Locator: 48506SERBIA.
Does Trump ever quit? The most audacious Obama got was a "beer summit." Someone said Trump has been in office less than twenty days.
This weekend he will be in New Orleans for the Super Bowl. IIRC, someone said President Trump is the first US president to go to the Super Bowl. This is # fifty (L) [subtract one (I) from ten (X) to get] nine. LIX.
Locator: 48505B.
Eggs: I've never hoarded eggs but local grocers in north Texas (DFW area) are starting to impose limits so now I make sure we have enough eggs. I've never had more than two 12-dozen eggs in my fridge at one time; now trending toward four dozen at all times. Current price running about $4.89 / dozen.
Opening comment: the GOP is going to have quite a strong field of contenders for the 2027 / 2028 presidential primary season. SecState Marco Rubio is going to get a lot of exposure. Pam Bondi could be in the mix. SecDOT and SecDEF will get a lot of exposure. I'm impressed.
USAID: a federal judge ways he will issue a "short pause." Not a problem. Once these folks serving overseas find themselves with no US support, regardless of the legal rulings, they won't hang around for long.
"Sanctuary cities": get out the popcorn. Once the word gets out there are five sanctuary cities of choice -- Denver, NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston -- Greyhound will have to add more buses.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor: no one is above the law ... except of course, the dozens of family members and friends that President Biden pardoned during Trump's inauguration. LOL. And most of those folks had not even been officially charged with any crime.
Echo chamber: the Dems. It gets tedious. Theater.
SPOT: EPD, update. Link here. Up today. Up nicely this past year. Pays 6.5%.
Enterprise Products Partners (EPP) LP’s 2-million b/d Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT) offshore crude export project lacks sufficient customer interest and may be cancelled. Enterprise received its US Maritime Administration license for SPOT last year and been targeting 2027 startup (OGJ Online, Apr. 10, 2024).
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Back to the Bakken
Released from confidential list today:
| ool | Date | Days | BBLS Oil | Runs | BBLS Water | MCF Prod | MCF Sold | Vent/Flare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BAKKEN | 12-2024 | 31 | 17436 | 17419 | 15334 | 40764 | 40463 | 301 |
| BAKKEN | 11-2024 | 30 | 25496 | 25749 | 24052 | 46752 | 46277 | 475 |
| BAKKEN | 10-2024 | 26 | 14224 | 14176 | 13119 | 22870 | 20984 | 1611 |
| BAKKEN | 9-2024 | 30 | 24252 | 24287 | 20954 | 37896 | 37009 | 336 |
| BAKKEN | 8-2024 | 16 | 21489 | 21073 | 14506 | 37761 | 36906 | 403 |
| BAKKEN | 7-2024 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 915 | 1157 | 0 | 1157 |
WTI: $71.00.
Active rigs: 34.
Four new permits, #41597 - #41600, inclusive:
Two permits renewed:
Four producing wells (DUCs) reported as completed:
Locator: 48504EVS.
Updates
February 10, 2025: Ford CEO -- Trump tariffs would wipe out billioins in profits if they're long-lasting. Link here. A must read. More than just about tariffs.
February 10, 2025: Ford expects mounting EV losses this year. Link here: https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/ford-expecting-mounting-ev-losses-year.
February 10, 2025: Ford stock down 8% during week ending February 7, 2025; great summary here.
February 10, 2025: GM is slowing down EV production in Mexico per Honda's request. Link here.
February 8, 2025, less than a day after updating current EV situation, we get this from Trump (as expected and "forecast" below), link here:
Original Post
Some months ago I said I wasn't going to blog about EVs any more and explained why.
But the story is incredibly compelling after Ford's 4Q24 earnings call.
Below the fold: re-posting a long post on EVs from last month.
Other links that caught my attention this morning:
EVs sell well when gasoline prices are high and there's a concern about shortage of oil going forward. Right now, gasoline prices are fairly high but stable; and there's no concern about any shortage of oil going forward.
Trump has yet to weigh in and we know where he stands on EVs.
Google California EV sales.
The problem with EVs, link here. To the best of my knowledge this has not changed, and this is why EVs will fail:
In the graphic above, the bigger car rated at 120kWh pulls up to the charging unit rated at 60kW. The car takes a charge for two hours. Two (2) hrs x 60 kW = 120 kWh which is what the bigger car in the graph above is rated.
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EVs
From the blog, January 9, 2025.
Wow,
this was talked about on the blog years ago -- how this would
absolutely devastate the automobile industry -- trapped between the
California mandates and the reality almost everywhere else. The
Obama/Biden legacy/reputation, with regard to EVs, will go the way of
Angela Merkel in Germany.
The years just keep getting warmer. I mean this facetiously. At first, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told us 2016 was 0.94 degree warmer than the 20th-century average. Then the agency raised its estimate by several steps to 1 degree in 2020 before dropping it back to 0.99 perhaps under Trump influence. With Democrats back in charge under President Biden, 2016 started getting warmer again, reaching 1.03 degrees in 2023. The latest NOAA chart shows it 1.04 degrees warmer than the baseline.
Consider it a small evidence of what David Samuels, in a widely noted article, calls the legacy of Obama-era “permission structures.” By permission structures, he means a “whole of society” strategy of pressure and subtle bullying to force buy-in of Obama goals. I hit on a similar formula in 2012 when I explained that Mr. Obama imposed his will by giving voters “permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him.”
One residue, which NOAA obviously participated in, was the permission structure behind today’s gathering boondoggle created by Obama-era mandated investment in electric vehicles.
A feature Mr. Samuels stresses is an Obamaesque ability to substitute new, instantly embraced ideas for old, instantly embraced ideas. In his first two years, Joe Biden justified his giant increase in EV subsidies and mandates by citing the “existential risk” of global climate change. Then that argument was junked overnight. EVs became a “strategic” technology that must be protected from Chinese competition.
Both arguments were nonsense, as I belabored here, yet were seamlessly echoed in the media in turn. Subsidizing green-energy consumption is simply to subsidize energy consumption, including fossil energy. EVs are “strategic” only for China, to reduce its reliance on imported oil in anticipation of military conflict with the U.S. For the rest of the world, including the U.S., electric cars are a consumer technology, albeit a fast-emerging and promising one. Sensibly, they’re also a technology that should have been left to consumers and carmakers to adapt and develop without distorting handouts and mandates.
The result is finally in view: a colossal self-destruction of the Western auto industry, with Germany’s at the forefront. Volkswagen is in a panic about Chinese competition to the money-losing EVs that Berlin forces the company to sell. Germany’s export-led economy is in free fall. Its bellwether auto giant, VW, is pursuing its first-ever domestic factory closures and layoffs.
Likewise, Ford CEO Jim Farley sees his company’s survival in the U.S. threatened by Chinese EVs given the tens of thousands of dollars Ford already loses on each of its government-mandated electric vehicles. The author of Germany’s auto mess, Angela Merkel, is now reviled as an unprincipled bandwagon grabber.
Don’t kid yourself.
The same reputational fate is coming for Messrs. Obama and Biden. Mr. Biden’s EV protectionism is America’s admission of defeat. The U.S. went from “Americans must buy EVs to save the planet” to “Americans must be prevented from buying cheap, high-quality Chinese EVs to preserve a government-created domestic boondoggle.”
Much more at the link.
Locator: 48502JOBS.
They're still talking about that "second rate cut." It gets tedious.
Whatever the number is, by 10:00 a.m. the jobs report will have been forgotten by the market.
The number:
Unemployment rate falls to 4.0% -- exceeding every analyst's estimate. "Every" analyst said the
34.1 hours = work week. Has been at 34.3 "forever." Bit move.
U3: 4.0%! Huge.
Labor force participation increased.
Absolutely no reason to cut rates; unemployment numbers dropping.
Wow! Link here. Wow, great statistic.
Steve Liesman:
Market slightly more negative after numbers came in, but not much.
Everything else: blah, blah, blah.
Essentially full employment. Holy mackerel -- U-1 at 1.5% -- how can it get any better?
Participation rate, link here. This certainly suggests a robust US economy:
Is this the most important graphic? This number affects a lot of other data. Link here. Obamacare defines a full-time employee as one who works 30 hours / week or 120 hours / month.
Locator: 48501AAPL.
Apple suppliers, this is an old screenshot, shown many times on the blog. Search Apple iPhone suppliers.
Why it's important: link here.
I invested in Skyworks for a very short time. I forget the time frame. Something -- I've long forgotten -- suggested that it would be best to exit that Skyworks position. That was some years ago. One can do a "Skyworks" word search if interested. I'm not. I've moved on.
AVGO has become a core holding for me.
I wasn't going to post this story when this story first broke -- apparently I wasn't interested. Today, I took a second look -- now, it's worth posting.
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Disclaimer
Brief
Reminder
Briefly:
Locator: 48499B.
Politics: power of the purse -- Democrats will be spinning their wheels in the US House -- they need three Republican votes for any bill they want to pass (won't happen); then US Senate needs to take up the bill and then pass it (won't happen); and, finally, Trump is buying a boatload of Sharpies from Staples for use when getting ready to veto such bills if they happen to sneak through that legislative process.
Department of Education: the secretary will go through the rules and regulations line by line and will remove them if not explicitly written into US law. Trump 1.0 learned a lot about how to do this right.
Wow: this is the Dems' biggest problem --
Democratic US House leader Jeffries is an Obama dobblegänger in speaking, looks, mannerisms, and politics. If you haven't seen this, watch Jeffries' daily briefing on FOX Live Now streaming every day about 11:00 a.m. CT.
Sanctuary cities: Trump is doing a great job working the "sanctuary city" issue.
The one thing he could be doing: "incentivize" criminals to move to sanctuary cities. Advertise at bus stations, railroad stations. Even offer free transportation (rail, bus) to "sanctuary cities."
GDPNow, link here:
ISO-NE:
My favorite chart, link here:
AMZN: earnings.
BABA, link here:
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $71.13.
New wells:
RBN Energy: how would Midwest refiners deal with a 10% tariff on Canadian crude?
The looming threat of a 10% tariff on U.S. imports of Canadian crude oil hasn’t just angered Canadians — and understandably so, we might add. It’s also put a spotlight on PADD 2 — the Midwest/Great Plains region — whose pipelines transport the vast majority of Canadian exports and whose 25 refineries (combined capacity 4.3 MMb/d) are, in many cases, significant consumers of heavy and light crudes from up north. Put simply, to assess the impacts of the still-possible trade war on U.S. refiners and producers on both sides of the border, you need to understand PADD 2’s crude oil supply/demand balance and the options Midwestern refineries that currently run Canadian crude would have if a tariff were put in place. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss these dynamics.
The monthlong truce between President Trump and Prime Minister Trudeau is just that: an agreement to pause a possible trade war for a few weeks to give both sides an opportunity to come to a longer-term meeting of the minds. Trump has famously said that “tariff” is his favorite word, so assuming a 10% levy on imports of Canadian crude is off the table would be a mistake. All bets are still off, and even if things are settled once and for all, Canadians might reasonably ask, “Why the heck would the U.S. turn on its best friend like that?”
Figure 1. PADD 2 Sub-Districts and Refineries. Source: RBN
Note: Refineries represented by colored dots
The Big Picture
Before we discuss the specifics of how a sampling of PADD 2 refineries might react to a 10% tariff on U.S. imports of Canadian crude oil, we’ll take a quick big-picture look at the region. Stretching from North Dakota to Oklahoma to Ohio, PADD 2 is, first of all, a crude oil production powerhouse (~1.8 MMb/d in recent months), led by the Bakken Shale (~1.2 MMb/d) in the northwestern corner of the PADD’s Northern sub-district (medium-green area in Figure 1 above), the mature Anadarko Basin across Oklahoma in the Southern sub-district (dark-green area), and even burgeoning supplies of condensate (~100 Mb/d) from the Utica play in eastern Ohio, situated near the eastern edge of the Eastern sub-district (light-green area). Additionally, PADD 2 currently receives ~2.5 MMb/d of Canadian imported crude oil — mostly via Enbridge’s massive Mainline system and South Bow’s Keystone Pipeline — but we estimate that about one-fifth of that, or ~500 Mb/d, passes through the Midwest/Great Plains region on its way to refineries and export docks in PADD 3 (Gulf Coast). PADD 2 also receives inflows from the Permian and other production areas in PADD 3 (~750 Mb/d, on average, in the second half of 2024) and the Denver Julesburg (DJ) and other basins in PADD 4 (Rockies; ~930 Mb/d in the second half of 2024), though a good bit of the latter simply flows through PADD 2 (most of it through Cushing) to the Gulf Coast.
