Random Update Of Statoil Brown Wells In Alger Field -- December 31, 2016

I follow the Statoil Brown wells at this post.

These four Brown wells (#27003, #27004, #27005, #27006) all have a production profile similar to #27005. In addition, another older Brown well (#20790) has the same production profile. Those five Statoil Brown wells are all on the same pad. Obviously they must have been doing some pad work in September. Note the production in 9/16; there is nothing in the file report to explain what was going on. The company says the wells were on-line for the full month, but note the production:

Pool	Date	Days	BBLS Oil	Runs	BBLS Water	MCF Prod	MCF Sold	Vent/Flare
BAKKEN	11-2016	30	3956	3694	4250	0	0	0
BAKKEN	10-2016	24	2641	2596	3089	2009	1239	770
BAKKEN	9-2016	30	16	217	138	1554	33	1521
BAKKEN	8-2016	15	1349	1336	1201	1703	185	1518
BAKKEN	7-2016	31	2927	2964	3190	369	369	0
BAKKEN	6-2016	29	2945	2977	3121	154	154	0
BAKKEN	5-2016	31	3429	3402	3521	1122	1122	0

Huge Miss And Other Stuff -- December 31, 2016

I cannot believe I forgot to post this link. I thought it was the biggest story of the week when a reader sent it to me. I was saving it to post at the right spot, right time, and then I completely forgot about it. Scrolling through the top stories over the past year reminded me that I had forgotten to post the story.

This is huge.

It is now being reported "everywhere," and I assume the stories are almost the same. I will link the story as posted by The Grand Forks Herald:

A group of researchers in Grand Forks can now fly unmanned aircraft to new lengths—beyond what their eyes can see.

The Federal Aviation Administration has granted permission to the Northern Plains UAS Test Site to conduct beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations at Grand Sky technology park on Grand Forks Air Force Base.

The permission, known as a certificate of authorization, allows test site staff to fly unmanned aircraft systems, also called drones, without the use of a chase plane. Chase planes are piloted aircraft that follow drones during flight to maintain a sightline between the drone and a human in order to avoid midair conflicts.

"Every time that we go up on a flight, we're sending up two aircraft," said Nicholas Flom, executive director at the Northern Plains UAS Test Site. "It doesn't make any sense. That kind of defeats the entire purpose of an unmanned aircraft if I have to send up a second aircraft to go along with that."

Test site personnel won't be able to retire the chase planes just yet. It will be about three to four months before they can take to skies without one because Grand Sky needs to complete technology upgrades so it can link to the base's digital radar system.

This is a big, big story, and again, another first for North Dakota, as far as I know.

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Apologist For Putin

Dr Chris Miller has an excellent essay in today's Wall Street Journal, "The Survival of Putin's Economy." Dr Miller is associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University and the author of The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR, University of North Carolina Press.

In a required course in religion in my first year of college, I first heard the word "existentialism." I had trouble understanding it throughout that course. Now, almost 50 years later I understand it very, very well, and I find it an incredibly useful word to use when discussing geo-politics. I don't hear this word used much by television talking heads (in fact, I don't recall hearing that word ever on MSNBC "Morning Joe." (There's a reason for that which is somewhat counterintuitive.)

Reminiscing: my declared major when entering college required a huge amount of biology and chemistry and one year of calculus (which college bound students can now take in their senior year of high school). The college required one course in religion in the first year. It was my most difficult subject; and, at the time, I don't think I understood "any" of it. I do not remember whether I enjoyed that course or not. I do remember the professor as a most unusual individual but incredibly personal and understanding; I assume he had a doctorate in divinity but at the time I would not have known, given my lack of curiosity in such matters. I remember him only vaguely -- his physical attributes -- short, glasses, tinny voice -- but I remember vividly the first time he handed out "blue books (?)" -- those 10-page narrow-lined pamphlets that were/are (?) the mainstay for essays. We were instructed to write an essay interpreting a piece of music (Simon and Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock") based on the lectures he had given the past semester. Wow. Up until then I had only listened to country music for the most part and had never heard this song.

In the USAF, one of the most impressive/important/memorable courses I ever took was Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit #5 (seek first to understand, then to be understood) was the most difficult for me to figure out what Covey was saying. It is perhaps the most important of his seven habits.

Putting this altogether helps me understand the perspective of my doppelganger 65-year-old white Russian walking the streets of Moscow today.

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Quantum Theory

A Note for the Granddaughters

This past week I've been spending a lot of time reading and re-reading books on quantum theory -- just mainstream stuff, nothing of an "academic level," if that makes sense: books you see at Barnes and Nobel, for example, or articles one sees in The Wall Street Journal.

That's what led me to post this earlier:

9. Biggest disappointment of 2016; physicists were no closer to understanding quantum theory  in 2016 than they were in 2015. Or 2014. Or 2013. Or 2012. Or 2011. This one we can't blame on George W. Bush although the fact that he was not intellectually curious did not help.

Today, of all things, there is a half-page book review in today's "Review" section of The Wall Street Journal: "A Perfect Fit" by Gino Negre reviewing A Fortunate Universe, by Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes. I will order the book from Amazon later today.

My hunch is that it is very similar to The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, c. 2004. 

The review notes: a tiny tweak to the mass of quarks would yield a universe with nothing but hydrogen and helium.

By the way, in the same "Review" section, a short essay: quantum theory can help us teach tolerance. The writer begins: "Complementarity is the idea that there can be several different ways of describing a single system, each useful and internally consistent, but mutually incompatible. It first emerged as a surprising feature of quantum theory, but, following Niels Bohr, I believe that its wisdom is much more widely applicable."

By the way, for someone with a fairly good background in this subject, the book I would recommend: The Age Of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn, Louisa Gilder, c. 2008.  

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Lunch

Comments On 2016; Comments And Predictions On 2017 -- December 30, 2016

This is going to be a rambling note for the archives, looking back on 2016 and thoughts on 2017.

I don't know if it's going to be a long note, or a really, really long note. I don't even know if it's still in progress. Just some idle rambling on a Saturday morning; some predictions; some observations; some comments.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, travel, job, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here. It's also not a dance site.

1. The US stock market. Prediction: the overall market (Dow 30 / S&P 500) will be higher in October, 2017, than it is now. What it does between now and then is anybody's guess. I'm sticking with my 30-plus-year investment strategy.

2. The coming trade with China. Comments: this is all about plastic toys for US holidays (mostly religious holidays); clothes; and, iPhones. The coming trade war with China is not an existential issue for either country. China needs the US more than the US needs China when it comes to trade.

3. Spy vs spy. Comments: when the market doesn't react to a US president expelling 35 Russian spies diplomats and closing two Russian "compounds," that tells me everything I need to know. Congress loves these kinds of issues. 

4. Coming arms race with Russia. Comments: it's a given that the US military needs to be re-built after eight-plus years of neglect. Even Russia knows that. This, too, is a non-story, except for investors canny enough to know where to invest.

5. Chinese build-up in the South China Sea. Comments: the US had the Monroe Doctrine, 1823. The Chinese have their doctrine, 2016. It's a regional thing. Hopefully the new President will figure that out.

6. The Bakken. Observations: a couple of years of relative quiet, 2015, 2016; more and more infrastructure was put in place in the past two years. Prediction for 2017: slow and steady. Just not as slow as 2016, but just as steady. A no-brainer: operators will get their DUCs lined up.

7. Energy: it might take a year, but if it's not obvious by the end of 2017 that America is the new center of energy -- overtaking the entire Mideast without the fighting -- it will never be obvious to some folks. Crude oil, LNG, and coal exports will  increase -- that genie is out of the bottle.

8. Pipelines. Whatever.

9. Biggest disappointment of 2016; physicists were no closer to understanding quantum theory  in 2016 than they were in 2015. Or 2014. Or 2013. Or 2012. Or 2011. This one we can't blame on George W. Bush although the fact that he was not intellectually curious did not help.

10. Biggest surprise in 2016. Goes without saying.

11. EU: irrelevant. Brexit: kick this can down the road for another year.

12. UN: even more irrelevant. Watch for the "shoe dropping on the UN" once Trump is sworn in. It's not gonna be a pretty picture.Well, maybe it is.

13. The Mideast: as much as PEOTUS Trump wants to minimize US involvement in the Mideast, the US will reverse Obama's Mideast strategy. Oh, that's right. Obama had no Mideast strategy. Trump will punt this one to his generals.

14. Back to investing: investing in oil service companies (HAL, SLB, BHI, GE, frackers, etc) will be a better strategy than investing in oil companies. Re-read the disclaimer.

15. Biggest decision for Putin: whether to test Trump on Crimean, Ukraine, Kaliningrad.

16. Sanctuary cities. I've discussed this before. For me, it's a non-issue. I think Texans would love it if New Mexico declared itself a sanctuary state.

Top Stories By Month For 2016 Have Been Compiled -- December 31, 2016

Top stories by month for 2016 have been compiled. If you go to the link, one can quickly scroll through the links by month.

From this list, the top stories for 2016 will be selected. I plan to post that list Sunday, January 1, 2017, but with a lot of family commitments, it could slip to Monday, January 2, 2017.

Starting January 1, 2017, and running through January 20, 2017, I hope to post one YouTube video on a daily basis to ring in the new US president and his administration.

More Data On Mexico's Gasoline Imports -- December 31, 2016

The original story was at this post.

Now, additional data is provided, from Platts. Data points:

• Mexico's record-low refiner production and growing consumer demand: pushed US gasoline exports there to a new high in October
• gasoline exports to Mexico climbed 1.86 million bbls to 12.08 million bbls in October
• the previous peak was 11.42 million bbls in December, 2010
• Mexico is by far the largest importer of US gasoline; take 46% of the 177 million bbls of finished gasoline exported by the US in October, 2016
• exports push the price of gasoline higher
• outright price of Gulf Coast pipeline-delivered conventional gasoline, $1.71, highest price since August 18, 2015
• prime reason for increased exports to Mexico: chronic underinvestment in downstream investments over the years
• Mexico's refined product production is at its lowest point since Pemex started tracking data in 1995
• this, despite domestic sales climbing to a record high
• Mexico is expanding its main import terminal, the port of Tuxpan on Mexico's east coast

This won't be the top energy story of 2016, and it may not even make the top ten list, but it's a huge story and it's going to get much bigger.