Nikola Goes Bust; Apple Unveils New iPhone; And The Bakken Is As Strong As Ever -- February 19, 2025

Locator: 48585NIKOLA.

Nikola

• Nikola: link here.
• Nikola: a great trading stock -- link here.
• buy the dip.

In other news:

Trump stops global warming in first month of new administration. Secretary of Interior to be nominated for Nobel Prize. Will receive Medal of Freedom in special Oval Office ceremony. New federal holiday to be announced: Doug Burgum Day. Greta Thunberg to purchase a brand new Ford F-450. Al Gore to release his award-selling book with new introduction, and re-titled: I Was Wrong. Some of the preceding may be inaccurate. Needs to be fact-checked.

Record lows: link here. Later, North Dakota lows -- these are actual temps, not wind chill numbers -- but actual numbers -- unless. you've lived there, you can't imagine these numbers --

Apple iPhone 16e: no joke — link here.

• ticker AAPL: improves slightly after announcement. 
• then in late morning trading, goes positive! Whoo-hoo! 

Politics:

• watching political news the past few weeks, the GOP is going to have an incredible stable of folks running for president in 2027 ...
• SecState: Rubio -- the one to beat
• JD Vance: or is he the one to beat
• and then all the rest will look forward to a second term
• the Dems? Kamala, Newsom, George Clooney, Jeffries ... in that order

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Back to the Bakken

WTI: $72.46.

New wells: 

• Thursday, February 20 2025: 36 for the month, 81 for the quarter, 81 for the year,
• None.
• Wednesday, February 19, 2025: 36 for the month, 81 for the quarter, 81 for the year,
• 40428, conf, Grayson Mill, Alfred North 17-15 4H, 

RBN Energy:  the Permian-focused E%P expands again through M&A.

We defy you to name an oil and gas producer that’s been on the buying side of more $1-billion-plus M&A than Permian pure play Diamondback Energy, which announced February 18, 2025, that it had agreed to purchase a chunk of Midland Basin assets from Double Eagle IV, one of the Permian’s largest privately held producers, for just under $4.1 billion.

You’d be equally hard-pressed to find a team that’s assembled and flipped more Permian acreage and production than the folks at Double Eagle. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the newly announced Diamondback/Double Eagle IV deal and what it gives Diamondback, the fourth-largest producer in the Permian after ExxonMobil, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum.

Travis Stice, who has served as the company’s CEO for the past 13 years and chairman for the past three, has said that “M&A is as fundamental to Diamondback Energy as the air we breathe.”

No argument there, as evidenced by the E&P’s seemingly insatiable appetite for top-tier Permian acreage and oil-focused production. Midland-based Diamondback started a long string of multibillion-dollar deals in 2017 when it bought assets from Brigham Resources for $2.55 billion. The E&P followed that up in 2018 with agreements to acquire Ajax Resources for $1.25 billion and Energen for a whopping $9.2 billion, thereby increasing Diamondback’s Permian production by 75% and more than doubling its proved reserves. In the months after COVID hit in early 2020, the company bought QEP Resources and Guidon Energy for a total of $3 billion, and in 2022 it shelled out $1.6 billion for FireBird Energy and $1.5 billion for Lario Petroleum.

You’d think that after seven deals totaling more than $19 billion that Diamondback might have finally had its fill. After all, over just a few years it had rocketed to #5 on the list of publicly held Permian producers — and one of the biggest E&Ps in the U.S. for that matter.

But the company was really only getting started.

As we discussed in You Belong With Me, Diamondback announced last February that it had entered into its biggest deal ever: a $26 billion, stock-and-cash agreement to acquire privately held Endeavor Energy Resources. The transformational transaction, which closed in September, doubled Diamondback’s net acreage in the Midland to 694,000, increased its total Permian acreage by 70% to 838,000 (see Figure 1 below), and helped Diamondback boost its production by more than 90% year over year — from 463 Mboe/d in Q4 2023 to an estimated 870 Mboe/d in Q4 2024.

[Doing the math: $45 billion / 838,000 acres = $55K / Permian acre. Assuming FANG owned some Permian before it went on a buying spree, the $/acre has to greater.]

Figure 1. Diamondback and Endeavor Acreage in the Permian at Announcement. Source: RBN 

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The Book Page

I think I need to identify another "genre" of books.

"Airport" books. That category has already been identified by others. See this blog.

Who Really Wrote The [Hebrew] Bible: The Story of the Scribes, William M. Schniedewind, c. 2024. Princeton University Press, definitely fits this category.

Arrived today at the door, via Amazon. 

The notes for this book will be at this blog.