Wednesday, August 27, 2025

"California Can't Survive What's Coming" -- Victor Davis Hanson -- August 27, 2025

Locator: 48977ARCHIVES.

For the archives. This might be interesting ten years from now. Or not. 

All of this needs to be fact-checked. I often make simply arithmetic errors.

Link here.


Utility bills:

This site says 20% of Californians are at least a month behind in paying their utility bills.

Births:

From GoogleAI:
In California, the percentage of babies born with costs paid by Medicaid (Medi-Cal) is around 40% to 41%, with recent figures from sources like the California Health Care Foundation and Becker's Hospital Review placing it at approximately 39% or 40.5%.
This makes Medicaid a major source of financing for births in the state, alongside private insurance. [Well, duh.] There are approximately 400,000 live births in California. See California budget here.
Doula care, Medi-Cal payments for doula care:

  •  a January 2024 reimbursement update for doula services under Medi-Cal provides a glimpse of delivery-related costs:
    • vaginal delivery: Maximum reimbursement for a full package of prenatal, delivery, and postpartum doula services is $3,152.65.
    • Cesarean birth: Maximum reimbursement for a doula services package is $3,263.31.
  • broader cost comparisons
    • for a broader perspective, other studies have compared Medi-Cal reimbursement to commercial insurance payments for childbirth. A 2022 analysis found the disparity in California to be one of the highest in the nation:
    • the payment gap between commercial insurers and Medi-Cal for childbirth in California was over $15,000.
  • the average commercial payment for childbirth was considerably higher than the average fee-for-service Medi-Cal payment in all 38 states studied.
  • it's easy to do the math
    • cost to the state / Medi-Cal
    • cost to the hospital

Foreign born:

  • in 2023, approximately one in four Americans not born in the United States lived in California.
  • the state has the largest immigrant population in the nation; it accounts for about a fourth of the national total.
  • here is a breakdown of recent data on the foreign-born population:
    • share of national total: In 2023, California was home to 11.3 million foreign-born residents, or about 28.4% of the U.S. total.
    • California's population: Foreign-born residents also represent a significant portion of California's population. In 2023, they made up 27% of the state's residents, the highest share of any state.
    • other states: The next largest immigrant populations were in Texas (over 6 million) and Florida (5.4 million)

Deportation:

  • it would require deporting 8,000 undocumented visitors per day for four years to get the number of undocumented visitors in California back to the number it was the day before Joe Biden was sworn in as president -- needs to be fact-checked.

Chart Of The Day -- August 27, 2025

Locator: 48976INVESTING.

Tag: Bank of New York Mellon

Headlines:

Ticker:


Link here.

Focus on dividends:

  • (53-47)/47 = 12.77%

BR With Permits For Three New Wells In Dimmick Lake Oil Field -- August 27, 2025

Locator: 48975B.

WTI: $63.78.

Active rigs: 32. Recent high.

Three new permits, #42256 - #42258, inclusive:

  • Operator: BR
  • Field: Dimmick Lake (McKenzie County)
  • Comments:
    • BR has permits for three wells (Demicks Lake, Clemens, and Maverick), SESW 7-151-96; 
      • to be sited 830 / 958 FSL and 1225 FWL.

Two producing wells (DUCs) reported as completed:

  • 41042, 486, Oasis, Sedge 5202 24-17 3B, McKenzie County;
  • 41151, 553, Oasis, Sedge Federal 5202 24-17 2B, McKenzie County;

Nvidia — June, 2025, Quarter — August 27, 2025

Locator: 48974NVDA.

3:20 p.m. CT: earnings release.

4:00 p.m. CT: Jensen Huang’s storytelling.

Forecast: $1.01 and $45.91 billion. ($0.98 at source).

Whisper numbers: as high as $1.06 and $55 billion (talking head at CNBC).

The results:

Before announcement, at 3:18: $182.41.

Earnings crossed. NVDA down 5%.

EPS: $1.05

Revenue: $46.7

No sales to China of high-end (H20) chips. Needs to be sorted out.

Numbers beat but not by much. 

China is the bottleneck.

Buyback: $60 billion share buyback.

No increase in dividend.

Later: share prices have recovered a bit. Now down about 3.4%.




Lego Reports Record Revenue -- August 27, 2025

Locator: 48973B.

Lego: record revenue. Link here.

***********************************
Back to the Bakken

WTI: $63.77.

New wells:

  • Thursday, August 28, 2025: 55 for the month, 93 for the quarter, 533 for the year,
    • 41175, conf, KODA Resources, Amber 1435-4BH,
    • 41010, conf, Oasis, Rystedt 5892 31-28 2B,
  • Wednesday, August 27, 2025: 53 for the month, 91 for the quarter, 531for the year, 
    • 40706, conf, Oasis, Lake Trenton Federal 5302 21-31 5B,
    • 40730, conf, Oasis, Nordby 5793 13-12 3B,  

RBN Energy: upstream divestitures in the wake of big-dollar M&A. Archived.

The fact is, many major E&P acquisitions include at least some production assets that don’t align with the acquiring company’s long-term strategic plans. Also, it’s often true that big-dollar M&A increases the buyer’s debt level — and it’s typical in such cases that the company commits to quickly reducing its debt through the divestiture of non-core assets. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, there’s a lot of that going on now, and in many cases smaller, private-equity-backed producers are scooping up the acreage and production being sold. 

Through the first half of the 2020s there’s been a frenzy of upstream M&A activity in the U.S., with a good number of deals valued in the billions or even tens of billions of dollars. Earlier this week, for example, Crescent Energy announced plans to acquire Permian producer Vital Energy for $3.1 billion in stock. Just over a year ago, Crescent closed on the $2.1 billion, stock-and-cash purchase of SilverBow Resources, a leading E&P in the Eagle Ford, and in January, Crescent bought more Eagle Ford acreage and production from Ridgemar Energy for $905 million. (More on Crescent in a moment.)

Or consider Pioneer Natural Resources, which followed up several years of mostly organic growth with the 2021 purchases of Parsley Energy (for $7.6 billion) and DoublePoint Energy (for $6.5 billion; see Buy Buy Buy for more on the deals), only to be gobbled up by an even bigger fish, ExxonMobil, in May 2024 for a cool $64.5 billion (including the assumption of Pioneer debt). Since then, ExxonMobil has worked to reduce its debt, in part through (you guessed it!) the sale of non-core assets.

ConocoPhillips

The same has been happening at ConocoPhillips, which made headlines last year with its $22.5 billion acquisition of Marathon Oil. As we discussed in Everybody Dance Now, the real gems in the deal for ConocoPhillips were Marathon’s highly complementary production assets in the Eagle Ford, the Bakken, and the Permian’s Delaware Basin. The transaction also gave ConocoPhillips the greater scale it needed to compete with the likes of ExxonMobil and appeared to be the best option for Marathon, which was probably too small to be a major acquirer.

Marathon also came with something ConocoPhillips didn’t see fitting into its long-term strategy: about 300,000 net acres in the Anadarko, more specifically natural-gas-focused assets in the SCOOP/STACK play in Oklahoma that have been producing about 40 Mboe/d in recent months — one-quarter of that (or about 10 Mb/d) in the form of crude oil. ConocoPhillips announced August 7 that it has reached an agreement to sell those assets (green star in Figure 1 below) to an undisclosed buyer for $1.3 billion. According to published reports, the purchaser is Flywheel Energy, a privately held, Oklahoma City-based E&P backed primarily by energy-sector investor Stone Ridge Energy. The deal is expected to close in Q4 2025.

Recent and Planned ConocoPhillips Divestitures

Figure 1. Recent and Planned ConocoPhillips Divestitures. Source: RBN