WTI Trades Well Below $60; Brent At $62.83; No Wells Coming Off Confidential List -- March 19, 2021

Fast and furious:

• "Worriers are going to worry" -- Bank of America
• three pillars for this bull market:
• liquidity (really, really, easy money)
• earnings growth
• breadth of market recovery
  
• Economy, the Fed:
• US jobless rate will fall to 4.5% this year
• inflation will rise temporarily
• lower rates for longer
• That was the headline, here are the details:
• US economy to grow at its fast pace in four decades;
• the Fed's rosiest picture of the economy since the pandemic began one year ago;
• consumer prices will jump, "at least" temporarily;
• inflation will hit 2.4% compared to the Fed's earlier estimate of 1.8%
• uncharted territory for the Fed:
• the economy is getting strong, but not enough for the central bank to roll back emergency measures;
• Powell: will let the economy run hotter for longer before raising rates,

• SeekingAlpha contributor: 
• the Fed may have just sealed the stock market's fate; link here; and, here;

• Jobless report, yesterday, March 19, 2021: link here;
• interactive map at the link;
• I recall the famous line by President Obama: "those jobs are never coming back."
• Zoom / Webex economy is going to last a lot longer than some originally thought;
• the nation is still almost 10 million jobs short of the number of jobs it had in February, 2020
• as mentioned earlier, no one in Washington "really cares"; exhibit A: the Keystone XL.

• Oil sell-off: transient -- GS; link here.
  

• FANG:
• offering notes at low rates; link here;
• reader noted: "30-year notes with ten years left of inventory. Makes sense."

• FedEx: the e-economy, revenue, earnings beat; link here;
• revenues: $21.5 billion vs $20.02 billion forecast;
• EPS: $3.47 vs $3.22 forecast

• Travel: 
• one mystery solved;
• US jet fuel consumption won't increase as quickly as air travel demand -- EIA; link here;
  

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$59.77	3/19/2021	03/19/2020	03/19/2019	03/19/2018	03/19/2017
Active Rigs	16	52	66	58	47

No wells coming off the confidential list today. 

RBN Energy: maintenance to curb Alberta's synthetic crude oil production this spring.

Production of synthetic crude oil that is processed from Alberta’s oil sands reached record highs at the end of 2020 after touching on two year lows just four months earlier. However, these highs could be undermined and sink to four-year lows for a short period of time this spring with what appears to be a heavier than usual slate of maintenance work on three of Alberta’s four upgraders, the immense processing units that produce synthetic crude oil from bitumen. In today’s blog, we take a closer look at the upgraders, the timing of maintenance, and what this might mean for synthetic crude oil production and exports.