Locator: 49754B.
Texas: way too cold to be up today. Clear, calm, but 40°F, feels like 50. Whoo-hoo. Below freezing tonight and then this weekend forecast for coldest day on record in 30 years. With precip. We'll see.
Natural gas prices surge: link here.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $60.28. Despite that shares prices of CVX, COP are down.
New wells reporting:
- Tuesday, January 20, 2026: 33 for the month, 33 for the quarter, 33 for the year,
- 41255, conf, Oasis, Erickson 5203 14-25 5BX,
- 41254, conf, Oasis, Erickson 5203 14-25 4B,
- 41253, conf, Oasis, Erickson 5203 14-25 3B,
- 41061, conf, Oasis, Erickson 5203 14-25 2B,
- Monday, January 19, 2026: 29 for the month, 29 for the quarter, 29 for the year,
- 41856, conf, CLR, Schilke 3-19H,
- Sunday, January 18, 2026: 28 for the month, 28 for the quarter, 28 for the year,
- 40247, conf, Hunt Oil, Palermo MCNIC 156-90-22-34H 4,
- 40077, conf, Devon Energy, Cuda 15-27F 3H,
- Saturday, January 17, 2026: 26 for the month, 26 for the quarter, 26 for the year,
- 41350, conf, Iron Oil Operating, Patten 2-27-22H,
- 36614, conf, BR, Sandi 2B UTFH,
RBN Energy: AltaGas upsizes midstream infrastructure as western Canadian NGL production hits record high. Link here. Archived.
NGL production in Western Canada hit an all-time high in 2025 and looks to be headed even higher in the years ahead. Major midstream players have been undertaking infrastructure expansions to deal with all the additional gas processing, Y-grade fractionation and exports of valuable products such as propane and butane. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll take a closer look at the expansion plans of AltaGas Ltd., one of Western Canada’s leading midstream operators.
Western Canada set a record for natural gas production in 2025 at 19.1 Bcf/d. With that mark, it stands to reason that the region will also see record output of NGLs, such as ethane, propane, butane, condensate and pentanes-plus (known as field condensate and natural gasoline in the U.S.), the vast majority of which are derived through the processing of NGLs at fractionation plants. Production of mixed NGLs (aka Y-grade) through the first 11 months of 2025 averaged 1.29 MMb/d (dashed red box in Figure 1 below), a gain of 0.06 Mb/d versus the same period in 2024, with the biggest growth coming in the pentanes-plus category (teal bar segments). It is that portion of the NGLs suite that has nearly insatiable demand for use as a diluent in Alberta’s oil sands. As discussed in Yes We Can, we expect that Y-grade output will experience additional volume growth in the range of 300 Mb/d by 2030, which would put total output at around 1.6 MMb/d that year.
