Manic Monday -- June 20, 2022

The four big energy stories trending on my twitter energy feed today:

• coal: European countries bringing back coal;
• Germany, first to announce; 2nd, Austria; Britain likely to be in the mix eventually
  
• geopolitics: Kaliningrad "blockade"
• Michigan: Line 5 
• would severely disrupt operations at half a dozen refineries 
• this could tell us we need too know how serious the administration is about using all "tools" available to bring down price of gasoline
• direct: disrupt crude oil flow to refiners
• indirect: CBR uses diesel to transport that crude when pipelines shut down
  
• GasBuddy: gasoline demand

*************************************
Back to the Bakken

Far Side: link here.

Markets closed today. It looks like oil is trading.

WTI: $110

Active rigs: 39 or thereabouts.

Monday, June 20, 2022: 30 for the month, 168 for the quarter, 328 for the year

• None.

Sunday, June 19, 2022: 30 for the month, 168 for the quarter, 328 for the year

• 38662, conf, CLR, LCU Reckitt 12-22H1X, 
• 38658, conf, CLR, LCU Ralph 11-27HX, 
  
• 38598, conf, Murex, Sheldon Mark 34-22H-A 3MB,

Saturday, June 18, 2022: 27 for the month, 165 for the quarter, 325 for the year

• 38436, conf, WPX, Wounded Face 14-15HEL,
  
• 37330, conf, Petro-Hunt, Lovdahl 158-94-32C-29-3H,

RBN Energy: the fundamentals driving the energy transition. 

If you want to get the energy world’s full attention, give it a global pandemic, a rush to decarbonize, and a brutal land war in Europe — all in quick succession. Bam! Bam! Bam! The past two-plus years have shaken the global oil, natural gas and NGL markets to the core, and forced just about everyone involved to rethink the expectations and plans they had before everything seemed to unravel. So what happens next? How do we provide energy security, put a lid on inflation, and save the planet? To answer those questions, a good place to start is to gain a better understanding of the fundamentals — how energy markets develop, work and interact. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss highlights from RBN’s recent School of Energy, a like-you-were-there replay of which is now available.

With COVID on the ropes, if not yet down for the count, we were finally able to conduct an in-person School of Energy — face to face, just like the old days! — in Houston on May 17-18. It was great to see some old friends and meet some new ones, but all of us in attendance were well aware that the energy world has been turned on its head since the last School was held in the fall of 2019. Back then, WTI was selling for about $60/bbl, Henry Hub natural gas was steady at about $2.30/MMBtu, and regular gasoline — never mind, it’s too painful to be reminded how cheap it was. Europe was pulling out all the stops in its effort to decarbonize as quickly as possible and, to supplement its new wind farms and solar facilities, was making plans to pipe in a lot more natgas from Putin’s Russia.

That was then, and this is now. Today, everybody and his/her second cousin have thrown out their old expectations about “the future” and are in what you might call mid-scramble — that is, trying to figure out exactly how to navigate the very uncertain months and years ahead. Near-term, there are serious questions and concerns about energy supply, demand and prices — not just in Europe, but in the U.S. and just about every other energy-dependent nation. How high will gasoline and diesel prices go? Will there be a recession? And what about natgas supplies and prices this coming winter? There are other questions too, such as how fast is too fast for the transition to a lower-carbon world? How do we weigh the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the need to keep the economy humming and the lights on?