Locator: 51163REFINERS.
Up 10% in the last five days ... and it's not a semiconductor company. A 52-week high today.
Monday, July 13, 2026
America Extends Its Lead Over Russia And Saudi Arabia In Oil Output -- July 13, 2026
Locator: 51162PRODUCTION.
Making America great -- the roughnecks.
Tag: US Russia Saudi Arabia record production
Link here. It's not so much that the USA has the lead but look at how big that lead is -- greater than 40% more than Russia or Saudi Arabia. Forty percent is not trivial. And with regard to Russia, the gap will likely widen.
The Iranians Are Misreading President Trump -- Not That It Matters -- July 13, 2026
Locator: 51161WTI.
Will we go over $80 before the end of the week?
The Iranians have misread President Trump. Not that it matters.
Step-by-step -- Trump is upping the "Kharg Island" play. President Trump will talk to the nation Thursday night -- three days -- most likely it will just be another uneventful political speech -- but what if it is something about Kharg Island?
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A Musical Interlude
I'm gonna put a spell on you. CCR. Link here.
This Is What Makes America Great -- National Chicken Fingers Day -- Save The Date -- July 27th -- Posted July 13, 2026
Locator: 51160CHICKEN.
Note to the Texas extended family. We'll be hosting a chicken fingers day, July 27. save the date.
July 27th this year is a Monday. On Tuesday, I'm on the road.
Seven New Oil And Gas Permits -- July 13, 2026
Locator: 51159B.
Oil company share prices at the close:
- CVX: up 3.3%; up $5.80; trading at $182.20; now owns Hess, except for the famous holiday toy-truck business (still owned by the family); after jump in first six months; pretty flat in most recent six months; up 20% this past year.
- DVN: up 3.6%; up $1.50; trading at $43.73;
- EOG: up 4.1%; up $5.51; trading at $139.61;
- MPC: up 4.63%; up $13.14; trading at $296.88; up 121% past year.
- EPD: up 2.79%; up $1.04; trading at $38.31; up 20% past year.
Senator Lindsey Graham: net worth according to public filings, about $2 million.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: Holy mackerel -- $78.41.
Active rigs: 27.
Seven new permits, #43109 - #43116, inclusive, with one exception, 43112. Note: 43112 and 43117 were SWD permits.
- Operators: Slawson, Formenters Operations (2), Phoenix Operating (4).
- Fields: Painted Wood (Williams County); Black Slough (Burke County); and Skabo (Divide County).
- Comments:
- Slawson has a permit for a Stampeded well, NWNE 36-154-104,
- to be sited 430 FNL and 2294 FEL;
- Formentera Operations has permits for a Rabbit well and a Gabriel well, SWSW 8-162-93;
- to be sited 520 FSL and 779 / 814 FWL;
- Phoenix Operations has permits for four Akemi Ferrari wells, SESE and SWSE 14-160-98,
- to be sited 350 FSL and 12/76 / 1396 FEL.
With Regard To The Buffalo Toss In Yellowstone Park Recently -- July 13, 2026
Locator: 51158BUFFALO.
Updates
Wow, this was fast.
Original Post
Query: did a buffalo toss a man in Yellowstone park this past week, July, 2026?
Reply:
In case you missed it.
They interviewed the buffalo, also, to get the buffalo's side of the story.
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The Book Page
My book for the day.
A Backward Glance: An Autobiography, Edith Wharton, c. 1933.
My wife happened to ask me if I had read The Age Of Innocence or The House of Mirth. I can't recall to what extent I read any part of those two books. I do recall having read some of A Backward Glance and was curious to take another look. But my "original" copy was packed away and it would take forever to find it, so I ordered a new copy from Amazon and it arrived today.
Notes, if any, will be kept here: link here.
The Viceroy Of Venezuela -- Marco Rubio -- NYT -- July 13, 2026
Locator: 51157VENEZUELA.
Tag: Marco Rubio.
Because this is in The New York Times, I don't know how much is true, and how much is opinion, but it's an interesting article.
The article begins:
My hunch: this may be a bit of hyperbole. It may be how the reporters view the situation and it may be different from reality. I don't know.
A Tale Of Two Cities -- July 13, 2026
Locator: 51155SEATTLE.
I assume the suburbs are doing great!
Tag: northwest downtown commercial property
SEATTLE:
PORTLAND:
COMPARISON:
Manic Monday -- META More Than Doubles Down On Its Louisian LDC -- July 13, 2026
Locator: 51154LDCS.
But first, a review:
Top states, change from previous update (July 3, 2026 -- July 13, 2026 -- link here):
- Virginia: 579 --> 601-->603-->609 -->633-->637
- Texas: 411 --> 441-->461-->464–>467-->480-->504
- California: 289 --> 288-->287—>287-->291-->292
- Illinois: 232 --> 228-->228-->228-->239-->239
- Georgia: 214 --> 213-->213-->219-->228-->228
- Ohio: 201-->204-->204-->204–>210-->224-->236
- Arizona: 163 -->157-->156-->156-->156-->160
- New York: 133 --> 132 --> 132-->132-->133-->133
- Pennsylvania—> 131-->133-->138
- Indiana: 89 --> 122-->122-->122-->123-->123
- Iowa: 96 --> 101-->102-->102-->105-->116
- Missouri: 91-->92-->92
- Tennessee: 61-->63-->63
META's LDC in Lousisiana: link here.
Meta’s massive Hyperion data center project in rural Louisiana is getting much bigger and costlier, with a big assist from the state’s government. The company said in a blog post Monday that the site in Richland Parish, Louisiana — home to what will be Meta’s largest data center — will be a 5 GW facility and cost more than $50 billion.
That’s higher than the $27 billion figure that was revealed in October, when Meta and Blue Owl Capital formed a joint venture to help with the build-out and management of the facility, originally planned as a 2 GW data center.
It appears that discontinuing its VR division has generated a lot of free cash flow to significantly increase their pivot to the cloud, AI, and LDCs.
LDCs are tracked here.
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More Background
Re-posting from March 26, 2026:
META's LDCs:
- as of April 16, 2025, AI says the largest data center in the US is owned by Meta Platforms, located in Prineville, Oregon. Out in the middle of nowhere, northeast of Bend, Oregon.
- Meta's Richland Parish Data Center, Louisiana: link here.
- Meta's El Paso Data Center, El Paso, Texas: link here. $10 billion.
This is META's El Paso, Texas, project, from AI, just moments ago.
Breaking: META now plans to spend $10 billion on this data center, up from $1.5 billion. Link here.
Manic Monday -- The Bakken -- July 13, 2026
Locator: 51153B.
The strait:
- Trump will reinstate the blockade against Iran;
- the USA will be reimbursed 20% on the value of all cargo shipped brought through the strait
- to compensate the USA for protecting the strait
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $74.60.
New wells reporting today:
- Tuesday, July 14, 2026: 23 for the month, 23 for the quarter, 376 for the year,
- None.
- Monday, July 13, 2026: 23 for the month, 23 for the quarter, 376 for the year,
- 41918, conf, Murfin Drilling, MH Hecker 1-11H,
- 40623, conf, Devon Energy, Skaar 15-22 6H,
- Sunday, July 12, 2026: 21 for the month, 21 for the quarter, 374 for the year,
- 42042, conf, Phoenix Operating, Willow Gray 2-11-14-23 4H,
- 42041, conf, Phoenix Operating, Willow Gray 2-11-14-23 3H,
- 42040, conf, Phoenix Operating, Willow Gray 2-11-14-23 2H,
- 42039, conf, Phoenix Operating, Willow Gray 2-11-14-23 1H-LL,
- 41548, conf, Oasis, Ellis 5602 13-17 4B,
- Saturday, July 11, 2026: 16 for the month, 16 for the quarter, 369 for the year,
- 41619, conf, Devon Energy, Sanders 34-27 5H,
RBN Energy: more on how hyperscalers mitigate the impacts of their fast-rising use of natural gas. Link here. Archived here.
There are several approaches environmentally inclined hyperscalers can take to mitigate the climate-related impacts of their increasing consumption of natural gas for data centers. These include buying and retiring environmental credits for low-methane-intensity (low-MI) gas; capturing and sequestering most of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by their gas plants; developing new wind, solar and geothermal projects (either onsite or elsewhere) to offset the gas-fired generation; and buying power from existing nuclear units and/or supporting the development of new ones. In today’s RBN blog, we continue our look at what hyperscalers are doing to mitigate the impacts of their growing reliance on natural gas.
As we said in Part 1, many of the nation’s largest hyperscalers — companies like Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft — now acknowledge that the need to rapidly ramp up the availability of around-the-clock electricity to power their new data centers gives them little choice but to rely heavily on gas-fired generation, at least for the near term. The catch is that these gas-dependent plans conflict head-on with the companies’ long-stated “net zero” goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, so many of these same AI giants are taking aggressive steps to mitigate the environmental impact of their fast-rising gas use.
We also summarized the major hyperscalers’ stated goals for reducing GHGs and the new challenges they face in meeting those goals, and identified the primary approaches that hyperscalers are leaning into — noted just above.
Today, we will put a little more meat on those bones, focusing initially on what seems sure to be a popular tactic, namely the purchase and retirement of low-MI gas certificates (aka MiQ certificates) tied to natural gas that has been independently certified as having very low methane intensity. As we said a while back in our Drill Down Report on certified gas (aka differentiated gas), there are a variety of efforts underway in the U.S. and elsewhere to make the natural gas piece of the global energy puzzle as clean as it can be. A primary focus of these efforts is on reducing as much as possible the amount of methane (CH4) — the main ingredient in natural gas — that is released into the atmosphere along its route from the production well to the end-user’s burner tip.
There’s good reason for zeroing in on methane emissions. Methane is a particularly potent GHG, with 84 times the atmospheric heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide (CO2) over the short term (five to 20 years). That means reducing methane emissions along the gas value chain has quick and very positive climate effects.
Certified gas is natural gas that an independent auditor has verified against a third-party standard, thereby providing a credible and transparent accounting of emissions performance. For the most part, the certified gas movement has focused on the upstream end, namely where gas is produced, either in gas-focused plays like the Marcellus/Utica and the Haynesville or crude-oil-focused plays like the Permian and the Bakken, where large volumes of associated gas (a mix of methane, NGLs and various impurities) emerges from wells with crude oil.
Monday Morning -- July 13, 2026
Locator: 51152AAPL.
AAPL: hits all-time high this morning.
TSMC: here we go. From CNBC, this link.
You can howl at the wind, but AI is here to stay.
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Disclaimer
Briefly:
I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken and I am often well out front of my headlights. I am often appropriately accused of hyperbole when it comes to the Bakken. I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. See disclaimer. This is not an investment site. Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If something appears wrong, it probably is. Feel free to fact check everything. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken, US economy, and the US market. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. And now, Nvidia, also. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Nvidia. Nvidia is a metonym for AI and/or the sixth industrial revolution. I've now added Broadcom to the disclaimer. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Broadcom. Now, I've added Amazon. And QCOM. Longer version here.
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