Thursday, July 17, 2014

Another Interactive Oil And Gas Map: Canada; ObamaNation: More Americans Than Ever Living In Multi-Generational Household (2014 -- Five Years Into The Reovery; Story Based On 2012 Data)

For those interested in tracking Bakken/Spearfish wells just north of the Canadian border, consider this interactive map: https://www.geoactivity.ca/views/map.aspx?O8la79Wkzr7Uxn96KD/IL+zSkTpjE6KdFJuNz9GVXjYKkXMCAw8aNSQdL2OcQXQexNFvrVLAe/2AQy/pZZ2BKLnISurkoMZ1AK9iRDKw84I=.

Sent to me by "anon 1." I will add this to the "Data Links" page.

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ObamaNation Five Years Into The Recovery: More Americans Than Ever Live in Multi-Generational Households

In a long, rambling note of July 14, 2014, I wrote:
Out here in California, on the surface, things look really, really good. But just beneath the surface, I'm not convinced everything is so hunkey-dory. Two things that one can't fail to notice almost immediately: the number of cars parked in driveways and on the streets in residential neighborhoods; and the price of gasoline, now pretty much averaging $5.00/gallon.

In middle class neighborhoods, houses were built for two-car households; now it appears it is not uncommon to see three-, four-, and five-car households. These are all sedans, pick-ups, SUVs, not recreational off-road vehicles. Local folks probably noticed this some time ago, but are now finally talking about it: multiple generations of same family living in three-bedroom homes. Across the street is a typical example, noted by many: grandparents, young adult children (both working), and elementary school children living in a small three-bedroom house, probably 1,500 square feet. Four cars. My brother-in-law lives in middle class neighborhood where townhouses are now going for $750,000 -- in Williston they would be $350,000 houses; in Williston, before the boom, they would have been $100,000 houses. His house and his neighbor's house share one wall. The neighbors are renting. The landlord is probably unaware of living situation: the landlord thinks a nice young couple moved in. In fact, there are three families living in the house: the parents and two of their adult children, both married. The parents and one son/wife life in the house; the second son/wife live in the garage. There are eight adults altogether in the house. The homeowners' association allows only two cars per townhouse to be parked in the complex. It took six months to a year to finally get the family to play by the rules; they now park six of their eight cars on a street outside the complex. A very, very nice family; all/most work at Disneyland (security guards, operating rides, etc; none professional as far as we know). No judgement. Simply a new phenomenon.
I wrote that on July 14, 2014. Today, three days later, The Los Angeles Times does the same story based on Pew Research:
More Americans than ever live in multigenerational households, and the number of millennials who live with their parents is rising sharply, according to a study released Thursday.
A record 57 million Americans, or 18.1% of the population, lived in multigenerational arrangements in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center.
That's more than double the 28 million people who lived in such households in 1980, the center said.
A multigenerational family is defined as one with two or more generations of adults living together.

The sluggish job market and other factors have propelled the rise in millennials living in their childhood bedrooms.
About 23.6% of people age 25 to 34 live with their parents, grandparents or both, according to Pew. That’s up from 18.7% in 2007, just prior to the global financial crisis, and from 11% in 1980.
For the first time, a larger share of young people live in multigenerational arrangements than of Americans 85 and older.
Hmmm..... I'm not going to add anything; the story speaks for itself.

Comparing The Bakken Boom With Previous Booms -- The Male Migration -- Pew Research, July, 2014

On July 15th, 2014 -- just a few days ago -- I had a long post on taxable sales and purchases in North Dakota as a result of the Bakken boom. A reader found a very interesting Pew Research study that was posted the very next day. Below is a graphic with regard to the male migration:


The second point had to do with the increase in women during those booms: "From 1970 to 1980, the number of men in Alaska increased by 31% (51,000). But the population growth of women was even faster, with a 46% increase (60,000) over the same time period."

I guess the "rush" is over.

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Ten (10) New Permits; 196 Active Rigs; Nine (9) Producing Wells Completed; KOG Reports Several Nice Wells; Statoil With A "High-IP" Well; July 17, 2014; Four Of Six Wells To DRL Status

Wells coming off the confidential list Friday:
  • 25490, drl, QEP, Johnson 2-4-9TH, Grail, no production data,
  • 26428, 1,437, Whiting, Norgard 21-13-2H, Ellsworth, t1/14; cum 48K 5/14;
  • 26446, drl, Petro-Hunt, USA 153-95-4B-9-2H, Charlson, no production data,
  • 26525, drl, CLR, Jerry 2-8H, Poe, no production data,
  • 26986, drl, Hess, EN-Dobrovolny-155-93-2128H-6, Alger, no production data,
  • 27118, 427, CLR, Priebe 1-5H1, Border, 30 stages; 4.4 million lbs; open hole packers utilizing 30 stages and plug & perf;  t6/14; cum 3K 5/14;
Active rigs:


7/17/201407/17/201307/17/201207/17/201107/17/2010
Active Rigs196189209178132

Ten (10) new permits --
  • Operators: Oasis (5), CLR (3), Sinclair, Mountain Divide
  • Fields: Missouri Ridge (Williams), Tyrone (Williams), Sanish (Mountrail), Big Dipper (Divide), LIttle Knife (Dunn)
  • Comments: CLR's newest permits are all in the Sanish (Mountrail) oil field
Wells coming off the confidential list today were posted earlier; see sidebar at the right.

Nine (9) producing wells completed:
  • 27794, 524, Whiting, Brehm 42-35-3XH, Sanish, t6/14; cum --
  • 26062, 1,658, MRO, Two Crow USA 21-15TFH, Moccasin Creek, t6/14; cum --
  • 24156, 1,790, KOG, Koala 16-32-29-2H, Poe, t6/14; cum --
  • 24155, 1,928, KOG, Koala 16-32-29-1H3, Poe, t6/14; cum --
  • 26244, 1,955, KOG, Koala 16-32-29-1H, Poe, t6/14; cum --
  • 26243, 1,898, KOG, Koala 16-32-29-2H3, Poe, t6/14; cum --
  • 27793, 885, Whiting, Brehm 42-35-2XH, Sanish, t6/14; cum --
  • 27268, 1,803, BR, CCU Red River 34-9TFH, Corral Creek, t6/14; cum --
  • 24373, 2,719, Statoil, Garmann 19-18 2TFH, Banks, t6/14; cum --
End of the road for the Mylo Wolding 14-11 well? Placed on "TA" status.
  • 18511, TA/39, MRO, Mylo Wolding 14-11, Reunion Bay, a single stage frack;  t9/10; cum 4K 5/14; this well was never planned to be a producer. "The Mylo Wolding 14-11 is the second of three planned vertical wells to be drilled on the same pad as part of Marathon's Bakken Integrated Core Study. The project well pad will have two monitoring wells flanking a test well, each spaced approximately 5000 feet apart. The monitoring wells (Mylo 1 and 2) will be drilled to the Three Forks; the test well (Mylo Wolding 14-11) will be drilled to the Three Forks, logged, and cased." Summary: the well was successfully drilled. The will was cased as a vertical test well with no immediate plans for completion.

For Investors Only -- July 17, 2014 -- Microsoft, Minimum Wage, ObamaCare

Updates

July 18, 2014: in the original post I mentioned "minimum wage" in Seattle and how it related to Microsoft's announcement to cut 18,000 jobs. I was informed by a reader that MSFT was headquartered in Redmond, not Seattle. I stand corrected. However, on further review, at least one huge campus -- a manufacturing facility -- is located in Seattle. My hunch is that MSFT has more folks working in Seattle (subject to minimum wage) than in Redmond. 

Later, 4:56 p.m. PDT: it looks like the market is finally starting to pay attention to the three shooting wars (Ukraine -- taking out civilian aircraft; Iraq -- Russia filling the void; and, Israel-Hamas -- the latter being stomped): the market fell today and futures show continued selling, while oil is quickly moving back to the $104 level (WTI crude).

Original Post
 
Perhaps the top story of the day for those not following the Malaysian Airline story is the news that Microsoft will cut 18,000 jobs as it "chops" (their word, not mine) Nokia. Reuters is reporting:
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella kicked off one of the largest layoffs in tech history on Thursday, signaling he intended to shake up the aging PC industry titan, but leaving questions about how exactly he would transform it into a nimbler, Web-based rival to Apple Inc and Google Inc.
Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it will slash up to 18,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its workforce, over the next 12 months as it almost halves the size of its newly acquired Nokia phone business and tries to become a cloud-computing and mobile-friendly software company. 
The larger-than-expected cuts are the deepest in the software giant's 39-year history and come five months into Nadella's tenure.
There's no question this is due to the changing nature of technology and cloud computing, but one has to ask the question: what other factors played into this decision? Microsoft is headquartered in Seattle. Seattle recently passed a $15/hour minimum wage. Granted, most tech jobs pay way more than minimum wage, but minimum wage jobs are everywhere (food service, janitorial, landscaping, transportation, etc). For every ten to twenty high-paying tech jobs, there are support service jobs -- cafeteria, janitorial, building maintenance, etc. [A reader points out that Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, WA, not Seattle. When I wrote this piece, I knew it was a stretch attaching minimum wages and even ObamaCare to the 18,000 jobs that Microsoft will cut. I should have just left it well enough alone. The good news, I learned a bit more about the enthusiasm with which Seattle is embracing that $15/hr minimum wage.]

The most interesting thing, however, and what is never mentioned in these articles is the cost of ObamaCare. Wasn't ObamaCare going to cost employers somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 / employee? I've long forgotten the number, but for argument's sake, let's say, $3,000.

$,3,000 x 18,000 employees = $54 million every year.

I know a lot of folks will blow off these personnel costs as marginal, but I remember clearly the history of the railroads. At one time, it was required that the last car, the caboose, have an engineer. It took years to get the number of engineers on a BNSF train from three to two, just the two engineers in the pulling locomotives. It's hard to believe that one person made such a big difference but it was a big deal at the time to eliminate that position. [See comment below: a reader does a much better job recalling the transition from five FTE's on one train, to three, and finally to two.]

Whatever. Idle chatter.

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That Pesky Global Warming

WKRG is reporting:
Forecasters say Mobile, AL, has broken a 128-year-old record with a low temperature of 64 degrees.

The National Weather Service says the low Thursday morning was 1 degree cooler than the low of 65 degrees set in 1886.

The weather service says Huntsville tied a record low for the date of 59 degrees set in 1945, and temperatures were in the mid- to upper 50s across north Alabama.
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Others Have Noted The Same Thing: It's All A Scam
 
Bloomberg is reporting:
Australia’s decision to repeal its levy limiting fossil-fuel pollution makes it the first nation to turn back from a market approach to fighting global warming.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government won final approval from Parliament yesterday to scrap a levy about 300 companies paid for their carbon dioxide emissions. The move leaves Australia, the largest polluter per capita among industrial nations, without a system for reducing greenhouse gases as it prepares to host a meeting of the Group of 20 nations. 
The first nation to turn back from a market approach to fighting global warming? None of these stories ever mention that Canada was the first signatory to opt out of the Kyoto Protocol some years ago. 

Global warming? I thought we had moved on. I did not know that it was called "global warming" any more; I thought it was "extreme weather." I guess sometime in the past couple of years we moved back to "global warming."

There has been no sign of global warming for the past 18 years. Just saying.

Legacy Fund To Receive Largest Deposit Yet -- $112 Million In July, 2014; Total Now Over $2 Billion

The Bismarck Tribune is reporting:
The state’s Legacy Fund will be receiving its largest infusion of cash since its creation this month, according to the state agency that oversees the multi-billion-dollar fund.
On Thursday the state treasurer’s office announced it anticipates a deposit of $112 million to make its way into the Legacy Fund before the end of July.
It is the first monthly deposit of more than $100 million since funds began being placed in the fund monthly in 2011. Through June the Legacy Fund totaled more than $2.2 billion in deposits.
Since its creation monthly deposits have been as low as $32 million and as high as $93 million.
$2 billion / 700,000 people = $3,000/person -- a family of 6 = $18,000.