WTI Hits $77; EOG Breakeven At $30, Covers Dividend At $36; One Well Coming Off Confidential List -- December 30, 2021

Dow hits record high.

First group "financial / economic" indicators:

• 10-Year Treasury: link here. 1.543%, unchanged.
  
• DXY: link here. 95.94. Yawn.
  
• Silver: link  here. $23.045, significant trend.
  
• CBOE volatility index: link here. 16.9, flat.

Spain: Alcoa to halt aluminum production at Spanish plant for two years, citing high energy costs. Bloomberg. 

• for two years ... this plant is closed
• aluminum is up 40%; still, they chose to stop production
• energy intensive industry will inevitably shift from Europe to Texas
• Spain: fourth EU country slapping ban on new fossil fuel producers
• down, down, down they go ... like dominoes

COP: ex-div tomorrow.

Mexico to end oil exports in 2023. Link to Charles Kennedy. 

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$77.06	12/30/2021	12/30/2020	12/30/2019	12/30/2018	12/30/2017
Active Rigs	31	13	55	66	49

Thursday, December 30, 2021: 87 for the month, 116 for the quarter, 342 for the year:

• 36995, conf, CLR, LCU Ralph 9-27H1,

RBN Energy: top ten RBN blogs of 2021 -- energy transition slams into energy reality. 

How do you sum up a year like 2021? It was good times for the economic health of producers and midstreamers alike. Prices were up, as were production and flows. But 2021 also brought along more than its share of chaos, including disruptive market events like Winter Storm Uri’s deep freeze and Europe’s natural gas crisis, along with general perplexity around all things clean, green, renewable, and certified. At RBN we take a different approach to assessing common industry themes. Namely, we examine the events and trends that the market considers the most important — crowd-sourced market intelligence, if you will. We can do that because every weekday we post a blog covering a single topic and blast it to almost 35,000 people, and we scrupulously monitor the website hit rate to see which blogs garner the most interest. Then, at the end of the year, we look back to see which topics rank at the top of the hit parade. That score reveals a lot about major market trends. So today we dive into our Top 10 blogs based on the number of rbnenergy.com website hits over the past year to see what we can learn about where things stand today and what’s up next.

So what was the #1 theme for 2021? Well, the title of today’s blog has already given away the answer. The most prevalent issue resulting in high hit rates across the 255 blogs we posted this year was the collision of the energy transition into energy reality — the challenge of moving toward decarbonization and at the same time making sure markets have enough energy to survive the transition. It’s the energy markets conundrum of the 2020s and beyond. We must live, work, and produce hydrocarbon-based products the way the world works today, while at the same time preparing for and investing in the world to which we’re headed. A world that a lot of folks believe means net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and no more hydrocarbons. It’s like a mild case of schizophrenia; we live in one reality, but we must think in terms of an entirely different future reality. Already we’ve seen evidence of the implications: very messy energy markets. Given this as our theme, let’s see what the top blogs of 2021 can tell us about what we’ve observed so far and what we might expect in the coming year. Just like any year-end Top 10 list, we’ll start with #10 and work our way up to #1.