Back To Twenty-Three Active Rigs; WTI Up Over Two Percent -- July 9, 2021

Nonsense. But this is where we will start. Link to Yahoo!Finance's anchor, editor-at-large, Brian Sozzi. What a bunch of nonsense. 

OPEC spat #54: what this one is all about. This is perhaps one of the best articles I've read on the subject. 

UNP: plummets; loses $10/share in one day. Biden upset with "monopoly-like" moats the regional railroads have. Link to The WSJ.  My hunch: Warren has already called Nancy Pelosi. They're close friends from way back.

Biden's deterioration: the meme seems to be getting louder and more frequent. I assume we will soon see an article in The NYT suggesting why that is not true.

How bad is the editing over at the NY Times: they misspelled Mrs. Clinton's first name and it was so bad, the newspaper put it in Corrections Section. Link here. Someone must have been thinking of Mt Everest.

US shale: on track for one of its best years ever. Link to Alex Kimani. Coming close to being nominated for a Geico Rock of the Year award. 

California drought: yes, it's a big deal. Links and stories everywhere. Probably not a lot of talk about fracking in California these days. 

NBA ratings: the bad news continues to come in. Forbes. Tanked again. Outkick.

Wind: more evidence of the uselessness of green energy. Over at PowerLine. 

Berlin: Tesla gigafactory faces another setback. Link to Tsvetana Paraskova. 

Chip shortage: Tesla increases Model S and Model X prices by $5,000. Link here. 

WTI: surges. up over two percent. Trading at $74.55.

Gasoline demand: this is a bigger story than most folks realize.  

Gasoline demand: and there's more to come.

Coal: coal output in US seen rising most since 1990 on global demand! Link here. See the McKinsey article that comes next  -- getting easy to start connecting the dots.

McKinsey: dream big. The world is about to enter a new age of prosperity. Great article. I said the very same thing on the blog some months ago. Covid-19 may not have been the "black swan" everybody says it's been. It may have been one of the best things to have happened since WWII. Will post again as a stand-alone post.

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$74.58	7/9/2021	07/09/2020	07/09/2019	07/09/2018	07/09/2017
Active Rigs	23	11	57	65	56

One well coming off the confidential list -- Friday, July 9, 2021: 4 for the month, 4 for the quarter, 184 for the year:

• 37401, drl/NC, CLR, Gale 10-32H1, Cedar Coulee, first production, --; t--; cum --;

RBN Energy: desert southwest natural gas basis is sizzling. 

Usually when we write about natural gas markets in the Western third of the U.S., we spotlight the Permian Basin and its Waha gas hub. The focus on Waha has been for good reason, as the last three years have been nothing if not exciting in the Permian’s primary gas market. 

The basin’s huge volume of associated gas production and Waha’s volatility and deeply negative basis — even negative absolute prices — have made the West Texas market eminently watchable. Though a flurry of new pipelines out of the Permian have helped tame the market somewhat recently and driven Waha to the point of positive basis on its best days, the markets west of the Permian are a different story. They have seen very little in the way of new gas infrastructure, and the constrained inbound pipeline capacity has recently driven prices in the Desert Southwest to some incredible premiums. In today’s blog, we take a look at the gas markets there.