It's Cold out There -- And Expensive -- PJM -- December 16, 2025

Locator: 49720PJM.

PJM wiki. 

Link here. 

 

Critical Minerals Deposit -- Utah -- December 16, 2025

Locator: 49719UTAH.

I never once believed that China had the only "critical minerals deposit" in the world, and the US had none, or very little.

This tells me that at least four US presidential administrations were asleep at the wheel, letting China take the lead and ignoring our own backyard. It took a crisis (and a Trump) to get this back on track.  

Link here. 

Two New Permits; Nine Permits Renewed -- December 16, 2025

Locator: 49718B.

Silver:

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Back to the Bakken 

WTI: $55.77

Active rigs: 29.

Two new permits, #42566 - #42567:

• Operators: KODA Resources; Spotted Hawk
• Fields: Daneville (Divide County); Van Hook (McLean County)
• Comments:
• KODA Resources has a permit for a Bock well, NENW 21-161-102,
• to be sited 545 FNL and 1734 FWL.
• Spotted Hawk has a permit for an Athena well, NENW 18-150-91, 
• to be sited 368 FNL and 1524 FWL.

Nine permits renewed:

• Hess (5): two AN-Double Bar V permits; three AN-Lone Tree permits; all in Antelope oil field, McKenzie County;
• KODA Resources (2): two Stour permits; both in Fertile Valley, Divide County;
• Cornerstone Natural Resources (2): a Christianson permit and a KMC permit, both in Burke County, Northeast Foothills oil field.

Map Of The Bakken -- December 16, 2025

Locator: 49717B.

Link here. 

This was recently posted by RBN Energy. This map will be posted and re-posted by many folks on various websites. One person who has commented on this map has made an interesting observation, one I've thought about many times, used to write about it often in the early days of the blog, but now, not worth the push back, so I simply post the map, for now.

RBN Energy: Which Bakken Operators Have the Biggest Inventories Of Top-Tier Drilling Sites? Link here. Archived. 

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The Book Page 

I continue the practice and the habit of keeping several books at hand and reading whichever captures my attention at the moment. My three books right now: Tale of Two Cities, a biography of Joseph Conrad, and the history of Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris. 

It is interesting that Charles Dicken, whom I had not previously read, is quite a good read. I started Bleak House, but put that aside for awhile and will read and complete Tale of Two Cities. I'm about a third of the way through the book. 

What I have found very, very useful is to check in with Google Gemini after I complete each chapter to see what I may have missed and reinforce what I just read. It is interesting: Google Gemini is so much faster and so much easier than Cliffs Notes (CliffsNotes).  

But wow, this is really, really bizarre. Many / most of the main twelve individuals in the novel have their own wiki page. Amazing.  

Wow, it would be fun to be a high school literature teacher these days.  

PJM -- Auction -- December 16, 2025

Locator: 49716PJM.

Link here. 

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Three Unwise Men

USAF Story -- December 16, 2025

Locator: 49715USAF.

Link from USAF. Link here.

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Family Vignette

Our five-year-old twin grandsons are home-schooled in Portland by two exceptionally well-grounded and highly educated parents.

The home school program is very well organized. 

Our daughter sent us this note today: 

My favorite math moment today was when Judah had to solve "8+8" in his workbook. He had to draw out the dots and then count them because he didn't know that particular problem off the top of his head. Thinking out loud, he said, "So, I need to draw four sets of four dots because "4+4" is 8, and I have two eights." 

Wow, what a character. 

Tuesday -- December 16, 2025

Locator: 49714B.

Ford: reverberations continue. 

GM: keeps backtracking on an incredibly bad decision not to include CarPlay in their cars. Will now start offering iPhone car keys. Link here.

Jobs report: country adds jobs; unemployment rate clicks up, to 4.6%, four-year high. Jobs added in education and health services (which is a "negative" for the country and the taxpayer). Loss of jobs in manufacturing. 

Oil: awash in oil around the globe.

EU: trashes regulation that would have banned on all ICEs. Link here.

It ain't over: Nvidia, Broadcom named top picks at BofA.

PJM: auction, pending. Link here. 

IS-0NE:  

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

OKE in the Bakken: link here. 

WTI: $55.62.

New wells reporting:

• Wednesday, December 17, 2025: 41 for the month, 164 for the quarter, 748 for the year,
• 41525, conf, Petro-Hunt, Torgerson 158-94-15C-10-2H, 
• 41524, conf, Petro-Hunt, Torgerson 158-94-15C-10-1H, 
• 41107, conf, Devon Energy, Helling 16-21 3H, 
• 40964, conf, Devon Energy, Costanza 24-13 3TFH,   

• Tuesday, December 16, 2025: 37 for the month, 160 for the quarter, 744 for the year,
• 41523, conf, Petro-Hunt, Lee 158-94-22B-27-3H, 
• 41299, conf, Hess, BL-Kvam-156-95-1918H-5, 
• 41108, conf, Devon Energy L And E 9-4 3H,  
• 40963, conf, Devon Energy, Costanza 24-13 2H, 

RBN Energy: Basin and Sunrise pipelines remain a key part of Plains' Permian operations. Link here. Archived.

The largest artery moving crude from the prolific Permian Basin to Cushing, OK, is Plains All American’s Basin Pipeline, one of the first long-haul pipelines out of Midland, TX. Basin gets help along the way from the complementary Sunrise Pipeline, and together they are responsible for moving large volumes from the Permian to Wichita Falls, TX. From there, the Basin pipe moves barrels all the way to Cushing, delivery point for the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures contract and home to massive commercial storage. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll dig into why Basin and Sunrise are so important to the Permian, Plains and Cushing.

This is our most recent in a series of blogs highlighting Permian outbound long-haul crude oil pipelines. We’ve highlighted pipelines to Houston, Corpus Christi (Cactus I and II; Cactus III, formerly EPIC Crude; and Gray Oak) and Nederland (West Texas Gulf and Permian Express), including our recently published Drill Down Report. In today’s blog, the first in a mini-series on pipes going to Cushing, we’ll discuss the Basin and Sunrise pipelines. In an upcoming blog, we’ll dive into Centurion, which also delivers to Cushing.

The small town of Cushing occupies a central place in the U.S. crude oil market thanks to its hundreds of storage tanks and numerous pipeline connections, as shown in Figure 1 below. Cushing — the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World” — is never far from our hearts and minds here at RBN. A popular topic in the RBN blogosphere (see Give and Take, among others), Cushing is connected to several inbound pipelines from Western Canada, the Bakken, the Niobrara, the Permian and SCOOP/STACK, and is also linked to outbound pipes that deliver to inland refineries, Gulf Coast refineries and export terminals. The Oklahoma hub is also the delivery point for the CME/NYMEX futures contract for WTI — one of the most widely and actively traded physical commodity futures contracts in the world and the benchmark underpinning most physical U.S. crude oil purchase and sales contracts.