Four new permits, #37571 - #37574, inclusive --

Operators: Kraken (3); CLR
Fields: Oliver (Williams); Rattlesnake Point (Dunn)
Comments:

Kraken has permits for a 3-well Raymond/Fairbanks pad in NENE 29-157-98, Oliver oil field;
CLR has a permit for another Cuskelly well in NWNE section 07-146-96, Rattlesnake Point oil field;

Four permits renewed -- obviously there's an error at the NDIC daily activity report -- here's the screenshot for permit renewals:

It's possible this is what the permit renewal section should be:

XTO (2): two Hartel permits in McKenzie County;
Lime Rock Resources (2): two Robert Sadowsky permits, Dunn County; both of these permits were to expire May 4, 2020, based on letter dated April 6, 2020, from the NDIC in the file report; both scout tickets show the permits to be PNC as of May 9, 2020, but the wells' status are listed as loc.

Producing wells (DUCs) reported as completed:

32383, SI/A, CLR, Bohmbach Federal 9-26H1, Elm Tree, t--; cum --;
33797, SI/A, CLR, Antelope Federal 13-23H1, Elm Tree, t--; cum --;
32388, SI/A, CLR, Antelope Federal 12-34H, Elm Treek, t--; cum --;
36949, conf, Whiting, Arndt 11-24XH, Sanish,

Saudi Aramco Breakevens -- Re-Visited -- May 13, 2020

This takes me back to all those discussions about the breakeven costs for Saudi Aramco and how inexpensive it is to produce oil in Saudi Arabia. Breakevens are very, very similar to those in tier 1 plays in the US.

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Highway 61 Re-Visited

Highway 61 Revisited, Karen O and The Million Dollar Bashers ********************************** Steak Update

Omaha Steaks: still a lot of selections "temporarily unavailable."

Another option from a reader: crowdcow.com.

Notes From All Over, Mid-Morning Edition -- May 13, 2020

See this post for photos off Long Beach port.

They're reading the blog! I posted this about an hour ago. LOL:

If the chart above is hard to read, here it is by itself:

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The Sophia Page

Another Sophia in the news. Sophia Coppola creating Apple TV+ show based on Edith Wharton's 'Custom of the Country' novel. Link over at MacRumors. Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation is either on my top ten movie list or close to making the list. Can't remember exact status.

This Sophia sustains severe injuries in playground fall:

Flashback, almost ten years ago: Trent Reznor and Karen O's cover of Led Zeppelin's 'Immigrant Song." Link here. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo finally moves into my top ten movie list. Huge mistake by Hollywood (again): 84th (2012) Oscar (Academy Award) for best actress went to Meryl Streep playing herself in The Iron Lady. Anybody paying attention would have given it to Rooney Mara in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

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Word For The Day

Whin: Scottish -- any prickly shrub, especially gorse. Probably used interchangeably with gorse by some folks.

I saw this word for the first time, and then the second time, reading/re-reading The Scotch Irish: A Social History, James G. Leyburn, c. 1962, p. 4.

One more: burn, moving freshwater, creek to very small river.

Are You Kidding Me! Re-Posting! -- May 13, 2020

Wow, wow, wow. This takes me back to all those discussions we had on whether Saudi Arabia retained bragging rights as the swing producer, or whether US shale was the "new" swing producer. We're not talking about how much oil either Saudi Arabia or US shale oil could put into off-shore tankers; we're talking about actual change in production.

Headline writers still writing "the expected narrative."

Re-posting. I'm sure I'm misreading something.

Swing producers? US shale? I don't know. We'll have to look at the numbers six months from now, but it certainly appears that US shale operators can "turn on a dime." I think it's fascinating. News out of the Mideast suggest weeks, if not months, of negotiations, talk, fake news, etc., and then we might finally see some data. US shale -- in the Bakken it's a daily update. In the Permian maybe a bit longer, but certainly within a month we see production responding to geopolitical events. Whatever. Idle rambling. Waiting for EIA data. [Update: five minutes later -- wow, talking about turning on a dime! See below.]

EIA, weekly data, link here, and here, pending, released at 9:30 a.m. CT -- are you kidding me? --

US crude oil inventories decreased by 0.7 million bbls from the previous week

US crude oil inventories now stand at 531.5 million bbls -- 11% above the already fat five-year average;

Re-balancing:

Week	Week Ending	Change	Million Bbls Storage
Week 0	November 21, 2018	4.9	446.9
Week 1	November 28, 2018	3.6	450.5
Week 2	December 6, 2018	-7.3	443.2
Week 3	December 12, 2018	-1.2	442.0
Week 4	December 19, 2018	-0.5	441.5
Week 5	December 28, 2018	0.0	441.4
Week 6	January 4, 2019	0.0	441.4
Week 7	January 9, 2019	-1.7	439.7
Week 8	January 16, 2019	-2.7	437.1
Week 9	January 24, 2019	8.0	445.0
Week 68	March 18, 2020	2.0	453.7
Week 69	March 25, 2020	1.6	455.4
Week 70	April 1, 2020	13.8	469.2
Week 71	April 8, 2020	15.2	484.4
Week 72	April 15, 2020	19.2	503.6
Week 72	April 22, 2020	15.0	518.6
Week 73	April 29, 2020	9.0	527.6
Week 74	May 6, 2020	4.6	532.2
Week 75	May 13, 2020	-0.7	531.5

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Are You Kidding Me? EIA Weekly Data -- May 13, 2020

Updates

See comments: I don't want to lose this comment, so here it is again. It has to do with EIA's US crude oil supply in days, which the EIA now estimates to be 42. days. A writer who follows this much more closely than I do, and who understands it much more closely that I do wrote:

I figure there was an 18,160,000 barrels per day global surplus in April ....times 30 days would mean 544,800,000 more barrels were produced than used, and hence had to be stored somewhere

With global demand revised down to 81.30 million barrels per day, that means "we" have added 6.7 days to global supplies in just one month.

Original Post

Swing producers? US shale? I don't know. We'll have to look at the numbers six months from now, but it certainly appears that US shale operators can "turn on a dime." I think it's fascinating. News out of the Mideast suggest weeks, if not months, of negotiations, talk, fake news, etc., and then we might finally see some data. US shale -- in the Bakken it's a daily update. In the Permian maybe a bit longer, but certainly within a month we see production responding to geopolitical events. Whatever. Idle rambling. Waiting for EIA data. [Update: five minutes later -- wow, talking about turning on a dime! See below.]

EIA, weekly data, link here, and here, pending, released at 9:30 a.m. CT -- are you kidding me? --

US crude oil inventories decreased by 0.7 million bbls from the previous week
US crude oil inventories now stand at 531.5 million bbls -- 11% above the already fat five-year average;
refineries operating at 67.9% capacity -- a new modern low?
imports averaged 5.4 million bopd last week, down by 321,000 bbls -- another surprise -- what happened to all that Saudi oil off Long Beach port? Wow!
imports average about 5.3 million bopd, 26.1% less than the same four-week period last year;
jet fuel supplied was down a whopping 68.5% compared with same four-week period last year;