Locator: 50323B.
IOC: Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from competing in women's events.
Trump's Iran ultimatum: expires Friday night. Tomorrow, about 36 hours from now.
Updated: EVs that were canceled or delayed in 2025 / 2026. Link here.
********************************
Back to the Bakken
WTI: $94.16. Up $3.84; up 4.31%.
Natural gas: has hardly moved (here in the US) this past year -- today -- still under $3.00.
New wells reporting:
RBN Energy: Iran War roils pricing just after US E&P returns hit four-year lows. Link here. Archived.
The upstream oil and gas sector has been periodically roiled by
dramatic price swings triggered by world events over the last five
decades, including the 1970s oil embargo, the 1990-91 Gulf War, the
late-1990s Asian financial crisis, the 2008 financial collapse, the
onset of COVID in 2020, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and
now, the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran. The subsequent nearly $40/bbl
surge in crude oil prices has taken attention away from the
just-released year-end 2025 reports that showed U.S. E&P profits and
cash flows have been steadily squeezed by the decline of realizations
to a five-year low. In today’s RBN blog, we analyze the impact of
bottoming oil prices on earnings and cash flows as the industry girds
for an unpredictable 2026.
As
shown in Figure 1 below, crude oil prices (gray line and right axis)
rapidly gained momentum in late 2020 after plunging to just $16.55/bbl
in April of that year, breaking the $50/bbl level in January 2021 and
building to a peak above $100/bbl in March-July 2022. U.S. producers,
which after decades of reckless spending transitioned to a model that
prioritized free cash flow, basked in record returns that were passed
along to shareholders. However, prices steadily retreated, lingering in
the $70-$80/bbl range from 2023 through the first couple months of 2025
before declining more rapidly in the second half of the year. The
average WTI price for December dipped to $57.85/bbl, the lowest since
January 2021. (Prices have surged since the start of the war with Iran,
settling at $98.23 on March 20.)
