Active Rigs -- Midnight Bakken Time, January 14, 2015

	1/14/2015	01/14/2014	01/14/2013	01/14/2012	01/14/2011
Active Rigs	158	188	184	200	163

Good luck to all the roughnecks out there. This too shall pass.

Political Commentary; Nothing About The Bakken -- January 14, 2015

Then:  From a Jamie Dimon letter, from the opening paragraph on bank regulation, of an undated letter:

The Obama administration has laid out a plan for regulatory reform that offers a strong platform for moving forward. 

Now: It appears that Jamie Dimon has had his fill of the Obama regulations. The New York Times is reporting:

“Banks are under assault,” Mr. Dimon said in the call with reporters. “In the old days, you dealt with one regulator when you had an issue. Now it’s five or six. You should all ask the question about how American that is, how fair that is.”

This is not the first time that Mr. Dimon has publicly criticized the new scrutiny and rules that banks have dealt with since the financial crisis. But in the past, Mr. Dimon was often confronting skeptics from outside the banking world. On Wednesday, he faced off against several industry analysts who questioned whether the costs associated with JPMorgan’s heft are outweighing the benefits.

I assume his worse nightmare has come to fruition: Obama's Pocahontas is now a US Senator and on the Senate Banking Committee.  

I have no idea why Dimon would support the party that loves regulations. From a post long ago, OpenSecrets.org is reporitng:

Since Democrats swept into congressional power in the 2006 midterm elections, many industries — including some that traditionally back Republicans — have either begun to contribute to both parties equally or favor Democrats outright.

The chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase, however, never had to make any shift.

Jamie Dimon happens to be a long-time Democratic donor.

Dimon and his wife, Judy, have donated more than a half-million dollars to Democratic candidates and committees since 1989, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of his donations. That is nearly 12 times what the couple has given the GOP. 

And now he complains about regulators. It will be interesting which party he supports in 2016.

Same with Warren Buffett. I don't get it. Wanting taxes raised but fighting (all the way to courts) for every tax break possible.

UK North Sea Oil Drilling Work Lowest in 15 Years -- January 14, 2015

From Rigzone/Reuters, UK North Sea oil drilling work lowest in 15 years:

The number of oil wells drilled in the British part of the North Sea fell to the lowest level in 15 years last year, data showed on Thursday, underlining the basin's struggle with high exploration costs that have contributed to a decline in output.

Oil and gas explorers drilled just 40 exploration and appraisal wells in the UK Continental Shelf in 2014, 47 percent lower than the average yearly drills over the past ten years.

Many large oil companies have cut investments in the North Sea as they see more profitable new fields in emerging areas such as south-east Asia and Brazil. Oil explorers' high North Sea costs have been compounded by a 60 percent drop in oil prices in the past seven months.

Brazil? The tea leaves suggest things aren't going all that well either.

Update On The Monterey Shale Formation In California -- January 14, 205

Regular readers know my "fascination" with OXY USA (their Bakken wells and their activities in California). I keep waiting for clarity with regard to OXY USA in the Bakken, and the Bakken/OXY USA seems to get murkier and murkier. Look at the recent permits and look at the recent OXY USA wells that have come off the confidential list to see what I'm talking about.

So, I was quite interested in this Rigzone article about drillers in California:

California's oil industry is being hit harder than any other state by falling prices because of the comparatively poor quality of its crude and its aging fields.

The number of active drilling rigs in the state has more than halved since June 2014, from 48 to just 21, according to oilfield services company Baker Hughes (http://link.reuters.com/ruz73w).

The California rig count is the lowest since October 2009, when producers were struggling with low prices in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and deep recession that began a year earlier. California's high-cost and low-productivity oil industry has always been vulnerable to falling prices and exhibits deep especially cycles in activity rates.

It is still the third-largest oil producing state in the union, producing almost 560,000 barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Oil fields in the Los Angeles Basin and around Bakersfield in Kern County were once among the largest and most productive in the United States. But the state's output has been steadily declining since 1986.

Unlike other major producing states such as Texas, North Dakota and Oklahoma, the shale revolution has bypassed the state.

California's very mature fields produced 3 billion barrels of water and just 200 million barrels of oil in 2012 - 15 barrels of water for every barrel of oil - according to state regulators.

Most of the oil is heavy and viscous. More than half of state production, including big fields like Kern River, Belridge and Midway-Sunset, has an API gravity of 20 degrees or less.

In 2009, California operators had to inject 500 million barrels of steam and almost 1.4 billion barrels of water into declining fields to maintain pressure and improve flow to produce just 230 million barrels of oil.

The state has around 35,000 stripper wells which produced on average just 3.4 barrels per day each in 2012. These highly marginal wells accounted for 116,000 barrels per day of the state's total output, more than 20 percent of the total, according to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. 

Much, much more at the link, including this:

The state's fields are all conventional rather than shale plays and mostly very old so decline rates are slow. Production did not surge in 2010-2014 and for the same reason it is unlikely to collapse now even if drilling rates decline. The drilling slowdown will not contribute much to the rebalancing of the global oil market.

But the price collapse has killed off plans to frack in the state's giant Monterey shale formation. It illustrates the intense financial squeeze on all high-cost low productivity producers across North America as prices tumble.

ONEOK Increases Dividend -- January 14, 2015; Reason #45,698 Why I Love To Blog

From a press release:

The board of directors of ONEOK, Inc. today increased ONEOK's quarterly cash dividend by 1.5 cents per share, or 3 percent, to 60.5 cents per share, effective for the fourth quarter 2014, resulting in an annualized cash dividend of $2.42 per share. The dividend is payable Feb. 13, 2015, to shareholders of record at the close of business Jan. 30, 2015.

Tweeting now:  Blackberry shares plummet 12% after company says it's not engaged in discussions with Samsung.

Tweeting now: UK's Northampton General Hospital confirms it is treating a woman who is suspected of having Ebola  -- at least it's hard to catch.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you might have read here. If this stuff is important to you, go to the source. 

Behind the scenes: unbeknownst to most Americans, there may, in fact, be a race between two states to have the first "bullet train": Texas and California. Regular readers are aware of the $100 billion bullet train proposed by Governor Jerry Brown (won't happen in my lifetime), but few Americans are probably aware of the "bullet train" that is actually moving along in Texas, one that would go from Dallas to Houston. The Texas proposal actually has a fair amount of support and is financially doable. It's very possible this thing could be built within the next 20 years. Texans generally support growth. Except for Sam Houston National Forest there's not much in the way, and the train could easily follow the interstate corridor. The distance is only about 240 miles and there would be very few cities along the route that conflict with the "bullet train." Should be fun to watch. 

Reason #45,698 Why I Love To Blog: a couple of hours after posting that note about the proposed bullet trains in Texas and California, Don sent me a link to this article:

Mexico began accepting new bids on a multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project Wednesday, two months after the concession was abruptly canceled amid allegations of favoritism.

The planned 130-mile (210-kilometer) line between Mexico City and the central city of Queretaro would be the first of its kind in Latin America, reaching speeds of up to 186 mph (300 kph).

Officials say it will cut what is now a 2 1/2-hour trip by car to just under an hour and carry 27,000 passengers daily.

A decision is expected in late July.

The original winner of the $3.7 billion concession was a Chinese-led consortium that had submitted the only bid and included a subsidiary of Mexico's Grupo Higa. But days after the announcement in early November, the government cancelled the concession.

So, now we have three "bullet train" projects we can watch: a) the train to nowhere in California, b) the  240-mile rail from Dallas to Houston; and, c) the Mexican "bullet train." Anyone want to guess which one is likely to win?