Locator: 49119BRK.
The prospect of lower short rates may be weighing on Berkshire stock, which continues to languish as the S&P 500 hits new highs, including a record close for the index Monday.
The lack of technology in BRK is coming an existential issue for BRK?
Locator: 49118B.
Bakken deals are tracked in sidebar at the right.
From X.
Chord Energy:
Graphic of XTO's assets in the Bakken:
Link also at Reuters, not yet behind a paywall.
Smaller, but similar, deal several years ago..
From Oil & Gas Journal, July 1, 2008, link here.
RBN Energy, May 24, 2024, link here.
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Previously Published
RBN Energy: there's a lot more happening in the Bakken than you might think. Archived.
On the surface, the Bakken story in the mid-2020s may seem as boring as dirt. The boom times of 2009-14 and 2017-19 are ancient history. Crude oil production has been rangebound near 1.2 MMb/d — well below its peak five years ago. And that output has been getting gassier over time, creating natural gas and NGL takeaway constraints that have put a lid on oil production growth. But don’t buy into the view that the Bakken is yesterday’s news. Beneath the surface (sometimes literally), the U.S.’s second-largest crude oil production area is undergoing a major transformation that includes E&P consolidation, production (and producers) going private, the drilling of 3- and (soon) 4-mile laterals, novel efforts to eliminate flaring, and even a producer-led push for CO2-based enhanced oil recovery (EOR). As we’ll discuss in today’s RBN blog, these changes and others may well breathe new life into the Bakken and significantly improve the environmental profile of the hydrocarbons produced there.
Original Post
February 21, 2024
Chord - Enerplus Merger PowerPoint.
Timeline:
- Locator: 46774DEVON.
- Devon Energy offers to acquire Enerplus, including its Bakken assets -- NS Energy
- Reuters.
- Yahoo!Finance.
From the blog, May 22, 2024;
Locator: 44726CHORD_XTO.
Full story here (and re-posted below).
Previously posted.
Locator: 44691B.
Chord Energy: to bulk up in the Bakken, divest non-core, Hart Energy. Chord Energy website. A reminder: Chord Energy: Whiting + Oasis.
Is this new or is this an old news story? One never knows with Hart Energy.
Let's see if we can find any other source. I can't find anything else. I haven't checked Chord's website yet.
From the link:
Chord Energy Corp. has strengthened its position in the Williston Basin with an agreement to acquire core acreage from Exxon Mobil Corp. subsidiary XTO Energy Inc. and affiliates for $375 million cash.
The acquisition was announced May 22, 2023, as Chord sheds non-ore acreage outside the basin.
Disclaimer: I am building a position in Chord, but not increasing my overall fossil fuel position. I am selling other energy assets to pay for additional investments in Chord.
Abbreviated disclaimer: this is not an investment
site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or
relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have
read here. Full disclaimer at tabbed link.
All my posts are done quickly:
there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of
my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find
typographical / content errors, I will correct them.
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Updated Here
Hart Energy tweeted this yesterday (May 22, 2023). Now, more background, from stories posted May 23, 2023.
Bottom line:
Back-of-the-envelope:
One wonders if most of the acreage in the deal was "outside" the reservation?
From this blog, but I quit following XTO almost ten years ago:
XOM (XTO)
Locator: 49117CHIPS.
Tell me again Nvidia is not a monopoly without telling me it's not a monopoly. Regardless, that moat is very, very wide.
New business models. We've discussed this before.
CoreWeave: ticker price in past year -- up 201% (Yahoo Finance!).
Nvidia: up 52% in past year (Yahoo Finance!).
This is why Apple's Tim Cook places such a huge emphasis on a solid supply chain.
I think this whole sector is incredibly fascinating.
On CNBC, Jim Cramer is one of the few regulars that "gets it."
Locator: 49116B.
The maps.
The first map takes in the full area of interest.
The next two maps zoom in, in that full area of interest
The first map:
The two maps that zoom in:
Locator: 49115B.
Not yet proofread. Consider this a draft.
Five four-mile laterals on a five-well pad:
The maps:
File report:
41875, conf/drl, Phoenix Operating, Nystuen 20-17-8-5-5H, Big Stone, npd,
This simply blows me away. Thirteen days from spud to TD with a couple days lost due to typical problems encountered while drilling; lateral was almost four miles along; total amount of pipe: almost six miles of pipe.
Locator: 49114MSFT.
But even a 10% jump in the dividend only brings the dividend to 0.7%. Wow. And that gets a headline. Wow.
Market cap, P/E, dividend yield: both AAPL and MSFT, neck-and-neck.
Locator: 49113B.
WTI: $63.31.
Active rigs: 34.
Four new permits, #42307 - #42310, inclusive:
Locator: 49112B.
From today's daily activity report:
Four new permits, #42307 - #42310, inclusive:
The narrative for the four permits. Note the spacing unit: sections 5 and 8 to the south, and 29 and 32 to the north.
The map:
Locator: 49111ELECTRICITY.
Electricity demand. It sounds like a talking head on CNBC misspoke. The talking head definitely said that energy (electricity) demand would increase six-fold over the new six years. Fact check:
So, either I misheard -- mostly likely -- or the talking head misspoke -- let's re-wind the tape.
Over 20 years. Either way, that's still quite a jump in electricity demand. In the big scheme of things electricity demand has remained pretty stable and rising slowly and predictably until recently.
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External Disk Drives Increasing in Price
Western Digital announced that today. Shares rose significantly in price.
Seagate: no announcement but Seagate shares rose significantly, also.
Locator: 49110AAPL.
Tag: Apple.
Duolingo drops another 14 points today.
There are so many things, so many story lines here.
The biggest story:
The second biggest story for Apple:
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The Market
On a day all three indices are hitting new records (or flirting with new records), BRK has another down day.
Locator: 49108CORN.
Re-posting, from September 20, 2024. Link here.
This was a big story for me. While in college, I participated in a study on the North Slope, Barrow, Alaska, studying the CO2-utilizing efficiency of the grasses there.
Locator: 48343CORN.
A tip of the hat to Geoff Simon for finding this one.
Corn, or maize, is foundational—along with rice, wheat, soyabean—to global food security, serving as a critical source of nourishment for both humans and livestock. Over the past few decades, increases in atmospheric CO2 from industrial emissions have tracked with notable boosts in corn yields.One wonders if corn might be grown above the Arctic Circle? Corn, from seed to maturation, 60 to 100 days based on variety. The "warm season" in Barrow, Alaska, lasts 3.3 months = 99 days. Wheat? Slightly longer.
Between 1900 and 2024, the national corn yield in the U.S. rose to 183 bushels per acre (bu/A) from just 28 bushels. During the same period, atmospheric CO2 increased from 295 parts per million (ppm) to 419 ppm. Worldwide, corn yield rose from a mere 29 bu/A in 1961 to 86 bu/A in 2021.
This phenomenon is not merely coincidental; it is deeply rooted in the physiological characteristics of corn as a C4 category plant. C4 plants like corn – so named for the number of carbon atoms in their photosynthetic product — possess unique biochemical pathways that make their photosynthesis particularly efficient under high concentrations of CO2 and elevated temperatures. Such plants employ a mechanism that concentrates CO2 in specialized structures called bundle sheath cells.
Higher CO2 levels also improve water-use efficiency in corn, which is particularly beneficial where water supplies are limited or during droughts. This efficiency translates into enhanced growth rates and potentially greater yields. In fact, researchers say that “less water will be required for corn under a high-CO2 environment in the future than at present.”
Locator: 49107B.
GOOG: hits $3 trillion market cap.
The data center boom is sweeping across the country and Texas has garnered more proposals for new centers than almost any other state. If every planned project were to go forward, it would mean nearly 9 gigawatts (GW) of additional electricity demand, or just over 1 Bcf/d of natural gas. That’s enough to power the entire country of Switzerland.
In today’s RBN blog, we’ll check out the biggest planned data centers across the Lone Star State and give a quick rundown on where things stand for each one.
Texas easily ranks among the nation’s top states for existing data centers, with only Virginia edging it out in both data center count and associated power demand. Texas is also competing for the top spot in brand-new developments, with more than 10 hyperscale campuses announced and dozens more planned — not to mention community-changing projects like Stargate and Data City that are in the works (more on this below).
As we discussed recently in Won’t Get Fooled Again, we’ve been grappling with the challenge of tracking and ranking data center projects in Texas and Louisiana, in part to help us better assess the likely impact of their power and gas demand on Gulf Coast gas markets for our proprietary Arrow Model. In that blog, we explained that we’re using a scoring system that assigns each project a score from 1 to 3 based on public information. It ranks a 1 if the project has an offtaker, a 2 if it also controls the site, and a 3 if construction is underway. Projects missing these criteria don’t make it into our detailed forecasts.
The Arrow Model carves up the region into pipeline “corridors” (aka arrows) that are used to determine changes in the region’s inflows, outflows and flows within each state via groups of pipes that serve similar markets from comparable supply sources. Data centers have been emerging as an important data input in the model because it’s likely their ongoing development will result in significant bump-ups in both power and gas demand in various parts of Texas and Louisiana.
Many of you have asked which proposed data centers are on our list and how we rank them. Here’s a partial answer, namely a list (in no specific order) of the largest data centers proposed in Texas that will need 300 megawatts (MW) of power or more. (Look for a companion blog on Louisiana data centers soon.)
Figure 1. Proposed Texas Data Centers. Source: RBN
