Locator: 50367B.
WTI: later, March 30, 2026 -- jump in WTI -- strange
- tickers for most oil and natural gas companies are down significantly from earlier highs;
- diplomatic efforts coming out of Mideast are more optimistic than pessimistic
- and yet WTI is now up almost 4%; up $3.60; trading at $103.20
And look how far natural gas has fallen! It's just been announced / reported that natural gas export at Golden Pass (XOM / Qatar Energy) has now surpassed that what was lost in Qatar due to missile / drone attacks by Iran. Link here. It certainly appears that the US can make up for any LNG "lost" from the Mideast in the US/Israel-Iran War.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $101 just before opening.
New wells reporting:
- Tuesday, March 31, 2026: 53 for the month, 157 for the quarter, 157 for the year,
- None.
- Monday, March 30, 2026: 53 for the month, 157 for the quarter, 157 for the year,
- 42217, conf, CLR, Louisville FIU 5-7H,
- 41447, conf, Whiting, Violet Olson 5596 13-5 5BX,
- Sunday, March 29, 2026: 51 for the month, 155 for the quarter, 155 for the year,
- 42216, conf, CLR, Louisville FIU 4-7H,
- 42052, conf, Petro-Hunt, Tinjum 159-91-31C-19-1H,
- 41477, conf, Hunt Oil, State C156-90-3-36H-5,
- 41476, conf, Hunt Oil, State C 156-90-3-36H-4,
- Saturday, March 28, 2026: 47 for the month, 151 for the quarter, 151 for the year,
- 42245, conf, CLR, Addyson 7-23H,
- 42215, conf, CLR, Louisville FIU 3-7H,
- 42189, conf, BR, Abercrombie 8-8-12 MBH,
- 42053, conf, Petro-Hunt, Tinjum 159-91-31D-19-2H,
- 41503, conf, Hess, RS-Sorenson-155-92-0105H-1,
- 20595, conf, Devon Energy, Wahus Federal 152-97-13-24-1H,
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.)
