Locator: 48618B.
SIRTRUMP: check out the inflation report this a.m. Following the report, the DOW turns more negative, down 165 points, and the NASDAQ turns green, up 60 points.
China oil imports: Saudi crude flows to China remain at one-year high. Doesn't feel like a recession to me.
Focus today: hydrogen. Later.
United Health: oh-oh.
McDonald's: to hire 375,000 new employees. Doesn't sound like a recession to me. Will add 900 locations; currently has 13,500 locations in the US. 6.7% increase.
ChatGPT: this morning. The query: "Bakken blogs." Six-paragraph response, and this was at the top:
Million Dollar Way: has nothing to do with investing or "money to be made in the Bakken." It refers to the main highway leading out of Williston when I was growing up in North Dakota, my "way" of getting out of Williston when traveling. LOL. Seriously.
DFW:
- Starbucks: coffee, $3.85; plain croissant, $4.25
- McDonald's coffee, $2.19; two hash browns, $4.18
Back on the road: generally on this trip, much more time for blogging.
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Back to the Bakken
The big story in the Bakken right now? For the past several days, the number of permits being renewed is as high as I've ever seen. Below, I’ve posted the numbers.
WTI: $62.73.
New wells:
Wednesday, May 14, 2025: 35 for the month, 135 for the quarter, 327 for the year,
- 40910, conf, BR, Devils Backbone 5D,
- 40804, conf, Hess, EN-Horst-LW-154-93-1004H-1,
- 40177, conf, Five States Operating, RH 1-16H,
- 39981, conf, Zavanna, Collie 13-25 3H,
- 37575, conf, BR, Keene 21-2 TFH,
- 39819, conf, Hess, RS-Nelson Farms-156-91-1819H-2,
Bakken permits renewed over the past few days:
- past week
- Monday, May 5, 2025: 18
- Tuesday, May 6, 2025: 14
- Wednesday, May 7, 2025: 14
- Thursday, May 8, 2025: 21
- Friday, May 9, 2025: 16
- Monday, May 12, 2025: 14
RBN Energy: Vaquero Midstream breaks into the big time with Delaware Basin expansion. Archived.
The Permian’s Midland and Delaware basins have seen their share of midstream success stories the past few years — many of them privately backed efforts to gain a foothold and then expand into the big time. Navitas Midstream Partners (later sold to Enterprise Products Partners) comes to mind; so do Oryx Midstream and Brazos Midstream. Now comes Vaquero Midstream — vaquero, of course, being Spanish for cowboy — the scrappy developer of a gas gathering and processing network in the Delaware. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, Vaquero recently announced plans to build a new high-pressure pipeline that will double the capacity of its gathering system and a new processing plant that will give it a total of 600 MMcf/d of processing capacity with a slew of interconnections to key gas and NGL takeaway pipelines.
First, an explanation of our song title and why it fits today’s topic. “Rhinestone Cowboy” may conjure up images of country music’s Glen Campbell duded up in fancy, gem-encrusted attire, ”riding out on a horse in a Star-Spangled rodeo.” But the song’s lyrics reveal it’s really the story of a determined, hard-working singer with a dream who won’t give up ’til he’s “where the lights are shining on me ... like a Rhinestone Cowboy.”
That’s also the story of Vaquero Midstream, which over the past nine years has been operating and expanding a network for gathering rich, NGL-packed associated gas in the West Texas part of the Delaware and shuttling it to a processing complex where it is separated into residue gas and mixed NGLs. That network, which we first discussed in 2017, currently includes more than 200 miles of low- and high-pressure lines (dark-green lines in Figure 1 below), plus two 200-MMcf/d gas processing plants at Vaquero’s Caymus complex (magenta star) just over the line in Pecos County, near the all-important Waha gas hub (magenta circle; more on that in a moment.) Caymus I came online in 2016, and Caymus II started up in 2018.
Figure 1. Vaquero Midstream’s Gas Gathering and Processing Network. Source: RBN
