WTI Trending Toward $70 -- December 5, 2023

Locator: 46237HEADLINES.

Investing: not only "conviction" stocks, but cream of the crop -- AAPL and NVDA. Goldman Sachs. Link here.

ATT: partners with Ericsson. Says adios to Nokia.

Nvidia: for those who missed it, a great blog on supercomputers.

EVs infrastructure:

AAPL: after a bit of a scare yesterday, it appears that AAPL is back above $190. We'll see.

Inflation killer: CVS to lower drug costs. Link here. You can all send a thank-you note to Amazon Pharmacy and Mark Cuban and, perhaps, even President Biden. CVS must be getting slammed by on-line pharmacies -- or they see what's coming down the road. From the linked article:

CVS Health , the nation’s largest drugstore chain, will move away from the complex formulas used to set the prices of the prescription drugs it sells, shifting to a simpler model that could upend how American pharmacies are paid.

Under the plan, CVS’s roughly 9,500 retail pharmacies will get reimbursed by pharmacy-benefit managers and other payers based on the amount that CVS paid for the drugs, in addition to a limited markup and a flat fee to cover the services involved in handling and dispensing the prescriptions.

Today, pharmacies are generally paid using complex measures that aren’t directly based on what they spent to purchase specific drugs.

A similar payment model, sometimes known as “cost plus,” has been promoted by entrepreneur Mark Cuban’s eponymous pharmacy company, among others [insert Amazon logo here], which have said it brings greater clarity and accountability to drug pricing.

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Back to the Bakken

WTI; $72.38

Thursday, December 7, 2023: 159 for the month; 159 for the quarter, 729 for the year
39308, conf, Hess, SC-JW Hamilton-153-99-1314H-9,

Wednesday, December 6, 2023: 158 for the month; 158 for the quarter, 728 for the year
None.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023: 158 for the month; 158 for the quarter, 728 for the year
39309, conf, Hess, SC-JW Hamilton-153-99-1314H-8,
39148, conf, Enerplus, LK Bice 147-96-6-31-5H,
31769, conf, BR, Ivan 4-1-29MBH,

RBN Energy: Transco Corridor expansions give Appalachian gas producers a way out, part 2. Archived.

When it comes to midstream development in the Northeast, Appalachian natural gas producers have learned by now not to hold their breath. The region is notorious for its staunch environmental opposition to hydrocarbon infrastructure and its propensity for sending gas pipeline projects to the trash pile.

Against all odds, however, midstream development in the region has thawed in recent months, in large part spurred by the unlikely advancement of Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), the long-embattled project to move up to 2 Bcf/d from the Appalachia gas supply basin to the Transco Corridor, which runs north-south along the Eastern Seaboard.

In today’s RBN blog, we take a look at historical flows on Williams’s Transco Pipeline and what they can tell us about how MVP and Transco’s own planned expansions might reshape gas flows along the corridor. 

In Part 1, we looked at the latest on MVP and the slew of Transco Corridor expansions that were recently announced. For its part, MVP resumed work on the project in August, shortly after a Supreme Court ruling removed its last major legal hurdle. It has faced construction slowdowns since then, but Equitrans Midstream said during its Q3 earnings call in late October that it expected to finish the bulk of the work by the end of the year, followed by commissioning of the greenfield system in January, and full completion in Q1 2024, with commercial service starting April 1. That’s a delay from the end-of-2023 target set this summer, but for the first time ever, the project is now all but guaranteed to come to fruition.