Locator: 50382EVS.
Interesting, huh? High gasoline prices won't rescue EVs this time around.
Ticker: Rivian --
Back to GM:
And Ford?
Locator: 50382EVS.
Ticker: Rivian --
Locator: 50381WTI.
Breaking, 7:15 p.m. CT: Trump says he will address the nation on the Iran War tomorrow night, Wednesday, March 31, 2026. He will get back to "his" agenda after helping Netanyahu reach his agenda. I think it will be fascinating.
Breaking, 6:41 p.m. CT: Trump says the US will have "nothing to do" with the Strait of Hormuz once the special military operations in Iran concludes.
This seems to me to be very good news for US drillers.
It seems to suggest that the price of oil will remain in a trading range of $90 - $100.
****************************
Money, Money
Locator: 50379B.
So, where's this shortage of oil we were told the Iran war would cause? It gets tedious. Link here. How much did US oil inventories rise last week? Whatever it was, it was "staggering."
The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimated that crude oil inventories in the United States rose by a staggering 10.263 million barrels in the week ending March 27.
In the week prior, US crude oil inventories rose by 2.3 million barrels.
Analysts had expected a draw of 1.3 million barrels in the current reporting period.
Consistently, analysts seem to get these estimates wrong.
********************************
Back to the Bakken
WTI: $101.80. Prices dropped significantly in the last 48 hours but still trading above $100. And get this: US crude oil inventories see a "surprise" 10-million-barrel spike.
Active rigs: 23.
No new permits.
Six permits renewed:
Locator: 50378WTI.
Share prices of oil majors plummeting. War will end soon.
Tea leaves:
Breaking, 6:41 p.m. CT: Trump says the US will have "nothing to do" with the Strait of Hormuz once the special military operations in Iran concludes.
This seems to me to be very good news for US drillers.
It seems to suggest that the price of oil will remain in a trading range of $90 - $100.
**************************
The Book Page
My book today: Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir, Jann S Wenner, September 13, 2022.
Notes here.
This is absolutely fascinating.
From the notes:
So, Jann Wanner, my almost exact contemporary but being older by five years (born 1946), he was a generation older than I -- the first love of my life and my wife of 50 years -- both born 1949 ...
the Beatles, Vietnam War, etc., during his coming of age years, just after graduating from high school and starting college at Berkeley -- meanwhile -- I was still in middle school, transitioning to high school.
Most fascinating: Jann Wenner's first 20 years of life in northern California and then southern California were areas that I came to know very, very well in 1973 and later years.
It's also interesting, in anyone's life, how a fork in the road or a short five-year period of time -- for me -- WWII -- the Korean War -- the Vietnam War -- USC School of Medicine -- Bitburg AB, Germany -- can change everything that follows -- forks in the road.
Wow, wow, wow -- never quit reading; one never knows what one might find.
Locator: 50377ARCHIVES.
How incredibly "mixed up" Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson really is. This is truly scary. Yes, she was out-ruled, 8 - 1 -- even her most liberal justices voted against her.
I could not care less about the case -- the bigger story here is KBJ.
KBJ was one step away from what the Nazis did leading up to and during WWII.
****************************
PSA
Y'all are probably getting notices from your local pharmacy that the newest Covid vaccine is now available.
**************************
The Nearest Neighbor Rule
The nearest neighbor rule. Link here.
**********************************
Operation EPIC FURY
Locator: 50375TINTIN.
The boys reading TinTin.
Locator: 50374B.
Anticipation: I am so ready for summer! It's cool (cold?) in the morning but gets to 84°F in the late afternoon, but being cold in the morning doesn't allow for the pool to retain the heat overnight. So, still too cold to swim. I am so ready for summer! Biking would be fine but it's been incredibly windy lately.
Boring: Overnight, no news to report. Boring. So, two Apple links.
Iran: folks continue to miss the story. This country was on its way to having a nuclear ballistic missile.
Investing: finally, after being in the vortex, I was able to get back to investing. Yesterday / early this morning, "we're" back. It's a great feeling! SRE hitting an all-time high yesterday was a huge morale boost.
WTI: from sometime yesterday --
*******************************
Back to the Bakken
WTI: $102.9. Off its recent high of $104.6. Wow. CVX was off 44 cents yesterday; futures, up 62 cents today. A really, really high p/e of 32 this morning. After hitting an all-time yesterday, Sempra (SRE) is flat in pre-market trading. So, even the oil market is boring.
New wells reporting:
RBN Energy: where western Canadian crude oil goes and how it gets there. Link here. Archived.
End markets for Canadian crude oil have evolved as production and export capacity have grown, especially in the past few years as more Western Canadian crude has moved off the continent. In today’s RBN blog, the fourth in a series, we’ll dig deep into the data to see exactly where Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) crude oil supply goes, how it gets there, and how those destination markets have evolved over time. What we’ll present is not the typical assessment you’ll see elsewhere that cites commonly referenced statistics. Instead, we’ve waded through several data sources to piece together a more accurate analysis of where these barrels ultimately end up, adjusting for nuances that are often overlooked. We’ll also distinguish between where the heavy and lighter barrels go. This will establish a baseline so that in future blogs we can look at how each of the proposed WCSB export capacity growth options might impact market dynamics, which is especially topical these days given how the turmoil in the Middle East is disrupting global crude oil flows.
Canadian crude oil has been a popular topic in the RBN blogosphere since the beginning of the year. In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the drivers behind WCSB crude oil production nearly doubling from 2010 to 2025, as well as its seasonal trends. In Part 2, we reviewed the major pipeline projects that expanded capacity to move barrels out of the WCSB, how the timing of those projects matched up with supply growth, and current export pipeline capacity. In Part 3, we examined how WCSB crude oil price discounts are impacted by pipeline scarcity and production seasonality.
In today’s blog, let’s start by recapping the pipelines that move crude oil out of the WCSB, a region that spans west to east from northeastern British Columbia (BC), through Alberta and Saskatchewan, to western Manitoba. Figure 1 below shows the main North American pipeline systems moving WCSB crude oil. The largest pipeline export conduit is the Enbridge Mainline (light-pink lines), which moved about 3 MMb/d of crude oil out of the WCSB in 2025 (70% heavy), of which approximately 2.4 MMb/d went to the U.S. PADD 2 (Midwest) and PADD 3 (Gulf Coast) markets, while the remainder was delivered back into Canada at the Ontario border to feed pipeline-connected refineries in Ontario, Quebec, and Pennsylvania.
Locator: 50373B.
WTI: $104.70.
Active rigs: 24.
Three new permits, #42799 - #42801, inclusive:
One producing well (a DUC) reported as completed:
Locator: 50371HEARTHEALTH.
Link to The Guardian. And this article links to the Europe Society of Cardiology.
Is this even plausible?
Does hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock count towards that 11 minutes more each night?
The lede:
Fifty-three thousand folks kept track of exactly what time they "went to bed," but "going to bed" is not the same as "sleeping." I don't know anyone who knows exactly what time they fell asleep -- unless they're somehow hooked up to a polysomnograph.
And eleven minutes over an 8-hour period of "sleep" -- is that even statistically significant?
And, then, reduce your risk of heart disease by 4.5 minutes with a brisk walk! Oh, give me a break. If that's all one needs to do ... a brisk walk for 4.5 minutes every day reduces your risk of major cardiovascular events. Wow, sign me up!
And what does that get you? A ten percent reduction in "avoiding" a chance of a major cardiovascular event.
In a population of 53,000, one would expect a rate of 250 - 300 suffering a major cardiovascular event. Ten percent of 250 to 300 is 25 to 30 individuals.
This study has had its 15 minutes of fame. By the end of the week the study will be consigned to the trash bin (or is it the dustbin) of history.
Wow, how gullible do they think we are?
Locator: 50368QATAR.
Comment: this LNG story is really quite fascinating!
Golden Pass (US export terminal) will more than make up for any LNG loss from Qatar the country, if I'm reading the links below correctly. How quickly the US becomes the largest LNG exporter. Truly amazing.
A reader sent me a note earlier today: how Europe has fallen so far behind in the energy producing sector; in fact, Europe has fallen even further behind in AI investment. Europe has become not much more than a tourist destination for Americans.
To be completed later, but here are the links:
Locator: 50367B.
WTI: later, March 30, 2026 -- jump in WTI -- strange
***********************************
Back to the Bakken
WTI: $101 just before opening.
New wells reporting:
RBN Energy: the triple-whammy impacts of Iran war on refined products. Link here. Archived.
The ongoing conflict between the U.S. and Iran and the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz isn’t just stranding significant volumes of refined products (especially diesel, jet fuel and naphtha) in the Persian Gulf. It’s also resulting in potentially extensive and long-lasting damage to some refineries there and trapping crude oil that Asian refiners depend on to supply their own operations. The net effect is the largest disruption to the global refining sector in decades (with the exception of the demand-induced COVID lockdowns) and — depending on how long the Iran war continues — maybe ever. In today’s RBN blog, we look at the multiple impacts of the conflict on global refined product markets.
This is the second blog in our series about the effects of the Persian Gulf conflict that has been flaring since February 28. In Part 1, we focused on the region’s NGL fractionators and NGL exports. Before the war started a few weeks ago, the Gulf countries (not counting Iran) had more than 2.7 MMb/d of fractionation capacity, about two-thirds of it in eastern Saudi Arabia and the rest divided among Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). As a group, they had been exporting an average of about 1.7 MMb/d of NGLs, including about 1.5 MMb/d of LPG (mostly propane, some butanes) and ~200 Mb/d of natural gasoline and pentanes-plus. (We noted that virtually all the region’s ethane is either rejected into natural gas or consumed domestically at petrochemical plants.)
Part 1 also explained that the vast majority of the Persian Gulf’s exported LPG ended up in Asia — mostly in India (more than 600 Mb/d) and China (more than 500 Mb/d) — and that, with the nearly complete stoppage in imports from the Gulf, India’s LPG supply situation is particularly dire. We added, finally, that there is little U.S. suppliers can do to help in the near term due to limited Gulf Coast LPG export capacity and the fact that it takes at least five to six weeks to transport LPG from Texas to India.
Today, we shift our focus to Persian Gulf refineries and their exports of refined products, which have been affected in the same way as exports of LPG and in many ways are more critical to global product markets.
As shown in Figure 1 below, the combined capacity of non-Iranian refineries in Persian Gulf countries totals about 7 MMb/d, including ~3.3 MMb/d in Saudi Arabia (dark-blue refinery icons), ~1.4 MMb/d in Kuwait (white icons), ~1.1 MMb/d in the UAE (green icons), 429 Mb/d in Qatar (pink icons), 380 Mb/d in Bahrain (purple icon), and 280 Mb/d in Iraq (gray icon). Importantly, Saudi Arabia’s capacity is split, with ~1.4 MMb/d on or near the Persian Gulf — and therefore directly affected by the situation in the Strait of Hormuz (orange circle) — and ~1.9 MMb/d along the Red Sea. (As we’ll get to, even the kingdom’s Red Sea-oriented refineries have been impacted by Iran’s retaliation to U.S. and Israeli attacks.)
Locator: 50366WTI.
"They" say the market it is in correction territory, down 10%. If your portfolio is poorly diversified, you are probably up 10% (or more).
Ticker: CVX --
Later today --
Six months --
***********************
The Book Page
Joyce Carol Oates vs Joan Didion.
JCO: born 1938.
JD: born 1934.
John Gregory Dunne: born 1932.
More later. It's too early in the morning to write on this now.
AI prompt: Joyce Carol Oates vs Joan Didion.
Joyce Carol Oates: Blonde; a fictional biograph of Marilyn Monroe.
her memoir following the death of her husband, A Widow's Story,
reviewed in The New Yorker, December 5, 2010; link here.
Joan Didion on grief:
AI prompt: was the word "vortex" when associated with grief, coined by Joan Didion or was "vortex" already used by grief therapists by then?
Gemini: while Didion may not have been the absolute first person in human history to use the word "vortex" to describe emotional pain, she coined it as a specific, widely recognized metaphor for the modern, clinical experience of abrupt bereavement.
Blue Nights: published 2011
The Year of Magical Thinking: published 2005
I spent a lot of time on this subject, grief and "vortex" for a couple of specific reasons. I will continue at a later date on a different blog.
****************************
The Book Page
Ten years from now, it is likely the best-seller in non-fiction will be a history of the US-Iran war called An American Tragedy. It will begin with the loss of Susie Wiles' ability to keep the president in check.
**************************
LNG (Cheniere)
Might LNG open above $300? LNG was trading for $190 on December 19, 2025 -- just a couple of months ago. That's a 58% gain in three months. Okay. With all the reading Charlie Munger was supposed to have done, one wonders.
Locator: 50365RAISINS.
For as long as I've been alive, I remember the small Sun-Maid "California Sun-Dried Raisins."
Years ago I remember when opening those boxes they were filled to the top and even seemed that to close the box, the manufacturer had to "squish" the raisins farther down.
Now, the boxes are literally half-full.
The content is measured in weight; currently the weight is one-ounce.
AI prompt: Sun-Maid sells raisons in small boxes, now weighing one ounce. Have they always been one-ounce boxes?
Reply:
Locator: 50364ARCHIVES.
UConn stuns Duke:
This barely begins to tell the story:
Ticker CVX: tea leaves suggest it's gonna be a lot more tomorrow --
The bigger story here: has the Middle East just "eaten itself"? This is a huge story. Since 1979, the GCC tried getting along with Iran, and several US presidents kicked the can down the road, often with huge monetary payoffs to Iran -- link here. Trump continues to play 5D chess.
******************************
Can This Really Be The End?
**************************
The Opposition Party Agrees: Trump Is NOT A King And Never Has Been
Wow!
Even Trump supporters can agree with that. Trump is not a king. LOL.
Most humorous: protests in London calling for no more kings, where there actually is a king! LOL. My hunch: the Royal Family is not pleased. LOL.Locator: 50361AIRFARE.
I visited our grandsons in Portland, Oregon, earlier this month -- the trip was very expensive -- but it was due to spring break. DFW to PDX -- PDX is my favorite airport in the world.
I have booked my next trip -- same trip -- for high season, July, summer, 2026 -- just a few months from now. I was pleasantly surprised. The trip is as inexpensive as ever. Probably the same that I paid last year. To pay for the seat I want has doubled in price since last summer but that's fine. It's well worth it, having the seat one wants, although I will give it up if a family needs to sit together. Pay it forward.
Locator: 50359WELLS.
The wells:
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 7668 | 0 |
| 12-2025 | 3408 | 0 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 15185 | 0 |
| 12-2025 | 6569 | 0 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 8563 | 0 |
| 12-2025 | 3961 | 0 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 15176 | 0 |
| 12-2025 | 3940 | 0 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 5511 | 0 |
| 12-2025 | 1129 | 0 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 26744 | 18261 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 25470 | 19953 |
| 12-2025 | 26673 | 20469 |
| 11-2025 | 19575 | 15206 |
| 10-2025 | 19112 | 14373 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 24525 | 16818 |
| 12-2025 | 25635 | 16994 |
| 11-2025 | 24666 | 15797 |
| 10-2025 | 21494 | 13007 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 19725 | 14424 |
| 12-2025 | 18399 | 11996 |
| 11-2025 | 15498 | 10687 |
| 10-2025 | 24697 | 16546 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 28160 | 10837 |
| 12-2025 | 33668 | 13818 |
| 11-2025 | 32649 | 6443 |
| 10-2025 | 19665 | 6829 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 25555 | 9684 |
| 12-2025 | 28385 | 11569 |
| 11-2025 | 25747 | 5166 |
| 10-2025 | 20335 | 6613 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 39583 | 71410 |
| 12-2025 | 37079 | 60149 |
| 11-2025 | 35703 | 63241 |
| 10-2025 | 36229 | 59106 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 19831 | 37963 |
| 12-2025 | 24735 | 40781 |
| 11-2025 | 24604 | 46366 |
| 10-2025 | 27339 | 47025 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 24408 | 45430 |
| 12-2025 | 38537 | 63601 |
| 11-2025 | 34965 | 63511 |
| 10-2025 | 35709 | 59275 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 26156 | 56300 |
| 12-2025 | 27088 | 46280 |
| 11-2025 | 31107 | 57010 |
| 10-2025 | 31493 | 54776 |
| 9-2025 | 0 | 585 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 18472 | 6151 |
| 12-2025 | 19117 | 4150 |
| 11-2025 | 19095 | 3166 |
| 10-2025 | 14175 | 4906 |
| 9-2025 | 1209 | 374 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 16852 | 5984 |
| 12-2025 | 18026 | 4184 |
| 11-2025 | 18423 | 3308 |
| 10-2025 | 13899 | 5284 |
| 9-2025 | 1103 | 37 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 17939 | 13301 |
| 12-2025 | 17929 | 12037 |
| 11-2025 | 17141 | 12499 |
| 10-2025 | 31740 | 22812 |
| 9-2025 | 1941 | 1670 |
| Date | Oil Runs | MCF Sold |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2026 | 11399 | 75845 |
| 12-2025 | 15051 | 92354 |
| 11-2025 | 18879 | 73879 |
| 10-2025 | 31280 | 93586 |
| 9-2025 | 919 | 1876 |