One Well Coming Off Confidential List; WTI Melting Up -- April 6, 2022

Russia:

• Russia will find it needs the West a lot more than the West needs Russia;
• once the oil income starts to fall, it's all over
• every week this war drags on, sets Russian economy back another year;
• the Vietnam War was a huge drag on the US economy; Putin's War will be exponentially worse for Russia
• now Charles Kennedy suggests that Russian oil production dipped for the first time since August, 2021; link here.
• marker: 11.01 million bopd (oil + condensate)
• 0.6% lower than production in February
• under OPEC+ agreement, Russia allowed to increase production by 100,000 bopd; did not "take advantage of that"
  
• Russia needs western technology to keeps it oil industry operating at peak capacity;
• at least they have pipelines, something the US would like more of. LOL.

Oil:

• OPEC basket: continues to move up
• Brent: up 1%; up $1.18; trading at $107.80
• WTI: up 1.4%; up $1.43; trading at $103.40

New Mexico rig count: 96 (link here)

• North Dakota: 36

Average automobile fuel cost by state: updated as of early March, 2022. 

• most expensive: three guesses and the first two don't count
• least expensive: Arkansas - Oklahoma - Texas in that order
• most expensive: $4.94 (at least it's not over $5)
• least expensive: $3.34

Immigration: wow, wow, wow! I hinted at this data point some years ago, but I'm not going to expand. I don't need the pushback. LOL.

• from The WSJ: add declining immigration to problems weighing on the labor market
• industries that depend on foreign-born employees face high job vacancy rates and wage pressures;

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$103.40	4/6/2022	04/06/2021	04/06/2020	04/06/2019	04/06/2018
Active Rigs	36	13	40	62	57

Wednesday, April 6, 2022: 11 for the month, 11 for the quarter, 170 for the year

• 37601, conf-->loc/A, Whiting, Littlefield 41-2H, Sanish, first production, 11/21; t--; cum 107K 2/22;
  

RBN Energy: can green methanol help clean up global shipping? 

When the world’s second-largest container-ship company makes a massive, long-term commitment to a carbon-neutral shipping fuel, you can’t help but take notice. Over the past few months, A.P. Moller-Maersk has placed orders for a dozen large, ocean-going container vessels that will be fueled by “green” methanol, which can be produced by “breaking up” water to produce hydrogen, then combining the H₂ with captured CO₂ to “make up” enviro-friendly bunkers. And, to ensure an ample supply of the climate-friendly fuels for its first 12 “boxships,” the shipping giant also has entered into strategic partnerships with six alternative fuel companies that by 2025 will be producing a total of at least 730,000 metric tons (MT) a year of either bio-ethanol or e-methanol — two chemically identical forms of green methanol. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss why Maersk thinks bio-methanol and e-methanol may be the carbon-neutral shipping fuels everyone’s been searching for.

The global shipping industry spent the 2010s ratcheting down emissions of old-school pollutants — mostly sulfur dioxide (SO₂) — from the 50,000-plus tankers, dry bulkers, container ships, tankers, cruise ships, and other commercial vessels plying international waters. As we said in a number of blogs on the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) ever-tightening environmental rules, the maximum allowable sulfur content in marine fuel (or bunkers) used around most of the world plummeted from 4.5% in January 2010 to only 0.5% in January 2020, when IMO 2020 was implemented. As of January 1, 2015, the allowable sulfur content in bunkers used in the IMO’s Emission Control Areas (ECAs) — which include Europe’s Baltic and North seas and areas within 200 nautical miles of the U.S. and Canadian coasts — was slashed from 1% to 0.1%.