The Million Dollar Way (The Bakken Oil Blog)

Sunday, June 11, 2023

GDPNow — Up Again — “We’re Nearing A Mild Recession” — And, Oh, By The Way: Back In A Bull Market —June 11, 2023

Locator: 44910MKT.

GDPNow: link here. Most recent reading — 2.2%.

The only “thing” in a recession? Oil stocks. I’ve been waiting two decades for a breakout in the price of WTI. Time to move on.

Fed: likely no change in “Fed rate” in June.

Market:

XOM -- Double Shale Production -- June 3, 2023

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/exxon-bets-new-ways-to-frack-can-double-oil-pumped-from-shale-wells-1.1927597

“There’s just a lot of oil being left in the ground,” Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods said Thursday at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference. “Fracking’s been around for a really long time, but the science of fracking is not well understood.”

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the process of blasting water, sand and chemicals underground to break apart rock and keep it propped open for oil to flow out. Though the technology gave rise to the US shale boom, only about 10% of the oil in a reservoir is recovered using current techniques. Better drilling and fracking methods may prove critical as output growth from shale fields slows.

Exxon is working on two specific areas to improve fracking, Woods said. It wants to be able to frack more precisely along the well so that more oil-soaked rock is getting drained. It also wants to keep the cracks open longer to boost the flow of oil. Sand is the primary method today to prevent fractures from closing up.

“That in my mind is where the first wave of technology will come into that field,” Woods said. “We think we’ve got some promising technologies to employ there that will significantly improve our recovery.”

Revenge Travel -- It's A Thing -- A Mild Recession — Munger — June 11, 2023

Locator: 44909MKT.

Shell: says it's in the oil and gas business, again. Link to The WSJ.

US rail: CEOs realize their workers are ... important .. offering concessions ... link to The WSJ.

Airlines ... revenge travel: this is very, very interesting.

link to NPR;

Travel insurance company Allianz Partners analyzed more than 40,000 trip itineraries planned for this summer and concluded that American travel to Europe will jump 600% from last year.

This sharp uptick is not limited to Europe. This month during an industry conference, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said that "demand is off the charts," while the airline industry is struggling to keep up.

link to Yahoo!Finance: Delta Airlines.

The summer of 2022 proved to be a season of “travel chaos,” but there’s something funny about this year: People just keep hitting the road. Even stubbornly “sticky” inflation and the highest ticket prices in many years aren’t enough to spoil the appeal.

And Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian just revealed to Fortune that demand remains “really, really strong,” to say the least. In fact, as he told Fortune CEO Alan Murray and editor-at-large Michal Lev-Ram on the Leadership Next podcast this week, his team has quantified Americans’ thirst for “revenge travel” right now, and it’s a huge number.

“People talk about revenge travel, or pent-up travel—this is beyond anything that people can classify as truly pent-up,” Bastian said. “We went through several years of people not being able to get back out and travel and experience and see loved ones, see their business colleagues, adventures—all the reasons we travel. And people had a lot of time.”

He revealed that he asked his team to measure the gap between inherent demand for U.S. travel that couldn’t be met over the past three years, based on “any kind” of historical pattern: “That gap is $300 billion—with a B.”

Delta is currently seeing demand it’s never seen before, he continued, “and there’s no end in sight. We’ve had the 20 largest cash sales days in our history all occur this year.”

Technology Weekend Continued -- Part 4 -- Superchargers -- Ford And General Motors Partner With Tesla -- June 11, 2023

Locator: 44908TECH.

TSLA: surges (in a good way). Shares up almost 50% in past month. We’re in a mild recession — Munger.

Crashed and burned: Blink Charging, EVgo, and ChargePoint;

Motley Fool notes Tesla partnership with F, GM; says Stellantis could be next;
closer and closer to the "holy grail": a universal supercharger.
see this post.

Take it to the bank: if Stellantis partners with Tesla, the US has its universal supercharger