Quick Connects -- Geoff Simon -- Alison Ritter -- Juy 25, 2025

Locator: 48683B.

• North Dakota's oil boom powering its economy, creating jobs, funding schools -- MSN

• Landowners appeal state decision on major power line project -- Bismarck Tribune

• North Dakota is leading a feasibility study to develop geothermal energy -- E&E News

• Production dips in May; more consolidation with Chevron-Hess deal -- Bismarck Tribune

• Wellspring Hydro, Volt Lithium propel ND to supply domestic lithium -- North Dakota Commerce

• Company behind wind farm project near Wishek discusses need for waiver from PSC -- KFYR - TV

• AI data centers are using more power. Regular customers are footing the bill -- North Dakota Monitor

• US Rep. Julie Fedorchak faces frustration in first forum after 'big, beautiful bill' -- Bismarck Tribune

• Governor Armstrong requests presidential disaster declaration for June storms -- North Dakota Monitor

• Digital driver's licenses are on track to be introduced in North Dakota in the fall -- Dickinson Press

• How is North Dakota preparing for sweeping changes to property taxation? -- Dickinson Press

• Pilot makes sharp turn to avoid a B-52 bomber over ND, then takes to the mic -- Bismarck Tribune

• Dept of Commerce announces grants for tourism and community enhancement -- Grand Forks Herald

• US Supreme Court to keep district map in place until voting rights case wraps up -- North Dakota Monitor

• Medora braces for boom ahead of Theodore Roosevelt Library's grand opening -- Dickinson Press

• $211M budget proposed to Minot City Council; reflects decline in overall spending -- Minot Daily News

• Watford City launches branding effort to reflect the community's growth and character -- Dickinson Press

• McKenzie Health, Chord Energy celebrate expansion of services in Watford -- McKenzie County Farmer

• McKenzie County sees drilling growth amid housing, workforce challenges -- McKenzie County Farmer

• Long-awaited Theodore Roosevelt Expressway expansion set for fall bidding -- McKenzie County Farmer

• Projects demonstrate carbon capture North Dakota ranchers may get behind -- Dickinson Press

• Large fire breaks out Wednesday morning at a fertilizer storage facility in Deering -- KFYR - TV

• Five-year strategic priorities plan has been adopted by Williston City Commissioners -- Williston Herald

• Dept. of Education reinstates $1.3B for after-school programs after senators' plea -- Dickinson Press

• Applicants sought for Ray school board; vacancy intended to be filled by August meeting -- The Journal

• Child care centers grow own food with North Dakota Agriculture Department grant -- Dickinson Press

• Tardy federal school funding has North Dakota schools working on alternatives -- North Dakota Monitor

• Baesler celebrates four finalists for ND 2026 Teacher of the Year award -- The Center Republican

• Several North Dakota high school seniors awarded $46,000 in scholarships at state fair -- KX News

• What the media still won't tell you about the energy transition - it's not happening -- Robert Bryce

• BP agrees to sell U.S. onshore wind business, continuing efforts to pivot back to oil and gas -- World Oil

• Coal making comeback under Trump; halting plant closures and supporting mining projects -- Oil Price

• House GOP's CRAs free up millions of acres for American energy independence -- Washington Reporter

• Interior advances energy dominance through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act -- BLM News Release

• Group of eight oil and gas trade associations call on U.S. Congress to push permitting reform -- World Oil

• Trump EPA will propose repealing a 2009 finding that climate change endangers public health -- The Hill

• Trump admin on verge of nixing endangerment finding, the left's favorite climate tool -- Daily Caller

• Burgum to give personal approval of any energy projects on federal lands -- Oklahoma Energy Today

• America's energy mother lode is more vital than ever as the world enters the AI era -- Townhall

• Interior Secretary Doug Burgum urges House GOP to roll back Biden-era energy policies -- E&E News

• Power output from fossil fuels rises in Europe, US despite soaring clean energy generation -- Oil Price

• Watchdog Group: Biden EPA rushed billions to Democrat-tied green groups in final months -- Daily Caller

• NBC pushes climate alarmism on hailstorms, ignoring science and IPCC data -- Issues and Insights

• Real-world data shreds the warming narrative pushed by activists and the media -- I & I Editorial Board

• The great "zero-carbon renewables" deception; Green energy claims are half truths -- California Globe

• Wyoming's new mine extracting critical minerals from coal powers America's future -- Patriot Newswire

Four New Permits; Fifteen Permits Canceled; Three DUCs Reported As Completed -- July 25, 2025

Locator: 48682B.

 ***************************

Back to the Bakken

WTI: $65.16.

Active rigs: 31

Four new permits, #42157 - #42160, inclusive.

• Operator: Formentera Operations

• Field: Larson oil field
• Comments:
• 
Formentera Operations has permits for four The Great wells, NENW 25-162-94, 
• to be sited 400 FNL and 2279 / 2384 FWL.

Fifteen permits canceled:


• Burlington Resources (9):

• Abercrombie (3), McKenzie County
• Aberlid, McKenzie County
• Omlid (5), McKenzie County
  
• WPX Energy (5):

• five Syw wells
• Syw 22-27HE, Syw 22-27HY, Syw 22-27HA, Sy2 22-27HX, Syw 22-27HIL
  
• Kraken:
• a Cass permit, Williams County

Three DUCs reported as completed:

• 
41178, 2,705, CLR, Helen 5-8H, Williams County;
• 41311, 2,164, CLR, Kenneth 6-17H, Williams County;
• 41312, 2,160, CLR, Helen 7-8H, Williams County;

Kelly Evans, CNBC Anchor, Starting COB Today -- Three-Months Maternity Leave -- Pregnant With Her Sixth Child -- July 26, 2025

Locator: 48682ARCHIVES.

Breaking: Anthropic (Claude) seeks to double its valuation to over 150 billion in talks with Mideast funds -- Financial Times -- this news broke after the information below was already posted.

• corroborates Tom Lee's statement -- see below: this is still the early states of AI;
• reminder: Anthropic was not part of the Trump-Musk Mideast Tour of The Mideast (TMMT) some months ago
• this tells me a number of things, to include:
• Anthropic wouldn't make this announcement if they didn't think the Mideast still has another $100 billion to invest in AI
• Anthropic is a very, very sophisticated chatbot; it's not a conversational chatbot like Gemini or ChatGPT

From CNBC, mid-afternoon, Friday, July 25, 2025.

Tom Lee -- speculative bubble:

• speculation that inflation is coming back;
• speculation that we are on the precipice of a recession.

Tom Lee -- PTSD, due to:

• fear of tariffs;
• fear of "the Fed."

Tom Lee "only" invests in the "35 best large cap publicly traded companies." 

Tom Lee:

• early stages of AI

Other:

• risk of recession: lowest "recession probability" year to date
• anyone who says this is a bubble didn't live through or doesn't remember the 1990s 

*********************************
The Book Page

So, I’m reading The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, by Simon Winchester, c. 2019. 

Chapter 8 on “GPS” was incredibly fascinating, but then I started reading Chapter 9 — and whoo-hoo!. It turned out to be the story of a machine that makes machines, a machine that was sent to Chandler, Arizona, in 2018.

The chapter begins:

Once every few weeks, beginning in the summer of 2018, a trio of large Boeing freight aircraft, most often converted and windowless 747s of the Dutch airline KLM, takes off from Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with a precious cargo bound eventually for the city of Chandler, a desert exurb of Phoenix, Arizona.

The cargo is always the same, consisting of nine white boxes in each aircraft, each box taller than a man. To get these profoundly heavy containers from the airport in Phoenix to their destination, twenty miles away, requires a convoy of rather more than a dozen eighteen-wheel trucks. On arrival and finally uncrated, the contents of all the boxes are bolted together to form one enormous 160-ton machine — a machine too, in fact, a direct descendant of the machine tools invented and used by men such as Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay and Henry Royce and Henry Ford a century and more before.

Just like its cast-iron predecessors, the Dutch-made behemoth of a tool (fifteen of which compose the total order due to be sent to Chandler, each delivered as it is made) is a machine that makes machines. Yet, rather than making technical devices by the precise cutting of metal from metal, this gigantic device is designed for the manufacture of the tiniest of machines imaginable, of which perform their work electronically, without any visible moving parts.

......

......

The particular device sent out to perform such tasks in Arizona, and which, when fully assembled, is as big as a modest apartment, is known formally as an NXE:3350B EUV scanner It is made by a generally unfamiliar but formidably important Dutch-registered company known simply by its initials, ASML.

Each of of the machines in the order costs its customer about $100 million, making the total order worth about $1.5 billion.

Wow, wow, wow. I did not see that coming.

But it certainly connects a lot of dots.

***********************
Continuing

On page 291, more of the ASML story.

Enormous machines such as the fifteen that started to arrive at Intel's Chandler (Arizona) fab from Amsterdam in 2018 are employed to help secure this goal. The machines' maker, ASML -- the firm was originally called Advanced Semiconductor Materials International -- was founded in 1984, spun out from Philips, the Dutch company initially famous for its electric razors and lightbulbs (sic). The lighting connection was key, as the machie tools that the compay was established to make in those early days of the integrated circuit used intense beams of light to etch traces in photosensitive chemicals on the chips, and then when on to employ lasers and other intense sources as the dimensions of the transistors on the chips became ever more diminished.

Then the process is explained in great detail.

Then:

With the latest photolithographic equipment at hand, we are able to make chiops today that contain multitudes: seven bilion transistors on one circuit, a hudred million transistors corralled within one square millimeter of chip space. But with numbers like this comes a warning. Limits surely are being reached -- remember, this was being written in 2018. The train that left the railhead in 1971 may be about to arrive, after a journey almost half a century, at the majesty of the terminus. Such a reality seems increasingly probable, not least because as the space between transistors diminishes ever more, it fast approaches the diameter of individual atoms. And with spaces that small, leakage of some properties of one transistor (whether electric, electronic, atomic, photonic, or quantum-related properties) into the field of another will surely soon be experienced.

There will be, in short, a short circuit -- maybe a sparkless and unspectacular short circuit, but a misfire nonetheless, with consequences for the efficiency and utility of the chip and of the computer or other device at the heart of which it lies.

So, they need new machines to make chips even smaller. 

An American company (which ASML subsequently bought) had already developed a unique means of producing this particular and pecuiar type of EUV radiation. Some said the company's method verged on the insane, and it is easy to see why. 

If everything works properly -- and at the time of this writing, it seems to be -- then the first of these supercomplex chips, made in this bizarre manner, will be on offer from 2018 onward. And Moore's law, by then fifty-three years old, will prove to have kept itself on target, again.

But.

How much longer? The use of EUV machines may allow the law's continuance for a short while more, but then the buffers will surely be collided with, at full speed, and all will come to a shuddering halt. The jib, in other words, will soon be up.

A Skylake transistor is only about one hundred atoms thick -- and although the switching on and off that produces the ones and zeros that are the lifeblood of computing goes on as normal, the fact that such minute components contain so very few atoms makes the storage and usage of these digits increasingly difficult, steadily more elusive. See also this post.

There are plans for getting around the limits, for eking out a few more versions of what might be called "traditional" chips by, among other things, making the chips themselves increasingly three-dimensional -- by stacking chip on top of chip and connecting each for forests of ultraprecisely aligned and very tiny wires. This would allow the number of transistors in a chip to keep on increasing for a while without our having to reduce the size of individual transistors.

Other talk:

• the curious one-molecule-thick substance graphene;
• molybdenum disulfide, black phosphorus, and phosphorus-boron compunds as possible alternatives to silicon.

And then finally: quantum.

Light squeezing, for example, allows some actual measurement (rather than calculatioin, which is the basis of immensely small numbers -- see page 298 -- the Planck length -- 0.0000 (34 zeroes) 16229 meters, or about twenty decimal places smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. The time it would take a photo to journey through a Planck length: 5.49 x 10^-44 seconds.

Back to Intel's 14A chip:

Intel -- Breaking Up -- ICYMI -- July 25, 2025

Locator: 48681INTC.

Link here.

Breaking, 1:45 p.m. CT: it's being reported by CNBC that Intel will spin off its networking division (think "Oracle") as a stand-alone company. INTC was down about 7% before the announcement; after the announcement, down about 10%.

This suggests to me, Intel will have three divisions:

• Intel hardware: think Apple
• Intel inside: think AMD
• Intel networking: think Oracle.

Let's see what ChatGPT has to say about.  This is exactly how best to use a conversational chatbot.

From ChatGPT:

*************************
18A

Tag: Intel 7 Intel 18A Panther Lake Fab 52 Fab 62 Arizona RibbonFET gate-all-around transistors and PowerVia backside power delivery.

When I compare Nvidia's 2-nm current chip and Intel's 18A chip, it seems the Intel chip is better but the Nvidia chip is already about to ship or shipping (and the company has the MOJO), where Intel's 18A is scheduled to ship in 2026 and is lacking MOJO. Having said that, my understanding is that Intel is competing with AMD. 

A reminder:

• GPUs: Nvidia
• CPUs: Intel, AMD

Honda Mileage -- Personal Data -- July 25, 2025

Locator: 48680HONDA.

Technically, it's a 2012 model but it was bought in late 2011. Mileage, MPG, has remained remarkably "stable" for several years, ten cents / mile for gasoline, averaging about 30 mpg in city driving, of which maybe a fourth of that driving is on interstate or four-lane divided highways.