One Well Coming Off The Confidential List -- November 10, 2021

Wow, wow, wow, talk about timely: yesterday a reader noted the narrow WTI - Brent spread. Today, another spread is highlighted -- the WTI - WCS spread. See RBN Energy below.

RIVN: IPO today?

Bitcoin: to hit $68,000 this week. $680 million next week.  

RMOJ RIP: this will be a stand-alone post. It affected me deeply to have seen this. 

Where are all the other truck drivers? Again, later, another stand alone post. Later. 

Out: Brian Williams out at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow to cut back. Link to The WSJ. One word: ratings.

ISO NE: finally, a relatively decent day -- and renewable energy is supplying, as a percent, an almost negligible contribution. Link here. Natural gas + nuclear: 89% which is as high as they get; generally natural gas + nuclear runs 84%; I've never seen the two combined hit 90%. Renewables at 5% is less than hydro at 6%. 

Note: the other day I mentioned that certain NDIC pages would not download on Firefox. That seems to be a personal problem. NDIC pages seem to download just fine on Firefox on my "old" MacBook Air (13-inch, early 2015 with an Intel HD graphics card) but not on my "newer" MacBook Air. Don't understand it. It just happened and I haven't upgraded the software in either nor have I reset any of the settings. So my excitement that maybe we were about to see some movement on the NDIC IT issues seems to have been premature and entirely wrong. 

Speaking of which: the MillionDollarWay operations center is moving from our little hovel on the second floor in this huge apartment complex to Sophia's bat cave on the first floor. Readers will not be affected by the change. 

Today's agenda: the only thing, of interest, on tap today, is the EIA's weekly petroleum report. I will post that data later, but I'm taking the day off. I will check in, and maybe even post a few notes, but with so little news, time to relax. Maybe I'll update some incredible Bakken wells.

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$83.50	11/10/2021	11/10/2020	11/10/2019	11/10/2018	11/10/2017
Active Rigs	23	15	55	66	52

One well coming off confidential list -- Wednesday, November 10, 2021: 12 for the month, 15 for the quarter, 266 for the year:

• 37393, conf, Petro-Hunt, Blikre 158-94-13A-24-3H, East Tioga, no data, 

RBN Energy: will Enbridge's Line 3 replacement narrow the WCS / WTI spread.

Crude oil production in Western Canada has been rising steadily for most of the past decade. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its oil pipeline export capacity to the U.S., which has generally failed to keep pace with the increases in production. Dogged by regulatory, legal, and environmental roadblocks, permitting and constructing additional pipeline takeaway capacity has been a slow and complicated affair, although progress continues to be made. The most recent tranche arrived last month with the start-up of Enbridge’s Line 3 Replacement pipeline, which provides an incremental 370 Mb/d of export capacity and should help to shrink the massive price discounts that have often plagued Western Canadian producers in recent years. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the long-delayed project and how its operation is likely to affect Western Canada’s crude oil market, now and in the future.

In recent years, Western Canada had been chronically short of sufficient oil pipeline capacity to its primary export market: the U.S. At times, the huge mismatch between production and takeaway capacity resulted in enormous price discounts for its flagship Western Canada Select (WCS) heavy-oil blend relative to West Texas Intermediate (WTI) at Cushing — a spread that ballooned to more than $40/bbl in October 2018 and spurred a major rebound in crude-by-rail, a more expensive transport alternative.