Barnum & Bailey And The Biden Family Circus, Part 1: The Three-Ring Circus Today With "The Fed" In The Center Ring -- February 1, 2023

EPD: link here.

The circus today:

• the center ring: the Fed announcement today
• the small left-side ring: weekly EIA petroleum report
• the small right-side ring: Brady -- but that show is over

Brady: another job opening. The GOAT announces retirement -- "for real this time." Will become CFO for Cathie Wood's ARK innovation ETF fund. Some or all of this may be inaccurate. No source.

Ukraine: US readying another $2 billion aid package. 

Recession:

INTC: most egregious news today -- Intel "implodes" and CEO, directors take "small pay cut" and apparently staggered. INTC up almost a percent today.   

AMD: up 8%.

Texas grid: holds, but huge ice storm today could knock out transmission lines. 

• Everything still shut down in great state of Texas -- okay -- everything shut down in our neighborhood -- LOL.

Alaska: COP might get its 3-well project. More on this later, perhaps. Alaska is tracked here.

• Reminder: May 30, 2021: why President Biden approved COP's giant Willow Field in Alaska. It was all about saving the TAPS -- a national security issue. 

• Willlow project on North Slope
• 600 million bbls; $8 billion
• COP wants 5-well exploration project
• Biden willing to go to 3-well program -- COP says anything less is uneconomical
• if no decision quickly, summer 2023 drilling program dead
  
• Biden says "okay" but bureaucrats hold the sealed envelope with the final decision. Me? The story is a political story, not an energy story -- except for COP which is running out of oil plays. 

So, this is what we have, link here:

• Trinidad and Tobago: Shell.
• Surinam: Apache and TTE.
• Guyana: XOM.
• Venezuela: CVX.

Where's COP? The Permian, which some folks say has reached peak production.  

Right on cue: see RBN Energy below. 

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

Active rigs: 46.

The Far Side: link here.

WTI: $78.58.

Natural gas:$2.604.

Thursday, February 2, 2023:
39074, conf, Crescent Point, CPEUSC Szarka 4-36-25-159N-100W-MBH,
39071, conf, Resonance Exploration, Resonance Fylling 3036H,
39034, conf, CLR, Rhonda 11-28H,
38409, conf, Whiting, Kannianen 11-5TFHU,
38164, conf, Hess, BB-Budahn A-150-95-0403H-11,

Wednesday, February 1, 2023: 1 for the month; 71 for the quarter, 71 for the year
39075, conf, Crescent Point Energy, CPEUSC Szarka 3-36-25-159N-100W-MBH, 

RBN Energy: Permian M&A widening the gap between the major and minor players. Archived.

“Top-tier rock, massive scale, and ever-improving efficiency” — that’s the mantra of the largest publicly held E&Ps in the Permian, many of which have only added to their heft during the pandemic/post-pandemic era by acquiring complementary production and midstream assets from private equity funds and old-time oil-and-gas families.

Yes, it’s either/or time in the U.S.’s leading oil and gas basin: Either you get bigger, high-grade the acreage you control and supercharge your free cash flow (and your stock buybacks and dividends) or you accept your fate as an also-ran or, if you’re lucky, an acquisition target.

Just last week, Matador Resources announced a $1.6 billion deal to acquire Advance Energy Partners, which will boost Matador’s Delaware Basin output by 25% and give it a foothold in the Permian’s big-boy league. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss this and other recent asset acquisitions in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico and what they say about the Permian’s future.

A year ago we said the upstream oil and gas sector was in the midst of the most impactful wave of corporate consolidation since the turn of the century, when a plunge in oil prices spurred mega-deals that helped to form many of today’s supermajors. Well, the M&A wave that started in mid-2020 may have crested but it’s still rolling in. 

In 2022, we returned again and again to the growth-through-acquisitions story, which often had a Permian angle. We focused on the series of Permian-related deals (five totaling more than $1.8 billion) that Earthstone Energy had completed in 2021 and early 2022 to significantly expand its role in both the Midland and Delaware basins. Last summer, it closed on a sixth: the $627 million acquisition of Titus Oil & Gas assets in the northern Delaware. Then we looked at Devon Energy’s extensive “portfolio renewal” program, which last year included a number of major acreage trades in the Delaware that unlocked more than 200 extended-reach drilling locations previously constrained to one-mile developments. (Devon is among the top E&Ps in the Permian, with production averaging 421,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, or 421 Mboe/d, as of Q3 2022.)