Earthquakes, Texas Freeze, SABIC Missing Expectatiions. Good Morning. Four Wells Coming Off Confiidential List -- Febriuary 3, 2022

Texas grid faltering? Link to Irina Slav. Anything's possible I suppose but the "local investigative reporter" is confusing the website with the grid.   

Apparently 60,000 people have lost power in Texas and Arkansas, based on a national reporting agency much earlier this morning so that number will grow over the next 24 hours. 

Population of Texas and Arkansas: 35 million. 60,000 / 35,000,000 = 0.17%. For AOC folks, that means out of 100 people, 0.2 have lost power. Rounding to nearest whole number = 0. Having said that, I would not want to be one of the 60,000.

So far this has nothing to do with ERCOT or the grid, per se, it's the ice on trees falling on power lines. A neighborhood down the road from us is without power, but we are still fine. Our local utility, by the way, spent the summer clearing trees from power lines, which they do every summer but it's truly the "luck of the draw," as they say in Texas. All it takes is one tree.

We have not yet turned on the heat to our apartment. It's a toasty 65°F inside and 22°F outside. My wife will decide when we turn on the heat.

Forecast: generally it will get colder, down to a low of 18°F at 4:00 a.m. and then warm up to 44°F by Friday afternoon. By the weekend, it's all back to normal. 

SABIC: profits may fall in 2022 on tight supply chains. Inshallah. Link here. SABIC missed forecasts for 4Q21. This would have been my lead story today had it not been for Facebook and the Texas Freeze.

Saudi Basic Industries Corp., the world’s biggest chemicals maker by market value, said profit would probably fall this year as the global supply-chain squeeze pushes up costs.

The Riyadh-based company, known as Sabic, made net income of $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter, down 12% from the previous three-month period and below analysts’ estimates.

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$88.68	2/3/2022	02/03/2021	02/03/2020	02/03/2019	02/03/2018
Active Rigs	32e	14	54	64	58

Thursday, February 3, 2022: 11 for the month, 66 for the quarter, 66 for the year

• 38424, conf,  Crescent Point Energy, CPEUSC Reed 6-10-03-158N-100W-MBH-LL, Winner, no production reported;
• 38386, conf, Hunt, Blue Ridge 159-100-6-7H3, Green Lake, some production reported;
• 37980, conf,  CLR, Clear Creek Federal 2-26HSL2, Elidah, no production reported;
• 37913, conf, CLR, Charolais South Federal 15-10H, Elm Tree, no production reported;

RBN Energy:  is seismic activity a threat to Permian crude production growth? The short answer: no.

Even through the market turmoil of the past couple of years, the Permian has been a production powerhouse, lately churning out an average of nearly 5 MMb/d of crude oil and 14 Bcf/d of natural gas. But is the Permian on shaky ground? Well, sort of. Distinct areas within both the Midland and Delaware basins in West Texas have experienced an increasing number of higher-magnitude earthquakes that have been linked to the saltwater disposal (SWD) wells that E&Ps use to get rid of the massive volumes of “produced water” their oil and gas operations generate. As a result, regulators have been ordering some of these disposal wells to be shut down and directing producers and midstreamers to develop “seismic response action plans” aimed at reducing the frequency and severity of quakes. In today’s RBN blog, we look at what has been happening on the earthquake front in West Texas and how E&Ps can deal with it.

We’ve seen this movie before, right? Through the first half of the 2010s, Oklahoma, home of the SCOOP/STACK production area, experienced a sharp increase in the frequency and magnitude of earthquakes — there were 585 tremors with a magnitude of 3.0 or greater in 2014 and 887 in 2015, compared to an average of only three per year in the 2000-09 period (see Figure 1). The trend was soon attributed to the injection of massive volumes of produced water from oil and gas production into deep SWD wells in specific geologic formations, especially the Arbuckle, the deepest sedimentary layer in the Sooner State. Oklahoma regulators stepped in, shutting down a number of SWD wells and establishing (and later updating) protocols for the use of existing and planned wells. The frequency of earthquakes has plummeted — fewer than 30 tremors of 3.0 or higher magnitude were recorded in 2021, and the state’s first quake of 2022 happened on January 31 (a 4.5!). The seismicity problem, while not fully resolved, is being carefully monitored and managed with only limited impact on oil and gas operations.