While Minnesotans Prepare For Global Warming, Mother Nature Hits Them With A(n) Historic "Spring" Winter Storm -- April 11, 2019

What's wrong with this picture? Hint: this picture is not tipped on its side.

In the eighteen years growing up in North Dakota, I never once saw this.

From "Homeland Security":

HSEM continues to track snow storm reports from emergency managers as more counties are reporting impacts. The following are new reports we’ve received over the past two hours.
• Blue Earth County reports downed power lines and power poles which have resulted in widespread outages.
• Cottonwood County has pulled their snow plows from the roadways due to fallen power lines and poor visibility. There are numerous electrical outages and crews are quickly working to restore service.
• Dodge County reports multiple downed power lines over roadways.
• Faribault County reports nearly 100 downed power poles.
• Freeborn County reports more than 200 downed power poles. The utilities are calling partners to help with repairs as thousands of customers are without power. Downed power lines forced the closure of Highway 13.
• Nicollet county reports scattered power outages as crews battle strong wind gusts to make repairs.
• Waseca County has issued a no travel advisory. The sheriff is assisting with road closures.
HSEM is conducting daily conference calls with regional staff and county emergency managers to assess weather impacts. No requests for state assistance have been made.

WTI Drops Below $64; Five New Permits -- April 11, 2019

Active rigs:

$63.71	4/11/2019	04/11/2018	04/11/2017	04/11/2016	04/11/2015
Active Rigs	63	59	53	31	93

Five new permits:

• Operators: Whiting (3); Lime Rock Resources; BR
• Fields: Sanish, Murphy Creek, Big Bend, Corral Creek
• Comments:
• Whiting has permits for three single wells:
• Jones, section 8-154-91, Sanish oil field 
• Oppeboen, section 5-142-91, Big Bend oil field
• Stenseth Trust, lot 4/section 5-152-91 in Sanish oil field
• Lime Rock has a permit for a Brew well in section 13-143-96 in Murphy Creek;
• BR has a permit for a CCU Burner well in section 26-147-95 in Corral Creek;

Two permits renewed:

• XTO: two Lonnie Federal permits in Williams County.

Natural Gas Fill Rate -- April 11, 2019

Link here.

This is something I did not see predicted. In hindsight, it seems like it should have been easily predicted.

Look how fast the "curve" is turning.

It's hard to say whether the rate of "fill" will exceed that of one year ago -- very steep a year ago (once it started to turn), but one can see that the curve turned positive sooner this year than last year. In retrospect, that should have been predicted. I completely missed it.

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What Condition My Condition Is In

Natural Gas, April 11, 2019, T+99, Part 2 -- Making America Great

Updates

April 12, 2019: with regard to the note below, a reader noted --

"Unfortunately: NGCC power plants are less efficient than other forms of natural gas-fired capacity." Did you mean non combined cycle are less efficient - like single stage peak load generators....the other 1/2?

Original Post

Natural gas milestone, 2018: US natural gas-fired combined-cycle capacity overtook coal-fired capacity in 2018.

NGCC.

• 2019, US:
• NGCC capacity: 264 GW
• coal plant capacity: 243 GW
• NGCC capacity: accounts for about half of all natural gas-fired capacity in the US

Unfortunately: NGCC power plants are less efficient than other forms of natural gas-fired capacity.

Last four years:

• coal: shed 40 GW of capacity
• NGCC: added about 30 GW 

Examples:

• Duke Energy: $1.5 billion, 1.64 GW Citrus Combined Cycle Station in Florida
• Dominion Energy: $1.3 billion, 1.6 GW Greensville station in Virginia

$1.5 billion / 1.6 GW =  $1 million / MW
New natural gas capacity for 2019: should add 6 GW of electricity -- mostly in PA, FL, and LA

It's very interesting: California is not mentioned in the article. In fact, the entire west coast is AWOL.

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Skills For The 21st Century

My Inappropriate Exuberance Regarding The Bakken Has Not Abated -- April 11, 2019

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or what you think you may have read here.

Disclaimer: I am inappropriately exuberant with regard to the Bakken.

Disclaimer: when it comes to the Bakken, I sometimes think I live in an echo chamber.

Disclaimer: connecting the dots below; there will be factual and typographical errors; personal comments and opinions will be interspersed with data points from other sources.

From the NOG presentation:

• nothing new here, NOG repeats the current EUR from the Bakken: 7.4 billion bbls
• another decade of drilling based on current data
• 7.4 billion bbls recoverable oil
• 1.4 million bopd crude oil (not boe)
• 14.5 years 

EOR, Bloomberg:

• tight oil goal: move primary recovery from 10% to 20%
• that's a huge goal -- doubling primary recovery from 10% to 20%
• the original Bakken wells had EURs of 350,000 bbls crude oil; now, the expectation is for new wells to have EURs of 1 million bbls crude oil
•  North Dakota legislature, oil industry already beginning to address issues of CO2 storage, injection
• conventional oil: 50% primary recovery

Original Leigh Price paper:

• 500 billion bbls original oil in place (OOIP)

Primary recovery in the Bakken:

• early on in the Bakken boom: 1 - 3% recovery 
• currently: some think we may be nearing 20% from primary recovery in the newer wells in the Bakken

USGS survey of the Bakken: promised a long time ago; still waiting for it

• when we get it, it will include the middle Bakken and the first bench of the Three Forks
• will not include the lower benches of the Three Forks
• will double the recoverable reserves from the previous report

NDIC map:

• currently the NDIC map includes one "page" -- the entire state of North Dakota
• the next iteration, the NDIC will have four pages or more: one page for each of the four main counties and a map each for the southwestern counties and the northwestern counties

Bakken strengths:

• small geographic area
• infrastructure in place; already good, getting better
• huge microseismic array; at one time, the world's largest such array
• good relationship among all players