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.
- 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.)
