Alison's Quick Connects -- December 31, 2025

Locator: 49772B.

The quick connects: 

• Williston State to Offer Criminal Justice Degree -- Williston State

• UND Awards Five New Community Engaged Projects -- University of North Dakota

• Department of Education awards $10 million to DPI -- Sen. Kevin Cramer

• Legislation to prevent Discrimination against Energy Sources -- Sen. Kevin Cramer

• Fedorchak Votes to Strengthen Grid Reliability -- Rep. Julie Fedorchak

• Senate ENR Committee Approves Wild Horses Legislation -- Sen. John Hoeven

• Gov. Armstrong, legislators waiting on CMS for special session -- KX News

• Oil well pad fire near Watford City -- KX News

• States brace for Trump's push to make oil drilling cheap again -- Bismarck Tribune

• North Dakota law accidentally lists fake critical minerals -- North Dakota Monitor

• Jennifer Benson running for District 41 seat -- InForum

• New Daycare Facility Opens in Alexander -- Minot Daily News

• North Dakota oil production resilient even as prices have declined -- North Dakota Monitor

• Property taxes eliminated for 50,000 North Dakota households -- North Dakota Monitor

• House Passes SPEED Act, Advancing Federal Permitting Reform -- American O&G Reporter

• Williston mayor highlights new law as most significant moment of 2025 -- KFYR-TV

• Basin Electric selects PCL as General Contractor for Bison Station -- Basin Electric

• Ron Ness guest hosts Dakota Morning with Michael Bell 12/30 -- KFYR 550

• University of North Dakota To Introduce Students to Energy-Sector Careers -- The Way Ahead

• Regional Workforce Grant Deadline Extended to January 22 -- ND Dept. of Commerce

• First Round of Rural Catalyst Grant Closes Jan. 7 -- ND Dept. of Commerce

• Feeling the Crunch: Young Station Manages Another Planned Outage -- Minnkota

• Controlled Chaos: Minnkota Members Participate in Simulation -- Minnkota

• 2026 Could be a Different Kind of Bakken Boom -- McKenzie County Farmer

The Bubble Should Last At Least One More Year -- December 31, 2025

Locator: 49771AI.

Minnesota scandal: so, what's all the fuss about? The key word: significant --

Jobs: again, the numbers continue to beat expectations. Rent is down. Prices for used autos are down. A dot connects all of these and it's all due to Trump. 

AWS: and "they" said this was a bubble. If so, it's going to last another year. Link here. 

Put this in perspective -- the government awards Boeing a $2-billion contract to upgrade the B-52, while AWS commits 25x that amounts -- $50 -- to upgrade its AI. 

Nvidia: and "they" said this was a bubble. If so, it's going to last another year.  

• link here;
• link here. 

CAT: link here. Part of the bubble, apparently.

Boeing: this is on top of the story reported yesterday -- one of many links here -- the B-52J -- 

Boeing just landed a major new Pentagon award tied to the B-52 Commercial Engine Replacement Program, a $2.04 billion task order that keeps the decades old bomber moving toward a new set of engines. 

The contract was posted on December 23, 2025,  and is aimed at pushing the program through the post design review phase. Right now, each B-52H flies with eight Pratt and Whitney TF33 engines mounted in four twin pods under the wings. 

Under this task order, Boeing will complete system integration work and modify and test two B-52 aircraft with the new engines and related subsystems, with work across Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Seattle, and Indianapolis. 

The Pentagon schedule runs through May 31, 2033, and about $35.8 million is being obligated at the time of award, with the rest funded over time. The new engine is the Rolls Royce F130, picked by the Air Force in 2021, and Rolls Royce cleared a key critical design review milestone in late 2024. The idea is straightforward: modern engines that are easier to sustain, more efficient, and better suited for keeping the B-52 flying for decades more as the fleet moves toward the B-52J configuration.

New Year's Eve Day -- December 31, 2025

Locator: 49770FOOTBALL.

Nothing to do but wait for the ball games! It took three attempts, but I finally got it:

And instead of searching the net, and getting a lot of useless information and a lot of ads, I simply go to Google Gemini and request: tell me everything I need to know about the Cotton Bowl later tonight. If I need / want more, I can simply ask the next question  and so on and so on and get a news story tailored specifically for me. 

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Back to the Bakken 

WTI: $58.25.

New wells being reported the last day of the year:  

• Wednesday, December 31, 2025: 72 for the month, 195 for the quarter, 769 for the year,
• None (there was no June 31, 2025)

RBN Energy: the top ten RBN blogs of 2025. Link here. Archived.

The Top 10 RBN Blogs of 2025 -- Based On "Hits" -- Summaries Generated By ChatGPT With Human Editing -- December 30, 2025

What it takes to get energy from Point A to Point B — from where it is produced to where it is consumed — was at the heart of many of RBN’s most popular blogs in 2025. Infrastructure bottlenecks, shifting logistics, evolving price signals, and the constant push-and-pull between supply and demand all shaped the markets, with each segment seemingly wanting to go its own way. But there was another layer too: the three T’s that hovered over everything this year: Trump, tariffs and turbulence. Together, they formed the backdrop for a market that kept everyone guessing about where things were headed. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the Top 10 blogs of 2025.

Fortunately, in the RBN blogosphere, we have a great way to size up what’s coming next — the blogosphere itself. A huge advantage of publishing a daily blog on a single topic — and distributing it to tens of thousands — is that by tracking how many hits each post gets, we can spot emerging energy-market themes as they develop. And we share those insights with the RBN community. For more than a decade, we’ve wrapped up each year by reviewing which topics rose to the top of the hit parade in our year-end “Top 10” blog, distilling the common themes we learn from what amounts to crowd-sourced market intelligence. Today’s blog is the latest edition of that tradition.

#1 – 8/4/2025 – Crude Oil: 

Take the Long Way Home - Enbridge's Oil Pipeline Expansions Likely to Spur More Projects Downstream

Rising Western Canadian crude production and Enbridge’s push to add nearly 400 Mb/d of new Mainline and Express-Platte capacity set up a critical downstream question in 2025: How will all those incremental heavy barrels get from the Canadian border to the Gulf Coast? Building on the themes in #9 (The Race Is On), this blog showed why Canadian flows, export routes and midstream competition are key considerations for the oil markets and why they were among the year’s defining storylines — and that accommodating new north-to-south volumes will require a new generation of pipeline expansions. With another takeaway crunch looming over the next couple of years, Western Canadian crude flows will remain a major driver of midstream development.