Locator: 48630CALIFORNIA.
Locator: 48630B.
Trump tour: link here.
Trump's 2025 Mideast Tour is tracked here. That tour clearly exceeds all of Taylor Swift's tours
combined. Trump's 2025 Mideast Tour is
tracked here.
EIA: why California pays so much for gasoline.
Vistra Energy: Texas utility expands
- announces $2 billion deal
- by Charles Kennedy, so you know it's important and it's a good article;
- look at this and so much more at the linked article:
Texas-based utility
Vistra Energy has struck a $1.9-billion deal for the acquisition of
close to 2.6 GW worth of gas-powered generation capacity across several
states from Lotus Infrastructure Partners.
The
seven power plants are located in New York, California, New England and
parts of the U.S. spanning 13 states serviced by transmission company
PJM Interconnection, Reuters reported. The assets include five combined-cycle facilities and two combustion turbine power plants.
The
news of the deal comes amid reports of an expected surge in electricity
demand in the United States, driven primarily by the proliferation of
data centers.
********************************
Back to the Bakken
WTI: $61.94.
New wells:
- Sunday, May 18, 2025: 47 for the month, 147 for the quarter, 344 for the year,
- 41040, conf, XTO, HBU Lizette State Federal 21X-16G,
- 40861, conf, Hunt, Alexandria 161-100-23-35H-3,
- 40860, conf, Hunt, Alexandria 161-100-23-35H-2,
- 40494, conf, Oasis, Lee N 5201 21-5 6B,
- 37576, conf, BR, Keene 21-2 MBH,
- Saturday, May 17, 2025: 42 for the month, 142 for the quarter, 339 for the year,
- 41039, conf, XTO, HBU Lizette State Federal 21X-16C,
- 40542, conf, Hess, EN-Horst-154-93-0310H-8,
- Friday, May 16, 2025: 40 for the month, 140 for the quarter, 337 for the year,
- 41038, conf, XTO, HBU Lizette State Federal 21X-16F,
- 39980, conf, Zavanna, Collie 13-25 2H,
RBN Energy: predicting the Uinta Basin's productivity and long-term staying power. Archived.
There’s a lot to like about the Uinta Basin’s waxy crude, but ramping up
its production and use in refinery feedstock slates will require
multimillion-dollar investments in rail terminals, special rail cars,
heated storage, refinery equipment and other midstream and downstream
infrastructure. A natural concern for E&Ps, midstreamers, and
refiners is whether the basin has sufficient long-term staying power to
justify the upfront costs and commitments. As we discuss in today’s RBN
blog, a machine-learning-based analysis can provide many of the answers
by assessing the basin’s long-term outlook under various scenarios.
In Part 1,
we explained that there are two flavors of Uinta waxy crudes: black
wax, with an API gravity of 32 to 36 degrees, and yellow wax, with an
API gravity of 38 to 44 degrees — both are desirable for a number of
refineries. Waxy crude is, of course, highly paraffinic (great for
making high-value lubricants); it also has amazingly low levels of
sulfur and other impurities and yields desirable proportions of gasoil,
kerosene, naphtha and other important refined products. And it can be
blended with other crudes, albeit usually as only a small percentage of
the mix. We also noted that IP rates in the heart of the Uinta are darn
good, matching and even exceeding those in the best parts of the
Permian.
The catch is that at ambient temperatures, waxy crude has the
consistency of shoe polish in a tin, so it needs to be stored in heated
tanks to remain in a liquid, pourable state. Then it needs to be raced
in insulated tanker trucks either to refineries in the Salt Lake City
area geared up to take the Uinta grades (130 miles to the
west/northwest) for offloading into heated tanks or 80 miles to the
south/southwest for transloading into expensive coiled and insulated
rail cars, then on to distant refineries that have made the necessary
investment to handle the Uinta barrels. During the subsequent multi-day,
unit-train rail trip, the waxy crude is allowed to solidify. When a
train arrives at its receiving point, steam is fed through coils in the
rail cars to reheat the stuff for offloading into (once again) heated
storage before it heads to refinery distillation and (for yellow wax)
sometimes straight into a fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) unit.
Despite waxy crude’s need for special care and handling — it’s a
talented but troublesome diva, the Mariah Carey of crude oil —
production has been rising fast (now averaging 170 Mb/d) and so has
demand from distant refineries and blenders, putting strain on existing
midstream and downstream infrastructure and spurring talk of needed
expansions. But as much as waxy crude market players — E&Ps, rail
terminal developers, refiners and blenders — want Uinta Basin production
to keep rising, they’re also wary of making big up-front investments to
support that growth without having a clear understanding of the basin’s
long-term prospects and, with that, a high degree of confidence their
investments will pay off.
Today, we’ll try to help out on that front by describing the AI-based analytics our friends at Novi Labs use to:
- Understand the individual contributions of a wide range of geologic
and operational variables to production levels in the Uinta’s two most
extensively drilled layers or “benches.”
- Use that understanding to predict the performance of future wells in the two benches.
- Forecast the volumes of waxy crude that could ultimately be extracted from these benches at various price points.
As we said last time, Novi Labs’ primary focus — for now — is on the
Uinta’s Green River Formation and, more specifically, the Uteland Butte
and the Upper and Lower Castle Peak benches (dashed black oval in Figure
1 below), where Uinta producers have drilled hundreds of wells and
which therefore offer the largest amount of geologic and operational
data. (More on that in a moment.)
Uinta Basin’s Geologic Formations
Figure 1. Uinta Basin’s Geologic Formations. Source: Novi Labs
