Locator: 51386B.
New England, natural gas, and Enbridge: update here. The blog at that site will soon go dark. Link here.
Finances: without question, that one-half trillion dollar financing announcement announced yesterday is an incredibly huge development. The only reason it garnered such little media attention: a) it was Jensen Huang / Nvidia again; and, the money involved in AI deals is already measured in tens of billions of dollars.
So, we'll see. My little understanding of this, in addition to everything else, this is huge for CoreWeave, and, of course, Oracle.
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Back to the Bakken
Activity in the Bakken: new permits announced:
Five new permits, #43200 - #43204 --
- Operator: BR
- Field: Haystack Butte (McKenzie County)
- Comments:
- BR has permits for five HBU Sandstone wells, SESE 15-148-98,
- to be sited 763 / 1051 FSL and 126 FEL.
Look at what's going on in the area:
Haystack Butte.
- to the west: new permits for five BR HBU Sandstone wells.
- I forgot to add the arrow -- the new Sandstone wells will be in section SESE section 15.
- to the NNE: multi-well BR HBU Hazel wells.
- to the SE: multi-well BR Badlands wells.
The BR HBU Badlands wells.
The BR HBU Hazel wells.
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Continuing in the Bakken
WTI: $83.93.
New wells reporting:
- Wednesday, August 12, 2026: 27 for the month, 68 for the quarter, 412 for the year,
- 42167, conf, Slawson, Shad Rap Federal 3-2-3H,
- Tuesday, August 11, 2026: 26 for the month, 67 for the quarter, 411 for the year,
- None.
RBN Energy: new rule on decommissioning offshore assets aims to ease burden on US producers. Link here. Archived.
Long-standing U.S. rules around decommissioning offshore oil and gas platforms were rewritten by the Biden administration in 2024, a move designed to ensure that owners of those assets bear the often significant cost of deactivating them. But the Trump administration paused their implementation in early 2025, promising to revise or overhaul them as part of a broader effort to reduce federal regulations and boost domestic energy production. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll examine the issue and the changes included in the administration’s proposed rule, which aims to reduce the regulatory burden without shifting decommissioning liabilities to taxpayers.
As we noted in Back to Life, most U.S. offshore E&P business occurs in the U.S. Gulf, which generates about 14% of U.S. crude oil output. The federal government regulates most of that activity along the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Its oversight begins about 3.5 miles off the coast of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi; for Texas and Florida, its jurisdiction starts about 10 miles offshore (see black line hugging the coast in Figure 1 below). The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) are tasked with managing Gulf activity, from overseeing lease sales to expanding production areas to issuing rules on what E&Ps must do with wells, platforms and associated infrastructure once their projects have run their course. (Note: Yellow dots in Figure 1 indicate active leases.)
