Locator: 48741IRAN.
Diego Garcia, June 11, 2025, link here.
US to evacuate embassy personnel from Iraqi immediately.
UK warns maritime traffic risks in Hormuz Strait. Link here.
Sources: attack may be imminent. Link here.
Sources? Link here.
Families of US military in Mideast being moved out of the region. Link here.
Again, in real time. Link here.
Locator: 48740AMD.
Ticker AMD:
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Locator: 48739ORACLE.
Updates
June 12, 2025: the transcript does not even begin to give one the feel of the CEO's almost giddy remarks regarding Oracle following earnings report. Takeaways from the CEO's comments:
June 12, 2025:
Oracle: immediately after the open, Thursday morning opening;
Oracle CEO comments are absolutely incredible; up 10% at the open on a
down day for the Dow.
Original Post
CNBC, on Oracle, after Oracle reports results. Link here.
Disclaimer
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Oracle
It's a bit unclear, but Oracle should now have its headquarters in Nashville, having announced that it (Oracle) planned to move from Austin, TX, to Nashville, TN, in 2024.
One of many links on the blog regarding Oracle. Link here.
Ticker today:
And here, App Economy:
Locator: 48738B.
Note to readers: there is so much going on and I'm so busy, the full note may have to wait until midnight tonight.
Two big stories:
Driven by two other stories:
Oracle earnings: link here.
On another note, AAPL was crushed after the Joanna Stern interview; can be seen on YouTube. I posted my comments to the YouTube video, a "cut and paste" from my notes on the blog.
Her interview was with "Craig and Greg" to discuss Apple's AI debacle. Apple's AI story is an incredibly good story, as it were, for folks like me. We'll talk about that later, also.
And then a personal story, "REAL ID" in Texas.
But more later.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $68.15. Up overnight but then surged during the day with news that President Trump has ordered non-essential US embassy personnel to leave Iraq, shall we say, immediately. WTI finished up $3.17 for the day; up almost 5%. My recommendation: find some good sites on "x" and stay tuned. This may be a good start. [After hours: up another 64 cents; trending toward $69.]
Active rigs: 32.
Six new permits, #41991 - #41996, inclusive:
A spacing change for:
Four permits renewed:
Map of North America's Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs). Similar maps can easily be found. This is from Arcus Power Corp that suggests that some RTOs, such as Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) and Southwest Power Pool (SPP) do not accurately represent the actual cost of energy and capacity.
Go to the link to see that discussion.
Here's the map, posted March 11, 2024:
What makes this interesting is this press release from SPP that was dated March 20, 2025:
From the link:
On June 4, 2024, SPP filed its amended tariff with FERC to accommodate requirements for Western entities pursuing RTO membership or increased participation as part of the expansion of the SPP RTO: Basin Electric Power Cooperative; Colorado Springs Utilities; Deseret Power Electric Cooperative; the Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska (MEAN); Platte River Power Authority; Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association; and the Western Area Power Administration Colorado River Storage Project, Rocky Mountain and Upper Great Plains regions.
The expansion of the RTO is part of Aspire 2026, SPP’s five-year strategic plan, which details opportunities to fully integrate Western facilities into SPP’s existing market system in a way that creates meaningful, equitable value for new and existing members.
Again, these are the seven western entities, which are now part of the "eastern" SPP RSO:
Basin Electric Power Cooperative; Colorado Springs Utilities; Deseret Power Electric Cooperative; the Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska (MEAN); Platte River Power Authority; Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association; and the Western Area Power Administration Colorado River Storage Project, Rocky Mountain and Upper Great Plains regions.
The SPP RSO now extends from the Canadian border right down the mid-section of America to the northern "border" of ERCOT (Texas).
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Inc., formerly named Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, Inc. (MISO) is an Independent System Operator (ISO) and Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) established in 1998.
It provides open-access transmission service and monitors the high-voltage transmission system in the Midwestern United States, in Manitoba, Canada, and in a southern U.S. region that includes much of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
MISO also operates one of the world's largest real-time energy markets. The 15 states covered by MISO are: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin.
North Dakota: it appears MISO's coverage in North Dakota is fairly small geographically compared to SPP but appears to take in a larger part of the North Dakota population.
From wiki, SPP:
Southwest Power Pool and its member companies coordinate the flow of electricity across approximately 60,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines spanning 14 states. The company is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Locator: 48736B.
Oracle: to release earnings after market close later today.
EVs: Trump will sign bill to rescind California's EVs mandate. To sign legislation, tomorrow, Thursday.
Climate pledges? Major corporations go quiet on climate pledges. Link here.
Peak oil demand: narrative has flipped. Last ten years, forecasts were "oil demand has peaked." Now? Oil demand: o peak in sight; will reach 120 million bopd by 2050. OPEC expects a 24% increase in world's energy needs between now and 2050. Link at Reuters.
Permian: it's all about natural gas. And it's gonna last a long time.
The Ukraine effect? Pentagon slashes in half its request for USAF F-35s (Lockheed).
China-US trade talks: it surprises me how many folks on social media appear not to have read Trump's book, The Art of the Deal.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $66.42. Up another $1.44 overnight; up 2.3% overnight.
New wells (amazing how few new permits needed each year to maintain oil production):
RBN Energy: can US ethane survive without China? Note: story breaking today -- China and US have tentatively agreed on tariffs with which both can life. Headline releases did not mention ethane trade with China. Having said that, EPD was up a bit yesterday and is up again today, albeit not much. Same with Engergy Transfer.
Two-thirds of Gulf Coast ethane exports — about 225 Mb/d in 2024 — go to China via docks owned by Enterprise Products Partners and Energy Transfer.
These days, that’s a big problem. The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has effectively banned ethane exports to China by requiring licenses that it won’t approve.
Ethane has become a bargaining chip in U.S.-China negotiations over rare earths and tariffs — in part because China has no alternative source of waterborne ethane feedstock for its petchems. But the U.S. has a reciprocal issue. While China isn’t the only market for U.S. ethane, there are very limited other destinations for the volumes they typically take. That could mean significant “rejection” of ethane into natural gas at U.S. gas processing plants — i.e., selling ethane for its fuel value instead of recovering it for petchems or export. Of course, the U.S. is actively negotiating with China on trade issues in London this week, and the ethane export ban could be lifted by the time you read this. But if it drags on, can the U.S. gas processing and pipeline system handle that much additional ethane rejection? That’s a huge, critically important question for NGL markets — and precisely what we’ll explore in today’s RBN blog.
The Shale Revolution has had many effects on U.S. energy production, but one of the most dramatic and far-reaching was the unprecedented growth in the volumes of ethane emerging from wells along with other NGLs, crude oil and natural gas. As we have blogged about extensively over the years, ethane — aka C2 because it has two carbon atoms (plus six hydrogen atoms) — is the quirkiest NGL for at least two reasons. First, it can either be “rejected” into natural gas and sold for its Btu value or separated (with other NGLs) from natural gas at processing plants and then fractionated into liquid ethane for use as a feedstock in steam crackers to make ethylene and other petrochemicals. Second, fractionated ethane — unlike propane, butanes and other so-called NGL purity products — has (with very limited exceptions) only that one use, as a petchem feedstock.
Note that, like the other NGLs, ethane is a byproduct of natural gas production, which likewise can be primarily a byproduct of crude oil production in some oil-centric basins like the Permian and the Bakken. That means that ethane gets produced regardless of its price! It comes out of the ground as a comingled stream, is extracted in a nearby gas processing plant, and then is, in almost all cases, transported by pipeline in the form of a Y-grade mix to a centralized fractionator that splits the mix into ethane and the four other purity NGL products. In 2024, U.S. fractionators churned out about 2.8 MMb/d of ethane; we estimate that another 1 MMb/d of ethane was rejected at processing plants into natural gas and sold as gas. (Much more on ethane rejection later.)
As shown in Figure 1 below, of the 2.8 MMb/d that was extracted from gas and produced as liquid ethane last year, about 2.3 MMb/d (or ~82%; orange layer) was piped to U.S. steam crackers, many of them built over the past few years to take advantage of the flood of cheap domestically sourced ethane coming their way. The other 500 Mb/d (or ~18%; blue layer) of produced ethane was exported, with more than two-thirds of those exports (~70%, or about 350 Mb/d) being shipped out of Enterprise’s Morgan’s Point, TX, export terminal near Houston and Energy Transfer’s Orbit terminal in Nederland, TX. The other 30% was either piped north to petchem plants in Canada or shipped out of Energy Transfer’s Marcus Hook terminal near Philadelphia. Most of the ethane exports out of Texas went to Asia (smaller volumes went to Europe and Latin America), while most of the exports out of Marcus Hook went to Europe.
Figure 1. U.S. Ethane Exports vs. Domestic Demand. Source: EIA
