Four Wells Coming Off Confidential List, WTI Pulls Back Overnight; And, THE MERGER -- March 22, 2022

Important links:

• Whiting was tracked here; no longer.But, great historical data at original post.
• Oasis was tracked here; no longer.But, great historical data at original post.
• The new WHOasis (Whiting-Oasis) is now tracked here. Or should it be OH!-Whiting?

Oil: this is good; prices drop back a bit overnight. Orderly movement much better than sudden spikes.

Market: wow! I didn't look at the market very closely yesterday after headlines that market turned negative after Jay Powell's remarks: Fed may tighten more than expected; faster than expected. 

This morning I'm looking at a few stocks at the close, completely blown away. Numbers below may be rounded:

• BRK-B: was up over $7 / share yesterday. Closed at $350.
• UNP: was up over $3 / share yesterday. Closed at $265. Futures indicate profit-taking today.
• of course, any pull-back makes no sense with current geo-political events.
• SRE: was up $3 / share yesterday. Closed at $160.

Diesel: all of a sudden everybody's talking about this. We started talking about this months ago. From Laura Sanicola:

The difference: most natural disasters resolve after two weeks. I think the diesel issue started well before the Ukraine invasion. There is nothing to suggest this will improve any time soon.

Headline of the day comes from The WSJ: stock futures rise after Jay Powell says Fed may raise rates faster, higher than expected. Even the tech-focused NASDAQ-100 rose 0.5%, which is not trivial. 

AAPL: this is huge. Apple's new Studio Display is "the perfect all-in-one monitor for Mac users. Link here. This is a huge story. Tim Cook didn't even begin to tell us how incredible this display was.

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$112.80	3/22/2022	03/22/2021	03/22/2020	03/22/2019	03/22/2018
Active Rigs	35	15	51	68	60

Tuesday, March 22, 2022: 37 for the month, 146 for the quarter, 146 for the year

• 38299, conf, CLR, Rolf Federal 7-17H,
• 38213, conf, MRO, Katherine Schettler USA 34-22H,
• 37710, conf, Hess, EN-Johnson A-155-94-2932H-8,
• 36865, conf, CLR, LCU Truman 10-23H1,

RBN Energy: Whiting and Oasis return to their roots and merge. Archived.

So far, most of the merger-and-acquisition activity among crude-oil-focused producers in the COVID era has occurred where you would expect it: the Permian, which seems to dominate almost every discussion about the U.S. energy industry. More recently, though, there has been an uptick in E&P consolidation in the Denver-Julesburg Basin in the Rockies and, earlier this month, in the Bakken. There, Whiting Petroleum and Oasis Petroleum — two once-struggling producers — have agreed to a merger of equals that will create the Bakken’s second-largest producer and the largest pure-play E&P. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the companies’ stock-and-cash deal, which will result in a yet-to-be-renamed entity with an enterprise value of about $6 billion.