Locator: 51633B.
Pageviews: 90 million. The run rate of 1.8 million pageviews / 24 hours was correct yesterday morning.
Liz Ann Sonders: bulls back in charge.
Dow futures: up 122 points. NASDAQ down a bit.
After jobs numbers came out: Dow jumps. Up 215 points in futures trading. But also, labor costs cme out lower (albeit not much) than expected. It looks like NASDAQ could also turn green; NASDAQ is not pretty much flat from yesterday, very, very slightly negative. S&P 500 keeps heading higher. At 8:00 a.m. CT, NASDAQ suddenly turns green. Up significantly.
Budget: Trump signs stopgap bill averting government shutdow. Tea leaves suggest neither party gains politically from government shutdown and folks on both side of the aisle like spending money and going home (back to their districts) during the holidays.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $92.45. Whoo-hoo. Though oil company share prices down in futures. Dow up slightly.
- Trump is considering calling the war over.
- Putin exploring ways to end its own war.
New wells reporting:
- Friday, September 4, 2026: 8 for the month, 106 for the quarter, 445 for the year,
- 41970, conf, Devon Energy, Thunderbolt 10-12 1H,
- 41883, conf, XTO, GBU Artemis 32X-13H-S,
- Thursday, September 3, 2026: 6 for the month, 104 for the quarter, 443 for the year,
- 42333, conf, XTO, GBU Artemis 32X-13B-N,
- 41882, conf, XTO, GBU Artemis 32X-13C-S,
- 40939, conf, Zavanna, Hereford 13-36 4TFH,
RBN Energy: ONEOK levels up its Permian presence with $4.4 billion Brazos midstream deal. Link here. Archived. OKE up 30% over the past 52 weeks. Dividend 4.5%. Likely to maintain same dividend in November, 2026, but will like increase dividend by 3 or 4 cents in February, 2027.
ONEOK is buying Brazos Midstream’s natural gas gathering and processing assets in the Permian’s Midland Basin for $4.425 billion. The deal, announced August 30, will more than double ONEOK’s Midland Basin processing capacity to roughly 2.3 Bcf/d and is funded by a $9 billion nonvoting minority equity investment from funds and affiliates managed by Apollo Global Management Inc. In today’s RBN blog, we look at what the transaction could mean for ONEOK.
Let’s start with a little background on Brazos Midstream and note that the company has only agreed to sell its gas gathering and processing assets in the Midland (see photo below; we’ll discuss in detail farther down) and will maintain its crude oil assets in the basin.
The Fort Worth, TX-based company got its start in April 2015 and, with financial backing from Old Ironsides Energy, a then-new private equity firm, Brazos quickly determined that the Permian (and more specifically the southern Delaware Basin in West Texas) offered the best midstream development opportunities and concentrated its efforts there (see Have It All). The timing worked.
Thanks to producers’ success in “cracking the code” in the Wolfcamp, Bone Spring and other hydrocarbon-rich formations, the Permian turned out to be the only crude-focused shale play where production actually increased during the mid-2010s downturn in crude prices. Those wells also generated large volumes of associated gas, much of it rich in NGLs, and created an opportunity for a range of midstream infrastructure.
