When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going: CLR With Eight New Permits -- January 8, 2021

Active rigs:

$52.24	1/8/2021	01/08/2020	01/08/2019	01/08/2018	01/08/2017
Active Rigs	11	56	63	54	39

Eight new permits, #38064 - #38071, inclusive:

• Operator: CLR
• Fields: Rattlesnake Point (Dunn); Jim Creek (Dunn)
• Comments:
• CLR has permits for an eight well pad; the two-well Cuskelly FIU / Lundberg Federal wells on that pad in NWNW 8-146-96, will be in Jim Creek; both 358' FNL and 1144' - 1189' FWL;
• the six-well Lundberg Federal wells on that same pad will be in NENW /NWNW 8-146-96; Rattlesnake Point; all of them 358' FNL and between 1234' - 1459' FWL;
• see notes below
  

Three permit renewals:

• NP Resources (3): one 20002 Agate permit in Golden Valley; two Mosser Federal permits in Billings County;

*************************************
Those CLR Permits Above

In section 8-146-96, there are only two active wells:

• 17403, 354, CLR, Lundberg 1-8H, Rattlesnake Point, t4/10; cum 285K 11/20;
• 21877, 1,131, CLR, Lundberg 2-8AH, Rattlesnake Point, t6/15; cum 383K 11/20;

To the west, the Cuskelly pad:

• 29711, 1,625, CLR, Cuskelly 4-7H1, Rattlesnake Point, t6/18; cum 149K 11/20;

$2,000 Per Adult, $2,000 Per Child? -- January 8, 2021

Updates

Later, 1:26 p.m. CT: I just happened to catch Biden's live speech announcing the rest of his cabinet. I think he's going to impress a lot of folks -- good, bad, or indifferent. I don't listen to political speeches as a rule, so it was interesting to hear Biden speak. I could never listen to an Obama speech (too many "I's") and after his early speeches, I never listened to any of Trump's speeches. But for various reasons, I will probably listen to Biden's "live" speeches for the next few months. If nothing else, Biden comes across as calming, self-effacing, and measured. If Biden doesn't tweet his thoughts, the only way we will "know him" unfiltered by the press is listening to his "live" speeches, and watching his actions. [By the way, "Manchin" is walking back his remarks suggesting that he is against "$2,000 checks." He obviously didn't get the memo that was Biden was about to speak. "Manchin" now says he is "open" to "$2,000 checks. LOL.] Biden re-emphasized that his "Covid recovery plan" or whatever it's called will run into the "trillions of dollars."

Original Post

I've completely lost the bubble on this one. I don't recall the details of the original "$2,000" plan; I'm barely aware of the new "$600" plan.

So, I about fell out of my chair when a talking head for a major financial firm mentioned on CNBC this morning that his firm anticipates the Biden administration will authorize $2,000 for every person which includes $2,000 for every child in any household earning less than .... the number was not stated but if it's for any individual earning less than $150,000 / year this is huge. Think about that. 

$2,000 for a family may not be much, but a typical family of five -- a couple with three children -- think about that -- that's $10,000 for some families. This is more money most folks will ever see in one check in their entire lifetime. 

What surprises me and what irritates me most about this is this: did Mitch McConnell not know who was going to become president January 20th? Schumer and Pelosi will get credit for this $10,000 check and President Biden's signature (along with Bernie's) will be on the check. Not Trump's. Not Mnuchen's. I don't get it. 

By the way, maybe someone can help me with some datelines and timelines.

When is the new US Congress sworn in? It was my understanding that it is the first weekday in January. If so, we have a new US Congress. Who is the US Senate majority leader? The races have been determined in Georgia. 

The US Senate majority leader sets determines the calendar. I assume the first order of business is for the US Senate to vote for a new majority leader.

Trump may want to get those pardons signed this weekend. 

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Remember When It Was Just $2 Trillion?

UNP? January 8, 2021

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

Holy mackerel. After seeing NSC earlier this week I had some concerns about UNP. But look at this. Wow. Who would have thought?

Up almost $5/share before the opening. Up almost 3%.That's on top of a solid gain yesterday. Should open at an all-time high. Generally, pre-market swings are a lot higher than what actually happens during normal trading hours. So we'll see.

Earnings come out later this this month. Something tells me someone has seen the numbers. I'm not sure where we will see them first, but here's one link. 

Wow, Jim Cramer just mentioned UNP ... he caught this one, also. This is pretty exciting.

Notes From All Over -- France: Electricity Shortage -- January 8, 2021

Before we get started, breaking news:

$2,000 stimulus checks all-but-guaranteed. US jobs report for December: US employers unexpectedly shed 140,000 jobs. Economists were expecting a gain of 50,000 jobs. Anyone want to hazard a guess the stimulus checks will be bigger or this will simply be the first of many. Quick: who will be the new chairman of the US Senate budget committee? That should answer your question.

Does anyone think that the IRS won't extend the filing AND paying date by four months this year? There may be some exceptions: perhaps those earning more than $50 million / year will be required to pay on time. By the way, that's why a lot of CEOs take their pay in "benefits" rather than income. I remember Steve Jobs famously pegged his salary at $1/year.

Chinese flu watch: Being reported today over at twitter (we'll see if we can find a link later): The French have been "asked" in a very nice way to "confine at home" due to Covid-19, and to turn down their thermostats (heating) and their televisions due to an electricity shortage. Are you kidding me?

202One Summer Olympics: unlikely at best. 

Now it's being reported that Japanese airlines have cut their domestic flight schedules after their government declared a state of emergency to contain a rise in Covid-19 infections.

Does one really think Japan is gong to invite thousands of Japanese from across their islands to show up in Tokyo to put on a spectacular opening and closing ceremony to entertain thousands of foreign athletes and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of privileged white people (tourists from the US, Britain, and the EU where Covid is raging).

Masks: by the way, I don't know if folks are paying attention, but now that the football playoffs are here, and basketball season has started, more and more games are being played; more and more fans are attending, and more and more players and coaches are not wearing masks. And those that do wear masks, most of them are wearing their masks around their necks. Those who still wear their masks on their face, cover their mouths, but not their noses. What a joke. Seriously.

One step forward, two steps back: Japan has fired up a brand new 650 MW coal-fired power unit at its Hitachinaka complex, taking its coal-fired power capacity to almost 8,000 MW.

Vaccine rollout in New York state has been a "total mess." As of last night, Thursday, January 7, 2021, even as new cases are surging, Governor Cuomo has vaccinated only 430,000 people out of 1 million doses distributed. Why aren't we seeing photographs of folks standing in line to get their vaccinations? My hunch is that the powers-that-be are rationing the vaccines to ensure that there is enough vaccine for the elite and privileged. One notes that the DC politicians all got their vaccinations. Previously posted. 

And despite all this "bad news," the market will open at new highs today and will close at new all-time highs. What a great country.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

China: Freezing -- January 8, 2021

Updates

Later, 11:35 a.m. CT:

Later, 11: 30 a.m. CT:

Original Post 

Reuters link here. 

BEIJING (Reuters) - Exceptionally cold weather sweeping through China has caused a huge increase in power demand in the world’s largest energy consumer and hampered transportation. 

Frigid weather across north Asia has caught utilities and liquefied natural gas importers off guard as demand for power lowered inventories and pushed spot prices to record levels.

China’s Central Meteorological Station released the first cold warning in 2021 earlier in the week to several regions. Cities such as the eastern port city of Qingdao recorded the lowest temperature in history and the capital city Beijing had coldest day since the 1960s on Jan 7.At least nine provincial grid systems in northern China saw peak power load hitting historic highs this week, according to China’s State Grid.

China’s industrial belt, where a stunning manufacturing recovery from the coronavirus pandemic boosted energy demand, experienced a temporary power crunch in the last cold snap in December.“The (latest) historic peak load came as extreme cold weather increased demand for electricity-powered heating facilities, which account for 48.2% of total load,” an official from the State Grid told state television on Thursday.

China has been replacing coal burning with gas- or electricity-fueled heating devices as part of a campaign to combat air pollution in its smog-prone northern regions.

The only remaining coal-fired power plant in Beijing, managed by state-backed China Huaneng Group as a backup power source, resumed operations two weeks ago in order to meet the surging electricity demand.

Later this week, CNN will report that December was the warmest month in Chinese history. 

Exceptionally cold weather. Not just "cold weather," but exceptionally cold weather.

And did you catch this? Frigid weather across north Asia has caught utilities and liquefied natural gas importers off guard as demand for power lowered inventories and pushed spot prices to record levels.

We can predict to the tenth of a degree the average global temperature one hundred years from now but weather two weeks out still catches personkind off guard. LOL. 

By the way, where are we on the AOC-globale warming countdown? It was January 22, 2019, when OAC said the world would end in 12 years if "we" don't address climate change. I guess we're down to ten years.What a doofus.

UK: The "Saudi Arabia" Of WInd Power -- FT -- January 8, 2021

Financial Times link here: lots of money spent; little return on investment; few jobs. That pretty much sums it up. From the linked article:

In his last year in office in 2010, then Labour prime minister Gordon Brown said the UK’s leading position in offshore wind meant the sector could support up to 70,000 jobs by 2020. But in reality, direct employment and supply chain jobs stand at an estimated 11,000, according to RenewableUK, the industry lobby group.

“It’s a con,” said Gary Smith, secretary of the GMB union in Scotland, which includes BiFab workers among its members. “What the UK is, is the biggest offshore wind sector in the world and the only expertise is about how we offshore jobs.”

His scepticism is shared in north-east England, another area of the UK that had hoped to benefit from an offshore wind jobs boom.

The region is “living off the crumbs of the major orders”, said Bruce Shepherd, chairman of Shepherd Offshore, a family-owned Newcastle business that owns industrial sites on the banks of the Tyne. “The government isn’t insisting the fabrication is done in the UK like it was when we were doing oil and gas.”

At three mothballed fabrication yards in Scotland, promises by Boris Johnson that the UK would become the “Saudi Arabia” of wind power rang hollow as their owner BiFab, a producer of giant foundations for offshore turbines, collapsed last month. The move into administration by the 20-year-old Fife company, which at its peak employed up to 2,000 workers at the three yards, came just a fortnight after the UK prime minister had placed offshore wind at the centre of his “green industrial revolution”. Mr Johnson’s 10-point plan promised 60,000 jobs and turbines in British waters that would “power every home” by 2030.

BiFab’s struggles in recent years, which saw it lose out on lucrative contracts on UK projects to competitors in the United Arab Emirates and China, meant its collapse came as little surprise.

But the demise of the company, which had its roots in the North Sea oil industry, was still a painful reminder of the empty promises made by successive governments that offshore wind would herald a bright new industrial dawn for Britain.

The UK’s waters are home to more offshore wind farms than anywhere else in the world but this concentration has not translated into the jobs and manufacturing boom envisaged in the years since the first one came on stream 20 years ago. 

Much more at the link.
 
More:

RenewableUK estimates that for every pound of capital expenditure on offshore wind projects, which accounts for the lion’s share of overall spend, just 29p goes into the UK economy. If development costs, operations and maintenance are added in, based on an assumed 30-year life cycle, this figure increases to 48 per cent.

Mr Johnson has said he wants that figure to rise to 60 per cent by 2030, which includes between 40 and 50 per cent of capex spent with UK-based suppliers, according to the business department.

But Dennis Clark, the former chairman of engineering company Offshore Group Newcastle, who has long highlighted the difficulties for British companies trying to win work in offshore wind, said the government needed to be more ambitious. “It needs to be 60 per cent of capex.”

In November, ministers launched a consultation that included proposals to strip developers of subsidy contracts if they failed to deliver promised support for the UK supply chain. The business department said “ensuring the UK’s workforce and supply chain can fully share in the offshore wind sector’s success is a key priority for the government”.

Offshore wind developers, which include some of the largest European energy groups such as Denmark’s Orsted, Norway’s Equinor, Spain’s Iberdrola and the UK’s SSE, have insisted UK companies have been capturing more of the overall spend in recent years.

Keith Anderson, chief executive of ScottishPower, which is owned by Iberdrola, told the FT Energy Transition Strategies Summit in December that UK content eight years ago was closer to 30 to 35 per cent.

General Electric is exploring the case for building a wind turbine factory in north-east England that would give the government’s push an early boost, adding to other manufacturing sites, including MHI Vestas Offshore Wind’s blade plant on the Isle of Wight and a similar facility owned by Siemens Gamesa in Hull.

US LNG Exports Set Another Record In December, 2020

Link here. EIA link here.

LNG export terminals are tracked here.

The Art Page -- At 6:30 A.M. -- Nothing About The Bakken -- January 8, 2021

In the summer between my junior and senior year in high school I was a privileged white kid from Williston, ND, attending a summer course on Romanticism, at St Olaf College, Northfield, MN. It was mostly literature, but there was a fair amount of art, music, and theater. 

We were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, and my father certainly would not have had any connection with fine art (or any art for that matter) or literature. Why he was willing to spend that much money to let me take this course I will never understand. I do remember bits and pieces of the long car ride from Williston to Minneapolis (and return). I don't recall staying overnight anywhere along the way, so we must have made the trip (each way) in one long stretch. If so, we would stopped along the way to eat summer sausage sandwiches on white bread prepared by my mother. We certainly would not have had the money to eat at a restaurant. My dad drove, my mom went with us, and I vaguely recall one other sibling in the car. 

I can count on my two hands the number of life-altering events in my life and that eight-week course was one of them. There were so many highlights -- one of them was seeing not less than two plays at the Guthrie Theater (I can't remember if we saw two or three; it's possible we saw only one, but if so, it must have been overwhelming and awe-inspiring because it registers as not less than two plays in my mind).

We studied a lot of paintings from that period. I do not recall visiting an art museum but I certainly recall all the paintings we saw displayed on some kind of big screen projection. The screen shot on this page is the painting that stood out most at the time and still haunts me. It may be the one painting, followed by Monet's lily pond paintings, that really affected my life in a very positive way. 

I never understood the painting, and I'm not sure I understand it today. My understanding of French history was never any good. I probably know Chinese history better than French history. Whatever. 

The interesting thing is that I instantly recognize this painting and its painter, Eugene De La Croix, whenever I see it (although I had to look up the spelling of the painter's name to make sure I had it right).

An aside: Sophia just returned from a catamaran-sailing trip in the US Virgin Islands. She tells me she visited St Thomas, St John, and St Croix islands. In fact, St Croix (Holy Cross) was too far for them on this trip so she only saw St Thomas and St John. As another side, Alexander Hamilton was born on a Caribbean Island just to the east of the US Virgin Islands, at Charleston, Nevis Island. [There must be a nexus of nerve cells in my left temporal lobe that contains all this confusingly unrelated "screenshots." The mind is a very curious thing.]

From stanito.wordpress:

A Closer Look At The QEP Van Hook Well That Came Off Confidential List Today -- January 8, 2021

See this note also: link here. 

The well:

• 35453, drl/A, QEP, MHA 7-27-26H-150-92, 33-061-04300, Van Hook, first production, 6/20; t--; cum 151K 11/20; fracked 6/18/20 - 6/26/20, see graphic; see recent production:
  

Pool	Date	Days	BBLS Oil	Runs	BBLS Water	MCF Prod	MCF Sold	Vent/Flare
BAKKEN	11-2020	30	23599	23776	29147	18865	15159	3706
BAKKEN	10-2020	31	28057	28742	34813	23217	20288	2929
BAKKEN	9-2020	28	26316	25293	45842	21460	11296	10164
BAKKEN	8-2020	31	33396	33865	44184	29753	24450	5303
BAKKEN	7-2020	31	38930	38803	101577	26849	19453	7396
BAKKEN	6-2020	3	655	0	2230	547	0	547

FracFocus:

There are six wells on that pad:

• 35453, runs east, drl/NC, QEP, MHA 7-27-26H-150-92, Van Hook,
• 35455, runs west, drl/NC, QEP, MHA 7-29-30H-150-92, 33-061-04302 Van Hook,
• 35454, runs east, drl/NC, QEP, MHA 5-27-26H-150-92, Van Hook,
• 35456, runs west, drl/NC, QEP, MHA 5-29-30H-150-92, Van Hook,
• 35449, runs east, drl/NC, QEP, MHA 4-27-26H-150-92, Van Hook,
• 35451, runs west, drl/NC, QEP, MHA 4-29-30H-150-92, Van Hook, 

Production data for #35455, fracked 6/18/20 - 6/26/20; :

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
11-2020	35356	21000
10-2020	39274	23176
9-2020	37537	15347
8-2020	54102	30211
7-2020	40318	21126

 FracFocus for #35455:

Two Wells Coming Off The Confidential List -- January 8, 2021

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

 

First things first: EPD declares dividend yesterday; slightly higher than previous. $0.45 vs $0.445. Trading around $21, pays about 8%.

 

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Back to the Bakken

 

Active rigs:

$51.52	1/8/2021	01/08/2020	01/08/2019	01/08/2018	01/08/2017
Active Rigs	11	56	63	54	39

 

Two wells coming off the confidential list -- Friday, January 8, 2021: 8 for the month, 8 for the quarter, 8 for the year.

• 37458, loc/NC, Petro-Hunt, USA153-95-13D-12-6H, Phelps Bay,
  
• 35453, drl/A, QEP, MHA 7-27-26H-150-92, 33-061-04300, an Hook, first production, 6/20; t--; cum 151K 11/20;
  

RBN Energy: the 2021 outlook for Permian oil and gas markets. 

If you are looking for a way to focus on 2021 without reflecting on the last 12 months, we might have a deal for you. That’s because Permian natural gas and oil production is starting off this year at levels very close to where they finished 2019. That’s right: as far as the Permian is concerned, you can almost skip entirely over 2020 and pick up right where we left off the prior year. 

Well, for the most part. Oil prices are lower, rig counts have been reduced, and industry consolidation has removed some of the familiar Permian names from the stock ticker. In general, the atmosphere out in West Texas has calmed down dramatically from the headiest days of Permian growth and it’s safe to say it’s easier to grab lunch in Midland these days. Does that mean things in the basin aren’t still interesting out there? If you ask us, the answer is a resounding “No!” For starters, growth is back in the basin, even if it is at a slower pace than in 2019, and natural gas prices are stronger, with negative-price trades a thing of the past thanks to new pipelines. Even crude prices are better than some might think, with Permian barrels pricing over Cushing for many months now. The Permian in 2021 is certainly a half-empty or half-full type of market. We go for the latter in today’s blog, in which we outline our view of production growth in West Texas this year.