No Wells Coming Off Confidential List; Rig Count Drops To Fifteen; WTI Trends Toward $64 -- April 20, 2021

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Whoo-hoo! JNJ increases dividend by almost 5%, from $1.01 to $1.06/share. Link here. Beats on top, bottom line; high-end guidance slightly higher than analysts. Shares down slightly.

• sales: $22.3 billion vs $21.82 expected; and $20.7 billion one year earlier;
• EPS: $2.59 vs $2.31 forecast
• guidance, high end, for full year 2021:
• EPS: $9.57 / share on sales of $91.6 billion
• analysts: $9.48 / share on sales of $91.3 billion

The Miocene: I had seen this story earlier but it didn't interest me enough to post it. Then a reader sent it to me this morning and I saw something in the article I had not seen before. The BP discovery in the Gulf of Mexico is in a very "recent" geologic reservoir, the Miocene. How recent: it was during the Miocene that apes and humans were diverging. 

It is generally agreed that the taproot of the human family shrub is to be found among apelike species of the middle Miocene epoch, roughly 15 mya or the late Miodene epoch, roughly 10 mya. -- Britannica.

Links to come back to when I have time:

• Mad Dog field -- see this post at the blog, April 19, 2013;
• the Miocene Monterey formation, GEO Ex Pro, 2013;
• the Monterey Formation, wiki;
  

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Back to the Bakken
Active rigs:

$63.69	4/20/2021	04/20/2020	04/20/2019	04/20/2018	04/20/2017
Active Rigs	15	32	63	59	49

No wells coming off confidential list.   

RBN Energy: a year like no other -- negative crude oil prices, an anemic rebound, and a deep freeze.

Well, it’s been 365 days since the unthinkable happened: the price of WTI at Cushing went negative last April 20, and by a solid $37.63 a barrel at that.

The insanity didn’t end there, though.

The pandemic that many thought would be behind us in a season or two at most had a second wave, then a third and, some say, a fourth. U.S. refinery demand for crude oil, which plummeted by more than 3 MMb/d last spring, still has only recouped only half that loss. E&Ps, who shut in thousands of wells when oil demand and prices tanked, still are only producing 11 MMb/d — 2 MMb/d less than they were pre-COVID. LNG exports took a big hit too, another victim of demand destruction.

As if all that weren’t enough, a couple of months ago, just as new vaccines were providing hope that everything would soon be returning to normal, the Deep Freeze put the Texas economy on ice and slowed production and refining once again. Strange times indeed. But we’re learning from it all, right? Today is the one-year anniversary of oil price Armageddon, so we take a look back at 12 months of market madness that no one could have predicted.