TGIT -- The Early Morning Edition -- Resistance At $80 -- July 27, 2023

Locator: 45220B.   

Wow: both Shell and TotalEnergies miss forecasts; earnings plunge by half? More than half? Well, whatever it is/was, it is/was a lot. Shell didn't miss a beat: raised dividend by 15% and said they would increase buybacks. Well, of course, they would buy back their own stock. They know that 3Q23 is gooing to be .... awesome.

CMCSA: beats estimates.

TESLA: rigged "range" estimates; confirms "cold weather woes."

China: youth unemployment staggering. Kinda tells me the US economy is doing just fine, thank you. Think "Goldilocks."

INTC: it's not all about phones any more.

Oil demand: globally, using more than ever. An inconvenient truth. And, here.

Coal demand: globally, using more than ever. Starting to see a trend here.

Internet for all: why didn't the US / NASA do this years ago? $120 million = 33 cents / American.

AI bubble. Probably not. Apple supplier says AI demand robust. And, here.

Trucking: Daimler and hydrogen.

RIG: the stock, doubled in price over the past year. Link here to Guyana.

Inflation: corroborates the "blog's" take on inflation. JPow gets it. Americans don't care about "the number." They care about the price of gasoline which they see in huge lights every day.

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Back to the Bakken

WTI: $79.47.

Friday, July 28, 2023: 87 for the month; 195 for the quarter, 450 for the year
39475 conf, Ovintiv USA, Newman 150-97-21-16-15H,

Thursday, July 27, 2023: 86 for the month; 194 for the quarter, 449 for the year 
None.

RBN Energy: ethane prices rocket into space, then crash to earth on Tuesday. What happened?

In just over a month, the price of Mont Belvieu purity ethane doubled, from 19 c/gal to 39 c/gal on Friday. Sure, the price of natural gas was up about 15% over the same period. But that increase was nowhere near ethane’s, so it was certainly not the price of gas that was making ethane take off. In fact, with ethane rocketing into space and gas prices still in the dumper, the ethane-to-gas ratio — a key measure of the value of ethane — skyrocketed, soaring from 1.2X in mid-June to 2.2X on Friday. A ratio at this level has only happened twice before in the past decade: once in 2018 due to a collision between fractionation capacity and new petchem plants coming online, and then again in 2020 during the COVID petchem demand surge. But the most recent price surge didn’t last long. On Tuesday ethane came back to earth, crashing 22% in a single day, and the ethane-to-gas ratio deflated down to 1.6X. So what’s happening? There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there that we won’t repeat here. Instead, in today’s RBN blog, we’ll lay out what we think are the most likely contributing factors behind this wild ride.